by Sharon Maas
‘No, of course you don’t have to help Mama! As I said, you can do as you like.’
I was proud to be able to offer my wife leisure time, in keeping with her former life. I would not have her toiling in the kitchen.
‘Well, I would like to come with you! Can I do that?’
I chuckled. ‘I’m going to work, my darling. What would you do?’
And then I saw the tears in her eyes, and stopped laughing.
‘What’s the matter, my sweetheart?’
‘I just – I’m just a little afraid of your mother. She’s – she’s so stern! I don’t think she likes me!’
‘Well, she will love you, just as I do. Who would not love you? And I’ll tell you a secret…’
I whispered into her ear. ‘Ma’s a bit afraid of you! That’s why she seems so unfriendly. She isn’t really. Just be yourself and you’ll be fine.’
‘What – what shall I call her?’
‘Just call her Ma.’
We had breakfast together, all four of us – Ma served us a boiled egg each, and some bread with butter and guava jelly, and coffee. And then I bid Winnie goodbye, and she came with me down the front stairs and I unlocked my bicycle and snapped on my bicycle clips.
‘I’m going to miss you awfully!’ she said, and I hugged and kissed her one last time. I wheeled my bicycle on to the road. She stood at the gate, watching, and as I sailed off she still watched; and as I reached the corner I looked back and she was still watching, and I waved, and she waved back. I prayed to God that she would settle down soon. Ma could be formidable when she wanted to be. But Winnie could be formidable too. This uncharacteristic shyness: it would pass. Winnie was fearless. She had proven it to me over the last two years. Fearless and stubborn, and yet soft and feminine – what a mighty combination! I had no doubt that Winnie would win my mother over. It was in her name: Winnie was a winner. A winner of hearts and minds.
When I returned home that afternoon I saw immediately that I had been right. The first thing I noticed on entering the cottage was the aroma – the mouth-watering smell of baking. It lured me on, and following the trail I came to the kitchen door, and at once I saw that Winnie had indeed won Ma’s heart. The two of them were standing at the stove making rotis for dinner; Ma was teaching her how to toss the just-roasted rotis in the air, and clap them in mid-air. Both were white with the flying flour, and laughing. They didn’t see me standing in the doorway, so intent they were on their work, and I stood watching, smiling, for a while.
‘Don’t be afraid!’ Ma cried. ‘Pick it up and throw it! Throw it!’ Winnie kept touching the roti as it baked on the roti pan on the fire, and then pulling her fingers away.
‘Ouch!’ she cried, laughing. ‘It’s hot! Scalding hot!’
‘Never mind it hot! Just grab it and toss it up! Like this!’
And Ma reached out, grasped the roti at its edge and nimbly tossed it a few feet into the air. ‘Quick! Quick! Now clap! Clap it quick before it fall!’
Poor Winnie! The roti spun in the air and she reached out for it, trying to clap it, to puff it out, but she clapped thin air and the roti fell exhausted back on to the pan.
‘Oh no!’ cried Winnie.
‘Try again quick! Before it burn!’
This time Winnie managed to grab the roti and toss it as quickly as Ma had, and when she clapped it she caught it right between her palms and gave it three swift claps, and it fell back as a perfectly formed roti.
I applauded, and they both swung round.
‘George!’ cried my wife, and flung herself at me, laughing, covered in flour as she was. At first I drew back, but then I couldn’t help it – how could I reject Winnie’s embrace? I let those floury arms close around me, and I let that floury face nudge mine, and I felt her lips on my cheek, and I knew heaven.
‘I love your ma, George! We’ve had a lovely day! I met so many people and we went to Bourda Market and bought tons of provisions and she’s teaching me to cook!’
‘As I just saw!’ I said.
‘Come! Look!’
She pulled me into the tiny space we called a kitchen – there was just about standing room for the three of us. On the second burner of the stove stood a big black pot, covered. Winnie picked up a dishcloth, folded it to make a pad and lifted the cover. A cloud of heavenly-scented steam rose from the innards of the pot.
