Mama really cared for Bella, and they spent a lot of time together. Even before Vittorio could talk, he knew all the rooms in Melbourne’s massive three-storey house, for he and Bella were regular visitors. I, too, had warmed to Bella from the first. She was at most eight years my senior, the big sister I never had. I told her secrets and asked questions I would never have asked my mother. We laughed about silly things, tried out different hairstyles on each other and went shopping at the mall. She taught me Italian swear words and how to say, “I love you.”
We had all seen her bruises, but we did the polite thing and kept quiet. Some nights she’d be wearing dark glasses. Sometimes I’d go to babysit Vittorio and she would make excuses about bumping into a closed door.
One day I was visiting Mama when she called. We were in the living room watching General Hospital, and Mama was trying to teach me to crochet, but my fingers wouldn’t obey. The phone rang and when Mama answered, I heard Bella’s high and trembly voice.
“Mama? Mama, I’m at the Toronto Western Hospital.” Then I heard her crying. Mama didn’t wait to hear anything else.
“Hold on, Bella, ah coming.” And she hung up the phone.
We hurried to the hospital. What a sight she was. Swollen eyes. Bruised arms. A broken nose. Her beautiful golden hair chopped off.
“Mama, I didn’t do anything,” she said.
Mama hugged Bella, careful not to hurt her. She sat down next to her, her eyes pools of sympathy.
“Mama, yesterday was my mother’s birthday.” Bella struggled to speak.
“Tek it easy, dear, ah right here,” Mama reassured her.
“I called her to wish her happy birthday. He was right there, he knew who I was talking to …and he just slapped me in the face for nothing.”
She started to cry again, and Mama stroked her hand.
“So I said to him, ‘What’s your problem, Freddie? Do you have a problem?’ and he just stared at me with his nostrils flaring like I said something awful. So when I hung up, he started in on me, kicking and slapping me around. He didn’t stop until Vittorio started to scream, and the next-door neighbour threatened to call the police. Then he kicked the front door open and left. The neighbour helped me into a cab.”
“Did the dutty dog say why he beat yuh?” Mama asked.
“He said I was talking to my mother in Italian because I didn’t want him to understand what I was saying. Mama, he kept accusing me of telling her things about him. I would never do that, Mama, never.”
She was in a lot of pain. Mama pressed her arm lightly, and Bella continued. “I said to him, ‘How do you expect me to talk to her? In Jamaican? For Christ’s sake, Freddie, she’s Italian like me, remember? And she hardly understands English.’ That just made him crazy.”
She was shaking and sobbing hard. I got up and looked through the window at the streetcars and the night falling. For the first time Freddie held no magic for me. I wondered how this could be the same Freddie who was so gentle with me, the Freddie who taught me to fly kites, eat crab, took me to my first cockfight.
“Mama, I’m going to leave him,” Bella whispered. “I can’t take it any longer, it’s not right.”
“Stay, Bella,” I heard Mama plead. “Stay, it important for de child to have a mother. Stay and ah will help yuh, ah promise yuh that.”
Bella didn’t answer.
When Glory heard what happened, she told Mama to leave them alone. “Mama, cockroach no business inna fowl fight.”
They quarrelled, of course, Mama protesting this wasn’t a case of cockroaches and fowl—we were all family and it was our duty to take a stand.
Bella listened to her own mind and left without goodbyes, without a trace. Uncle Freddie came home to find Vittorio in front of the television, happily eating a bag of chips. Freddie said she took nothing. Her clothes hung neatly in the closet. Her toothbrush, perfume and hairbrush were still in the bathroom. Even her nightgown lay peacefully under her pillow.
At first Uncle Freddie resisted any help from Mama. He made arrangements with his neighbour to babysit, but that didn’t last long. Some nights he’d come home late and rely on his charm to wipe away the neighbour’s irritation. One night he went too far. He didn’t come home and he didn’t call. When he hadn’t turned up by morning, the neighbour called Catholic Children’s Aid and they took Vittorio away.
Uncle Freddie didn’t contact the CCA. When Mama found out—through a slip of Glory’s tongue—she immediately called Freddie and demanded that he bring the child to her.
