A Little Piece of Light

by Donna Hylton

  I lowered my chin, timid about the idea of going anywhere with two grown-ups I didn’t know. I turned to my mother, searching her face for her role in this, only to find an amusement in her eyes that seemed to urge me forward. Would she be coming, too?

  For another moment, I stayed silent. “Do you know what Disneyland is?” Daphne’s eyes were a see-through shade of brown when she bent to see me eye-to-eye—a nature of exchange that would later be rare between us. “It’s a magical place for children.”

  “Magic?”

  She stood tall again, indicating with her raised eyebrows that this was something I’d be silly to miss.

  Standing in the clarity of the Jamaican sun, we all bought into Daphne’s story about magic. I would trust Roy and Daphne just enough to step onto an airplane and fly to the place of promises and dreams… but before very long, my childhood would turn into a nightmare that would be impossible to escape, no matter how hard I would run.

  The next time I meet Roy Hylton will be the last time I’ll ever see my natural mother. In June 1972, four months before my eighth birthday, Roy passes my mummy a handful of money. I watch while in exchange, she hands him some papers. They’d already sent me for a haircut, where I counted each of my wild Caribbean braids as they fell to the ground, a piece of myself landing there with each one. I glance at the document in Roy’s hand—the word PASSPORT written above a photograph of a little girl with wild, frizzy hair and eyes that look tired, sad… powerless. Doing my best to practice my reading from primary school, I read the words typed under her face: DONNA PATRICIA WALDEN.

  Until this moment, I’ve never known my last name.

  It’s still daytime when Roy and I land at LaGuardia Airport, where adults bump into me with their suitcases as I follow Roy off the plane. The air in the taxi line smells like cigarettes and petrol, and when we get in a car that moves along into the street, the buildings here are so tall that I have to shield my eyes from the sun to take them in. Buses beep, the subway trains rattle the tracks above the ground, and steam rises from grates in the street. “What’s that place?” I point.

  From the front seat of the taxi, Roy looks up from the newspaper he’s reading. “That’s a playground,” he says. Children run and swing and spin each other on the rides, shouting and squealing with laughter.

  Is this Disneyland?

  The taxi lets us out in front of a high, redbrick building with lots of windows and terraces all the way up to the top. “Where are we?” I quietly ask Roy.

  “We’re home.”

  Home? I think. What is home? “When are we going to Disneyland?”

  And then there’s my most pressing question: When will I see my mummy in Jamaica again?

  Roy says nothing about Disneyland, or my mummy, or anything at all as we enter the double glass doors into the apartment building. Inside, two silver doors slide open when he pushes a glowing button on the wall. “Go on,” he says. “Get on the elevator.” Cautiously I step inside, and the doors slide closed behind us. When I catch my reflection, my eyes are worried. My hair is messy, like in the photograph on my passport.

  Roy lets us into the apartment, and I look across the floor of the living room, hard tiles stretching across the floor, with the walls painted a beige shade of green. There stand a bench, a chair and sofa, a piano… and lots and lots of bookshelves. There’s also a sliding glass door with a terrace that overlooks the world below.

  Daphne, Roy’s wife with the flipped-up hair, walks politely down the hall toward me. “I suppose you’ll need to get acquainted around here the next few weeks,” she tells me.

  When are we going to Disneyland?

  She walks me down the hall, past the bathroom and a wall of closets. Across from a bedroom with a big double bed is another bedroom, with a single bed. “This will be your room,” she says. “Unless we have guests. Then you’ll stay in the living room.”

  To do errands in the city we ride the subway, which moves and rocks and makes me feel so unsteady. All the people and distractions in the city have the same effect on me, and for weeks I walk around wide-eyed. I have so many questions: Why does everybody move so fast? Why are all the buildings so high? When will I see my mummy again?

  And what about Disneyland?

  Roy and Daphne take me to flea markets, where Roy shops patiently for furniture, guitar strings, and old shoes. “Why do you buy all these things?” I ask him.

