by Kei Miller
And then my grandmother’s eyes light up. She has remembered something—another detail. “Oh yes—she killed my brother, you know. I told you that she was Haitian, yes? Well she made all these bush teas for Massa. It damaged his liver.”
They did not want to tell me this story. They did not want to tell me about this woman from Haiti who raised cows and who helped kill a man. And they did not tell me about the old black woman who sat in the corner.
I think about my family—my black family—and the black women we hide from our story.
Maybe all that a family is, is the stories we do not tell. Maybe all that a family is, is the shape of its silence. For there in that silence lies all the family’s shame, and all of its values, and all of its most desperate longings. Often, in the vault of a family’s untold stories are the most important things.
I must write this from a peculiar angle. I cannot tell you the stories that were never told to me, or at least that were never told definitively. These are only whispered stories—the little bits overheard when the aunts thought you were not listening, the assorted pieces of a puzzle assembled by you and your cousins as you tried to figure out how things fit together; these are the half stories you swapped at night like little prizes; these are the small snippets told to you by your grandmother when she decided that she was dying and so to hell with it. Perhaps, at the very least, I will change some names—not in order to make this fiction, but to acknowledge the fiction that would have already crept in over the years—the guesses, the conjectures. I must acknowledge the incompleteness of it all. I know how to tell stories, but how does one begin to tell silence?
Of course, my grandfather should have been the one to tell this.
Of course, he would not have.
That would be wishful thinking. A stern and proud man, he, perhaps more than anyone else, was the orchestrator of the family’s silence. He often liked to say, “I am not a man of words.” And this became a family joke. You see, my grandfather was very much a man of words. Words were his livelihood. I am not the first writer in my family. That was my grandfather. He was a newspaper man, writing and editing for the New Statesman, Public Opinion, the Daily Gleaner. His best friends were also writers of books and he too had had ambitions of writing his own books one day, though it never happened. He was a man of words. Words had once landed him in jail for sedition.
Perhaps my grandfather really meant that he was not a man of speech, but that would also have been untrue.
My grandmother tells me of the day she sent him, her husband, to buy laying chickens for the coop. It was a large family that my grandparents had—eleven children—and so they needed the eggs. My grandmother tells me how, on his way back home he stopped to talk to one of his mentees—a young journalist—and they talked and they talked. My grandmother was waiting, but my grandfather was sitting on a verandah on Slipe Road, talking until the sun was going down. At last, seeing the colours of day change, he gets up to leave. By this time, the chickens in the boot of his car have died. He goes home, wrings his hands, shamefaced. My grandmother laughs when she tells this story—when she tells me about my grandfather whose speech was longer than the lives of chickens.
My grandfather was most definitely a man of words, but he would not have used his words to tell this particular story because to tell it, I suspect he would have had to tell you about another woman that he loved, and maybe then my grandmother would not be laughing at all.
For this, we will call her Miss Henny. It is not her name, but it will do. And in any case, for most of my life I did not know her name. She was just the old woman at Aunt C’s house. She had beautiful black skin and impressive white teeth. They were big and straight and I was so young that I did not know that they were false—that they were things that she would take out at night and rest on the bedside table in a cup of water. I knew little about Miss Henny—only that she had been a maid and that even now, in her old age, she still cooked the food at Aunt C’s house, and made the beds, and swept the yard. It seemed to me that Aunt C was a generous woman—that she would not dispense of the housekeeper simply because she was old. I saw Miss Henny at least once a year, whenever the family gathered at Aunt C’s house. There were so many family gatherings. My grandfather, my grandmother, eleven brothers and sisters, and all of them close, and all of them competing to have the entire family over at their house for one celebration or another. So I saw Miss Henny when the family gathered at Aunt C’s, and always I was introduced to her all over again, as all my cousins were. Someone would shout in her ear: “Miss Henny, this is D’s son!” or, “This is M’s daughter!” And she would smile her big, impressive smile and nod. It strikes me now that the introduction was never returned. She was never introduced to us. As the night wore on she just became a shadow sitting there in her chair, sometimes looking on, sometimes sleeping. She was just the old black woman who sat in the corner. I did not know her story. I did not know her story was connected to my family’s—not until the cousins began to whisper: “Do you know who she really is? Do you know her connection to us?”
My grandfather who insisted he was not a man of words instituted the most wordy ritual as part of our annual Christmas dinner. After the feast, and after the family song (yes—my grandfather had composed a family song which we sing with all the gusto of a National Anthem), then it is time for the speeches. The speeches are interminable. Beginning from the eldest child straight down to the youngest, each is expected to stand, give an account of the year just gone and give general Christmas greetings. But of course there are eleven children, and those eleven children have children and grandchildren. So the speeches start with one generation, and then go to the next, and then to the next. My grandfather is long dead, but it seems this tradition will not die. Whenever it is the turn of my youngest cousin to speak we all breathe a sigh of relief because it means there is only one speech left. The last speech belongs to my grandmother. She is the matriarch.
