Fingerprints of Previous Owners

by Rebecca Entel

  No matter how busy or dead-on sunny the day, I slowed down for every rustle in a pile that could be paper. Every book I found, which was never the book, came home with me. Cleaned off. Put under the table. Never called them our books. Just the books. Folks started coming by to borrow and return them more often than they came for Mother to check their mouths for pain. Sometimes came for both.

  One day same as any other: Isa waiting for me on the step; two of us walking the dusty road with a wave and a wag to whoever passed going the other way; resort truck beeping its way in for the first of three visits that day and letting down its avalanche of sacks; sun in the sky as ever. Day same as any other, except: there it was. Those words that pointed to the words that weren’t there.

  Binding glue dried and broken, two of the five stitches loose. Cut map pages still cut. Gone. I sliced my fingertip on their remaining edges, but I didn’t bleed. Sat and didn’t work the rest of the day, without even looking inside. Just set it on my knees. Not as heavy as it had once seemed but a weight on my legs all the same. My fingers tensed into clamps—almost as if it were mine.

  A few days later I scratched up the words to tell Mother the book had turned up. Really turned up: poking out of a pile of what had been thrown away. And should I send another box to Manion Cottage Consignment, though we’d never received word about the first?

  “It wasn’t really hers,” Mother said.

  We ate dinner that night with The Cruffey Plantation Journal against my mother’s bare left foot, where we knew it was there.

  Bench Story No. 17: Myrna Daphanie Cruffey Burre

  Crouched at the bottom of the pool, I leaned back on my heels like a child and hugged my upper arms, etched as they were with fine white lines written on me by the haulback. I could no longer see up onto the empty pool deck. In this cave of the pool the sun didn’t even descend to cast its shadows. If a cow had come thundering through like the worst storm I wouldn’t have known: nightmare vanishing before a memory of it nestled in.

  Troy had said that to be a watercolorist, you had to know what not to paint. Where to make yourself absent, leaving slices of paper blank and bright as light. Mother had been such a good watercolorist of the past, strategically tiptoeing around the blank spots, guiding around their treacherous edges. I was not a watercolorist.

  Where Jasmine Manion’s blood ran brownish: I had covered it in some places but left it visible in others. Red gone brown, like a thiflae flower that had leaked out its sweetness.

  Mine was not the brush of an artist. It was a brush for painting the outsides of houses or for painting fences, quickly and coarsely. The handle was thick in my hand like rope. The brush was wiry. I had to muddle the bright paint colors I’d been given to find the grays, browns, and dark greens that I needed. I mixed gray and white with blue for the swaths of sky: the true blue of the sky, not their fake blue that had been so difficult to cover. My knees got in the wet paint sometimes. I was not such a painter. But I could still see it all emerging. As if I were erasing a false bottom to reveal what was beneath it, not like I was composing it at all. I slid back and back to keep the mulchy paint from getting all over me, until I was against the side of the pool.

  In front of me: the ruins.

  The chains of stones that cut the brush meeting the lasting corners of buildings, like ghosts reassembling themselves to claim the shoes they’d left behind. With their crumbled corners, their cracks, and their diamond-shaped scars left for all to see. With the whipping post drawn as what it would always be. A whole bird’s-eye view map that had been only in the book, only in my mind.

  And on the map, as best as I could locate it by the watering hole, I made a tiny painting of a pile of stones humped into a bench. And I stippled in shadows beneath the roughly rendered stones, the way my brother had taught me to tuck them under.

  I imagined the lumpy forms of tourists, like manatees etched with bone, buoyant in the pool. Hovering between water and sky. How they couldn’t help but reach out to touch this scratchy floor of ruins and post and dreamed ships and stones. How if they just put out their hands, they’d find our different island.

