My mother’s behavior borders on the subservient—bathing him, changing his sheets and clothes, swapping out his bed pans. Yet I begin to see: Arya wants him dead just as much as Rebecca.
But.
There is tradition to hold to. He is her father, and no matter what he’s done—what has he done?—the hold he has over her is firmer than my grandmother’s pain. She can’t cut herself loose from this man. I realize my mother knows why my grandmother is indifferent to my grandfather’s death. I struggle to understand what has happened among them but can’t know without asking them.
I fitfully attend school, sleep, and work. I gain temporary respite by turning away to conjure images of when he’d toss me over his shoulder, run up the stairs, and tuck me in next to him to watch a show or for a nap. We’d leave behind everyone else—parents, grandmother, cousins, aunts, uncles—and he’d ask me to tell him everything since I’d seen him the weekend before.
Each time he is in the operating theater, I think of how we used to be. For as long as I can remember, my grandfather took me with him to the banana fields. He strapped me into his jeep, and while I prattled on, he dug around in his pocket for my favorite mint candy with a chocolate encased inside. We bounced and leapt over hills and potholes until we got to one of the many rivers. Here he tied burlap sacks around his waist and clipped cutlasses and sickles to his back. We had to cross an overturned tree to get to the other side of the river. With some gentle coaxing, I walked in front of him, both hands held over my head, each of his calloused palms wrapped around one of mine. Doh look dung, he whispered, but I couldn’t help myself. In the muddy water swirling beneath us, I saw alligator eyes and snakes, all of the things my mother warned me existed in these waters. She would know, having followed these paths through all shades of the day as a child. I faltered. My grandfather dropped and held me around my waist. Poh yuh hand forward and creep creep creep till yuh reach de end. Doh worry, ah right behind yuh. Just creep slow. There was an urgency in his commands and actions that rattled me, but the assurance of his hands stabilizing and guiding me forward kept me calm.
When we got to the leafy banana plants, I collapsed in the shade of their sprouting leaves and drank some water from an enamel cup he presented to me. Bunch by bunch, he cut the fruits down, tumbling them into sacks. He cracked one from the main stem and peeled it for me. I let the warm sweetness melt in my mouth. After I was done, I jumped up, but my grandfather hissed, Geh dung, geh dung! Lie dung on yuh belly, Krystal, now! I just dropped. He pulled his cutlass off his bag like a sword and hurtled forward. I rolled over and looked up to see him slice off a snake’s head in one swift motion. I walked toward the head but he shoved me back and said, No! Dey does still bite doh mind de head cut off. Yuh hah to mash it up good.
The snake’s head was face down in the grass, its underbelly wet. My grandfather placed the flat blade over it and stomped, then ground his boot into the blade, ensuring the head was obliterated. I looked up at the tree I took refuge under only to find the snake’s fat body, the same color as the branches, woven round and round the trunk and leaves. I looked up at my grandfather in awe, this killer of serpents, gatherer of food, this man who’d saved my life.
In the hospital I sit with my head in my palms and I squeeze tears out of my eyes; I try to preserve this image of him but it cannot be sustained; I need to know him.
I WAIT FOR MY MOTHER to come home. When she pushes through the entrance of our third-floor apartment in Jersey City—New Jersey’s second-most-populated city, sandwiched by the black waters of the Hudson and Hackensack Rivers, as well as the Newark and Upper New York Bays—I’ve prepared myself to ask her everything.
An aura of cold clings to her jacketed frame. Her lioness’s mane of barrel curls shimmers with melting snowflakes. Winter’s grip is tightening, and it is an unaccustomed cold that tortures our bodies even though seven years have passed since we left the islands.
This climate is a far cry from the tropics of coral and blue ixora hedges bordering our front garden in the shade of palm fronds. The scrimp of a backyard we have now is covered in dirt. Tufts of grass struggle to grow here, paling in comparison to the lush backyard of our vast house in Trinidad. There, our evening ritual was to suck grapefruit pulp straight from a hole sculpted at the top of the rind, sugar stuffed into the golden globe, or to scoop jelly out of coconut gourds, hairy spoons hacked from slivers of the husk. It is the space we crave, room to live and breathe as we once did instead of cramped together in apartments with barely room to move and nowhere to nurture flowers or fruits and vegetables.
