We leaned close together on the deep, cool ledge of the windowsill.
“You know, they are revered for wonderful human qualities. Symbols of integrity and beauty. Through the years they have carried a mythical reputation for nobility and holiness, for watching, guid-ing, and protecting.”
“Where did the myth begin?”
“Who knows for sure? Probably Greek or Roman. Hera is said to have created the peacock from Argus, whose hundred eyes are the stars of heaven. In Babylon and Persia the bird is the guardian of royalty, it’s carved on their thrones. I like to think of them waking each day as the modern-day phoenix.”
What a burden of history. Poor birds, I thought.
I retrieved my manuscript and a bracelet of brown rosewood beads from the bag and handed them to Daniel. He held the manuscript as though judging its weight without a scale, then flipped to the back page.
“Four hundred and eighteen pages. Hmm.” He looked pleasantly surprised. “The End. All in upper case. How quaint!”
The bracelet he looked at uncertainly.
“That’s a mala. It’s Buddhist.”
“A mala?”
“You can use it to meditate. It’s like a rosary. Count the breaths with each bead. Start at ten and go backwards.”
He smiled indulgently and slipped it on his hand and left to make my eggs.
I pulled back a bit from the window so as to watch the birds, myself invisible, like a Maltese widow peering from behind curtains. Their squawks were still frantic and ungainly and I didn’t want to embarrass them further. It made me think how involuntary life is; this thing all creatures accept so meekly, suddenly seemed like the rape of gods. Every renewal. Every morning. All of us hostages. These birds protesting, being thrown back into the ring. Terrifying and beautiful. Each one a phoenix.
Were we all like peacocks sleeping on a limb of some tree of life, waiting to fall and wake? Maybe Jacob had taken the highest limb that night, knowing the fall would be too great to survive.
Did writers not end a story with “The End” anymore?
I watched for a while through the window, and fast as the onslaught of their uproar had come, the din ended.
DANIEL
I asked my friend Henny over and over to look out for the girl in Seacole Hall. Lethe. Henny chupsed her customary chupse and said it was all my imagination. No Lethe Strong in Seacole. There was a room over the porter’s lodge with the name Lethe Strong, but no one was ever there. Not even the porter seemed to know who she was.
“What happen to you? You in love?”
She laughed her gentle, charming, tentative giggle, all velvet and unexpected in such a huge and definite woman. A woman with such a searching intellect and strenuously held and certainly expressed opinions. She and Timmy, my two university cohorts, scolded me for this lately held obsession. I tried to explain it was not an obsession, but a new reality I found myself being drawn into, not against my will, mark you, more despite my will. Something imperious from the universe. I’d see her face in my mind, eke out a little more of its memory every time, assembling only one frown, one jerk of the chin, one glance or a single perplexed expression at a time, even though by now I had seen her face much more than once. Every time I’d see her, I got the impression she’d changed. She’d seem completely different, not to look at — I had got used to her with her panda eyes — but something in her mood which seemed to drift and reform like clouds.
She must be related to the strong Strongs, decided Henny.
Who were the strong Strongs? A Jamaican name I hadn’t heard.
Timmy laughed. Maybe she is a weak Strong.
Timmy was a romantic. Timmy wanted to take his medical knowledge and cure the world, little village by little village, the frailty of old people, the helpless young, unstable teenagers. He knew all the nooks and crannies, the secrets of this medicine and that medicine. He was Chinese and knew about herbal remedies, he wasn’t Indian but knew about those too. He knew country people in Jamaica applied cobwebs to cuts and that it worked because cobwebs had sulfur. He knew about fever grass and Cerasee tea. He was working on a theory that the good weed from Solomon’s Tree, if used wisely, was sure to cure something in the nervous system but he hadn’t figured out how or what it was yet.
