Sonnyboy had been a badjohn, a rebel, a revolutionary, he had appeared as a member of the National Party, he had been the local organizer of the Hard Wuck Party. All in an effort to win acceptance from his community. I felt he was done with trying. He had found a secure place as an African.
We had gone forward to right back where we had begun.
Africa
Sweetie-Mary wasn’t happy with all these changes. She had little life beyond working in the shop and minding her children. And although Sonnyboy had taken her only once to the Oval to see Test cricket and two times to a calypso tent, those were great events in her life and had given her a base from which to contribute to discussions on cricket and calypso as an equal. Also, her excursions with Sonnyboy in the steelband on Jouvay morning was still one of the sweetest times she had had with him. But his changes in attitude had left her with a feeling of unease and she showed it. Now and again I would hear Sonnyboy grumbling about her behavior: “She start back eating meat . . . She want more jewelry . . . Buying a set of clothes . . .”
I overheard her: “But, Sonnyboy, Africa is not a prison. You can’t make Africa a jail.”
Sonnyboy sought my opinion: “King, what it is she want? What she want?”
“Man,” I tell him. “If I was you I would just go in the Carnival band and beat the iron and let the woman play her mas.”
He looked at me as if he wanted to hit me.
“King,” he said sternly, “Sweetie-Mary is an African woman.”
“If you know who she is, then what you asking me?” I didn’t usually talk to him so sharply. But really I wasn’t joking.
I had to say goodbye. I felt a certain sympathy for Sonnyboy, and admiration, even. I do not mean to sound superior. However, I expected that Sonnyboy would occupy the exile of his comfortable harbor until he saw something else to move on to.
Aunt Magenta was puzzled at my concern for Sonnyboy. “Donny, Sonnyboy is no revolutionary, he is a badjohn. What you expect from him?”
The heroes we had inherited had it easy. Distance had crowned them with haloes. Sonnyboy was in the here and now. In the brilliance of this light, we could see his every flaw.
I know Sonnyboy was a hustler. He had lived a twisted life, I know, there was nothing pure about him. I knew his story. But he stood for something. And I was beginning to see that however twisted he might be, what he had contributed to us was a No. I not fucking taking that. That no joined the No’s our heroes had said to the colonizing world. His No was directed at his brethren, not only from a point of view of not wanting what was on offer, but in the suggestion that there was something else we had to build. That was his importance to us. And that is why I had to have us see him not in terms of delinquency, but as serious actor and cause.
I didn’t know if I was making myself clear. My aunt and Clephus continued to criticize me for holding up Sonnyboy as some kind of hero. I know they meant well, but I also knew that they were responding with the prejudices of their education, our education. But I had to go on. However, I didn’t quite give him up. I would drop in to see him. We would chat. I would invite him for a drink. This was just a phase he had to go through, I thought. It would soon come to its end.
I was wrong. Clayton’s Africa was gaining ground. Everybody was seeking public ethnic recognition. In Cascadu, Carlos Nan King spearheaded a move to
have the day the Chinese arrived in Trinidad declared
a public holiday to match Indian Arrival Day and Emancipation Day.
Romesh had become one of the school of home-grown Hindu holy men barebacked and wearing dhoti like Mahatma Gandhi and in the absence of the river Ganges cleansing themselves in the Manzanilla sea. A new African society validating and accrediting individuals and institutions had arisen, with Clayton having the prestige of being installed as its first chief. I saw him in his regalia of chieftainship, his chin tilted upward as his subjects made their obeisance to him. Every tub was sitting on its own bottom, everybody was finding his own ethnic harbor and those of us left outside were suddenly nowhere. But Clayton didn’t pose just an abstract challenge, he had attracted to his attention Dorlene Cruickshank, the most beautiful woman in Cascadu and the bright spot of my world.
