Big Island, Small

by Maureen St. Clair

  “So that give them reason to cuff you? If a white woman running down the street you think they chase and cuff she and bring she to the station? They’d think she going for a run or she running from someone.”

  Sola laughing. She say, “You think I have time to study the police when some jumbie chasing me from inside out.”

  I want to say, “Jumbie? Jumbie my ass that’s an old fucking man chasing you down.” But I don’t. I change the subject. I tell she about Margaret and Mom. I tell she how they meet before Mom travel to Small Island. I tell she how Margaret have feelings for Mom. And how it sound like Mom may have feelings too. I tell she how Mom spend time in the cabin after the abortion and how she go through a grieving period; how I believe Aunt Rachel dislike Margaret because of the abortion; how Aunt Rachel blame Margaret for Mom’s death; how I still trying to figure out why she blaming Margaret. Sola listen like she taking in everything.

  A star shoot through the sky and we make our wishes.

  I wish for the future. I wish to find my way back to Small Island safe and with little hassle.

  Sola ask me what I wish for.

  I tell her if we tell out loud our wishes won’t come true.

  “I know. I know,” she say. Then she tell me about Baby Mado. “I knew her. I was there the day she was born. It was the week before I left Small Island. Ma Tay put her in my arms and told me to hold her good. The mother brought the baby to Ma Tay to be named. That day, a name rounded from Ma Tay’s tongue like she was making bubbles from air. ‘Madonna,’ she said. Ma Tay named that baby Madonna after the Black Madonna. Ma Tay said she’d never seen a baby born so black, so beautiful. Usually the colour came after, but this baby she was brown brown brown. Dark brown. Earth brown. ‘Like you,’ Ma Tay said, smiling into my eyes. We used to call her Baby Mado. And now, she’s dead.”

  “Let’s have a ceremony,” I say. “We can go behind the cliffs tomorrow, find a space and honour Baby Mado. We could make offerings, a poem, a prayer, something that reminds you of she. We don’t have to go to the sea; we can go to the woods on the other side of the cliffs. Make a small cross under a maple or pine.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We can make she something.”

  “Judith, she’s dead.”

  “I know Sola. All I saying we can do something to remember she by.”

  Sola don’t respond, not until next morning, when I hear she say, “Okay.” Before she jump from sleeping bag to cabin.

  Aunt Rachel show up next day in the middle of second coat. Margaret with us. Sola up on ladder painting edges and Margaret down below. Margaret sitting on a chair with a cup of tea and she keeping us company while we paint. She telling us of she days working on a cargo boat. I imagine they the same boats carrying barrels and containers across the sea to Small Island. She telling us she the only woman and of course they have she cooking for the crew. She say she don’t mind ’cause she love to cook and she make good money.

  Aunt Rachel open the car like she coming out but then she close the door and sit staring. I look at Sola then at Margaret. I wondering what to do next. Margaret look at me and nod me over to the car. This the first time I see Aunt Rachel visibly upset. Even at the funeral I never see she cry. I remember ’cause I fall down sobbing and she never slip a tear. I remember wishing she dead not Mom. And I vex she at funeral so still. So steady.

  The sides of Aunt Rachel’s mouth curve down, between her eyes a crease. Or maybe the sun in she eyes. But why she sitting in the car with windows up and the door open? As I reach closer I see she hands wrap tight round steering wheel, she body leaning forward staring at the cabin. I imagine she shutting the car door, starting the engine and backing all the way home.

  “Aunt Rachel you okay?”

  She turn to me with cheeks like she just come from the cold and say, “I miss her. I miss her so much.” And then she cry. She cry. She cry. She cry. And I just stand and let she cry. Head bowed on steering wheel, great big sobs busting from she chest, she throat, she mouth.

  Margaret standing behind me. Then Margret in front of me and she calling Aunt Rachel’s name and this make Aunt Rachel sob louder. Margaret sit in the passenger seat. She just sit and say nothing.

  I run to get tissue. I can’t find any so I bring a roll of toilet paper instead. I unravel and hand to Margaret who is now weeping too just quieter, as she wipe she tears with the back of she hand. I sit on the grass outside the car close to Aunt Rachel’s side. I hear Margaret say to Aunt Rachel, “I am so so sorry, dear Rachel.”

