Each time, fear ejects me out of sleep and I wake disoriented and in two, body and spirit. My still sleeping spirit tries to pull me down towards the bed, back into the black oil of nightmare. And then, suddenly, I am one and panting into the darkness of my room. This darkness has real weight, infinitesimal, but real weight nonetheless.
Maami’s words return to me on such nights: “I told them to pray; I told them to seek God. Look what happened?”
I know that one day I will meet the man who watches our house in the streets of Nairobi. I will know him immediately. He will wear a shabby suit and we will hold each other’s eyes over the hurrying heads of Nairobians. Perhaps I will stop in my tracks. Perhaps I will try to run. My heart will clench into a fist and try to pound its way out of my ribcage. My throat will be parched. But he will be unperturbed by the honking cars and the shouting hawkers.
“Kendi,” he will say, placing a cold hand on my shoulder. “I have been looking for you.”
I will not resist him. I will simply turn and follow him.
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida
translated by Eric M.B. Becker
Born in Angola, she grew up in Portugal, and lives in the suburbs of Lisbon. She is the author of two novels, Esse cabelo (2015), winner of the Novos Prize 2016 and a finalist of the Casino da Póvoa Prize 2018, and Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso (2018). Her portrait of a community of people with cerebral palsy, Ajudar a cair, was published in 2017. A graduate of the New University of Lisbon, she has a PhD in Literary Theory from the University of Lisbon. In 2013 she received the Serrote Essay Prize and in 2016 was a finalist of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. She is a contributor to the Blog da Companhia das Letras in Brazil, and her writing has appeared in Granta. com, Granta Portugal, Revista Serrote, Revista Zum, Quatro Cinco Um, Revista Pessoa, Ler, and Words Without Borders. That Hair is forthcoming from Tin House Books in the US in 2020.
From That Hair
My mother cut my hair for the first time when I was six months old. The hair, which according to several witnesses and a few photographs had been soft and straight, was reborn curly and dry. I don’t know if this sums up my still-short life. One could quite easily say just the opposite. To this day, along the curve of my nape, it still grows inexplicably straight, the soft hair of a newborn, which I treat as a vestige. The story of my hair begins with this first haircut. How might I write this story so as to avoid the trap of intolerable frivolity? No one would accuse the biography of an arm of being frivolous; and yet, it’s impossible to tell the story of its fleeting movements—mechanical, irretrievable, lost to oblivion. Perhaps this might sound insensitive to veterans of war or amputees, whose imaginations conjure pains they still feel, rounds of applause, runs along the beach. It wouldn’t do me much good, I imagine, to fantasize over the reconquest of my head by the soft-stranded survivors near the curve of my neck. The truth is that the story of my curly hair intersects with the story of at least two countries and, by extension, the indirect story of the relations among several continents: a geopolitics.
Perhaps the place to begin this biography of my hair is many decades ago, in Luanda, with a girl named Constança, a coy blonde (a fetching “typist girl,” perhaps?), the unspoken youthful passion of my black grandfather, Castro Pinto, long before he became head nurse at Luanda’s Hospital Maria Pia; or perhaps I ought to begin with the night I surprised him with braids that he found divine. I’d spent nine hours sitting cross-legged on the floor at the hairdresser, head between the legs of two particularly brutal young girls, who in the midst of doing my hair interrupted their task to turn some feijoada and rice pudding left over from lunch into a bean soup, and I sensed a warmth on my back (and a vague odor) coming from between their legs. “What a sight!” he said. Indeed: perhaps the story of my hair has its origin in this girl Constança, whom I’m not related to in any way, but whose presence my grandfather seemed to seek in my relaxed hair and in the girls on the bus that, after he was already an old man living on the outskirts of Lisbon, would take him each morning to his job at Cimov where, his back hunched, he swept the floors until the day he died. But how to tell this history with sobriety and the desirable discretion?
