How to Escape From a Leper Colony

by Tiphanie Yanique

  We were at the Cathedral downtown. In days the Cathedral would be locked up as Carnival revelers stamped through the street. Obeying the song that would be the road march. Be wild, it commanded. We own this Carnival, it declared. But now “I am the vine and you are the branches” was being sung by the choir. The priest called for the child to be brought up. The microphone wasn’t working and so we couldn’t hear the godparents respond to the sacred questions. My mother was wearing a big cream-colored hat and a fluffy dress. I thought she looked silly but hadn’t told her so in the morning. Her husband, who had only been her husband since the baby but was now living in our house, told her she looked fabulous and kissed her on the mouth. I didn’t like him. His mouth was always greasy and I knew he wouldn’t stay.

  In the Cathedral I held the Body of Christ on my tongue seeing how long it would take to melt if I didn’t chew it. I stared at the Stations of the Cross on the walls, studying the story it was telling. Finally, on the station where Jesus falls for the second time, the wafer slivered into nothing and melted away in my mouth. “Abide in me as I in you.” I closed my eyes thinking that in the front pew only God and the priest would see me taking a rest. And I must have dreamed about a girl because when I felt someone slide up against me in the pew I didn’t flinch out of my sleep. I just nestled in. A song was playing. My boy cousin was kneeling on one side of me. My mother’s husband was on the other side of him. The baby, who hadn’t taken the water on his forehead well, started crying and I woke to my mother rustling out of the church with her new son in her arms. The girl next to me was kneeling with her head down like she was praying. She lifted her head to stare at the altar. Then she turned to me. “I stare at the paintings,” she said. “I like to look at pretty things.”

  I nodded. She was older than me, but she didn’t look like the religious type. Her yellow dress was grabbed around her waist, and she was wearing big gold hibiscus earrings. But with these girls you never knew. They want diamonds and Jesus at the same time, forgetting that Jesus walked Palestine barefoot with only bread and wine to eat.

  “We will be one in love.” The song finished. She leaned into the seat but stopped before her back touched the pew. She was perched, ass alone holding her up. She whispered to me. “I like Simon Peter best.” Her face was the sweet color of brown sugar.

  The recession song came on, “Give me joy in my lamp, keep me burning,” and the girl slid out. I followed her. She didn’t just dip her finger in the holy water. She cupped it out and splashed on her sign of the cross. Outside the beads of water were still on her forehead and spotted on the chest of her dress. An interesting yellow dress. Tight on top with puffy shoulders and like skin on the bottom. The dress was glittering somehow, like maybe it was done up with gold thread or something. Like something old-timish, like a hand-me-down or costume. People were mingling and taking pictures of my mother and the baby. The baby was wearing a long white dress. The family was supposed to go to brunch at some hotel out East End that was expensive and reserved for such occasions. A car drove by shaking and blasting the song that was the anthem: Legal. The hook was playing. “Kill the rabbits! Kill the rabbits! Kill the rabbits …” All the adults pursed their faces and flipped their hands as if fanning the car away. The car drove on but the song stayed in the air.

  “Paul is the one who carries the pen. He’s the scholar. But Peter carries the keys. To the Church. Which do you think is more powerful?” Now she was walking back behind the church. She walked with her back erect. Like a model. I wondered if I knew her. It seemed like I’d seen her around. But St. Thomas is a small island. Everyone looks familiar. I followed her to the side of the church, where the stone wasn’t painted over. She nestled behind these big winding stairs that went up to the place where the priests lived. It smelled like pee. I’d never followed a girl to a small smelly corner before. I kept looking back to see if my mother would forget me and go to the Baptism brunch. But this girl said “I’m Xica” and before I could tell her “I’m Cooper, but call me Coop” she had pushed up against me and was kissing me and we were clutching each other and our mouths were wet with their own juices and different parts of my body were going limp or stiff. And then she pulled away, but I pulled her back because I wasn’t done with this brown sugar. Our faces were right up against each other. She looked at me hard. She must have been a woman, really. She must have been eighteen.