  “I fix and resell them,” he says. “It’s important to know how to bargain.” I watch the thought and consideration in his face as he barters with the people who work at the flea market, just like they do in Jamaica. When they don’t agree to the price he wants, he shrugs to me gently—always my cue that it’s time we walk away. The salespeople usually catch on and take this opportunity as their last chance to negotiate a fair price. Roy’s nature is not disrespectful or unkind… but he does have a masterful way of getting what he wants.

  His warmth is subtle, but Daphne’s feels nonexistent. On the walk home from the train as we pass by the playground, she warns me how I’m to behave when I begin to meet other children: I’m not allowed to have anyone over, nor am I allowed to call anyone—they ensure this with a lock on the phone. “You don’t go outside,” Daphne says one morning as she slips her arms into the sleeves of a suit jacket. “New York is not like Jamaica, do you understand? You don’t just speak to everyone you meet on the street.”

  I nod. “Where are you going?” My voice comes out like a whisper.

  “To work.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “I’m a psychiatric social worker.” She starts out the door and opens it back up to meet my eyes. “Be very quiet,” she tells me. “Your father tends to get upset if there’s noise in the house.”

  My father?

  The heavy white steel door clicks closed behind her. I stare at it, wondering for how long she’ll be gone. I take in my surroundings as classical music crackles through the speakers of the brown wooden radio. I stand in the center of their living room, looking around for something I can do. I take soft steps across the grayish-beige tiled floor toward the bookshelves, to not disturb Roy from the work he’s doing in his bedroom down the hall, across from my bedroom. He tends to get upset if there’s noise in the house. I don’t want Roy to get angry with me. In fact, as I linger silently in the living room, I hope he’ll forget that I’m even here.

  As the sound of his hammer taps from down the hall, I quietly browse the bookcases for something that I can page through, something with pictures or small words. But shelf after shelf, there are no stories here for me. There are big, thick books too heavy to hold, with titles I can’t pronounce. They’re written by people with difficult names that I try my best to sound out from the reading lessons I had in my first year of school in Jamaica: Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche. There’s also a book with the title Crime and Punishment, whose cover I study—a painting of a man in a shadowy room who seems to be ducking in the dark away from something that scares him.

  I discover a whole row of paperback books that are small enough for me to hold in my lap. I pull one of them out from the shelf and gaze at a painted image of a shirtless man holding a woman who seems too distracted by kissing him to notice that her lavender dress is falling off. I close the book and listen again: the sounds of hammering and violins.

  One Saturday, just after I’ve arrived, Daphne takes me to Lord & Taylor to get me clothes for the school year. We take the elevator down to the basement clearance racks, where I gaze toward racks of dresses with ribbons that tie at the waist. “No, Donna Patricia,” Daphne says. “You have to dress nicely.” Over her arm, she drapes pairs of long slacks that bell out at the ankle, like some of the ones she wears, and turtlenecks that coordinate with little button-up blazers and plaid blouses. We go to the shoes section, and I look at the Mary Jane shoes with a tiny heel and a strap that fastens across the top of the foot. Daphne buys me a pair of blue suede-and-patent-leather loafers.

 
Before the first day of school, she stands behind me in the bathroom and uses a fine-tooth comb to part my hair severely to one side. “You must excel at school,” she tells me. I try to steady my neck to each tight pull as she forms multiple braids on my head and fastens each of them with a plastic barrette. “And we’ve allowed you to get familiar around here, but from now on, you’ll have to earn points at home. Do you know what this means?”

  I meet her eyes in the mirror’s reflection.

  “It means that you need to help out around the house. You’ll have chores, and you’ll have to wash up before bed and brush your teeth. You’ll do just as your father and I say.”

  My father? I don’t have a father.

  “Remember that your father can have a short temper, and I’m very busy with my work.” She drops her hands to her sides and stares at me in the mirror. “We expect the best from you, Donna Patricia. Do you understand?”

  I nod, but the butterflies inside me swarm my belly in worry.