“Perhaps someone has already written a book about hair,” problem solved, but no one’s written the story of my hair, as I was painfully reminded by two fake blondes to whom I once temporarily surrendered my curls for a hopeless “brushing”—two women who, no less brutal than the others, pulled my hair this way and that, commenting aloud “it’s full of split-ends” as they waged battle against their own arms (the masculinity of which, with their swollen biceps bulging from beneath their smocks, was the entire time my secret form of revenge for the torture they inflicted). The haunted house that every hair salon represents for the young woman I am is often all I have left of my connection to Africa and the history of the dignity of my ancestors. However, I have plenty of suffering and corrective brushings after returning home from the “beauty parlor,” as my mother calls it, and of attempts not to take too personally the work of these hairdressers whose implacability and incompetence I never summoned the courage to confront. The story I can tell is a catalog of salons, with Portugal’s corresponding history of ethnic transformations—of the fifty-year-old returnees to the Moldavian manicurists forced to adopt Brazilian methods—undergoing countless treatments to tame the natural exuberance of a young lady who, in the words of these same women, is “a good girl.” The story of surrendering my education in what it meant to be a woman to a public space is not, perhaps, the fairy tale of miscegenation, but it is a story of reparations.
No blonde woman on a city bus ever gave my Grandpa Castro the time of day. Humming bakongo canticles to himself, Papá was the man whom you would never suspect of continuing the time-honored tradition he carries within on our side of the bus; the man of invisible traditions—and what a ring this would have to it capitalized: The Man of Invisible Traditions, an original notion. No one ever looked at him, this man who, by his own account, was rather cranky, “the Portuguese kid,” as he was known as a young man, who was always shouting “Put it in the goal, you monkey,” referring to black soccer players, and who categorized people according to their resemblance to certain jungle animals, even describing himself as “the monkey type,” the kind of person who patiently waits for the conversation to come to a close before proferring his wisdom.
I come from generations of lunatics, which is perhaps a sign that what takes place inside the heads of my ancestors is more important what goes on around them. The family to whom I owe my hair have described the journey between Portugal and Angola in ships and airplanes over four generations with the nonchalance of frequent fliers. A nonchalance which nonetheless was not passed on to me and throws into stark relief my own dread of trips; a dread that—out of an instinct to cling to life that never assails me on solid ground—I constantly fear will be my last. Legend has it I stepped off the plane in Portugal at the age of three with my hair in a particularly rebellious state, clinging to a package of Maria crackers. I came dressed in a yellow wool camisole that can still be seen today in an old passport photo notable for its wide smile, the product of a felicitous misunderstanding about the significance of being photographed. I’m laughing with joy; or perhaps incited for some comic motive by one of my adult family members, whom I re-encounter tanned and sporting beards in photographs of the newborn me splayed atop the bedsheets.
And meanwhile it’s my hair—and not the mental abyss—that day in and day out brings me back to this story. For as long as I can remember, I’ve woken up with a rebellious mane, so often at odds with my journey, far from the recommended headscarves for covering one’s hair while sleeping. To say that I wake up with a lion’s mane out of carelessness is to say that I wake up every day with at least a modicum of embarrassment or a motive to laugh at myself in the mirror: a motive accompanied by impatience and at times, rage. It’s occurred to me that I might owe the daily reminder of what ties me to my fam
ily to the haircut I received at six months of age. I’ve been told I’m a “mulata das pedras”, as they say in Angola, not the idealized beauty that “mulata” conjures for them but a second-rate one, and with bad hair to boot. This expression always blinds me with the memory of rocks along the beach: slippery, slimy stones difficult to walk across barefoot.
Alake Pilgrim
From Trinidad and Tobago, she has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, thanks to the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship. Her short stories have received several awards, including a Small Axe Literary Prize and have twice been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She has had residencies at the Cropper Foundation Writers Workshop and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and participated in the Bocas Lit Fest’s New Talent readings. She is at work on her first novel.
