Nevertheless, Clotel and Dionne entered the church hall hand in hand. And both feigned surprise when the lights came up over pink streamers, balloons, and a sign that read HAPPY BIRTHDAY, YE CHILDREN IN CHRIST. The next day, in church, the congregation would sing to them, “Happy Birthday, Dear Christians.” But on this night, both young women were glad to be spared a song as they were overwhelmed by the smell of food in the church hall. There were the legendary fish cakes women from Bird Hill were known for all over the island, and which no small number of less-favored women bought at the bottom of the hill on Saturday mornings. Dionne could smell the yellow cakes with pineapple filling and frosting and the milk-soured mouths of the children who ran circles around their mothers. The church hall doors remained open behind Clotel and Dionne; the sweet stink of the guava trees, which were planted when an ugly woman named Cutie died and left her small fortune to the church, wafted inside.
Both girls were new to the high heels that bore blisters into their feet. Dionne was painfully aware that she’d finally turned sixteen, the age at which Avril said she could start wearing heels, and her mother wasn’t there to see her wobbling or to show her how to walk in them. Dionne and Clotel shifted their weight as Father Loving said an interminable prayer, during which Dionne fluttered her eyes open to find the reverend wiping his brow and studying her breasts, which pressed insistently against her dress. After his incantations, Father Loving offered them each a new leather-bound King James Bible. Clotel seemed genuinely excited to accept her gift while Dionne took hers reluctantly. She mumbled thanks to everyone for their gifts and kind words, all their variations on wishing her the best of life in Christ. Then she steeled her shoulders, readying herself for the inevitable conversations on one of two topics—books or baptism.
“So, now that you turn sixteen, are you going to give your life over to the Lord in service?” Mrs. Jeremiah asked, her rheumy eyes taking Dionne in. She clutched Dionne’s elbow between two firm fingers. The younger woman felt that Mrs. Jeremiah’s conviction about Christ could break bone.
“Yes, God willing,” Dionne said. Her voice cracked. God’s name felt like a word in a language she’d never learn.
Dionne looked over the jaunty red feather in Mrs. Jeremiah’s hat and her gaze landed on her grandmother and Phaedra. She felt keenly the absence of her mother, who was in no small part responsible for her birthday turning out like this and should, she thought, at least be there to witness the disaster. The women kept bringing more and more food in aluminum pans out to the blue-flame burners. And Dionne kept expecting her mother to walk through the church hall’s front door.
The people on the hill were Christians, and seriously so, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t like to have a good time. Lyrics like “get something and wave for the Lord” were made for Bird Hill, where any news was reason to have a party, and parties could start in the late afternoon and put the stars to bed the next morning. The Soul Train line sent women hobbling back to their seats with sweat on their brows and complaints on their lips about their old bones, the small children rubbing their eyes and seeking their mothers’ laps.
Dionne and Trevor, who had been keeping each other at a respectful distance until then, came together in the back of the church hall. They agreed to slip out separately and meet at their usual rendezvous location, star side. They’d named it that because of the way the moon and stars bathed the graves in the cemetery that sloped down behind the church in light, eliminating the need for flashlights that might lead prying eyes to their hiding place. “We’ll call this our special place,” Trevor whispered the night they named it, and Dionne, desperate for space that was not her sister’s, not Avril’s, not Hyacinth’s, just hers, nodded, thinking he could give her what she needed.
A couple hours later, when the sun had long since set and the murmurs of good-byes filled the church hall, Dionne went to find Trevor. It was hot outside, as if all the heat that had gathered during the day decided to stay the night. Sweat collected in Dionne’s bosom, plastering her cotton bra to the top of her dress’s wide collar. She’d worn the dress all evening with an air of self-sacrifice, but now, in the open air, she tugged at its buttons. She took a seat on Trevor’s forbearer’s grave with the gift Bible tucked firmly beneath her, making a show of trying not to dirty her new clothes.