‘Chicken curry!’ said Winnie, and I could hear the pride in her voice. ‘I made it all by myself – every bit of it! I skinned the chicken and boned and quartered it and chopped the vegetables and everything! I can cook! I can’t believe I can cook!’
‘She need more practice wit’ dem rotis, though!’ said Ma, and though she was pretending to grumble I could hear the approval in her voice. Everything was going to be fine.
5
Yoyo
I should have been pleased to see Mama, but I wasn’t. Not really. Mama had deserted us: sailed away to Europe, leaving us in Papa’s care. She stayed away for years, never writing to us, wallowing in some kind of gloom that stripped her of every motherly emotion. Now, apparently, she was healed. Winnie lured her back from Austria, met her at the harbour and brought her back to Promised Land with all sorts of radical ideas about how to run a plantation. All these people who know nothing, nothing, about the business, breathing down my neck! It was enough to send a sane girl to the madhouse. But I must keep my sanity, for the sake of Promised Land.
I love my home. I love the Corentyne Coast, the land so flat it seems to last for ever, the ocean lapping at our northern border, the vast sky. Most of all, I love the house.
Our house in Promised Land is a palace, a fairytale castle made of wooden lace. It’s constructed of sturdy greenheart in the Dutch Colonial style, just like those magnificent mansions in Georgetown’s Main Street. It sparkles white in the sunlight. Its filigree fretwork, the lattices on the outside walls, the curlicues on the jutting Demerara windows let in the cool Atlantic breeze, which flows throughout the house, up and down stairs, over the walls and through the windows, so that it is never hot.
I know that Winnie, too, loves this house, this land. How can anyone who grew up here ever leave? We have sugar in our blood, we girls. And Winnie has destroyed it all. Or tried to.
How are the mighty fallen! Our father, he who now languishes in a prison, was once a sugar king. Kathleen, Winnie and I were raised as sugar princesses. Our realm is magical: a sunlit, wind-blown bubble of sweetness. Sugar is our livelihood, sugar establishes the seasons, sugar is our world. We grew up basking in sweetness and light.
The rhythm of sugar dictates this world, and any child growing up here knows each season by the sights, sounds and smells of the sugar cycle. Full growth, when the canes are high and wave against the sky, the greenness stretching for miles. Then the burning of the trash, when fire and smoke consume the fields and the air smells of scalded, syrupy, smoky cane juice, intoxicating in its pungency. At harvest, half-naked coolies wielding cutlasses swarm the fields, shouting and swearing as they slash their way through the canes, felling those giant scorched denuded canes. Then comes the time to load the punts. Those same cane-cutters, their bodies now smudged black with soot, ash and cane juice, bent low with the weight of the bundles on their backs, carrying the canes to the navigation canals. The mules, several of them chained together, pulling the loaded punts to the factory. Then the grinding season, when the factory groans and chugs day and night, a dark lurking monster turning the once-green canes to gold. Sugar is our gold. Corentyne gold, we call it. Corentyne gold, Essequibo gold, Demerara gold. Each county in British Guiana produces its own version of sugar wealth. After the harvest the once-glorious fields remain behind, denuded, ugly, disfigured by endless miles of hacked-off stumps black from the burning. But then comes the flood-fallowing and new life, when the young green shoots, the ratoons, grow out from fields now glistening with water, and the coolie women bend low in the water as they weed. And every few years, the planting of new canes.
&nbs
p; This was our world: sweet, romantic, magnificent. Yes, I know there is a dark side to it, and I know that Winnie saw herself as some kind of heroine, taking the side of the sugar-workers. And I know that Papa, my beloved Papa, had done wrong. But surely blood is thicker than water! In choosing the wrong side Winnie has betrayed us all, and it is left to me to save our kingdom.
The absurd thing is that, after Papa’s trial and conviction, Winnie got some notion into her head that Clarence and I were not enough; that she, as the elder sister, was needed to direct the business. That I was too young, and needed help, her help. She, whose head was filled with nothing but fluff!
