Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  Part II

  In a poor isle and all of us ourselves When no man was his own.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST

  The St. Catherine Crier

  April 7, 1977

  Low & Behold

  by Epictetus

  Eppy: Well, gents, the grandkids had a puzzler for me since last we met in our seminar of the streets. It seems the schoolmarm entered some confusion into their heads.

  Sir Cease-All: I understand that’s the modern method, imported in the barrel of independence from the world’s great centers of learning.

  Beau of the Bawl: What, we still import stupidness to St. Catherine?! But we oversupplied as is with the home-grown variety, man.

  Joe Pittance: Not being as educated as you fellers, I can still say Old Rod and Master Cane never failed to explain a lesson clearly.

  Eppy: Here’s the nut, now see if you can crack it. The innocents went off to form believing they were sound Catherinians, and after a day at their desks, returned in doubt of their common identity. One child was Spanish, one French, one African, one English, one Portugee, one savage Indian and the like. What shall you make of that?

  Beau: What history herself has made of it: a d —m scramble. Since we have proved unable to make history, history tried to make us —but couldn’t even make up she own mind, eh?

  Sir C: Such a hee-haw this man makes. We share a Queen with the great Commonwealth and have been lucky in that regard for as long as anyone here can recall. We’re as English as Aunt Nellie’s knickers —that’s the end of it, sirs.

  Joe: With all due respect, Your Honor, God issues souls and nations issue passports. The skin you’re dressed in was not issued by Her Majesty’s Government. We are Africans first, all else second.

  Beau: Heh-heh, that’s a good one, boy. All these fellers screaming black power yet when was the last time one of them purchased airfare to the dark continent. You couldn’t pay a feller from around here to go back across the water, yet he will teef to make passage to London, Toronto, or Brooklyn.

  Joe: What is sweet in our natures carries over from Guinee. What is sour comes from pretending to be what we are not.

  Eppy: Rein you horses, gents. You’ve done a fine job of enacting the puzzle, and I thank you. But is there no one answer we can agree to on the question: Who are we people of St. Catherine’s? Can history tell us? As you well know, the Admiral of Castille discovered our fair island upon his third voyage in the year 1498 and named it Conception, to honor the Immaculate birth.

  Beau: Family Planning looking to rechristen her Contraception, eh-eh, to chastise our national pastime, immaculate or otherwise.

  Sir C: I protest your play with morals not with words. Blasphemous play to boot.

  Beau: I mistook you for English, not Roman.

  Sir C: As my parents believed so do I, and the better for it.

  Joe: And so do I though I suspect none of you will hear of my old folks’ country ways. But “discover” is not a fair word, for the island had a name before Columbus saw it —Haroon —and a population that we could say “discovered” Spaniards.

  Eppy: I see we cannot quickly direct history to our goal, so back we go to our question. Think, now, so that I may straighten out the kids. Who are we Catherinians? Beau?

  Beau: We are perpetual knockers on the doors of houses other than our own.

  Sir C: Each to his own opinion even if it serves no one. We are a modern nation, sirs, newly born but nevertheless free and on the road to maturity, aligned with a greater power for greater benefit and security. We are, as they say up north, a melting pot.

  Beau: Melted pot is what you mean.

  Joe: In my simple judgment, until we are at peace with ourselves we are only abandoned oxen, some mooing at coattails of those who have left us to our own devices, some bulling around as if they would replace their former keepers in the drawing room, but most only lost and unable to reconcile the injustice of their position.

  Sir C: Negative, negative. You have practiced a speech, Joe.

  Beau: The barnyard ain’t need a keeper for a cock to rightfully rule.

  Eppy: I suppose the rightful question is not who we are but who we are becoming. By the way, why is it that the streets have been turned into dance halls, playgrounds, sports arenas, and the like by young idlers and their corner gangs? Now the latest fad is flying kites in the middle of the road, joining in with the karate practice and stooping and gambling. The Police are seemingly unable to do anything about it, especially against the use of the foulest language accompanying such vice. Let’s be positive about our image and clean up the streets. And speaking of sport, congrats to our boys for taking the third Test against India on Sunday past, winning convincingly by six wickets. Until next week then, Clarior E Tenebris.