“Listen to mi, Freddie, yuh have to get dat child out of dat place. Yuh can’t come to white-man country and put de little pickney in a orphanage, not wid so much family around.”
He was stubborn and he held out. When she wouldn’t let up, he told her angrily that she was the last woman on earth he wanted to raise his child. Never one to give up easily, she ignored him and turned to Glory and Uncle Peppie and Aunt Val for help.
“Lord, how unnu can sit dere and mek de nice likkle bwoy go to government? Unnu nuh have no compassion? If him won’t let mi tek de pickney, why one unnu nuh tek him? Why unnu cyaan do de right thing?”
Vittorio went to live with Mama and Uncle Mel when he was three years old. Uncle Mel, who loved Vittorio from birth, embraced him like his own son. Unrelenting, Mama demanded that Freddie come visit the child and show responsibility by giving her an allowance to take care of him. Of course, he did neither, and soon he stopped even calling her. Months later, after more stormy quarrels, he vanished.
Like Bella, he left without saying goodbye. For a time we received postcards tracing him to Calgary, then Vancouver and finally through Europe, but there was never a return address. Then the cards stopped. Later Glory told us that he was with a woman from Germany and was expecting a child.
Uncle Peppie and Aunt Val moved to Atlanta, Georgia, sometime afterward. Aunt Val had a sister living there who had encouraged them to make the move.
When Vittorio was about nine, Freddie made contact, and Vittorio went to Europe to spend a holiday with his father and his new wife. We all hoped that it would be a new beginning for both father and son, but much as I hate to admit it, especially now that Mama is dead, she behaved badly about the reunion, and instead of encouraging the relationship, she found fault with Freddie and laid open his past in front of Vittorio before he left. Freddie and his mother had one last dreadful telephone quarrel seven months before her death, and that was the last time they spoke.
Although I spent a lot of time at Mama’s, I continued to live with Glory and Sid. I saw Justin regularly, going for rides in his Pontiac and visiting his friend’s place in the east end. Justin was a sweet talker, and he spread his words like items from a picnic basket in front of me. I ate everything. I was sure that someday soon I would be his wife.
When I was nineteen, I received my high school diploma and landed a job with an agency, watering office plants. Glory didn’t think much of it, but Mama gave me all the encouragement I needed. “Good gal. Yuh have to start somewhere. Nuh matter how little de pay. Hold on. Things will work out. Oletime people use to say, ‘One, one full basket!’”
Glory had gone on to receive a nursing assistant diploma and was now working at a hospital near Keele and Eglinton.
Justin was the first person I told about the pregnancy. In my naïveté I had expected a quick and quiet wedding, our own apartment, our baby in a cradle next to our bed. Instead he acted like a bumbling idiot, offering me more promises “if only just this one time you get an abortion.”
Next I confided in my grandmother. How sweet it was to be comforted by her. I sat with her in her kitchen and listened to the hum of her reassuring voice, which had calmed me since I was a baby curled up in our mahogany bed.
“Stand up and hold yuh head high, gal,” Mama told me. “Is nothing fi shame. Is a thing what happen to better dan yuh and worse dan yuh. Face de challenge. Don’t run from it. Keep de pickney, mek de dutty man go weh. Him will get fi him comeuppance.”
“Leave dis house before dat belly start show! Either dat or get rid of it!” she shouted at the top of her lungs.
Sid sat with his head lowered, no doubt embarrassed for me. I didn’t know whether he knew about Justin.
My mother started again. “Yuh is a blasted dutty wretch. A sneaking bitch, run round town wid every man.”
I stared her down and a feeling of hatred heated up in me. “If mi is a blasted wretch and a bitch, yuh is a whore. Mi know mi father?” I challenged.
She slapped me with all her might and I fell to the floor.
“Yuh bitch, pack yuh clothes and get out of dis house. Ah only hope to God is not Sid …” She broke off.
