The Secret Life of Winnie Cox

by Sharon Maas

  The village started with a few straggling cottages. A darkie woman in her front garden waved and smiled as we rode past, and a man carrying a bulging bag across his shoulder removed his cap; we were well known. The post office was on this main road. We dismounted, placed our cycles on their stands, and entered.

  It was no more than a single room on ground level, divided by a waist-high counter, the larger portion of the room being behind the counter. The walls of the behind-counter area were lined with shelves and cupboards; there were drawers and cubbyholes and a rather large desk with a chair; and at the desk someone sat with his back to us. Strange clicking noises seemed to be coming from the desk. The front door was wide open, and we made no sound as we crossed the threshold, and so this someone did not hear our entry, and jumped when Yoyo called out, ‘good morning’. He sprang to his feet, almost toppling his chair, and turned towards us.

  My heart stumbled unaccountably as I recognised him. It was the lad who had delivered Uncle Percy’s letter. Of course it was! Hadn’t he said that he was replacing Mr Perkins? The various dramas that had followed in the wake of our first encounter had wiped his memory entirely from my mind, and only now I remembered – what? Nothing, really; nothing real. Simply an acute sense of his presence, and bemusement at his entire demeanour, and an odd sensation I could not identify for I had never known it before; not ever, not with anyone, and certainly not with a darkie. The nearest I can come to describing it is this: it was an overwhelming sense of recognition. As though I already knew him, even though I didn’t. As if we had already met, even though we hadn’t. As if we were already friends, even though we weren’t. All of those feelings, combined and vague, and distinctly foreign: it was the other Big Thing of the last few days. And that Big Thing was back. My breath stopped as he leaped across the room to join us at the counter.

  ‘Good mornin’, ladies, Miss Cox, mornin’; what can I do for you?’ he said, and looked from me to Yoyo and back, smiling that very same smile as before, a grin that Papa would certainly have described as ‘too familiar for a darkie’, and yet it wasn’t: it contained nothing but simple friendliness. A heart-warming smile that made you want to smile back, so I did, and, I’m afraid to say, I blushed; at least, my cheeks grew hot so I knew that they were red. Ashamed of that blush, I lowered my eyes from his; I was strangely sure my eyes gave me away, that he could read me like a book.

  When I looked up again I found he was engaged with Yoyo, who, unlike me, seemed perfectly composed; she had, apparently, looked beyond him to the desk at which he had been sitting.

  ‘What’s that thing?’ she asked, pointing.

  ‘What? Oh, that. I’ll show you.’

  He bounded over to the desk and back and placed the object in front of us. It was a strange, rather crude contraption: a small wooden board, on top of which a wooden lever was balanced on a metal hinge; it had a knob on one end, and on the other a metal spike on the lever, which touched a small metal plate on the board. Underneath it was a spring. As he showed it to us he grasped the knob end and tapped a few times; the noise that we had heard emerged, an arrhythmic staccato sound.

  ‘It’s a Morse machine – a Morse key,’ he said. ‘I made it myself! I’m practicing the Morse code. Look, see, you tap this li’l thing here, and normally, it would have wires attached to it that you send out long and short pulses down the wire, codes for letters, words. And someone on the other end of the wire, even far away, gets the message and writes it down. Hey presto: a telegraph! You have to learn the combinations of dots and dashes – really. They’re called dits and dahs, but we like to call them ‘dots’ and ‘dashes’ anyway. Look how it works:’

  He tapped several times on the machine again, and then looked up with an expression of pure delight. ‘See? You know what that was?’

  I watched him as he spoke, taking in his features; they pleased me. Today he was without his khaki postman’s cap; his hair was cropped short, in the darkie style. His hairline started far back on a shiny high forehead – a stark black curving line that swept in and out along the natural contours of his forehead, the hair springy like black moss against the smooth dark brown of his skin. His eyes were large, set wide apart beneath finely drawn brows. A generous smile revealed pearly white teeth set in a strong jaw with a dimple in the middle. On the counter, long-fingered hands moved in time to his speech to demonstrate his words, tapping at the machine.

  ‘No,’ said Yoyo. ‘What was it?’