“You having fun yet?” Trevor asked.
“Define fun.”
“C’mon, Dionne. You have to admit that seeing Sister B. do the pepper seed was fun.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Dionne laughed. She remembered the old woman’s shaking shoulders, the way that everyone was genuinely concerned about her teeth rattling out of her mouth.
“What do you think his life was like?” Dionne asked.
“Whose life?”
“His life. Trevor Cephus Loving. July 14, 1928–July 21, 1973.”
“Probably the same as my father’s. Baptisms, weddings, funerals. More food than you could ever eat in one lifetime.”
“Same as yours? Do you want to be a reverend?”
“I guess I never thought I had a choice.”
“Everything in life is a choice. It’s not like you just wake up one day and suddenly you’re Father Loving the third.”
“Well, it’s not like in the States, where you just decide what you’re going to be and then you go to school and become that thing. Here on the hill, who you are is who your people have been. I was born the same day my grandfather died. Everyone said that was a sign I was coming back as him.”
Dionne felt the door close on anything substantial between her and Trevor, but then also the urgency of their closeness. Dionne knew that any man whose life was already decided for him couldn’t be hers. But here, where her spirit felt only halfway home, anchorless without Avril, she wanted something familiar to be close to, somewhere to land.
“Have you ever noticed that all these people died close to their birthdays? It’s almost like the earth remembers them and knows it’s their time.”
“I don’t know how your mind works, Dionne, but I like it. What would you do if you knew this was your last birthday?”
Dionne turned to Trevor and whispered in his ear. Trevor was shocked that what he had been begging for all summer was finally being offered freely. He tried to stay cool. He placed a fiery hand on Dionne’s thigh and did away with her blue panties with the deftness and care that indicated he knew that at any moment she could decide differently.
“Go slow,” Dionne said, warning. She used her hands to guide him inside her.
Trevor made love to Dionne by moonlight, her bare feet planted on the crumbling gravestone while he entered her with sweetness she didn’t know he could muster. Dionne remembered the roughness of Darren’s hand inside her and braced herself for what Taneisha told her would feel like a pinch and then like the ocean opening inside her. She sighed, taking in the heat of him at her neck and the damp of the night air.
When they were done, Dionne took her panties in one hand and her new Bible in the other and let the breeze when it came touch her where Trevor had before. She felt wiser somehow, and looking at the church lit up above, thought that maybe this kind of pleasure could be her religion.
AFTER THE PARTY, Phaedra helped Hyacinth out of her brassiere. She unhooked all sixteen eyelets until the sandwich of flesh on the older woman’s back parted, and marveled at her grandmother’s unlined skin. Phaedra was going to find a book to lull herself to sleep with when Hyacinth told her that she should come to the back of the house.
Hyacinth opened up the top half of the back door to let the night air in. Then, she undid the locks of the sea-green cupboards with keys she fished out of her nightgown. For weeks, Phaedra had been dying to know what her grandmother kept there. Whenever Phaedra begged her to open the cupboards, Dionne told her that curiosity killed the cat. Phaedra was annoyed that Dionne, who was generally unafraid of trouble, wouldn’t h
elp her. Phaedra bet Dionne that Hyacinth hid a secret cache of Shirley biscuits there and her sister just shook her head, saying it was probably something boring, like mothballs or detergent.
Both of them were wrong. When Hyacinth opened the cupboard doors, she revealed herbs of all varieties in glass jars, each labeled in her careful fourth-grade print.
“What is all this, Granny?” Phaedra asked.
“Roots.”
“You mean to do obeah with?”
“Dear heart, labels are for things, not people. I don’t work obeah any more than Father Loving does when he says that a couple drops of holy water on a sick man’s forehead can make him well. There’s all kind of magic, some for daytime, and others for the night.”
“So, it’s all just different ways to make people well?”
“You could say that. All different ways to help the body do its work. Now, we need to find roots to make a tea.”
“What kind of tea?”
