How to Love a Jamaican

by Alexia Arthurs

  Back then we lived in a basement apartment on Chester Street. We had been staying with my mother’s friend, who was settled on Flatbush, since she had the sense to leave the island years earlier when everything was easier—you would have your green card in less time in those days, no waiting for twelve years, “till kingdom come.” Those days America wasn’t tired of foreigners yet.

  We’d slept on an old mattress in my mother’s friend’s living room. It was hot—we’d got off the plane in August—and the air conditioners were only in the bedrooms. From a corner of the living room, a fan blew hot air. My brother could sleep shirtless, since he didn’t have to worry about my mother’s friend’s sons watching him sleep half naked. This is why, after three months of all four of us on that mattress, the basement apartment felt like home to me. Even after I heard my mother marvel to her friend that coming to America was moving backwards since we had to start from the bottom. So I realized that where we lived was somewhere to be ashamed of. We had left a house with front and back yards and a dog named Lady for concrete playgrounds, a mattress in someone else’s apartment, and, finally, a basement apartment. Because I was still so young, I often forgot to feel ashamed.

  I remember the basement apartment like this: down the steps was a living room so small it could only fit a two-seater and a television, but my siblings and I didn’t mind sitting on the carpeted floor to watch our shows. Then it was my mother’s room, followed by a room big enough for a kitchen area, a small dining table, and a bookshelf. I remember how one time my siblings and I ate scrambled eggs and white rice at the table, and another time we ate fried chicken from the Chinese food restaurant. I think we ate the fried chicken on my birthday.

  Because my brother was small enough, he slept with my mother, while my sister and I shared a bed in the other bedroom, which was past the kitchen. We weren’t allowed in the front yard because my mother said that the people next door sold drugs. The place we came from, we had heard the rumor that terrible things could happen to children, but this kind of thinking was primarily absent from our consciousness.

  My mother worked at a daycare, where an old white lady used to come and show the children her guinea pigs, and allow them one at a time to hold out a piece of lettuce or a carrot. Because the old lady’s son threatened to put her in a nursing home if she didn’t do something about her guinea pigs always having babies, she started to give the babies away, which is how we came to own two guinea pigs when we lived on Chester Street. I don’t know what happened to those guinea pigs. I know we couldn’t have given them away, because we adored them, but I also don’t remember that they died. They used to bite our fingers if we weren’t careful when feeding them carrots. I remember that they had sharp teeth.

  I turn my head from the Associated supermarket to see that the B35 is letting on the last few passengers. History always has a way of weighing me down, making me forget myself, forget the present. The therapist had wanted to know when my trouble with food and my body began, and we narrowed it down to my moving to America. It’s so tricky to name the beginning of things, to see an experience for what it is, but I remember being fourteen years old and being afraid of what food could do. The food in public school was fatty and processed, and students didn’t walk or run in the yard during lunchtime like we used to back home. We sat in the cafeteria and talked. I remember knowing that I had the potential to be more beautiful, and that this wasn’t just my opinion but the opinion of others as well. My family—my mother and aunts and uncles—wanted to talk about my body whenever they saw me because I’d gained a lot of weight. It was out of concern, but how to explain how assaulted I felt? How to explain the shame I felt when my mother singled me out to explain to a church member that no, she didn’t want any more cookies to take home because she didn’t want Renee to gain more weight? The years passed. My family continued talking.

  The move itself had been dramatic, my mother taking us without our father’s permission because he’d lost interest in being a husband and father. My mother made up her mind quickly—one moment I was preparing to start at an all-girls’ high school in Jamaica, and it seemed that the next moment I was enrolled in a public school in Brooklyn. The therapist had wanted to know the disorder’s origin story, but all I had were bits of memory: the time I finally had a little money to myself and binged on the Chinese food I bought in the neighborhood and then I wanted the food to go somewhere else that wasn’t inside me; the time my aunt offered to buy us ice cream when the truck came around and then told me that if she was my size she wouldn’t eat ice cream. Maybe beginnings aren’t beginnings, maybe they are harder to pin down, like waves pulling off the shore at different moments, waves of all sizes and strengths, but eventually and ultimately they are all the same wide expanse of sea. I run to catch the bus before the doors close.

  Yolande

  I tell my roommate, Emma, a white girl who calls herself a poet, and who stands in our kitchen wearing a T-shirt that says “Abortion rights are human rights” and a pair of panties with pink roses, a cup of coffee in her hands, that my life will be my own when my mother is dead. I just got off the phone with my mother, who spent a large portion of our phone call in disbelief that one of her friends was organizing the wedding reception for her pregnant daughter and the low-life man who impregnated her. My mother had said, “Mi nuh know how some parent condone any an’ any behavior.” Emma’s curly black hair is hanging long and loose, and she rests the coffee cup on the counter so that she can gather all of it into a bun on the top of her head. Meanwhile, I am trying to piece the words together to explain that of course if my mother dies tomorrow I would feel devastated, but I would also feel free. I know I won’t be the first or the last person to whom the death of a loved one comes as a tragedy and an answer to a prayer at the same time. But Emma is looking like she wants to cry. When she talks to her mother on the phone, they have an actual conversation, sharing intimacies, thoughts both mundane and extraordinary. Once, Emma told me that when at sixteen she got her first serious boyfriend, her mother said to her, “So we need to get you on birth control.” My own mother might really believe I’m a thirty-year-old virgin. Of course Emma can’t help feeling sorry for me, and of course I regret that I’ve shared something she couldn’t possibly understand. I stop talking mid-sentence because it doesn’t make any difference to continue and she nods her head as though she understands. We sip our coffee, she attempts and fails to commiserate with me, and then we retire to our bedrooms.