  Chapter 14

  Start on Cotton Island, where nothing of consequence to the world ever started, where even by the primitive standards of the sleepy island, twenty-two years ago, before the airstrip was built and the atoll became a fashionable place for wealthy Europeans, the birth of Cassius Collymore came to be known for its unwarranted crudeness, the baby expelled into a windrow of sea trash on the beach sand down from the old wooden dock near the anchorage, a place where the air is never fresh but a pungency of creosote and tar, iodine and rotting marine life. Born collectively, as it were, to an island sect of the Pentecostal church —The Church of Christ of the Crossroads —at the pitch of the moment most sought by the celebrants, in Creole known as the crisis de loa, when Jesus and his court of lesser gods mount their human horses and express themselves.

  Only, the night of the birth of Cassius Collymore, they chose to express themselves in the language of impossible love, manifested in blood, pain, and excrement —the brawny, lust-ridden Erzulie Mary, Lady of Sorrows, the Black Venus, demanding that the child forfeit the flesh and spirit of the mother, so that the goddess might inhabit them herself. Into the fetal ear, Erzulie Mary is said to have ordered, “Go down into the world and leave these waters.” A mother has the right to intervene on behalf of her child, to prevent the unhealable wound of being supplanted, but Miss Diedra was fourteen years old, a simple god-struck girl, favored by Erzulie Mary for her promiscuity, the abandon with which she had given herself to the fisherman Collymore, and could make no other choice than to seek the unattainable perfection of all her passion.

  Foolish girl, her stepmother clucked, seeing Miss Diedra dress in her smock and turban, wash her face with holy water: stay home in bed with your jerking belly. Her smock was a white whale, its immensity foreshadowing the labor that seemed to begin with a deep puckering contraction that faded seconds later, leaving behind a sense that the folded, circling emptiness between her legs was loosening, just as her bowels would slacken involuntarily when she was ill. Those hard lips, so loyal to their secrets, were swelling and opening and losing their ability to harness whatever ecstasy was farther up inside her, shoving out. Still, she wrapped her small head in white binding and sat in the kitchen of her stepmother’s house, her skinny legs open like a compass, her adolescent body crushed by the boulder of the pregnancy Collymore had thrown on her, and waited to be collected for Sunday evening service, always held on the beach under the stars. In a mirror, Miss Diedra had practiced being a lover, making her eyes try to be Erzulie Mary’s eyes, eyes that could cry red tears; making her mouth try to be Erzulie Mary’s mouth, a mouth that could jealously accept a penis half a yard long, a mouth that could eat dreams and express pleasure beyond human capacity. Now she made her lover’s face unknowingly, and sang: Where are you, beautiful woman? Oh, come to me. Here you are in the water. If you need me, come to me. Come —

  Before she could even say why she was up out of her chair and waddling like a frightened goose, down the back stoop to the outhouse, the water pooling for a moment inside her heavy panties before it bathed her legs. With shaking hands, she took a match from a can on the wall and lit a candle, illuminating the shed of foul darkness, its palm crucifix a
nd faded chromolithograph of the Madonna and child nailed to the door. She sat over the rough hole and removed her underwear, left them on the floor, sponged her aching thighs with paper as she dripped into the latrine, terrified but blessed with an affirming ignorance which made her as thoughtless and accepting as an animal. She closed her eyes and experienced the impulse to lie down on her back on the floor of the outhouse. Erzulie Mary, she sang in her mind, you bring me joy. Then she gasped as the baby stabbed her, and she thought of it rapturously, its weight and restless movement undammed, on the verge of cascading down the sluice of her cunt, as the god of the sea launching his boat. Where are you, beautiful woman? Here you are in the water

  Voices called to her from the shell-white road that ran past her stepmother’s house to town and the beach. She stood, tottering so that it seemed she was thrown at the moldy image of the Madonna, which she gave a feverish kiss, already half given to the spirit herself. The hem of the long smock descended like a bell of light around her legs. She blew out the candle and let herself be carried in Erzulie Mary’s arms up to the road.

