by Annie Bryant
I’m usually kind of reserved about making new friends. At school I have a reputation for being a little hard to get to know, or standoffish, and it even took me some time to accept Isabel when Maeve wanted to include her in the BSG. But with Olivia, it was different. I instantly felt close to her. I had heard Grandma once say that families feel connected in ways they don’t even understand. I don’t know if that’s why I warmed to Olivia so quickly—because she was family?
She took me to her room, which I would share with her for my stay. Like all the others in the house, this room was large but didn’t have much furniture—just two small, mismatched beds, a dresser, and a writing desk and a chair. On one wall was a large, framed picture of Olivia as a little kid and a pretty woman I guessed was her mom. Grandma had told me Olivia’s mother had died a few years ago. On another wall there were several papers taped up. They looked like charts and school projects and lists.
Olivia ran to the closet and pushed her clothes to the side, making room for my stuff. “Go ahead, hang anything you want in there. Do you want a drawer, too?”
“Sure!” I told her. She was being so nice, moving all her things around for me. As I lifted some clothes out of my suitcase, I spotted a new headband I’d bought just before I left Boston. The tag was still on it and everything.
“This is for you,” I told Olivia, holding out the headband. I knew that Grandma Ruby had brought gifts for the whole family, but I wanted to give something of my own to Olivia. “Thanks for sharing your room and your family with me.”
“Oh, thank you!” she exclaimed. “I’ll be wearing this to church on Sunday. It’ll match my dress.”
She changed from her uniform into what she called “home clothes”—faded jeans rolled up to capri length, a faded, big, light blue T-shirt knotted at the side, and old, not very clean sneakers. Definitely not high fashion, but that girl wore her clothes with confidence! Style must be in the family genes.
Looking at Olivia’s outfit, I suddenly had a lightbulb moment about the difference between fashion and style, and I dug out my notebook to write it down.
If I had thought about it before I’d come to Jamaica, I would have imagined that I would be the one making an impression, with my foreign clothes and my signature Kgirl look. But I had nothing over this girl, I could tell.
Olivia tied her head with a cloth. “To keep my plaits neat,” she said, “while I do my chores.” After a confused second, I realized “plaits” meant “braids.” I practically needed a dictionary to keep up with the way people talked around here!
Goat Herding?
“Oh, no thank you,” Grandma Ruby was saying to Enid as Olivia and I walked into the kitchen. “Katani and I aren’t very hungry. Selvin took us for a big lunch.”
Enid smiled. “But you must be thirsty. Come, drink,” she commanded us. Enid was one of those people you don’t say no to, so we followed her to the back of the house, where there was a giant pile of coconuts. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, she pulled out the biggest knife I’d ever seen! Yikes! Before I could spit out a question, Olivia saw the surprised look on my face and smiled. “That’s called a cutlass,” she explained as Enid chipped off the tops of a few coconuts and invited us to drink the water out of the husk. I guessed I was going to have my fill of coconut water today!
I hadn’t really liked the bottled coconut water at Scotchies, but drinking it straight from the fruit gave it a much better flavor. When we were finished drinking, Enid split the husk with another ginormous knife.
“Go on now, eat the jelly,” Enid invited us, holding out the husk of the coconut. She explained that the jelly is the part of the coconut that becomes hard and white when it dries. It looked sort of like soft, colorless Jell-O. It had to be scooped out with a “spoon” cut off a side of the husk, and I felt very awkward scooping it out. Olivia laughingly showed me how to do it, then invited me to go with her while she tended her goats. Goats?
My eyebrows shot up. This was definitely not what I expected from my Jamaican vacation! What about a dip in the sea or a nice nap under a palm tree? Hanging out with a bunch of goats was definitely not my cup of tea, but Olivia was already out the door. This was the first thing she asked me to do with her, and I didn’t want to be rude. Grandma Ruby gave me a reassuring nod. “Go with Olivia, Katani,” she encouraged me. So I followed Olivia outside.
