by Margot Kahn
In the care that my grandmother took with her house, I found a model for making my own home and creating space for myself and my needs. Over the many summers I spent with my sister, cousins, and large extended family in the house down Villa, I came to appreciate how, in building this house by hand, my grandparents and uncles made a place to which we could always return and call our own. I also came to understand how it was possible to make a space for quiet solitude even in the context of a large, occasionally raucous family.
My second grandmother, my stepmother’s mother, Lily, also built a house. She built her home in Jamaica’s Windsor Forest, a tiny district high in the mountains of Portland. The house sits at the top of a potholed road where everyone peers into your car without shame when you arrive, staring and trying to sort out to whom you belong. Below the house is a shop that sells sundries for the people who want the convenience of buying batteries or rice or cigarettes without going all the way into town. There has been talk of turning it into a bed and breakfast, offering donkey rides to tourists.
During my only visit there, on a junior high spring break to Jamaica with my stepmother meant to cool the venom that had risen between us, I had the best sleep of my entire life. Something about the cool breeze and quiet melted away the worry that dogged me in Brooklyn. Experiencing tranquility for the first time in Jamaica, I began to understand the sacrifice my parents made to give themselves and their children better chances at life in the States. What they’d given up in leaving the Caribbean was not some abstract sense of home, but quite literally peace—the possibility of touching and knowing peace in a place that was yours. They forfeited the calm of rootedness that their ancestors knew, and a calm they knew they would never find elsewhere, for the uncertainty of life elsewhere.
As I slept in Jamaica, I pressed my hands and heart to the treasure they’d left behind and understood the gamble they’d made of our lives.
My mother’s mother in Barbados, Oriel Loleta Brewster, lived the last ten years of her life before she passed in 2014 in a chattel house that she built with her own sweat and money. For years, my sister sent my grandmother money each month to supplement her pension from her work as a nursing assistant in England. Granny, whose thrifty ways I’ve inherited, used some of that money to support herself, but most of it went into building the house.
She enlisted her childhood friend and onetime sweetheart, now an architect, to draw up plans for the house, paid contractors, and bought materials. In the end, the house was humble—two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen nearly destroyed by a fire she set while trying to cook with wood fire on a gas stove because she could no longer afford cooking fuel.
Like my grandmother in Antigua, Oriel had a beautiful white rosebush in front of the house. On the side of the house, there was a small plot of okra, pigeon peas, tomatoes, and other staples she used to stretch her meals and money. Long before the artisanal and slow food movements that are so popular in America now, all my grandmother’s meals included ingredients she’d grown with her own hands.
In the end, the house wasn’t much. But it was hers. As is the tradition with homes in Barbados, above the threshold of the white clapboard house was its name, two words printed in blue cursive: “Why Worry?” When I find myself worked up about some existential, overwrought, and usually self-made crisis, I remember these two words and my grandmother’s resilience in the face of a world that was at best indifferent to her survival. It anchors me when I am tempted to be led astray from my path, when I am led too far afield from myself.
Back on the Cape, later the same day as the cat-calling Jamaican, a white man offers me a ride to the center of town. I tell him I’m only going as far as the grocery store, and he asks me if I work there. I am offended but I also find myself comforted by his racism, which is a kind of home I’ve lived in for most of my life. As an American child of Caribbean immigrants who fears the distance that my life choices have taken me away from my family and the people I so love, I find solace in being recognized, even for the wrong reasons, as a Caribbean woman. Is it my gait, or my accent, or my clothes, or his racism, I wonder, but will never know.
That evening, sitting in the audience at a reading at the Work Center, I trouble a grain of sand from Herring Cove between my teeth and remember that I will soon be home, am just a few days from a trip to Barbados where my grandmother is no longer alive and troubling me with her eccentricity and her hot mouth. I will see her beneath the ground and sink my toes beneath that sand and know that we will never talk again, that she will never again press her hand to the formidable arm I inherited from her to make a point as she tells me a story. But right now, the sand that I eat is the sand from Massachusetts, a place I will soon call home. It is not the sand of the beaches on the islands that made me. But it is what I have for right now. The sand from a place that will soon be home, and the knowledge that home for me will always be held just between my teeth.
