How to Love a Jamaican

by Alexia Arthurs

  “Wah yuh doin’ down ’ere?” my grandmother wanted to know down at Mermaid River. I remember she was looking over me carefully, and using her hand to shade her eyes, which made the bangs on her wig scrunch up. She braided her hair in little plaits but I only saw them early in the mornings or late at night because she wore a wig everywhere. “Oh, I just come down to help you.” This made my grandmother look at me hard, as though I was telling her stories.

  As suspicious as she appeared, she also looked happy to see me. She could show me off to Mrs. Angie and Mrs. Wright, explaining how I always brought home the highest marks in school. She offered me the piece of foil she was eating from. It was a piece of jerk chicken, still warm as I used my fingers to break the flesh apart. Mrs. Angie was roasting jerk chicken in a steel drum and Mrs. Wright was roasting yams, saltfish, and corn in another one. They were across the road from Mermaid River, under a tree where everything they needed was laid out: chairs for sitting, an umbrella, paper fans, and a Bible and church hymnal and other necessities I can’t remember. The tree was in front of the house where Mrs. Angie lived with her husband. On one of the two front walls of the house were painted the words WE SELL HOT GOOD FOOD, big enough for the people in passing vehicles to make out. Every morning my grandmother woke up early to prepare various sweets, like tamarind balls, coconut drops, and plantain tarts. Then she walked down to Mermaid River to sit under that tree with her two friends. On the days it rained, if the rain was very bad, they all stayed home. But if it was only a drizzle, Mrs. Angie would get her husband to tie a piece of tarpaulin under the tree.

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  —

  There are three black students in my chemistry class. And then there is me. When I told my mother this, she said I shouldn’t worry with those things. The and then there is me part was supposed to be funny but she didn’t get it. My mother wants to keep me strong to make sure I do something important with my life. My stepfather is a garbage collector, which must have been a disappointment to my mother. Once, I heard her tell her friend that she never wanted to marry a man who came home with dirt under his fingernails. The irony of my mother marrying a garbage collector, the exact kind of man she didn’t want to marry, filled the next moments with laughter. I could hear my mother’s friend laughing on the other end of the phone. But my mother says my stepfather’s job is very good money in this country, and nothing to be ashamed of, and she says this to convince the both of us, and to meet our surprise, because where we come from nobody with any shame would willingly collect people’s garbage for a living.

  When class ends, I walk up to the chemistry teacher to show him the letter. He is an old white man with thinning hair, who smells of cigarettes and something else we can’t put our fingers on. He is known to make at least one student a semester, usually a girl, openly cry. He is also known as the only teacher who cusses in class, saying, for example, “I don’t give a rat’s ass” whenever someone gives him an excuse. Now he says to me, “I’m sorry for your loss.” This is a surprise to hear from him, but how he says it feels appropriate since it’s the uncaring way he always speaks. He must have lived a hard life—that’s what my mother says about people who are miserable. And then he says it’s okay that I’m going to Jamaica, but make sure I get the notes from someone when I get back. I thank him and leave the classroom.

  I show the letter to all my teachers. Mrs. Cunningham, my French teacher, looks very sorry for me because this is the kind of person she is. She looks like she is about to hug me but she remembers herself so she only puts her hand on my shoulder. My classmates want to know what’s in the letter because they are nosy. I see them looking at me.

  * * *

  —

  The day I went down to help her, my grandmother and I sat under the tree, waiting for customers. She started telling me about old times—how the river used to be fat, how it used to be unnamed. Eventually a tour bus pulled up across the road, everyone disembarked, and we watched a tour guide talk to a group of people. Then the tourists were taking photos and a few crossed the road and bought jerk chicken, roasted corn, saltfish, and yams. One woman bought a dozen coconut drops from my grandmother, explaining that she was taking them back home with her. As afternoon pushed into evening, cars pulled up alongside the tree. Mrs. Angie and Mrs. Wright would get up to take the orders. I collected one of everything my grandmother prepared and held them out by the top of the plastic bags she tied them in, so customers could see what we had for sale.

  By the time the second tour bus pulled up to Mermaid River, I had learned that as little girls my grandmother and her friends from primary school tied up their uniform skirts to wade in the river. One time, they got it into their heads to wade in their drawers, so that’s how they were, all four of them, and then they wrung out their drawers and hid them in their schoolbags and walked home holding down their uniform skirts in case a heavy wind blew.

  Sometimes someone would go home with a busted-open foot, a sharp stone having made its mark. The time it happened for my grandmother she was walking softly on that foot when her mother asked her, “Wah wrong wid yuh foot, gal?” “Nothing, ma’am,” my grandmother said, and then she tried to walk normally on the foot, just until her mother shifted her attention to something else. Later my grandmother was made to reveal the foot, to lift it onto her mother’s lap, because her mother once again noticed how lightly the foot was touching the ground. Somehow my great-grandmother knew the cut was from a stone in the river, so even while holding my grandmother’s foot on her lap, she smacked the side of her daughter’s head, hard enough for tears, because she wasn’t allowed at the river without somebody grown watching. Later, though, my great-grandmother would find a piece of aloe vera to rub on the cut. And that day under the tree, the memory of the whole incident made my grandmother smile.