  Rachel turn she head and watch Margaret. “You’re sorry? How can you be sorry when I’m the one who refused your phone calls, your letters, your… I’m the one Margaret. I’m sorry.” Aunt Rachel wipe she nose, she eyes and then she apologize again to Margaret. She turn to me and say, “Your mom would never forgive me the way I treated Margaret. She loved you very much Margaret. And look here she is.” Aunt Rachel look up at the cabin, “Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. She is here.”

  Then she turn to me and say she sorry too. She sorry for leaving me alone so much. For not being around. For always going somewhere other than where she meant to be, “With you Judith.”

  Aunt Rachel turn the key in the ignition and put down all the windows. Then she turn to Margaret and say the day Mom died they returning from the post office. Mom insist she had to mail a package that day. “She was flying back to Small Island that night. I said I’d mail it for her the next day. She said she needed to mail it herself. The package was for you Margaret. She never told me that. But when she was getting out of the car I saw your name on the envelope. I blamed you Margaret. All this time I blamed you. But it was me she didn’t trust; that’s why she wouldn’t let me mail the package.”

  Aunt Rachel cry again. Margaret get out of the car and go to Aunt Rachel’s side. She crouch down and say, “Rachel. Let’s bury this. Let’s move forward. No more sorrys.” Then she take Aunt Rachel’s hands and lead she out the car. Aunt Rachel look up and see Sola on the ladder and smile. Inside the house she thank us over and over for painting the cabin. When Henri walk in she hugging and thanking him too.

  That night Aunt Rachel and Mr. Merle cook up a small feast for dinner. Shrimp and garlic butter, basmati rice, cheese biscuits, Greek salad with olives and feta spilling over, and curried lentils. Dolma and Shy show up like they know something going on. They say they going for their regular Sunday drive and decide to check in on Margaret and see how the ole girl getting on. They too show up with food. Macaroni pie and fried chicken, a bottle of mauby and ginger beer.

  We pull two picnic tables together, light lanterns and spread out food. After the meal Mr. Merle bring out a tub of mint ice cream, chocolate cake and a pot of tea. I watch how Aunt Rachel’s eyes continuously move to the cabin as if she including Mom at the table.

  While finishing dessert Dolma ask Mr. Merle what Henri is for him. And Mr. Merle laugh and say, “Henri is my son’s friend.” Henri look at Mr. Merle and say, “We more than friends Mr. Merle. Much more than friends.” Mr. Merle’s eyes do that familiar roll while he place his arm around Henri’s shoulder and then leaves his hand on Henri’s back while finishing he last piece of cake.

  Aunt Rachel smiling looking over at Margaret and Margaret nod like she accepting another apology from Aunt Rachel.

  Then Dolma say, “Why you call this place a cabin anyway when everyone else call their place cottage?” We all let out a laugh either ’cause we never wonder why or we never bother to ask.

  “In truth,” I say, “why cabin and not cottage?”

  Margaret say Mom start calling it a cabin from the first day she stay there. And cabin stick. Margaret say Mom say it look like a cabin that suppose to be in the middle of the woods not on top a cliff looking over the sea. And she right. But now with bright mango yellow Mom exactly where she suppose to be. Bordering sky and sea.

  Not long after, I annou
nce I leaving. I say I book my ticket the other day while in town. I look at Sola first. She head and eyes down. Aunt Rachel say, “What?” And I say it again, “I going back to Small Island.” Margaret lean over and hug me.

  “What about school, Judith?” Aunt Rachel say.

  “I almost say something but I guess I fraid to disappoint you. I know what I’m doing. I know I’m making the right decision. You’ll see Aunt Rachel, I not wasting my life. I just beginning.”

  Mr. Merle hold up he wine glass and make a toast even though only Henri, Margaret and Shy holding up their glasses too. Dolma never raise she glass ’cause Sola never raise she glass.

  That night I dream Sola under the plum tree in the yard back home. She come up the driveway on a pink BMX calling, “Yoo-hoo.” And me in the tree picking and sucking all the ripe plum. “Why you up there?” she say.

  “’Cause I know you coming,” I say.

