“But I hardly know anything about you.”
“Well, let me tell you.”
Sonnyboy told her the story of his life. He talked about the insult and blindness of not been arrested on his own merit, of the sadness over the business with his father.
“Don’t make them make you stop loving,” Sweetie-Mary said, her voice thin and trembly and as if she was saying these words not so much to him as to herself, their eyes linking. She surprised him. She really was listening. That was when he knew it. Yes, this was the woman.
Yes. With renewed pleasure.
“And you?” he asked. “You went away and come back. What about you?”
“Me?”
Sweetie-Mary Tells Her Story
After she leave Cunaripo Secondary School, with a pass in Religious Knowledge and Cookery, Sweetie-Mary look around Cascadu to see what she could find to do. The only employment was in the government works project, keeping the roads clean and the hedges trimmed. Agriculture was dead, and in any event that was not a sector her education had prepared her for. She wasn’t qualified to be a teacher. She wasn’t qualified to be a nurse. She feel she was too good to be working in a store, if she could get even that, and she know that if she was to make something of her life she would have to leave Cascadu.
So, she headed out one Monday morning in her best dress, something off-the-shoulder, with two straps to keep it up and a little blouse over it, with her red high-heeled shoes and her handbag with her birth certificate and her General Certificate of Education with her two passes, Cookery and Religious Knowledge, to Port of Spain where she get a job to sell beauty products that had her going from door to door trying to sell people the idea that it is nice to look nice and smell sweet, advising them which shade from among a range of lipsticks suited their complexion, she herself smelling of the perfume she was selling, her face smoothed over with the makeup creams, her hair falling around her face like a model in a fashion magazine, sweating (though she can’t allow herself to sweat) in the hot sun in the outfit she was required to wear, balancing in high heels to represent glamour, her own language reformed, refined, the clothes she wearing costing more than a month’s pay, the more time she spend doing this job the more into debt she falling. People find she looking nice and staying slim, not knowing that it is because she hardly eating. Sometimes she dress up like Christmas and she don’t even have money to take a taxi home, and she didn’t have to have a pass in mathematics to understand that she was not working for money but working to be working, to keep up the appearance of doing something. There she was, a woman alone, far from the strictness of her home. No religion to save her, no protection of family to shelter her, free, alone, every temptation she have to deal with by herself alone, every move a fella make to interpret for myself, nobody to decipher anything for her, a whole world to face in freedom without support or cover. And she have no money. She owe the company for the dresses she wearing, for the shoes, for the hairdo, for the brooch. The only thing free is the perfume and the cream she was selling. To have any money she have to take advances on her salary; and because she don’t have money anyone that offer her something, she looking at them with suspicion. She start to be afraid of men who look at her too hard, to swell up her face at fellars who wanted to talk to her. She start to close up, to get dry. She dream that she was pregnant. She dream she was falling. She look around her, nobody to give her rescue and she realize that she was alone and that the world didn’t care. It didn’t care. People smiled or cried, the world didn’t care.