Remember Miss Franklin
Catherine sits on the counterpane, fluffy and full of down, with the only daisies she will ever see in a field of white embroidered elegance. She runs her rough fingers over its smoothness. This counterpane came to Barbados in a British ship in the year of her Lord 1918. It has been with her these ten years, since the day her mother unwrapped the petticoat pressed flat under the mattress and counted the pound-notes kept safe for her only daughter’s wedding, the only day for which she could buy this counterpane; the most expensive gift she had ever given or received.
Catherine lifts the counterpane from the bed slowly, drawing it into her arms. She had planned to do this washing the day before, but it had rained. Rain or not, she gets up in the cool air of dawn and kneels on the worn wooden floor to pray, then goes to the kitchen at the back of the house. She prepares her family’s breakfast that leaves behind the smell of saltfish like clothes wet in sea spray, then left too long in an enclosed room. Each morning, she lays out her husband’s ironed clothes, sleeves and pants’ legs creased to perfection, collar stiff with starch.
Now, with her husband at work and son at school, the house is hers for a while. The tea she takes each morning stands beside the hot coal stove—verveine today to ease the upset feeling in her stomach. Did she already feed the fowls? Their clatter flies like pebbles against the turquoise walls of the house, capped with sheets of tin, coated red against the rust.
“Two times three is six, six into three, two!” rises triumphantly from the nearby schoolhouse. She stands still to listen, the counterpane gathered in her arms, paused before an island so flat, it feels like she can see from one end to the other. Barbados, the only place that she can call home: an island with few rivers to speak of.
“One one hundred, two one hundred, three one hundred, four . . .”
The sound of children counting takes her back to her childhood. She was a little girl looking for a place to hide. Behind the rocks there was a hole in the face of the earth.
“Eight one hundred, nine one hundred.” At almost “Ten,” she crawled inside. It was wider within. The counting stopped.
“Our Father,” she whispered, not sure God would hear.
Ma had told her once, “Them caves full a ghosts, still hungry for they freedom.”
Pa said, “Don’t mind you mother’s ’Nansi stories. Is once to die and after that the judgment. Jus’ don’t go near them caves.”
He wouldn’t say why. She went further in. She wasn’t afraid of any old ghosts. She’d rather die than let Pips catch her down here by Harrison’s Caves. Harrison, like the college Pips dreamed of entering; the one that was only for boys.
“Who don’t have horse mus’ ride cow,” her father had muttered on her last day of school, scraping the mud from his hands. She had stared at his square forehead, his broad heavy cheeks, marked where the cane leaves had sliced him.
Catherine catches herself standing, staring out into the trembling air. The schoolchildren have stopped singing their times-tables. Why remember that now? It is years since her parents have crossed over and she is a grown woman.
The counterpane is a white mound in her arms. She walks carefully down the back steps and releases it into the stone sink behind the house. Where the time goes, she cannot say. Her son Obed is ten years old. When he was younger, she made housework a game. She swept the ground around him with a broom she made herself out of coconut leaves’ dried spines. Heat came up through the soles of her slippers as she bent and swished, bent and swayed in a solemnly joyous dance.
“Bush-broom, bush-broom,” he sang, a melody so unlike the sentences in his schoolbooks: John—and—Jenny—like—snow.
One day, when he is a man with thick black hair like his father’s and solemn dark-coffee eyes, she hopes that he will remember the soft used pages of books, hidden in the folds of her skirts. Now, there is washing to be done. The rainwater collects in a drum at the side of the house. She adds lime so that she can use it to wash. She moves water from the drum to the stone sink with a metal pail, careful not to waste a drop.
With the rush of pouring water she is a little girl again, poised inside the entrance of Harrison’s caves. Back then, it was the sound of water that drew her in deeper, after playing in the hot sun outside. At first she had seen nothing but a hole in the rocks, somewhere to climb up and in. A place to hide and make Pips pee his pants when she jumped out at him like a ghost. Then she heard it: water like a low gurgle in a baby’s throat. She went further in, clinging to the wet walls so as not to fall, following that growing sound until it led her into a cavern crisscrossed with spears of sunlight piercing through holes from her former world.