  The congregation moved forward like a tribe of ghosts, the women floating and faceless, white clouds blowing seaward, the men chopped in half, wearing dark pants but white long-sleeved shirts, their heads invisible except for the bobbing crowns of their felt hats. At the beach the priest took his walking stick and drew the vévés of all the gods in the sand, beginning with the cross and the fish, the symbols of the Christian lords. He sacrificed a chicken, singing Our fathers who art in heaven, so that the gods would find nourishment when they arrived. He sprinkled the sand where they would dance with the chicken’s blood, and then wet the sand again with an offering of bush rum, dribbled from a bottle labeled Château de St. Amour. His assistants began to beat their crude goatskin drums, softly, since those not of their religion considered drumming a backward form of worship. In the rhythmic surf of handclapping, the priest sang the names of the twenty-four apostles of Christ of the Crossroads, twelve white and twelve black, sang the names of the forefathers and wives and divine children, invoked the gods of the hearth, of the forest and of the wind, until the words of his song were far away in the minds of the dancers, muffled and incomprehensible, as the prayer jumped like electricity from one pole of reality to the next, becoming a prayer of flesh, without which the mysteries would not present themselves. In the starlight, an old woman had been watching the girl, her moans and shudders others mistook for piety, and had realized what was happening. “Child, is your time, you muss go home,” she said, taking Miss Diedra by the arm as the dancers weaved and interweaved around them. Peering closer at the girl’s face, she saw her eyes rolled back, leaking the red tears of Erzulie Mary, her dark lips flecked with foam. Suddenly the girl convulsed. The old woman struggled to hold her up, but she wheeled away, mounted by the goddess, into the dance. There was a great agony in Miss Diedra’s dance, not unfamiliar to the others, and they swirled together like white storks in the darkness, the black water of the harbor lapping their bare feet. Down to the earth the girl —though she was no longer merely a girl, but a servitor of the angel that was dancing in her head —summoned a surplus of grace and, one by one, the other women became flames of the Holy Spirit, flames and doves, tongues of flame and wings of doves. Amid the ululation of their praise, her cry was most piercing, her gift most convincing, but she did not know how to respond to the extravagant demands of Erzulie Mary, and as the child battled with the angel for its sanctuary, Miss Diedra realized she wasn’t prepared to offer such absolute fidelity to such an insatiable spirit. The celebrants flew around her, a whirlwind of shining, flaming birds, while she heaved and screamed, unnoticed except for her exquisite fervor.

  “She serves the Virgin Mary,” a man sobbed in a guttural voice. And from another, “She dances with the hand of God!”

  Startled by the brutality of her dance, the priest rushed to catch her as she seemed to collapse; he was afraid, because now he too, like the old woman, knew the nature of the girl’s dance, which was unprecedented in his experience, and he feared for the safety of that part of her that he called, in the old language, petit bon ange, and because he understood that you could not always know where the powers of evil reside. In his arms, the girl shrank back upon her heels, squatting and shitting, and with a wail as high and unbroken as a steaming teakettle, released one spirit from her womb, and went limp at the entrance of a dominating, intractable other. As tiny as Miss Diedra was, the priest could not support the massive bulk of Erzulie Mary, and let the girl fall back in the sand. At her feet squirmed a glistening shape, in a sandy puddle of blood and feces and seaweed, a baby swaddled in cord and placenta, steam rising from its heat. The celebrants fluttered between the higher and lower worlds and were slow to stop their dance, being more inclined to elevate the girl and her miracle back into it. Madonna Madonna, some of the women chanted, among them Emma Quashie, who believed that Miss Diedra had indeed been transformed into a vision of the Holy Mother, and when she stooped to the child and picked him up, and bathed him in seawater until he screamed from the salt on his new flesh, she acted in response to this vision, to the ancient savage glory of the epiphany, the gods’ signature on hapless human creation, and not because her heart went out to the infant though she was a mother herself, with a nursling at home. She found a bird’s nest of nylon fishing line in the windrow of soggy turtle grass, plucked its ends from the ball and tied off the child’s umbilicus, pulling the second knot tight enough to sever the cord. The celebrants formed a white wall of faith around Miss Diedra, who lay dazed in the sand, exhausted by the unimaginable violence of the spirit named for love. Below her waist, the fabric of her smock filled with the black clots of her hemorrhage. Without a word to the others, Emma Quashie slipped the blouse of her dress over her meaty shoulders, put the baby to her nipple and took him home. Miss Diedra was now nothing more than a dead person who seemed, incidentally, to be alive.

