“I witnessed it,” says Mrs. Henry to me. “I saw his car strike her.”
“She just stepped out onto the road,” says a man. “I couldn’t stop in time.”
He’s not from here. He’s well dressed, his car is big and expensive. “She stepped into the road out of nowhere,” he repeats. A neighbour says they’ve called an ambulance, and now I hear the siren. I look down at Mother and see Jelly dabbing at her mouth with a tissue.
“Don’t touch her!” I shout.
“She’s thirsty,” Jelly says.
“I said don’t fucking touch her.”
Jelly stands, watching me, and Mrs. Henry shoulders her way past me. She bends with difficulty down to Mother and touches her face. “Ruth?” she asks calmly. “You will be all right.” She starts to sing softly with closed eyes. “Come home, Zion wanderer. Come home, Zion wanderer.” Mother nods, eyes closed too.
The ambulance arrives and the paramedics put Mother onto a stretcher, put a mask on her face. They ask me if I’ll ride in the back with her, but I can’t seem to answer them.
“Jelly and I will meet you at the hospital,” Aisha breaks in.
“Stay away from us!” I shout.
“Michael,” she begins.
“I mean it. Haven’t you done enough?”
The paramedic asks again if I’m riding in the back, and I get in and the doors shut and protect me from their faces.
—
Mother is taken quickly away from me, and a nurse is asking me questions about her. Do you have her health card number? Has she been ill? Is she on any medications? Does she have a history of mental illness, confusion, dementia? I think I’ve been shaking my head, but I don’t know. The buzzing tubes above me cast chemical white light and throw no shadows, and I look up to them and listen for a short while. The nurse speaks slower now. There may be shock, there may be broken bones, but for now my mother looks stable. They may want to keep her here for observation. I’ll be able to see her soon, but it may be a long night. I should make myself comfortable.
The waiting area features a vinyl couch and a rubber plant and a box of Kleenex on a side table. There’s a television mounted on the wall, and I watch commercials for cars and vegetable slicers and vitamin formulas. A man with a trimmed beard who’s willing to sell you calcium and zinc, shark cartilage and rosehips, secret cures for those you love.
Some time had passed. How much time, I don’t know. I’m looking at the closing credits of an action film when a big man in a uniform appears beside me. It takes me embarrassingly long to realize he’s a nurse. He’s smiling kindly. “Are you Mrs. Joseph’s son?” I nod, and he tells me that her right leg has been set, complex, but not terrible. Her hip appears fine, thank goodness, but she is not responding to any of their questions, and they’re not sure if she’s in any pain still. He wants to know if I can help them in some way, and I nod, but can’t find my voice or the right words. I touch the wet on my face, and the man nods and puts his hand warm upon my arm. He asks another question, but I can’t seem to hear or remember it. He nods again.
“It’s okay,” he explains. “I know it’s a lot to process at once. Let’s just start from the beginning.”
SIX
Once, when we were very young, Mother took us back to the place where she was born. A taxi came to take us to the airport, and we helped as best we could in the snow with the two suitcases, as well as the boxes Mom brought containing a toaster oven, a cassette radio, and two tins of maple syrup. I remember the taxi took us across the city in the winter traffic, and then the brightness of the airport, the ads everywhere for watches and cars and clothes and fancy dinners. I remember the long lineup with others carrying suitcases and boxes, and Mother’s confusion for a moment when she couldn’t find the tickets, and all the while our own excitement and nervousness as we searched the faces of others behind us. Tourists, some of them. But others travelling “back” to that mysterious place that some—but never our mother—called home.
I don’t remember much from the actual flight, only scattered sensations. I remember standing on the seat to put my hand through the stream of air flowing from above, and also flicking on and off an overhead light, Mother too tired to scold me twice. I remember complaining about my ears, and another passenger giving me minty adult gum, too strong to enjoy. I remember waiting to get out of the plane, and then walking into another airport. Around us were some of the very same ads for watches and cars and clothes that we had seen in that first airport at the start of the trip. The air in this second airport was cold, colder, it felt, than that wintry place we had left behind. And I worried if, somehow, we had been fooled. If, really, we hadn’t travelled anywhere at all, or if the world were everywhere the same.
But when we stepped outside, it was hot. The sun had just begun to set, and we got into a car that was loud and smelled badly of exhaust even when we got moving. The driver might have been a relative, but I don’t remember an introduction or a conversation. Around the airport, a field of sharp light pushed back at the surrounding darkness, and I could see billboards along the road showing nice places to stay, with the bluest waters and beaches of white sand. But as we kept driving, for hours it seemed, it became hard to see anything at all. I caught only the yellow orbs of street lamps and the ribbed metal top of a building, and then fewer street lamps, and finally little else but a great moon and the bright starry sky. There were the smells of flowers, thick in my nose and throat, and also mud and dung and decay.
Mother’s family lived in a village named Ste. Madeleine, in the middle of the island, and the ride was very long and sick-winding. But finally we rocked upon the potholes of a dirt road and pulled up in front of a big single-storey house. There was scurry of a creature into the shadows, a reptilian tail, did you see that, I asked. But Mother was already out of the car to hug a woman who had stepped outside as soon as the car pulled up. Francis held my hand, and the first greeting that I received in that place of “back” or “home” was from a spotted dog, who lunged at us against a frayed rope, baring his teeth.