With the little pittance that they give her, she keep up the pretense that this was a great city and a great world and she made her appearance in Cascadu in the high-heel shoes and the pretty dresses that she didn’t tell them that she did not own, with presents for her mother and her little sisters, not big things, little things, a ballpoint pen, a nail file, ribbon for the hair of the one still in school, candy, to make them think things was all right with her, all of them waiting for Saturday afternoons for her to come out the taxi, everybody shouting Mary Mary Mary, all of them standing around waiting for her to open her purse and take out the little nothings, all of them believing that she was more than OK, that she was good. Many times when things get hard, she thought of going back home to Cascadu, but when she think of the sight of her sisters’ faces as she dip into her bag those Saturdays and bring out the little square chocolate in the pretty gold paper or the little rubber doll or the bodice, she couldn’t do it. She think of it, but she couldn’t do it and she bear what she had to bear alone. She blamed herself for not learning in school. She blame herself for not signing up to be a security guard like her cousin Janice who at least had a uniform and a baton. She blamed herself for not being brave enough to open her mouth and let the people employing her know the pressure she was under. And men, she stayed far from men, because it was one thing to get pregnant in Cascadu but even worse to get pregnant in Port of Spain. She looked around at the girls cheerfully selling in stores, girls prettier than her serving in snackettes, at people passing chatting with each other in the streets – where did they get their smile? How did they keep the rhythm of their body? What it is give them their pep, their bravery? And what to do? She changed her hairstyles but that didn’t change her. She begin to feel odd, like the only person in a Carnival band without a costume. Where was she living? First in the hostel for women and then in a little place up Belmont Valley Road that she could barely afford, where it had no lights, the water was at a standpipe in the yard, the only furniture a bed and a table that she used to iron on. And who to talk to? Her neighbors in the apartment next to her room, Miss Elaine and the man she living with, a seaman, Jose, a smiling Spanish fellow who was always home, waiting for a boat, from the moment he get up from sleep, smoking cigarette after cigarette and every day discussing a different part of a woman’s anatomy to the mechanical amusement of his pet parrot that he had trained to laugh at his jokes, Ha ha ha, and to say the only other words in his vocabulary, Excuse me! Excuse me! Ha ha ha excuse me. In the upstairs apartment was a newlywed couple whose names nobody knew because they called each other by one name: Darling. I’m going out, Darling. Bye, Darling, Hello, Darling. To save money, which she didn’t have, she started to carry a sandwich to work; and to kill two birds with one stone she started to go to the Roman Catholic cathedral around lunchtime to eat her sandwich and to pray. One midday as she come out the church, she meet Miss Waldron, a woman who worked same place as she, stylish, well put away, everything in place. She too was leaving the church where she had gone to pray. They start to talk.
“No, girl,” Miss Waldron tell her, after she tell Miss Waldron how her life was going. “Nothing ain’t wrong with you. You just young. You just totally new and free and modern. You is the first free woman in the world, no man, no family, no religion, everything to fight for, everything to replace or reject. Everything to build. You is new. You can’t want to give up even before you begin. And looking for a man wouldn’t help you. You approaching it wrong. You frightening life. You making life nervous around you. You not giving it a chance to help you. If we have a responsibility to this place, to this business, then it have to have some obligation to us. If we put our labor here, it is here we have to look for our future. Where the cow tie is there it have to graze.”
It was after she talk to Miss Waldron that she raised with her supervisor the question of the money being deducted from her pay for the clothes they give her to wear. She talked to them. They danced her for two months.
“We striking,” Miss Waldron tell her.
“Two of us?”
“You want me to do it alone?”
The next thing Sweetie-Mary know, is she and Miss Waldron on the pavement in front of the business place, she that first day in her nice dress and high-heel shoes like she going to a soirée, and Miss Waldron as usual well put away. At the end of that day her feet killing her, she sweating, she tired, she thirsty. With that experience she and Miss Waldron learn that you c
an’t go on strike looking like you just step out the pages of a magazine. Next day they gone back in more comfortable clothes. They stay in front that place on the pavement for three weeks. They had started off, she and Miss Waldron, in their feeble, uncertain voices whispering the words that people on picket lines used:
Don’t buy, Pass by.
Don’t buy, mamaguy.
And singing even more feebly the hymn sung by trade unionists, “Hold the fort for I am coming,” timid, like she doing some kinda wrong. Then it hit her, Girl, what you frighten for? You ain’t thief nothing. If you open your mouth and talk, the police can’t hold you. So what you handcuffing your mind for? And what you have to lose?
And it hit her that all she have is her love.
“And each other,” Miss Waldron tell her.
Next day, she upped the volume of her singing and she get into the rhythm of the song, Hold the fort for I am com-ing, like she is a roadside Shouter Baptist, until people start to look at them, some to smile and some even to join them in the chant:
Don’t buy. Pass by.
Don’t buy. Mamaguy.
