Redemption Ground

by Lorna Goodison

  She whirled round and round as she danced, she hummed as she danced, then she danced jumping up and down Rastafari Nyabinghi style, hopping from one foot to the other, then lunging forward, harder and harder until she realised that she might wake the baby, and with no water to wash him it was best that he slept a while longer.

  She sat down cross-legged on the verandah and attempted to visualise sheets of rain dropping down from the sky, a technique she had learned when she once did some classes in Transcendental Meditation.

  It had been drizzling the second time she saw him. The truth was she had been walking by his house on purpose; and there he was in the driveway, putting up the top on his sports car. He had not seemed surprised to see her; he just said, ‘Come inside or you’ll get really wet. I’m about to have lunch, you can have half my sandwich.’ She remembered that once they went inside the sun came out, and it did not rain.

  Just like that. If she’d believed then in action at a distance, and using mental powers to draw people to you she would have sworn some force like that was at work pulling her to him. He was at least ten years older than her, he was a somebody. She was eighteen years old. She’d met him at a birthday party given by one of her friends the week before. He lived around the corner from her friend, who’d asked him because he was a somebody, to come to the party as the master of ceremonies.

  She’d been standing over by a window, and after he’d finished his MC spiel he’d walked straight over to her and said something quite ordinary, something like, ‘God, it’s hot in here, I’m going to stand by this window right beside you.’ And she’d fallen in love for the first time, just so.

  She had felt as if she were bathing in warm water all the time she was with him. He’d taken her out to see a play, and they’d met for lunch two or three times and they’d spent the afternoon together the day before he left the island. They’d talked a lot, about music, about books, about movies; he used words like unexpurgated and bowdlerised when they discussed books, and he’d given her some of his books because he was heading off to England to study law. On their last afternoon together he’d said, ‘I so want to be the first man to make love to you, but I need time, way more time than I have now.’ So he concentrated on doing two things: he gently probed the outer corner of her mouth with the tip of his tongue until he set off starbursts in her brain, and he stroked her body slowly so that she’d risen up out of herself and hovered between the floor and the ceiling just like that time she’d had the transcendent experience in church. As a farewell present he gave her his collection of books by Bertrand Russell, a copy of sayings by Nietzsche and a well-thumbed copy of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

  After he left she bought a copy of Dionne Warwick singing ‘Trains and Boats and Planes’ and played it and played it as she wept. She also stopped going to church.

  The baby woke up cooing and smiling like a small jovial Buddha. He wanted to play, kicking his chubby arms and legs and blowing spit bubbles. She loved him so, she loved him so, she loved him so much. She loved him so much she knew that if she had to, she would die for him.

  Later that day she paid a small boy who was walking by her house to draw water from the river that ran through the village. Sediment settled in the bottom of the plastic bottles as the river was running low, and she used the grey water to flush the toilet.

  And that night she made sure to stay up until after midnight when the waterman magnanimously turned the water back on for four hours, and she filled every container in the house with water, and she had a long shower and washed her hair at 1am on January 2nd. Later that day, she went through her bookcase till she found all the books he had gifted her. On the flyleaf of each collection he had written something cryptic and koan-like in his bold hand, and he’d signed with his initials. She remembers he’d used a fountain pen. She remembers that she’d read ‘Why I am Not a Christian’, and that she’d tried hard to agree with what Bertrand Russell wrote, but somehow she could never fully get his point of view, and she’d stopped reading that book because, she’d told herself, she wasn’t bright enough to understand it. She’d felt the same way when she tried to agree with Nietzsche that God was dead.

  She leafed through the books and noted that he had underlined passage after passage; she finally settled on one from Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness: ‘You can get away from envy by enjoying the pleasures that come your way, by doing the work you have to do, and by avoiding comparisons with those you imagine, perhaps quite falsely, to be more fortunate than yourself.’

  And that would always make great sense to her.

  She’d been only eighteen years old, and she had read those books he’d gifted her as if they were holy texts, concentrating really hard to absorb the ideas generated from the mind of an upper-class Englishman, and a hardcore Übermensch. She concluded that some of what they wrote contained great wisdom, but not much of it had ever really been useful to her. Then she thumbed through the copy of Atlas Shrugged and wondered why she’d spent so much time trying to relate to the words of a control-freak of a woman with ice in her veins, a woman who was all about WILL, and being harder than the rest. Arrrgh! She had spent countless hours bending her mind to agree to their take on life.

  The time had come to really search for spiritual nourishment. She needed to read living words that would nourish her so she could nourish the baby; maybe she’d even have to write them herself. She packed the books in a cardboard box. When she moved from that house she’d leave them behind.

  What she needed now, cool clear water. She needed it now more than ever, not just for herself, but for the life she had brought into the world. The world, which, when the baby boy smiled and warbled and babbled sweet baby glossolalia, was the exact opposite of horrible. The father of the baby liked poetry. They once wrote a play together. He was writing a novel, a coming-of-age story. They were trying to make it work. The world was not horrible, horrible, horrible as one of those books claimed.

