What was the color of her wedding day? When she first saw him was she overwhelmed with desire? The impulse to possess is alive in every heart, and some people choose vast plains, some people choose high mountains, some people choose wide seas, and some people choose husbands; I chose to possess myself. I resembled a tree, a tall tree with long, strong branches; I looked delicate, but any man I held in my arms knew that I was strong; my hair was long and thick and deeply waved naturally, and I wore it braided and pinned up, because when I wore it loose around my shoulders it caused excitement in other people—some of them men, some of them women, some of them it pleased, some of them it did not. The way I walked depended on who I thought would see me and what effect I wanted my walk to have on them. My face was beautiful, I found it so.
And yet I was standing before a woman who found herself unable to keep her life’s booty in its protective sack, a woman whose voice no longer came from her throat but from deep within her stomach, a woman whose hatred was misplaced. I looked down at our feet, hers and mine, and I expected to see my short life flash before me; instead, I saw that her feet were without shoes. She did have a pair of shoes, though, which I had seen; they were white, they were plain, a round toe and flat laces, they took shoe polish well, she wore them only on Sundays and to church. I had many pairs of shoes, in colors meant to attract attention and dazzle the eye; they were uncomfortable, I wore them every day, I never went to church at all.
* * *
My strong arms reached around to caress Roland, who was lying on my back naked; I was naked also. I knew his wife’s name, but I did not say it; he knew his wife’s name, too, but he did not say it. I did not know the long list of names that were not countries that his wife had committed to memory. He himself did not know the long list of names; he had not committed this list to memory. This was not from deceit, and it was not from carelessness. He was someone so used to a large fortune that he took it for granted; he did not have a bankbook, he did not have a ledger, he had a fortune—but still he had not lost interest in acquiring more. Feeling my womb contract, I crossed the room, still naked; small drops of blood spilled from inside me, evidence of my refusal to accept his silent offering. And Roland looked at me, his face expressing confusion. Why did I not bear his children? He could feel the times that I was fertile, and yet each month blood flowed away from me, and each month I expressed confidence at its imminent arrival and departure, and always I was overjoyed at the accuracy of my prediction. When I saw him like that, on his face a look that was a mixture—confusion, dumbfoundedness, defeat—I felt much sorrow for him, for his life was reduced to a list of names that were not countries, and to the number of times he brought the monthly flow of blood to a halt; his life was reduced to women, some of them beautiful, wearing dresses made from yards of cloth he had surreptitiously removed from the bowels of the ships where he worked as a stevedore.
At that time I loved him beyond words; I loved him when he was standing in front of me and I loved him when he was out of my sight. I was still a young woman. No small impressions, the size of a child’s forefinger, had yet appeared on the soft parts of my body; my legs were long and hard, as if they had been made to take me a long distance; my arms were long and strong, as if prepared for carrying heavy loads. I was in love with Roland. He was a man. But who was he really? He did not sail the seas, he did not cross the oceans, he only worked in the bottom of vessels that had done so; no mountains were named for him, no valleys, no nothing. But still he was a man, and he wanted something beyond ordinary satisfaction—beyond one wife, one love, and one room with walls made of mud and roof of cane leaves, beyond the small plot of land where the same trees bear the same fruit year following year—for it would all end only in death, for though no history yet written had embraced him, though he could not identify the small uprisings within himself, though he would deny the small uprisings within himself, a strange calm would sometimes come over him, a cold stillness, and since he could find no words for it, he was momentarily blinded with shame.
One night Roland and I were sitting on the steps of the jetty, our backs facing the small world we were from, the world of sharp, dangerous curves in the road, of steep mountains of recent volcanic formations covered in a green so humble no one had ever longed for them, of 365 small streams that would never meet up to form a majestic roar, of clouds that were nothing but large vessels holding endless days of water, of people who had never been regarded as people at all; we looked into the night, its blackness did not come as a surprise, a moon full of dead white light traveled across the surface of a glittering black sky; I was wearing a dress made from another piece of cloth he had given me, another piece of cloth taken from the bowels of a ship without permission, and there was a false pocket in the skirt, a pocket that did not have a bottom, and Roland placed his hand inside the pocket, reaching all the way down to touch inside me; I looked at his face, his mouth I could see and it stretched across his face like an island and like an island, too, it held secrets and was dangerous and could swallow things whole that were much larger than itself; I looked out toward the horizon, which I could not see but knew was there all the same, and this was also true of the end of my love for Roland.
