by Sharon Maas
‘You do?’
‘Yes. He might take some persuading, and he hasn’t done the work for many years, but he’s just the man we need.’
‘But – is he available? Will he want to move here and work for us? What is he doing now? Where is he?’
Mama laughed. ‘He’s not far away at all,’ she said. ‘And yes, he’s available. I’m just not sure if he will care to do the work. But he can. And I can perhaps persuade him.’
‘Who is he, Mama?’
‘His name is James Booker.’
‘James Booker? A Booker? Mama, are you mad?’ I cried. The Booker clan and their Booker Brothers Company is the huge conglomerate that owns practically all of British Guiana: almost all of the sugar estates, all of the shipping, and most of the shops. They are our rivals, eager and willing to take us over, an evil spider ready to pounce. How could Mama even think of bringing one of them into the fold?
‘You must be mad,’ I repeated, calmer now. Mama had raised my hopes only to dash them again; we were back to the beginning.
Mama only chuckled. She took a sip of her coffee before she spoke again. ‘I’m not mad, but they say that he is,’ she said. ‘You might know him better as Mad Jim.’
My jaw fell open; Mad Jim Booker! Mama must really be out of her mind.
Mad Jim lives on the edge of Promised Land; he owns a big house there, and has a coolie wife, and all the coolies run to him with their troubles. Rumour has it that he is the brains behind all the labourer bother we have been having. That he masterminds the uprisings; that he instigates the protests and strikes that have plagued us the last few years. Mama’s suggestion was in fact to put the wolf in charge of the herd! It was preposterous. I said as much. Mama only laughed again.
‘Hear me out,’ she said. ‘Jim’s good. In his young days he was trained in estate management, so he knows the ropes. He grew up on Estate Prosperity, in the Essequibo – one of the most successful of the Booker estates. He’s a renegade, it’s true – he had too much empathy for the workers for the company’s liking, refused to push them to their limits. But what he is now – as I’ve heard from Winnie, who knows him well – is a man who the labourers trust. They’ll work for him.’
‘But Mama – you can’t run an estate on kindness! Mr McInnes is a brute but we can’t go in the opposite direction! We need someone moderate – not a nigger-lover.’
The word slipped out before I could check it. I think I was as shocked as Mama. She sprang to her feet and strode towards the door.
‘Never let me ever hear you say that word again in my presence!’ she exclaimed, and she was gone.
The second part of my plan for Clarence – my impregnation – is proving rather more difficult than the first. It’s said that men who drink rum are more easily excited by the ladies, but rum seems to have the opposite effect on my Clarence. It’s rather frustrating. In the four months we have been married we have had only had conjugal relations three times. It’s certainly not my fault. Once we are in our chamber I do all I can to charm and seduce him, but he simply flops and sleeps. How will I produce a son at this rate?
I have taken to reducing his rum intake at the evening meal, which is harder than it sounds. Some time ago he took to inviting his friends from the senior staff quarters, Mr McInnes, Mr Hodgkin, Mr Frith and so on, to join him for after-dinner drinks and conversation on the verandah, just as Papa had done in the past, and of course drinks are always served.
What an unpleasant, raucous lot those men are! I do not remember this level of noise when Papa was head of the household. Mr McInnes especially. Winnie and I had always loathed this man and had vowed to dismiss him the moment we had the power to do so, which unfortunately proved to be easier said than done; we can only let him go once we have a replacement, and that is proving more difficult than anticipated. Qualified estate managers simply aren’t running around free in British Guiana looking for work.