  Years later, when she met the man who would become her husband, his first present to her was a Waterman fountain pen.

  22

  Parliament Street

  ‘They’ve really fixed up that Tim Horton’s nicely, haven’t they?’

  ‘Yes, and we, the people of Parliament Street, will soon fix that.

  I tell you this street is really changing.’

  I OVERHEARD this conversation outside one of those spiffy coffee-shop-slash-pubs on Parliament Street. The guy who said the street was changing was talking to a man who looked just like that actor who stars in Da Vinci’s Inquest.

  I wouldn’t know, I’m fairly new around here, but the Da Vinci’s Inquest guy, who looks just as handsome in real life as he does on TV (if it was in fact him), seemed a little cast down to hear the news that Parliament Street was changing.

  I don’t know what it used to be like, but here’s what I like about it now: on some days it looks like I imagine the Kingdom of Heaven is supposed to look, with every conceivable type of person walking up and down going about their business. Actually some, like the group in their wheelchairs who congregate at the corner of Amelia and Parliament, are not, strictly speaking, walking up and down, but there they are. And the very posh people who patronise the fine French restaurant along Amelia Street have to make their way past the social club of the motorised wheelchair people, who are definitely not posh.

  I’m not sure how she will fit into my Kingdom of Heaven analogy, except maybe as a reincarnation of Rahab the harlot gone back to her old ways, but there is this one girl who openly propositions men at the intersections along Parliament Street in broad daylight. A tall, rangy girl who has that model’s springbok walk. She is sometimes dressed in an expensive-looking leather jacket, and she probably used to be very beautiful, but now her face looks like too much life on the streets has rearranged her features so that when you look at her you look quickly away. I once heard a taxi driver threaten to run her over with his cab after she stuck her head in his window and
said something to him.

  Today I had lunch with my friend Isabel. She is a very important lady in this town, but unlike a lot of people who consider themselves to be really important she is one of the warmest and most generous-hearted people I have ever met, and lunch with her always strengthens my faith in humanity.

  After lunch with Isabel, I decide to take a walk. It’s an early fall day, a Kingdom of Heaven kind of day, because the people you pass on the street all look burnished and smiling, like they’ve eaten their fill of inky sweet blueberries and golden Ontario corn.

  I cherish what I think of as my silent times. Times when I spend at least six or seven hours by myself, not speaking even one word out loud. I’m a big fan of Thomas Merton, who was a Trappist monk, but even before I started to read his books I liked the idea of being silent for set periods of time. After those self-imposed silences I tend to talk too much in big over-excited bursts.

  I get to the corner of Parliament and Dundas and I turn right. Maybe I’ll just walk down to the Eaton Centre and get myself a new sweater for winter is a comin’, sure as fate. Dundas is a strange street. There are whole blocks that seem almost abandoned, lonely, scary, even at three o’clock in the afternoon.

  And then I see them up ahead. The two women.

  When I get closer I notice that one is older. The younger one is maybe twenty years old. They are both shading their eyes. The older one is saying something about how they should eat now before things get really busy later.

  The younger, taller, dark-skinned one says something in a foreign language and then shakes her head, looks down at the pavement, holds both palms up to the sun and mutters ‘Okay, okay.’ She is dressed in a wide, gorgeous boubou, all deep blue and white. She looks like she is standing neck deep in the Atlantic Ocean and the swirls in the tie-dye pattern of her voluminous gown are frothy whitecaps of waves. The neckline dips in a style that I know, from being the daughter of a dressmaker, is called a boat neck. It slips and slides to one side to reveal a polished shoulder blade. She could easily have been posing for a spread in a fashion magazine right there on semi-deserted Dundas Street.

  Then she looks up, drops her hands to her sides and sees me staring at her. She stares hard back at me and rolls her eyes back in her head. All you can see are the whites of her eyes. Jesus! I hurry past.

  The older one looks as if she has a lily on her brow and anguish moist and fever dew. The faded rose on her cheek is fast withering too. The woman looks, like John Keats’s knight at arms, as if ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, has her in thrall.

  But the younger one, the Senegalese lady, she looks like really beautiful women in their twenties do, invincible, as if nothing, no power on earth will ever vanquish her. She looks as if she is certain she will never look as beaten down as her companion, the veteran of the flesh wars who is advising her to eat now before the fleet comes in for servicing, before the raft of Johns rolls in. Maybe feral lady is fresh off the boat herself and is working to pay back her passage. Maybe she is a victim of human trafficking.

  It could well be, you know. It’s likely that she has a pimp who has put her to work in this run-down place.

  This is very depressing.

  I ONCE KNEW a girl who used to be a prostitute. By the time I met her she had left that life behind and was working as what was then called an ‘office maid’, serving tea and coffee and taking the mail to the post office and things like that, at a place where I used to work.

  When she brought round the tea and coffee at ten o’clock, she would make sure that she brought me my tea last. At first, I was puzzled about this, and then I realised that when she brought me my tea she would always stay to talk with me about something. She’d hold the metal tea tray up before her chest like a shield, and she’d say something like, ‘The tea taste alright?’