  “That’s it,” she said. “It was nice.” And she pulled away so quickly that her chain busted off in my hand. “Shit,” she cursed, then crossed herself. “Keep it.” Then she snapped away. I was in love. That was it. I was in love with Xica. And all she had done was kiss me. She didn’t come to the brunch. She wasn’t close family.

  That Carnival I was overtaken by the slapping of steelpan and the clanging of cowbells. The food fair was so rammed that it was easy to stick my hand in a white woman’s pockets and take her money as she pressed her puffy twat against my hand thinking I was looking for something else. I stole from tourist women, mostly. It was easier than magic. If you had asked me then why I was stealing I would have said to buy a better necklace for Xica. One that wouldn’t break so easily.

  I hadn’t ever been like this before. Before I just stole to know I could do it. Now I stole and stole and I told myself that this was the Carnival for revolution. Love was a revolution. And stealing was part of the war. I was part of a movement. Anarchy is the word for it. I didn’t know that word then. Then I would have said that I was just obeying the song.

  At Jou’vert I tramped behind Jamband, holding on to the truck, swinging to catch the bottles of spring water they threw to the crowd. They played their oldies which made the girls bend down low with their hands on the ground. Whenever they struck up Legal the whole crowd, thousands of us there in the street, would go jump and prance and lose our minds. They must have played it five times. A long version that lasted for fifteen minutes. When it was dark everyone sang along loudly and put their hands in one direction and their backsides in the others. “Take off you shirt and wave it!” And in the light of the moon girls took off their shirts to reveal sports bras worn for the occasion. As the sun came up on the Waterfront me and my boys found each other and moved through the crowd like a pack of dogs. Our elbows out and faces hidden by handkerchiefs. We weren’t stealing or anything. We were just making room for ourselves. Watch us, we were saying. The sun is up on this street party and you better know that we’re here.

  Two days later I was a wild clown in the Carnival parade. I tramped with a crew of my friends and I looked for Xica. I saw many women I thought must be her. I touched them. I smelled them. I told myself I would find her after Carnival when we were without masks. I would present her with a new necklace. But that was my last Carnival.

  I still have Xica’s broken necklace. I had it made into a hand chain and it’s the one vanity they allow me—though I only wear it during Mass. It’s my talisman. And now I look forward to spying on the thick crowd of revelers of Jou’vert morning as much as I look forward to the one martyr on Easter night.

  5.

  Xica

  I wish to blame my mother. It is the thing we all wish to do and Dr. Freud has given us license so now we are taught that this desire is natural—even though nothing about blame is natural. I have simply made a decision that my pain is inherited. In which case, it is from her. But that still does not make it her fault. Notice that I do not mention my father—since I did not know him at all and so can credit nothing to him. Not even abandonment, because in truth he may not even know that I exist. Fatherhood is a thing that is assigned and accepted.

  I will blame my mother. Let me say that living my first year, quite literally, in a suitcase, did me in. In first grade I could not touch my toes. I could do a split and that was thought remarkable by the boys in class. But I could not touch my toes. No one kept track of this inability, except me. In middle school it was the rave to build a body pyramid for pictures. I could never hold anyone on my back. And I was
always thought too tall to be the point person. In the pictures of that time I am the pretty thing in the front doing the split. My legs open to the ground.

  I always walked very erect. I breathed shallowly. It was thought that walking with my back straight and breathing deliberately was another way I flirted—because once a reputation has been assigned, everything is attributed to it. I could sit only at the very edge of a chair, so that the sharp muscle of my buttocks alone held me up and that was thought to be a way of saying come hither. In truth, if I did not walk straight I could not walk. If I did not breathe shallowly I could not breathe. If I did not sit at the edge of a chair I could not sit. My back was in a constant tremor of pain. Either it felt as though something deep in the muscle was ripping asunder, or it felt as though the spine itself had been lit on fire. When I was feeling the one pain of tearing I longed for the relief of the other pain of burning. But I was never without one. No one knew of this pain. I did not speak of it. It seemed as normal as getting my period every month. Something that happened. Something expected. Something that one did not talk about. The only thing that made the pain stop was something that was not unlike the thing that made bleeding once a month stop. Let us call it slackness. Rudeness. Bad behavior. Call me a slut.

