How to Love a Jamaican

by Alexia Arthurs

  He looked at her. “That came out of nowhere. Why didn’t you stay in Jamaica?”

  “Here they were offering to pay my tuition.”

  “Same with me. My mother said it was a waste not to come. But being around so many white people makes me nervous.”

  “What about Taylor?”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s white.”

  He laughed. “So I’ve observed.”

  He put the key in the ignition and they rode silently for a while. Tiffany wanted to discuss the nature of their relationship, but she didn’t know what to say. She thought it was sloppy how he pursued her in the very same room she shared with Taylor. It was almost as though he wanted to get caught. They were driving through the downtown area. It was larger and more energetic than where they went to school. She’d been told that it was the capital of Iowa.

  “Before I came to America, I’d never heard of Iowa,” she said.

  “You heard of Chicago, though, right?”

  “Yeah, Oprah used to live there, and that rapper who said that the president didn’t care about black people.”

  “You mean Kanye.” He laughed. “That was a long time ago. Kanye doesn’t care about black people anymore.”

  Wayne was waiting for them in front of an exhausted-looking apartment complex. He was a short, wide man in his late twenties wearing a T-shirt with Biggie’s face on it. In fact, he looked like Biggie himself. “What happened to the white girl?” he asked, stooping to look into the car. Kevin laughed a response. He and Wayne went into the house together. A little while later, Kevin returned, smelling of marijuana. He asked Tiffany if she wanted to come inside.

  The apartment was the very definition of disorder. The center table was covered with empty food cartons, a pee-soaked diaper, various body care and makeup tubes, a few packages of condoms, and a bowl of soggy cereal. A beautiful white woman sat on the couch holding a sleeping toddler, whose brown face was caked in something he had eaten. When Tiffany sat next to her, she responded with a soft, vacant “Hi,” before returning to her phone.

  Across from them, Kevin and Wayne were sitting at the dining table having a heated conversation about a cousin, who was marrying a man they disliked. Twenty, then thirty minutes passed. Tiffany wanted to use the bathroom, but she was afraid of what would meet her there. The beautiful white woman left the sleeping child on the couch, picked up her purse and jacket, and slammed the front door behind her. She was wearing red leather pants, which made Tiffany think that she had someplace to be. Kevin and Wayne looked momentarily surprised, but then continued talking. “He called me a self-hating black man because my baby mother is white,” Wayne was saying. “I told him, how you mean? Pussy is pussy.” Kevin laughed. Wayne continued, “He said that black people in the Midwest fuck with hick-minded white people. I said to Britney, where you find this high and mighty nigga at? The club, she said.” He and Kevin laughed. Tiffany stood. Wayne turned toward her. “My cousin says you run,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, waiting for whatever came next.

  “What’s your nationality?” he said, studying her carefully.

  “She’s Jamaican,” Kevin said brightly, as though it was something he was proud of.

  “Wha’ gwan,” Wayne said, laughing, but no one else joined him. He became serious. “Why are Jamaicans so fast?”

  “Because it’s a small island,” Kevin said.

  Wayne looked to him. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It’s a limited gene pool.”

  “Interesting. I hadn’t thought of that.” He turned back to Tiffany. “What do you think? What’s your name again?”

  “I wish I knew,” she said. She was annoyed, but she didn’t know why. “Where is the bathroom?”

  Behind her, she could hear Wayne asking, “Did I say something to offend your girl?”

  Later that night, when Tiffany and Kevin returned to campus, at the desolate corner where they would part ways, she asked, “What do you and Taylor talk about?” She’d observed that they mostly lay in bed watching Netflix. Apparently, they both loved to laugh. Kevin looked at her for a long moment. He was surprised. Perhaps, she would later consider, right then he was deciding never to ask her out again. Perhaps he was thinking that if he only slept with her, it would be easier for everyone involved. “Everything,” he said, but he seemed unsure.

