Book of the Little Axe

by Lauren Francis-Sharma

  Now, Rosa was left alone to bear the brunt of being her father’s child.

  “How old is this one?” The woman asking of Rosa’s age had only just ceased complaining about the conditions of the road from Port of Spain. This woman, Madame Bernadette, held a special reputation among the colored women on the island for being the loudest and most bold-faced, which in Trinidad was saying a great deal. She was a sizeable woman with flamingo-pink gums longer than her teeth.

  “Nine years. Almost ten.” Mamá looked to Madame Bernadette as if to seek approval of Rosa.

  “Humph, she favors Demas, eh. Goat doh make sheep. Skinny like him, but so bozal.” Madame Bernadette used this word that could have connoted “unlearned” or “raw” or even “stupid,” but Rosa knew Madame Bernadette meant to suggest that she—Rosa—was “savage,” for the term had come to be used by the Spaniards solely to describe the undesirableness of Africans. “With that dark-dark skin,” Madame Bernadette continued, “it’s possible to find her in de night out on dat big piece of land allyuh have?”

  Several of the women and girls giggled. Rosa felt the heat rise inside her, easy-footed, like it could melt her into nothing, and so she smiled, for she knew no better way to conceal how she felt. She herself had wondered if the color of her skin made her more visible or less, for it seemed to have both those powers.

  “She’s definitely her father’s child,” Mamá said, as if resigned to this indisputable fact.

  “Demas still not lettin’ you take on any help? With all dat house and land, you should have t’ree, four maids. This lil darkie you does have here must be tired to de bone.”

  “We all work hard,” Mamá said.

  “That big gyal you have over there”—the woman nodded toward Eve, as she fanned herself, uselessly—“how many years she does have?”

  “Eleven. She’ll have one more year soon,” Mamá said. “There are ten months between she and Jeremias.” Mamá covered her mouth, seeming to remember only then how very young Jeremias was on this, his wedding day.

  “Now she will be easy easy to marry off.” Madame Bernadette bit into an ear of corn. Juice squirted upon her dress and she rolled her eyes as if the cob were to blame for it. “She become a woman yet? I have a nephew who would take a real good liking to she when de time come. But she gointa have to move to San Fernando cuz he ent movin’ this close to town, for sure. He a bush boy.”

  Mamá rubbed perspiration from her neck, and Rosa noticed that her fingers were again swollen.

  “He’s Monsieur Benoit’s son,” Madame Bernadette added.

  “The cocoa estate owner, Benoit?” one of the other women said.

  “Yes, well … he’s one of his sons.” Madame Bernadette seemed to be struggling to find the right words. “Benoit sees about him. Doesn’t deny the boy is his. He’s a fine boy.”

  Eve, overhearing, smiled politely. Rich planter’s son or not, Rosa knew “bush boys” were not to Eve’s liking. Much like Jeremias, Eve wished for a life of intellectual pursuit, she wished for a man who might one day take her away from their stifling little island, a man who could recite Voltaire and who might refer to her as “the goddess everywhere so much admired,” she’d once joked. Indeed, Rosa knew whenever Eve was ready, she would have her pick of boys who were not from the bush.

  “But this one here will give you plenty problems.” Madame Bernadette moved toward Rosa as she sucked a remnant of husk from her teeth. The long hissing rang in Rosa’s ears like a circling gnat that she wished to smack down. “Dirt under she fingernails, skin like mudcakes, and dat cheveaux tac-tac with hair knots like knuckles.” Using her thumb and forefinger, Madame Bernadette pulled at a clump of hair at the back of Rosa’s neck, causing Rosa to wince. The woman then twirled the tuft and released it as if to see how it might perform. “She not ugly, no, but she doesn’t try to pretty sheself. You must make her downplay la mauvais.”

  Mamá nodded, and Rosa felt the embarrassment flush her chest then her face like a mad rash. If she could’ve found her words, she would’ve said she had no interest at all in prickly dresses with piping, no interest in massaging her hair with coconut oil or picking out grit from beneath her nails only to have it reappear within hours. Whom would she be trying to impress? There had never been a boy or a girl, a woman or a man (save for Papá), to offer her anything but a scowl. Even on that day, when she had prettied herself in precisely the way Mamá wished, not one soul thought to set their eyes upon her in the admiring way they had set their eyes upon Eve and Mamá.