And is so her employers hear them. So when they call in she and Miss Waldron with the offer to give them a few dollars more and to deduct only half the cost of their clothing from their pay, she decided that she wouldn’t take it. She would leave the job. She wanted to do something for herself. She could cook. She was young enough, she could start again.
Sonnyboy was hearing what she was saying, but, even more, he was listening to the spirit in her, feeling from her the humor, the joy, the faith, the life.
The Love Song of Sonnyboy
Sonnyboy couldn’t help a smile broadening his face.
“So what you grinning at?” she asked him.
“We should be together,” he said, and when she said nothing: “You is just the woman for me. Can I come for you and take you for a drive sometime? I sure you never see all the places around here. The beach, the waterfall.”
She looked at his leg.
“My foot,” he said in explanation. “It got short.” He pronounced it shot. “I was going through the Nariva swamp trying to save one of my buddies when the enemy tossed a hand grenade. I’m lucky to be alive today.”
“You was in a war? In Trinidad?”
“In a battle. You never hear of it, the Battle of Nariva?”
She looked at him suspiciously, “No. I never.”
“It’s a joke,” he said. “That is what I tell people when they ask me about my leg.”
“Fool,” she said. “Whose van it is you driving?” asked as if the question was not her own; and he notched it as an inquiry inspired by either her past or by her mother.
“You want to go for a drive?”
“Drive? I in enough trouble already. If I leave here for any drive, my mother . . . I don’t want her to be talking, telling me anything.”
“So how I will see you, then? The cinema? You go to the cinema? If you want, I could ask your mother if you can go for a drive with me. You want me to ask your mother?”
“No. She wouldn’t want me to go with a break-foot man.”
But you’re a big woman, he thought to say. Instead, he said, “In the war I got the medal of honor for bravery,” still trying for a joke. “You sure I shouldn’t ask your mother?”
“She wouldn’t understand. Is better not to tell her anything. She would love to be able to say that I run away with you. She will feel better. It will make people feel sorry for her, for her troubles, her children.
“It will be a Godsend to her, her daughter running off with a short-foot man, a break-foot man, and a badjohn to boot.”
“Badjohn? That is how you see me? A badjohn?”
“So, you not a badjohn?”
“What you think?”
“I don’t know.”
He swallowed his disappointment and tried again. He said, “So how will I see you?”
She didn’t say anything.
Then she turned to face him, to study him, and suddenly he saw in her eyes the mischief and daring, as if a fresh thought had just jumped wild into her head: “Though if you come in the night when my mother sleeping . . .”
He turned back to her. “When can I come?”
“Any night,” she sang.
“Good,” he said, too quickly, not wanting to ask for details lest she discover a difficulty and withdraw her invitation.
And is only afterward that Sonnyboy discovered that he didn’t know when to go. Any night was so imprecise. What hour? When did the mother go to sleep? And Sweetie? How would she know when and where he would be waiting? He didn’t want to wait for another two weeks when he had legitimate reason to visit the shop.