I got up and went to my room to pack my things, then left for Mama and Uncle Mel’s. I was thankful I had my grandmother to teach me how to be a mother. Under her guidance, I concentrated on my unborn child. When I bathed myself, I washed my passage with care and used sweet oils. At night, wrapped in a blanket, I imagined my baby lying next to me, sucking milk from my breast. Mama cooked for me. I watched her moving about the kitchen, my worries and fears soothed by her humming and the smell of her cooking.
Mama knitted and crocheted just as she did for Bella’s baby. We shopped together for things for the baby, and when I was too big and heavy to move around easily, she took great pleasure in shopping by herself. She bought the baby’s first bath set and a brush and comb. She insisted that cloth diapers were best and got a full supply.
I loved my grandmother’s pure and simple generosity, the return of the unconditional love I’d had throughout my childhood and now enjoyed again with my baby inside me. She knew I wanted a girl. She wanted a boy, for reasons I’ve never understood. Men had caused her so much grief, but if she were telling this story, she might tell it differently.
Without her, I don’t know how I would have carried myself through those nine months. She held me in her arms if she thought I was slipping into self-pity, telling me I had a whole life ahead of me. With her by my side, I believed it.
My water broke in February. My daughter’s arrival was swift and miraculous. I was still thin and small, and the pain surpassed anything I’d ever experienced. Mama wiped the blood from my baby’s body, and the midwife cut the umbilical cord and laid her in my arms. Her cry echoed against my chest when I cradled her, her black moss of curly wet hair cool against my skin. Her complexion at birth was a deep brown, like the bark of a tree, and at the base of her neck was a lighter, coin-shaped patch. Just like the one on Justin. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever laid eyes on, and she was mine. I felt blessed. Had it not been for Mama, I’d never have known such beauty, never felt such love.
I named my daughter Ciboney Margaret Galloway. Margaret for my great-grandmother Mammy. Ciboney, because I liked the sound of it, and I remembered the old plantation with that name in Ocho Rios, where Mammy’s mother grew up.
I made a pledge that day as I held Ciboney that I would never leave her.
Glory left Canada, following Uncle Peppie and Aunt Val to Atlanta. They told her there was more opportunity there, better prospects. Never one to stand in the way of progress, Mama gave her her blessing. When Glory decided to move, she broke up with Sid. She’d had enough of his extramarital affairs.
Sid came around to Mama’s house a few times, bringing gifts for Ciboney. Once when he held her I was sure he saw the light coin at the base of her neck, just like Justin’s. Mama fussed and looked after him, sending him home with large containers of food. In time his visits stopped, and it was just as well. Each time Glory called and heard that he had visited, she got angry.
The first time I met Rose was at a women’s health clinic. I had gone there for a checkup after Ciboney, who was now six, had the chicken pox. Rose was sitting in the waiting room with a pregnant friend. We exchanged names and talked a bit about Ciboney. They left the clinic before I was called for my appointment.
Rose says fate brought us together. I say it was a simple cloth bag. I should have left the bag at the clinic’s front desk for them to return to her, but her address was typed on an envelope in the bag and I decided to return it myself. I had an urge to take the bag home with me and explore its contents. Diagrams, designs of gardens large and small were scribbled on scraps of paper. Inside tiny notebooks were names of plants and flowers, some I’d never heard of. There were some university calendars in the cloth bag, too, one dog-eared at the pages listing horticulture courses. A small bottle of Japanese musk oil was in a corner of the bag, and I dabbed drops of it behind my ears.
I kept the bag for several days. To this day I still can’t explain why, but I think I’d fallen in love with its contents.
I finally phoned Rose and told her I had found her bag. I apologized for the delay, and we made arrangements to meet midmorning at a coffee shop in Kensington Market. What was to be a brief exchange of a cloth bag and a cup of coffee turned into hours of talk. She was from Grenada, the Isle of Spice. Mountainous, lush, fertile. Grenadians say, “Throw a seed on de ground and fruits, vegetables, flowers spring up.” Rose was all that: sensuous, lush, warm and generous.
