How to Love a Jamaican

by Alexia Arthurs

  Every morning, Trudy woke her granddaughter so that she could help with the breakfast, and she would help with the other meals as well. Stacy learned to fry dumplings that were almost as good as her grandmother’s, to make a nice chicken foot soup, and to bake sweet potato pudding. In New York, Pam had done all the cooking. When Stacy started at the all-girls high school, she learned to wash her uniform by hand even though Trudy had a washing machine, because her grandmother claimed that it was the only way to ensure that a white shirt was really clean. She was distracted from boys because the relationships with her classmates were so intricate and consuming, all of them interested in befriending the foreign girl.

  The mother Trudy had been was another woman. When Pam was sixteen, Trudy, acting on a tip from a neighbor, had found a love letter in one of her daughter’s schoolbooks and had punched her, even slapped her face. It wasn’t until Pam had become a woman with a husband and children that she could almost forgive her mother. Not all mothers could afford to be kind. When Pam had first come to America, she cleaned for a white family, and one afternoon, standing at her employer’s bedroom door, she overheard the woman and her teenage daughter debate the daughter’s decision to lose her virginity to her boyfriend. Pam marveled that this was a thing that could happen. She had vowed to become a better mother than Trudy. But then, without realizing until it was too late, without knowing why or how, she had failed her daughter. She had had to send her daughter to her mother, and she hoped that the old woman would be tough. Maybe, she thought, maybe the formula so many Caribbean mothers use on their daughters wasn’t the worst thing. Maybe, she thought, it was sacrilege for daughters to discuss their sex lives with their mothers, and what a daughter needed was not a confidante but a woman who loved her enough to show her some of the harshness that the world was ready and able to give her.

  For a long time after Pam came to America, it seemed that she was eternally in school. At first, for years, she studied on a part-time basis for her bachelor’s degree. After all, she hadn’t come to America to clean and cook for white people and take care of their children. After marrying Curtis, she went to school to become a registered nurse. It had taken longer than necessary because she had to attend part-time. She needed an income, so she was still cleaning for white people and taking care of their children. When Stacy was growing up, Pam was always working overtime so that they could buy a house. And when she and Curtis bought a house, she worked overtime so that they could pay the mortgage, the water bill, the electric bill, and all the other bills that came with owning a house. She’d married a man who wasn’t as ambitious as she was. For years, she nagged Curtis to go to school, and for years he said that he would look about it soon but soon never came. He was a simple man when she’d met him, and she believed that he would be good to her, so she married him for something that wasn’t quite love and because she was tired of struggling in America without a green card. When she met him, he made his money by cleaning for the church he attended, and though it wasn’t plenty of money, he seemed contented. Now he was one of the janitors at an elementary school. If it had been up to Curtis, she and the children would have stayed in that tiny two-bedroom on Sterling Street and he wouldn’t have minded. Curtis, unlike Pam, hadn’t come to America for a better life. He’d left Jamaica because his mother had filed for him, and he figured that it seemed like a reasonable opportunity. Pam worked hard because she had to—what choice did she have with a husband like Curtis? If she didn’t put a pot on the stove, the thought would never have occurred to him. Before she had children, she had hoped that she would see her daughter as more than a daughter, as a person with desires and her own set of truths, but it turned out that all she saw was a child who needed from her. She determined that what a daughter needed was to be fed, clothed, baptized, and protected from men. When her daughter put her mouth on that boy’s penis, the question hadn’t been why, but the answer had been no.

  * * *

  —

  The following year, Pam, Curtis, and Curtis Jr. return to Jamaica. Pam leaves Curtis and Curtis Jr. to bring the suitcases into the house, while she goes looking for her daughter. The house is empty, so she ventures to the back, where Stacy is squatting under the mango tree, scaling a pan of fish. Pam watches her. Every time Stacy guts a fish, she throws the insides to Fatty. In New York, her daughter had certainly never cleaned fish. Of course, Pam thinks, of course my mother set her right. Unbeknownst to her, Trudy talks to her granddaughter, reasons with her. Once, they’d walked down to the shop together and because Trudy noticed that the shopkeeper’s son was looking at her granddaughter as though he had plans for her, she said to him, “Tek yuh eye off mi gran’pickney. Ah no yuh get Grace pickney pregnant?” Stacy had laughed in agreement. Now she looks up, and in her excitement to greet her mother, she knocks over the pan of fish, but Fatty, who is pregnant again, is quicker than she is, grabbing a fish in her mouth and ambling off before anyone can stop her.