  And I’d say, ‘Yes thanks.’

  Then she’d ask to borrow a magazine, saying, ‘I will bring it back tomorrow.’

  I started bringing her books and magazines from home, and one day I showed her a short story of mine that had been published in the Sunday paper.

  The next day, when she brought my tea, she said: ‘Suppose I tell you that I could write a book about my life.’

  And before I could tell her that everybody I know thinks that their life story is interesting enough to become a book, she said, ‘Tell me if you think this don’t belong in a book …’

  ‘Is a whole heap a children my mother have, and because I was bright in school, she send mi to Kingston to live with this lady who say she was looking for a schoolgirl to do little things around the house for her and her family and that she would take care of mi and send mi to school.

  ‘The lady and her husband have a rum bar and a club, and one day she tell mi that I was to start help out in the rum bar. I never did too like it, but I never know what else to do. And little by little them just call on mi to “help out” more and more until she and him put mi to work in the club and that was, as my grandfather would say, the beginning of sorrows.

  ‘Is just so I start to live bad life, a life I never want, but the lady husband threaten mi and say how mi ungrateful because is him and him wife put clothes on mi back and give mi food to eat, so mi owe them, and I better pay them and help out a situation. The lady, she say she was a Christian, say she personally would make sure I don’t have to sell myself to any and everybody; so she always send some of the more decent-looking man to mi. This one man, him was older than my father, him start to come regular. Him always ask mi how mi feeling, and sometime him would bring a little present or so for mi. I did think him was such a decent man.

  ‘Then one Sunday evening, I will never forget it, him come dress up in a good suit, but him wasn’t looking all that well, and when I look in him face, my blood just run cold. I ask him, “You sure you alright?”

  ‘And him say yes, and all him need was for me and him to go to bed.

  ‘Well the next thing you know I hear him cry out loud loud and then I feel this heavy, heavy weight…’

  She started crying uncontrollably when she came to this part of the story.

  From what I could make out between her sobs, that terrible cry emitted by the man was not the sound of la petite mort, the man was dead.

  There was an envelope addressed to her in his suit pocket. In the envelope was a note which thanked her for fulfilling his dream. His dream you see, had always been to die while having sex. To put it crudely, to come and go.

  Maybe he had confided his ambition to his wife of many years, maybe she told him to never, ever touch her again which is why he ended up having his dream come true in a brothel where he decided to bestow on this young girl the honour of having him die inside her.

  I TOLD HER to wait in my office, and I went to the staff kitchen and made her a cup of tea. I brought it back and she thanked me and drank it as we both sat in silence. My office was on the fifth floor and it had a window with a view of Kingston Harbour. I’m not sure that detail is important, but I remember looking out through the window at the Caribbean Sea in the distance as we sat there in the aftermath of that terrible revelation.

  ‘THE ONLY THING that save my life,’ she said after a while, ‘is that I read Psalms; every day, every night, I would be in the grave now if I never read Psalms.’

  She said she ended up working in another nightclub/brothel.

  Her saving grace was that no matter what was happening in her life she was always reading. She said she read a lot of Reader’s Digest.

  You ever notice how, no matter where you go, there always seems to be a copy of Reader’s Digest? I don’t know, there must be some secret society of people who go out in the dead of night, to distribute old copies of Reader’s Digest.

  Anyway, this poor girl said that a man who was a teacher and who was also a regular visitor to the nightclub, took notice of the fact that she was always reading, and struck up a friendship with her. He began to bring her books and he helped her to attend classes and to sit some GCE
subjects which she passed, and that is how one day she was eventually able to leave that life behind her.

  Now every time I read an article about prostitution or human sex-trafficking I think about this story and I think of those two women on Dundas. I wonder if they are still comrades in arms? Is the worn-out ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ one still standing? Does the beauty from Africa still stare hard and snarl at anybody who dares to look openly at her and wonder what’s-a-nice-girl-like-you? I wonder if there will ever be a Time’s Up or a Me Too movement for women like them.

  23

  Racism

  THE TAXI DRIVER looked like one of those men I’d grown up seeing in photographs in the weekly edition of the Daily Mirror. An ordinary-looking middle-aged man, maybe in a feature about a punter who had won the pools and had been seen in his local pub buying pints for his mates.

  I was totally taken aback when, as I gathered up my raincoat and bag to leave the taxi, he said to me, ‘Go on back to the jungle, we don’t want your kind over ’ere.’ Cold as you please.

  This was my first visit to England, ‘the Motherland’, and I’d been having a grand time up till that point.

  I was, to say the least, shocked. And then something happened that I’ve never been able to explain. Right after he said those words I said, ‘Thank you. Thank you very much for being so kind. You are the nicest, most polite person I have met since I’ve been here.’

  I do not know how or why I responded in that way, but I realised immediately that those words had a strange effect on the driver, for he just stared blankly back at me and said nothing.

  I got out of his vehicle and walked away, then turned and looked back to see the cab still parked in the same spot.