The black number five tacked to our yellowed front door in Jersey City swings past as my mother turns the lock into place. Salsa music from the floor below swells into the room. She and I sigh together, sick of the noise and tight space. The way she tosses her sneakers and gym bag into a corner, instead of shucking them at the door in their designated spots, tells me just how tired she is tonight. The snowflakes that twinkled in her hair have melted and, soaked now, her bouncy curls lie flat and greasy against her scalp.
I sit at the kitchen table. I must probe gently. Weariness shrouds her. To relax and escape the pressure of the hospital where she visits and cares for my grandfather daily, she tells me about the hours she spends on the elliptical machine, the weights she lifts, and the swimming lessons she takes on and off at the Y. The two hours she fits in after work each day help her relieve stress. Oh Gawd Krys, toh hah all dis ghadderin inside meh eh easy nah. Is ah good ting ah hah meh dawtah toh come hwome and tawk toh. She lifts her tee and rips off the sweat belt binding her waist before she collapses on the chair opposite mine.
My mother babysits in an affluent suburb of Westchester. She works with a family, babysitting four little girls, from six in the morning to six at night, drives to the hospital, where she spends a couple of hours caring for my grandfather, goes to the gym for an hour or two, and then comes home to cook a meal.
Whey Colette? she asks. I point to the bedroom. My sister, as always, has chosen to remain alone in the sanctuary of our room from the time she returned from school. My mother and I go through what has become our routine. She asks me about my day at university, and I revert to the comfort of my home language and answer, in what I notice is our idiosyncratic thrice, Good-good-good. Yuh know, de youge-wal—school, werk, and hwome. You?
Her days have a tiresome uniformity. Mondays through Fridays, the privileged white children she babysits, with their undisciplined ways and spoiled attitudes, drag her around their house like a rag doll. And when their parents are home—and many times they are, making her job even more stressful—the children are free to do as they please, stomping around, treating my mother as more of a servant than a nanny. When my sister and I were younger, before my father joined us in America, and sometimes after, we would occasionally go to work with our mother to escape the suffocation of our apartment. But eventually we stopped, disgusted by the children’s uncorrected behavior. Above all, we could no longer bear to watch our mother subjected to the whims of toddlers. Arya! the little children hollered. Arya. Perhaps because I grew up in a country where people older than I were called auntie and uncle, my mother’s name screamed from children’s lips never ceased to grate my nerves. Arya, they yelled, I’m done with my toys, clean up my mess. Arya!
If they couldn’t have their way they kicked and punched, slapped and spat at my mother’s face, her legs, her arms. Though the parents sometimes chastised their children, it was never with any severity and always ended with them laughing it off. Oh you know, they’re kids. I don’t know where they learn these things.
We sit for a few minutes at our wood-trimmed ceramic kitchen table—one my mother purchased at an estate sale, the way we acquired almost all of our furniture. I prop my head in the cradle of my right palm and listen. I listen because my father will not. She unloads her day’s tribulations. I wait for an opportunity to interrupt but only after she’s at ease.
Audience laughter tumbles from
the living room. My father rocks back and forth on the recliner enjoying George Lopez’s half-hour sitcom. My mother raises her voice so I can hear her; my father turns up the television. If either of us complains about the volume, he’ll steups—suck his teeth in the characteristic Trinidadian defiance, the meaning of kiss meh ass drawn out with the long sucking—and make it even louder. My mother, to keep the peace, leans in, says a quick Hi hon, and without waiting for a response pulls the door shut. Starved for adult conversation, particularly in a language that makes her comfortable, my mother continues her tirade.
