How to Love a Jamaican

by Alexia Arthurs

  Jacinth is still standing above me as I’m bent over my toes, both of us examining my nails that have grown thicker and yellow with age—my toenails and the little love handles around my waist remind me of my sixty-seven years. I have my mother’s toenails now. I remember once when she and I were watching cricket in the living room during one of her last visits to New York and I looked down at her toes and it seemed as though I hadn’t looked at her feet in twenty years. When had her toenails grown so ugly? The woman who raised me always had neat little toenails she sometimes kept painted. I couldn’t reconcile that woman with the one who sat beside me, her toenails thick and yellow, unpleasant to look at.

  I couldn’t remember if I had cut my toenails in the last year and I wouldn’t be bothered with the rusty nail clipper if it wasn’t for what happened at the shop yesterday. I had been watching the domino game with Ugly, eating slices of watermelon Old Henry sold to us, when Old Henry’s little granddaughter came out of the shop and started looking at my toenails. She couldn’t be more than three years old. She stared at my toenails with such interest that she stooped down to get a closer look. I was surprised at the boldness of the child. The domino players and Ugly became interested too. They all watched quietly. We all started to laugh when one of her little fingers reached down to touch one of my toenails.

  Jacinth is still watching me struggle with the rusty nail clipper. This morning she couldn’t find the nail clipper she usually uses but she found an old one of my mother’s. Yesterday, after Richie and the rest of them playing dominoes forgot about me, Ugly still chuckled softly beside me. “Bwoy,” he said, “likkle pickney a di biggest bitch.” As soon as I walked into the house, I asked Jacinth if she knew the whereabouts of a nail clipper. “A wah old man? Yuh see one hot young ting down di road that mek you wan fi groom yuhself?” I laughed heartily because she had stumbled so closely to the truth. And although she didn’t understand why I laughed so loudly but because she enjoyed the pleasure of her joke hitting me so hard, Jacinth started to laugh too. She laughed even harder when I told her about the little girl. And for the rest of the evening, she would remember the image of the little girl bending to touch my toe and she would start laughing again.

  I know Jacinth is here to ask me something but she’s distracted watching me. Right before she opens her mouth to speak, I anticipate it. Maybe her breathing changes, or another change so subtle that another person wouldn’t know to listen for it. That’s how well I’ve memorized her after all these years. “Why you asking me about forgiveness for?” I look up at her because I am surprised that she has returned to the question. I expected to hear another kind of question. Maybe one related to the meal she is cooking. I am searching her face for answers, to see if she suspects the boy or that I have anything at all to hide from her, but I can’t read that there is anything besides curiosity in her face. “No reason,” I say. “I read something and was wondering.” It’s true. I had been reading my mother’s old Bible. It’s on the dresser by her bed, and sometimes I flip through it. My whole life it’s the only book my mother kept beside her bed, and flipping through it, pausing to read a little bit, remembering how my mother used to say that when I left Jamaica I forgot God—and I used to argue back, in the calm, respectful way I was raised to talk to her, that I didn’t forget God, I just didn’t attend church—is calming, is refreshing in a way I couldn’t begin to explain to someone. I shrug my shoulders to show Jacinth the conversation about forgiveness isn’t a big thing at all, that I have forgotten it, so she should too. I continue clipping my toenails. Jacinth watches me for a moment, and then she is walking off to finish the lunch.

  * * *

  —

  I watch her as she walks away from me, entering back into the house. She is wearing my favorite wig—usually she wears short wigs but this one is long to her shoulders, with bangs. It creates youthfulness about her face, reminding me of when we first met because she had a similar hairstyle. That day after she pushed the stroller to my destination, I accidentally washed her number off my hand. I didn’t realize until I looked down at the smudged ink on my palm. I was disappointed. I didn’t have plans to call, but I wanted the option to. Dropping my palm to my side, and surveying the faces on the train car, my eyes rested on her. My mouth stood open. New York seemed so much bigger in the early days, but I quickly learned better. She was laughing, later she would admit that she had been watching me for a few train stops already.