The goats were in pens some distance from the house. Along the way I saw a hen and some small chickens scratching in the dirt. They ran away as we came closer. “The goats are my project,” Olivia explained as we walked. “When we sell one of them, my father puts the money into an education fund for me. I want to be a vet, since I plan to own my own farm. You have to know how to take care of the animals properly.”
I couldn’t believe we were alike in so many ways! I mean, living on a farm is definitely not in the Kgirl life plan (and I leave all that animal stuff to Avery), but I also know what I want to do when I leave school. I want to become a fashion designer and own a chain of stores especially for professional women. I’ve been saving my money earned from baby sitting and selling hand-knit scarves to start a college fund. I wanted to tell Olivia all about it, but as I jumped aside to avoid another squawking chicken, I decided that right now I had to concentrate on this vacation. It just kept surprising me.
I am strictly a city girl, so this farm life was kind of freaky. I mean, I love riding horses at High Hopes Riding Stable, back in Boston, but I also like being able to take a walk over to Irving’s Toy and Card Shop for candy and Think Pink! for the latest fashions. I was already feeling weird as I followed Olivia on the path through an untidy growth of tall grass and what had to be weeds, some of which were leaving green stuff clinging to my jeans.
“Leave them until we get back to the house,” Olivia advised when she saw me trying to brush them off. “They’ll come off easily enough.” Good thing I’m in a strange country, I thought. None of my friends can see the Kgirl disintegrating into a fashion disaster.
“Say hello to my goats!” Olivia greeted them when we arrived at their pen. The goats acted like they were Olivia’s pets, running over to the fence so she could scratch their heads and pat them. Some of the BSG had guinea pigs, a snake, and other weird pets…but no one had goats. Then of course there was Marty, that we all share.
There were six goats, mostly a drab brown color and ordinary-looking creatures—except for one. That one was brown, with large, dirty white spots, long, floppy white ears, horns curling backward, and BIG! He reached Olivia above her waist. In fact, I thought for a minute that he was a calf. Olivia said, with great pride, that he was an Anglo-Nubian goat, a special breed. She called him Spotty.
I didn’t like the look of Spotty one bit. When we entered the pen, he stood beside Olivia and stared at me as if he were inspecting me. The pen gave off a sharp smell that made me wrinkle my nose. P-U! At first, I wasn’t really afraid, but that goat stood looking me up and down and suddenly I began to feel that if he didn’t approve of me, I would have to get out of his pen—fast.
Olivia laughed when she saw the expression on my face. “That Spotty thinks he owns the place and everything in it. You can’t come near his goats unless he approves of you. Isn’t that funny?” She turned her attention back to the goat and talked in that weird, baby-talk voice people sometimes use with their pets. “It’s okay, Spotty,” she said as she rubbed his head. “This is Katani. She came all the way from America.” Then she turned back to me, still laughing. “Katani, meet Spotty.”
I gulped. Was that goat glaring at me?
“Hi, Spotty,” I said, feeling like a total dork. I mean, I wasn’t used to talking to goats.
Spotty stared at me for a moment. Uh-oh, I thought. Now he was definitely glaring at me. “Um, Olivia?” I started to say—when suddenly Spotty bowed his head and started charging right toward me!
“Ahhhhh!” I shrieked, racing toward the gate as fast as I could. I could hear Spotty’s hooves pounding the dirt behind me.
“Spotty, stop! Come back!” I heard Olivia scolding him. But this goat was in no mood to slow down.
Just in time, I made it outside the fence and slammed the gate behind me. I heard Spotty skidding to a stop. I turned around, panting, and saw Olivia laughing so hard, she was about to split a gut.
Now I was really annoyed. “Well, I don’t think it’s very funny!” I said, trying to catch my breath. Me, the Queen of Cool, running away from a goat! This Jamaican adventure was not going the way I had imagined.
Olivia immediately stopped laughing when she saw I was serious. “I’m sorry, Katani,” she apologized. “Him just wild sometimes. Wait over by the trees, I’ll be right out.”
So Where’s the Beach?