Timmy was as tall and slim as Henny was short and large. Our shadows — walking round Ring Road circling the campus buildings, Henny and Timmy flanking me — were predictably different at any time of day. We had been going round and round the same arguments, discussing Timmy’s rainbow of hopeful solutions against an ominous backdrop of Henny’s dire predictions, mostly political, about the third world. It was too full, it was too selfish, it was too poor, it was too capitalist, it was too prone to religion, it was too dry, it was too hot, it was too homophobic and bigoted. As she doomed our world, he cured it. I got both my physical and mental exercise circling Ring Road.
Henny said the Strongs were a prominent liberal family on the island. Ernest Strong was a retired headmaster who was once suspended for teaching socialism in his history class. “The wife’s an actress,” she said dismissively. “British.” I wasn’t certain what offended her, her acting or being British.
Nora Strong taught drama and had started a small repertory company on the island that encouraged local playwrights and staged Jamaican plays all over the country.
Henny said Ernest had greatly frustrated the boards of the schools he headed, boards that wanted to replicate the English public-school-system attitudes, clones that believed in the great enabler of the fine art of masterly bullying, the cane. Ernest Strong never allowed the use of the cane. And it was known that he often added Caribbean history to the curriculum, replacing the Tudors and Stuarts with what he considered more relevant regional heroes like Toussaint L’Ouverture and Simon Bolivar, George William Gordon, Paul Bogle, and Claude McKay. He reminded us that our history began in Africa, not Westminster.
Nora had been trained in England at rada, and had distinguished herself at Stratford as an understudy when she got a break to play a wan Ophelia to rave reviews. She never looked back, and surely would have become a significant British actress if she hadn’t met Ernest, a handsome Rhodes Scholar from Jamaica.
“The end of that career,” Henny said brutally. “She sounds damn silly when she tries to speak in a fake singsong Jamaican accent.”
They had read the Webbs, she said, unrealistic dreamers who wanted to create some ideal state based on economic and social equality where everyone was politically enlightened and culturally true. As if by waving a magic wand the British and all their brainwashing, their legacy of class and language, each man in his cubbyhole, each word in its correctly pronounced place, each culinary utensil placed and held according to some Victorian decree, would disappear. And in their place would be a well-integrated, unconfused people crossing with certainty and joy from one world and one culture to the other over a tidy bridge of national fervour. Everyone would be educated and have equal opportunity, all would pay and be paid the correct wage and know early on the morning of August third 1962 how to commence being a true Jamaican. And then she did her annoying jackass bray — hee-haw, hee-haw — heaved out in scorn when people spoke what she considered predictable crap, stating what they really wanted with their Fabian socialism was a British ideal of how Africans or their diaspora should live and behave. Idealism. Henny always questioned it. Whose ideals were they anyway? If you told her we needed African tribal society or chieftains in robes she would bray again and take you to task on Nkrumah’s Pan Africa or Garvey’s back-to-Africa message. She would bawl them out as only she could, because there was no ambiguity about her blackness — Timmy and I were called Custard and Milo respec-tively — she had skin the colour of a seal, smooth and glorious, and if any of these damn half-and-half bellyachers who carried their logs on their shoulders made a big fuss with their current fancy Black Power ideas, she�
��d give them a piece of her pure black mind. If anyone called her an iconoclast she’d cast that theory down as well.
I had limited knowledge of Jamaica’s history or politics — of any history for that matter — still naive enough to believe that without those tools one could be a significant writer.
“Sounds good,” mused Timmy on the other side, balancing, always balancing.
“Now the son! That’s the one I like!” She gave a coy whistle.
Jacob Strong. He must be Lethe’s father. A journalist always getting himself into the thick of things, “searching for the truth,” she scoffed, smirking simultaneously. “But he’s sweet on the eye.”
She knew the Strongs had a house up the hills next to the university retreat. And with that she set me free to pursue my great new obsession.
I went into the Blue Mountains in search of the Strongs. Good old Henny.
LETHE
“I was wrong. You’re not a poet. You’re a prose writer.”
Daniel delivered his dire verdict.
“Now I can die. Your legacy is safe.”