Well, perhaps I shouldn’t say that. By the time of the trial Winnie had started to fancy herself as some kind of a revolutionary, the romantic bubbles in her head replaced by dissident fervour and communist ideas. But of course it was only to impress George and the other darkies and our coolie labourers. Apparently she was now their heroine, and tried to establish herself as such on the plantation.
How circumstances can change! She and I had once been the best of friends but now – now we were tottering towards outright enmity. We agreed on nothing. The first thing Winnie wanted to do was build new homes for the coolies. It’s not that I did not want to do that – after all, building new homes, replacing that dreadful shantytown the labourers called home, squalid logies in stinking mud lanes, had been my aim too, right from the beginning. We agreed in principle. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and once I understood the economics of plantation running, I realised that there were other priorities. Just for the time being, of course. Charity could come later.
Winnie was rather emotional about the whole thing.
Tears in her eyes, she pleaded with me: ‘Yoyo,’ she said, ‘remember Nanny! How could you forget Nanny?’
‘Of course I haven’t forgotten Nanny!’ How unfair of her to bring up the question of Nanny! Nanny, my beloved nurse, who had spent her last days in the squalor of the logies. It was in fact Nanny’s predicament that had catapulted the two of us into this whole sordid affair. We had lived in a dream world of frocks and parties before then. ‘Don’t bother your pretty little heads,’ Papa had told us, ‘enjoy your lives, and leave the estate to me.’ And we obeyed. But then we found out how Nanny lived. How could I not care? How could I close my heart to the misery of Nanny’s living quarters? I had vowed to change it all; but once I took charge I understood a little better that change would take time, and anyway, it was far too late to benefit Nanny herself, and frankly, my interest had waned. There was time for everything, lots of time. Winnie, however, now that Papa was in prison, wanted change now. Immediately.
And that is why I did not want her back on the plantation; but she came anyway, sticking her nose into matters that didn’t concern her.
‘Let me see the account books,’ she said that day. ‘I’m sure there must be money left over to build new homes for the coolies. There’s certainly land enough – those fallow fields beyond the back-dam, for instance.’
‘Those fallow fields,’ I retorted, ‘are not going to be fallow for much longer. There’s a new strain of sugar cane we’re going to plant there; with almost twice the yield!’
She said nothing to that, but only stared at me.
‘You’ve changed, Yoyo,’ she said mildly after a while. ‘Very well then. If not that field then another, after the harvest. We’ll just clear one of the present fields and build houses on it.’
She refused to understand, but it wasn’t just the impracticality of her proposals that strained our relationship; there was that undercurrent of mistrust. How could I ever trust my sister again, she who had betrayed us all and dragged the Cox name through the mud? And so, though we argued about housing, the real issue was another, and sooner or later it was bound to come out, and it did.
‘Why did you come back here at all?’ I said after an hour of futile arguing, that first day. ‘You’re not wanted on Promised Land. Go and stay with your darkie lover!’
‘You know I can’t do that,’ she said. ‘We’re not married. And this is my home as well as yours. I have every right to be here. And my opinion on the running of it is as valid as yours.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong! Clarence is the estate manager and he has the last word, and I’m his fiancée. And besides – everyone hates you up here.’
‘Including you?’ She reached out her hands to me then, in a gesture of supplication. Winnie could not abide such ugly emotions as hatred; but she should have thought about that earlier. Yet I could not use the word hate towards her. She was still my sister. But not the sister I had grown up with, the one I once knew so well. She was now a stranger.
‘I’m furious with you and you know why!’ If my eyes could have shot poison darts, they would have. Already my voice was raised to an unladylike level – as Papa would have called it – and I longed to let go; to scream at her, to tear out her hair, to scratch that calmly smiling face of hers that refused to reflect my rage. But I held back. She would find out, one way or another, that I’m not the kind of person who takes kindly to betrayal. If not for Winnie’s witness statement Papa would have left the court a free man. I still could not believe what she had done. Betrayed not only her own father, her whole family, but the entire English community. She would always be a pariah now.