She forgot about that drink. She was inside the earth’s glittering heart. Above her, jagged teeth in blues and silvers and golds glistened and dripped. Out of the shadows, copper branches of rock reached down between misshapen pillars, while crystal trees struggled to break free from the earth and walk free into the light. She heard the river bubbling through, singing a forgotten language, but could only catch glimpses of it on the ground ahead, spots of reflected light.
She could have stayed there forever, been queen of that world. Now look how things had turned out. So many trips before the stone sink at the back of the house is filled. Sweat soaks the head-tie that keeps her short plaits in check. She pushes the counterpane under the water with both hands, holds it down, rubs it with blue soap, scrubs it over the hard ripples of the jukking board until her arms ache, thinking, who else could I have been? There, in that cave of wonders of her childhood, she could have been queen, but she does not want that now.
She remembers Pips on his way to the War. Phillip David Percy, the one and only, with his long-legged stride, turning heads in his brand new uniform.
“Turnin’ all them girls’ heads,” she teased him.
“Every one except yours,” he threw back in her lap and a silence fell between them.
Pips, with that leopard’s smile wiped from his face, in the uniform so stiff and different that it felt like she was seeing him for the first time. He stood close enough to touch her, said: “I got to go now, Cathy.” The only one who ever called her by that name. Now she grips the counterpane’s wet softness, white as the fog he once described to her in letters, creeping over the stealthy river Thames.
The sun burns her face. It is time to get back about her work. She is not a child and Pips is no longer with her. Sweat seeps out of her pores. Her petticoat clings to her skin. Her head-tie slips to one side. The parts in her hair are like shallow gullies after the rain, before the sun magics the moisture back into the air.
When Pips was killed, it took months for the news to reach her. Some said he was part of a mutiny. Others said the West Indian soldiers had to fight two wars at the same time. She keeps the newspapers from that time in a box of old needlepoint shielded by the counterpane hanging over her bed. The pages are brittle from years of handling, till Pips’ memory smells like black ink and dust.
She never had her mutiny. Even now, she imagines joining the Independence protests spreading up and down the islands. What a scene she would make, dancing through th
e street, Crop Over music and bottle and spoon beating in her feet, hips swinging, head thrown back singing, “This is mine, this is mine. Come an’ steal a little wine, but doh get too familiar!”
Catherine stares down at the counterpane filling up the stone sink. Sometimes she can see Pips looking at her out of her son’s eyes. One minute they’re full of love—at other times, accusing. In their brown depths, everything changes. His face writhes in pain, breaking out in yellow blisters. It is Pips’ face, covered in mustard gas, even though she cannot smell it. His eyes leak pus, but he does not cry out. Men groan in holes in the ground. Gunfire and echoes of bombs. Smoke clouds her vision. Pips’ face alters. She sees the King in whose name they went to war. He is a head severed and unchanged, floating on stamps stuck on letters to London, lost at sea now. Ink blotting, running out.
She sees counterpanes and the Queen Consort in Buckingham Palace, marooned on her own kind of island. She thinks of all the women she could have been. Are they as afraid as she is of the darkness inside, of things buried deep, still fighting to come to light? She runs her hands along the edge of the stone sink. Her fingers graze the cracks webbing its surface. Her palms ride the washboard’s unyielding ripples. She could break herself on this stone a thousand times.
Instead, she goes back to washing the counterpane, taking care of the delicate flowers. This counterpane must be cared for with gentle hands. It must be spread over her bed in the early morning light, when her husband has left for work. It must be straightened and pressed with hands that were once so smooth, to make her marital bed beautiful. It is enough. She sees the stains lift off into the water she has carried herself. Mrs Eleazar Conway Franklin she has become: to the Brothers of the congregation, a covered head bowed in prayer; to the Sisters, shared recipes and hand-finished clothes; to her husband, the memory of pink roses and white elbow-length gloves giving way to the smell of coconut bread and lavender baby powder. She is a decade of private caresses. She is the force that pushed her son out into the world and welcomes him back from it each day with warm food and a circle of bosom and arms in which he can, for a moment, feel safe. She is all these things and more.
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