Snake Cradle

by Roberta Sykes

  Once, in winter, after I had scrambled up the hill beside the cathedral, a snake and I, unbeknowns to each other, were both basking in the warmth of the sun’s mid-morning rays when we spotted each other. It was a powerful moment. We fell into complete stillness, each looking at the other’s eyes and watching to see whether the other meant any harm. At the end of our careful mutual appraisal, I knew the snake was not a danger to me and continued to lay on the rock without fear. The snake, too, stayed curled on the rock for quite a while before slipping away into the grass. Although other smaller snakes, to Mum’s mortification, sometimes slipped in and out of the retaining walls beside our house, this cathedral snake became my first real encounter. It was lucky that this didn’t happen at home, because when Mum saw a snake she would have Laaka chase it, no matter what I said.

  Classes at St Joseph’s came out at different times, Junior classes finished at 3pm, more senior classes at 3.30. So when I was promoted, Dellie and Leonie had to walk home by themselves. Mum was so flush with cash by this time that she occasionally gave them coins so that they could catch a school bus to North Ward or the city and walk from there. Neither of these routes was really much shorter, but nor did they offer the privacy for racist attacks. As well, the city route was not quite so steep.

  I wasn’t very interested in catching the bus, so I found a way that suited me better. The views from the top of the road I chose were splendid and lots of little creatures lived along the way. The footpath was particularly steep, made up almost entirely of cement and rock stairs, which led past the maternity wing of Townsville General Hospital and through to the nurses’ quarters. The difficulty of this route was one of its advantages as the likelihood of state school children coming this way was virtually nil, and their ability to wait in ambush for me, zilch.

  At the top of the steep climb, a narrow road swept by past the top-floor entrance of the maternity hospital. The floors below were surrounded by verandahs which faced the sea in order to catch any cooling breeze. At the end of one verandah which I passed on my way home there would often be several black women, large in their pregnancy and wearing only night attire and bed jackets or robes.

  ‘Psst. Psst,’ I’d hear one of the women calling to me. They’d ask me to run errands across to the little store on the main road to get packets of biscuits or sometimes sweets, softdrink or chocolates. In summer they would ask me to bring them mangoes. The composition of the group was always changing as the women completed the three months each was obliged to spend—six weeks before and six weeks after giving birth—in this enforced loneliness.

  ‘Who’s your mummy?’ some of the women asked.

  ‘Mrs Patterson,’ I’d reply.

  ‘Oh, yeah. White one mummy, eh!’ Then they would murmur and nudge each other about who might have given me up for adoption.

  ‘And where are you from?’ I’d ask them as I became bolder. I wasn’t used to having conversations on an equal basis with adults, or very pregnant women.

  Most were from Palm Island, and they would stretch their arms out wistfully to point where it was on the horizon. I couldn’t see it, but many of the women told me they could. I met quite a number of women there who would, many years later, remember me in the capacity of their little messenger-girl.

  Some of these women were only a few years older than me—although I didn’t know this at the time. To my ten years, they were sixteen and seventeen, though many, of course, were much older, up to forty, I’d guess. The most noticeable thing about them was the deep sadness in their eyes and their general air of wretchedness and despair. Once I began to spend time chatting with them on my way home from school and trying to answer their questions, I began to badger Mum for information about our family.

  For years I’d been overhearing Mum and Aunty Glad carrying on their secret conversations on the back verandah, when they thought I was asleep. They’d used words I’d never heard of, such as ‘throw-backs’ and ‘mulattoes’, which confused me. When I asked Mum what ‘throw-back’ meant, she had slapped my face hard and called me a sneak.

  I would occasionally try to pry information from her by a variety of methods. I would ask questions about her mother and father, which she refused to answer except to say that they were dead. ‘Dead and buried,’ she’d say to anything I asked. I’d inquired point blank a few times about my own father and received an assortment of answers. Once she told me he was from Fiji, another time that he was from Papua New Guinea. Then she said he was a war hero, and he was dead, and he’d been buried in Papua New Guinea. On another occasion, she answered shortly, ‘Do you know what a Fuzzy-Wuzzy Angel is?’ When I replied in the negative, she said, ‘Well, get out of here until you do!’

