So Many Islands

by Nicholas Laughlin

  He remembers what Taj had said. It’s probably dying. Beached whales usually do. How can the others be rejoicing when the job isn’t done?

  Lift and slide. Slide and pull. The blue hammock continues its journey, sliding along the sand to the water’s edge, where it comes to a halt. Looking at the incoming tide running towards them on feet of quicksilver, Patrick has the answer to his question. The others want to save the whale.

  But he needs to.

  The singing stops. Before them is the huge unpredictable ocean. In a timorous voice, the tall bredren asks whether they can’t just leave the whale and let the tide take it out. ‘No,’ says Papa Dickey. ‘Can’t leave her until she’s ready to go.’ They look at the dark shape lying motionless in its hammock.

  ‘Seen that water?’ the tall bredren insists, dropping the tarp and stepping backwards.

  ‘Never seen a spring tide?’ Papa Dickey asks with a sneer.

  ‘Good water for a whale, Papa. Not for us.’ The tall man shakes his head and sits down.

  ‘Scared of a little full-moon water? It’s only bad where the waves break.’ Looking straight at the thick band of boiling foam, Papa Dickey grabs the tarpaulin.

  ‘Papa,’ says Taj. ‘You know Chereece don’t swim.’ He leads her by the elbow beyond the reach of the surf to join the bredren who refused to enter the water. Again, Patrick has to look away.

  Now they are four toting the tarp. They rearrange themselves, preparing for the rough water. Patrick and Taj are on opposite sides of the hammock waiting for Papa Dickey’s signal. Patrick looks over his shoulder and sees Chereece, sitting on the sand, her arms clasped around her knees, rocking slowly. With the soft light from the east, he can see her face clearly. He reaches across the whale and grips Taj on the arm.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right. You didn’t know how my queen turned out.’

  ‘Not that. I’m sorry about Martha! How she treated you! She called you ...’

  Taj’s eyes widen.

  ‘Dumb. Trash. I know. But – she thought she was doing the best for you.’

  ‘Best!’ Patrick’s voice rises over the thunder of the surf. ‘More like the worst.’

  ‘Long time ago. Now you need to–’

  Papa Dickey raises his arm and shouts, ‘Let’s get crackin!’

  And with Taj’s words whipped away, they haul their cargo into the sea. The chaos is immediate as the surf swirls around them and undermines all the strategies that have worked on land. Inside the hammock are signs of agitation. Outside it, nothing but waves cresting and breaking, while the men try to keep afloat, stay alive. Patrick struggles for air. He goes under once, twice, three times. Is someone – something – swimming beside him? He breaks the surface again, gasping, and sees that the worst is behind them. Here it is calmer. He counts three heads with Papa Dickey nearest to him and, to his astonishment, the great dark shadow is still in their midst. He alone is holding onto the drooping tarpaulin.

  Papa Dickey’s head suddenly disappears. An instant later it reappears, then goes down again. Patrick shoots his arm high before diving down. The old man is fighting against an invisible force. By the time both their heads are above water, Papa is in full panic, his limbs flailing, his hands clawing the air. Patrick retreats, fearing those lethal hands. Then Taj surfaces behind them like a phantom and grabs his grandfather under his arms. He keeps the old man clamped and impotent until the drowning terror passes and a lifetime’s faith in the ocean returns.

  Papa Dickey coughs and splutters. It sounds like crying. ‘Just tired, Taj. Tired.’

  ‘We’ll get you in, old man. We’ll get you in.’ Taj looks over at Patrick. ‘Comin?’

  ‘Go ahead. I’m comin.’

  Patrick treads water as the three others swim ashore. Taj is out front, the short bredren is at the back, and in the middle is Papa Dickey, riding on the broad back of his grandson.

  The tumbling surf swallows them and the moments lengthen. At last a swell lifts Patrick high enough to see the trio stumbling onto the sand. A small wiry figure is the first to stand.

