by Andrea Levy
Mr Philip Roberts was almost as important a man as my father. Short with a round belly plump from plantain and his beloved dumplings. He had a house that sat in its own green acres of land, which was befitting of his status as the wholesaler for the grocers of the district. All produce came through his hands. So trusted was he that low-class people from all around would call at his door to settle any fuss in the neighbourhood. He was not the law but he was authority, and his face drooped two fleshy jowls with the weight of that responsibility.
Martha Roberts was known throughout the district for her pale grey eyes, a rarity on a face that everyone agreed should not have been so dark. Two inches taller than Mr Philip, her frame, over the years, had obligingly hunched shorter so as to spare her husband that indignity. She had given birth to three children: two girls and a boy. Her hair turned overnight from black to startling white when her dearest daughters died – together, only days apart – from measles. Mr Philip and Miss Ma, as I was allowed to call my father’s cousins, were then left with only one child to nurture. Their precious son, Michael.
Miss Jewel, Alberta’s mother, wore her good hat and her best blouse to lead me to the house of my father’s cousins. I, a tiny girl, tripping along beside her in sham-patta shoes. My only words were Mamma and na-na (which I believe meant banana). I remember staring at white shoes tied neat with laces, two bloody knees and a grinning boy, who held a gecko on his palm for me to see.
With a nod and the assurance of money from my father, it was all agreed. Alberta was to leave Jamaica and take up work in Cuba and Miss Jewel would stay as a servant of my father’s cousins. She would watch me grow. In those years she washed, dressed and fed Michael and me. Calling him Massa Michael and me Miss Hortense. (Miss Hortense when there was someone to hear and ‘me sprigadee’ when there was not.)
I sat a quiet vigil in the henhouse. Waiting. Watching the hen pushing out her egg – seeing it plop soft and silent on to the straw.
‘Hortense, where are you?’ Michael padded around outside in his rubber-soled shoes. His shadow playing on the wooden slats in the wall. His one eye, with lashes that curled like a girl’s, looked through a hole in the wood. ‘Come out, Hortense.’ He slapped his palms on the walls, which shook this tiny world and startled the hen into deserting her egg. Michael liked to see chickens flapping their wings, scattering in fright, screeching until he could do nothing but laugh and cover his ears against the sound.
I pushed him aside as I carried the newly laid egg into the house, him leaping around me saying, ‘Let me see, Hortense, let me see.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you have no patience, Michael Roberts, to sit and watch the egg coming out. So you have no reason to look upon the egg.’
Miss Ma thanked Michael for the egg I brought into the house. Her hands enclosed mine, the warmth of her touch gradually pulling the egg from my hand. Devotion lit her pale eyes as she gazed on Michael’s face. He puffed out his chest like a cock and said, ‘Shall I bring you more, Mamma?’
She only looked on me to say, ‘Hortense, I don’t want you in the henhouse. Leave the chickens alone. You hear me, nah?’
‘You are a nuisance to me, Michael Roberts,’ I told him. A boy one year older than me and one foot smaller who led me into mischief. For one, I was not supposed to climb trees. Mr Philip told me that it was not godly for girls to lift themselves into branches as a monkey would. Or come home wet from the stream, our bellies full of star apples, raspberries and mangoes, my skirt clinging to my legs with Michael running behind me dangling a wriggling fish from his hand. I was not supposed to hunt for scorpions, tipping them from their hiding-place, tormenting them with a stick. Or dress the goat in a bonnet and attempt to ride her like a horse.
‘Leave me alone, Michael. You can play all day but I have work that must be done,’ I told that wicked boy daily. I had washing to do in the outhouse sink, cleaning of the shades on the kerosene lamps. I was responsible for keeping the area under the tamarind tree free from dirt and a pleasure to sit in. But he was always, ‘Come, Hortense, come, Hortense. Let us see the woodpecker’s nest.’ Him impatient, wriggling underneath me as I stood on his back trying to see into the hole in the tree that the bird flew from. ‘You see anything yet? Come, Hortense, it’s my turn now.’ Tipping me on to the ground just as I was to look on the nest.