  The men carried the unconscious girl back to her stepmother’s, and eased her into her narrow bed. The women undressed and washed her, thickening the shadows with prayer. As if she were an icon or the prostrate statue of a martyr, they stole kisses from the girl’s waxen forehead. The oldest midwife on the island was summoned, a hag like a burnt, elfin wraith who had delivered hundreds of babies without ever losing a mother. She placed a poultice between the girl’s legs, wedging it into her torn vagina, then crossed the legs tightly shut, right over left, and bound them together at the knees and ankles with strips of bedsheet. Finally, the priest came from the front room, where he had been swilling bush rum while the girl’s stepmother argued out loud with herself for the benefit of all in earshot, that the girl was no good, that she had warned the girl to have nothing to do with men, that her dead husband would have beaten his daughter and locked her in her room if he were alive, to save her from turning into the green whore she had become; that this was a good house, until the girl had corrupted it with sin. The preacher knelt at Miss Diedra’s bedside, tormented by his own devotion to the Black Venus, and begged Erzulie Mary to dismount the girl, but the saint mocked the priest by exchanging the suffering in the girl’s face for a look of sensual beauty, moving the girl’s right hand so that it clutched the nut of her left breast, and pulling the other hand down to plant its fingers in the wool of her pubic hair. The next day, a doctor arrived from St. Catherine on the afternoon ferry, carrying his soupy bags of plasma in an ice chest, but the transfusions only funneled life back into the girl’s veins, not health or liberty, and she remained an angel trapped on earth, the living temple of the Lady of Sorrows, Erzulie Mary, bedridden in the house of her stepmother for five years, speaking infrequently and then only in the language of unutterable obscenity that composed the benedictions of her mistress. In due time, the priest of the Church of Christ of the Crossroads built a shrine in the girl’s room, and fornicated with the goddess on Tuesdays and Thursdays, her chosen days, and with the stepmother, when she would have him. The baby, being noth
ing, was neither remembered nor forgotten, as if it had come no closer to the lives within the house than a shooting star.

  Ten days after the birth of his son, Collymore returned to Cotton Island, his pockets full of money from a week-long expedition aboard a freezer ship, fishing grouper on the Leeward Banks, along the blue-water edge of the shoals. For two days and nights he feted himself in Mama Smallhorne’s rum shop and, after sleeping straight through the third, visited the girl Diedra on the fourth to verify the jokes and rumors that he had given the world another mouth to feed, again. One visit was enough, and more. The unwelcoming stepmother wanted to know who he was, and what business brought him to her door. “Mahn’s business, eh?” he answered, and stepped around her. The girl herself revolted him, with her deflated body and swimming eyes, her odor of embalmment. She spoke in a rasping, throaty voice but made no sense, though there was not much sense to her to begin with, only a hunger he could clearly see had itself been devoured. Relieved she had no claim on him, he backed out the door, nodding all the while, as if she were telling him not to come back, and he was bravely agreeing to obey her wish. Then, with no regrets, he walked a mile down the road and another ten minutes down a gully path to the Quashie house, to get a look at the baby and get a feel for the extent to which he might be held responsible for its welfare. He filled the doorway of the small frame house on Hammon’s Bight where the child had been carried the night of its birth, declining Emma Quashie’s chilly invitation to step inside.