  I graduated from high school but I did not walk in a graduation ceremony. It did not seem right to claim one school as my alma mater. Colleges in the States would not have me. My transcripts were too confusing. My grades did not match. I may have been an A student in history one semester at one school, but then there was a D in history at the next. I looked as though I was many people, and I was. I was someone who had traveled. I had traveled my island. I knew it. I knew it like the back of my hand, and when I thought this I did not mean it as a cliché. I meant that my hand was a thing decided by history. That my hand was colored and shaped by something that time had decided. But that my life was about defying that history. And I meant that I knew the land of my island as I could know a book I might read.

  One of my many teachers once said that history has no influence on land, that land is outside of history. He lied or he was mistaken. History has carved down mountains. History has drenched out rivers. History has made the land, and the land has, when under duress, made history. The land had decided that there would not be slave plantations on it and so we in St. Thomas did not have plantation history. No sugarcane for men to slash and suck. That is what women were for. No one and no thing is unmoved by human history and it is a sad, sad truth. But that Carnival the land had decided to defy history. And this, like my body, was a bit of an impossible thing—but an admirable thing as all impossible things are.

  But of course I could not be the only one like this. I could not be the only one with this wandering need. This one who longed to be packed in a suitcase and taken. Herman was such a spirit. He was a student. He was living on loans. A year in Texas at a community college. A year in Hawaii at a public university. Before the Virgin Islands he had thought about Alaska. Maybe Eden is a cold place, he said. But then he said that he was home now. That maybe this place was his home. Maybe, he said, he could spend his life traveling this small place and that would be enough. This is what he told me on the ferry ride. That we first spoke on water and not land is a symbol of something. But he was not like me, exactly. He was telling a lie that even he did not believe. He only wanted to be like me. But I did not know this at the time.

  He was in the Virgin Islands because his parents had bought a house and a bar. They had arrived on a cruise ship and had decided that there were some niche places here with people like them and that they could live here without having to change themselves too much. They could live what might be called the good life and it did not matter that most of the people they found here, the people who were not like them, but rather were simply characters in this good life, were people who disappeared bit by bit every time people like them arrived. It did not matter to them that their existence meant a space that was absent of our existence.

  Herman was white and I was black—we are still so. That he wanted to be like me said something about him. It said that either he did not understand how the world worked, did not know that he was born with the Great Advantage of pale skin (though it is not an advantage, it is only a genetic mutation, but let us put that aside, because it has been put aside long before us), or that he did not want his advantage.

  To me he did not have a past. To me he was a transient thing who simply appeared and I expected him to disappear any minute, so I fell in love with him. And I took him to pre-Carnival soca fêtes and on Jamband boat rides at night. We would be packed in by the heavy crowd and I always won the coveted corner of the rusty barge. It was dark there. As the calypso started up a woman could push her man into the corner and turn her back to him, roll her hips and ripple her waist, hoist up her leg and loose the burning and ripping of her back into the bass of the rhythm box and the lyrics that we called awesome.

  He was like watching a pageant with the different segments of sportswear, evening wear, and cultural costume. In one day Herman could be a white newcomer, a Frenchy liming in Frenchtown, a local kid grinding on his woman at a jam session. He knew to stay put. He knew to push his pelvis out and sway it side to side. He knew to follow my lead on the dance floor. This is the way you dance to soca, I told him once and then never again: you always follow the woman. He wore dark colors. He wore a hat low on his head. My aunts and uncles who visited the island in abundance during Carnival called him light-skinned so as not to insult me by calling my boyfriend white. He knew to hold me in the backseat of my car after the party when I curled into a ball and my back burned and tore all at once and I cried and he wiped my tears and said the right thing: Don’t ever be ashamed to cry in front of me.