‘Why you do that, Michael? I just about to see.’
‘It’s my turn, Hortense. Bend over.’ This boy, older than me, climbing on my back, complaining all the time. ‘Stand still, you make me fall, nah.’ And saying, ‘I think I see. Stay still. I think I see,’ as the woodpecker flew from the hole and pecked him on his head. Oh, how that boy screamed from the little cut the woodpecker made.
If Mr Philip knew of the devilment I had been tricked into he would have sent me away. Little girls did not climb trees! ‘Principle,’ he bellowed at every meal. ‘We must all have principle. Each one of us will stand accountable – puny and small in front of the magnificent throne of the Almighty.’ After he had blessed the food with a grace that sometimes went on long enough for my neck to get stiff with the prayer, Mr Philip started his sermon: ‘Life is preparation for the day when we finally look upon the face of the Lord, our Maker.’ He rose from his seat clutching his Bible like a weapon. ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’ Sometimes he banged the table – Miss Ma looking nervous, seizing a vibrating bowl or wobbling water jug. ‘It is only through the Lord thy God that we will reach the kingdom of heaven.’ Larger than a mountain, Mr Philip stood looking down between Michael and I. Michael did not attempt to catch my eye for fear it would start us giggling. No words came from our mouths. Not one word. Spittle often hit my cheek but I did not dare brush it away. Or look on Mr Philip’s face, scared I would be entranced by the lines that came and went as his forehead danced with the wonder of the scriptures. Miss Ma placed food on to Mr Philip’s plate, nodding her approval, then held out her hand to serve Michael and I. We kept our heads bowed to eat as Miss Ma instructed us on appropriate table manners. ‘Take your elbows off the table while you are eating. Hortense, please sit straight. Michael, do not put so much food into your mouth. Only a horse chews with its mouth gaping.’
I pinched myself at the table on the night before Michael was to leave to attend boarding-school. Squeezing my nails into my hand until blood pricked on my skin. I did not want to cry. I did not want to paw at the table and beg them let me go with him. I had been told, when there is too much pain, tears nah come.
‘Remember now thy creator in thy days of youth,’ Mr Philip began. ‘But it is time to surrender the deeds of thy younger years. And walk in the way of God as a man.’
I gave Michael my bottle of perfumed water with which to clean his slate at his new school. I did not want his slate to give off the stinking vapours that the boys’ slates at my government school did.
He took it, saying, ‘I will learn about the whole world, Hortense. And you will be staying at the penny-a-week school, skipping silly rhymes and counting frogs at the base of the tree.’
I pushed my fingers into my ears and sang, ‘“What are little boys made of? Moss and snails and puppy dogs’ tails . . .”’ He poked out his tongue and handed me back the bottle. It fell and I finally cried when the earth claimed the sweet-smelling liquid.
Tiddlers swam in the rivers without worry. Woodpeckers went about their business. The goat looked as a goat should. Scorpions stayed in their hiding-place. Even Mr Philip cut short his nightly Bible readings, asking for his glass of water to be poured long before Miss Ma had given me any table manners. And, without Michael, I sat in the henhouse undisturbed.
Miss Jewel called me every day after school, ‘Miss Hortense, di boy gone, come help me nuh.’ Her colossal leather-worn hands squeezed waterfalls from washing. Her breasts wobbled: two fallen fruit trapped by the waistband of her skirt. Her legs bowed.
‘Miss Jewel,’ I asked, ‘why your legs stick out so?’
She solemn, sucked her teeth and said
, ‘Me nuh know, Miss Hortense. When me mudda did pregnant dem seh smaddy obeah’er. A likkle spell yah no.’ And she sang as she washed. ‘“Mr Roberts wash him sock at night. And sidung pon de ground.”’
‘No, Miss Jewel,’ I told her, ‘you are singing the wrong words. It is “While shepherds watched their flock by night”.’
‘Weh you mean shepherd, Miss Hortense?’
‘A shepherd is a man who looks after sheep.’
‘Sheep? Dem nuh have none ah dat in Jamaica?’
‘No, it is England where the shepherd is, Miss Jewel.’