  Patrick looks around. No blue plastic, no bredren, no whale. With daybreak streaking the eastern sky, he is alone in the ocean. He understands Papa Dickey. He feels tired too. Empty, despite Martha’s miracle. Can he ever forgive her like Taj did? As he bobs like a cork on the easing water, he grimaces. He had heard the words that Taj didn’t say. Now you need to ... stop blaming her. Easy for him to say! He hasn’t been stuck with a spirit that knows neither forward nor reverse, cut off from itself with one swipe of mother love.

  Closing his eyes, he remembers the great tail as it looked in the shallows, immobile and beaten. He had wanted to weep then but had not been able. That’s my life right there. With an exhausted sigh, he begins to swim in. The water is getting calmer and with the coming of the day, he sees what looks like the tarpaulin floating near the sea bottom.

  He dives down into a silence he loves, that sea-blue silence. He exerts little energy, goes down slowly like a small pebble, sees no reason for coming up again, sees no reason for abandoning this peace. Then it hits him. The deep melancholy song of the ocean. It comes like a wave, washing not over him but through him. It booms and bends in the element of water, it enters his heart and brings with it the traveller, free and unfettered. The great whale comes so close, Patrick can almost touch the sleek darkness of her scarred side and the flashing light of her tail. Reluctantly, he rises to the surface, thinking her gone. But she is still there, just out of reach, describing a semicircle around him, a dark shadow under the skin of the ocean, breathing a fine fountain as she heads out to sea, alone, calling out to her kin but assured of her own power. He watches the fountain as long as he can before he begins the swim to shore.

  His limbs are buoyant and loose as he lets the turning tide bring him in. What will this new day bring when he sets foot on the sands? His people will still be scanning the horizon for ways to survive. He will be pulled and pushed by the tumultuous water. Where it will lead? He does not know.

  But one thing is sure. Today, he will go with his bredren to Sally Tuckers.

  Perilous Journey

  Tammi Browne-Bannister

  Antigua and Barbuda

  One only has to peer at the face of an African to recognise blood in those features. Anasha considered this as she sat in the comfort of her TV room watching Roots. The people on the screen resembled the people she saw around Barbados. A few looked as if they could be relatives.

  One would only think of family, presumably, after abandonment.

  Anasha refused to believe she had materialised out of nowhere. When she was five, she thought a stork swooped over rooftop after rooftop with her in a cloth bundle before landing at the cement doorsteps of the Children’s Lodge, the place she used to call home. She believed this especially after watching cartoons of storks delivering babies like airmail on television, and after reading The Storks by Hans Christian Andersen.

  When she was eight and a half, Anasha asked her former guardians at Children’s Lodge where she came from. They seemed as mute as a stork, a bird that, by the way, she discovered years later, was not indigenous to the island like the Scarlet Ibis was to Trinidad.

  Even though the raven tone of her skin pointed to Africa, Anasha didn’t know the origins of the blood that ran through her veins. Some time ago, she discovered that most of the enslaved Africans brought to Barbados were from places like Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon and from Central Africa. She raked her fingers into her scalp, as there were other bights and tribes to contend with, and she uttered the words, ‘never again,’ before shutting down the computer in frustration.

  Who she was and where she came from saturated her mind. Her roots were scattered and pruned ages ago. Given the chance, Anasha would have become a genome donor to determine her genealogy. Maybe history would explain why she wasn’t inclined to the ways of those around her.

  While watching television, her eyes wandered and she noti
ced a jet-black centipede, mammoth in size, on the wall. She gripped the arms of her chair. If it meant the death of an acquaintance, a colleague from the research plant where she worked or one of her virtual friends online, she would be tagged in a thread of the usual S.I.P.s and R.I.P.s that expressed sympathies and condolences on social media. She would receive a phone call. Anasha checked her cell phone. Nothing of the sort. Then could she be with child? This was another old wives’ tale she believed in, but no. She wasn’t pregnant, either – a novice to intercourse – not Agnes of God – for now, celibate by choice. In Anasha’s mind, Maat, the god of purity, had placed an arrangement in the starlit heavens of her existence and this she resolved to fulfil. Since she never knew family, she preferred to have sex after marriage and her children to have both parents present at home. One day.