  It’s funny to think that I came to America to study Caribbean literature. Now that I’m pursuing my PhD, even after all these years that my mother has seen that all I want to do is read, that all I’ve ever wanted to do is read, since it feels like the thing God made me to do, she still wants me home with her. If I was home, she could show me off to people, telling them that American schools gave me scholarships to study. If I was home, she would have someone to go to church with, even though unbeknownst to her I think that the Bible is the most imaginative book of fiction ever written. If I was home, we could take early morning walks—my mother’s attempt to get back the “sexy body” her fifties took from her—with her telling me the hilarious, heartbreaking things that happen to her woman friends, the morning air in Mandeville as crisp and as sweet as fall in New York. Often, when we talk on the telephone, because I graduate in the spring, she asks what kinds of jobs are available in Jamaica for someone with a PhD in Caribbean literature. “Maybe I can teach at UWI,” I tell her, even though unbeknownst to her, I am applying for tenure-track teaching jobs in the United States. In my mind, I will return to Jamaica for visitations as long as my mother is alive. When she is dead, I imagine that the island will feel less like home because there won’t be anyone to return for.

  Sometimes, I think that if my mother had a husband or a boyfriend, it would be different. Sometimes, I tease her that she should marry and she says, “Fi wha’?” The marriages of her women friends
have disillusioned her. When she became pregnant out of wedlock, my father, an older man in the community, agreed to marry her, but when the day came, he didn’t show up. This seems to be a pattern with him, because he mostly continued to fail to show up when I was growing up. Once, when one of my mother’s friends invited her boyfriend to live with her and her children, my mother remarked to me that she didn’t understand how a woman could bring a strange man into a house with her daughters. Sometimes, I wonder if for all these years she has been single for my sake, and if this is indeed the case, how to repay such a sacrifice?

  When I told my mother about my last boyfriend, Dylan, she asked, “Why yuh don’t come home an’ meet ah nice Jamaican man? Yuh would really want fi wake up to a pair ah blue eyes every mawning?” But Dylan’s eyes aren’t blue; they’re the same color as mine: brown. I hadn’t told her about the other boyfriends I’ve had in America because it would reveal too much: she would guess I am sexually active; she would worry that a man would distract me from studying and maybe even become the reason I stay here. I told her about Dylan because I couldn’t help it. Love had the effect of making me loose-lipped. With him I’d imagined a future—a few times after sex we’d become excited and talked about having children together. I said to my mother, “I have a boyfriend,” and there had been a slight pause and then she continued with the story she was telling.

  “Did you hear me? I said I have a boyfriend.”

  “I hear yuh,” she said, and besides asking about his race, that seemed to be the extent of her interest in him. She continued to nudge me about the possibility of a “nice Jamaican man.”

  We’ve talked in passing about the possibility of her moving to America. But she doesn’t have the qualifications to teach elementary school in America, and she says that she doesn’t want to die here. This year my mother turned sixty, which means that she isn’t leaving the only country she’s ever known.

  In America I meet women like Emma, whose mothers don’t want anything from them besides knowing that they are happy. It seems that mine believes that her happiness and my happiness are one and the same. She lives as if she believes that even after all this time an invisible umbilical cord connects us. And for my part, I am afraid of not being who she wants me to be. Jamaican mothers raise their daughters to be obedient, and some of us don’t know how to be any other way even when we are women. Some of us Jamaican daughters too easily forget the days our mothers were most tender. They tied ribbons in our hair that matched the colors of the clothes we wore. We were as beautiful as flowers. We are never as beautiful as we were then. We have the photographs as proof. And we do need proof because as women we are at times resentful daughters, who can barely remember the days our mothers treated us as innocently as we once were.

  My mother used to warn me, “Don’t expect mi fi come ah yuh wedding if yuh marry any an’ anybody,” and I believed her. And so when Dylan and I ended things amicably, for all of the conversations about timing and how our separate futures didn’t seem to merge, afterwards I couldn’t help wondering if a part of me had been unavailable all along.