I must have been an unbearable houseguest. I couldn’t think for a moment without the outline of pain. Beneath the early windmill mornings of tree-dappled light, the damp of misty rain, gloomy afternoons with the endless nudge of sound against the cliff, and persistent as the sloshing of water was the pain. Through Daniel’s reading aloud from my manuscript, Erehwemos, softly, dully, sombrely like a cow regurgitating my dead, was the pain. And the pain was Jacob.
But the exquisite tails of the peacocks distracted me. Every evening these bright creatures stubbornly returned to fly up a limb of the Samaans, to repeat their humiliating ritual, never learning their lessons, their terrified shrieks reaffirming a life sentence each morning, answering some divine roll call.
Nora would have christened each one, proclaiming their names each day as if to a new world ruled by the noble Samaans, gathering them into its shade for rest, for blessing under a hovering moon left on for comfort. I was becoming my grandmother. I longed for the magic of her world.
To wake to the birds’ stark cries became my new ritual — predictable, expected, necessary — almost promising. As the clatter of pots in a kitchen augurs breakfast. It met my hunger. The terrifying sounds excited me; primal, unattractive, lewdly intimate. Uninhibited grief; a ululation. There are many voices of grief, each declined from life’s language. It’s not arbitrary; it can’t be altered or improved or amended. It has its rules. I grieve, you grieve, she grieves. The big irrevocable. The tiny, explosive larynx of each peacock, morning after morning, left no space for negotiation with my own grief. We grieve, you grieve, they grieve. If I rose as they woke me and kept moving as they did, I could reconnoitre the day, dragging my nets of memory as they did, pulling straw with their elaborate tales.
Mumble, mumble, mumble, Daniel. “How can a turkey be unequi-vocal?” He chuckled as he read the manuscript.
It was Ernest’s turkey. “He named him Eric after your prime minister. He always thought turkeys looked like they were wearing costumes!”
Thinking of it, Othello reminded me of Eric. Peacocks are defiant showing off their beauty, turkeys are defiant about having none.
“I don’t claim to be an expert on major writers describing turkey-gobbling down the centuries. But as soon as I read it, I knew — I knew that is how a great turkey gobbles. So if it hasn’t been said before, it has been said now.”
“You’ve added a new thing to the world. Hereafter we can all leave that part alone and bend our minds to other things in the safe knowledge that it’s been done, once and for always. Turkeys gobble unconditionally.”
Daniel read my manuscript as though it were a ritual blessing, part of an old trust we shared. He’d once tried to tell Ernest’s story; that had caused chaos. I always knew he should have waited till Nora was gone before attempting to tell her beloved husband’s story.
“They are not gone yet, you know. Not till we stop carrying them. Only then will they finally wash out to sea and there’s no returning wave.”
Through rum punches, which always had small flies or bits of straw floating in them, through games of chess, various stones filling in for missing pieces, he always won, through nights in the sodden room I had insisted on using — with a cold night breeze blowing in through the endlessly open porthole, sometimes with fine rain — like a mist, through the choking smoke of the mosquito destroyers and the strange glunking of the water pump, through the torrential rain when the room was once again awash — I felt my way through the dark, to crawl into his bed, into his haphazard nest, his arm, heavy from sleep, enfolding me, his face against my ear, my body oddly reassured by the moderate outgrowth of hair on his chest, I saw the moon, heard the peacocks, felt the pain. That’s how I remember it.
There were long, dark nights; I had never seen such textured darkness, not even in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Lingering above the trees, no matter the cloak of clouds, was the biggest moon, like everything here, lush and overgrown. It hovered huge as a dinner plate, a flat, milky ceiling light. It was there also in the day, a distant map of suggested mystery.
It was indefatigable.
Moon echo of the flame, one of us wrote in a poem. An image of Nora. Ernest was the sun.
“Who wrote that?” I asked.
“You did.” But he had repeated that line so many times that for a moment I was not sure. Rather than sunlight, in those days I was always aware of the darkness intensifying in the trees with the endless moon as though Nora was presiding over us, presiding over my delivery of Ernest’s story. Or maybe we were all gathered here, the living and the dead, to mourn Jacob.
“Is the moon some obscure metaphor for grief?”