  Minutes later, Daphne walks me through the apartment building’s driveway and across the street to P.S. 93. “Look at her shoes!” one girl in my first grade class shouts as she points, and her friends all crowd around her, giggling. I look at their shoes, pretty brown sandals and shiny Mary Janes. I knew these shoes were for boys. “You don’t look like anybody,” one girl says. “Are you black, or are you white?”

  “She’s an alien!” another girl says.

  I don’t know what I am, so all I can think to tell them is this: “I’m from Jamaica.”

  “From Jamaica!” one yells, and turns to her friends. “She even talks funny!”

  These become the last words that I’ll utter out loud for weeks. My teacher, Miss Zano, gently calls on me in class and encourages me to speak up when I answer in a whisper. When the other kids laugh at my accent, Miss Zano corrects them. “Children, that’s enough,” she says. “Donna is very bright.”

  At recess, the girls in my class gather at the edge of the playground, where they’ve designated an area for taking turns to spin two jump ropes to play double Dutch. I watch them for just a moment before I find an empty corner of the playground to be by myself. With my eyes down and my knees held tight against my chest, I imagine running after the butterflies and the hummingbirds in the fields back home.

  For the first few weeks of school, I keep to myself this way, until I learn that not even staying alone is a guarantee against conflict. One day as I’m sitting against the chain-link fence in the schoolyard, a group of three girls approaches me. One of them kicks her foot at me.

  “Leave me alone!” I tell her.

  “Don’t step on my blue suede shoes!” she says. I look down at my shoes, embarrassed that they look like a boy’s. Why does she have to make fun of me with a song that I like? “Aren’t you going to say anything?” she says.

  “She can’t talk, she’s not American!” says one of the girls behind her. “What is she, anyway?”

  “Maybe this will make her talk.” The first girl raises her hand and wails it, smacking me in the face. That’s it. Feeling alone, like an outsider, and missing Jamaica and my mummy is all too much. When I stand up, I punch the first girl so hard that she falls down. I back off immediately, and the girls all run in the opposite direction, scared. They don’t bother me again after that.

  As I get more familiar being inside Roy and Daphne’s home, there’s not much sense of belonging there, either. After school, I have to sit in the stairwell of our apartment building to wait for Roy to get home from his errands. One afternoon while I’m locked out, I need to use the bathroom so desperately that I have no choice but to race to another floor to find a dark corner in the stairwell and use it to relieve myself. “May I please get a key?” I ask Daphne.

  “Why do you need a key?”

  “Because I don’t have anywhere to go after school.”

  “Absolutely not,” she says. “Only adults can have keys, and you are not an adult.”

  On weekend afternoons, the screams and laughter of neighborhood kids in the playground below are my only entertainment. For hours I stand with my arms over the balcony railing and rest my chin on them, watching while my chest aches to be with the other children. I am alone, the alien girl. I’m the child from nowhere—I have no one here.

  Back in the living room, I sit listening to classical music and the opera, the sounds and voices on the radio keeping me company. As Roy’s hammer pounds from back in the hallway, I see which words I can spell out of Daphne’s Harlequin romance novels with the cartoony covers, like Music on the Wind and A Wife for Andrew.

  I pull the Bible from the shelf, thick and dense, and read beautiful phrases from Proverbs and Psalms that talk about the promise of God’s power. “Out of my distress I called on the Lord; the Lord answered me and set me free.” I also like the story of Job, who experiences a lot of tragedy in his life but never fails to believe in God. The lesson in Job’s story is that sometimes we endure suffering for reasons that only God can understand, that God will always protect us as long as we remain faithful to Him.

  From Daphne’s dresser, I pick up a paperback book that interests me. On it is the photograph of a freckle-faced little boy, and the book is titled Dibs in Search of Self. “May I read this?” I ask Daphne.

  With her back leaning against her headboard, she rests the book she’s reading and pulls her glasses to the tip of her nose to look at me over the top of them. “You want to read that?”

  I nod.

  “That’s fine,” she says. “The woman who wrote it is a psychologist, like me.”