  Cherry

  Long before I knew my mother, there was a time when she was promiscuous. My sister Monique jokes that she also has white liver—a high libido. She tells me that she wants it every night, and her husband sometimes says a little seriously that he’s not sure that he can keep up with her. Maybe this is the kind of thing that runs in a family, which could mean that white liver, a love of sex, would account for my mother’s behavior. I know I love sex too, discovered this late, at thirty-seven, only this past summer when I met Afia and seriously considered for the first time that I was a lesbian. How else to explain that my heart opened like a bud? Here was Afia with her lisp, her big white teeth, and her high forehead—there was nothing and everything extraordinary about her. This kind of love is dangerous because you’re always looking around, waiting for it to end. You’re disillusioned enough to know that so few of us can keep something like that going.

  In this world it’s one thing for a woman to be promiscuous, and with the lovers I’ve had, I have no desire to judge. But it’s another thing to allow several men to father your children. That’s the kind of thing slack, shameless women do. What does it say about me that I prefer to believe that my mother was a woman so full with the desire to love that she took five different men into her bed, eventually bearing all seven of us?

  Yet when I knew my mother, she didn’t seem particularly interested in love or sex, and in fact she never had a kind word to say about any man besides Jesus Christ. I was the last child she gave birth to, the last child for another man who wouldn’t marry her, a man who had spread his seed all over the district. I wonder if my mother might have been different before I knew her, so I ask my siblings if they remember her any differently. “Mama was always Mama,” Smithy says, and everyone else more or less echoes the same sentiment. Maybe we weren’t watching closely enough. In my teenage years, when my shape started to form, my mother told me in a prideful way that I had taken after her. Now, all these years later, it seems that that moment had hinted at her sexuality. She had been desirable and she had known it.

  * * *

  —

  Last week, I saw Afia in a bookstore, and although there were a hundred things I wanted to say to her, including, “How could you have left me for a white woman?” I told her that Mama had passed away. “Oh no,” she said, pulling me into a hug, and I couldn’t help crying for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that Afia always manages to smell so good.

  And as snobby as my mother was, I could never understand the type of men she allowed to lay on top of her. After all, she used to tell me which classmates she didn’t want me hanging around with. The men she had children with are the kind of men I wouldn’t answer to if they called out to me on the street. None of them are particularly handsome. They are the kind of men who don’t hold any respectable jobs. They will pick up work wherever they can, maybe to help a man dig up a farm or lay cement, just enough money so that they can retire back to the rum shop or to play dominoes in front of the shop. Sometimes, I wonder what my father or the fathers of my brothers and sisters could have told my mother to seduce her. I can’t imagine that any of them would know how to tell a woman compliments as beautiful as poetry. They are the kind of men who use the same lines for every woman, and I can’t see my mother being naïve enough to believe tired words from a man. The woman I knew, no one, man or woman, would think to tell her any and any thing, because she would chase them off. But then I have to consider that perhaps raising seven children with little help from the fathers turned my mother into the woman I knew.

  * * *

  —

  “You’re going to let your mother shame you for your sexuality when she had seven children with five different men?” And so when Afia told me about the white woman, the first thing I wondered was whether I wasn’t gay enough. There were books I hadn’t read, sexual acts I hadn’t done, and most telling, I was almost forty and wasn’t out to my mother yet. “My little gay baby,” Afia had said once at the beginning, but evidently that was cute for only a season.

  * * *

  —

  When I was fifteen or sixteen, my mother started to eye me suspiciously. She would talk about how she didn’t want certain “goin’ ons” happening in her house. By now, all of my brothers and sisters were big men and women who had gone off into the world, and so I was the only one who still lived at home. Around this time, I started to feel that I was a big woman. My mother and I quarreled often. I believed that she wanted to run my life. Once she told me, “Just because yuh ’ave a big woman body don’t mean dat yuh a big woman.” I grew to mistrust her. I realized that she wasn’t but a few years older than me—she had been nineteen—when she became pregnant for the first time and yet she wanted to treat me like a child. It hurt that she insinuated that I was sexually active when I
wasn’t. Just because she had been slack didn’t mean that I was the same. Often when my mother was harsh with me, particularly when she talked about “goin’ ons,” I’d wanted to remind her of who she used to be.

  * * *

  —

  When I graduated from high school, I started working at a bank in town. One day after work, I was passing by the rum shop when I heard my father call my name through the window. I continued to walk past the shop, and when he saw this, he came outside to call my name. I turned around. “Yuh can mek mi hold one hundred dollars?” he asked. He was drunk, holding on to the door for support. I looked at my father, this man who had given my mother two children before he gave a child to the woman who lived next door. That day I hissed my teeth and I walked away. He called after me and eventually he gave up, or I’d walked far enough so that his voice couldn’t carry to me.

  When I left Jamaica, I used to have to work myself up to call my mother. She complained that my siblings and I didn’t call her often enough. She complained that she had seven ungrateful children. She complained that she worked hard enough as mother and father to receive any less than a call from at least one of us every day of the week. She said that she could die alone in the house and none of us would know. The questions about my life were sparse. Sometimes I called her and she told funny, vivid stories about so-and-so person from church or so-and-so person who lived in the community, and times like these I knew I loved her. But other times it was exhausting to hear how my siblings and myself had failed her.