  * * *

  —

  The news anchor said that the man identified as Jia Yi’s boyfriend confided to a friend that he was displeased because she was seeing other men. It made Tiffany wonder what if it had been her in that trunk. Everyone would know that she had carried on with another woman’s man. People would hear about her and believe that murder was the kind of thing to happen to a promiscuous girl. This is what Tiffany is thinking as Kevin pulls off her panties.

  They don’t talk. Kevin grunts, she moans, and sometimes he says dirty things to her. He looks at her lustfully, and though she is flattered, she knows that to him she is just a piece of ass. Still, he could be possessive. In the beginning he’d asked if she was sleeping with anyone else, and when she said that she wasn’t, he’d nodded appreciatively. When he found out through the black student grapevine that she’d been hanging out with Duane, he texted her, “My friend says that you’re a ho. Is that true?” She got upset, he apologized—claiming that he had been drinking—but it was obvious that for him their relationship didn’t have room for anyone else.

  During sex, Tiffany tries not to make extended eye contact, because something deep and disastrous is forming for him for these moments when his hands are on her breasts and then on her ass and then on her breasts again, and she’s wondering if he smiles like this when he’s with Taylor, if his hands are as busy for a white girl with small breasts and an ass that barely separates from her back.

  Taylor’s father hadn’t been pleased to hear that she was dating a black man. When Kevin heard about it, he broke up with her first, but later they reconciled. As far as her father knows, she’d broken up with him the previous semester. But Tiffany sees Kevin holding Taylor’s hand on campus, which means that in this threesome of a relationship, she’s the biggest fool. Tiffany doesn’t want to believe this, so she shakes her head because she doesn’t want to be a fool, shakes her head because this is already complicated enough without adding feelings to the equation, shakes her head because she isn’t the kind of girl to be along with another girl’s man. But Kevin mistakes it as a symptom of the sex being good, so he grabs her hair to keep her steady, and she reaches for his other hand, holding it gently, lovingly. She isn’t the first and she won’t be the last woman to baptize her sorrows into the arms of a man. When she is with Kevin, it’s easy to forget that America is a lonely place.

  Tiffany’s about to climax—any moment now—when the ghost of Jia Yi looks through her window. Tiffany screams and sits up abruptly, pushing Kevin off of her. He looks around, terrified, certain that Taylor has walked into the room. When he sees that his girlfriend isn’t there, he says, “What is it?!” But Tiffany doesn’t look at him. She’s looking through the window to confirm that there isn’t a tree or a fire escape or any other way for someone to climb to the third floor. After the tea shop, Jia Yi stayed away for three days, which gave Tiffany the opportunity to rationalize the haunting as evidence of her imagination. Now, she is quickly picking her clothes off the floor and dressing, and then she picks up Kevin’s clothes and throws them at him. He looks at her with the slow realization that this thing they have is over. He asks the question of a man humbled by disappointment, “What happened?” But Tiffany doesn’t answer him. How can she explain that her sins had been reflected on the face of a dead girl? She goes into the bathroom, where she peels off her clothes once again and takes a shower, soaping her body and rinsing, and repeating this process twice more, all the while crying and wondering if she
is going crazy.

  She isn’t even sure that she believes in ghosts. When she was a child, Miss Palmer—the woman next door, who her mother fell out with—died before they could make up. Tiffany overheard her mother telling her father that some funny things had been happening in the house. Her mother said that several times while she had been cooking pork, she turned around for a moment and somehow the fire under the pots had been put out. Miss Palmer had believed that eating pork was sinful. Another time when her mother was taking a midday nap, she felt someone push their hand through the open window to put their hand on her head, combing their fingers through her hair. She jumped out of her sleep and looked out the window but there was no one there. Miss Palmer had been notorious for putting her hand in people’s hair. Later, Tiffany’s mother would have the church pastor visit to pray over the house, and after that, she never brought up Miss Palmer again.

