Redemption Ground

by Lorna Goodison

  Felicity: ‘SO…TARQUIN IS VISITING WITH SOME FRIENDS OF MINE – honkinghorns, whooshofwind, criesof-vendors – WE ALL USED TO SHARE – honkinghorns, noiseofcarandtruckengines – A FLAT IN SLOANE SQUARE NEAR THE ROYAL COURT!’

  Bernard: ‘Oh, The ROYAL Court THEATRE! I SAW a very INTERESTING play there, I THINK it was called SLAG?’

  Felicity: ‘DID YOU REALLY? WHAT ARE THE ODDS! DAVID HARE IS A FRIEND! I WENT TO THE OPENING NIGHT… IT GOT PRETTY MIXED REVIEWS – honkinghorns, whooshofwind – I THOUGHT IT WAS A RIOT!’

  Bernard: ‘The staging was INTERESTING, especially that SCENE near the END at the tennis match blah blah blah blah…’

  Honest to God. I spent some time in London once, and some friends and I used to go to the theatre. It so happens that one of the plays we saw was Slag. I hated it. I thought it was misogynistic, sexist and cruel. I found nothing in it to laugh about and I especially disliked that business of the false pregnancy. However, I was not going to say anything; that night I was only along for the ride as I waited for my prince to come.

  While I was in London I also saw a musical called Catch My Soul based on Othello. Desdemona was played by the gorgeous African American singer and actress Marsha Hunt who went on to have a daughter with Mick Jagger.

  I thought about Marsha Hunt right then as we drove along in that convertible because she had a splendid nimbus of an Afro which was exactly how I wore my own hair back then. I cannot imagine what my hair must have looked like after half an hour blowin’ in the wind in Felicity’s convertible.

  Eventually we turned off Old Stony Hill Road and headed down a side road lined with pine trees. People who do not know Jamaica cannot imagine that there are places like that up in the hills just outside Kingston. The expatriate community has always preferred to live up in the hills where the temperature is invariably several degrees cooler than down on the plains. They take to the hills where they, or rather their gardeners, cultivate lovely gardens around their palatial houses.

  Felicity eventually turned her red roadster into a driveway and proceeded to mount a really a steep hill that appeared to be as long as it was high.

  I began to worry that her foot might slip and we’d plunge backwards down the slippery slope of the driveway and slide all the way down Stony Hill and end up back in Manor Park inside a coconut cart.

  But we reached the top eventually and there, set in a large lawn, was what looked like a sprawling great house that was in total darkness. ‘Are you sure we have the right address?’ Bernard whispered.

  ‘Of course, love, I come here all the time.’

  ‘It looks like everybody has gone to bed,’ said I, as I jammed Bernard in the side with my elbow.

  ‘No, no,’ said Felicity. ‘Maybe, ha, ha, maybe everyone just likes dancing in the dark.’

  I opened my mouth to ask, ‘Do you hear any music?’ but I thought that remark might not help what was clearly an awkward situation. I decided to keep quiet, but I jammed my elbow into Bernard’s side again, to say ‘See what you’ve got me into?’

  We got out of the car and Bernard and I followed Felicity as she marched up to the front door clutching a gift-wrapped bottle. She knocked. No answer.

  She knocked again and called ‘Helloooo! It’s me, Felicity.’

  The chirping of crickets was the only response.

  I started to say, ‘I think we should leave, don’t you?’

  Just then the front door opened less than halfway and a woman peeped round the door and said sleepily, ‘Felicity?’

  ‘Oh, hi, darling, we’ve come to the party.’

  ‘You’ve come to the party? But, love, the party started this morning, and it ended hours ago.’

  You had to give it to Felicity though; she stood firm, like the boy who stood on the burning deck, and holding her ground, declared, ‘Well we’re here, the party can start all over again.’

  I swear the sleepy woman at the less-than-half-open-door muttered something that sounded like ‘oh shit’ then, ‘I guess you might as well come in for a drink.’

  At this point I was seriously thinking of saying to Bernard and Felicity, ‘You two go ahead, I’ll just stay in the car,’ but I may have mentioned before that the entire place was in darkness, and who knew who or what was lurking in the Stony Hill bushes, ready to pounce upon a young woman (as I was then) sitting alone in a parked red convertible on the steep driveway of an expatriate couple.