  “Go and call Papá to come and toast with Tío Byron,” Mamá said mercifully to her.

  Rosa sprinted toward her father, taking only a small interest in the lone rider she noticed in the distance. A latecomer, she thought, as she skipped over two children tumbling like wild dogs in the grasses. When Rosa reached Papá, he remained with his back turned, staring up into a vivid silver-blue sky, as if he were counting sparrows. Playfully, she reached for his cup. He turned toward her in a start, wiped his face, and she felt she could not reconcile the sickening feeling in her belly with what she knew could not be true.

  “Were you crying?” she said.

  “Sweating. The blasted drink is just too strong.”

  She took his cup and sipped from it. Guava juice. It had turned a bit rancid, but strong it was not. Rosa took Papá’s hand, moist from tears, and found that her hand was too small to fully cover his. She offered him a moment before guiding him toward Tío Byron, who stood clapping beneath a new cowbell, one much the same as Papá’s.

  “You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to,” she whispered.

  Papá’s face was still damp, the lines upon it grainy. He had broken his promise “never to set foot in that house again.” “A man with broken promises is never again a man who does not break promises,” he often said. As Papá walked toward Tío, the crowd erupted into applause, surprising Rosa, for she would not have guessed that the rift between her father and the Robespierres had become a matter of public concern.

  Tío Byron panted, pushing out big words like proper man and destiny and reconciliation into a pocket of thick air that seemed to be roasting all those guests who’d moved in closer to look at the flaring of Papá’s nostrils and the hardening of his jaw.

  Rosa watched Papá closely as Mamá reached for his hand. Mamá smiled as if she appreciated what the performance had taken from Papá. When Rosa saw that Papá had accepted Mamá’s comforting, she turned her attention to the man who’d been riding, now hitching his fly-bitten horse to a tree at the front. The man’s face, half shadowed by his wide-brimmed hat, was a broken oval of whiteness against a sea of shiny black, brown, and copper skins. His hands trembled as he waited for Tío Byron to release Papá from an embrace. When the guests turned to scrutinize the man, he nodded first to Tío Byron, then raised his hand to Papá in an expression of apology. He placed his hat to his chest, and Rosa was relieved to see that it was only Señor Cordoza. But Papá moved through the crowd as if more alarmed that the face was a familiar one.

  “Demas, Byron, everyone,” Señor Cordoza said, “they’ve come.”

  5

  Papá wouldn’t allow the torchlights. They were gathered at the table—the four of them—listening to the cannons and arquebuses explode in darkness. The ground felt less fixed beneath them, as if the island, under the force of the English general Abercromby’s eighteen battleships, was at risk of tumbling into the Caribbean Sea. What would they do, where would they go, if the English demanded their departure, if the English demanded their freedom? Mamá said she was tired and that she wished to find her bed, but Papá held her close, insisted they stay together. Eve asked if she could search for the biscuit tin. None of them had eaten much; the reception had been cut short, and the guests had retreated to their homes, had packed their belongings, and waited, as the Rendóns, to learn the outcome of the invasion.

  Eve doled out one and a half of the stale biscuits to each of them. Rather than satiat
e, the small offering had the effect of sickening already anxious stomachs.

  “Was that your belly? Tell it only one biscuit.” Eve said this to Papá and they all chuckled. It was a great relief to laugh, and Rosa was reminded then that Jeremias was not there, might never be there again.

  “Do you think they’ll attack inland?” Mamá said, slicing their smiles at the knees.

  In the months before the wedding, the English had completed the conquering of all but one French-held island. They pivoted then to Spanish possessions. There had been reports of raids, savagery, small and deadly insurrections, few signs of peace. Trinidad, it was said, was particularly attractive to the English, for it was fertile and sat within short distance of the most vital continent, South America. It was presumed the Spanish would fight to the death for the island.