‘Oh, Hengland. Ah deh so de Lawd born ah Hengland?’
‘Of course. And in England sheep live everywhere. They wear wool to keep out the winter cold.’
She looked to me for all her knowledge of England.
‘Miss Jewel,’ I told her, ‘you should learn to speak properly as the King of England does. Not in this rough country way.’
‘Teach me nuh, Miss Hortense?’
I taught her the poem by Mr William Wordsworth that I had learned to recite at school.
I wander’d lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils.
Even though she asked, ‘Weh yoh seh it name – daffodil?’ and did not stop fussing until I had drawn the flower in the dirt, she learned every word. Watching my lips like a child enthralled, moving her own to form the same shapes. Recounting every perfect word with her chin high and her arms folded under her breasts. But soon she was rehearsing her own version as she went about her day. ‘“Ah walk under a cloud and den me float over de ill. An’ me see Miss Hortense a look pon de daffodil dem”.’
My government upper school had to lose its star pupil when I reached the age of fifteen. Upon leaving I was pressed by Miss Ma and others to continue improving myself by assisting with the education of young children (from good families) at a private school. I marked their dictation, underlining any wrongly spelt word and supervising as they rewrote the offending item six times. I listened to the reciting of times tables, correcting the bright pupils and encouraging the backward ones to speak up during the repetition of their mistakes. My favourite task was to hand out the books at the beginning of term. Those children all had new books, whose turning pages wafted a fragrance of sun on sweet wood; a scent of knowledge. They did not have the musty stench of decay that emitted from the dog-eared Nestfields grammar books at my government school.
This private school was run by Mr and Mrs Ryder, a married couple who had sold everything they had in America to set up the school.
‘It is for the poor people that we have been sent to do this,’ Mr Ryder told me, on our first meeting.
Mrs Ryder, in her movie-star accent, remarked, ‘Someone must help these poor negro children. Education is all they have.’
Many people wondered if Mr and Mrs Ryder were aware that their school took only the wealthiest, fairest and highest-class children from the district. Or whether these polite, clean and well-spoken pupils nevertheless still looked poor to them.
The Ryders were evangelists and Mr Philip had no time for evangelists. He did not like the way that people moved by the spirit of the Lord threw themselves to the ground shaking and frothing at the mouth like beasts. He could not understand that, as the service came to a close, those same people could be seen politely shaking the preacher’s hand as they left the church. He said, ‘The spirit of the Lord cannot come and go in people so quickly.’ I asked him to make an exception of Mr and Mrs Ryder as the spirit only ever moved them to raise their eyes to heaven and sway.
Mrs Ryder was, without any doubt, the whitest woman I had ever seen. Her short blonde hair sat stiff as a halo around her head. Her delicate skin was so thin that in places it revealed a fine blue tracery of veins. But her mouth looked unfinished – a gash in her face with no lips to ornament the opening. Mr Ryder had so very little hair that a naughty boy from the school claimed to have counted the strands that were left. Sixty-five was the number that escaped from the schoolyard out into the town. His poor shiny hairless head was red as a berry ripe to burst, and when the sun caught his face a fever of brown freckles was produced.
They had a car, which was the envy of every black man who ever walked from the fields in slip-slop shoes. Even Mrs Ryder drove this car, sitting low at the wheel in a hat adorned with a long brown bird’s feather. The car drew head-turning stares from anyone it passed. So it was to no one’s surprise that gossip about the Ryders followed close behind: in shops, under the shade of trees, on street corners, at food tables, busybodies discussed when they last saw Mr Ryder where Mr Ryder should not have been. When a pretty young woman produced a fair-skinned baby with a completely bald head, the men who sat at their dominoes sucked their teeth and whispered that Mr Ryder was spreading more than just his love of learning. Some looked in pity on Mrs Ryder as she sauntered through the district unescorted. Although plenty of young men would leave their game of dominoes undecided to rush to her assistance.
For Michael’s homecoming, I wore a pink floral dress that was given to me by Mrs Ryder. She had no more need of it so I asked if I might take it to have something pretty to wear for Michael. I sat into the night in the feeble flicker of a candle, adjusting the bust for a tighter fit, attaching ribbons of lace and sucking my pricked finger to avoid staining the garment red.