  The woman opened the door a little more and we filed in.

  Felicity handed our reluctant hostess the bottle saying, ‘Here, darling, I brought you some really good vino.’

  The woman made her way into the kitchen and turned on one light.

  That was it for lighting for the entire time we were there.

  She did not invite us to sit down, but Felicity told us to take a seat, so Bernard and I made our way through the gloaming and sat in two chairs on either side of a big bay window. The sleepy woman then came out of the kitchen and handed us clear plastic glasses half-filled with tepid white wine.

  Have you ever looked back and wondered about something you ate or drank? I found myself doing that after I read an interview with a famous chef who recommended that you should collect up all the dregs of wine left behind in glasses after a party, put it into plastic bags and freeze it for later use in sauces.

  I know the domestic goddess said to use it in sauces, but what if somebody took that advice a step further and decided to just serve backwash wine to other unsuspecting guests? Anyway, after one sip of warm flat, I decided to let that cup pass.

  I could feel Bernard refusing to look in my direction so for want of something better to do I studied the figure of a man, asleep on the couch, with his back to us. He appeared to be dressed all in white and what might have been a straw hat was set down on the floor in front of the sofa. He seemed to be sleeping very soundly and every now and again he made a whistling snuffly sort of sound, like babies make when they dream milky baby dreams. I could just make out that he was still wearing his shoes, and presumably his socks.

  Meanwhile, at the long dining table at one end of the room, Felicity was engaging our reluctant hostess in lighthearted party chatter. ‘So how was the party, then?’

  ‘Oh, it was (yawn) fine.’

  ‘Did Maxine and Donald come?’

  ‘Yes, (yawn) they did.’

  ‘How about Lucia? Did she and Graham manage to make it in from Ocho Rios?’

  ‘Mmm, mmm.’

  ‘So, tell me, how does Tarquin like being in Jamaica?’

  ‘If he wakes up, he can tell you himself.’

  ‘Oh! Is that him asleep over there? On the couch? Do you think he’d mind if I woke him, just to say hello? I didn’t realise that that was him.’

  ‘No, please don’t wake him. I’m sure he would not take kindly to being woken up. He has to catch an early flight to Barbados tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Oh, I was so hoping to catch up with him.’

  This really is not going well, I thought. Any fool could see that very shortly our drowsy hostess would be showing us to the half-open door, and we would be wending our way back down Stony Hill. It looked like I would be spending the night listening to Miles after all.

  Here’s what I thought as we climbed back into Felicity’s red car: Bernard can now tell everybody that he did meet Sir Laurence Olivier’s son and if he wants to make a joke of it he could say, ‘I once met Sir Laurence Olivier’s son and I could not wait to see the back of him,’ which strictly speaking, would be true.

  When we got to where I lived, I climbed out of the car threw a ‘goodnight’ over my shoulder and walked up the driveway to the front door.

  Bernard was right behind me.

  ‘Go away, you made me waste my whole evening. Why you making Felicity drive home by herself?’

  ‘She’ll be alright, I need a drink.’

  He and I spent the rest of the evening laughing about the non-party; drinking an appalling bottle of wine, imported from
, of all places, the vine (not vin) yards of Guyana. We also smoked an entire a pack of cigarettes between us while we listened to the Miles Davis sextet Someday My Prince Will Come.

  That was the night I began to really appreciate the genius of the Jamaican-American pianist Wynton Kelly, about whom Miles himself was supposed to have said, ‘Wynton is the light for the cigarette; without him there is no smoking.’ That night I realised that if hope has a sound it would be Wynton Kelly’s piano-playing. His hope notes were like sunbeams dancing on the morning waves coming in at Bluefields Beach.

  And my friend just kept lifting the arm of the record player, over and over, he and I both, the two of us just kept playing the same track, ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’.