  Earlier that morning, Anasha had gone outside into the yard and dug up a lime tree that had outgrown its pot. The roots needed trimming. She clipped the bulbous, frizzy fibres then placed the tree into a larger pot. She fed the tree chicken manure and watered it. The manure came in an eggshell crocus bag that she leaned against the side of the house. She didn’t think about transplanting the tree into the earth. She didn’t want to have to leave the tree behind whenever she decided to move.

  Now she wondered if the centipede had crawled out of the manure bag, since her landlord had recently sprayed the yard, despite her preaching to him about the harmful effects of chemicals on humans and the environment. She mentioned links to cancer, lung and skin diseases, hoping to discourage him. She even told him about adverse effects on bees, butterflies and certain species of bird which acted as agents of cross-pollination. Still her landlord turned his back on her and went about his business, filling the canister with a mixture of liquids and powders. After that, she didn’t feel like recommending green pesticides that were safer on the environment. Anasha watched him pump the canister and squeeze the nozzle. She followed him around the yard, ensuring he was careful with the few vegetable and flowering plants she owned.

  Take a deep breath. Settle your spirit. No reason to panic, Anasha told herself. A closer examination of the centipede revealed more than fifteen pairs of legs that made frightful scrambles to a corner of the ceiling away from her shadow. She knew ancient Egyptians believed centipedes protected their dead and Sepa, the centipede god of protection, worked closely with the anchor of the underworld, Osiris. Anasha had seen Osiris in the pages of books and on the internet – half-mummy with two horns that represented those spine-like antennae of centipedes. She believed in a place for every living thing on earth, as long as humans opened their minds and hearts in acceptance. Even though larger centipedes were known for delivering venomous stings, she couldn’t bring herself to kill this one on her wall.

  She refused to blame the creature for being lost – scooped up, perhaps, from the poultry farm where she bought the manure, before being shoved into a crocus bag and delivered to her house. Or maybe the centipede was living inside the old pot before it was disturbed. In that case, it occurred to Anasha, she could have been responsible for its displacement. Now her face dropped into a sorry expression. Maybe, too, the displaced creature sought better conditions in which to thrive, and since she had a few rotten sideboards, she wasn’t offended it had chosen to crawl into her home. Who doesn’t want better for themselves?

  She began to feel blameless and at ease with this idea. Anasha retrieved a Mason jar from the kitchen, climbed up on a Berbice chair, and used a fork to guide the creature inside. She screwed a tin cover onto the mouth of the jar. ‘Goin get my shoes,’ she said to it, before setting the jar down on the kitchen counter and hustling away. Anasha’s voice took on a patient grace and she spoke to this centipede, gentle-like, as if she thought the creature needed some kind of assurance, some kind of prompting that she wouldn’t leave him alone. She wouldn’t leave him to suffocate in the jar. She did not intend to hurt him. She just needed to get her shoes before she could help him.

  Minutes later, she dumped the creature outside into the dirt near the banana patch in her backyard and watched its undulating motion until it went underground. She thought it would: one, assimilate into its new environment; two, recycle the decaying and dead plant material to fertilize the soil; or three, instead of living harmoniously among other myriapods and insects, she would find it above ground – dead and desiccated. The chemicals in the yard could also kill it. ‘Blasted landlord,’ she said, then shrugged.

  Anasha transferred the bag of manure to the far side of the house to lean against the fence that divided the property from her neighbours. If there were relatives of the centipede visitor inside, she would give them an opportunity to find a suitable environment. A wicked smile rippled across her face. Perhaps the centipedes would visit the neighbour on the western side, who was on island six months out of the year – whose speckled forehead she saw briefly but intimately through the blinds – a neighbour who communicated only through Anasha’s landlord about suspicious noises, overhanging branches and debris that blew downwind from Anasha’s yard onto his manicured lawn. Or maybe the person at her backdoor, that one woman with the high-chair arse, who stood on her toes, as if she would tip forward flat onto her wide bull nose – she with that towering tree, laden with breadfruit. And refused to part with one – refused to part even with those on the ground, broiling in the sun. Even though bartering breadfruit for green bananas was on offer. This woman surveyed Anasha’s fine features and glared hard, as if Anasha was some insect to mash. All Anasha heard in the back of her mind was, When down came a blackbird …

  Later on, when Nut swallowed Ra to release the moon, Anasha saw high-chair-backside tossing those starchy orbs into a fire pit made for burning trash. Either speckled-forehead or bull-nose would be deserving of an unwanted visitor, Anasha thought.