While I waited for Olivia to finish up with the goats, I tried to regain my composure by looking around a little. There sure were a lot of banana plants. Selvin had told us that they had a couple acres planted in bananas. Most of the trees had bananas on them, and the bunches of fruit were covered with the same blue plastic I had seen before. At the roots of the trees there were other young ones shooting up.
When Olivia came out of the pen, she noticed me looking at the trees. “When the fruit is ready, those on the left are sent to the packaging plant for export to Europe,” she told me. “Aunt Faith uses the fruit from the trees on the right to make her Banana Bliss. They are special and have a nicer flavor than the others. That’s why Banana Bliss tastes so good.”
All this stuff about goats and bananas was interesting, but after my near-death experience with Spotty, all I wanted to do was find some warm sand and a cold fruit punch. “So when are we going to the beach?” I asked Olivia.
“I don’t know,” she responded. “The beach is far from here, but I suppose Cousin Selvin will arrange something.” That didn’t sound very promising at all.
Banana Bliss
By the time we got back to the house I was completely exhausted. My head was spinning from a long travel day and an overload of sun. I wondered if my body actually knew I had traveled to another country and was telling me to chill.
Lucky for us, Enid had prepared some cool lemonade and slices of Banana Bliss. I was super curious to taste it, since that was what had brought us to Jamaica in the first place. The loaf of bread looked like a firm, golden cake with tiny streaks of black.
A little table had been set on the side of the veranda closest to the kitchen. On it were jars of guava jelly, honey, and a small butter dish. Enid explained that we could eat the banana bread without anything on it or we could spread it with the jelly, honey, or butter.
“Banana bread can eat all sorts of ways,” Enid went on. “It can eat like bread or cake, so you can eat it by itself, or you can eat it with egg and cheese and plenty other things.”
I decided to try it with the guava jelly. Grandma spread honey on hers. Enid, Selvin, and Olivia were looking at us closely as we bit into the Banana Bliss. I guess they were anxious to see our reaction the first time we tasted it. My taste buds danced when I took the first bite. This stuff was fabulous! The guava jelly just made it even better. No wonder Banana Bliss was popular. “Wow!” I said to show my appreciation. “This is bliss!”
“It’s really wonderful,” Grandma Ruby murmured with a delighted look on her face. Olivia and Selvin and Enid nodded at each other, satisfied at our reaction.
“This one is a few days old. The last batch Aunt Faith made. Wait until you taste it freshly baked,” Selvin promised. “We bake every other day, so tomorrow morning bright and early, we start baking again. I’ll come for you by five o’clock, so set your alarm. Baking takes about three hours, then they have to be cool before they can be wrapped, and I start deliveries about ten o’clock. Okay?”
Grandma nodded. I got the impression that she couldn’t wait to get into the bakery. She loved baking, AND she was going to show Mr. Biggs who had the best banana bread on this island.
CHAPTER 5
Getting to Know You
I decided I needed to lie down and rest for a few minutes, but when I opened my eyes it was dark out. I must have slept for a couple hours at least. It must have been the Jamaican heat, because at home I never took naps. I managed a big cat stretch before dragging myself off to the bathroom, where I splashed cold water on my face and looked in the mirror. Aaaagh! I almost had a heart attack. My hair was sticking out in little spikes all over my head—kind of like a porcupine. Hair gel to the rescue! With all the humidity down here, it was going to be tough to keep a decent style. I patted my frizz down with some water and gel and went to find Grandma Ruby.
I poked my head around the corner. Where was everyone? There was no light at all in the house, which made it feel kind of creepy. I was no fan of things that went bump in the dark, so I searched for the light switch in the living room and flicked it on. Then I went out to the veranda, where I saw Grandma fast asleep. A notebook she had been reading had fallen off her lap. It had the same spidery handwriting I had seen in the letter back home: Aunt Faith’s writing. It was the instructions for baking Banana Bliss. Grandma must have been studying it.
As I flipped through the pages, Grandma sensed my presence and opened her eyes.
“Grandma, where is everybody?” I asked.
She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes. “Good gracious,” she said. “I nodded off. Are you all right?”
“Fine,” I replied. “I had a good nap too. Where’s Olivia?”
