“I ain know, miss. But things been unusual with Mada Eeona lately. Things been very unusual. She been telling everybody, even the paying guests, that some stories come back to haunt she. She get real funny. Funny like in the head. Episodes, she calling it.”
—
When the phone ring that night, my son jump up like the phone is fire bell. “Good evening,” he say. I can tell from the way he say it again and again that the person on the other end ain answering. “Auntie Eeona?” he say, hopeful because I already give the news that Eeona gone and ain say where. But I know it ain Eeona. I look at my daughter whose stare is busting through my forehead. She know it ain Eeona. My daughter and me we both know is her father, Jacob. Calling to see where I gone. To Jacob it probably come like I vanish out the restaurant. Leave the rose he slip behind my ear on the floor by the restrooms. But I ain go to the phone even though I know he won’t speak unless he hear my voice.
I sit there hearing my son say “Good evening, good evening” and feeling Me’s questions roaming round my head, and watching her unbelievable beauty come soaking into she face. And a feeling is coming over me. I watching my daughter. And I feel the sand beneath my feet. Franky walk in the door and we give each other the sliding look we been slipping on since we get kick off that beach on our very own island. Now I smelling the sea. And it ain that I drowning or that I in a net. I swimming like how Jacob teach me. And I know what I must do to make everything right. I need something big-big to belong to. Something bigger than husband or boyfriend or sister, even.
I have to haul my backside back to Frenchtown.
92.
The radio station was in Frenchtown. By car it was easy to find because all the paved roads in the village led to it. When Anette went on the microphone, she was introduced as Mrs. Coast Guard Lighthouse Keeper Franklyn Joseph and Senior Schoolteacher of History at the Anglican Parochial School, but you may call she Anette. Mervyn Manatee, the radio man, told her to speak clearly. Then she said what she had to say to all of the Virgin Islands, both the USVI and the BVI, and whichever other island could catch the reception waves: “We have had a storm. Our land and our sea have suffered, but now we must claim ourselves for ourselves. Is time that we claim where we belong.” Then she paused to reveal her dramatic meaning. “Our beaches must be free.” And the calls start flooding in to the station.
The BOMB began.
There were letters in the Daily News. People talked about it on the street: The beaches belonged to the natives. But what is a native? No, no. The beaches were for the tourists who were only just now returning since the storm. Beach violence would increase if beaches were opened to the local public. But the beaches were for everyone. They are our community parks. Our zoos. Our arboretums. Our places to marry and make love. But the beaches would be filthy with all the people. The bodies oozing sunscreen, the wrappers left behind. Was there nothing good left in the world for us, for them, for me?
The hurricane had revealed so many beaches. Ones that were hidden by bush and tree were now washed and revealed. The homes that had shielded them were blown away or flattened or gutted by wind and rain. Who in town had heard of the sea bath called Stumpy? Who alive had ever been to Botany Bay?
It went unnamed at the time, but let us call it something, for things without names do not really exist. In the history it will be called the Beach Occupation Movement and Bacchanal. In America the Weathermen and the Black Panthers were blowing up themselves and each other. In Vietnam a Vietnamese soldier who was on one side aimed a gun at a Vietnamese man from the other side. The soldier waited for the camera and then shot his quivering countryman in the head.
John F. Kennedy died. Che Guevara died. Martin Luther King, Jr., died.
And in the Virgin Islands we had the BOMB. We were marching on the sand and doing wade-ins and soak-ins and—for those who could—swim-ins. Running to the beaches in the middle of the night, past the guards and the dogs. By day, we pretended to be Afro-American tourists. We wore broad bright hats and cover-ups over our bathing suits. Sandals to walk in the sand. Gleaming sunglasses. But then we would reveal ourselves by turning on a radio and blasting some Pick-up Men or quelbe and then screaming, “We is the Virgin Islands!” as we stripped off our costumes and ran to the water. We would stay in the water, dancing up and singing loud until the police come. We were being hauled off to jail. One person even got stung half to death by a smack of jellyfish. That’s when the newspaper started sending reporters and cameramen.
