“It’s OK.”
“Not really.”
“You’re right,” Dionne said, and for the first time she felt something soft land where her rage had been before.
“I mean, you don’t have to pretend it’s OK, at least not with me,” Trevor said.
Dionne nodded.
“Well, anyways, I was just passing by. Maybe I’ll come check you tomorrow.”
“I’d like that,” she said.
“Look, I know you didn’t plan to stay here after the summer was over. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I’m glad you’re here.” Trevor took the three steps down from Hyacinth’s house in one leap. “All right, then,” he said.
“All right,” Dionne said, and then returned to the rice in her lap. Contemplating the whys and wherefores of her new life was easier when her hands had work to do.
BY THE TIME ADVENT ARRIVED, the long hair that Dionne had when she arrived in Barbados was falling in thick clumps, which she left behind her everywhere, like bread crumbs on a trail back to herself. At the desk where she studied and where her mother had studied before her, she scratched a bloody patchwork into her scalp and plucked out her straightened hair strand by strand. On the back steps where she shelled peas and cleaned rice, on the gallery near the chair where she always sat, Dionne’s hair dusted the ground like the snow she knew was starting to fall in New York. It was a nervous condition even Hyacinth didn’t have a cure for, because she couldn’t follow Dionne to school and around the house, couldn’t force her to stop this new habit of picking at and pulling out her hair. Hyacinth figured that in time, as Dionne settled in to her new life on Bird Hill, this, too, would pass.
Every first snow, Avril let Dionne and Phaedra stay home from school. It was a welcome respite from her ironclad rule that only children on their deathbeds could miss a chance to learn. As soon as the warmth burned off the air, right after Halloween burst through their neighborhood with rotten eggs hurled against bus windows, the girls would start to study the weather forecast, hoping that they could will a snow day to come simply by watching for it. That day usually came in November, but sometimes not until the first or second week in December. On the appointed day, they roasted marshmallows on the stovetop, drank hot chocolate and ate pancakes, and snuggled up on the couch together, telling stories as the city’s white coat fell around her shoulders. Avril would tell them about what it was like when she was in Girl Guides, and the girls would pretend that they’d never heard these tales before, not the one about the time when she didn’t have a bowel movement for a whole week during sleepaway camp because she had a “shy bottom,” or when she gave a girl a black eye for calling her a buller man’s wife, the nickname Avril earned once it was clear she would not succumb to pressure to scorn her gay friend, Jean. Without fail, Avril would tell them about the first time she’d seen snow in New York, how she hid under the covers in a cold-water flat in Bed-Stuy, terrified as she counted the hours until Errol came home from work.
Dionne wondered what had happened to their winter clothes, the jackets and coats and boots they’d packed away in plastic bins before coming to Barbados. Hyacinth said that a distant aunt, one who the girls never heard of, had gone to clean out their apartment and give their things to a church. Occasionally, Dionne wondered who had ended up with her things. She was particularly curious about a cream peacoat with brown leather buttons that her father bought her the year she turned eleven, right before he left. Her last winter in Brooklyn, her arms were already too long for the coat, but she wore it anyway, fashioning a pair of stockings into arm warmers; she was glad that her mother was too dazed then to protest. Every evening now, when she watched the news broadcasts from the States and saw clips of people rushing around Rockefeller Center doing their holiday shopping, Dionne scrutinized the screen, looking for a girl wearing her coat.
This winter was the first that Dionne found herself somewhere other than Brooklyn but not the first time she’d welcomed the first snow without her mother. The girls’ last winter in New York, when the snow came, Avril was gone. The flakes started falling just before daybreak and Dionne, who’d never been able to sleep when her mother was out, was up when it began. She coaxed Phaedra awake to watch the snow fall slowly, then with more fervor as the sun pressed through the gauzy sky. They watched all morning as the snow made beds on the windowsills, and they tried their best to resurrect the ritual without their mother. Dionne made pancakes from mix that she poured out of the plastic bag that protected it from cockroaches that came out at night in Brooklyn like the field mice that rustled the sugarcane next to Hyacinth’s house after dark in Bird Hill. Phaedra sat at the kitchen table her mother had rescued from the Dumpster and painted a hopeful shade of yellow, her knees pulled up to her chest. She watched as Dionne burned the pancakes, and then pretended that she liked them crispy.
Night fell, but Avril still wasn’t home, and the marshmallows Dionne took down from the cabinet were starting to sweat the plastic bag on the counter where she had laid them. When the kitchen’s clock radio read ten, Dionne was sure that her mother wasn’t coming home. She felt overcome by a sudden thirst. The tropical temperature that the building was set to in winter dried out the lining of her throat. She perched on the lip of the open window in the living room and pulled back the security gate. Dionne called Phaedra and asked her to hold her hands as she leaned out of the window. She opened her mouth and let the snow tumble past her teeth, savoring the feeling of being suspended above the courtyard below. She leaned back more and more until Phaedra wouldn’t let her go any farther. Dionne sensed her sister’s fear in her tense grip, but she stayed supine, feeling the silver glow the moon cast above her and the cold wet falling onto her skin and into her mouth. When she finally came out of the window, she brushed past Phaedra and opened the marshmallows. She ate the entire bag in silence before going to bed.