That night Sonnyboy put on a black beret, a black sweater and black pants so as to blend in with the darkness and set out on foot to Sweetie-Mary’s house. He had no idea of how he would see her or what he would do. But as he walked, all the music he had known flooded his brain, his being and he started to whistle. He wanted to whistle love songs that would expose his feelings, but the tunes he found himself whistling were tunes played by the steelbands on Carnival Monday when the city was a stage and symphony, thick with music, overflowing with love. And that night, on the four-mile stretch of road leading from his grandmother’s to Mary’s mother place, Sonnyboy whistled song after song after song from those mornings. He whistled “In a Monastery Garden.” He whistled “Lebensraum.” He whistled “Back Bay Shuffle” and Puerto Rican mambo. He whistled “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” “Minuet in G,” “The Flight of the Bumble Bee,” “Roses from the South,” “Skokian,” “The Bells of St Mary’s,” and when he got to Sweetie’s he whistled “With a Song in My Heart,” the tune that Ebonites mash up town with, when he, Sonnyboy, was a barebacked fella in the steelband, beating the iron, tasting the music, sweat flowing down his face, feeling the heat and the strain of his arms and the sweetness of belonging, and by his side big hard men who have no fear for nobody, who ain’t ’fraid nobody in the world, who will pelt bottle and stab and cut and butt and cuff, these big men marching down the road to their own rhythm, their feet dragging in that sweet hallelujah nonchalant rhythm, as if they own the world and the road ain’t big enough to hold them, so they walk, not side by side, but singly, one behind the other, with space around each, as if they were each costumed in a big mas, a King of the Bands costume that would require the whole road for them to display their power and beauty. All the dancing in their heart, in their pores, in the grains of hair on their head, in the stirring in their stones, and all they could do to express it was this chip chip chip, chipping down the road, part of this multitude, with their arms spread open like in a crucifixion, as if to say all this is we, all this is fucking we, all this, listen to it, listen to your heart and your stones. And in front the band, dancing the love is a woman with the flag, she jersey tie-up halfway up her belly, below she breasts, her bottom out-jutting, her foot planted so she could get a grip on the ground and bring forward the power and space to wave the flag and display all the fecundity and love in her dancing; and behind her the crowd, the band, just flowing, just chipping, everyone swept along by all the love a moment could hold. All that love. Lord! And that was the nature of Sonnyboy’s whistling, all that was his love song.
Every night the whistling would pierce the darkness, come out from the trees along the road and Sweetie-Mary would hear it, along with her mother and her brother and her three sisters. She couldn’t move because the whole household was awake, listening. When he went to deliver goods, her mother was present and he didn’t get to talk to her to firm up an arrangement as to when he would see her, so he continued his whistling. After three weeks, Sonnyboy was on the verge of giving up expecting Sweetie-Mary to come out and meet him because even he was aware that everyone was hearing him; but he kept on whistling “With a Song in My Heart,” whistling all the parts of the Ebonites Jouvay morning arrangement whenever he got in the vicinity of the house, because at least he knew sh
e would be hearing. And then one night in the middle of his whistling, she appeared smelling of the cleanness of honey and the sap of trees, and so as to not alert the neighborhood that anything different was happening he went on whistling and walking away from the house, she walking with him, because by then her household had grown accustomed to hearing the whistler and the mother no longer alert at the whistler’s presence had gone to sleep. And that was the pattern of their meeting. Still, every time he thought to touch her, she countered by a change in her posture and another story about her life, of the fellow she thought loved her, of the mistakes she made, of the wait she had decided she must wait, of the care she had to take of the difference between love and love, Sonnyboy all this time trying to calm her until his eyes began to close on him, forced open only because he knew he had to walk her home and then walk back by himself and get a little sleep and go and drive the van. But Sonnyboy had already had his answer from her. He was happy to be with her and really pleased that he could just enjoy her presence, his heart and head so full that sometimes he didn’t have anything to say there was so much, so that sometimes he just nodded and said yes aloud, as if, yes, this was right, this surrender.
“What you want with me?”
“I tell you already,” he said.
“Tell me again,” she said.
He looked for words: “I like you,” he said, knowing that those did not convey the weight of his feelings.
“Like?” she asked.
“Yes, I like you.”
“You like me? Man,” she said. “You have to love me. And show it to me every day.” And as if not to discourage him, but wanting to alert him to her ambition, she said, “I have my plans. To open a little business. I can cook.”
Sonnyboy didn’t say anything. He had wanted with her words to hold her, to draw her to him and to embrace her, but he resisted the temptation, careful to not make a wrong move because she might still be thinking of him as a badjohn. So, waiting for her guidance, they walked on in silence. Sonnyboy felt himself in an unfamiliar world and that he was being led by this woman. He was not unhappy to follow. He was thinking how to make her see him, wondering what to do. He wanted to be himself. But what was himself?
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