The Wonder That Was Ours

by Alice Hatcher

  As bulldozers displaced earth for a massive foundation and we grieved countless deaths, she celebrated the appearance of rumbling cement trucks. Who could blame her? She knew nothing of our suffering.

  “Your father’s a brilliant man,” she said, squeezing Wynston’s hand. “You will have a life we never dreamed of when we were your age.”

  Slowly but steadily, her worldly aspirations overturned scriptural revelations. Hats with satin sashes replaced sackcloth and ashes, and piety surrendered to a reverence for all wondrous things.

  The wondrous things happening on St. Anne quickly became a source of occupational solidarity for those handed cement factory jobs on the greased palms of Wynston’s uncle, John Cleave. Every night, seventeen dust-covered members of the United Gravel Grinders Union gathered around the Cleaves’ front stoop to analyze cricket matches and deliver successive toasts to St. Anne’s labor movement, however small, and the international brotherhood of workers, however dimly imagined. More often than not, Wynston fell asleep beneath his open bedroom window to the sound of UGG members complaining about cricket teams and drinking with Morris, a widower known for his unflagging generosity when it came to sharing a bottle.

  Six weeks after the union’s inaugural meeting, Rose complained. “Wynston will never sleep with this noise.”

  “This is grassroots organizing,” Topsy said. “The labor movement depends on it.”

  “You know very well about grass roots, after spending so much time facedown in the dirt. There will be no union if you have no jobs,” Rose insisted, bemoaning the price of hats in Portsmouth’s tiny department store and the growth of Wynston’s ungainly feet, now splitting the seams of his Sunday shoes.

  One month later, when American investors cut a slender ribbon stretched across the Ambassador’s glass doors, her fears faded. Her curiosity piqued by stories of guests signing checks with silver pens and firing champagne corks from their balconies, she suggested a trip to the hotel.

  “Put on your best dress. We’ll get something to drink.” Topsy patted his wallet. “Ginger beer with ice cubes.”

  “In the canteen,” Rose said, rubbing Wynston’s back.

  “The lounge,” Topsy said.

  By the time they stepped off the Portsmouth bus, the Cleaves were flecking sweat from their foreheads and nursing blistered feet. Wynston lifted his face and squinted at the Ambassador’s bright pink walls. “It touches the sky.”

  The young Professor Cleave had echoed our very thoughts. By that time, we’d ridden in the Ambassador’s brass elevators, sampled its unrivaled air conditioning, and gorged ourselves on scraps from overstocked buffets. A feast awaits at every turn for those with less refined palates, and we suffered a plague of riches.

  So we understood Rose’s fascination with bright green sod and her impulse to slip off her shoe and press her toes into soft grass. We understood her apprehension, too, when a valet standing beneath the portico narrowed his eyes. Suddenly conscious of the perspiration darkening her collar, she stepped back onto the sidewalk.

  “Are we allowed here?” she whispered, forcing her foot back into her shoe.

  Topsy glanced at the valet and gripped Wynston’s hand. “Maybe we’ll go inside another time. Let’s look at the swimming pool.”

  At the edge of a patio enclosed by iron gates, Wynston observed Americans for the first time. He wedged his face between two bars, and with metal warming his cheeks, he grew transfixed by the lethargic occupants of two deck chairs.

  “It’s nine feet deep,” Topsy said. “Do you know how deep that is?”

  Wynston didn’t answer. He was studying a woman wearing a bikini and oversized sunglasses. In her sunburn and lifeless black eyes, and in her red fingernails, fixed like pincers on an ice cube, he saw a lobster’s features grafted onto a nearly naked woman and wailed. The woman’s companion reached into a bowl of peanuts, struggled from his chair, and shuffled to the gate.

  “Peanut, son?” He slipped his fingers between two bars. “Nothing a peanut can’t cure.”

  Sniveling, Wynston accepted a peanut in his upturned palm.

  “Say thank you for the peanut,” Rose said, straightening her dress.

  “Thank you for the peanut.”

  The man brushed a peanut husk from his chest hair, turned from Wynston, and flopped into the pool.

  “Why don’t they swim in the sea?” Wynston asked.