  Recently, we went to town. We had walked through the market, and every way we turned, sellers were begging us to buy something from them. The market smelled of cooking meat, corn and yams roasting, the sweet, living smell of ripe fruits and vegetables mixed up with the smell of market men and women, sweat everywhere—under the arms, between the legs, on foreheads—and the perfumes and lotions of the customers coming to shop. All of these smells swirling, mixing with the smell of rotting food in the garbage dump. And if there was a smell for hardship, for hustling, for that feeling when someone leaves your sweet-sweet guineps to buy the little sour ones from so-and-so even after tasting yours, even after you lowered the price a little, it would smell like something that burns your nose and waters your eyes. If someone could bottle a smell for all the feelings in the market, it would be as sweet as the sweetest-smelling mango and as bad smelling as the market madman who walks around picking up fruit that rolled off somebody’s heap.

  Afterwards we went to buy jerk chicken from the men who cook the chicken in steel drums. Two of the four of them started motioning to us when they saw us walking toward them. When we approached them, another one of them had already shared out a piece of chicken wrapped in foil that he wanted to hand to me. He only wanted to hear if I wanted a larger serving. The whole thing was exhausting. When people warned us, “Watch dat people nuh smell foreign pon yuh,” we didn’t pay them any mind. We thought we knew how to dress, talk, and act like we belonged—and to us, we do belong. No amount of years living in America could convince us that this place isn’t our home. One time my daughter showed me a photo she took when she had gone upstate to visit a friend. In the photo, the grass, the trees, the mountains were covered with snow and the word “beautiful” came to my mind. But that’s uncommon for me. It’s more natural that I’m the man arguing that God didn’t mean for ice to fall from the sky. I’m the man arguing that God meant for summer day after day and that winter was the devil’s idea.

  We love to go to town to see all kind of people passing through. Mothers holding the hands of the children they just picked up from school. The day has worn on the children—they entered the classroom with shiny faces and neat hair, packaged so as not to shame their parents, but now the wrapping paper is frayed. Old women wearing old church shoes in town for the day, on their way to doctor appointments or to pick up medicine. Young men in street clothes, walking quickly as if they have somewhere to go, or idling around calling out to women or discussing this or that amongst themselves in front of Mr. Chang’s shop. High school students in their uniforms: the girls from Bishop Gibson in their purple jumper dresses, white shirts white-white, hair neatly combed, while the boys wear khaki uniforms. Jamaican children wearing their school uniforms are as beautiful as flowers. That’s what Jacinth said, and I nodded in agreement. When we sent our children to public school, it occurred to us how strange it was that so many American schools didn’t require uniforms. We ached for our daughters, both of them never having to kneel over their white school shirts, scrubbing with blue bar soap until the fabric glistened white. A teacher would never pass our daughters in the halls and ask why they neglected to iron their uniforms or polish their shoes or comb their hair neatly or why they were wearing white socks since it was against the uniform policy. We stood under the shade of a building eating our jerk chicken and people-watching when a taxi man started beeping his horn at us. We didn’t want to hear from anyone else looking to make money from us, and because we were preoccupied with eating, we ignored
him. But the beeping continued, so I looked over to recognize a face I couldn’t put a name to. After reintroductions were made—the man was a son of one of my mother’s church friends—the man, Eddie, drove us home.

  “But, Wally, yuh look like seh yuh still a young boy?”

  We hadn’t seen each other in over twenty-five years. Eddie reminded me that during a trip home, I had seen him at my mother’s church and we shook hands after the service. He had aged, the years pulled youth from his face.

  “Yes, and I’m his old lady,” Jacinth said, and we all laughed.