Dorlene
Dorlene that time was employed in the library in Cascadu, an elegant polite woman, her hair pulled back off her face with a simplicity that was more challenge than style, since she felt no need to create any illusion, having already established in her mind that no stranger would be visiting the library and there was not a man in Cascadu worthy of her, an idea planted in her mind at eight or nine soon after she came home from school one rainy Monday to find the fence mashed down and a piano settled on the veranda of her house and her father up from the garden inspecting the house to see what had been broken, while Mr. Alliman Brown, the truckdriver, who had been engaged to take the piano on the truck up the hill, stood in the road, looking down over the hibiscus hedge that separated them from the road, at the piano, asking Dorlene’s father if anything was broken and blaming the misfortune on the Englishwoman Miss Phyllis Dorset, the woman who had paid him to get the piano to her house up the hill, saying with a performed outrage, “What the hell she want a piano for? These people come from England and bring everything with them, why they don’t look for things we make here instead of having me carry that big-arse piano up that hill to mash up my frigging engine?”
“Well, thank God nobody ain’t get kill. Eh, Mr. Cruickshank? Eh?” And when her father, the Mister Cruickshank Alliman Brown was addressing, made no answer, he continued in the same irreverent fashion: “From what I could see, this piano reach where it going. It can’t move from here,” his voice louder now because he wanted to be sure that he would be heard by Phyllis Dorset, who had parked her own car and come fluttering up to join him, “What happen, Mr. Brown?” Alliman Brown not even bothering to explain the obvious, saying, “You lucky you wasn’t driving right behind me. The piano break the rope and chain and slide off the truck and slide down the hill and break down the man fence and nearly break down this man house and kill everybody inside. You lucky you wasn’t up in my tail.”
“You think he will let it stay there for the night?” Phyllis Dorset talking.
“I suppose I could come down and give piano lessons here. If we can’t move it and if it is all right with you, Mr. Cruickshank.”
“Piano lessons! You want to give piano lessons. You want piano lessons, Mr. Norman?”
And Norman Cruickshank, Dorlene’s father, standing and looking around with a sense almost of apology, as if it was his house that had moved out its way to intercept the piano; while Mr. Brown: “You can’t see it now, but just touch that piano and it wouldn’t surprise me if the whole damn house don’t come tumbling down.”
“Well, can I just leave the piano here?”
“Well, what you expect him to tell you. Of course, you have to leave it. Norman, you going to have to keep the piano.”
So that was how Dorlene’s family found themselves in possession of a piano. In order to move it, Norman Cruickshank erected two huge pillars to give additional support to the house, decided to reinforce the house so that it would be able to stand up on its own when the piano was removed. Before he could remove the piano, he received a letter from Phyllis Dorset who frequently went sailing up the islands that she was in St. Vincent and would be staying there for a while longer and could he please keep the piano until she returned. That while longer stretching into years. By this time the father had enclosed the veranda and made it a living room with the piano as the centerpiece, more as a monument to be tended than an instrument to master, and although the owner did not return to claim it, Dorlene’s people never quite felt they owned it. The only one of them who would venture to play it was Dorlene herself because she was the youngest and because her father could deny her nothing.
It was the prestige of this possession that her parents would take to heart and set themselves apart from the town and encourage
Dorlene to think she was better than other people, an idea further consolidated by her beauty, and advanced even further when she passed with superior marks the examination that would take her to secondary school at St. Joseph’s Convent in Port of Spain, my aunt Magenta obtaining the news while she was searching the newspapers for the names of children from Cascadu who had placed in the Common Entrance Examination, a habit she had inherited from her mother who had looked in vain to find Aunt Magenta’s name in what was then the College Exhibition Examination.
“Poor thing,” my aunt says, looking up from the newspaper, not overly joyful at all, but sad for the girl
who had grown up remote from our world. “She will not know the bush teas and the songs and the dances. She will live on the edge of the world that is her world. My Lord, how sad it is that so much will be lost to her, will be lost
to us.”
So from early I was mindful of Dorlene as someone disadvantaged, someone in need of sympathy. I wanted to embrace Dorlene, to make her aware of the world to help her bear the burden of this being here and not here. I imagine myself her protector. I want to speak to her, but we do not know each other really, except from this distance. I watch her walk past the corner, her white bodice immaculate, each fold of the pleats in her skirt in place, dispensing the charity of her smile, the smile widening as she grew because by now it was clear that she belonged elsewhere.