  20

  Femme de la Martinique

  FROM THE YOUNG girl in a beauty shop in a mall in Des Moines, Iowa, whose red mullet bristled like a fox’s tail, who’d said, ‘I just wouldn’t like, have a clue like what to do with hair like yours,’ to the older woman in the high street hairdressers in the north of England who looked as if she’d been hairdresser to the Brontë sisters, and who’d said, ‘I niver dun air like yourn, lass,’ the writer had become quite used to being told by hairdressers in different parts of the world that they did not do Black hair.

  ‘There is a woman here who does hair like yours, but she’s not working today.’ That woman. She is perpetually on her day off from hair salons all over the western world. Why, just the day before the woman in this story had arrived in Paris she had tried to get her hair washed, calmed with conditioner, set on medium-sized rollers and dried under a hairdryer for half an hour, in a salon on London’s Oxford Street, and she’d been told that the woman who did her kind of hair was not working that day. So, she’d arrived in Paris looking ‘like a bush baby’, as a hairdresser in Durban had once tactfully described her. But from the taxi on the way to her hotel she saw it, the answer to her hairdressing needs.

  ‘Les Trois-Îlets’ was lettered in gold leaf on the transom above the front door of the shop; and through the frosted glass of the French doors she’d been able to make out the figure of a dark-skinned woman. One day, she thought, I just might write a piece about trying to get my hair done in different places in the world, but really, she knew that she would never to do it. There is a list of topics that Black women writers often feel compelled to cover, Black women’s hair being near the top of the list, but maybe there are enough people writing about that subject. Does the world really need another essay about Black women’s hair?

  The next day, after a breakfast of café au lait and a warm croissant she made her way from the hotel to Les Trois-Îlets. She had dressed carefully in a white silk blouse and a blue and white striped skirt. She’d hung the outfit on the hook behind the door of the tiny hotel bathroom so the steam from the shower would ease out the creases. This was a trick learned from a French-Canadian woman she’d once worked with whose name was Françoise, like Françoise Sagan, the author of Bonjour tristesse.

  Bonjour Tristesse, Aimez-vous Brahms? and the stories of Colette had fed all her teenage fantasies about Paris. She had fallen in love with the idea of being in love in Paris and now, twenty-five years later, here she was, in Paris.

  As she made her way from the hotel back to Les Trois-Îlets, she found herself humming Peter Sarstedt’s song ‘Where Do You Go To My Lovely’ and after a while she realised that she was doing a kind of step and glide in time to the hurdy-gurdy waltz arrangement of the song. She quickly corrected her gait because she didn’t want to look foolish.

  What she wanted was to be taken for one of the fabulously dressed women looking all soignées and Parisian moving with such ease about the city. There were flower shops on almost every street corner. Buckets of springtime daffodils and peonies, lilies, jonquils, irises and roses scented the air, and perfectly dressed people sat at tables at pavement cafes and terraces flooded with sunlight. These smartly dressed shiny people all seemed to be drinking from gleaming goblets; everyone, everything in the city of light looked burnished, glowing.

  As she made her way along the rue, she began to feel light-headed, as if she had sipped champagne mimosas for breakfast, but even in this faux mimosa state she could see clearly that the women she passed on the street all had hair that was well-coiffed and coloured, usually in intense shades of red or brown. All these Parisian women, even those in their nineties, looked perfectly turned out, groomed and smoothed, as if on their way to or from meeting a lover.

  When she got to Les Trois-Îlets the door was locked and the dove-grey taffeta blinds folded down. She should have asked the clerk at the front desk to call. She began to worry that Les Trois-Îlets might be closed for the day. She decided to take a walk in the area and maybe do a little shopping.

  She walked on to a shoe store a few shops down from the hairdressers. After looking at at least ten pairs of shoes, she went back to the very first pair she had tried on: wickedly expensive cobalt-blue suede sandals, but so elegant, so stylish, with subtle, classy little details, like small fringed tassels floating from the straps that wound twice around the ankles. When she stood before the mirror in the shoe store, she saw how they completed her navy blue and white ensemble, and she thought: when I get my hair done, I will be so pulled together. I will look like a woman Monet would have painted. I will feel perfectly put together when I stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens; I will cut a fine dash as I proceed in a leisurely way down the Boulevard Saint-Michel where Marie-Claire, the woman Peter Sarstedt sings about, lives in a fancy apartment with her collection of Rolling Stones records and someone who is friends with Sacha Distel.