That day in the coffee shop she wore cut-off blue jeans and a loose white cotton shirt, buttoned all the way down the front. Her thick, black, baby dreadlocks barely touched the nape of her neck. Her laughter was infectious, and I immediately liked that about her, for laughing didn’t come easily to me. And her openness was refreshing.
“Did you go through my garbage bin of a bag?” she asked, laughing. I laughed, too, and avoided admitting to my curiosity. From the coffee shop we moved on to a small Caribbean take-out joint and then to Rose’s house. She devoured the food in no time, talking all the while about her island and all that she missed. I wasn’t as enthusiastic about the food as she was, and I promised her that soon I would let her sample my grandmother’s cooking. Rose had no family here, except for an older brother she was estranged from. She’d left the Isle of Spice years earlier, coming to Canada to stay with her brother and his wife while she finished high school. She’d meant to stay on with them through university.
“It never worked out that way,” she explained to me. “I finish high school with honours, but things so bad with mi brother and his wife I had to leave, too much confusion …and they never like my way of living my life.”
“You just picked up and left?” I asked.
She laughed again. “What you want me to do, wait until they kick me out? Girl, I just get up and leave, and stay with a friend until ah get my own place,” she said, waving her hand at the tiny bachelor apartment. “I couldn’t go back home. I had to finish what I set out to do. Get a university education. Aaye.” She shook her head, and despite the dance of her beautiful locks, her eyes betrayed her bravado. I learned later that she had just turned twenty-two, about four and a half years younger than I.
Lunch turned into dinner, then it was time for more coffee. It was early spring and the evenings were still short. I called Mama to say I’d be late, and Rose and I talked long into the night. I told her about the dead-end street and my family.
Within weeks we’d become fast friends, sharing our love for plants and talking about travel, music and the Caribbean. In time we graduated from coffee and tea to rosé wine and mango-almond cheesecake, which Rose loved with a passion. We talked freely, though I skipped over my grandmother’s binges because they were a thing of the past. I told her about Justin. And I told her about Myers and our garden back home, and about Grandfather Oliver, Punsie and Petal.
There were stories in her family, too: an uncle who’d sided with the Americans
in Grenada in 1983, which resulted in hush-hush deaths and shame on the family name; a sister who ran off with a half-brother; another family member, an immigration officer, who was caught taking home goods confiscated from tourists. For Rose nothing was too serious for her not to find humour in, even if it meant digging deep. Of her mother and father she spoke with respect and gratitude, and I warmed to her even more. They were close to Mama’s age.
Rose became as familiar with my household as I was with hers. Like me, Mama and Uncle Mel responded to her ready laughter. Ciboney and Vittorio loved to play tag with her, and she spent hours playing snakes-and-ladders with them. Rose was everything I had liked about Punsie and Petal. She had the same adventurous spirit. And of course there was her laughter, her scent and her flawless coffee-brown face.
With encouragement from Rose, I applied for a scholarship to study horticulture at the University of Texas. I had never imagined myself going to college. In high school I’d dreamt of working as an assistant in a plant or florist shop, but that was before Ciboney. I had devoted myself to her, harvesting all the joy that I could. Gardening was something I did in Mama’s backyard, and I hoped that someday I would have a meadow of flowers of my own. But I had never been lucky with dreams, and if I hadn’t met Rose, I would never have believed they could come true.
She had already been accepted to the University of Texas for the following fall semester, and she convinced me to go for a scholarship and join her. I didn’t want to leave my daughter, but I knew I couldn’t take her with me. For a brief moment I understood why Glory had left me with Mama to come to Canada. Had it not been for Mama, I wouldn’t have taken the plunge; I would have stayed home and fulfilled my duty as a mother, keeping my pledge that I would never leave Ciboney in anyone else’s care. But Mama remembered how I’d played in the dirt at Myers’s elbow, and she believed in me.
Next to Ciboney, there was nothing I loved more than flowers and gardening. And so, with the promise of a better future for me and my daughter, I left her with Mama. It seemed the right thing to do and it was what I knew: to make a better life one had to go away. I made two promises to myself: that I would come back every holiday to be with my daughter, and that I would stay in Texas no longer than the required time.
The Heart Does Not Bend Page 13