  “They prefer bleached water,” Rose said. “It keeps them white.”

  Topsy pinched Wynston’s arm. “They’re afraid the fish bite.”

  “Why did he talk that way?” Wynston asked.

  “People sound different in the United States.”

  “He shouldn’t have called our boy ‘son,’” Rose said.

  Sensing the edge in her voice, Wynston dug his thumbnail into the peanut’s shell.

  “Look at our little man,” Topsy remarked. “So serious about pools and American talk.”

  Wynston was right to be serious about pools and American patter. By then, the few British administrators on St. Anne were retreating further and further into exclusive clubs, where servants in white coats continued to serve tea and lemon tarts on eggshell saucers. In public, they maintained the stolid appearance of efficient bureaucrats. They defied the heat in linen suits and heavy nylons, and after sunset spent themselves in inconsequential bacchanals, swilling gin in elegant parlors and perspiring liquor and lime. They sensed what we knew, having witnessed the collapse of countless empires. Their sinecures had grown insecure. The era of endless puddings had come to an end.

  Americans, when they arrived, easily distinguished themselves from the British. They were a bundle of contradictions. They spent hours in the sun “working” on tans and then drowned themselves in air conditioning. They spoke loudly and perplexed harried waiters by leaving loose change to complement their endless complaints. If their strange concepts of hygiene involved buckets of bleach and caustic detergents, they tossed half-eaten entrées into the trash, trailed crumbs everywhere, and left gobs of exhausted chewing gum in ashtrays. Outspending and talking over the British, they carried a promise of political change that, for some, mitigated their offenses.

  “They’ll drive the British back across the Atlantic,” Topsy said to anyone who would listen. “We’ll be raising our own flag soon enough.”

  In this, he exhibited an uncanny prescience. Within a year, Britain conferred self-government to St. Anne and designated a skeleton crew of administrators to manage the island’s foreign affairs from the Governor’s Mansion. In the weeks before the Assembly elections, dozens of political parties representing a bewildering array of occupational interests formed, including the Social Democratic Alliance—a cadre of taxi drivers bound by elaborate manifestos and a revolutionary aesthetic based on berets and, in the case of its male members, excessive facial hair—and the Progressive Workers Party, a cement mixers’ association devoid of internal dissent due to its nightly affirmations of brotherhood.

  Despite the insobriety of its disorganized members, the Progressive Workers Party won two of eleven seats in the new assembly. On Election Day, the Cleaves and their neighbors gathered in a wild celebration of modest victory. They guzzled rum and danced, kissed good friends and hugged old enemies, made regrettable declarations of love and shunned thoughts of impending hangovers. Topsy hung on his brother’s shoulder, basking in the glow of victory and dispensing unsolicited advice.

  “We wore the British down,” he declared, talking around the soggy end of a cigarette.

  “You’re wearing yourself down. This has nothing to do with us.” John took a bottle from Topsy’s hand and raised it to his own lips.

  “We’re driving them out, straight into the sea. They see the tide turning.”

  “They’re washing their hands.”

  Topsy reached for the bottle. “You’re a gloomy bastard. At least those taxi-driving communists won’t be driving us into the ground. Only one seat. They have their heads hanging low to
night. This is a day for celebration.”

  “Let me tell you, the real work is ahead,” John said.

  “But things are turning. You’re a fool to go to New York now. If you had any sense, you’d tear up your ticket.”

  “The money’s still in the States,” John said, looking at a trampled ribbon on the ground.

  Three weeks after taking a job in an aluminum mill in Newark, John started sending Topsy letters about acid baths, vats of molten metal, and voracious presses that consumed limbs and spit out sheets of shining foil. He wrote of squalid boarding houses, horizons obliterated by haze, and junkies lying in gutters. He wrote about rats as big as dogs and cockroaches as big as rats. He exaggerated only the size of the cockroaches.

  Topsy spent hours digesting each of his brother’s letters. After collecting his thoughts, he’d sit at the kitchen table and spin tales of sleek red convertibles and tinted glass towers for Rose and Wynston. Afterward, he’d hide the latest letter in a box beneath his bed and hope for his brother’s return. When John finally returned to St. Anne, he stayed for only one month. He arrived in style, in a taxi loaded with three large suitcases.