On 25 December 2011, my grandmother stands up at our family dinner to give a kind of speech she has never given before. Her white curls fall over her wrinkled brown face and she leans onto her walking stick. She looks at each of her children gathered before her. She is a mixed woman, my grandmother—Norwegian, Indian, Black—and her children seem to fall, ad hoc, along the full spectrum of her own racial ambiguity. I wonder if it seems odd to her—not that her children have such various racial presentations, but that she has come to an age where they too are old and retired, and with age they have begun to look more alike.
“I’ve been thinking,” my grandmother begins, “that there were things we did in those early days—some decisions that we made—and I know they have caused a lot of hurt. Before I die, we should sit down and talk about these things.”
The family erupts.
“OK, Mother Dear. OK.” Mother Dear—that is what we call her. They pat her on the shoulder as if she is senile at last. But she isn’t and they know it. She is over ninety years old but is more clear-minded than almost any of her children. She has a BlackBerry phone and an iPad. Her husband—my grandfather—had suffered from Alzheimer’s and it was a gene he seemed to pass down to his offspring. My grandmother, however, is not so afflicted. She brushes aside these attempts to shush her. They are patronising.
“I’m not losing my head!” she snaps. “I’m old, and these days I’m weak. But I haven’t lost my mind. Everything is still up here.” And she raises a hand to her head. “And so I’ve been thinking, while I still have it all up here—while I still remember everything—we should sit down one day so I can tell you why we did the things we did.”
Once again the family erupts. Aunt C is on her feet. “All right Mother Dear! All right!” They cannot help themselves. The past is such an uncomfortable place. They have grown so used to the silence. “OK, Mother Dear,” they say again. “OK. One day.” Which means, never. They never want to talk about these things.
I
was not at that family dinner so it is my sister who calls and narrates all of this to me. “Can you imagine it!” she says. “She’s ready to talk.”
“I know,” I say, hardly believing it myself.
I hang up the phone and go online to buy myself a little tape recorder, and soon after that I book my ticket to Jamaica. My grandmother is conscious of her impending death and before she goes she must tell someone about the old black woman who sat in the corner.
The call comes from Jamaica. It is my Aunt C. She is calling my Aunt B who lives in a little town in Europe. But Aunt B is not home. Aunt C must talk instead to Aunt B’s husband, Uncle P. It is terrible news. The worst. Aunt C can barely get the words out. “You have to tell B when she comes home that our mother has died.” Uncle P almost drops the phone. He is shaking. My grandmother loved to insist that she had no sons or daughters-in-law. They were all her children. She was their mother. And so the news hits my Uncle P as hard as it would have if it had been his own mother. And he does not know how he will tell this news to his wife. He wishes he had been out. He wishes he had not gotten the call. He speaks to Aunt C for just a little longer, both of them with tears in their voices, and then he hangs up and waits for Aunt B to arrive.
She comes home at last and Uncle P is wringing his hands round and round. “B,” he says. “B, you must sit down.”
Aunt B raises a curious eye but continues towards the kitchen to unpack the groceries she has bought. “B, please!” he says more sternly. “You must sit down. I have to tell you something.”
“What in the world?” she mutters, even as she takes a seat, the panic already rising in her.
Uncle P holds her hand. “B, I am so sorry. I am so very sorry. But Mother Dear has died.”
And my Aunt B who had spent the best part of forty years losing her accent—the best part of forty years learning to be classy and European, she suddenly forgets all of this and a guttural wailing sound as if from the most rural village in Jamaica comes up from her chest and out of her mouth. Over and over she screams, “No! No! No! It cannot be!” It does not matter that my grandmother was so old. It does not matter that she had already lived a long, long life. None of it matters. Aunt B is inconsolable. She takes her wig from off her head. She throws it across the room. She beats her chest. “But how, P? How? She wasn’t ill. She was OK. She was fine. How? Who told you? How did you find out?”
Uncle P explains it all. “It was C who called while you were out. It was C who told me to give you the news. She said, ‘When B comes home, you must tell her that our mother has died.’”
How thick it is, the atmosphere that is grief. And how strange it is when that atmosphere shifts in a second, as if it never was. Aunt B’s eyes are suddenly dry, and wide, and curious. “P,” she says, a new sternness in her voice, “you must tell me now what C said. You must tell me in exactly the words that she said it to you.”
Uncle P is confused. “What? What do you mean?”
“Please P, this is important. You need to tell me exactly what C said.”
Uncle P tries to think back to the conversation. What was it that he missed? “I’m not sure B. I just know that C called and she told me, ‘When B comes home, you need to tell her that our mother has died.’”
Aunt B sighs heavily and then she almost giggles—a strangely inappropriate school-girl moment of glee. “Oh, thank God!” she says. And then she says it again. And then again. “Oh, thank Heavens.” She is out of her seat and walking in a circle. “Oh, thank God,” almost crying with relief.
It is a long moment before she is aware of the thoroughly confused face of her husband—her husband of over forty years. She pauses. She sits down again. She realises that there is something she has to tell him—something she has never explained to him. She has never told him about her mother. He has met Miss Henny before. He knows her black skin, and her beautiful big teeth. He knows about the way she sits silently in the corner. She has even made his bed. She has smiled at his children—her grandchildren—but nothing has been explained to him.