We will have to look further afield; to the islands of the Caribbean. I sent a telegram to our relatives in Barbados, and they are spreading the word among their acquaintances on other islands; but till we find the right man we are stuck with Mr McInnes, whose main off-plantation strength seems to be telling bawdy jokes and guffawing heartily once he has told them – fuelled, of course, by our rum. Not in my company, of course – he isn’t that uncouth – but I make a point of listening behind doors and curtains, and tough though I am even I blush at some of the filth coming out of that man’s mouth. His daughter Margaret is my best friend and I cannot believe the things he says about her, his own blood! It is almost as if – but no, I cannot possibly harbour such a thought. But I will speak to Margaret about it, or rather, drop hints so as to find out more. Mr McInnes would never have dared to speak this way in Papa’s presence! Yes, things are decidedly slipping downhill, and there is little I can do. In the end I am just a girl, hardly more than seventeen. Winnie wasn’t much of a help when she was here, as all she could think of was her approaching wedding and the arrival of Mama.
But then Mama came, Winnie got married and everything changed.
9
Winnie
I quickly adapted to life in our Albouystown cottage. So many people had told me I wouldn’t: I had to prove them wrong, and I did, and it wasn’t even that difficult. Yes, the bathroom was in the yard and all it was was a roofless cabin next to the rainwater vat, with a bucket of water and a ladle. And the lavatory – well, it might not be ladylike to speak about that, so I’ll just say it was a hole in the ground with a wooden seat built over it. But I’m not here to compare my old life with the new one. I had chosen the new one, and that was that. I would do it.
Winning over Ma’s heart had been relatively easy. That hardness she had first displayed was little more than a shell. Once it was cracked she opened up, and treated and loved me like a daughter. And as I got to know her better she earned all my respect. Our house might have been small but Ma treated it like a palace; meticulously clean and tidy it was. Once a week Ma would bundle her long cotton skirts between her legs, get down on hands and knees and scrub the kitchen floor and the back and front steps. She used a scraper, a kind of wide knife-blade, and some kind of white soap. And she polished all the inside floors so that they glowed the colour of honey. And she cleaned all the windows with vinegar and newspaper so that not a streak, not a fly’s footprint, remained.
There was a standpipe in the front yard from which we schlepped water for use in the house, for drinking and cooking and washing wares and, later, for bathing small children. Ma washed the household’s clothes each Monday in a wooden tub next to the rainwater vat, using a beater, scrubbing board, Rickett’s Crown Blue, salt soap and starch. The Blue was to keep the mens’ Sunday white shirts white, and the starch to keep them crisp. Downstairs she kept a coal pot and three cold irons; once the clothes were dry she’d light the coal in the pot and, once they were red hot, she would place the irons upon them. She’d carefully lay a blanket and a folded sheet on the dinner table, which then became an ironing board; she used beef suet to grease the iron before use. Ma did not allow me to help with the washing, but the ironing became my weekly task, and I learned to enjoy seeing the mountain of rumpled clothes removed from the washing lines converted into neat folded piles to be returned to the cupboards.
Ma was meticulous about her own appearance, too. She never left the house without splashing herself with Evening of Paris perfume, and dusting her face with powder, and her body with Mim’s Talcum Powder.
She had an acerbic tongue sometimes, but I soon learned that her bark was worse than her bite, and once I knew her ways we became a team, and she taught me the art of living in a very small space. One by one my spoilt English ways dropped away.
Adapting to Albouystown itself – well, that was not so easy. I am not a town girl. Growing up on Promised Land spoiled me for anything less than paradise. I missed the garden: the orchard that brought forth fruit of every imaginable variety, every month a different and more d
elicious kind; especially the mango tree with its low-slung branches inviting us to climb into its leafy canopy. The towering bougainvillea that climbed our porticos and porches, huge bunches of purple, pink and vermillion hanging low. Hibiscus and frangipani and oleander, and the rose fragrance wafting through it all, carried on the wings of a cool sea breeze. In Promised Land, stepping out of the front door was like stepping into a Garden of Eden, framed by birdsong – the sweet fluting of the kiskadee, the whirr of the hummingbird flitting from flower to flower. The flutter of butterflies, their sun-filtered wings like artists’ palettes.