  A Note from the Author

  The narrator of this book is a Caribbean woman. You may have noticed that the writer of this book is not. I’ve heard many propose that imagining another’s experience is all part of a writer’s job. I don’t disagree about the skills necessary for the job, but there’s more to the story. Focusing only on the writer’s imagination glosses over a history not just of absence but also of damaging misrepresentations of “others.” As a scholar of nineteenth-century U.S. literature, I think first of fictional idyllic plantations that persist today, for example. This book does not depict life on a plantation but rather a character haunted by not knowing what such a life was like for her ancestors. In following my imagination (when I first encountered a beach littered with international garbage and piles of stones U.S. researchers machete’d to but islanders did not preserve), I’ve been tasked both with creating a work full of empathy and realistic characters and with doing the research required to be truthful about a culture that’s not my own. Though the island of the book is fictional, I’m still a tourist there; the writing must exceed my own personal perspective. But just as empathy is not the only requirement, research isn’t either. As Kaitlyn Greenidge wrote, writers shouldn’t go about their jobs “with an implicit insistence that writing and publishing magically exist outside the structures of power that dominate every other aspect of our daily lives” (“Who Gets to Write What?” New York Times, September 24, 2016). A novel such as this requires an awareness of those structures, too. Derek Walcott, in “Isla Incognita,” invites his readers to proceed backward from knowing, from all the stories they’ve been told about islands—what he calls “the wrong or casual naming of things.” Proceed with “the opposite method to the explorer’s,” he instructs, and find your way only “by a great deal of principled doubt.” I believe doubt and trepidation in the writing process can be productive. And I hope that the book will lead to productive conversations with and among all kinds of readers.

  Acknowledgments

  of people, dogs, schools, funds, and texts

  Thank you to my family for their support in all forms: Esther and Leonard Entel; Gabrielle, Eben, Ethan, Jonah, and Dalia Hattingh; Mark, Brie, and Adlai Entel.

  Thanks to my agent, Allison Devereux, for being such an enthusiastic champion of my work at every stage and to my editor, Olivia Taylor Smith, for her remarkable commitment to this book.

  Special thanks to Karen Rile and Lorrie Moore.

  Friends, relatives, colleagues, acquaintances—writers and not, too many to name—buoyed me up during rough patches with questions about the book. Special thanks for advice from Jennifer Ambrose, Tori Barnes-Brus, Clara Burke, Glenn Freeman, Patrick Naick, Michelle Sizemore, and Rachel Swearingen.

  The staff of the Gerace Research Centre, past and present, gave me a space for research (and taught me to use a machete). Various residents of San Salvador answered questions, provided directions, and even offered me rides to historical sites. Colleagues I traveled with provided collaborative thinking and snorkeling partnership.

  My colleagues in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College helped me take a full-year sabbatical, without which the first draft would never have been completed. Brooke Bergantzel offered expert technological advice. Students in my Bahamian literature courses shared my interest in the big questions of this book.

  Much of this book was written at the Writers WorkSpace in Chicago. Thank you to director Amy Davis for making me feel at home there.

  My aunt Patty Jempty and my grandmother Frances Feigen passed away while I was writing this book; I already miss their reactions as readers.

  My late sweet dog, Charlie Brown, took me on incredibly long walks during which I often untangled knots in the plot.

  I appreciate the creative writing opportunities I had in the public schools in University
Heights and Shaker Heights, Ohio; from first grade on, my schools made space for reading, writing, and writers. Thank you, too, to all the writing teachers who both encouraged and challenged me at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Wisconsin.

  The McConnell sabbatical fund gave me the gift of time to work on this book and the opportunity for a much-needed research trip. Through a Mellon Foundation grant for environmental studies, I first traveled to the Gerace Research Centre to plan a Caribbean literature course and afterward began a short story about a debris-covered beach that eventually became this book.

  A few lines of Amiri Baraka’s “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” were adapted for Daphanie’s story. The book’s epigraphs come from Derek Walcott’s Midsummer, IX; Emily Dickinson’s “Pain—has an Element of Blank—”; and Toni Morrison’s “A Bench by the Road” speech. Among the many texts important to my research and writing were: the only surviving Bahamian plantation journal, republished as A Relic of Slavery: Farquharson’s Journal for 1831–32; John Cummins’s translation of Columbus’s journal, The Voyage of Christopher Columbus; Ian G. Strachan’s Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean; Virginia White’s The Outermost Island: An Oral History of San Salvador, the Bahamas; and Eva Jane Baxter’s work on ship graffiti.

  About the Author

  PHOTO BY ELIZABETH MCQUERN

  Rebecca Entel began this novel while teaching on San Salvador Island in the Bahamas. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College, where she teaches multicultural American literature, Caribbean literature, creative writing, and the literature of social justice. She holds a B.A. from the University of Penn sylvania and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. Her short stories have been published in Guernica, Joyland Magazine, The Madison Review, and elsewhere, and several have been shortlist ed for awards from Glimmer Train, Southwest Review, and the Manchester Fiction Prize. Fingerprints of Previous Owners is her first novel.

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