  ‘Everybody knows that! SOS! Dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot: ‘S-O-S’. Save our souls – the emergency call!’

  ‘Oh, well, our souls don’t need saving.’

  She nudged me then, and I woke up. All this time, while he had been speaking, he had looked from one of us to the other: mostly to Yoyo, as she had posed the questions and he was, officially, answering her; and yet he kept glancing at me as if to include me in the conversation, or as if to – oh, I don’t know. It was more than that. It was as if there were two conversations going on, one on the surface, a spoken one, with Yoyo, and another beneath the surface, a silent one, with me; and only he and I knew the silent one. But then again maybe it was all my own rabid imagination, this thing about a silent conversation, and I was just being silly and over-sensitive and taking my ‘inner feelings too seriously’, which is what Yoyo would say.

  The nudge she gave me was as good as an accusation. ‘Oh!’ I said, as I jumped to attention. ‘I have a letter!’ And pulled it out of my purse.

  The young man looked even more delighted. ‘A letter!’ he said, and, looking at the address, ‘to Norfolk, England. That will be twopence.’ He pronounced Norfolk phonetically, Nor-folk, which I found endearing.

  But Yoyo laughed. ‘It’s pronounced Nor-fuck,’ she said.

  I gasped in shock, my ears burning. I’m sure I turned beetroot red. How could she say that word! In a man’s presence! A word we’d heard whispered about, giggled about, with the other youths from the senior staff compound, the dirtiest word of all! Yoyo only giggled, enjoying her moment. I met his eyes; his lingered in mine, and I saw embarrassment there. I turned away, fumbled in my purse, and handed him the money. I watched as he tore a stamp from a large sheet, brushed it with glue, and stuck it on the envelope.

  I was scrambling for something distracting to say, for Yoyo’s last word still hung in the air. I reached for the Morse key, and tapped a few times on it. Each time, it clicked.

  ‘So every letter is made up of dots and dashes?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, relief in his voice. ‘I taught myself. It’s easy – after a while you know the whole alphabet just as dots and dashes, so you could theoretically write a whole letter an’ sen’ it by telegraph. This letter, for example. You could write it in Morse and the recipient would get it mebbe even the same day. Think of it! Normally it would take weeks to get to Norf … to England, right? But the same day!’

  ‘But I thought telegrams were always short?’ That was me again; I had finally found a way out of my debilitating embarrassment, for I was genuinely curious. What if I could write to Mama and have my letters delivered the same day! What a miracle! How wonderful! But how could I write to her in telegraph form? Telegrams, after all, leave out all the superfluous words, and thus all the essential emotion.

  ‘That’s why I said theoretically,’ he replied. ‘Telegraph can’t replace letter-writing; it is a short-cut, like an instant message, with only the really important words. In a letter, you get to say everything with all the words you want; you put all your soul into the envelope. I like delivering a letter into somebody’s hand, ‘stead of into a letter-box. It makes people smile – mostly, people are happy when they get a letter. It’s true, sometimes it’s bad news – but still!

  ‘A telegram is different. It’s only for urgent news, the essentials. Let’s say a boy wants to tell his sweetheart how much he loves her. He can’t do that in a telegram. It wouldn’t work. He would have to write a letter. Say he wants to propose marriage. He
would just say, ‘marry me’. And that’s the best way to get a marriage refusal – it sounds rude. So, letters are better for feelings. Telegrams are better for information – urgent information, news. Telegrams are just for important things, and you say it in a few words. I think if you were to get a telegram you would be frightened – because – is it bad news?’

  He now spoke in a curious melange of simplistic Creole, multisyllabic vocabulary, bad grammar and educated content, all spoken in a rich, melodic voice that was somehow fascinating and – to me at least – hypnotic.

  He tapped again into the machine.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Yoyo. Her eyes, too, sparkled; she seemed every bit as fascinated by the young man’s story as I was.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘dash-dot-dash-dash-dot-dot-dot-dot.’

  ‘What’s no?’

  He tapped it out quickly, speaking as he tapped: ‘dash-dot-dash-dash-dash.’

  ‘So you know the whole Morse alphabet?’ Yoyo asked. ‘By heart?