  * * *

  —

  A week later, Tiffany attends Jia Yi’s memorial service. She’s come directly from practice, so she’s wearing sneakers and sweaty athletic clothes under her coat, but even if she had come in proper clothes, she would have still held back, standing a distance from the service, leaning against a tree. There are a little over two hundred people, most of them Asian, circled around a table with lit candles and a photograph of Jia Yi. The director of the International Studies Program is speaking, saying obvious things, the only things to say: Jia Yi was kind, intelligent, her death a loss because what a future and the things that could have been. When the candles are blown out and everyone is dispersing, Tiffany looks up at the sky, remembering a conversation she’d had with her father.

  She’d gone home for winter break, and when she visited her father, the woman he’d chosen over her mother was conveniently visiting her own mother with their love child. Tiffany and her father sat at the dining table eating the simple dinner of saltfish and green bananas he had prepared.

  “So what yuh think, Tiffany? Jamaica too small fi yuh?”

  She laughed.

  “You know, you and I always alike. We neva content. I remember when you was likkle and I went to Panama and brought back a doll for you. You looked at me and asked, ‘Wha else?’ ” He laughed.

  “Is that why you lef’ Mommy? Because yuh neva content?”

  “I respect your mother. She gave me two children. I met your mother when I was a young man.”

  There was a long pause.

  “You know, I fret ova you,” he said, and it was obvious that he was deliberately changing the subject.

  “Fret over me why?”

  “Yuh tek everything so serious. I don’t want America fi swallow my one girl pickney. The other day I couldn’t sleep. I was looking at the sky and thinking it’s the same sky you see in Iowa. I prayed for you. Yuh know how long since mi pray?”

  * * *

  —

  That night, Tiffany dreams that she catches a fish. In the dream, she is fishing in the river where her father taught her to swim, but then the river becomes the university’s aquatic center. She stands on the bank of the pool holding the fish in her arms like it is a baby. Its face is almost human. Eventually, she returns it to the water.

  * * *

  —

  Eventually, the ghost of Jia Yi stopped visiting Tiffany. Once, Tiffany saw her running on the treadmill at the gym, her long black hair flying behind her, and another time when Tiffany turned a corner in the library, Jia looked up from a table scattered with papers and textbooks, lifting a hot beverage from a local coffee shop to her lips. Slowly she disappeared from Tiffany’s dreams, her reality, and never again did she whisper her killer’s name.

  Six months later, what happened to Jia Yi is still unresolved. If there is a heaven, perhaps it has a support group for women whose deaths don’t have the dignity of closure for those who loved and knew them, and maybe this is where Jia Yi has gone. Only occasionally does Tiffany remember her. And when she does remember Jia Yi, it’s with regret for all the times she failed to notice her.

  HOW TO LOVE A JAMAICAN

  The Israelites used to send a goat out into the wilderness, and leave the animal, the sins, there. The priest put his hands on the goat and spoke of all the ways the people wronged God, and then someone would lead the goat away. No animal was sacrificed, no person had to die, it all felt quiet to me, as if forgiveness could be peaceful. Earlier today, when I asked Jacinth if she thought forgiveness could be quiet like that, she shrugged over her cornmeal porridge. I ask questions that cause her to think too hard and sometimes she responds, but most times she shrugs. When we first met and during the early times of our marriage, before children, my questions used to charm her. She used to say, “Wally, you have a mind fah both ah we,” because where her mind stopped short, mine roamed, barely ever quieting. One time she told me, “You ha fi tink ’bout everything.” And then she asked me, “Dat don’t tire you?”

  When I was a little boy, my mother used to call me fast. “Wallace, why yuh ha fi fass inna people business?” There were many times I embarrassed her, asking Miss Brown why her children didn’t have a father or asking Mr. Latchman why he didn’t have any teeth in his mouth. My mind is like water—it flows into the deepest crevices. It wants to point a flashlight into dark corners. Asking, for example, if church people realize that the heaven they’re selling sounds like a long church service, and, if they are right, who wants to listen to sermons forever? I wonder if there is a point where my talk ceased to impress Jacinth, or if it happened slowly over time.