“She said something about choir practice at church. I think Selvin might have taken her. I don’t know where Enid is.” Then she saw the notebook in my hand and gently took it away.
“Do you know that Aunt Faith has a secret ingredient in her banana bread? She inherited the recipe from her grandmother. That’s why she calls it ‘Nana’s Banana Bliss.’” She waved a folded piece of paper at me. “I’m supposed to memorize the secret ingredient and destroy the paper.” She laughed like a little girl. “I feel as if I’m in one of those spy movies. Maybe I should swallow the paper, just in case Mr. Biggs tries to get hold of it.”
I groaned. Here was Grandma Ruby threatening to act out a Maeve movie fantasy. My friend Maeve could make a drama out of a trip to the grocery store. I missed that redhead, even though she and I didn’t see eye-to-eye on organization. Traveling with Maeve was like traveling with your own personal cyclone—clothes and shoes and stuff swirling every which way. Maeve as a roommate could be an overwhelming experience.
All of a sudden, a big truck drove into the yard and parked at the side of the house. The man fiddled around in the cab for a minute, then climbed out, carrying a battered old briefcase, and looked around. He saw us watching him and waved.
“That must be Cecil, Olivia’s father,” Grandma Ruby whispered, waving back to the man. “You should call him Cousin Cecil. It’s a sign of respect here not to call older people by just their first names. My mother taught me that.”
Cousin Cecil didn’t look like a farmer. He was dressed in khaki pants and shirt and looked more like a supervisor-type. As he strode up to the veranda I noticed that he had a very determined walk, almost like he was an army general or something. And, just like the rest of my family, he was super tall.
“So sorry I couldn’t be here to welcome you,” he said in a deep voice. “Busy day getting bananas to the packing house. I hope they took care of you.”
He shook Grandma’s hand. When it was my turn, I felt like I should almost curtsy or something! He definitely wasn’t as friendly as Selvin, and I wondered if perhaps he hadn’t wanted us to come. Maybe Grandma Ruby and I would have to check into a resort—one on a beach, of course. I thought I would ask her about that later.
Fishy Business
Dinner was okay, although I got the feeling Cousin Cecil was really anxious about making a good impression on us. More than once he got on Olivia’s case for something he thought she had done wrong. Obviously, since Aunt Faith wasn’t around, he expected Olivia to take her place and be the perfect hostess. She didn�
��t seem to be bothered by anything he said, though, and chattered away about Jamaican foods. She must be a good cook, I thought, because she seemed to understand a lot about spices and what went with what.
For dinner, we had fried chicken, fried fish, and rice cooked with red beans, which they called rice and peas. There was also boiled yam and green bananas, and home-baked macaroni and cheese that looked seriously yummy. I noticed that Olivia wasn’t eating any chicken, and when I asked why, she said that she didn’t eat meat.
“She don’t know what she missing. Half her life gone, and she so young. Poor thing!” smirked Selvin in mock sorrow.
Cousin Cecil glared at him, and I began to think that Cousin Cecil was mean and that maybe I wouldn’t like him very much. My dad was the jokester type, so I wasn’t quite sure how to handle somebody so serious.
“My mom was vegetarian too.” Olivia sounded sort of quiet, and suddenly I didn’t feel like eating any more chicken either.
“My wife died three years ago,” Cousin Cecil said gruffly. It was kind of obvious to everyone that that would be the end of that conversation. I concentrated on the fried fish, which was spicy and vinegary. Escoveitch fish, they called it. It was pretty tasty. I made a note to tell Avery about this because she loved fish.
“Cecil,” my grandma asked, “how long has your family been farming bananas?” Thank goodness for Grandma Ruby, because grumpy Cousin Cecil suddenly turned into a talk show host and started giving us the whole history of the farm and how important bananas were in the island economy. My Kgirl business sense perked up. It was fascinating to learn what it took to get a bunch of bananas to market. What it took was a lot of hard work and money. I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “Boy, people shouldn’t really complain about how much bananas cost in the supermarket.” Cousin Cecil seemed to agree and nodded approvingly.