Now Dionne was in Bird Hill on a Saturday morning in December when she was sure kids in Brooklyn were outside making snowballs and snowmen. Somebody else was kissing her old boyfriend Darren, some other girl wearing his varsity ring and letting him give it to her in one of Erasmus’s abandoned stairwells. Dionne tried to conjure what she’d felt for him when she’d first arrived, but there was no tingle between her belly and legs anymore. The part of her that needed a boy’s eyes to be seen was steadily dying, and she knew it would be a long time before she let herself be touched in that way again.
The sun beat down on the back of Dionne’s neck as she hung clothes to dry on the line behind the house. She felt the sweat collecting in her pits and between her thighs as a kind of betrayal of what she knew December should feel like. All summer and fall, she’d held out hope that something would change, but with the first snow falling without her and the blue sea and sun shining as brightly as they had been when she and Phaedra first arrived in June, the truth of this as her home now clicked into place. She finished pegging the clothes to the line and went back inside through the kitchen door.
Dionne was chopping okra for her grandmother’s cou-cou dish when the memory of leaning out of the window in the old apartment in Brooklyn came back to her. She remembered that when she finally came inside, Phaedra was crying. She pushed past her sister, thinking it was stupid for her to be afraid that she’d fall. In Dionne’s mind’s eye, her shoulders were brushing past Phaedra’s wet face. She could almost feel the cold at her back, the snow melting into her hair, her t-shirt plastered against her breasts, which were so much smaller then. Dionne was a stranger to apologies, but now she walked up to the edge of regret about how she’d treated Phaedra then.
It was no wonder that the knife in Dionne’s hand slipped.
Behind Dionne, Hyacinth was sitting on a stool, snapping the heads and legs off okra and watching her granddaughter. She noticed the patches where Dionne’s hair once was, the way she stood with her toes turned out, the same way Avril had. And so, just a split second after Dionne’s hand was
cut, Hyacinth was out of her seat. By the time the blood started to soak into the cutting board, Hyacinth was by Dionne’s side, running her hand under cold water, fashioning an old white dishrag into a compress that brightened and then darkened as Dionne’s blood soaked it. Dionne was shocked into silence by the intensity of the pain; she drew in sharp breaths as her grandmother helped her.
When her blood stopped flowing, Dionne pulled back the rag and saw the white of the bone between her thumb and index finger. She knew the okra had been solid beneath her hand, their insides slick and white, just before she cut herself. She was reminded again of the snow she’d been dreaming of just before her accident, and of her mother.
Without warning, the tears that Dionne had been holding back since Avril’s death came, the ones she’d gritted her teeth against, thinking that if she ever started crying she would never stop. She let the tears form a salty river in her mouth and splatter her housedress. Hyacinth saw the dam she’d been watching for months finally break. And as she went to comfort Dionne, something dislodged from the high shelves of her own heart. Hyacinth’s mother had told her that grief was a funny thing, not put to bed before its time, and that not even a nine-night would still a soul that isn’t ready to come to rest. Hyacinth remembered her mother often over the weeks and months she’d waited for Dionne to shed the prickly shell she’d gathered around herself, to release Avril’s spirit from the tight, small place where she tried to keep it captive.
Hyacinth knew the way it was with a story. She held Dionne’s unharmed hand and led her into the front room. They sat down next to each other in the way that two people who know each other well only need to hear the sound of each other’s voice to know the look on their beloved’s face. Hyacinth waited until her voice steadied, and then she began.
“Well, child, the old people say that it was a morning just like this when wunna great-great-grandmother was doing laundry, beating the white clothes with a rock. Her shirt was still wet from the child the master had sold away a few days before. That time, her husband, your great-great-grandfather, was always behind her telling her to clean herself up. That was the thing that mashed them up in the end, you know, that he couldn’t understand she needed to see and smell the milk, that there was no sense in trying to erase the only thing she had left of the baby.
“She’d let others go before. But this one, for some reason, maybe because she knew it would be her last, this one was harder. After she had my great-grandmother, every Crop Over saw her tumbling big. One by one they all went away. There were more than a few she was happy to bury before they got to know this place. But then there were four that survived and came quick-quick, all boys that she raised until they were out of short pants, only to see them sold away. Everything Bertha knew should have told her not even to look on this new baby and think love or stay or lifetime, but that’s exactly what she did. And so when they took this one, and didn’t even let her nurse him, it was like something inside of her broke open. The least of her worries was the milk.
“The old people say that back in those days you would never see a body crying, because the body that starts crying, that body wouldn’t ever stop. But that’s not what I’m wanting to tell you, because you already know that things does start and then end even if you want them to go on forever.