“The same tea I gave your mother to drink.”
“To make her strong?”
“To make her womb weak.”
“What do you mean, weak?” Phaedra asked.
Hyacinth turned the full force of her gaze on Phaedra, the way that she did when she wanted to be heard. With Hyacinth looking at her, Phaedra felt naked, as if her grandmother could see what was beneath her skin, the sturdy parts and what she was ashamed of too.
“A strong womb carries a healthy baby. A weak womb lets go of the baby before it grows.”
“So why would you want to give Mommy that to drink?”
“I gave it to her when she started tumbling big with you,” Hyacinth said, releasing Phaedra from her gaze so suddenly that Phaedra felt herself slip.
“You mean Mommy didn’t want me?” Phaedra grabbed the clothesline where she and Dionne hung their clean underwear after they washed them in the shower, but she felt it give, wavering where she wanted support.
“Sweetheart, it’s not to say Mummy didn’t want you. She was facing down the facts of her life and couldn’t see where another child might fit. I told her myself that if she thought life was hard with her and Dionne and that husband, she would understand what hard life really was with another one pulling at her. If she’d seen just one bit of the sparkle you have now, she would have been trying to bring you out sooner. One day you will see that what must be born will be born. Everything else will find another way.”
“Why would you tell me that?”
“Sweetness, the only thing that has power over you is what you can’t say, even to yourself.”
Phaedra considered this for a moment, letting the night frogs fill the silence between them.
“Everything hurt needs sun and air to heal it,” Hyacinth added, hearing what Phaedra had not said.
“So what you’re saying is that it’s not that she didn’t want me, but that she didn’t see how to make it work.”
“You could say that. I can tell you one thing, though. No matter what she did, her belly just kept growing and growing. You were determined to come.”
Phaedra touched the dime-size birthmark nestled inside her bruise’s faded half-moon. “Is that where this came from?”
“She tried one last time with the doctor but you would not come out no matter what he did.” Hyacinth bent down and kissed Phaedra’s scar, leaving a wet imprint of her lips that the breeze soon dried. Phaedra was hard-pressed to recall the last time she’d been kissed by her grandmother. She wished their closeness would last a moment longer than it did.
“Now help me make this tea. Granny’s eyes not so good anymore.”
“Yes, please,” Phaedra said. For the first time, it felt less awkward to say, “Yes, please,” which her grandmother had taught her to reply with, and which the Bird Hill girls said without issue.
Phaedra pulled down the jars from the cupboard as Hyacinth called their names—nettles and burdock for cramps, peppermint and gingerroot for an upset stomach, pennyroyal and tansy leaves for hastening the menses. She scooped the herbs in the quantities Hyacinth specified into a pan, and then into seven tea bags.
“Who’s the tea for, Gran?”
Hyacinth’s lineless face was obscured by the glass jar of chamomile she held up to the light. “Your sister,” she said, nonchalantly.
Phaedra already knew the answer to the question forming in her mind. She steadied herself with the work of alphabetizing her grandmother’s roots.
THE SECOND SESSION of vacation Bible School began just as July in Bird Hill was yawning toward a close. Going back for round two was particularly hard for Phaedra because now she didn’t have the benefit of ignorance about what VBS entailed to make it seem exciting. Just when Phaedra had conquered the steep ascent from the beach to her grandmother’s house, just when her latest rereading of Harriet the Spy was getting really good, just when she had learned how to launch boomerangs with Chris in Ms. Zelma’s backyard—she was thrust again into the tyranny and tedium of VBS.
Vacation Bible School always followed the same schedule: a prayer when they arrived, morning activities, lunch, afternoon activities, and a prayer before dismissal. Phaedra’s favorite things were praise song and Bible Jeopardy because these were the only times when she wasn’t being scrutinized, teased about her accent, asked about what her life in America was like, and, occasionally, interrogated about when her mother was coming to collect her and her sister.