  SOLA

  I CAN SEE MADO swimming in the stars. When a star falls from the sky I think of her immediately. I make a wish. I wish Mado freedom.

  I tell Judith about her, how she was named after the Black Madonna. Judith says we should have a ceremony to honour her, to pray for her mother and the rest of her family and to never never forget.

  I close my eyes and listen to the crickets, I hear the shore licking the sand, the wind knocking through the trees. I close my eyes and say a prayer to Madonna. In the morning I say yes to a ceremony down by the water.

  I’ve been working on Judith’s mom’s masks. Ever since I arrived those faces have been staring at me. They are in a basket in the corner by the door to the bedroom. Three of them half finished, alive through their glass eyes. Judith says her mom would love my hands weaving and bending, beading, restoring one of her masks.

  “Why me?” I ask.

  “I just know.”

  Then she pierces her skin with a needle she is threading. “Fuck,” she says.

  I can’t help myself. “What girl you plunge yourself into a bath of burning hot water and you can’t take a little prick of a needle?”

  We both start laughing.

  Judith hands me a calabash bowl full of glass, ceramic, paper, stone beads along with tamarind and donkey-eye seeds.

  I work with the glass ones, the ones Judith’s mom sourced on Big Island, the ones that look like jewels from a shipwreck. Wise-looking colours like silvers and burgundies, coconut flesh, starless sky black, streaked greys like dappled back horses and pink, the colour of early morning skies. The mask I am working on reminds me of a regal young woman, clever beyond her years. Seen too much. Seen too little. Eyes with beads the colour of cocoa. I give her a mouth, a round mouth beaded in silvers and purples. A mouth like she calling out loud definite “no’s.” I give her cheek piercings with juniper green. I bead a full-moon necklace around her neck. A small red bead to mark her womanhood. When I finish the mask Judith puts her on the wall and her eyes watch me incessantly. Judith says there’s a warrior in our midst.

  Judith and I spend our last days together walking, talking and making art. We leave the difficult conversations to simmer, to just be there, protected and well looked after. The masks our guardians. Of course they remind me of the ancestral stones. The ancient carvings I tended to when I was a young girl escaping all that grit from on top. The ancient faces that looked after me while I looked after them. I used to clean the river all around those gigantic stones. I’d go down there when no one was looking with an empty bag and pick up the strewn garbage, bottles and wrappings, old ripped clothing, pieces of cement, rope, cigarette butts, tin cans and bottle caps. I’m not sure what people were thinking littering sacred grounds.

  I say okay to the ceremony Judith proposes for Baby Mado. I lie awake most of the night thinking about it. Thinking about the baby who is now a twelve-year-old girl, a twelve-year-old girl under the ground. Thinking about Mr. Robbie and why he would do such a thing. Thinking about my own small self and why I kept going back. Embarrassed over the feelings that nobody told me about. The ones that shouldn’t have felt the way they did.

  Me telling Mikey, “He don’t do me nothing. I swear.”

  We go to the red cliffs, decide to go by the sea. The same sea Baby Mado swam or walked or viewed from some spot on Small Island. Judith walks with a small bag of what looks like candle wax but it’s the gum from the trees back home on Small Island. She says her father and other Rastas from their community called it gum and that it comes from trees they called gum trees. She said they used to burn it at their own ceremonies. She says her mom used to light it all the time too as part of her early morning meditation. Judith says she found a bag full when she found her mother’s notebooks. We gather wood, build a fire and burn the gum. We are sheltered from the wind, surrounded by red climbing earth, mahogany towers and two monumental stones, just like the ones in the ravine housing ancestral faces. I make a small beaded charm for Madonna that looks just like those same faces .

  Judith lights more of the tree gum and places it in a large piece of sea glass. She lights another piece while walking to the sea with an old shell she found. She scrubs the green moss from the insides, wipes it dry with the end of her shirt until it shines pink. She comes back and hands me the shell with the sweet smoke. I giggle seeing how serious and priestess-like Judith is. She cracks a grin. But then I become serious and remember, “I’m sorry for your loss Judith.”

  “What do you mean?” she says.

  “Your mother.”

  “Thanks Sola. But that’s not the same compared to what you and Baby Mado went through.”