The top half of my mother’s body disappears behind the door of our refrigerator as she burrows for the fresh chicken she chopped the previous evening, then rubbed with homemade green seasoning. Although it is already nine p.m., my mother insists on bustling around our narrow kitchen to whip together a “quick” meal. I tell her I’ve already eaten. Oh yeah? Wah yuh eat? When I tell her it was pizza or pasta from my waitressing job at a local restaurant, she laughs. Dah eh no food, chile, ahgo make yuh someting toh satisfy yuh belly. She extracts a large basin from the fridge. Plastic clings to the chopped chicken piled high in the bowl. It is tinged a bright chartreuse green. She’s rubbed curry powder into the meat and left it to marinate with the seasoning. With a flourish she unveils the chicken, passes it under my nose, and says, Sniff dat. Even meh raw meat does smell good.
She dices tomatoes and onions before tossing the juicy reds and crispy whites into the sticky meat. With one hand she sparks a burner, and with the other she fills two pots with lukewarm water. She pours rice grains into one and golden split peas into another. I know if I offer my help she’ll accept it reluctantly—I only slow her down.
Her eyes never shift to the clock; her fingers never set a timer; her hands never grasp the handle of a measuring spoon nor cup. She pours, stops, considers, pours again.
She sets a pot on a burner and adds olive oil. While one hand extracts a bowl from a cupboard, another stirs the split peas. She flicks saffron into the peas, and it cascades in a shower of gold; she adds only a pinch of masala. Black specks mottle the brightness of the dhal, turning it a darker hue of yellow.
To a bowl of water she adds Trini curry powder and two halved cloves of garlic. Trinis hah de bess curry, she says. While waiting for the oil to heat up, she busies her hands washing some of the dishes and tidying up the mess she’s created while in the process of dicing and chopping. When the oil is hot, she slides the sparse curry mixture from the bowl and into the pot with her right hand and covers the pot with her left. Her movements are as fluid as waves. Water and oil hiss and steam. The pungent scent of seared herbs and peppers tickles my throat; my belly rumbles. Rich green curry crackles; teeming brown bubbles spit. After she toasts the curry powder till it is on the verge of burning, she adds the chicken. Rice and dhal continue to boil in their respective pots.
She strains the rice in the sink. Billowing white clouds of steam rise and quickly dissipate around her head. On a fourth burner, in a steel ladle, she browns two cloves of garlic in oil. The garlic somersaults among bubbles until golden brown. She pours the torrid, garlic-infused oil into the dhal; it whistles and pops. My mother grabs the star-shaped dhal ghotni and swizzles the softened split peas until they turn a creamy yellow dotted with masala.
She achieves each step of the cooking process with finesse. She twirls around the kitchen. With a final sweep of her elegant arms, one we both laugh over, she signals to me that dinner is done—fluffy rice, chunkayed saffron dhal, and curried chicken.
The sting of habanero saturates the air. My mother spoons a mountainous amount of food onto two plates. She sits across from me with fork in hand and opens her mouth to call to my father and my sister, but I speak before before she can.
Ma, why Gramma wahn Grampa dead?
She drops her fork. It clatters to the ceramic countertop.
Oh Gawd Krys, dem memories and dem eatin meh up inside evah since e gone in dat hospital. Meh only wakin up so in de middle ah de night toh see e two eye burnin on meh so like fyah.
She starts to tell me about a beating that has haunted her for thirty-six years. The ease with which she slides into the telling of this story shows me she was bursting to tell it as much as I wanted to ask. With my grandfather struck lifeless in the hospital, she’s finally safe.
Our steaming plates of food are pushed to the side. They grow cold. Runny dhal pools in the middle of the rice; it clumps. The glistening curried chicken loses its shine.
Veins in her neck pulsate as she speaks. Her eyes dance and dilate, nostrils flare, cheeks pucker, and palms slam the table. The fluorescent bulbs burning down on us seem to dim, and she glows amber in the darkness slithering around us.
We start at the beginning. We go back to the haunting, to the cycle, to the deafening roar of silence from women echoing off the coasts of the islands. I learn that my mother and my grandmother do want to tell us. All we must do is ask. Then listen.