I am sitting across from my grandmother; the new tape recorder is in my hands. She knows that I am taping, but still I hide the recorder because I do not want it to feel like a presence between us. She is telling me of the birth of her first child and I glance on the wall behind us, on the picture of my grandmother and grandfather on their wedding day, and I think I have never studied that picture as closely as I should have. I had never before noticed the storm that was behind those smiling faces.
It is a black-and-white photograph. Of course, my grandparents are much younger people in this, but even in the youthfulness of my grandfather’s face, you can see the shape of the old man that he will become. My grandmother is less recognisable—a pretty mulatto girl with large almond eyes seemingly awed by the occasion of her own wedding. Sometimes I forget that she is only seventeen in this picture. My grandfather is a decade older. No wonder he has already settled into his features. And I wonder, if I look closely, will I see the shape of the child that was growing inside my grandmother? The pregnancy had saved her. She would always be grateful for it. Her mother had made plans to pack her things and send her off to America to live with her aunts. A young girl such as she, coming of age, and so many grown men wanting to take advantage. My great-grandmother could not risk it. My grandmother did not want to be sent off. She wanted to live her life, and here, in Jamaica, but without the strict Christian rules of her mother. So it was the pregnancy that saved her—the pregnancy that told her mother, it was too late already. A man had already been there. It was the pregnancy that delivered her from her mother’s house and into the arms of her own husband.
Months later, my grandmother gives birth to her first child. His skin is like alabaster; his eyes are hazel-grey; his hair is brown and straight. Stories of the baby and its whiteness spread, and beside those stories, a rumour. Of course the new bride was a mulatto, but her husband was a black man. Not a very dark-skinned black man, but a black man nonetheless—and black and mulatto could hardly produce white! Even the mother by herself could not have produced a white child! A disgrace. The husband had been taken for a fool. It was not his child. It could not be. Surely this was the rightful baby of some American sailor the young wife had messed about with before.
In time the child would become the spitting image of his father—my grandfather. Despite his light skin, strangers would take just one look at him in a crowd and say, “Oh! You must be the boy child of the journalist!” There would be no doubt. But back then, as he lay in his crib, he seemed an impossibility. And so they came. Every day. Visitor upon visitor upon visitor. They said they had come just to pay their respects, but they had come because they had heard the rumours. They had come to behold the white baby.
The days went by and the visitors kept coming. My grandmother, a teenage mother, confessed that she was tired. On the afternoon when she was dozing off for a nap with the baby in her lap, it irritated her when she heard yet another knock on the gate. She tells me she would have sent the person away if she had not recognised her. It was Henrietta Pinnock—a woman who sometimes did days’-work for her surly mother-in-law, my grandfather’s mother, my great-grandmother. Aaah, my grandmother thought. So that old bitch would like to know if I have really cheated on her son. She has sent this woman to inspect if this is really her grandchild!
But Henrietta Pinnock was there of her own accord. My grandmother opened the door. “Come in Miss Henny,” she said, and let her in. Miss Henny was accompanied by two of her own children—a little girl still sucking her thumb, and a baby still sucking at one of Miss Henny’s exposed breasts. Miss Henny introduced them. “This is B,” she said, of the little girl at her feet. “And this is C,” she said, of the baby on her breast. My grandmother introduced her own first-born, and then for a little while they spoke together as mothers will do. It wasn’t long, however, before my grandmother looked at B and C and ask
ed, “So who is their father?” My grandmother insists it was an innocent question. She did not know. She had no idea.
I imagine what must have gone through Miss Henny’s own head, how she must have felt something shift in that room—some balance of power. There must have been a part of her that resented my grandmother—this fair-skinned woman who had just upped and married the man who had fathered her own children—that man who had come to her bed again and again and again, but had never mentioned anything about marriage, or the life they could live together as a family. What was it that this woman had that she did not? Colour? Good hair? What was it about this woman that had turned her gallivanting lover suddenly into a family man? But at my grandmother’s question, Miss Henny must have realised that this was no woman. She was only a teenager. Miss Henny herself was already in her thirties. She must have felt the full weight and wisdom of her own years. This naïve little girl, Miss Henny must have thought, who knows so little about life and men.
So Miss Henny told my grandmother the truth. She told it as respectfully as she could. She had not come to cause any ruckus. She had thought my grandmother knew all along. “These are your husband’s daughters. We also have two older boys.” My grandmother tells me that is how she found out. Her first-born child was her husband’s fifth-born.
I listen back to the recording of this conversation and it surprises me that my grandmother had not described the light of a Kingston evening—all its purples and reds and blues—and how it holds within itself a quality of sadness. And yet I see it—the evening and all its colours wrapping itself about my grandmother’s shoulders like a shawl. Long after Miss Henny left, she sat outside with the miraculous white baby. She tells me that she cried. And she cried, and she cried. Perhaps she was mourning the little girl that she would never again be.