  I go silent for a few minutes. “It’s different. But you still lost your mother. And you’re still struggling with your own stuff. And the shit with Jared. That was messed up.”

  I want Judith to know I believe her.

  “Thanks,” she says, in a whisper.

  From her bag she pulls the old calabash I saw resting on the bookshelf at the cabin. She places our offerings into the calabash: a torn-out page from her mother’s journal and the charm I made for Baby Mado. I follow Judith and place my hands in prayer to my heart. Together we float our blessings, pieces of ourselves to sea.

  Author’s Note

  Big Island, Small began as tiny sprouts of two characters, one loosely based on my daughter born from a Big Island (Canada) Mother and a Small Island (Grenada) Father and the other loosely based on a dear friend of mine born of Small Island (Grenada) parents. Both young women come from vastly different backgrounds and yet share complex similarities in their exploration of love and violence in a racialized, gendered, sexualized world.

  I have married into and lived within a Black community, a Caribbean culture, and a Rasta faith for 25 years. With guidance and support from friends and family I wrote Big Island, Small with respect, humility and I hope responsibly.

  I want to note the dialect does not reflect one particular Caribbean dialect but represents one unique to a fictionalized Caribbean Small Island, and was guided by my daughter and other Grenadian women readers and writers.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks and praise first and foremost for the past twenty-five years immersed heart strong in beautiful Grenada. I arrived 23 years old and reached my 50th this year. Politically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually I grew up in Grenada; my mind, my heart cracked wide open where the gift of learning and unlearning occurred regularly. I married into Grenada culture and community through my husband Theo and eight years later we planted our own roots with the birth of our daughter, Maya. Both Maya and Theo born and raised in Harford Village, Grenada.

  Give thanks Harford Village. Honoured and humbled to call you home for over twenty years building and nurturing relations. Immersed in both celebratory and difficult times, from births, to birthdays, to graduations, to marriages, to village sport’s teams winnings and also to unexpected deaths, illnesses, injustices and natural disasters. Har
ford Village thank you for folding me strong into community, into family.

  A luminous shout out to Grenadian sistren who guided, supported and nurtured. Give thanks Judy Antione, Cindy Mckenzie, Damarlie Antione, Ayisha Sylvester-John, Malaika Brooks-Smith, KizzyAnne Abraham, Kimalee Phillip, Hilde Houen, Vida George, Sarah George, Kerlin Charles, Dolma Davis, Hermione Hutchinson-Harris, Alison Harris, Shamika Alexander, Vintrise Matthew, Carina Linden, Lydia Linden, Judith Linden, Leah Andrew, Wendy Matthew, Carlana Charles, Arlene Pilgrim, Tash Mitch, Jane Ivey Pearl Nurse, Patsy George, Kayla George, Sally-Anne George and to many many more strength and wisdom Grenadian women.

  Deep gratitude to the many who guided me with wisdom and love: Give thanks Augy Jones for believing in this story and reminding me over and over to have faith in the uniqueness of my voice and position; thank you Mary Ellen Clancy for holding and encouraging this story from the beginning and always having/giving time; Hilde Houen for your love, support, groundedness and positivity; Rachel Hurst for your friendship, your compassion, your love of justice; Donna Morrissey for saying “yes” to reading a small piece of the manuscript in its beginning stages even without knowing me well and then proclaiming “You are a Writer”; Jacob Ross for always getting back to me, for encouraging and supporting; Oonya Kempadoo for your critical feedback; Deborah Root and Shani Mootoo for your love, critical conversations and modeling life as art; Sobaz Benjamin for your vulnerability, your strength, your confidence in the power of story to heal; Dana Mills for mentoring me during the first stages of this novel and for your generous offering of the title; Stephen Law always for your friendship, guidance and love.

  Big thanks to the Writers Association of Grenada who claimed me from long; to the Writers Association of Nova Scotia for providing opportunities like the Alistair Macleod Mentorship Program and the Atlantic Writer’s Competition; to the Beacon Award for Social Justice Literature; to the whole crew at Fernwood and Roseway publishing for giving Big Island, Small a home, enabling this story to reach higher ground; and to my kind and humble editor Chris Benjamin for believing in me right from the beginning.