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I taught myself. All I got to do now is practise, practise, practise so I can do it quick on the machine. As quick as handwriting. Quicker. I tryin’ to increase my speed. See, this machine isn’t connected to a cable so I can use it to practise. When it’s connected it sends electrical currents through the cable, and the person on the other end gets the signal and interprets it and writes it down in words and sends it to the recipient in a telegram. Easy!’

  ‘What about telephone?’ Yoyo asked. ‘Have you seen one? I heard some people are getting them in Georgetown. Surely that’s even better than telegraph? I mean to actually speak to people over a distance – that’s even more miraculous, isn’t it?’

  But he shook his head in dismissal. ‘The problem with telephone,’ he said, ‘is that you got to set up a cable between the people who want to communicate. Plenty people got it in Georgetown, is true, and they even got lines all up the coast to the Berbice River. They ain’t yet manage to get it to New Amsterdam. And to cross the sea – country to country? No. I can’t imagine that happening. Maybe, a long time from now – who knows? No – telegraph is the thing. And one of these days I goin’ to be a telegraph operator. I goin’ to work for the West India and Panama Telegraph Company, Limited. And one of these days, I want to be the one runnin’ de whole telegraph company.’

  Such pride in those words, such ambition!

  ‘Really!’ said Yoyo. ‘Can you – I mean – usually – I mean to run an office …’

  She stopped, plainly embarrassed, but I knew what she meant and so too did the young man, for he scratched his head in obvious discomfort and rushed to explain.

  ‘I know is maybe too high-up for a coloured but I got a good education an’ if I can get some experience an’ learnin’ I can do it.’

  ‘What education do you have?’ I asked

  ‘Queen’s College!’ he said, and his grin spread wider than ever; Queen’s College, as everyone knew, was the most prestigious boy’s secondary school in the colony, and few darkies attended it.

  ‘I won a scholarship and I was able to attend till I got my School Certificate. An’ then I had to leave an’ the only job I could get was postman. But don’t matter – I like it. I was postman in Georgetown for a year, deliverin’ letters in North Cummingsburg. An’ then this job in Berbice came up an’ nobody wanted to take it, because it’s so far away, not even for six weeks till they find someone permanent from up here and train him in Georgetown, an’ I took it because I reasoned, if I do it, when the time come, an’ I want to work in the telegraph office, they gon’ remember me.’

  ‘So you don’t like it here?’ I asked. ‘I dare say it must be a bit lonely for you.’

  ‘Oh, I love it here!’ said the young man. ‘Nice and quiet an’ it gives me time to study, an’ the people are nice and friendly, not so rough like in Georgetown. Already I got a hundred friends in the village.’

  I could easily believe that. He seemed to me the kind of person who drew others to him like a magnet, who might light up a room the moment he walked in. Like Mama. Like Mama used to be, that is. Yoyo was one of those people as well. There were such people, and there were shrinking violets, like myself, those who went unnoticed, a plain little weed.

  There were only two differences to that situation on this occasion. He was the only darkie sunflower I had ever met. And he had definitely noticed me.

  As he spoke his eyes drifted back to mine again and again, and I felt, I knew, that it cost him an effort to turn back to Yoyo, that he did so only for the sake of politeness; that he would rather look at me, even in silence; that he did not find me stupid and awkward and nondescript. He told me so with deep dark eyes more eloquent than a thousand words; eyes I could read as I read a book for they spoke a plain language uncomplicated by subterfuge; nothing hidden, nothing masked. All else, speech, language, words, were as a fog drifting above that essential clarity. I knew, without being told, that what I felt, this connection so intimate it was beyond speech, beyond all common methods of communication, was shared by him. He knew. I knew. It was something secret, powerful, and completely and utterly preposterous.

  So preposterous it had to be all my imagination. I was making it up. It was only my starved romantic longings running wild. I was just a foolish little girl. Yes, that was it. Foolish, silly me.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I heard Yoyo ask the question through the fog, and I was glad of it, for in this new country of secret power and shattering doubt I was a stranger, and speechless.

  ‘George Theodore Quint,’ he replied, glancing from her to me. From the first I loved that name. It had something noble and strong and independent about it. Something different; something unique.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Nineteen, Miss. Twenty next month.’