  But under my laughter I felt a sadness I couldn’t name and I wondered if Jacinth felt it too. In preparatory school they used to call her Chicken Foot. When I met her, she told me she had gained weight from the decadence of American food, but she was still a little thing. Over the years, her body has become rounder with age. And life has left its scratches on her—because of bearing our children, because of life’s hardships, because of the disease.

  * * *

  —

  Here I have my stump. But when we are home, I go for walks. Past the houses of the other West Indians on the block—houses well kept, the small tidy space of lawns and tended flowers. Jacinth planted shrubs and flowers in alternating color arrangements in our yard. White people once lived in every house on our block. I don’t know why West Indians picked Canarsie as the neighborhood to overtake. Now only one white person remains on our block, a woman obsessed with cats. Her house is the only one on the block without a yard of dirt and plants. Instead her yard is concrete and cats. It’s because of her that the strays on the block have one of their ears clipped to signify that they’ve been neutered. She has what looks like an old doghouse out in the yard for them. I don’t know that any of them ever sleep in there but I see that they eat the provisions she puts out, a big tray of dry cat food and a bowl of milk and another one of water. This is the house that Jacinth says is the eyesore on the block. She says, “Di only kind of people weh live like dat are white people and African Americans.” It’s true that the ugly concrete and the house itself are nothing to look at twice. Twenty cats eating and drinking and licking each other behind the fence. When I walk by, most of them pause to look at me. Some immediately look away, while others hold my gaze. Sometimes when I drive down the street, I look around at the houses of the West Indians, the yards, the tidy lives we have built, and it surprises and impresses me.

  Back in Brooklyn I walked whenever I didn’t know what to do with myself—usually in the afternoon after lunch and sometimes after dinner if the sun goes down late. When I knew about the baby, and even after he came, it seemed like a dream, like a dirty piece of untruth someone told me. Even after I saw him with my own two eyes and felt him with my hands, I couldn’t believe it. And I couldn’t sleep for a long time after, maybe for a full year. I used to leave Jacinth’s side to walk before the sun came up.

  * * *

  —

  My son is on my mind. He is handsome, athletic, and smart. He is everything I could have wanted in a son, and his mother says the same. When I pictured the boy I wanted to raise, I imagined a boy better than I was, because in my mind I would have had an easier time if I had a father to show me the way. As a boy I wanted a man to teach me cricket, to show me how to fight. And as I got older, my needs became more complicated. I wanted a man to give me advice on how to live life. I wanted a man to love my mother. I wanted a man to show me how to remain faithful to my wife.

  Today Junior turns sixteen. When Jacinth gave birth to our second daughter, I smiled as though I wasn’t disappointed the baby wasn’t a boy. If the doctor hadn’t warned us against having any more children because of the difficulty of the pregnancy, if I couldn’t see that Jacinth was content with two daughters, and if I could’ve handled the disappointment of a third daughter, I wouldn’t have turned down Jacinth’s suggestion that we try a third time. I knew she was only suggesting a third child for my happiness—she never wanted more than two children. And then I met my son’s mother and even though it was something we planned against, she became pregnant. To have a son, I had to carry on with another woman, and I was convinced I could hear God laughing. Or maybe it was the devil laughing. It all felt like a cruel thing to happen to me. When I heard the news about the pregnancy, when I imagined my mother or wife or my daughters hearing, it filled me with a kind of sadness I wouldn’t wish on the devil.

  Once, my daughter Courtney told Jacinth about one of her college boyfriends. He was a Jamaican-American boy who took a bunch of pills to kill himself instead of allowing his family to find out about his homosexuality. Later, over dinner, Jacinth told me the story, explaining it was why Courtney was having difficulty at school, even dropping out of one of her classes. The story didn’t make sense to me. I asked Jacinth, “So you mean this boy would attempt to kill himself over letting his family see that he’s gay?” But when I found out about the pregnancy, when I thought how it would break Jacinth and when I thought about how it would cause my mother and my daughters to look at me differently, I considered for the first and only time that dying could be a relief from having to see their faces.