  The sandals came with a soft felt bag embroidered with a gold insect that could have been a bee. She peeled off quite a few traveller’s cheques and paid for them, put her old shoes in the felt bag and walked back to Les Trois-Îlets, glancing down every few seconds to admire her own, now exquisitely shod, feet.

  The dove-grey shades were up and the ‘Fermé’ sign had been replaced by an ‘Ouvert’ sign and when she pushed the door open, a bell rang and a tall, elegantly dressed woman d’un certain âge appeared from somewhere in the back of the shop.

  ‘Bonjour, mademoiselle, comment ça va?’

  ‘Ça va bien. Parlez-vous anglais?’

  ‘Oui. Yes, I do.’

  The elegant woman was from Martinique and her name was Hortense, and she used to be a fashion model. On the walls of the salon were many photographs of her on the covers of French fashion magazines, and a few images of her on the runway for top fashion designers, and a big blow up of her, and yes, Yves Saint Laurent, and she was wearing, without a blouse, one of his famous ‘Le Smoking’ tuxedo suits, the lapels caught at the waist by a braided frog.

  Hortense stood quietly, smiling and nodding as the writer inspected the photographs saying things like, ‘These are all you, right?’ and, ‘Wow! Is this you and Yves Saint Laurent? Amazing!’

  Finally, Hortense said: ‘And ’ow can I ’elp you?’

  Shaking her head from side to side, the writer ran one hand over her hair.

  Hortense smiled. ‘We need to fix that, hein? I have someone coming who has an appointment but if you can wait I will ’elp you, d’accord?’

  A sleek car pulled up outside the salon, and a young woman who must have been at least six feet tall strode into Les Trois-Îlets. She was wearing jeans and a dark brown silk shirt; her hair was covered by a plaid silk scarf and most of her face was hidden by tortoiseshell-rimmed sunglasses.

  She was carrying what the writer recognised (from reading high fashion magazines) as a Birkin bag: a handbag that cost as much as a significant down-payment on a one-bedroom apartment in many parts of the world.

  There was much air-kissing and ‘ma chérie’-ing.

  Then Hortense and the woman went into the area partitioned off from the main salon by a fall of grey curtains.

  The writer sat happily, taking note of her surroundings. The walls of the salon were covered in grey water wav
e taffeta, and the chairs in the waiting area were upholstered in burgundy velvet which picked up the grey and burgundy tones in the carpet. In addition to the photographic display of Hortense in her glory days, there were several prints by Gauguin on the walls and a photograph of a small terracotta sculpture, captioned ‘Femme de la Martinique’. The writer stared at the print of the small kneeling figure, which was dressed only in a ‘foulard’, the madras headwrap that was part of the national dress worn by women from Martinique. The statue’s left arm was bent at the elbow and her hand inclined at the wrist was held upright between her breasts, as if in an attitude of devotion. This unusual feature made her look more like a figure on a Buddhist carving, which, the writer (a sometime painter and art critic) noted, made the small sculpture a cultural composite.

  The writer remembered that Paul Gauguin had spent some time in Martinique, living in a lowly hut. The writer had once bought a refrigerator magnet depicting one of Gauguin’s Martinique landscapes. Gorgeous. The pinkish clay of the unpaved path, the sable and green-blue rocks, the foam white flowers on a wayside bush, just a glimpse of cobalt-blue sea and not a living soul in evidence.

  Hortense passed through the fall of sheer grey curtains.

  ‘We can wash that hair now, hein?’ Hortense washed and conditioned the writer’s hair with products that smelt like khus khus grass, also known as vetiver, and jasmine. She explained that her products were all made exclusively for her clients, from ethically sourced organic products.

  ‘The life of a model, it is très dur on the skin, on the hair, so much maquillage, so much heat. I know what it is like, I know, and so I opened this place, to help the Black models. My products, they are made in Martinique, they are totalement naturels.’

  Gauguin’s woman of Martinique looked out from the labels on the row of bottles on display above the wash basins; her left hand upraised as if to bless: blessed are the beautiful women who wash, cleanse and calm themselves with pure and fragrant soaps and unguents made by our lady Hortense.