The ultimate humiliation for Adriana.
With Sam Burke gone, she also spent hours, sometimes an entire day, putting us, her adolescent daughters, on guard against his kind. In warnings that were also threats, Adriana spelled out, in Bajan English that sounded almost Elizabethan (straight from the pit of the Globe Theatre), the dire consequences that awaited us should we become “little wring-tail concubines caterwauling about the streets looking for men.” Or worse, should we ever come before her with our stomachs “tumbling big with some wild-dog puppy.” Again shaming her before every Bajan in Brooklyn. Oh, no, we would have to pack our little “georgie-bundles” (Elizabethan for suitcases), take our little wild-dog puppy and “Get from out my eyesight!”
Adriana threatening banishment in an effort to save us from a fate similar to her own. And she went about it the only way she knew how, using the Xanthippe voice that by now had become a force greater than herself.
Barbados, Part II
“College?! Book writing?! Look, get from out my eyesight! You ain’ hear that the telephone company is starting to hire colored? You best march yourself down there and beg for a job!”
Adriana promoted the telephone company nonstop. But to no avail. Because by then, at age seventeen, I had quietly enrolled in Hunter College, which was free at the time to all New York City residents, once your grades qualified. By then I had also found two part-time jobs at branches of the New York Public Library, in order to contribute my share at home. Above all, and again secretly, I was writing a novel on the sly, my first, and soon even progressed with it to the point of considering possible publishing houses, starting with the best known among them.
My editor at Random House, a tall, imposing New England Brahmin of a man named Hiram Haydn, slowly slid his copy of my six-hundred-page manuscript back to me across his desk.
“Okay,” he said. “The contract’s signed, so that’s done. You’ve also got some ‘money in your purse’—and I wish we could have given you a larger advance, but then it’s a first book. And we have a title. Brown Girl, Brownstones. I like it. I think it’ll sell. At any rate the business end of things is out of the way, and it’s time now for you to get back down to work.
“And the work, dear author,” he placed a large hand on top of my manuscript, “is for you to take this swollen, overwritten baby tome of yours and to extricate from it the slender, impressive first novel that’s buried there. Along with the changes we’ve already discussed, I’ve attached a list of other suggestions that might help. The next phase of the work, the real work in some ways, is about to begin.”
Hiram Haydn dismissed what must have been the crestfallen look on my face with a laugh that reached the ceiling in the palatial room that was his office as editor-in-chief. (Random House at the time, the mid-fifties, was headquartered in a pair of regal, neo-Renaissance buildings on Madison Avenue.)
“Don’t look so worried,” he said. “You can do it!”
Spoken with absolute confidence across the desk.
“It’ll take time, of course,” he added, and then went on to suggest that instead of remaining in expensive New York I should go someplace where the modest advance would better buy the time I needed to get the revisions done.
“Barbados.”
I didn’t even have to think.
Hiram Haydn solemnly nodded. “Yes,” he said, “from this book of yours I think it’s important that you go there.”
With that decided, the moment I left his office I took the subway downtown to Delancey Street on the Lower East Side and the sprawling indoor/ outdoor Jewish market there that was known as the poor man’s Macy’s in New York. After the ritual haggling over the price with the Orthodox shopkeepers in their yarmulkes and oversized black fedoras, I bought—cheap—two extra-large suitcases that might actually have been genuine leather as the salesman claimed.
I was living in Manhattan by then, and the moment I reached my apartment uptown I started packing for the trip.
I was also married by then—both my sister and I driven into early marriages by the daily harangues about “caterwauling,” “wild-dog puppies” and the like. Marriage would pose no problem, though, to my taking off to the Caribbean to write. My husband was also someone in flight from the insular world of Bajan Brooklyn, where his family owned several brownstones. Ours was a mutual apostasy that also rejected traditional marriage, so that while we lived together, slept together, we essentially led fairly independent, unfettered lives. An open marriage, as it were. We were only in our early twenties, after all. Truthfully, even when we finally had a child some nine years later (the book-party baby that arrived with the publication of that first novel), I still wasn’t suited for the settled, stay-at-home married life. And this eventually, inevitably, led to a divorce.
Portable typewriter in one hand, overweight manuscript in the other and the two Delancey Street suitcases in tow, I left for Barbados in a matter of days, there to remain for almost a year. On a practical level it was the right choice. Tourism had not as yet descended on the little wallflower island off by itself in the Atlantic, so that my modest advance had almost the exchange rate of gold when compared to the local dollar. The other and more important reason for choosing Barbados was, of course, Adriana and Sam Burke. Perhaps living in their birthplace might help me to better understand them—and understanding might, in turn, bring about the forgiveness I as yet could not fully give.
With my American dollars, I quickly found room and board in a large, newly built manor-style house near the capital, Bridgetown, on the Caribbean, or leeward, side of the island. The owner of the house was a somewhat dour, taciturn old Bajan, a bachelor who had retired back home after fifty years spent working two jobs in Hartford, Connecticut, where he had also acquired considerable rental property. Once back in Barbados he had used his life’s savings to build this replica of a white planter’s great house, exhausting, it’s said, all his savings in the process. In fact, his grudging willingness to have me as a boarder was to help with the upkeep the place required. Mr. Watson was his name. In his youth he would not have dared to set foot near a house such as the one he now possessed—except, perhaps, to beg for a job as a yard boy.