How different were the narrow streets of Albouystown! Our cottage was just one in a row of similar ones, although surely the best-maintained. The cottage next door to the east – well, it was little more than a hovel, and the one to the west hardly better. And so it was all along Butcher Street, lines of cottages in various stages of dilapidation. They seemed to totter on their stilts, like falling birds. The staircases leading up to the front doors had missing treads and gaps in the balusters. The windowpanes were cracked; shutters were falling off their hinges. The street itself, potholed and cracking apart, had gutters on either side bridged by planks of all shapes and sizes, some rotting, so that one had to step precariously across them.
But all of that I swallowed easily. I’d seen similar in Kitty, when I’d stayed with Aunty Dolly. It was the people who upset me the most, to be quite honest. I had expected neighbourliness, friendliness. What I got was mistrust, rebuffs, rejection.
It started on my very first day, the very first time I left the house with Ma, on my very first expedition to Bourda Market. The lady from the cottage next door happened to be in her front garden (if one could call the patch of unkempt green between front stairs and front gate a garden!) She was bent over, seemingly picking peppers from a bush. She straightened up and glanced over as we proceeded to the bridge. She and Ma exchanged a short greeting, then her gaze turned to me. I smiled, waved and called out: ‘Good morning! How are you? I’m Winnie Quint, your new neighbour!’
I expected her to smile and wave back, call out a return greeting, introduce herself. Instead, she stared a minute, did not respond to my friendly greeting and bent back down to her pepper bush.
I blushed – it seemed I had made a huge faux pas. Obviously, I should have waited for Ma to introduce us; but Ma had walked ahead of me, saying nothing.
‘Ma,’ I said once we were on the street and past the house, ‘who is that lady? Why did she not return my greeting?’
‘What you expect? You, a white lady, calling out like that?’
‘I was just being friendly!’
‘People here don’t want white-people friends.’
‘Oh! Really? Why not? I would have thought…’
George had warned me of this but I had not believed him. After the trial I had been something of a heroine. The poor of British Guiana, whether of African or Indian origin, knew I was on their side; how they had cheered me after the trial! They knew that I supported them, that I held no racial prejudice. I thought of all people as equal, and my decision to marry George and live with him here in his own community was proof of that.
I was rather proud of myself, in fact. I loathed the snobbery most people of my race display towards those of dark skin, and I had made up my mind to be different, to demonstrate by my own actions, my own life, that we were not all of that ilk. That we could be better. That some of us knew what it really means to be a Christian. And I thought my sense of equality would be immediately reciprocated by those abused by our terrible system. That very first day I learned my lesson: it was not to be so easy.
Ma and I strolled down to the market, baskets slung over our arms. We passed several other pedestrians. Ma seemed to know most of them; she greeted them, sometimes by name, and they greeted her back. And then dark eyes would alight on me, and smiles would fade, and lips that had called out a greeting turned silent, and faces grew blank, sullen even. In the shops, too, shopkeepers ignored me, or served me with closed faces, never returning my smiles or my friendly words.
And so it continued, day after day. I was the only white person in Albouystown. When I walked the streets people stared, and animosity was written in their faces. When I went to the market the stall-women served me stony-faced and would not look me in the eye, whereas they served others with warmth and joviality. I could not understand it. I was embarrassed, hurt.
I understood well why white skin was not well-regarded by BG’s black and Indian majority. For decades we, the Europeans, had ruled this country with an iron fist. We had brought slaves from Africa and indentured servants from China, Portugal and India, and treated them appallingly. We had exploited them, flogged them, abused them; our men had raped their women. We kept them poor, and we flaunted our wealth, and we behaved as if we were the lords of the earth and they lived only to serve us. But I was different. They knew I was different. Why then this cold treatment?
‘George,’ I said one evening after such a rebuff, ‘it’s just not fair, to judge me by my skin! You all complain about racial prejudice – this is just the same in reverse!’
But George shook his head.
‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s not at all the same. See – white against black prejudice comes from an ingrained belief of one’s own superiority, and the inferiority of the other race. Black against white prejudice has a different cause altogether. It is derived from a history of abuse. People are wary because of their own experience. In their hearts burns anger; wounds are bleeding deep inside. They do not reject you because of your skin colour, but because of what your people have done to them.’
‘But it’s not fair! I’m different! I have not abused anyone! Why should I pay the price, just because of my colour?’
‘People are wary,’ George said again. ‘You will need to show them that you are different. You must win them over. You won Ma over, didn’t you? You must do it again. In time, you will show them that not all white ladies are evil.’
And so it was that once again, George opened my eyes to realities I had been blind to, hidden away as I was in my bubble of privilege. I had much to learn, and George, and Albouystown, would teach me.
In those early days he seemed shy and ashamed of the conditions he had placed me in, but once I had convinced him that I really wasn’t going to look down on him and his family, once he knew I was really his for ever, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, the old George returned: the George I had fallen in love with, the George who had won me over with his enthusiasm for life and his commitment to The Cause.
What a discovery that had been – finding out that George, my George, the George I was already head over heels in love with, was Theo X, the young and charismatic rebel, one of the leaders in the movement to disrupt the industry, to demand humane conditions for the workers, to put more power into labourer hands!
‘I’m going to a rally tonight,’ he told me that first Saturday.
‘Are you going to be speaking?’
‘Well, yes – I am.’
‘Then I’m coming too!’ His face fell, as I knew it would. We had spoken of this before. George wanted me to stay away from his political rallies, the People for Justice rallies where he would drop his George Theodore Quint persona, and appear only as Theo X. Of course, many people, especially among our neighbours in Albouystown, knew who Theo X really was – Georgetown was such a small capital city that it wouldn’t be possible to keep a secret like that for long. Still, Theo X’s identity was officially a secret; the British, we assumed, did not know. If they found out, he would surely lose his job.
As Theo X, George came alive. It was at one of those rallies, which I had attended in secret as a runaway sixteen-year-old, that I had finally seen the real George and recognised how much bigger this thing was than a teenage infatuation. When George spoke, and in particular when George sang, he swelled into the giant he really was: larger than life, eloquent, passionate, on fire. He set
hearts alight – certainly mine. That day, he became not just my sweetheart but my hero. I heard him speak to the crowds, and was mesmerised. I heard him sing to them, songs of motivation and revolution, and was transfixed. Not just a simple postboy, my George: he was a leader, a man of the future. And I loved him all the more for it.
That was the day I moved on from the frothy sentimentality of First Love to wade into the ocean that is True Love. That ocean is shallow at first, as all oceans are when they lap upon the beach; just so, it lapped upon my personality, enticing me to trust it and wade in deeper, to swim at last and trust the depths. I took the plunge, and then I was there, swimming; love was solid beneath and within and all around me. I trusted it. It was real. And finally it placed me here, in Albouystown, where it would be tested again and again, day after day.
Now George frowned and looked concerned, the way he always did when I spoke of being at his side throughout his mission, being his other half, fighting side by side with him.
‘Winnie – I don’t want you to come. It’s not safe. And when my people see us together they’ll…’
It wasn’t the first time George had revealed such fears.
‘I don’t understand it,’ I said to him, not for the first time. ‘After the trial I was such a heroine among your people. And, in fact, I wish you’d stop talking about my people and your people – aren’t we just all people?’
George sighed, and took me in his arms. I struggled to free myself. I didn’t want to be comforted with his love – I wanted to know.
‘Tell me why!’ I insisted, glaring at him with mock anger. ‘Why won’t they accept us as a couple?’
‘We’re not all one people,’ he said. ‘And we won’t be for a long, long time. That’s just wishful thinking, Winnie. It’s one thing for you to openly stand up for the underdog and speak the truth. It’s admirable for you to turn against your own people—’