  ‘And already running the Post Office?’

  He chuckled. ‘Young, yeah; but you know how it is in BG. Nobody don’ wan’ to go into the country. Nobody wanted to work in de Courantyne, not even for two-three months. I volunteered to come because it gon’ help me later on, when I look to become a telegrapher. An’ another thing – I got lines.’

  He leaned forward and almost whispered the last word, hinting at some mysterious process by which influential people of anonymous identity had placed him into high position. This was the way many promotions worked in BG, though in this particular case it seemed less of a promotion than banishment to an unpopular post that nobody else wanted.

  I would have loved to hear more about his lines, more about him, but Yoyo was growing restless, and bored, adjusting her clothing and tapping her fingers on the countertop. She looked at me and arched her eyebrows, asking if we should go. I nodded; not that I really wanted to go, but a nervous Yoyo was not good company.

  ‘Well, George, it was lovely speaking to you,’ She said now, and held out her hand for him to shake. He took it.

  ‘You are Miss …?’

  ‘Miss Johanna,’ she said firmly. ‘And my sister is Miss Winnie.’

  It was my turn. I hesitated before I took that outstretched hand. His long fingers curled around mine and it was as if a current ran between us, passing from one to the other as if for those few moments we were joined, one entity, and my eyes met his again and I knew that he knew. Those eyes of his! They drew me in, and told me things that words could never tell. His hand lingered around mine, and I did not pull away. For those few moments we stood in silence, linked by our clasped hands, those locked eyes, and I sensed a parting of the ways, as if a river coursing down a mountainside suddenly discovered a new path, a hidden one between the rocks and off its well-worn course. As if our joined hands and locked eyes sealed some momentous pact with history.

  An outsider, looking on, might see this: the Honourable Archibald Cox’s oldest daughter lowering herself to shake hands with the postman, a common darkie: a travesty. I knew only that there was no higher or lower. No white lady and darkie postman. There was only this: one soul. Unity. I had read
of love at first sight, and doubted its reality. Surely it was mere imagination? Surely love came slowly, after long acquaintance, long conversation. Yet here it was, instant, and real.

  ‘Come on, Winnie; let’s go.’ Yoyo was already at the door. How could I pull my eyes away? His were hypnotic; they held me bound. We stood still for several seconds, joined by our gaze, our smiles. Then I took a deep breath, summoned all my strength, pulled away both my gaze and my hand. I smiled with secret knowledge, and turned to leave.

  I was so much in a daze as I left the Post Office that I didn’t look where I was going and ran straight into a giant of a Someone as I turned to retrieve my bicycle. The next thing I knew, two giant paws were gripping my arms and I was looking up at the bluest eyes and the bushiest beard I ever did see. The eyes were set in a leathery face as brown as a light-skinned darkie, but the wild hair that surrounded it was brown, not black; and anyway the eyes’ brilliant blueness gave him away as European. And the beard! It was at least a foot long, all crinkles and frizz, darker than the hair on his head but still dark brown rather than black, fanning out from his chin in a glorious semi-circle of bush.

  I cried out in shock: shock, first at the collision itself, then at the sight, then at the realization of who this was; who it could only be: Mad Jim.

  I had seen Mad Jim before, several years previously; Papa had pointed him out one Sunday as we drove in our coach over to Sunday lunch at Glasgow. He – Mad Jim – had been walking along the road towards us, leading a donkey. On the donkey was perched a darkie woman. She had looked up at us as we passed; one glimpse of those striking dark eyes, and then she was gone; they were both gone. I looked backwards once we had passed, but Papa called me to attention.

  ‘Mad Jim,’ he said. ‘That’s what becomes of a man who abandons his own people. Pah!’ He spat over the edge of the coach. ‘Mad as a hatter.’

  But I had heard of Mad Jim, and even if Papa wouldn’t tell us more, the rumours in the English compound told me enough. He was, indeed, mad; a white man who had lived in the fearsome bush, the jungle backlands, for several years with a darkie woman, and produced a horde of children from her – a pack of wild animals, they said. Then for some reason, he had moved to the outskirts of Promised Land village and mixed only with darkies and coolies; which, it seemed, was the chief symptom of his madness.