  Papá rose to open the front door. There was one torch lit for each rider on horseback, two for every wagon. Since sundown, members of the upper class had been filing along the dirt road from town, their belongings in tow, their pace mad with terror. Papá said he was willing to open their home to a family or two, for Papá understood the uncertainty, the many questions that hung like flaxen webs in the air: If the English succeeded, what would become of the Spanish lands, the Spanish churches, the Spanish-held slaves? What would become of free coloreds and Negroes like them? Señor Cordoza had told Papá at the wedding party that Governor Chacon had failed to fortify the port and that there were already loud cries of betrayal from French farmers.

  “But the English … nothing good has ever been spoken of the English,” Mamá said. Another boom was heard in the distance. “They don’t even like themselves.”

  Then Mamá asked Papá to tell them a story, and Papá told what he knew about their little island. He spoke of the cultivation of it by the Caribs and the Arawaks, specifically the Lokonos and Taínos, and about how those peoples had fostered the growth of corn, tobacco, cassava, peanuts, cotton; how they had been the island’s only inhabitants until the arrival on July 31, 1498, of a sickly-looking man, leading a ragged crew of others. The twenty-four Taínos, who had been gliding across waters inside slim canoes, did not know what to make of the men they found sleeping in tall grasses. The Taínos saw the emaciated company of men as no threat, for the men were crying for assistance, for sustenance. The Taínos shared their food, showed them the island’s beauty, taught them the name they’d given themselves, which would matter little when the crew’s leader, Colón, became healthy again and would go on to brand the people of the island as “Amerindians” and rename their island, Lëre, Land of the Hummingbird, to “La Isla de la Trinidad,” proclaiming their bodies and their land property of the Spanish Crown.

  Rosa recalled only bits of this story from past tellings, but she remembered Papá speaking of the small wars fought for a hundred years afterward. How the Spanish had come for riches—gold and silver—and how the Arawaks and Caribs resisted month after month, year after year, ship after ship, until finally the diseases the Europeans brought had weakened the natives’ defenses to such an extent that the export, intentional displacement, and subsequent enslavement of most of the remaining first people of Trinidad had been simple to execute.

  By the mid-1500s, operating with native enslaved labor, the new Spanish settlers had cultivated a well-refined tobacco strain, Papá told them. In an effort to purchase it, the English began trading Africans to the Spanish settlers, while the French offered them textiles. The King of Spain, wishing to protect the gold he expected to find, attempted but failed to cut off the island’s trading routes. He would learn not long after, that Trinidad was, in fact, gold barren, and it would not be until cocoa was discovered in 1618 that Spain’s interest in the island piqued once more.

  “Of course, for cocoa to be profitable, more workers than ever were needed.” Papá nodded as if the story might have turned in a way that could have saved the Europeans from their inexpungable immoral stain. “Africans were brought to the island, but fewer Spaniards were willing to relocate to the tropics to manage the cultivation of cocoa that no one knew for sure would flourish. So the Crown turned to French farmers on surrounding islands—some free coloreds, most Catholic—and by last year’s count, there were close to twenty thousand people in Trinidad: a bit over two thousand Europeans, one thousand ‘Amerindians,’ ten thousand Negro slaves, and forty-five hundred free persons of color, including those like Mamá, born elsewhere, and Negroes like me, born or made free in Trinidad.

  “We are never again of one soil.” Papá reached for the torch and kneaded his hands above the flames. “So we find ways to stretch the world so there’s room for us.”

  It was some minutes after two o’clock in the morning when a final and thunderous explosion was heard. Papá blew out the flame and rose to open the door. He said he could see nothing in the distance, but Rosa did not believe him, for she could hear his breaths, quickening and fiery.

  At dawn they learned that as a small crowd looked on, the Spanish had put up no fight at all. The four ships Chacon had ordered to protect the territory against the English fleet had been torched by Chacon’s own commander, and many of the soldiers who had been aboard fled into the bush.