  “Look at your uncle,” Rose murmured, staring at John’s shimmering polyester shirt and the generous cut of his flared white pants. “They must wipe their asses with dollars.”

  Indirectly, John’s visit resulted in the nickname Wynston would carry for the rest of his life, a name born of curiosity about his uncle’s gifts—filtered cigarettes, bottles of cologne, and waxy chocolates filled with pale creams and translucent gels—and stories about floating suspension bridges and chicken fingers served in foam boxes.

  “Do American chickens really have fingers?” Wynston asked, breathing through his mouth to avoid the smell of cologne drying on his mother’s neck.

  “They need to count their money,” John said.

  “Don’t fill the boy with stories.” Rose dipped her finger into the creamy cavity of a chocolate mint. “His mind wanders already.”

  If Wynston’s mind was given to wandering, John’s visit gave it direction. Every night, John, Topsy, and Morris gathered on the stoop to discuss the glories and perversities of American life while Wynston lay beneath his bedroom window, eavesdropping on the conversations of intoxicated adults. Stirred by the odd reference to our relations in Newark, we perched on the sill.

  “You must think things have changed since you left.” Morris coughed.

  “It seems quiet. There’s always noise in the States. Car horns. Gunshots. I don’t stand near the window.”

  “American women must be nice,” Topsy said, after a pause. “I suppose you’ve had a few.”

  “The ones who don’t cost too much.”

  “A real romantic, buying them presents with your hard-earned money,” Topsy mused.

  “I give them my hard-earned money, fool. Too few women in the place I live.”

  “If the world was a fair place, you’d pay any woman double,” Morris said.

  “You wouldn’t pay less than what they ask. End up like one man I saw, lying on the street, staring at the sky with his face skinned like a goat.”

  Wynston’s scalp tingled, and for the rest of the night, and for many nights to come, he listened to conversations about gutted buildings, knife-wielding pimps, and scorched spoons, trying to reconcile his uncle’s letters and stories and envisioning streets of gold covered in shredded skin. One week after his uncle returned to Newark, he issued a dinnertime proclamation.

  “I’m never leaving St. Anne.”

  “Listen to him, so serious,” Rose said. “After so much chocolate, you think he’d beg to live with his uncle.”

  Serious, he was. He soon began secreting letters, one at a time, from the box beneath Topsy’s bed. With each letter, he grew more perplexed and more determined to answer questions about places he’d never seen. A broken-down bicycle enabled his self-education.

  On Wynston’s eleventh birthday, Morris conceded victory to emphysema and wheeled his twenty-year-old bicycle to the Cleaves’ front stoop, where Wynston was digging in the dirt with his toes.

  “No use to me,” Morris said, tilting its misaligned handlebars toward Wynston.

  A rusted one-speed contraption with bald tires, the bicycle carried Wynston, wobbling and elated, from Stokes Hill to Portsmouth’s one-room library, and into adolescence and intellectual maturity. Wynston spent five years’ worth of Saturdays poring through the abandoned books of British administrators and disintegrating Caribbean newspapers that, for years, we’d nibbled for want of less picked-over material on the library’s termite-riddled shelves. He sought out news of the United States, absorbing stories about Black Panthers, campus protests, and political assassinations, and as years passed, a hotel called Watergate and Americans dangling from helicopters in Saigon. In the afternoon, he’d leave the library with bloodshot eyes and ride around the island, refining his thoughts and rehearsing ethical debates with imagined adversaries.

  Hunched over books and crooked handlebars, he assumed the carriage of a brooding intellectual. Perpetually preoccupied, he ate sparingly. By the time he reached sixteen, his loose-fitting shirts hung awkwardly from his shoulders. He acquired a premature furrow between his eyebrows from squinting at faded newsprint.

  “Look at him,” Topsy said one afternoon, as Wynston coasted to a stop in front of his house. He was sunning himself in the company of Morris and the UGG’s most dedicated drinkers. “The youngest member of this island’s ‘intellectual avant-garde.’ That’s the phrase he used the other day.”