Ronalda, who in America wrote slogans for SNCC, could not think of a good one for this thing getting on at home. It was the first time that she had come up short in her sloganeering. Over the phone she tried out ones to her mother hesitatingly: “Don’t leech the beach” and “Take our shore? No more!” But Ronalda was not satisfied with these. Oh, this feeling again: that she was not good enough for home, that home needed a perfection she could not provide. It was why she had left in the first place.
But young Frank became heavily involved. His first swim-in was at night, and the island was still drenched in hurricane darkness, for only the government buildings had electricity. The people brought flashlights and started up a singing. Frank waited for the chorus on the calypso and then ran in so fast he actually made it past wading and was able to swim nine full strokes in the dark water before the authorities reeled him out. Usually the protesters were hauled away before they even got waist-deep, so Frank’s full swim was heroic. Anette cheered on her boy from the shallows. That was her son. Hers and Franky’s.
After that, Anette and her son led regular training sessions right in their living room. First, how to get your entire body into the water so that at least you were carried out soaking. Second, how to look like you’d been drowning, which was good for the cameras. She spoke while Frank demonstrated the headfirst dive, the full-body dunk, the flail, and then the dancing, so that the water sprayed everywhere.
But if the beaches were our place, our belonger place, then it seemed a real ridiculousness that most of us couldn’t even swim. Like we wanted the beach, but we hadn’t really yet appreciated the thing. Like a man who begs his woman to marry, but then steps out as soon as the wedding night is over. So we got serious-serious. We rented two rooms at the hotel owned by a local family where there was a private pool for every suite. Anette took the women, her son took the men. “Hold my waist. Kick, kick. Make a big splash.” Learning to swim in the pool was unnatural, hard. The activists shared the room fees for weeks. But when these amateurs first tried in the ocean, the salt raised them up. They swam. Easy as eels.
This thing Anette was doing was the biggest thing she had ever done. Her firstborn had run off to the Continent, her second child had some unworldly illness, her sister was missing, and she herself wrongly loved the most wrong man. But, for a little while, the BOMB was larger than all those loves.
Slowly and quietly, the hotels received their electricity. No more growling generators through the night. Charging full price again. Then the airport, which had been operating on half energy, went full lights. The planes started carrying as many visitors as they did emergency supplies. The islands were more, well, obviously Caribbean now. What with people back to buying their provisions in the market every morning. This authenticity, which was really poverty, was pulling in the tourists once again. Then the wealthier parts of the island started getting electricity back. Then the retail establishments went alight. Then the BOMB really began, because now the tourists were on the beaches and we all saw how they didn’t need passes, permissions, or protests.
We started bringing coolers of rum and Coke. It was a bacchanal. But it was also serious business.
Big Franky was as impressed as he was worried about his son’s activism. Suppose the boy was thrown in jail? Since Franky was in the Coast Guard, he couldn’t actively protest. He worried that he would be sent to pick up the protesters one day. Even Anette worried, despite her position as mother of the movement. What if Frank actually drowned?
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She was also anxious because she wanted to call Jacob. But she never talked to him now. That was through. That was over.
Oh, but it wasn’t. Because they had a child between them. It could never be over. And when young Frank convinced that child to stop fretting over her foot and join the movement, things really began to move.
93.
The big protest was planned over on Water Island. It was the very beach that long ago Anette and Franky had danced on for that nasty movie. People hired or rented fishing boats and dinghies, and motored over or rowed over on their own. There was no restriction for boats in the water. The natives had to fish. So we all gathered, filling the channel between the big island of St. Thomas and the smaller Water Island. Honeymoon Beach had the perfect name. Because on that day something sweet did occur. Then a month later, a moon, it was over.