  * * *

  —

  My closest friend is a Chinese boy named Jason. His real name is something else. Every time we have a new class, the teacher will try to pronounce his Chinese name and Jason will say, “Just call me Jason.” We met freshman year in literature class because we sat next to each other, so we were always assigned to work together. When Jason asked where I was from and I said Jamaica, he complimented my English and asked what language Jamaicans speak. I laughed. That question is what I remember when I think about us first becoming friends.

  We are the same: quiet, loyal, but mostly our commitment is because we were each other’s first friend in a new school. Sometimes we forget each other. Jason will hang out with some other Chinese boys, and I will hang out with the smaller amount of black boys in our school. The black boys like me, especially because sometimes what I say that isn’t meant to be funny is funny because I say it. Since I don’t want to bother with the pizza they are serving in the cafeteria, and I see Jason with some other Chinese boys eating pizza, I go to the gym to watch the basketball game.

  Before I moved to Brooklyn, I’d never played basketball before. We played cricket and football at my primary school. Since the game has already started, I sit on the bleachers and watch. Nicolas looks up and asks if I want to play. “Next game,” I say, knowing that by the time the next game starts it will be time to head back to class. I like that they want to include me and I’ve grown to enjoy watching them play when I have nothing better to do, but as often as I can I try to get out of playing because I know I’m no good.

  If I could play basketball better or had more interest in watching games with my stepfather, we would get along better. We get on fine. Nothing is wrong. I just know I am not the son he was hoping for. Sometimes my stepfather will see me studying and he says, “I could have used a little bit of that when I was your age,” but I know he is also saying, “You are not how I was expecting.” Sometimes I’ll sit for a while to watch a game with him and I can tell my presence pleases him. When he and my mother picked me up from the airport, he touched my shoulder and smiled; later he would laugh a
t my accent. My mother told me that because he is older than she is, he didn’t want to bother with any babies, which is why he was glad to hear that she already had a son. They married just before they sent for me, since my mother didn’t want me to think of her without respect. She said she couldn’t bring me into any living arrangement with a man she wasn’t married to. She is always telling me everything, even what she is ashamed for me to know. This is how my mother kneads the eight years away.

  Sometimes I want to lie on my bed in the middle of the day, which is another thing my stepfather doesn’t understand about me. I just lie there thinking, with my hands folded under my head, and sometimes I fall asleep. When I lived with my grandmother, I used to sit up in the mango tree to think or when I had to memorize something for school. One time, my grandmother told me that the man next door complained that I was sitting in the mango tree because I wanted to peep on him. But when my grandmother told me this, she was smiling when she really wanted to be laughing at the man. Because she did things the old way, she didn’t want to laugh at him in front of me because she didn’t want me to forget I was a child. I smiled back at her, because this old man was known to be miserable and forever convinced that people were stealing from him, or watching him, or talking his business.

  * * *

  —

  All those years later, my grandmother still went back to Mermaid River, though she hadn’t let the water touch her in years. She faced her history even while she made her future. All her life, she only called one place home, and she watched it build up and change so that some parts didn’t bear any resemblance. As a little girl walking to and from school, she’d become familiar with the modest stretch of concrete and zinc houses whose backyards dipped into the river. In the afternoons, a woman used to sit on one of the verandas discreetly breastfeeding a fat baby. Next door lived a couple that seemed to enjoy cursing each other at their gate. A cherry tree leaned out of one of the yards, which attracted schoolchildren. When the houses and the inhabitants were gone, the government finally looked about the potholes in the roads. My grandmother packed her basket every morning and walked the twenty minutes to the river where people will remember her, if they remember her, as an old woman selling from a basket when they got off the bus. Or stopped their car to see Mermaid River, maybe to take a photograph by the sign. Perhaps they heard the story given by the tour guide, or read it in a pamphlet, or they knew it for themselves. An old-time story about how old-time people used to see a mermaid combing her hair on the bank of the river. The mermaid is said to have jumped back into the water when she realized she was being watched. WELCOME TO MERMAID RIVER and in smaller print, “No swimming, the rocks are sharp.” Always, someone will dip his or her foot into the water, since the sign only forbids swimming.

  Only now does the history of that river sit on me. I realize that my grandmother had a world all her own, one that excluded me because I’d never thought of her as a little girl or as anyone other than the woman who took care of me until the real woman who should have been taking care of me was set up good enough to send for me.