  6

  1802

  Placards were nailed to the trunks of the fattest trees on the corners of each dirt road in Port of Spain, in Saint Joseph, all along the coastal towns. They read:

  THE COLONY OF TRINIDAD HAVING, BY VIRTUE OF A CAPITULATION CONCLUDED ON BETWEEN HIS EXCELLENCY DON CHACON, LATE GOVERNOR FOR HIS CATHOLIC MAJESTY, AND OURSELVES, BECOME SUBJECT TO THE CROWN OF GREAT BRITAIN.

  Subject to the Crown of Great Britain. The words themselves meant little to the island’s citizens, but not long after the Capitulation Treaty was signed on Valsayn Estate, life began changing for the Rendóns. And it was not for the better.

  The English declared English the official language of Trinidad, and though the country would remain under Spanish law until further notice, in practice, all trade was to be conducted in English, all documentation requiring enforcement needed English translations, and all non-English anything or anyone would be treated as unsavory until otherwise noted.

  By the first day of March, male inhabitants were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the English Crown. Failure to do so would warrant deportation to a colony more suited to his loyalties.

  During the first few months of English ascendancy and immediately after taking his oath, Papá began spending his days at the new government’s offices, hoping to guard against the deleterious effects of the English arrival. Finally, he was taken into a small office with one desk surrounded by loose stone walls and told he would have to wait for a census to be taken before he could declare his holdings and before he could declare himself a free man.

  As time passed, Papá worried more. He began requiring a reporting of every family member’s whereabouts. He told Eve that he would place her best dresses in a wooden box in the barn loft beside the muskets he had refused to turn in to the authorities. He asked Mamá not to ever again bring out the Martinique saucers and cups, not even for longtime friends. And when the influx of the Englishmen began in earnest the year of 1802, Papá planted more silver-thatched palms alongside the road not only to obscure the view of their home but also to obscure their view of a changing world.

  The most notable and perhaps most distressing change in Papá, however, was that though Papá had never been a superstitious man and had often argued with Mamá about her visits to the obeah woman, he had suddenly begun taking note of certain bleak correlations: within a day of Mamá waking from her last dream of empty fishing nets, Byron had come to demand that Jeremias marry Francine; within hours of crossing the cursed threshold of the Robespierre property, the English arrived at the Dragon’s Mouth; and in July 1802, as Papá worked an iron pipe in the furnace, he noticed, to his chagrin, a potoo, the ugliest and unluckiest bird in the entire Southern Hemisphere, with its sickly, raspy song, perched on the windowsill of his smith s
hop.

  Papá’s shop was situated at the end of a yet-to-be-named road overlooking a shallow tepid-water stream. On the backside of the three-walled store, set inside a rocky hill, Papá had built a stone furnace. Many had wondered how a lone blacksmith could afford such an elaborate establishment, but Papá never felt he owed anyone an explanation. Without shame, he fired the furnace once per week, and when Jeremias stopped working alongside him, Papá fired it more frequently, sometimes for a continuous forty-eight hours, sleeping in two-hour intervals on a thin pallet in the corner, then rising to finish the next order and the next. As more Englishmen arrived, the demand grew for axes, shovels, cooking tools. And though the quality of his work was largely admired, Papá told Rosa, who by then was fifteen years, that he felt as if he were trying to keep a young man’s pace with old man’s boots.

  It was before midnight on a Sunday when Papá sat upon a wobbly stool across from the furnace. A breeze blew in from the east. It was a soft, tickly kind of breeze, the kind that could lull a tired man into a deep baby sleep. When Papá woke, he wiped his eyes only to realize that the sun had risen long before, and that that ugly bird, with its oversized grey head and bulging yellow-rimmed eyes, still remained across from him.

  He remembered then that potoos swallowed their prey whole. “Shoo!” he said.

  The bird flew off in the precise moment Papá remembered his furnace. Panicked, he doggedly attempted to relight it, but his efforts were useless. By the time the Englishwoman Mrs. Teller arrived beneath an unseasonably warm grey woolen hat to collect the pots needed to equip her kitchen, Papá’s only choice was to ask for more time. He promised that the handles (for this was the only part missing on each) would be finished by the end of the day, but Mrs. Teller would not hear of it.