  The first time I spoke to Jacinth, I asked a question, though the simplest of questions. I had only been in New York for three months and I was lost in Manhattan. My mother’s half brother was putting me up in Brooklyn, and he knew Joy, a woman from church, who cleaned and cooked for a wealthy family that was looking for a male caretaker for the elderly father who had recently moved in. I needed to be strong enough to help an elderly man into his wheelchair and into the shower, and willing to escort him to his doctor appointments or to see a movie or eat in a restaurant or wherever else he wanted to go. I was also to pretend to know Joy so well that the family would believe I was her nephew. When my uncle explained the situation, I remember I asked him, “You see how church people lie?” I saw a young black woman pushing a stroller with a white baby in my direction. I stopped her for directions. She started laughing and asked me how long since I left Jamaica. I heard the island in her voice too—she told me that she hadn’t left for a full year yet. Jacinth pushed the stroller all the way to the apartment building because she said she wasn’t good at explaining directions. When I tell people how we met, Jacinth allows me to say that she wanted to look some more into my face and that’s why she walked me to the building. She smiles and shakes her head and allows me to exaggerate. Before I entered the building, I took my pen out of my pocket and wrote her number in the palm of my hand.

  Now Jacinth has come out of the house, where she is preparing our lunch. In New York, we alternate the cooking. By the time I met Jacinth, not even in New York for a year and she had learned enough about feminism to explain the kind of Jamaican woman she refused to be. But back on the island, we’ve fallen into Jamaican ways. Not purposefully, but because Jacinth hogs the kitchen. Cooking bloody meat from animals we can trace to the owners and vegetables we can dust the dirt from has instilled a new love for cooking in her. We are living in the house I was raised in, though it’s a different house now. When I was growing up, there was an outside bathroom and half of the house lay unfinished. My father finished four rooms—two small bedrooms, a living room, a small inside kitchen—but the other half of the house, which was to be a dining room and another bedroom, lay unfinished for many years after he took up with another woman and moved to England with her. As a man, I sent money home for my mother to finish the house.

  I am sitting on the tree stump clipping my toenails and I feel her eyes on me.
I call the stump my “thinking seat.” Jacinth calls it my “idle seat.” I have become married to the stump—it’s where I sit after meals while the food digests or when I want to do a little reading or writing, or sometimes I don’t do anything at all. I just sit here and think—all kinds of thoughts and memories come to me. Yesterday, I remembered a dress my mother used to wear. A flowered dress and she is walking into the schoolyard to collect me. Where did that come from? And why? That’s what I don’t understand about memories. A little quiet and the mind will do its job, pulling all kinds of moments from the deepest caves for my remembering.

  We cut down the pear tree because the fruit for some reason—Jacinth thought the roots were diseased—never ripened edible. The flesh was always brown and tasted off, and when the fruit fell in the backyard it created too much work to clean up. Not even the mongrel, a stray that plants himself daily outside our front door looking hungry, wanted to eat the pears. Jacinth picked two pears from the ground and put them on his plate next to the homemade dog food. She made cooked cornmeal with pieces of chicken. He ate the cornmeal, sniffed each pear, and started to sip water from his bowl. Jacinth and I laughed. We were watching because we both wanted to see if the dog would eat the pears.

  “Since when dog don’t eat pear?”

  “What yuh saying? Even mongrel know good food. You tink dog a fool?”

  The rotting pears on the ground behind the house bothered us. We didn’t like when we accidentally stepped on one, because the rotting flesh not only dirtied the bottom of our shoes but it also smelled nasty. It seemed like a sin for all the pears to go to waste. Together we contemplated what a shame it was that we had to buy pears with a tree behind our house. We imagined that if the tree had been good to us we would eat pear for every meal, if the tree’s bearing allowed for it: pear with fried dumplings for breakfast, pear with the pumpkin soup at lunchtime, pear alongside the rice and peas and stew chicken at dinnertime. Plus sometimes the fruits fell on the zinc roof of the chicken coop, scaring the chickens. Jacinth said the chickens wouldn’t lay eggs if they were frightened, and I didn’t believe her but she kept nagging me about the tree, so I finally cut it down. The chickens started laying more eggs and the stump is the best sitting spot in the yard.