Yet in my heart is this sympathy for her.
“How terrible it must be for her,” Aunt Magenta said. “Her only sin is she just happen to pass an examination that her schooling was preparing her for. And it will take her away and keep on taking her away if she unlucky enough to pass another one, and she will go completely if there is another one after that. That is education for you. Is a lucky thing you ain’t have none.”
All those growing years I watch her from a distance, good morning, good evening. And she makes her way to the cocoon of her world of family, the cousins, the aunts, the weddings, the christenings, the Christmas dinners, where they all get together to eat pancakes, to play Scrabble, to count the deceased, to get news of those who have gone away to England and to be brought up to date on the year’s scandals, her mother the resident historian quoting from the stack of newspapers she saves to read up on the murders, the embezzlements, the political scandals that supported her proposition that independence was something they not ready for.
When she left school, Dorlene would have loved to get a job in Port of Spain. Instead, the job she got was in the library in Arima seventeen miles away. The librarians there agreed that nice men did not read, and, in order to expose themselves to a wider pool of a suitable set of men, had organized a program to invite poets to read their work in the library, calypsonians to sing, and John de John the novelist from Matura with thirty-five unpublished novels to read from his current novel, which he had been finishing for forever, Dorlene herself appearing on the program playing the piano and beating the tenor pan. I was one of the calypsonians invited. It was a successful project. At the end of the series, one of the librarians was engaged to be married, one of them had moved in with a man, and a man moved in with one. Mabel, a girl who had started same time as Dorlene, was pregnant and Miss Trim, the head librarian, who had been most skeptical of the idea, had found romance. In her youth she was one of the most beautiful women in the island; her problem, she could not find a man worthy of her. Hassled by men who found her so attractive and desirable, she had gone through life trying to hide herself to make herself a little less obviously desirable, but the clothes she chose refused to cooperate and nothing she wore could contain the scandal of her body and the scent of mornings and rivers and swamp lilies that she left in her wake. Not knowing what else
to do, she became a born-again Christian and began to wait on the only refuge she could imagine, age. But age came slowly and ripened her into a more formidable beauty, her presence so heating up the church that the pastors stumbled over their sermons and wives were cold to her. She moved from church to church, increasingly uncomfortable, sinking herself into an even more glamorous piety in an effort to diminish her attractiveness and keep herself out the mouths of wives threatened by her presence. Even she found love. She discovered that one of the poets best received was a weightlifter who lived next door to her brother. He was a vegetarian and an avid hiker. By the time the series was over, she had begun to lift weights, to hike and to cut meat from her diet. The man who was interested in Dorlene turned out to be not the calypsonian he had presented himself as being but a fella on his way to becoming a priest. That was when she met me. She returned on weekends to Cascadu, where she attended the Roman Catholic church, distant, remote, pious, chaste. Feeling somewhat disappointed that she had not met the man worthy of her, she teamed up with Cynthia de Leon, a red woman like herself, a singer from Maraval, with her head shaved clean, her shaved eyebrows replaced by a long blue line. She had been one of the discoveries of the literary program and had joined Dorlene to take cheer to the unfortunate and the sick, Cynthia singing and she accompanying her on the guitar. They made a good pair, Cynthia de Leon with her voluptuous body, her extravagant gestures, and Dorlene, sober, laid-back, intense, each one giving balance to the other, each one almost laughing at the other so that on stage they would appear to be enjoying the show at least as much as the audience. Dorlene found herself thinking more and more of her music and the orphans and the sick and of joining the nunnery. The idea of her as a nun flattened her mother, who on the weekends they spent together tortured her with her tears of disappointment and prayers to find a man to bring her grandchildren. Her brother who had come back from studying and was about ready to take up a government posting in the Ministry of Agriculture did his part by setting her up with friends of his. She dressed carefully for these dates, not wanting to look too stuffy, and went to them with an attitude to enjoy them, but they never got past the fact that it was a set-up and she went back to finding her mother dismissing her opinions, because as bright as she was she couldn’t get a man. She began to panic. She saw her parents growing old and began feeling as surrendered as Miss Trim might have felt. She listened to her parents laugh and talk as if the world outside was dangerous, some place that could claim them anytime unless they were vigilant. Her mother with the newspapers saved from years before as if she found the past vastly more interesting than the future, her brother, impatient, demanding as if the world had not turned out quite as he had expected it to. And what was her life to be? Dorlene enrolled for music classes at the university on evenings, and during the week traveled down from Arima to St. Augustine.