‘I did the right thing, Yoyo,’ is all she said. ‘I had to do it. And if you will only let me I can help you with the running of the plantation. I know I don’t know much about business. But I know about people. I know the workers, and what they need. They trust me. Now is the time to really change things; we could work with the labourers, instead of against them!’
See, that was just the kind of romantic notion Winnie was wont to entertain; always this talk of appeasement and goodwill, but you can’t run a plantation on love and peace, and that was why I thought she should go. But she stayed, a thorn in my side, constantly nagging me about this and that, and though that first argument fizzled out more arguments followed and by the time Mama arrived I was ready to throw Winnie out – on her backside, to put it crudely. But I didn’t need to, because she married her little darkie lover George.
The worst of it is that Mama has taken Winnie’s side. The two of them, against me! By the time Mama returned from Austria, Winnie and I had each dug our heels in on our respective positions. Luckily for me, Papa passed power of attorney on to Clarence, not Winnie, and so I was on the winning side; nothing need be done. But Winnie seemed to think herself the voice of conscience; she placed herself clearly on the side of the coolies and they, of course, rallied behind her and got up to all kinds of mischief, such as refusing to work, or working slowly – that kind of thing. And that crazy fellow, that Mad Jim Booker, who Winnie referred to as ‘Uncle Jim’, the white man with a coolie wife – it didn’t help that he was behind the whole thing. Always had been. How naïve I had been, not to have known about the plotting and the planning that had driven us into this position!
Winnie, and Mad Jim, and now Mama: it was all their fault. The coolies were helpless without support, and I found it abominable that white people, English people, should so forget their roots as to harness their indisputable authority to the so-called underdog, giving them a false sense of power. It has always been my position, even as a young girl of fourteen, that change must come from above. It must be granted, and we must be the ones to grant it, and in our own time: carefully planned, and in accordance with the economic needs of the plantation.
I won’t say that I wasn’t happy at Mama’s return. It was a surprise, indeed; and initially a happy one. She had been away so long, I had almost forgotten her, and anyway, I’d hardly known her before she left, sunk as she was in her melancholy. I was happy to get my mother back; but she had changed, for her melancholy had left her, and she came full of vigour and fervour and before long she had ganged up with Winnie and Mad Jim against myself and Clarence. Thus the stalemate.
So when Winnie married her darkie George soon afte
r Mama’s arrival, I breathed a sigh of relief. It left me alone with Mama on the plantation, true enough: but it also removed Winnie and her constant nagging, and that’s why I went to the wedding, abominable as it was. But I wore that hat to show her, to show everyone, that I am now in charge.
6
Winnie
The following morning I took Mama to visit Uncle Jim. We went by bicycle, and as we walked over to the bicycle shed they all came out, the servants Mama had known in the years gone by. First Bobby, the yard-boy, now a grown man. Once I had called him simply ‘Boy’; now I knew his name, and I whispered to Mama: ‘His name is Bobby.’ She nodded, understanding. He came up to me shyly, smiling somewhat hesitantly – but Mama stopped in her tracks and held out both her hands for his, and that wavering smile turned into a fully fledged grin.
‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘so good to see you back again!’
‘Oh Bobby, how you’ve grown!’ she exclaimed. Then came Doreen, the washerwoman, also waiting to greet her, and Patch, the gateman, who had left his post at the gate to approach, and others. People who had known us since I was a spoilt little brat, floating in an unreal bubble of light and beauty, oblivious to the trials and tribulations of the common folk. Mama remembered them all; she had always been good to the servants, and they welcomed her back with joy.
As for me: that spoilt little girl was long gone. I was a grown woman now. These people I had once treated as servants; I now understood that their inferior roles in life were just that, roles, roles as in a theatre play; and beneath the roles they were as worthy of respect, and even love, as we who play more elevated roles. And just as the actor is not identified only by the role he is playing, so too I knew that we are all on this earth as equals. Shakespeare’s words sprang into my mind: All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.