“It was a morning like this when your great-great-grandmother, her two big bubbies leaking down on everything, brought one of those big rocks, big like what you see by Bathsheba, down on her hand while she was doing the washing. People say that they could hear her scream all over the hill, from those that was working in the fields to the people working in the big house, all the way out to the sea. They say that the fishermen who heard her scream pulled up their nets, no matter that they hadn’t yet caught fish nor fowl. They say that every man, woman, and child who heard that scream knew that what had been broken couldn’t fix. And everyone, from the little boys in the plantation yard to the old man who couldn’t hold his penis to go to the bathroom by himself, everyone knew the pain behind that scream. And they went to look in on her, all who could walk, to see who had felt that kind of pain and lived.
“They say that her hand was never the same again, neither her mind. They say that from the time she start screaming until the next time she spoke was the three days the master let her take off from work. You would think that was generous, but the crop had already been taken in and he could spare her. On the fourth day, she got up before cockcrow. She said to her daughter, my grandmother, that the next blood shed would be bakkra’s. And she never said another word to her husband again.
“If you think this life you have is hard, you have to imagine those days. No television to watch. No electric iron to turn on. No curling iron to fix up your hair. No inside bathroom. Nothing like everything that you know to be true now, nothing like what you call your life now. Every day the children that you call your own, the husband that you call your own, the wife that you call your own, everything that you call your own, you knew it wasn’t yours in truth. You knew that any tie to what you thought was yours could be broken just so. And so this thing people call grief, this thing that people call sadness, this thing that people call darkness, that was what we were living in all the time. There was joy, yes, a dance here and there, a boy who catch your eye, the babies before they grow big enough to have value. But that part of your life that was light was small and this dark thing, this ugly thing call slavery, it was big. This big ugly thing had a hold on you strong enough to make you feel like nighttime was constantly grabbing at your neck.
“Before time, there was a whole heap of confusion about renaming this place Seven Man’s Hill. And that’s because people can only remember the men who went into battle for our freedom and not the women who made it possible for them to be there. Because even though Bertha herself didn’t even have two strong hands to fight, it was she who gave the young men the courage to make up their mind about what they had to do. It was she who said the prayers over them, she who put the pouches next to their hearts that protected them. And beside her every step of the way was her daughter, a girl with strong, long legs like you, about your age, your great-great-grandmother I’m talking about now, and she was a warrior too. And so even as the men were already puffing out their chests at what it was they managed to do, there was your great-great-grandmother among them, fierce and taking in everything she needed to know to make a life. That is the people you come from, child. Not a sad-sack kind of people that does sit down and let life blow all the air out they chest.
“The same way that your father’s people blood run through your veins, you have a strong line of women behind you, Bertha and her mother and her mother before her. If they could still stand up after what they did and what had been done to them, you have more than enough legs to stand up on now. Your heart is going to heal, you know. Your hand too.”
“What did they do to make their masters set them free?” Dionne asked.
“Oh, dear heart. They didn’t ask for their freedom. They took it.”
“But Bertha was an old woman then. What could she do?”
“Being old and being dead isn’t the same thing. She was a wise woman. She never turned her back on the things her mother brought over with her from Africa. So even though she wasn’t in battle herself, she cleared the way for the people who could fight.”
“You mean to tell me that it was some spells that took down the planters?” Dionne said. She turned to look at her grandmother. From this angle, she could see the wiry gray hairs that sprouted like wildfire at Hyacinth’s temples after Avril died.
“It was some spells that brought you back here after your father took you away.”
“Spells that drowned my father too?” Dionne said, straightening her back the way she’d seen Errol do.
“You already know the answer to that.”
Dionne searched Hyacinth’s face, although she wasn’t sure exactly what guilt would look l
ike when she found it.
“I don’t practice the kind of magic that hurts people. And if you think that I killed your father, then you don’t know me half as well as you think you do,” Hyacinth said.
“Apparently you don’t practice the kind of magic that helps people either,” Dionne said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Exactly what I said. All these years you’ve been helping all these women on Bird Hill. And not once did you say to yourself, well, let me go check on my child and see how she’s doing. Or I wonder how my granddaughters are.”
“You don’t think I thought about you?” Hyacinth asked.
“Thinking about someone and helping them is not the same thing. That’s the problem with all you old-time people here. You believe that if you just pray for something, ‘watching and waiting’ for it, then it will appear. But the world doesn’t work like that. Don’t you remember what Father Loving said about how when you pray you have to move your feet?”
Hyacinth went to hold Dionne, as the tears her story had dried were back. She said something that she’d never said to Avril, though she’d always wondered if saying it might have brought her home. “I’m sorry, Dionne. I’m so, so sorry. If I could bring Avril back or go back and change the way things were for you, I would,” she said.
“I know,” Dionne said. “I know.”
And they stayed there like that for a while, feeling the newness of embrace and apology until the pressure cooker’s whistle called them back to themselves.
“Well, child, this food is not going to cook itself. I’ll let you finish the cou-cou. Your cooking is getting so good I just want to lay back with my two long hands now,” Hyacinth said.
“Yes, Gran,” Dionne replied. She followed her grandmother into the kitchen where neat piles of okra and cornmeal lay on the counter. And then she went back to making the meal that was so close to Hyacinth’s heart it was like second skin.
The Star Side of Bird Hill Page 20