“Not so obscure. Maybe a metaphor for mystery — the unresolved. Perhaps a metaphor for us,” he said.
So, he’d remember it differently.
I hadn’t any idea how long to stay. This was an idea I’d followed like a path in an unknown forest. For Daniel my arrival was its own glorious conclusion and he did not mention the eventuality of my departure. He loved my being there. And I loved that he loved that. This was good enough. I had no idea there was any particular reason for his invitation.
“You edit your story, and I’ll work on mine,” he declared as he gave me back the worn manuscript of Erehwemos, which bore his comments and corrections in the hieroglyphics of a professional editor.
“Oh, Daniel,” I groaned as he handed it back. He always wore down a book, soiled the pages, folded deep corners to mark his place, wrote in columns, underlined, crossed out and replaced words.
As he put it, this would be a time when all waters were running the same way.
Daniel was the reminder of my sense of original family, and here he was happily stranded in relative poverty, despite coming into his own as a writer, a journalist, and a teacher, the three worst-paid white-collar professional jobs in our region. He was a household name in the Caribbean. Everyone read his often controversial poli-tical columns — not right-wing, not left, just full of foreboding predictions which sometimes were right — or they’d try to identify people his vivid short stories were based on.
Daniel worked in the mornings, when I read and wrote letters. I couldn’t bear looking at my manuscript, it was too near a conversation started with Jacob, our first real one. Perhaps the uncharacteristic objectivity of this book opened a door for Jacob and me. I was usually prisoner of my own rhetoric, having imbibed from Nora a myth about my place in the family that took on its own reality: my assumption that Jacob had abandoned me emotionally, that we didn’t get along, that Ernest had no choice but to step in to father me. In truth, Jacob had probably made way for his parents to do my parenting. I see how one can do that — assume a role and keep playing at it. Daniel had done that with me too, treating me like a child or a waif. His imagining of me saved me from hav
ing to be me. Maybe everyone gets designated a role. But my book opened up a conversation between Jacob and me, and now with him gone I was the lone voice.
Not being adventurous, I went for short walks only to get as far as the rocky promontory to sit and watch the sea, that vast, enigmatic cradle. Its indifference attracted me. Othello would wander over stiffly, which meant Aesop was nearby. The bird was filled with curiosity, though he feigned indifference. A real busybody. Turning his back to me, he’d stretch out his mighty fan of feathers and, with little stick feet, he reminded me of a child hefting aloft a vast carnival costume, staggering to keep it balanced.
“Why won’t you acknowledge me?” I asked him as he stood, proudly displaying his magnificence for me. “You’re such a showoff! A real Trini. Look me in the eye, Othello. All right then, don’t. See if I care!”
“He seeing you all now …” said Aesop from the shadows. “But we only humans. I’m his human and he don’t bother look at me. But he still see me.”
I never stopped watching those birds, some more shades of blue than the sea. They would wander to the edge of the patio beside the house, never beyond the grass and dirt, never onto the rocks. I didn’t know if it was the challenge of walking on a less predictable surface, or the sound or spray of the sea acting as a deterrent. Sometimes, when there were only a few to be seen, I’d search the limbs of the Samaans looking through the gloom for a sign of them.
I’d cluck like a chicken, gobble like a turkey, make a little sibilant endearment as one would to call a cat — I even tried whistling and click-clicking as though to a dog or a horse. No sign of them. And then one day I practised a little high cry and Othello came bounding, stopping side-on exactly in front of me, looking out to sea. I thought he wanted to be petted, but as I reached out my hand he backed off, his feathers bristled, and he marched away.
I walked around that steadfast windmill that hovered like an elderly husband of the Samaans. That tree must have been several hundred years old. The spread looked as large as a football field. Below, I found huge boulders. But upon examination, I discovered they were not stone but spheres of wood, a grain running through them like in some elaborate dining-room table. Occasionally Othello would follow, but, soon bored, he’d go looking for Aesop, whose busy garden schedule he liked to supervise.
The Black Peacock Page 4