  ISLAND

  We were on the beach when the man approached us, pulling a marijuana plant out of a faded black JanSport backpack. I started to laugh. It seemed like just the kind of ridiculous caricature of a scene from a film set in Jamaica—a bare-chested Rasta man pulling the entire plant out of his bag as though only twenty minutes ago he’d lifted it from where it hung drying in an unused closet in his house. But there we were, and it was really happening. He wanted to sell to us in the aggressive way of Jamaican merchants, so that even though we hadn’t shown any interest in his product, he was pulling it out of his bag and asking how much we wanted. Andrea and Tracy, true to themselves, jumped up and backed away. I’d hoped they’d relax on this trip. Who wouldn’t want to smoke bud in Jamaica? And it was basically being handed to us.

  I’d observed from the corner of my eyes the group of dykes sitting close by. One of them had blue dreadlocks, reminding me of a woman I’d hooked up with in New York, Jessica with the emerald hair. But what had fascinated me about her was that though she was Chinese-American, she spoke like a black woman, and it seemed to come naturally to her. We’d sat next to each other at a coffee shop in gentrified Brooklyn and hadn’t talked until she was getting up to leave, and by then there was all this built-up tension. The sex had been mediocre. Besides the woman with blue dreadlocks, there were three others—they were all tattooed and pierced with partially shaved heads, that aesthetic of gay white women. I’d noticed the prettiest one among them—soft butch because of her long brown hair and black bikini—and she had looked away when she saw me looking. The next thing I knew, the dykes were crowded around the Rasta man and me, Andrea, and Tracy were leaving, and afterwards, we were passing a blunt around on a secluded area of the beach as the sun went down. I learned that they were graduate students from Chicago.

  “Our friend who used to be gay is getting married to a man,” the one with blue hair explained. Her friends chuckled, but had I imagined that though she smiled, there was something darker behind it?

  “I’m here for a straight wedding, too,” I told them. “Tia and I fooled around, but she would never admit that there is a gay bone in her body.”

  They clucked knowingly.

  They wanted to hear about my life in New York, which made me feel self-conscious. I always wanted to impress queer women, and people tend to have naïve expectations of life in New York. I started talking about a club I’d been to. A woman I’d met on Tinder was DJing, which was how I made it onto the VIP list. All night long, people were saying that the singer Shirley was on the dance floor and it seemed that everyone but me had seen her, until I went to use the bathroom and she held the door open for me. The woman with the blue dreadlocks was actually Mexican-American, so I’d forgiven her the hair offense, until she said, “Who’s Shirley? Sorry, I don’t listen to pop music.”

  When the talk of their dissertations and the bliss of the Caribbean sun started to bore me, I got up to leave. But there had been a transcendent moment when
the blunt had been in my hand, and I looked around at four other women who were not yet thirty and seemed at peace with something as primal and contentious as desire for other women. I was happy and I was gay, and it occurred to me that both of these things could happen at the same time. “I’ll see you ladies later,” I said, but I was looking at the one in the black bikini. Her name was Jen.

  I found Andrea and Tracy eating in the dining room. Andrea had an entire fish laid out in front of her, and Tracy was sipping a thick, fragrant soup. Even though I couldn’t reasonably hold it against them, I was annoyed that they’d gone to dinner without me. I’d only been away for maybe thirty minutes and they were already carrying on without me. I knew that if it had been one of them who was delayed, we’d have waited. But this wasn’t always the case for me. I would do a gay thing, and when I came back both of their faces were posed at me in an ordinary way, but I couldn’t help wondering what they had said about me behind my back.