  I brought Herman to my house. Carnival does not end at this house. All year long bands and troupes come to my grandfather and he keeps their ideas in drawers alongside his rolled-up socks. His costumes compete against each other to win King of the Band. Every year a Carnival Queen contestant hires him and her sponsors pay him a year’s salary to ensure that she wins at least the cultural costume segment.

  This is where I would bring Herman. We would make love among the empty costumes that hung in my closet. Those costumes would be living things and it was as if I had many lovers. I felt in control and wild at the same time—in control of my wildness. I felt as though my own clenching and releasing was like an injection, an elixir, a cure.

  We visited once with a glittering set of jagged red dragon wings that filled an entire wall of my room. The wings shook as if in flight if we just breathed on them. Herman climbed inside the costume and he became a dragon. Shimmery and scaly and attached to a set of wheels because the wings, though they threatened to launch, were too heavy to be carried on the back all up the parade route. Even for someone with a strong back like Herman’s. Herman rolled the dragon cautiously around the cluttered room and I watched him and instantly I wanted to be a maiden in a high tower. And then Herman climbed out and he climbed on top of me and I said: Pull my hair down. Call me Rapunzel. And he said: I feel strong. I feel powerful. And when we left we could not believe that my grandfather had made the dragon with his own hands. And when we left there remained little curls of my hair that were quite unlike Rapunzel’s long blond ropes.

  That Carnival there was also an entire array of Oompa-Loompa candy cane costumes because one school troupe in the children’s parade was doing a vapid Charlie and the Chocolate Factory theme. They hung limp and tiny in my closest. The curling pointed shoes still being worked on up until the day after the food fair because they had to be sized perfectly and children’s feet, it seemed, never stopped growing.

  My man was brave. Herman said he wanted to be in the Carnival parade. Herman said he wanted to process down the road. Jou’vert wasn’t what he wanted. In that you didn’t get to put on a costume, really. Your costume was cutoff jeans and sneakers, maybe a fine layer of mud to keep you cool. And perhaps Jou’vert w
as too dangerous, with those crazy young boys elbowing their way through the crowds. Causing fights. But in the parade the costumes were elaborate. They didn’t just make you feel different—they made you a different person, maybe even a different species. You might be a dragon or an Oompa-Loompa for a whole day. I said I would help him. I said that together we could join a troupe. And we did.

  I had not been allowed to join the Crushers until I was eighteen. I do not know if this was Carnival rules because the Crushers was a troupe of the adults’ parade, or if this was Crusher rules. The year I was eighteen was the year of the lyrics, kill the rabbits, kill the rabbits, kill the rabbits, each sentence a higher octave than the last so that it was more of a taunting than a war cry. Nothing was to be killed with blood. We would kill them with the rhythm. That year was also the year of Herman. That “them” meant my boyfriend was something I understood. But I was not thinking along those lines. I knew he wouldn’t last; like all the others he would clutch a suitcase and leave. So I would not wait until next year when perhaps a more benign song was in rotation. I wanted him in Carnival. I wanted him to be one of the pretty things.

  We joined the Crushers. We went down to their base and picked out costumes from the sketches tacked to the walls. Their theme that year was professionals. Firefighters and police officers and the military. Did it seem that Herman wanted us to be in the same uniform? I didn’t care. This is the Crushers, I told him. We don’t have to stay in order. We don’t have to stay in our section. We can mingle. We can jump on a steel band truck and pung some tenor. We can sit on the side. We can even jump up with another troupe if we want. I wanted to be a firefighter. That he also wanted to be a fighter I took as a coincidence. We both liked the felt hats and the shiny red jackets. I especially liked the hose that we got to hold. The Christmas tree icicles that came out the front like sparkling water. The song the Crushers chose for the road march, the song our d.j. would play when we entered the field, would be Legal, with its revolutionary lyrics and its can’t-be-avoided beat. We did not even need to vote on it. What other song was there that Carnival? In the fêtes when the call came on to kill the rabbits, it did not matter if I was dancing with Herman, I would fashion my arms as if holding a rifle and crouch down low—bouncing, bouncing all the while. It did not matter if I was dancing with Herman; he would crouch down with me.