Naomi Jackson is the author of The Star Side of Bird Hill, nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Debut Fiction and long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Jackson studied fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. A graduate of Williams College, her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines in the United States and abroad. She has taught at the University of Iowa, University of Pennsylvania, City College of New York, Oberlin College, and Amherst College. Jackson lives in Brooklyn, where she was born and raised by West Indian parents.
Allá En La Fuente
Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas
“Wait. Where you say you were from?” the man asks me from behind a screen.
“Um… Colombia,” I reply, plugging in another donated laptop at the Iowa City’s Shelter House.
“Seriously?” the man says, emerging from behind a screen.
“Yeah man, why? You know it?”
I sit down in front of one of the crumb-encrusted computers.
The room is small and nearly full—five others around the chipped-corner conference table we use to run the thrice-weekly job and house-hunting lab.
“Yeah,” he replies, smiling wide. “I been there.”
I left China, after a year and half, only a few months ago, and I’m still jetlagged.
Wenzhou, Shanghai, Frankfurt, Bogotá, Houston, Cincinnati, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City. From grad school in Iowa, to unemployment in Colombia, to a lectureship in China, to the possibility of a visiting job somewhere in Ohio. Not a job, just the possibility. So now I’m here in Iowa City temporarily, volunteering twice a week at the local Shelter House. Helping other people find part-time jobs and part-time homes while I wait between interviews for maybe jobs and maybe visas to maybe see where I’ll live next.
So I drive around in circles. I play video games and sit on sidewalks. And sometimes I ride my bike slowly through Iowa City and imagine it is the small town in Colombia where I spent the first seven years of my life. Pretend I never left, pretend it never let me go. I pedal through the pedestrian mall and imagine it is Chía’s dirty cobblestone colonial town square and that the injure-proof jungle gym is the dry fountain at its center. I stand on the pedals of my bike, as tall as I’ll ever be, and remember feeling my legs tremble as I sat on the back of my mother’s bicycle. Five years old, wearing orthopedic shoes and fighting their weight to keep them from touching the spinning spokes and making us crash into a dry town-square fountain.
The man across from me is handsome and no older than twenty-three, broad shoulders, black skin, dreadlocks. He wears a sleeveless white shirt and sits beside a young woman with slick-black hair in a ponytail and features as if painted with a thin brush on tracing paper. He seems uninterested and she seems exhausted while a toddler pulls on her sleeve and wipes his nose with the back of his hand.
“No way!�
� I respond with what feels like an insincere amount of enthusiasm. “That’s cool.” I try to correct myself, as if tuning a radio with a broken dial.
The man nods slowly and stares at me intently, as if he were checking a counterfeit bill. So, I sit very still and smile, wondering if they know for sure they can stay here tonight—because it’s a raffle after all, you can never know until you know, and most of it is waiting. The toddler rubs his eyes yawns.
I hope they know, hope they can stay. “Where are you from?” I ask.
The man first seems taken aback by the question and then disappointed as he slumps behind the screen.
“Chicago,” he mumbles.
I’m trying to stay in the U.S., though I don’t like to admit it. Don’t like to mention how my parents thought I’d have a better shot at life if I lived far away from them, from everything I knew, from the machismo my mother was constantly crushed under and the self-cannibalizing brutality of an endless civil conflict. And I especially don’t like to admit that I think they were right.
But it feels like a betrayal of the little dry fountain in the middle of a small town square, and the song my mother used to sing when we passed it on our way to the butcher shops.
“Chicago,” I parrot clumsily. I have friends there, they live in a loft on a nice side of town, but that’s not what I say. Instead I just say, “That’s cool,” partly because I don’t know what else to say, mostly because I assume that he’s not from that nice side of town. Then I cringe at how unfair it is to assume as much.