I would later write a story about old Mr. Watson and his colonial showpiece. It would be part of a collection of stories about old men called Soul Clap Hands and Sing, the title taken from a poem by W. B. Yeats on the subject of aging.
Once settled, I got down to work overhauling the bloated baby tome of a novel. Using Hiram Haydn’s notes and suggestions, as well as my own instincts, I began eliminating what I soon came to see were the excesses burdening the narrative, impeding its pace. All that highly decorative prose that called attention to itself! Style overwhelming rather than serving the story! Worst was the surfeit of details! Three or more qualifiers to describe an object when one alone would do! Long hours were spent painstakingly cutting away the fat. Some days the revising felt like a wrestling match that had unfairly pitted me, a rank amateur, against an opponent, my sumo-sized manuscript, that was far superior in weight, strength and skill. It was somehow up to me, the underdog, the weakling, to pin the behemoth to the mat and strip it of every superfluous word.
Days—long, solitary days, weeks and then months spent learning the painful but necessary lesson of every novice: that writing is rewriting, is honing, pruning, refining, is becoming, essentially, one’s own unsparing editor.
At times when the work became too punishing or I simply needed a break from the loneliness and the routine, I would flee Mr. Watson’s plantation house and treat myself to a swim—or what the local folk called “a sea-bath.” Bajans never used the word “swim.” Rather, on Sunday mornings usually, an entire family might go for a sea-bath, with everyone swimming but also standing and washing themselves down in the surf, especially the older folk. According to them, “a sea-bath” in the waters surrounding their little coral gemstone of an island had the power to heal whatever ailed you. I could have used those healing
powers years earlier when I came down briefly with tuberculosis while at Hunter College, the disease brought on in part by my taking a full academic program while working two part-time jobs. All this on a diet that consisted of little else than sandwiches eaten on the run.
It was still better than the telephone company.
In Barbados, as relief from the writing, I also spent time at the Museum and Historical Society, reading up on the early history of the island. Other times, needing company, I sought out the small group of friends I had made once I settled in. They were all part of the pro-independence movement slowly getting underway on the island, young barristers, doctors, economists and other professionals, the lucky few who had won island scholarships to study in England: the Inns of Court, King’s College, Cambridge, the London School of Economics. To a man, they had returned home radicalized and eager for change.
“Look at Ghana, man! I hear it gon soon be independent! So why not us? What the bloody hell wrong with us, nuh? We Bajans need to tear down all the blasted pictures of the queen, then chase her kiss-me-ass governor-general out of Government House and run Barbados on we own! It’s we country, nuh! Is we sweat and blood build the place!”
Long, heated discussions during which they reverted to pure Bajanese. How I envied them! Black people who could actually anticipate taking charge politically! Who could seriously contemplate running their own government! What black American could ever dream of exercising that kind of power?
As for Barbados, it would be another nine years later, in 1966, before it finally achieved independence. And even then the old colonial imprimatur—economically, culturally, socially—would remain intact for some time.
At least twice a month, I dutifully traveled up to the remote hilly district called Scotland on the Atlantic side of the island where Adriana had been born, there to visit her eldest sister and the only one of the Clement children who still remained on the island. Her name: Branford Catherine. Adriana always wrote to her and, whenever she could afford it, would slip a five- or ten-dollar remittance in the letter. After all, Branford Catherine had been her surrogate mother, the one who had braided her hair up to the day she set sail for America.
The trip up to the Scotland District began in Bridgetown, which at the time was your typical small island colonial capital, with the long-established white planter and merchant class, their heirs and descendants, still controlling every aspect of the commercial life in the place. Adjoining a large open-air market near the edge of town was the equally large outdoor bus stand where the country buses assembled for their scheduled runs to the various districts or parishes on the island.
“Mints. Toffees. Nuts. Who call?”
“Julie mangoes. Sweet-to-you’-mout’ Julie mangoes. Who call?”
“Sweet drinks: Fanta. Juice-C. Cola. Ice-cold! Who call?”
The cries of the women hawkers plying their snacks among the buses waiting to depart called to mind Adriana and her “mout’-king” friends at 501 Hancock Street. So, too, did the hawkers’ faces under the heavy trays of candies and fruit and the heavier basins of sodas and ice they carried seemingly effortlessly on their heads.
“Mints. Toffees. Nuts. Who call?”
I usually bought a piece of fruit and a cold soda.
The country buses were makeshift affairs completely open on the sides, the only protection when it rained being a length of tarpaulin that could be lowered from the roof. Rows of benches nailed to the floor provided the seating. Then there were the drivers, the younger ones especially, who behaved as if the jury-rigged vehicles were prime entries in the Indianapolis 500. Keeping the accelerator to the floor, they sent the buses barreling headlong in what seemed a deliberate game of chicken with every oncoming bus, car, lorry (truck), bicycle and donkey cart. Complaints from the passengers (and they complained often and loud) were treated as compliments by the madcap at the wheel.