The goal this time was to get to the shore. To get on the beach, either by diving over and swimming or by riding your dinghy right up to the sand. From the beach, we looked like part of the entertainment the tourists had paid for. Yes, the Virgin Islands was worth the money. The natives came with music! Markie, of Pick-up Men fame, was still alive and he brought his handmade ukelele and sang out loud like a bugle to war.
Anette, the one who had begun it all, did not attend this protest, despite the perfect symmetry of its backhand slap. There were two things that kept her away. The first was her sticking fear of boats. Without her husband, there wouldn’t be anyone there to stay by her side and ring his arm around her. The second was that word had been coming from St. John about Eeona. About people seeing her. Anette needed to stay by the phone. So she stayed in her house, but kept the radio on for news from Water Island.
The morning of the big protest Franky kissed Anette on the mouth, like he’d done during the hurricane. He was wearing his official white uniform, which he never wore and which meant that he was heading somewhere on Coast Guard business. They didn’t speak about it. Perhaps the children, as they do, might save them both.
We Virgin Islanders wore cut-off pants and straw hats. We carried banners and battery-operated cassette players. It was easily mistaken for a Carnival until one read the banners that had Ronalda’s slogans on them. To the tourists, it slowly began to feel like an invasion.
Unlike the scattered and spontaneous swim-ins before, this was the best-planned and most major event of the movement. The history maker. It wasn’t planned as a swim-in even. It was a lime-in. We were coming from the water this time. The plan was to get to shore and party there like we belonged. Youme was there, though she was wearing the strange new style of bell-bottom jeans and the old-style sneakers. As the boats got closer to the shore, Youme shouted with the best of them. From the boats they could see the tourists, pink like seashells and scared. They could also see the hotel security guards who had been hired by the Gull Reef Club. The security guards, who were all Caribbean people, we people, were waiting in uniforms of American dark blue.
Security lined up along the water’s edge with six feet between them, as they had been trained and told. But as the boats came closer and the chanting became very clear, some of the security guards, overcome with love for the islands, stripped off their uniforms and swam out to join the protesters. They clambered into the boats, where they stood out in their white briefs and black shiny shoes.
But that is when the real police revealed themselves. Those men, better trained and holding jobs that earned them health care, stayed in uniform and filled the spaces where the hotel security guards were quickly evacuating.
When the boats started singing toward the shore and the people who could swim started jumping overboard and making toward the sand, the police put their batons up, but they did so only halfheartedly. They were amused and proud, even as they grabbed people by the shoulders and corralled them into one gathering, out of the tourists’ way. “V.I. people crazy!” the officers shouted. After all, these people were their cousins or their aunts and uncles or, in some cases, their sisters and brothers, wives and husbands. “All you so crazy!” The police said it singing, like crazy was the best thing to be.
But that was not all.
The Coast Guard was federal and so they appeared, as colonizers do, in big ships. As soon as the little protester rowboats and motorboats had left the waterfront for their five-minute voyage to Water Island, the Coast Guard boats were dispatched. It took the Guard just about ten more minutes to arrive. Their vessels were now out in the water, facing the crowd of protesters who were held on the sand, bearing down on the little boats where the people who hadn’t jumped, because they weren’t yet confident in their swimming, now threw down anchors or cut off motors and tried not to look afraid. The white Coast Guard commander got on a bullhorn and told those on the beach they would be uncorralled and told the ones in the boats that they would not be sunk, and told them all that they would not be arrested—but only if they agreed to go home.
“We already home!” the people on the boats and the sand replied in unison as if it had been planned.
The tourists on the beach were frozen in their fright. They seemed like huge sand sculptures. Like Lot’s wife, tropical style. They stared at the protest signs stuck in the sand and did not know that they were the leeches. A revolution? Oh, no! The natives were rebelling. But for what? Look how beautiful it was here. Who could not be happy here in this paradise? Who would revolt here?
With the Coast Guard there now, the tourists moved slowly, hoping that if they gathered their towels and sunscreen bit by bit that no one would notice them.