  I also asked her about our names. ‘Where does my name, “Roberta”, come from? How did you think to call me that?’

  And at other times: ‘How did you come to call Dellie “Delores”? Did you know someone called Delores? What about Leonie? Does her name have a meaning?’

  Depending on Mum’s mood, the answers I received ranged from plausible to bizarre.

  ‘I called you Roberta after your father. His name was Robert and I added the “a”.’

  But I also heard: ‘You were named Roberta after an opera. I heard it on the radio’, and, ‘You weren’t named after anything, it was just a name I liked.’

  Once when I pursued the reply that I’d been named after my father, I asked, ‘That’s nice, Mum. What was his last name?’ She leaped up and whacked me. ‘I know what you’re doing, you sneaky girl,’ she screamed.

  Dellie, whose birth name was Delores, which Mum said was to be pronounced ‘Del-or-aise’, was named, according to Mum’s story, after Our Lady of Sorrows. Given Mum’s dislike of Catholics, which hadn’t disappeared just because we went off to St Joseph’s school each morning, it didn’t ring true that she’d called her daughter after a Catholic figure, but I was in no position to argue. I began to suspect she’d read the name in a book and liked the sound of it.

  Another time, Mum told me she’d named Leonie after her birth sign, Leo. I let it pass. Mum and I were the Leos in the family and Leonie, who was born in September, a Virgo. To contradict Mum was to invite trouble. Earlier, when Mum was having her screaming and swearing fits, both Aunty Glad and Nell had whispered to me, when Mum was mid-tantrum, that I should be considerate because she was having her ‘change’. I recall wondering what she was likely to change into, but neither Aunty Glad or Nellie gave me any indication of what they meant. Mum’s often violent moodiness remained, change or no change.

  While all three of us girls had the surname ‘Patterson’, which again I was not allowed to ask about, Mum also gave Dellie and me a middle name, ‘Barkley’, and Leonie was given ‘Mary’. Mum said she had taken Barkley from the tablelands of the same name, which were, at various times, either where she came from, or where she’d spent a lot of time, or where our father had come from or where she’d met him. Despite the inconsistency in her stories, it pleased me to know of some connection—until I learned that the name of the tablelands is not spelled the same way as she spelled our name. It didn’t seem likely, given what a stickler she was for correct spelling, that she’d made an innocent mistake. I was profoundly disappointed.

  So, one day I put together all the pieces I’d picked up over the years and tried to present them to Mum, to try to jolt her into giving me a more coherent picture of our family’s background. Did I get a shock! I’d just started laying out some of the inconsistencies—Mum was sitting at her treadle machine—and she burst into tears. She said she was sick and tired of the government trying to take us off her, and why couldn’t I just leave well enough alone? She continued that if I didn’t stop giving her trouble by pestering for information that could only get us all put away, the government would take me and she’d let them have me. I didn’t know whether to believe her or not.

  From then on, she increased her efforts to create a credible history for us. She’d married, she said, an A
merican soldier who was half Negro and half Cherokee Indian. She said that mixed marriages such as these often produced children who didn’t look the same, and she pointed out brothers and sisters around the neighbourhood who didn’t appear to share similar features or hair colouring. That, she said, was why Dellie and I looked one way, and Leonie looked another. It was because our father was of mixed blood. Dellie and I looked like half his family and Leonie looked like the other half.

  She also said I’d been born in America, in a big house in Maryland, and didn’t I remember how I used to run around and around with my hand on the shiny wooden pole at the bottom of the huge staircase? We had lived in that house with my father’s mother, my grandmother. Mum described her as a very old black lady, a Negro, with grey hair and wrinkles.