My father’s skin was the color of corruption: copper, gold, ore; his eyes were gray, his hair was red, his nose was long and narrow; his father was a Scots-man, his mother of the African people, and this distinction between “man” and “people” was an important distinction, for one of them came off the boat as part of a horde, already demonized, mind blank to everything but human suffering, each face the same as the one next to it; the other came off the boat of his own volition, seeking to fulfill a destiny, a vision of himself he carried in his mind’s eye. It was a legal union and it took place in a Methodist church in the village of All Saints in the parish of St. Paul, Antigua, on a Sunday afternoon in the late nineteenth century. His name was John Richardson and her name was Mary; I do not know if the word “happiness” was associated with marriage then. They had two children, boys, named Alfred and Albert; Alfred became my father. What my father made of his parents I do not know. I do not know if his mother was beautiful; there was no picture of her and my father never spoke of her in that way. I do not know if his father was handsome; there was no picture of him and my father never spoke of him in that way. His mother would not have been born into slavery, but her parents most certainly would have been enslaved people; and so, too, his father then could not have been an owner of slaves but his parents might have been. How these two people met and fell in love then, I do not know; that they fell in love I do not know, but I do not rule it out, nor any other combination of feelings. This man named John Richardson was a trader of rum and he had lived all over the English-owned West Indies, longest in Anguilla, before he settled with his wife, Mary, in Antigua; he had many children with many different women in these places where he had lived, and they were all boys and they could tell that they were the sons of John Richardson because they all had the same red hair, a red hair of such uniqueness that they were all proud to have it, the hair of John Richardson. This I knew because my father would tell people that he was a son of this man and he would describe his father in this way, as a man who had lived in this place and that place and had children, all of them boys with red hair, and that whenever he himself saw a man with red hair he would know that this man was related to him and he would always say these things with pleasure and with pride and not with irony or bitterness or sadness at the trail of misery this drunk from Scotland would have left in his wake.
I did not have red hair, I was not a man.
His mother remained to him without clear features, though she must have mended his clothes, cooked his food, tended his schoolboy wounds, encouraged his ambitions, soothed his wounded brow; these are things I would have liked my mother to have done, if only I had had one. John Richardson was eventually lost in a squall at sea, a convenient event, for I would not be surprised to learn that he had after all r
eturned to Scotland, where he had more children, all of them boys with red hair of a different texture. Mary died of something not very long after, perhaps of heartbreak, perhaps not. My father did not attend her funeral, he was then a policeman in St. Kitts and already on his way to establishing his own small dynasty of red-haired boys; he did not marry yet. He was tall, and by a standard that was not my own, he was thought to be very handsome; all the clothes he wore were becoming to him; he looked very good in his uniform, he looked very good in the linen suit he wore to church on Sundays; he was a vain man, so vain that he had trained himself not to steal glances at his own reflection in public; I believe he spent much time in a room with the door locked rehearsing various poses he would take up in public, while leading his family to think he was preparing a lesson for Sunday school; he was an ambitious man, he liked to do things well and he did not like his effort to go unrecognized. He never carried money in his pocket, he would never surround himself with actual money, but this was not unlike training himself not to glance at his own reflection in public: to be seen with money was to reveal how much he loved it, and he loved a farthing more than he loved a penny and he loved a penny more than he loved a shilling and he loved a shilling more than he loved a pound, and this would seem crazy only to a person who doesn’t understand money or love, a person like myself; but my father, who did not understand love when it applied to a person, only love when it came to money, understood that it was in the small parts of something that its true whole is expressed, it is in the small parts of something that its real beauty lies. He knew that there were 960 farthings in one pound and that 960 farthings scattered across the floor of an empty room are mesmerizing, enchanting, and seen by the right person are the foundation on which worlds are built. He was cruel especially to children and people in a weaker position than himself; he was not a coward, it is only that he never really felt rage at anybody more powerful than himself. He seemed to regard his life, himself, all of his surroundings, with humor; he wore a smile on his lips at all times when he was in public, but it was directed inward, not outward; this smile also served another purpose and perhaps he had not intended it to: it made people less powerful than he hesitate to approach him and it made people more powerful than he comfortable approaching him; and yet again the smile was a disguise, something he made himself do in public; he made himself smile with the same determination he made himself not glance at his own reflection; it was to mask all that he felt toward his fellow men, and all that he felt was not good. I never grew to like my father; perhaps I loved him, but I could not bring myself to admit it. I did not like him. Inside my father, the Scots-man and the African people met; I do not know how he felt about that; I do not know if that was one of the things he thought of when he sat in a room in his house, a room that had a view of the sea, the black Dominica sea, a sea that was a tomb, and his history which was made up of man and people was locked up in it. Such a position could have left him paralyzed as to which to be, man or people; his complexion, which was the color of corruption: gold, copper, ore (though if I had loved him, had felt sympathetic to him, I would have described it as the color of bread, the staff of life), made him look more like the victor (the Scots-man) than the vanquished (the African people), but that was not the reason to choose the one over the other. My father rejected the complications of the vanquished; he chose the ease of the victor. In the vanquished, had he looked, he could have felt the blankness that all human beings are confronted with day after day, a blankness that they hope to fill and sometimes succeed in filling, but then again, mostly not; and these people, these African people in whom he could have found one half of himself—they, too, being human, would have felt the blankness and they would have tried to fill it with the usual things: time divided into years, months, days, or something like that. They, too, would have made a fetish of the ordinary: the outer skin of the penis, the thin membrane at the opening of the vagina; they, too, would have made things, utensils from a variety of materials, in a variety of shapes, for a variety of uses; they, too, would have observed some violent occurrence in nature—the earth rupturing, seas where dry land used to be, darkness where light used to be—and would have found in these occurrences promises of some kind, ways to live by, rituals, and a sense of specialness, for they had been spared; and they, too, would have had myths of beginnings and myths of ends. The blankness is the chaos from which they had rescued themselves and given their life order, from there to there and back again, and in just this way. And it was from this life that those people were taken away by the Scots-man or some other hyphenated man who cannot exist as just a man but only with a hyphen.