And no one noticed them at all. Because something else was happening not bit by bit. A girl who had slipped out of the protesting crowd was rushing toward the water. She was doing a swim-in, even though a lime-in is what they had planned. But still, this girl was right. To be able to go back and forth from water to land as you pleased, that was the thing. The back and forth was the beach. The girl was fully clothed, with strange pants ringing at her feet, but her hair was swimming behind her like an impossible school of barracuda. Though she was running to the water, it seemed as though she were running in every direction. She kicked off her sneakers just before streaming into the sea.
Her beauty was so disturbing, so unusual, and so unfair that even the protesters lowered their voices. Even the police now policing the water slacked their arms and saw her slip through them like a fish. And then she was lifting her T-shirt off and flinging it to the surf and charging the ocean like a reverse Athena. Sprouting inwardly back to her creator. So many, many metaphors.
Eve Youme had not meant to expose herself. Perhaps she was coming into her gift. Perhaps she was out of her mind, having her own episode. We old wives can’t say for sure. Because when the T-shirt was raked off, so went the bathing suit top that had been underneath, and Jesus Lord, what pillowy wonders her breasts were. As Eve Youme dived under, every single person on the beach was filled with an ancient urge. They all flooded after her.
For a full minute everyone, tourists and natives and locals and Coast Guardsmen and even the ones who just before swore they couldn’t swim, now splashed like they were children. Like it was a pure bacchanal. Like it was Carnival Sunday and we were all one at the last lap. Everyone swimming. A miracle.
Finally, the Coast Guardsmen, finding themselves unexpectedly steeping with the others, regained their composure and swam after the protesters, dragging them splashing out of the water. Eve Youme resurfaced far out by a buoy. A young hero Guardsman stroked out to her; she waited until he was close and then began thrashing and screaming like a banshee.
In handcuffs on the shore, young Frank was dripping. He saw his sister being reeled out of the water and was glad he had convinced her to come. “Me!” he shouted at her, so she would know she was supported. “Me!” her brother said, until she found his face and locked on his eyes for assurance. Then a thought came over Frank in a singular way that it had not when he had simply joined the others in the dash toward her and the sea: His sister w
as stunning. Frank had seen breasts before; his popularity at school had afforded him the privilege. But his sister, Lord Jesus. Frank allowed the police officer to turn his face away.
When Eve Youme was being hauled out of the water by the Guardsman, she looked like something of the sea. The young Guardsman had not taken off his own shirt to cover her, as he should have. Oh, she was something beautiful and magical that belonged to another world or maybe to this very world in all its magic. The Guardsman, though he was supposed to be protecting the tourists from her, held on to Youme as though she were his woman, his sunburned hand gripping her high on the waist, right below the breasts. Everyone watched as her body was revealed. Everyone waited for the fish tail. Her legs appeared but her jeans, wet and heavy, flared at the bottom like fins. She did not hold her arms over her breasts to hide them. The photographer from the Daily News remembered his vocation and put the camera to his face. With all that blinding beauty, no one had bothered to study her feet, shielded as they were in the newfangled pants. But wasn’t it strange how afterward her footprints seemed to be sending her in opposite directions? Backward, forward. But then again, there were many footprints, who is to say for sure which were hers.
The young Guardsman continued to hold Youme tight. “I’m sorry, it’s just my job. I’m not from around here, but I’m on your side, Me. That’s your name, right? Please forgive me, Me. It’s just my job.” He sank this into her neck like a lover’s whisper.
A group of older Guardsmen who had stayed behind in their officious whites and watched through binoculars, now dinghied to the shore. One of them ran forward, his shoes slipping in the sand. He unbuttoned his shirt. He stood before Eve Youme and the brave blond Guardsman. “Seaman, get your hands off my daughter.” Youme allowed Papa Franky to slip her hands into his gleaming shirt. After a moment, Franky also took off his shoes and pushed her feet into them. She allowed his stumbling fingers to tie the laces and button her in. And forever after, he never allowed himself to consider what he had seen.
Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel Page 31