“Do you have family there?” I ask.
He seems disappointed once more. “Um… yeah,” he says, “My mom.”
“That’s cool,” I repeat, while the others in the room continue scrolling through pages and pages of mostly broken links. “It’s not too far,” I try again, “If you wanna visit.”
He nods and scratches something on the plastic beside the keyboard while the toddler begins running circles around the conference table.
“It’s like… what? Six hours on a bus, right?”
He nods again, keeps scratching whatever is stuck to the battered laptop.
“I don’t get to see family that often.”
After Chía I lived in Cali for three years. I chewed sugar cane through math class, popped the sun-made blisters on my shoulders with guadua splinters, and listened to the adults whisper about the cartel at the height of its control over the city. Some kids came to school with bodyguards and brand new clothes their fathers had just brought back from Miami. They threw the best birthday parties and had marble fountains on their front yards that remained filled even in the hottest days of a city in the throes of perpetual summer. And everyone agreed, “The Cali cartel is just better.” At church, on the bus, on the street, “Not good, but better.” Even those who hated the cartel on principle—the priests, the cops, the drivers, the soldiers—they all preferred the cartel that had not declared war on the entire Colombian state. “Let Pablo burn himself out trying to burn the country down,” they said. “Let him make all the noise. Let ’em go deaf.” Because the capos of the Cali cartel understood that so much violence draws so much attention, that there is no point in making a point, and no point ever worth making if you can’t keep making a buck. The economy of bloodshed dictated by the banality of bookkeeping. So they let Pablo and his Medellín cartel set bombs all over the country, let him make the capital click and tick and shatter and weep, and they let their own city simmer in the quiet amassing of white-powder wealth, while Pablo paid two million pesos for every dead cop that any kid with a gun could take down.
I don’t like to admit it, but it really was better in Cali. Chía was too close to Bogotá and Pablo’s war. In Cali I liked listening to those classmates with bodyguards tell me in whispers about the spinning tea cups in Disney World and the limousines parked outside the Miami airport, while our teacher explained how in the trash dump a few miles down the road there were people living between heaps of plastics bags and towers of scrap metal, and she showed us how to double bag leftover rice so those people in their tinfoil homes could find it clean when they went digging through our trash. “That’s how you can do your part,” she said.
The man looks around as if for a distraction. His eyes bounce from spot to spot until finally he settles on the room’s only window. But there are only cubicles on the other side, and the glass is broken anyway.
I’m glad the conversation is over. I look down at my own screen, my own list of obsolete links leading to filled positions and occupied apartments. It’s my job to purge this list. Delete the broken links and leave only the paths that lead somewhere.
Soon, however, I can feel him looking back at me, even before he says, “So… where you from, exactly?”
“Oh…” I stumble. “Well, Bogotá,” I say, “It’s the capital.” Speaking mechanically and clicking through the expired links of defunct pages, “It’s up in the Andes, kinda cold weather but not really. It’s…”
“I know.” He smirks again, “I was just there.” And suddenly, it seems, we are finally where he wants us to be.
After Cali it was Orem and then Provo, Utah, while my father earned an MBA. In Provo I didn’t speak—not in English, not in Spanish—nothing for a whole month. I attended the wrong classes because I couldn’t understand the student who gave me my schedule, and when a boy found out I was Colombian he pushed me against the lockers because, either, the boy’s brother had gotten sick from drinking the water in Colombia, or had been shot near water in Colombia. Which one I will never be sure.
But after two years, I could speak, and we went home.