  The day after I helped my grandmother down at Mermaid River, I still had the fire lit under me, so I flung the coconuts against the cement at the back of the house. I cracked open tamarinds and, following my grandmother’s instructions, folded them into little balls with sugar. I got to school a few minutes early and was shocked to see Roger Boxx playing cricket. That was how he would level out his height; he turned out to be the strongest cricket player in our school. And he brought me along. He convinced the other boys to look past my overall mediocrity and my subpar batting skills, and then my mornings and afternoons were filled with cricket. The first few days, I felt guilty because of the thought of my grandmother, an old woman, who I should have been helping. But guilt often loses its flavor, I’ve found. My grandmother shook her head when I raced out of the house in the mornings. She said she should have known it was too good to be true, but I knew she missed me. The morning I started leaving early again, I left the coconuts on the dining table. I left them even though I knew they were laid out for me to crack.

  * * *

  —

  I close my eyes on the plane. I see three old women under a tree laughing a dancing laugh. My mind doesn’t recognize who they are and still I want to tell one of them, “I never seen you laugh like that but once the whole time I knew you.” I open my eyes and I can’t say whether I was dreaming or remembering, maybe both.

  My cricket days ended when the school year came to a close because my mother finally sent for me. She had married a man for love. It also solved the problem of getting her papers. Now I am back, finally, for my grandmother’s funeral. In the city, the heat feels as if it wants to knock us down; that’s what my mother says, she says the heat wants to knock us down. I have been craving the sunshine the whole time I’ve been away. On our way from the airport, my mother convinces the taxi man to stop in the city. All because my stepfather wants oxtail from a restaurant he ate from when he visited the island with another woman long before he knew my mother. My stepfather says he has been thinking of the oxtail for the past seven years. I see my mother look at him because she cooks oxtail in New York whenever he wants it. I see the look she gives him and I understand because I am her child. The look passes, and then my mother is telling my stepfather to buy enough oxtail for all of us.

  This is how my mother and I are alone in Kingston, Jamaica, such a small place on the globe in my World History class that if you aren’t careful you can easily miss it. At the market, there are so many people, most of them trying to sell us something. There is a man selling string crafts, he has them stacked up top of his head and he is shouting that the crafts are patterned into the hummingbird, the national bird. There is a woman selling bammy from a basket on her head. There are fruit stands and men roasting meat, corn, and yams. My mother’s head is turning to look at everything and everyone because she so badly wants to use the spending money she budgeted.

  Long after my mother and I have eaten, my stepfather is still sucking the oxtail bones.

  The taxi is driving my mother, my stepfather, and me to my grandmother’s house, where we will meet relatives before the funeral tomorrow. Even though I’m waiting to see Mermaid River, I almost miss it. Because on the other side of the street, there is a tree and behind the tree is a blue house that used to be painted yellow. There is no longer a sign that reads, WE SELL HOT GOOD FOOD. There are no old women laughing a dancing laugh.

  I can’t remember this, but my grandmother used to say I would sleep on her breast after my mother left. I cried when she put me in bed by myself, so she put me in bed next to her. She said I used to fall asleep with my head on one of her breasts. This embarrassed me because it was a story that my grandmother repeated often to her friends and I realized early that old women breasts were something I should stay far away from. I didn’t know what about the story pleased her to retell it. Now I think maybe she was trying to say, “Listen, to how this boy loves me.”

  THE GHOST OF JIA YI

  FOR SHAO TONG

  Tiffany can’t sleep when she hears that police found Jia Yi, the missing international student, dead in the trunk of her car. The news anchor reported that “a person of interest,” the man Jia Yi had been spending time with, had already flown back to China, and that someone had stuffed her body in the trunk of her car as though she was less than a person. When Tiffany finally falls asleep in the early hours of the morning, she dreams that Jia whispers her killer’s name in her ears. And isn’t this what Tiffany’s mother prayed against? She worried that she would lose her daughter tragically in America, a place that, according to the television and newspapers, took daughters and later spit out their bones. Tiffany had ignored her mother, even laughed at her because she believed her mother to be too country, too afraid of the world. But if it happened to someone else’s daughter, who’s to say that it couldn’t happen to her?r />
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  —

  Your first time to America, Iowa isn’t where you expect to end up. Midwestern towns are at times charming, and stretches of farmland have been thought to be beautiful, but Iowa isn’t the kind of place Jamaicans talk about when they talk about America. Before Tiffany left home, whenever she told people that she was moving to Iowa because a school offered her a track scholarship, they screwed up their faces because they’d only heard of the well-known places in the States. So she started to tell people that she was going to a place near Chicago, because Chicago might have been a place they’d heard of before. Sometimes, when things were really bad, she said, “Near where Oprah used to live.”

  Tiffany started running for the reasons all children run: the ground fleshy under her feet, a day thick with possibility, and how else to keep up? And then she discovered running a second time because it was a way to beat and impress her brother. When they were children, Kareem’s favorite game was to tease his sister, like calling her Coconut Head because her hair was short. Whenever he played in the yard with the boys who lived next door, he refused to include Tiffany. She sat on the front steps watching them play football or marbles, and sometimes she was bold enough to ask them if she could join them. While the other boys wouldn’t have minded, her brother always told her no. She didn’t understand why he disliked her so much. It wasn’t until she was older that she could look back to see that he resented her for taking up all the attention when she was born premature. Their parents were so relieved that she lived that their gratitude looked like favoritism.