  “You made some new friends,” Tracy said, smiling, but I could see that she was studying me carefully.

  “Yeah, they’re from Chicago—they’re graduate students,” I explained. “They’ve also come for a wedding.”

  “A gay wedding in Jamaica?” Andrea looked confused.

  “No, it’s a straight wedding.”

  “Oh, that makes more sense.”

  * * *

  —

  I’d always wanted to go to Jamaica as a tourist—to see the island as an outsider. Who doesn’t want to, at a certain point, be pampered in her own home? It’s why, I suspect, my mother used to ask us to bring her a glass of water even though the kitchen was the next room over, and why she would sit in the bathtub after a long day at work and call one of us to scrub her back. Yet when I told my mother that I was going to a destination wedding in Jamaica, spending all that money for a couple I’d known in Madison when I was in law school, she hissed her teeth and asked if I didn’t have better use for my money. We’d left Jamaica when I was a child, and we’d gone back only to visit family.

  But I was optimistic—here was the trip I’d always wanted to take with my friends, and finally it was happening. And I needed to travel. I wasn’t over Allison. After I graduated, she’d moved back to New York with me, but it was all drama with her, the persistent gaslighting and the fact that she was always the victim as no one, not even I, who claimed to love her, could understand her trauma. As a girl, there’d been a man who lived next door, who invited her over affectionately and then forcefully, and it had gone on for years. When she announced that she was moving back to the Midwest, that Brooklyn wasn’t her speed, and that I reminded her of her mother since we shared the same horoscope sign, I hadn’t begged her to stay. I was in love but I was tired.

  Tracy and Andrea were both excited about our trip. They were still living in the Midwest pursuing their degrees, and I would call from my apartment in Brooklyn and they would tell me how the college town hadn’t changed—the undergraduates were still plentiful and boozy on a Saturday night, the black eligible men were few—and then they would gush over how lucky I was to be living in New York. And so we all had our separate reasons for fleeing to Jamaica. We looked forward to the buffets of tropical fruit—we would, we pledged, eat mangoes by the half dozen. We wanted to sit by the Caribbean Sea, our legs naked and warmed by the sun. We talked about a man Andrea was interested in—a man in her department who was giving her mixed signals. We talked about a man who’d asked Tracy to dinner but she was unsure whether she was interested. I offered advice. Neither of them asked about my romantic life. Sometimes, I thought they were just no longer interested in our friendship, but then I reminded myself that they’d made a point of keeping in touch. Still, when I hugged them, I would wonder if they felt uncomfortable. I questioned whether they thought I was destined for hell or if I had, in some way, opened up their minds to other ways of living. But really, I had no idea what to think.

  When we arrived at the hotel room, although we’d never discussed sleeping arrangements, I noticed that when we sat down to figure out our evening plans, I was sitting on one bed by myself and they were sitting on the other bed. Later that night, they crawled into bed together but I only registered this through tipsy eyes, and so it wasn’t until the next morning that it stung.

  * * *

  —

  Red bougainvillea framed the grounds of the hotel, those prideful flowers, and meanwhile Brian, the best man, light-skinned and pretty, decided in his head that I was interested in him. I could tell that he was the species of black man who believed that he was a catch because he was college educated, hadn’t ever been to jail or sold drugs in the hood, and as far as the world was concerned and fuck the fact that it exoticized him, he had a big dick. A man like that wasn’t about to let a black woman forget that he was her ideal and the fact that his ex-girlfriend, who he had been briefly engaged to, had been a white woman. Over drinks, he tossed his Ivy League education and job in finance my way, mentioning it casually but making eye contact with me every now and then to see whether this information impressed me. All of us who had come for the wedding had met in the bar, reacquainting or meeting for the first time. There were a little over thirty of us, and energy was high because here we were in paradise. Brian was talking about a restaurant he had gone to with an ex-girlfriend, and a few minutes later, Beyoncé and Jay Z were seated at the table next to them. Tracy and Andrea, and Isaiah and Tia, our two friends to be married, as well as everyone else gathered around looked impressed, but I almost rolled my eyes. When I left to get another drink, Mr. Wall Street showed up next to me, flashing his well-attended teeth, and meanwhile I was wondering exactly what it was that he wanted from me. I assumed that it was a little vacation sex because he had the misfortune of traveling to a beautiful locale during the off-season, that he was without a girlfriend, and that the woman he was sleeping with in New York, a pretty little young light-skinned thing or a naïve white girl, couldn’t be taken on the trip without assuming that it meant something more than it was.