  Quickly, I grow immersed in the story about a little boy who’s my age and doesn’t play appropriately with other children. In school, he crawls around the classroom and acts out with tantrums. Other times, he isolates himself and doesn’t want to speak at all. His parents bring him to a counselor who invites Dibs to play with games and toys. By playing together, the counselor discovers that Dibs is actually a very smart little boy, that he feels alone in life. Maybe Dibs is magic. Nobody can understand Dibs, but I can. I don’t fit in anywhere, either.

  In October 1972, just over a month after I begin first grade, I turn eight years old. Roy smiles subtly when he gives me coloring books and comic books to read. Meanwhile, Daphne reminds me, “You need to read the more advanced books, too.” She marches out to get the dictionary and teaches me how to look up words from the comic books that I don’t know. “The words are listed alphabetically, Donna Patricia,” she says. “This should make it relatively simple for you to find.” I glance at Roy, who wears no expression as his eyes meet mine. It seems we’re developing a shared awareness for Daphne’s rigidness. Book after book, she builds a small stack of the stories that she assigns me to read, usually on the topics of psychology and philosophy, death, and the meaning of existence. After I read Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky, she asks me to sit down and give her a verbal summary of the story. “Well,” I tell her with an uncomfortable sigh. “The story made me feel very sad.”

  “So?” she says. “What was it about?”

  “It’s about a man who is treated very unkindly. It reminded me of something I read about concentration camps in your Reader’s Digest,” I tell her.

  “Ah, yes,” she says. “That was quite a compelling article.” Her response to my emotional reaction is always academic, never maternal. “Remember,” she reminds me, “if there’s something you don’t understand, you can always find the explanation in the dictionary or encyclopedia.”

  “What if I can’t find it there—then can I ask you?”

  “An intelligent girl doesn’t ask others questions, Donna Patricia. We must learn to find our own solutions.”

  She begins to give me lessons in the languages she speaks: Italian; Portuguese, as her father is from Portugal; and the two particular languages that she would like me to speak whenever I’m at home, French and Spanish. A couple of months into first grade, Miss Zano informs Daphne that they’re advancing me to sec
ond. Daphne is delighted and so our lessons at home grow even more hands-on. She shows me how to cut out patterns and stitch them onto fabric using her Singer sewing machine. She teaches me how to prepare recipes like Jamaican patties, rice and beans, and also okra, of which I’m not very fond. She also teaches me how to brew hot tea with a cup and saucer, and I begin to serve this to her and Roy in their bedroom each night while she reads and he watches the television. “Donna Patricia?” she calls from their bedroom. “Would you prepare the tea, please?” I bring the kettle to a boil and drape the tea bag string over each cup, dropping in a teaspoon of sugar after the water has begun to steam with the scent of dried tea leaves. I balance the saucers carefully as I make my way down the hallway, serving Daphne first, as she’s taught me, and then Roy. “You know, in Japan,” Daphne says, “tea time is quite a formal ceremony.”

  “Oh really?” I stand in the doorway, waiting to know if she intends to teach me more, but by now she’s setting her teaspoon onto the saucer and taking her first sip. “Is it OK?” I ask her.

  “It’s fine,” she says.

  As my first Christmas with them approaches in 1972, I see Daphne warm up in a way I haven’t seen before. Right after Thanksgiving, she says, “We’ll have to get a beautiful tree for Christmas.”

  What’s Christmas?

  She leads Roy to a street corner vendor, where he buys a fresh pine tree tied with twine to make it easier to carry home by hand.

  I watch and learn as Daphne makes an elaborate affair of decorating the tree with a string of teardrop-shaped, rainbow-colored bulbs and a sparkly tree topper star that plays Christmas songs. She leads me in arts and crafts projects, making ornaments out of pipe cleaners and paper. Orange-handled scissors move along to cut apart the cups of cardboard egg cartons, and we paste them back together in tiered rows to form a triangle Christmas tree. Then, Daphne and I paint all the cups green and decorate them with glitter. “This is fun, Mother,” I tell her. I pause and glance out of the corner of my eye to see how she’ll receive this title.