Everyone else in the house was asleep, and we were told there’d be proper introductions in the morning. Mother was to share a bed in another part of the house with the woman who had greeted her, her sister, and Francis and I were put to sleep together on a mat on the floor of the living room. We brushed our teeth at a pipe outdoors that offered only cold water. And trying to pee one last time before bed, I stepped on something hard but moving, an insect, prehistoric big it seemed to me, that clicked angrily and flapped away.
Francis and I lay down on our mat, but when the lights were turned off, we couldn’t sleep. Wild creatures called in the dark, and the air was filled with the hum of insects, louder than any traffic we heard at home. The living room window framed a full moon that shone like a cool white sun, and billions of stars, a universe we had never even imagined. I remembered Mother would sometimes tell us tales of the ghosts and spirits that foolish little children walking alone in her birthplace might imagine themselves encountering. Of soucouyants and lagahoos. Of duennes, little children who died before baptism, before the proper rites could be performed, and who then would roam the wild and forested places, luring living children to their deaths. These stories were never meant to scare us, and they never really did. The names given to the creatures too strange to be truly fearful.
But during that first night in Mother’s birthplace, I remember feeling afraid, though of what I did not know. Something old and unburied in the darkness, something closer to us now than ever before. I remember lying awake with Francis and hearing for the first time the scream of a rooster, my brother’s hand pressed hard in mine. The sun still hadn’t risen, and I remember looking at Francis, who lay beside me very still with his eyes wide open. I remember searching for a clue about our situation in some slight movement of his ear, or of his jaw, or of that expressive space between his mouth and nose. And when he caught me looking at him, he swallowed and nodded.
“D
on’t be afraid,” he said.
—
In the morning, it was different. We met a blur of uncles and aunts and older cousins. We had a proper introduction to Nora, our mother’s sister, heavier and older. We met a very old and skinny man with eye-whites that were brown, and he was my grandfather, and he never left his bed. We met another “aunt” of some uncertain connection to us named Beulah, with the sharpest eyes and a sore on her mouth that was disgusting, and that you also somehow wanted to touch. We met many “cousins,” boys and girls of complicated relation to me and Francis, who looked the two of us up and down and who seemed never satisfied about our responses to any of their questions about “America.”
What was this place of origins we had we come to? In the years to come, Francis and I would hear the words slavery and indenture. We’d learn that the Caribbean was named after people who’d been pushed by murder and disease to the very brink of oblivion. But what of these histories could we read in the land we saw as children? Around us were wasted farmlands and abandoned cane fields, punctuated by what looked like shacks. We heard our poor black relatives speak of coolies, and our poor Indian relatives speak of niggers, and both sides huff laughter at “the Carib woman,” our distant relative, who sold green seasoning at the market and was obviously half-mad. All of this somehow worked together with the modern airport we had come from and its ads for fine restaurants and hotels, or else the luxury cars and office buildings we’d spotted in the capital. The white beaches of advertisements were reserved for tourists of the proper sort, for the one we visited was small and rocky, the sand carrying a black stickiness and a tarry smell. There was a yellow foam in parts of the water that we were told to avoid, and Aunt Beulah told us that years ago a ship from overseas had left the oil refinery on the island and ground up against a rock and spilled much of its cargo.
But here too was beauty. The sea itself was fierce with light and colour. The hills were thick with the deepest green, and there were lizards and the brightest birds that made a joyous racket. And our relatives, on both sides of our family, were beautiful. These were people who could throw scorn at others in the most casual way and then also, in a moment, laugh. There was a souse that looked to us like garbage, and we shivered at the split head and the feet with gristly knobs of pink and white. But when we tasted it we wanted more. There was ice cream hand-cranked in a rock salt bath by a neighbour.
One night, we were taken to an old white church. We were greeted as “brethren” and ushered into the service. Inside were many candles, and people dressed in different colours. The preacher held a book, but rarely read from it. Instead, he pounded it expressively while the congregation shouted out in unknowable tongues. Something about redemption and the persecuted, something about Canaan and promised lands and how God gave everyone a secret name, the deep name that only he knew, and he would call you this one day, and you would answer fully.
I felt amazement at all of this, at the loud spectacle that I’d never seen before of adults, and when I looked to Francis for an explanation, I saw him looking on, listening to that strange language and music and noise with a wet face.
—
I remember, very clearly, the drive back to the airport. I remember Aunt Beulah wasn’t asked to come with us, and that my mother’s other sister sat in the car with us. She explained how sad she was that her sister and her boys were leaving. When would we return? When would my mom see her nephews and nieces again? She missed our mother’s company and jokes. She missed the times they had travelled together to town for dances. “And do you still like to dance, Ruth? Do you still go out dancing?”
“Sometimes,” Mother told her, watching the fields passing by.