  “Has anyone ever told you that you could pass for Lisa Bonet’s little sister?” he asked.

  I laughed. “Someone once told me that I’m Lisa Bonet with Queen Latifah titties.”

  He grinned, taking a long sip of his drink.

  “Of course, this was before my breast reduction.”

  I could tell that he wasn’t quite sure how to respond, so I continued, “Which Lisa Bonet do you mean?”

  “Which Lisa Bonet?”

  “Yeah. Are we talking Cosby Show Lisa Bonet or married-to-a-Game-of-Thrones-babe-warrior Lisa Bonet?”

  He laughed. “I still haven’t seen Game of Thrones. What are you drinking?”

  “Pineapple juice with rum.”

  “I’ve never had that combo before.”

  “Yeah? A woman I dated put me on to it.” He was visibly surprised, which I loved. Some men tried to brush it off as though they’d known all along. I reminded them of their aunts who believed in incense, shea butter, and head wraps—the type of woman who was always less conforming than their mothers, who wore pantyhose to church on Sundays. They admired these aunts, these pariahs and poets who kept relationships and children with men they weren’t married to. But unlike their aunts, I’d gone too far. I liked it best when they couldn’t hold their disbelief, because who were they to assume anything about me? One Jamaican man in Brooklyn, just someone who had approached me on the street, told me, “Yuh too pretty to be wid women.” Brian and I talked for a bit longer, during which he asked the obligatory question of whether I also dated men, and when I said that I no longer did, I could see that his interest waned and he scanned the room to see who his other options were.

  He was gone by the time Tia showed up next to me. “So Brian found out that you don’t date men, huh?” We laughed and turned to look at the other woman he was now in the process of wooing—a cousin of Tia’s with long
extensions, who was wearing one of those extraordinarily low-cut dresses that small-breasted women can get away with. I’d had a crush on Tia when we were in law school together. She had a way about her that made it seem like she slept with women. I’d even assumed that much until she introduced me to her boyfriend when I bumped into them on campus. One night after we shared two bottles of wine, the both of us newly single and commiserating, I dared myself to tell her that when I first met her I thought that she was gay and that I had had a crush on her. We’d laughed about it as though it was a silly thing I’d said because I’d had too much to drink. But then a few weeks later, before Tia had gotten together with Isaiah, we’d fooled around. We hadn’t had sex exactly but we’d come close, and afterwards she was apologetic because she’d been the one to kiss me. She wasn’t sure, she said, that it was anything more than a thing she wanted to try, and because I didn’t want to be something someone tried and more so because it seemed that Allison and I would be getting back together, we agreed to be friends.

  When Isaiah came over and put his arm over my shoulder, I shuddered without meaning to. I’d never gotten used to him—he’d played football in college and was one of those beefy, touchy types. It mattered greatly to him and Tia that they were both Chicagoans who had gone to the same elementary school when they were little and had met in graduate school in Wisconsin, but it was far too sentimental and irrelevant a story to matter to anyone else, because they were so mismatched. Tia was a sensitive, artsy type who had somehow stumbled into law school because her middle-class upbringing had determined this path. I imagined that in five years she would quit law to work for an art nonprofit, when she wasn’t caring for her and Isaiah’s children. Whenever I imagined them having sex, it always began with Isaiah lifting Tia and throwing her into bed. I never thought they would date for more than a few months—just long enough to realize their incompatibility.