The one area where Phaedra excelled, even though she didn’t necessarily enjoy it, was memorizing Bible verses. The prospect of wresting the Bible verse memorization championship crown from her nemesis (and three-time winner) Angelique Ward motivated Phaedra to go to VBS even when she didn’t want to. Well, that, and the fact that Hyacinth insisted that she was not going to let the good money Avril had spent on VBS go to waste because the girls would prefer to wear out her furniture with their lazy behinds than to learn about the Lord. During recess, while the boys ripped around and the girls jumped double Dutch or played with each other’s hair, Phaedra stood off to one side, repeating scripture she’d committed to memory the night before with her grandmother’s help. She was not surprised to learn that she and her mother shared the same favorite verse: “No weapon formed against me shall prosper.”
While Phaedra flailed against the injustice of being forced to go to VBS, Dionne sucked up whatever feelings she had about it. Her mounting disinterest in Trevor meant that she sought him out infrequently, but VBS guaranteed that she saw him every day. Dionne simply dried up her remaining affection for him and threw herself into a role she knew well—taking charge of the little sixes and sevens who came for the morning program. When Trevor asked Dionne why she no longer had time for him, she told him that she had plans with her friends. Even he could see that she was becoming popular with the older girls on the hill, who had gone from seeing Dionne as an oddity to claiming her as an asset, asking her opinion on boys, their hairstyles, clothes. It wasn’t unusual that summer to walk onto the netball court in front of the church and find Dionne holding forth to a group of rapt girls about, for example, how to rock leg warmers in spite of the warm weather.
Before VBS, Phaedra had not had any dealings with white people other than the ones she saw on television. She wasn’t sure if she could count as white the Hasidic Jews who lived in her neighborhood in Brooklyn, the ones who rushed past her on Shabbat toward their services. These white people who ran the Vacation Bible School were strange, Phaedra thought, but likeable—big, friendly Texans who roasted themselves in the sun and laughed heartily all the time, as if Christ’s glory had a laugh track. Her favorite was her teacher, Tracey Taylor. Phaedra knew from watching television that Ms. Taylor was what some people would call beautiful—blond-haired, blue-eyed, flat-bottomed, and full-breasted. She noticed the way all the men and boys panted after Ms. Taylor, especially her coworker Derrick Boss.
The girls in Phaedra’s a
ge group were flexing their last bits of power before they’d be reduced to first-formers when school started back in September. In Phaedra, they found an easy target. It was the first Friday of the second, monthlong session of VBS, right after praise song, when the barrage of questions started.
“A jumbie comb your hair or what?” Angelique Ward drew attention to the halo of frizz that hovered above Phaedra’s head, the outcome of Phaedra’s tender-headed protest against having her hair cornrowed every week. Dionne was not above chasing Phaedra around the house until she washed her hair and sat down for an hour of oiling her scalp, combing through the knots in her hair, and then braiding it. It was more for Dionne, since she saw Phaedra’s appearance as a reflection on her. But Hyacinth cared about different things, and said that she didn’t want Dionne acting like anybody’s mother, lest she find herself in the family way with some bighead boy’s child.
“I thought they had combs in America,” Simone Saveur added.
“I don’t know where she think she come from with her funny name and her hair flying every which way. What I want to know is who says that light skin and long hair makes you pretty?” Tanya Tompkins pronounced.
The least troublesome of these girls, Donna, was both too round and too timid to join in the teasing. She wore her body like a mistake she hoped to one day be forgiven for. She gestured to Phaedra to follow her inside. Phaedra smashed her fists into her shorts pockets and slid onto one of the church hall’s benches beside Donna.
Donna hunched her shoulders as she devoured four tuna fish sandwiches, washing them down with too-sweet Tang, whose flavor crystals stuck to the corners of her mouth. When she’d taken her last gulp, she let out a burp behind her hand and then she turned to Phaedra. Her eyes darted around the room as if she wanted to be sure that no one heard her secret.
The Star Side of Bird Hill Page 5