On the morning of Michael’s homecoming we assembled ourselves on the veranda. Mr Philip and Miss Ma fidgeted nervously as the Daily Gleaner van could be heard crunching along the stones of the path.
Michael had been home for holidays many times before. Once he even appeared when Mr Philip had a fever. He read the Bible to his father, talked close into his mother’s ear until she was consoled and left only when Mr Philip demanded his dumplings. But each time he visited something of him had altered.
‘Michael Roberts, what is wrong with your voice?’ I had teased him. We were sitting in the tamarind tree swinging our legs.
‘You can see Cuba from here,’ he said. But his voice cracked like an instrument with a loose string.
‘You sound funny – like this.’ I sang high like a girl, low like a man and something like a goat in between. ‘What is wrong with you?’
He jumped silent from the tree and did not speak until it was time for him to leave. I did not recognise the deep bass noise that came from his mouth the next time I saw him.
‘Come, Hortense,’ this growl from within him said. ‘Stand on my shoulders and see the woodpecker’s nest.’ He was firm and solid under me. ‘Can you see?’
‘I can,’ I said, looking on the empty hole. When I got down I gazed up at his face, him realising at the same moment as I that there was no chance he could stand on my back to look. He would snap me in two.
Was it the suit, the crisp white shirt, the brown-and-green-striped tie held in place by a pin? Was it the hat tipped at an angle on his head? His thin moustache, perhaps, or the crooked smile that lit his face? His eyes, it may have been his black eyes where a mischievous boy could be glimpsed laughing within. Or perhaps it was Miss Ma’s breathless exclamation, ‘Look at you, son. I send a boy to boarding-school and see what they send me back – a man!’
He stepped down from the van in his shiny city shoes. He shook Mr Philip by the hand and bowed his head politely, like a man of class, a man of character, a man of intelligence. Noble in a way that made me want to shout, ‘Michael Roberts! Have you seen Michael Roberts?’ Or perhaps it was the way he looked at me then. Over my curves, across my breasts, up and around my lips as he said, ‘But, Hortense, you are all grown-up.’ Whatever it was, I knew – from the moment my eyes first beheld this handsome, dapper, newly made man – I knew that I loved him.
Michael was gazing on me as we all sat down that night at our usual places for dinner. His eyes willing me to look up into his. I did once – briefly. He smiled so sweetly I nearly pass out at the honeyed taste o
f it on my lips. Miss Jewel arrived in the room carrying a plate of fried chicken. Michael’s eyes closed as he inhaled a waft of fragrant air. ‘Oh, boy, Miss Jewel,’ he said, ‘how I miss you’ spice-up chicken.’ Mr Philip looked up as startled as if a bird had flown through the window. A voice at the table – a child of his had dared speak at the table. But Michael simply patted his stomach as if unaware of this transgression.
After we had eaten, Mr Philip lifted his Bible as he had at every meal I could remember. Miss Ma slapped gently at my hand to stop me playing with my hair as Mr Philip began. ‘And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night.’
Mr Philip then paused for the briefest second – just enough time to clear his throat. His lips were poised to open again and complete his sermon when Michael’s voice said, ‘I have been taught that the earth moves around the sun and that it is this movement—’
Miss Ma, agitated, quickly interrupted with, ‘It is rude to speak at the table, Michael.’
‘Oh, Mamma, I am a grown man now – not a boy.’ It was only shock that kept Mr Philip mute in this situation. While Michael carried on with, ‘It is this movement of the sun which causes night and day.’
‘Boy or man, there will be no back-chat at this table. We will have hush,’ Miss Ma said.
Mr Philip glanced from the Bible to his son with the fierceness of all Ten Commandments, then continued. It was mid-reading when Michael interrupted Mr Philip for a second time. God was making man in his own likeness, as he had done on many occasions before. But this time the Lord’s endeavours were cut short when Michael said, ‘Tell me, Papa, what do you think to the notion that men are descended from monkeys?’