For an hour or more we traversed a Barbados that felt larger than its minuscule 160-odd square miles. Creating the illusion of greater size were the narrow, winding country roads, the villages of little tin-roofed chattel houses endlessly repeated along the roads and sugarcane fields as far and wide as the eye could see. Above all, there was the seeming overflow of humanity everywhere. “Bajans like peas,” Adriana would have said. Indeed, Barbados remains the eighth most densely populated piece of real estate on earth.
The Scotland District finally, so named probably by some “poor johnny” Scotsman long ago nostalgic for his native Highlands. But “Scotland” was a misnomer when applied to the few low, nondescript limestone hills crowded into the northeast corner of the otherwise flat island. Chalk-white some of them, the hills surrounded the valley floor where my eighty-five-year-old aunt, Branford Catherine, lived in a two-room board-and-shingle house, weathered dun-gray by the sun. The house stood on the Clement family’s last remaining “canepiece,” the one that would have been sold to finance Branford Catherine’s passage north had she not defied her mother, the imperious M’ Da-duh, and refused to emigrate.
I had no recollection of my aunt from the childhood visit years before. Nor did the old woman remember me, given that she was almost completely senile. Long-legged, large-boned, her body apparently still fit, her black face still miraculously unlined, but her mind eclipsed. Branford Catherine spent her days on an old-fashioned wooden recliner called a planter’s chair in the tiny sitting room of her house. There she was devotedly cared for by a niece of her late husband.
The niece, called simply Mis’ Edith, was a sprightly middle-aged spinster who delighted in repeating the saga of my aunt’s life whenever I came to visit. Not only had the young Branford Catherine refused to be sent north, she had also chosen to become a common hawker, to M’ Da-duh’s shame and disgust. According to Mis’ Edith, dawn would find Branford Catherine, a full basket of mangoes, yams, cassava and the like on her head, briskly setting out on the fourteen-mile walk to the main market in Bridgetown. Hawking—buying and selling, commerce—had been her life and her love. Even now, on those rare occasions when, as Mis’ Edith put it, “she comes back to she-self for a minute, her mind clear-clear as a bell”—when that happened Branford Catherine was known to slip out of the house and set off down the road to the main market in Bridgetown.
“I has to watch she like a hawk.”
I once witnessed one of those fleeting resurrections. My aunt, moribund on her planter’s chair, suddenly turned one day to where I was sitting nearby and, peering at me, said “Adrie?” (Adrie had been Adriana’s pet name as a child.) “Is you, Adrie . . . ?” The old woman’s eyes, the whites stained tobacco-brown with age, carefully parsed my face. Again: “Adrie . . . ?” Then, before I could react, her mind abruptly shut down again.
Adriana, who had recently died, would not have been pleased to learn that she and I looked so much alike.
The ironies and absurdities of my family history! A rumhead of a grandfather—a brilliant craftsman, yes, but a rumhead nonetheless—who had been named after Queen Victoria’s consort. Then, a little dictator of a grandmother who had so impressed me at age seven that I would forever memorialize her in my work. An aunt who had rejected Big America to remain on the little two-by-four island as a common hawker. An uncle in Brooklyn who, having converted the several brownstones he had accumulated into rooming houses, now lived rich as Croesus on Long Island—he and the other West Indians like himself responsible, in part, for creating the near-ruin of an inner city now called “Bed-Stuy.” Then there were all the other Clement family members, known and unknown, dispersed widely across England, Canada and elsewhere.
At the same time, there was the lacuna, the missing chapter in the manuscript of my life, as it were, created by Sam Burke, a man who, for whatever reasons, refused to ever speak of father, mother, sister or brother; who wouldn’t even name his birthplace on the island, aside from dismissing it as “some poor-behind little village buried in a sea of canes, a place hidden, forgotten behind God’s back.”
The
same was true of him. Everything about Sam Burke was also “hidden behind God’s back,” and remained so, I discovered, when I tried tracking down his family and birthplace while in Barbados. Each attempt on my part proved futile. Until, the old unforgiving anger with him flaring up again, I abandoned the search, telling myself in my bitterness that Sam Burke might not even have been his name, but an alias he had concocted out of the raw sugar in the hold of the freighter that had brought him, a stowaway, to New York.
Again furious with the father I continued helplessly to love.
Abandoning the search, I began filling in the lacuna Sam Burke represented with other, adopted “kinfolk”: with, for example, “the incorrigibles” in Barbados long ago who had somehow withstood the whipping post and the pillory. I claimed them among my progenitors. Also, “the twenty-and-odd negroes” at Point Comfort, Jamestown, Virginia, who had been exchanged for so many sacks of meal and salted meat before being led off to centuries of John Henry work. Next: little Olaudah Equiano, the captured eleven-year-old boy-child from Yoruba Land who had arrived traumatized in Barbados in 1756, only to be transshipped to Point Comfort also. Years later, Equiano, the man, would write a best-selling narrative of his travails once he managed to purchase his freedom.
Triangular Road Page 6