  This story was like an oasis to a person dying of thirst. I drank it all in and repeated it many times, to myself, my sisters and friends, and to welfare people who came around periodically. A few days after Mum had started the story, she continued it by saying that my father had been a hero in the war. She produced a sheet of paper which she said was a citation for his heroism and that it would be mine eventually, but in the meantime she’d keep it for me. It had nothing on it but a poorly typewritten tract, no insignia, no signature, just a small page of writing. Mum said she would put it in her trunk for me. Years later, after I’d seen a detective in a film compare print faces of typewritten ransom notes, I discovered the letters of the citation contained the same idiosyncrasies as the old manual typewriter Mum had given us. This, too, was disappointing, but so nicely did the story fit my deep need that I was able to explain the discrepancy away to myself.

  One day when I was home in bed with asthma, I heard two men at the front door telling Mum that it would be in her children’s best interest for them to be brought up by the government, and that she ought to let us go. Mum was speaking softly, trying to get them to keep their voices down because she knew I was only a few feet away in the back bedroom. But then I heard her yelling: ‘You can’t do that to a white woman. You’re not dealing with some poor dumb Abo here!’ When they left, I asked her what an ‘Abo’ was, but her rage had been stirred up by their visit and she ranted at me in her strongest language for the next half hour or so. My fears—that being an ‘Abo’ was the worst thing one could be—had been mightily reinforced.

  On other occasions, men in suits came around when Mum wasn’t home, asking me or our neighbours questions: how many of us were living in the house? Did we have a bed each? How did Mummy make her money? We got a flogging from Mum if we went to the front door and answered questions or failed to call her immediately anyone knocked when she was home. Dellie and Leonie weren’t allowed to answer questions. In Mum’s absence, my sisters had to call me. Mum had coached me on a stock of answers with which to put people off, to get them to go away. I had to tell them that she would come down to their office, or ask them to go away and come back at a time when she’d be home.

  I believed her story of our big house and family in America because I badly wanted it to be so. I wanted a story that would protect us, one in which my mother was not regarded as the local ‘sinner’ and her children could not be abused as bastards. Whatever her lifestyle may have been before she had us, there were no grounds for disrepute after, and I wanted a family history which reflected her goodness, her widowhood, and gave us a respectability in our town. That was all I wanted. Mum and I both worked very hard, earning our living, scrubbing people’s houses and washing their dirty linen and clothes, and I understood we had to work for any material thing we got. But it seemed to me, from the shabby way people often spoke to us, that no matter how hard and long we worked, we would never earn their respect. Respect was something that flowed out of a family’s history, and when Mum finally told me our wonderful story I wondered why she had kept it to herself all this time.

  It didn’t have to be true, and in a part of myself I knew that it was too good to be true. From time to time I tested Mum, asking her questions such as why we had come to Australia, to Townsville, to live. Her answer was that a lot of racists lived in Maryland and they didn’t like children of mixed marriages. To my ten-year-old ears, this sounded like a good enough reply. From the way she talked, I thought Maryland was a little town, and I looked out for any mention of it in the American cowboy movies we sometimes saw at the theatre.

  Perhaps Mum didn’t notice, or didn’t want to notice, that most of the white people who lived all around us in Townsville also didn’t like children of mixed marriages, especially those who were poor.

  The seating divisions in the local picture theatres were a good barometer of class. Children from my school, when they went to the theatre, sat up in the balcony, in the most expensive seats. Their parents bought their snacks from a snackbar which served only people sitting in the balcony, and the ladies’ room which serviced that section had large mirrors and little stools on which to sit in order to repair makeup, quite unlike the spartan facilities available to those of us downstairs.