  * * *

  In her dream, she is on a ship with The People. Twigs wearing tattered loincloths and Anasha in the purple camisole and pink cotton pyjama pants she wore to bed that night. Anasha feels a-kind-of-way about wearing cotton. It was all she saw on television: black people picking cotton in the fields. It was all she remembered from textbooks: black people toiling under the sun, blacks cutting sugar canes for plantation owners, black people working to make white people richer. It’s the reason she chose to become an agronomist – somehow this meant being more than just …

  It’s hot below deck. It is hard to breathe when she’s inhaling the stuffy fumes of everyone else’s fear, not to mention the stink of steeping bodies in the air.

  Women sing in their native tongue. Anasha does not know if they sing songs of consolation, yet she sings along with them. She feels everyone knows by heart the words to a wretched song. She picks up the language easily, and she’s surprised how fluently she sings, but no one can see this. Anasha thinks everyone yearns for a song of freedom. That must be what the women are singing, and that is what Anasha understands. She raises her hands in applause. It is then she realises her arms are free. She checks her legs and they are not bound. Nothing restrains her. She rises – and sets off to find one of the white men in charge of the ship. She is not afraid. In Barbados, blacks are proud of their blackness.

  Anasha marches up to the captor, says in the most defiant of voices, ‘Send back my people. You have no right to keep them here. You have taken them from their homes. They have no water and you give them no food. How would you feel if they were to do the same to you?’

  She can sense that no one has risen to join her – not one in support of what she’s saying. She thinks, no wonder he’s decided to ignore me. She gazes at The People and they look back at her with luminescent eyes. Anasha wonders about this. Maybe their eyes are that way because their captors regard them as fauna, and certain animals have eyes that glow in darkness. Maybe The People don’t even see themselves as human beings anymore. Maybe their nature has changed. They have folded themselves small, willingly, to make room for each other, not even rattling their chains in rebellion. She
walks over to where the men are. They are not bound either. Why haven’t they tried to escape? Why have they chosen to stay with their women and children on this miserable ship?

  Anasha goes up to another captor. ‘How would you feel to see your own wife and children mistreated and abused? How would you like them to be treated like pilchards in a can?’ For a moment, she can taste the three gleaming silver fish inside a Brunswick can – the sardines she had for breakfast that morning, mashed in Hellmann’s mayonnaise with a squeeze of half of a lime that she pasted onto Eclipse crackers and washed down with a mug of Lipton tea.

  While she hollers at this man, he stands there blank-faced and unbothered. She thinks he’s brazen to behave in this manner. Last time she checked, she had a face and she had a voice. She had limbs and strength. She waves a hand in front of his eyes. It’s as if he cannot see her, cannot hear and cannot feel her warm breath against his skin.

  The women continue singing to their young. Soon the men throw their voices to join them, as if to comfort themselves as well as their women and children. Anasha grows angrier, riling up, chest heaving, hands flailing. Back in the white man’s face, spitballs flying – but he remains tight-lipped and pinch-faced. This time his throat bloats like a bullfrog’s, as if he’s holding his breath, as if her own breath flexes muscles. She begins punching, kicking and cursing the air. She clobbers him again, but her hand runs right through his face and now she realises that even she is useless to The People.

  The man utters something. His words fall on her ears like jabber. She rolls her eyes at him. He ambles through her, grabs a couple of The People, mumbles again. Others follow suit, shoving and pulling the captives, motioning them towards the stairs where everyone ahead of her disappears. Anasha clambers behind them to the upper deck where she faces the blinding light.