And in the quiet that followed, my aunt found the voice to make a confession. It had not been easy since Mother had left. And sometimes, explained my aunt, she had even been jealous of her older sister, and the perfect life that she alone had found by going away.
Mother stayed quiet. She did not say that our father had left us years before. She did not admit that she had not had the time or money to complete her studies to become a nurse. She did not hint at the debt or struggle or the aches she often felt. As we headed to the airport, she just nodded and looked out the window at the coconut trees towering black against the evening sky, and the old untended fields of cane stretching out like a sea.
—
It wasn’t just “she alone.” All around us in the Park were mothers who had journeyed far beyond what they knew, who took day courses and worked nights, who dreamed of raising children who might have just a little more than they did, children who might reward sacrifice and redeem a past. And there were victories, you must know. Fears were banished by the scents from simmering pots, denigration countered by a freshly laundered tablecloth. History beaten back by the provision of clothes and yearly school supplies. “Examples” were raised.
Our mother, like others, wasn’t just bare endurance and sacrifice. There was always more to her, pleasures and thoughts we could only glimpse. The times she visited her beauty salon, and how she leaned her hair back into a sink, her eyes closed in pleasure, another woman’s hands in her hair. The time our neighbour Sonny Barrington put his arm around her and said something into her ear and made her laugh, a silly real laugh. The time we watched her spend a day on the couch with an amazingly thick library book. That whole day never once driving herself frantic with duty, just reading. Whole chapters of time spent in quiet aloneness. Reaching up in concentration to touch her own earlobe, to pinch it gently while something on the page stilled her.
And the Rouge. It was Mother, really, who introduced Francis and me to this place. When we were very little, she’d walk us down the rabbit path, and we’d eat on the grass beside the creek, ignoring the bugs and pushing away the stray dog we named Rudebwoy forever nosing us for company and food. We’d spend whole seasons of time down there. The falls when the valley floor was a bowl of yellow and orange and red. The winters when the trees were bare, the ice locking up the creek, our breath on the stillest days like purest calcium in the air before us. The summers when the creek shrank and the gooseberries along the side of the path broke at the slightest touch, insects bumbling about heavy and tired with pollen and nectar. And that magic spring, I still remember it, when the creek rushed extra fast and high with the winter melts. When there was everywhere the fluff of some plant in the air. White spores, millions of them, each of them a memory, a dream waiting to land and bloom.
Always, for our mother, there was the hidden life to point out for us in the Rouge. The monarchs she explained had crossed whole lands to be here. The bird of prey she spotted on the day after she and her co-workers were all suddenly let go, a red-shouldered hawk, pure fierceness and pride. Even once, on our way back home, a raccoon leaving a dumpster, tiptoeing unafraid with a queenly rump-high walk. She’d show us weeping willows and maples, that great father of trees with its corduroy bark welling with sap, a sea of sticky goodness for insects. Once she put a sprig of pine up to Francis’s nose, smiling awkwardly when my brother named its peculiar smell.
“It’s Mr. Clean!” he said.
What was the hope or philosophy in these excursions? What is a mother’s dream of land? Once, when Francis had one of his nightmares, the terror overwhelming, impossible as always to name, Mother again took us to the Rouge. Lying in bed beside us, she told us with eyes closed and in a voice turned dreamlike with exhaustion of little moths that flocked and hovered around the ugly tufts of a plant at the creek’s edge. And maybe, if you weren’t watching the right way, you wouldn’t even think they were moths when you saw them. You’d think they were just little bits of paper tossing and turning in the wind. As though someone took an old book and ripped it to bits and threw them up in the wind. Letters gone missing from each other. A scattered and wasted alphabet. Without any meaning at all…
“Mother?” asked Francis, looking at her with concern.
“But look closer,” she said, eyes still c
losed. “Cup your hand and feel the proof of them against you. They’re not trash. They’re living things. And they’re flying.”
—
We never spoke as a family about what happened, once, when Francis and I were still very young. One afternoon, a group of young men entered a convenience store in a neighbourhood we didn’t know and botched a robbery, shot a clerk and left him to die alone. But there was a security camera in the store, and grainy images of the murderers were broadcast throughout the city.
Mother was working a twelve-hour night shift, and so Francis and I sat alone at home watching those images of the shooters on the television. They moved in jerks, a frame count running at the bottom of the screen. They hunched into their big jackets, hands driven hard into their pockets, one pulling down the brim of his cap as he entered. There were no other telling details. Just fields of shadows. Murder reduced to three indistinguishable dark faces, haunting the city. In the very early morning, a newspaper was pushed into our mail slot, the subscription Mother had always insisted upon, even in tight times, and it featured on its front page the same images, but also, inside, a news story and even what I’d later understand as an editorial. Francis was seven at the time, and just beginning to learn how to read, just beginning to understand what is executed every day in language, and he studied the words surrounding the black faces. There was a growing fear in him that, sitting beside him, I smelled and felt, but that he would not express.
It was morning before Mother returned home, and Francis and I had still not gone to bed. Francis had put a chair up against the door for our safety, like he’d seen on TV. When Mother unlocked the door, though, she pushed it open slowly but easily.
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