  We were in another class and sat in the cheapest seats. We were lucky to have a few pennies with which to buy anything at interval, a sherbet or a drink between us. After the films we would always scramble about under the seats to collect the empty bottles left behind by the better classes, and redeem them for their cash deposits. In that way we’d try to ensure that we had enough money to go again the following week. As we grew older and Mum had a little loose change, she tried to stop us from collecting bottles, but our frugal habits were completely ingrained by then; to walk past an empty bottle was almost the same as walking past at least the equivalent of a dollar. Our coins were smaller but they bought a great deal more than today’s money. As children we were given a shilling (ten cents in today’s currency) to go to a film; admission tickets cost just nine pence each and most sweets were four or six for a penny.

  It was at the picture theatres that I first began to meet other coloured kids—Mum had told us to refer to ourselves as ‘coloured children’ to stop other people from calling us ‘niggers’—and was able to talk to them, because neither their parents nor my mother were there. We began to band together to work the theatres—collecting all the bottles and redeeming the deposits—and in the process, cut out poor white kids who wanted a share in the money.

  Slowly, our familiarity grew. As we were leaving we’d call out, ‘See you next Saturday,’ and the other kids would reply, ‘Yeah. Next Saturday.’

  After a while I asked one child, ‘Where d’ya live?’, and got the reply, ‘Garbutt. Where d’ya live?’

  Garbutt sounded like a magical place because just about every coloured child I asked seemed to live there.

  Laaka, who’d settled down and was employed in regular work for the railways, bought a truck. There weren’t many vehicles in Townsville at that time and the roads were very safe, although you might not have thought so on Sundays when all the Catholics arrived at the cathedral for Mass.

  Laaka’s truck, like many other vehicles then, had to be cranked to start. It had a metal cabin and the entire back was built from planks of wood. For a few pounds, he also bought a small block of land on Black River, which was then regarded as a very long way out of town. I recall the first time he took us there to show us his purchase. Mum sat in the front of the truck with Leonie on her knee and a picnic basket on the seat, and Dellie and I slid around in the back and got splinters from the floorboards. Laaka later fixed a blanket for us to sit on if we were going anywhere, but on the first ride we were unaware of the hazards.

  The idea of a trip was so exciting, and our family had been anticipating it for weeks. Apart from the journey to Cairns, we kids had only been to places which could be reached by the local bus service. Now we were going somewhere that we could walk around in the real bush, where we might see real animals—cows and horses—and I’d be able to climb up a real bush tree!

  We left very early in the morning, just as the sun’s first rays allowed us to see the road. The tr
uck lights weren’t strong enough for driving in darkness. The trip took hours, but our excitement kept us buoyant. We kids sang songs at the top of our voices. At long last, we pulled off the narrow bitumen strip onto a graded side road, and then onto an even smaller road. When we left that road we had to make our own track, because we were now on Laaka’s little block.

  Laaka carried everything we’d brought for our picnic to a clearing and Mum spread out a groundsheet on which to set it up. I was so delighted at the sight of the trees, all gums, that I announced loudly that I was going to climb one immediately. Everyone stopped what they were doing to watch me.

  The one I chose was, naturally, the tallest tree around. It soared up into the air on its long thin and bare, but sturdy looking trunk, and had a few sparse boughs and leaves only at the very top. I had seen jungle films of people climbing trees of this shape, so I wrapped my arms and legs easily around the trunk and quickly worked my way almost to the top. I reached what I thought was the first of its boughs, scrambled over it and put my foot on it to get purchase. Suddenly, I was falling through the air towards the ground. The bough had been dead and had snapped off the tree at its fork. On the way down I heard Mum’s shriek.

  I lay on the ground for a moment, quite stunned and then, carefully moving each limb slowly at first to make sure it wasn’t broken, I got to my feet. My knees were shaking like jelly from the shock. Laaka, Dellie and Leonie were standing wide-eyed, gazing at me in surprise, but Mum had her back to me and her spine was rigid with tension in her expectation that Laaka was about to tell her that I was dead, or my leg had been broken, or something. When I walked up behind her and said, ‘My legs are wobbling,’ Mum looked around in surprise at the sound of my voice, and let out a sharp gasp of relief.