They reach deep into the gullet of Trinidad’s history to extract stories women carry, stories men like my grandfather have striven to squelch. Their voices are thread thin and low—slow and rhythmic musical notes from the side pockets of a steelpan. Their words crescendo like the pulsation of island music. I close my eyes and listen to their textured words layered with Trinidadian Creole. They will spend a lifetime trying to escape the islands and these memories, to unclasp the shackles around each wrist. The cadence of their language is mature and differs from the shrill intonations of the children they once were. Their words are incantatory, a chant I cannot, will not forget. I feel it like blood pumping in my veins.
These two women pour themselves into me, and for four years it is difficult to pull apart our separate lives. What I learn of our islands, our people, and their buried collective history torments me before it shifts to something else entirely. My family’s history attacks me in waves as notorious as those that clobber the Caribbean shores.
My grandmother, my mother, and I: we enter this world together, collaborators.
Witness
SILKEN STRANDS OF MIST lingered over the galvanized metal rooftops, rising out of the valley in peaks. Hordes of chickens stampeded from one end of their pen to another, dredging up the stale scent of bagasse and excrement. Up the hill, closer to the house, dewdrops slid off glossy avocado leaves and around the orbs of grapefruits and pomegranates. The heat of the sun sliced through the night chill.
Arya crouched at the side of the half-wooden, half-concrete house. Hewn logs of the kitchen walls shielded her. She curled and snapped her bony, brown toes; she tightened her burning thigh muscles. The ominous thump of footsteps against the kitchen floorboards squelched her attempt to draw a fresh breath of air. To relieve the tension from her folded legs, she rocked back onto her haunches, wrapped her arms around her knees, and locked each hand around an elbow. Her hands were calloused from the hours of farm work she and her six siblings performed each day during the twilight hours of the morning. At eight years old, Arya was an expert at slaughtering, defeathering, and roasting chickens, milking cows, churning butter, leading goats to fresh pastures each day, feeding the chickens and then collecting their eggs, and carrying bunches of figs on her head while going at breakneck speed.
—Krys gyul, my mother tells me, we din hah electricity oh nutten yet so we wake up wid de cock crowin four een de bleddy mawnin, and ah hah to feed chicken and duck, milk cow, tie up goat, and cut grass befoh ah even tink bout school. And den, meh hah toh walk ah mile an ah half toh reach dey.
That morning, instead of threading her arms through the hoops of her backpack after the hours of work in the chicken pens, fields, and orchards, she disobeyed her father’s rule that ordered them straight to school. As Arya hiked from the valley of chicken coops with her brothers and sisters up the gravel-covered hillock, to the outskirts of their lopsided house, the dramatic drop and pop in her stomach started again. She knew she would be lunging her way to the latrine soon. Her siblings shed
sickles and cutlasses to equip themselves with pens and pencils, notebooks and rulers. The brothers tossed a sack of ripe oranges plucked from the groves at the kitchen door; their mother had to squeeze and strain them one by one to serve to their father with his meals. Ma, they said with a thump on the door, we gone. Arya dropped the rope used to tether the goats and donkeys to the grass-carpeted earth.
Arya, come nah gyul, her brother Amrit beckoned to her. E goh ketch yuh if yuh stay hwome and is nah only you dah goh get lix mahn is all ah we. They all paused at this, but Arya shook her head, craving the comfort of her mother’s attention while ill, the concern, the fleshy warmth of her embrace. She stepped back and motioned for them to continue on without her. It was almost eight; the farm and field hands would be here soon, and they still had a mile and a half to walk to school.
—Ah know dey goh geh een trouble if e ketch meh, eh Krys, my mother tells me, boh ah was sick and we was ahready late. Dere was dis teachah who din like Grampa, and e used toh soak ah leddah belt een watah toh beat meh wid foh no reason. Ah couldn’t handle dat today.
She watched the backs of her siblings recede in the distance as they scurried to school barefoot, casting apprehensive glances her way, refusing to draw attention to themselves or her. They carried their lunches, tins of roti stuffed with channa and aloo clanking on dented wire handles. Their individual frames bled into one as they followed the path that snaked its way through the estate before stopping abruptly at the paved main road. Eventually trees and mountainous terrain obscured them from view. Though they would race to be punctual, none of them ever were. Their morning’s work was, and would always be, too much.
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