  “The only member.” Morris gathered a pinch of snuff between his stiff fingers. “You could learn something from him.”

  “He’ll be at his pulpit soon enough, telling us what to do.”

  “My lectern,” Wynston said, sealing his own fate.

  “Listen to him. The Professor.”

  Bestowed in the presence of many, the title clung to its reluctant recipient. By the time Wynston took his first job, his friends and neighbors regularly addressed him as “Professor” with encouraging smiles or dismissive sneers, depending on their attitudes toward his erudition, or what some called his airs.

  At the Ambassador, a starched bellboy uniform enabled Professor Cleave’s entrée into a world of glowing televisions and glossy magazines that provided perspectives, however skewed, on places he’d known only through outdated books and crumbling newspapers. He worked overtime, using each paycheck to order academic monographs and literary classics from New York. Every day, he ascended the service stairwell to the Ambassador’s roof and spent his breaks engrossed in words, oblivious to our presence.

  He was, to us, a curiosity, an unassuming human with gangly limbs not entirely unlike our own. He seemed taken with the idea of flight, or so we incorrectly assumed from the amount of time he spent staring at clouds (probably to give his eyes a rest from the torturous sociological prose he so often read). Between paragraphs, he’d absentmindedly chew bits of fried plantain we hadn’t ingested while he was absorbed in some social question. Who could blame us for taking a tiny share? To each according to his needs, as Karl Marx once muttered at us. Blame the great political economist for our sins! Remarkably, Professor Cleave was already reading Marx by then. He’d become consumed with questions of collective action and worker solidarity, though solitude seemed to suit him.

  He socialized very little and might have continued in his lonely orbit, if not for a fortuitous encounter with an estranged cousin, James Brooks, the subject of endless editorializing among extended family members outraged by his unofficial marriage to a retired prostitute. One morning, while riding from the post office, he heard someone call his name and looked up to see a young man standing outside the taxi stand that doubled as the headquarters of the Social Democratic Alliance. He came to a halt and studied the dense beard covering the man’s face.

  “You blind? It’s your cousin.” James looked at the book resting in the basket beneath Wynston’s handlebars. “A Co
mplete History of Empires through the Ages. I hear you’ve become the little scholar.”

  Wynston picked at his disintegrating handlebar grips. “What are you doing now?”

  “Organizing the movement. It’s time for change, cousin. Come inside. I’ll show you.”

  Speechless at the prospect of seeing the infamous communists of his father’s harangues, Wynston propped his bike against a wall and gathered his book.

  “Leave it.” James nodded at the book cradled in Wynston’s arms. “No one steals here. If they did, no one would steal that.”

  Wynston pressed the book to his chest and followed James past a warped screen door. Inside, dust motes drifted over card tables covered with old newspapers and coffee-stained pamphlets. Beneath a poster of Martin Luther King Jr., a bearded man wearing a black beret was speaking to a slender young man with flawless skin. Seeing James, he broke off his conversation and crossed the room.

  “Brooks Brother,” he said, pulling a thread from the split seam of James’s sleeve.

  “Cousin, this man you should know. Patrice Williams, President of the SDA.”

  “A cousin of James is welcome here,” Patrice Williams said.

  Fearing he might collapse from the dizzying effects of Patrice Williams’s stare, Wynston looked at a newspaper lying on a table. “The Guardian,” he mumbled, nodding at a grainy photograph of Welsh miners. “I read about that strike.”

  “You read British newspapers?”

  “Guests at the Ambassador leave them sometimes. Usually, the Miami Herald.”

  “You’re a cousin of our Brooks Brother how?”

  “My ma is Rose Cleave, John’s aunt.”

  “You’re a Cleave?”

  “My father is Topsy Cleave. A union man. UGG.”

  “He must have been pleased with the elections. ‘Our future is America’s.’ Isn’t that what the UGG says? Or is it ‘America’s future is ours’?”

  “Not everyone agrees with him. With the UGG,” Wynston stammered. “Some people think self-government is not the same as governing ourselves. That independence requires the end of economic dependence.”