She was on her way to Rio Claro to perform at a concert when, as she was traveling by taxi along the Cocal road, a coconut fell off one of the trees that lined the road and smashed the windscreen. In the multiplying fractions of the seconds during which the driver struggled to bring the car under control, to avoid hitting a coconut tree and to escape collision with an oncoming truck, Dorlene saw the swirl of sea, the fins and fans of coconut trees, the blue arc of sky, she saw the mangrove on stilts, on grids of roots and the gulls and the gaulins with long feet and with the bags underneath their beaks, heard in her ears such a rush and roaring of life, of stars of eternity stretched out seamless and everlasting and endless and the color of speed and the radiance of sand all in a moment that she prayed to God that if He spared her this time she would spend the rest of it in His service. She didn’t say it in her prayer, but she was thinking definitely of the nunnery. When, after an eternity, the car righted itself, inches from the trunk of a coconut tree, she found herself where the impact of swerving and braking had thrown her, in the back seat with three other passengers, in the lap of Pauline Mendoza, a fisherman who was on his way to Manzanilla Police Station to report the sighting of a strange abandoned vessel that had run aground on the reef. She felt his breath, his arms, the grizzled scrape of his beard, the fiber of his muscles. She smelled the beautiful stink of fish and knew that she was alive. She saw the coconuts
for the first time, the beach across the road, the weeds growing on sand, she saw the endless awesome infinity of space and time, she saw the gulls and the seaweed floating on the seawater and shells of shellfish, ants balancing on leaves sailing, she saw the mangrove and the small crabs and puddles left after the rain and knew that she was part of this magnificence that she had never before imagined, and she knew then with a beautiful impatient certainty, her blood roaring inside her ears, that this life was something that had been given her to live and she felt that service to God could be undertaken in a variety of occupations and His praises sung best by her living. She had escaped without injury; even her guitar miraculously remained unbroken. She untangled herself from the embrace of the fisherman and beaming the widest and most brilliant of smiles she made the sign of the cross, got out the taxi, and crossed the road to wait for one going in the opposite direction.
It was after that event that for the first time I saw her at a dance at the community center. She came over and spoke to me. She remembered me from the program in the library. We danced. We talked. She talked. She told me of her work in the library in Arima. She told me the story of how they got the piano into their house. She told me of her near-death in the car in Cocal. She told me of her love for the piano, for music. She lived here but she didn’t know the place, she was ashamed to say.
“If you want a guided tour, I can show it to you.”
“You serious?”
“Yes.”
I wanted to impress her. I talked of my writings, my singing, the difficulties of being a poet in this place.
“And I thought you were a calypsonian.”
“I am a poet. I only sing calypso because poets can’t make a living in this island.”
We became friends. On weekends when she came up from Arima I would show her Cascadu. I invited her to hear me at the calypso tent. We went together to Siparia fête, Fisherman fête in Toco. She joined the Cascadu steelband, wanting to play pan. At dances well-dressed strangers came over to dance with her. She loved the attention, especially from fellows not from our town. I could see her discovering herself, becoming aware of the power of her charms, the intrigue of her silences, the various effects of the looks in her eyes. One by one, we fell in love with her, but none of it registered on her. We were her chums. None of us was intimate with her and none would be. I watched her fall in love with strangers. Smooth fast-talking fellars, fellars who were nothing – who in any arena of male tussling I would mash up – would become giants, gods, because of the blessing of her love.
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