  When possible, Jacinth turns her back when she’s dressing or undressing so that I don’t see the flatness where her breasts used to be. I don’t know why she does this. I understand that she’s shy for me to see, maybe it’s that she doesn’t want me to see the ugly scars or to think of her as unwomanly. But after all this time, I don’t understand how she could feel the need to hide. One time I said to her, “Then, Jacinth, why you turn when you taking off your dress? A hide you a hide fram me? A see you don’t want me to see you? I’m your husband. You don’t have to hide from me.” She looked surprised, as if she hadn’t expected me to notice her newfound modesty. “I am not hiding anything,” she said, but it sounded weak, she couldn’t even make her lie convincing. Three years ago, when she felt the lump, she put my hand on her breast so I could feel it too because she hoped she was imagining things. After the surgery and during the chemotherapy, when I thought about her dying, and when I think about the cancer coming back and taking her, there is relief in thinking that she might never know about Junior. That she could go thinking of me as a good man. My pride shames me.

  * * *

  —

  The rusty nail clipper is already in my pocket when Jacinth comes through the back door to call me for lunch. It is good timing because my stomach has just started to complain. When I get into the house, Jacinth is sitting in front of her plate and Ugly is already eating. The smell of curry fills the room. I look down to see that on my plate the curry chicken is staining the white rice yellow. I’m only a little surprised to see Ugly at our dining table. Sometimes I walk with him down to the shop to play dominoes with the men in front. Jacinth says that I have lost my age card, but she says this while smiling. During the game, oftentimes Ugly and Richie get into an argument, and Old Henry takes up his broom and shoos us from the front of his shop. He poses the broom at younger men, and he only shakes his head at me. I don’t know why he bothers. It doesn’t take one hour for the men to return to playing dominoes in front of his shop.

  Ugly lives next door with a young girl. An Obia man used to live in their house. A man named Keston, who my mother would smile at but throw away any food he gave us. If my mother were alive, she would talk at the stupidity of people moving into his house. Last year, the first time Jacinth and I saw Ugly, we had walked down to the shop and while Old Henry started putting our groceries in a plastic bag, he started to call, “Ugly!” He must have called “Ugly!” five times before a man appeared from the back of the shop. “Ugly, dese people want a piece of yellow yam” Old Henry told him. “Guh dig up one.” Jacinth and I were shocked. We had heard all manner of wicked names given to people—no other kind of people is as wicked as Jamaicans when it comes to name-calling. But we had never heard a man called Ugly to his face, nor did we imagine that a man would a
nswer to Ugly. That’s how our fascination with him began. And then we saw the girl he lives with, a pretty little coolie girl, long-haired and light-skinned. Ugly brought her and the baby to show off. She came holding the baby in her hand, wearing a tight little skirt, looking like somebody’s daughter a grown man ruined.

  When they left, Jacinth shook her head. “Then where him find that gal now?”

  “A same thing mi a wonder.”

  “Some a dem ya girls these days don’t have no shame. You tink mi would a follow back a one man wid no teeth inna him mouth when mi was a young girl? Jesus. Something name shame.”

  “Well, you know how dem say beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” I said, laughing.

  “Wally, the man don’t have one teeth inna him mouth. Mi feel sorry fah di people who pickney him ruin. Yuh tink that girl twenty? I can’t even tink who nastier, the gal or Ugly.”

  Ugly’s main problem is that the girl can’t cook. Every day he eats with us, he reminds us. Today he says, “She try but she nuh reach deh yet. Yestideh di dinner she cook wouldnah cum out too bad if she neva figet di food pon di fire. She did a bathe di baby an she figet di food pon di fire.” Jacinth and I always listen to him complain, Jacinth even offers him seconds, which he is always happy for, but after he leaves, we laugh at him. We dissect every foolish thing he says. It feels good to be accomplices. He realizes we love to hear him talk, and since he loves to hear himself, we get along wonderfully.