“Really?” I ask tentatively, “That’s not usually where people go, like, for a holiday. It’s usually Cartagena, or Medellín, or San Andrés. You know. Warmer weather. Less traffic.” Bogotá sits well over a mile and half above sea level. It is, depending on the listing, either the third or fourth most populous city in South America—though it does not, by any means, compete with the square footage of the other cities on the list. It is densely packed, clotted jaundice-yellow with taxi traffic, and fresh-scab scarlet with red buses that feed one into the other into the other like a long chain of rusty-fanged snakes. It is high up on a shelf like something delicate or poisonous that children should not be able to reach, but it is no city upon a hill. It is built on a hollowed-out Andean plateau, built on the quicksand ground of a former lake, where I lived from ages twelve to seventeen and what I mean when I say that I want to go home.
“Yeah.” He scratches the computer’s dirty plastic panel with his fingernail, looking down at the keyboard and up at me intermittently like he has the script and is waiting for me to say the next line.
“There’s plenty to do in Bogotá though,” I say, trying to stay on topic though my mind is already wandering. When I lived in Chía my older sister used to call Bogotá “the place where bad things happen.” I imagined she mainly meant the bombs, the mechanical ticking and nervous twitching of a sieged city waiting for the next explosion. But that’s not fair either. There is no place on earth where bad things don’t happen—more things, worse things—and that’s never all that ever happens in that one place in that one time. Everything happens, everywhere, at once. It’s not what Bogotá is now, anyway. “I hope you had a good guide.”
“Yeah,” he shrugs, and brushes one of his dreadlocks from his eyes, “I was with people.”
“Did they take you to La Candelaria? Or the 93rd Street park? Or the salt cathedral?” I hear myself speak as if my city were a kid on picture day and I am combing furiously through knots with a fine-tooth comb. “There’s nowhere on earth I’d rather be than a mile underground in the salt cathedral.”
The man does not seem to hear me. He seems lost in his own thoughts as he continues to scratch at whatever dirt clings to the donated laptop and then, he finally looks up again. “Nah,” he shakes his head, “I was only there a couple of days.”
I pause.
If I’ve ever known anythi
ng in my life it is the price of a ticket to Bogotá. The price of a ticket, and the length of a trip. Eight hours, on the low end, $800 on average. But then there are taxes, extra charges, layovers, delays, and the minutes that an immigration line can alchemize into agonizing hours. A couple of days in Bogotá, he said. And slowly, I begin to understand. Which, maybe, shows on my face because he meets my eyes and seems excited once more.
“I didn’t really leave the hotel that much.” He speaks calmly and emphatically, and then he pauses, as if he’d just thrown a pebble into a well to see how deep it goes.
“Oh,” I reply, feeling his words grind like sand between my clockwork organs. “I see.” And what I see is this young man behind a donated computer screen not quite smiling, not quite winking, but something in between.
I’ve always thought that extremists had a philosophical advantage in this one point and no other. One could be entirely, irrefutably wrong in one’s conviction, in one’s choice, one’s faith, one’s belief, but to die in belief, for belief, any belief—even a completely twisted, misplaced notion of nobility, nationality, or ideology—has always seemed to me better than to have died to simply liven up someone else’s party.
I know this is unfair. But recognizing that it’s unfair makes no difference.
I still hate Studio 54, hate the ’80s. Hate the music, the hair, the videos of people dancing all night covered in sequin scales and oil-slick sweat. The lingo, the retrospectives and the nostalgia for wilder days of purer unbridled humanity. I hate the men who come up to me at parties and repeat their own variation of a familiar theme, “I was crazy then. Unstoppable-crazy. With what I did, how much I did! Whew. Doctors have told me I should be dead.”
But they’re never dead, they want me to know. “I could be, but I’m not. It’s my constitution.” They want me to see in their imagined bruises and chapped lips how close they came, and I never want to know, and I always hate them. I know it’s unfair, I know. I do. But I hate the bored bankers and the tired moguls. I hate the fringe artists, the outsiders, the sensitive musicians and activists who have struggled, who really know what it’s really like. Who buy free range, and free trade, and who speak up for all the filthy-winged third-worlders gathered voicelessly around dry fountains, while simultaneously inhaling expensive white dust.