Outside, outside my father, outside the island on which he was born, outside the island on which he now lived his life, the world went on in its way, each event large, a rehearsal for the future, each event large, a recapitulation of the past; but inside, inside my father (and also inside the island on which he was born, inside the island on which he now lived), an event that occurred hundreds of years before, the meeting of man and people, continued on a course so subtle that it became a true expression of his personality, it became who he really was; and he came to despise all who behaved like the African people: not all who looked like them, only all who behaved like them, all who were defeated, doomed, conquered, poor, diseased, head bowed down, mind numbed from cruelty. And he believed he was being himself one day when a man named Lazarus, a gravedigger, came to ask him for some nails to help rebuild the roof of his house; his house had been a dainty little structure of pine painted red and yellow and it had been destroyed in a hurricane two years before; my father was the highest government official in Mahaut then, he was given by the colonial government various things to give for free to people in the most need whenever there was a disaster; in the case of the hurricane he was given building materials of a not very good quality. My father did dispose of some of the things in the proper way, giving them to people in need, but just enough not to cause a scandal; the rest he sold, and the more a person was unable to pay, the more they were in need, the more he charged them. Lazarus was such a person, more unable to pay and more in need; in him, too, the event of the African people meeting the hyphenated man had taken on such subtlety that any way he chose to express himself was only a reminder of this: a happy song for him would be all about the idea of freedom, not a day spent lying on the sand near the sea in aimless pleasure. And so when Lazarus asked my father for the nails to complete the roof on his house, within my father the struggle between the hyphenated man and the horde had long since been resolved, the hyphenated man as before had triumphed, and my father told Lazarus that he did not have any nails left. I was ten years old at that time; I did not know my mother, she had died at the moment I came out of her, I knew only my father. I did not understand him; I loved to look at him from a short distance where he could not see me looking at him, his red hair glinting in the sun; I loved to look at him when he wore his dress uniform of navy-blue serge pants and white cotton twill jacket with gold buttons, the uniform he wore to a parade celebrating the English king’s birthday. But at that moment when he denied Lazarus the nails, he started to become real, not just my father, but who he might really be. I knew that he had a large barrel of nails and other things in a shed at the back of the house, so in innocence, believing that he might have completely forgotten about it, I reminded him of it, I told him of the barrel full of nails, I told him just where the barrel was, what the barrel looked like, what the nails looked like, what the nails lying in the barrel one on top of the other—frozen, shiny—looked like. He denied again that he had any nails at all. The sound of his voice was not new; it was just that I heard him for the first time. It did not cause anything inside me to shatter, it did not cause anything outside me to shatter, it was not sudden, it was not unexpected, though I was not expecting it either—it was natural, an accepted fact, like the unevenness of height to be found in mountains, or the blue of a sky, or the moon. This was my father, the man I had al
ways known, only there was more of him.
After Lazarus left, without the nails he had come for, without the nails he needed, my father grabbed me by the back of the neck of the dress I was wearing and dragged me through the house to the shed where he had the barrel of nails, and he pushed me facedown into the barrel of nails, at the same time saying in French patois, “Now you know where the nails are, now you really know where the nails are.” He spoke patois, French or English, only with his family or with anyone who knew him from the time he was a boy, and I associated him speaking patois with expressions of his real self and so I knew that this pain he was causing me, this suffocating me in a barrel of nails, was a true feeling of his. He gave my head one last push and then he quickly left me. He went to sit in the room that looked out on the sea, the room that had no real purpose, it was used so infrequently; the sea’s surface was still, and as he looked at it he removed wax from his ear and ate it.
The Autobiography of My Mother Page 12