The band started to play, the floor became crowded, and feeling that he was safer on the dance floor, he took her strong hand and led her to the circle of the dance.
The music was very slow. He was hearing Barry White’s “I Don’t Know Where Love Has Gone.” He knew that all he had to do was lean; lean on her. Belly rub, grind some coffee. Her greater size would do the rest, he was going to relax, against her fine brown frame.
But something happened. Out from the saxophones, trumpets, bass guitars and drums came a turbulence that needed the expertness of lithe Southern black movement. It was the funky chicken. He heard a man scream in glee, “The funky chicken, man!” He was left standing lost in a sea of bodies breaking their limbs at parts where there were no joints, doing a soul sashay, a choreography of spin steps, a barnyard cakewalk, women with their wig hats and high heel sneakers on…
He was wooden. Like a piece of stick. He could only watch.
The woman was not interested in his clumsiness, did not care for his inadequacy. It didn’t matter what he thought of himself; that he was a professor at an Ivy League college; that he had recently given a brilliant lecture on Dutchman; that white men with degrees behind their names wanted, by tracking him through tenure, to validate his authority; it did not matter. He was adrift, a leech, a virus, something that took all the juices of joy and creativity out of the situation he had entered into, and he was incapable, not just through lack of talent, lack of training and lack of exposure, to feel in his bones now that he was in this midst of this total blackness, he was anything other than – a transient.
He could only envy, and then hate the bodies of these men and women bent in ecstasy.
“Move!”
It was Calvin, transformed. Though not really transformed. He had always been that.
“Move, motherfucker!”
Calvin looked like a tall, black pullet.
A chicken, his face blank, flat, and pallid. Calvin laying an egg. Calvin fluttering his wings. Calvin, cock of the roost. With a deep almost imperceptible joy. Crowing; a stubbornness and nobleness; watching for another cock who might challenge him, all this was in the dance.
“Move, brother,” Calvin said, pleading with him, as one would plead with a man to force him to take the first step to coerce arthritis in the legs. Step on out, man. Strut your stuff. Keep the jive alive. Calvin was urging him to reach for the warrior-dancer who dwelled inside, like oil in the land, untapped. “Come on, brother. Ain’t no difference between the funky chicken and you standing still doing the belly-rub. Git on board, professor man. Move it.”
OUR LADY OF THE HOURS
When the snow fell like this, when it was night, she was lost in the whiteness. “Why I still in this blasted country? This blasted snow! Me coming home to all this.” She looked at the houses along the street. No light came from the windows, not from her two-storey rooming house. “Now, back home, we make one house different from all the others. Bring out the personality of the house and the dwellers therein. Lord, look at this blasted thing!” thinking, as she descended into a darkened stairwell to the basement rooms, that she must get out soon of her underground living, this confining hole; she did not know at that moment if she was walking on wooden steps, so deep was the snow; and she stopped a moment under the eave, which was not a well-built eave, for it kept out nothing, neither snow nor rain, and she made up her mind: “First thing in the new year. First thing come the new year, I moving from this blasted basement. Basements’re where animals should live.” Yes, she would look for a better place, “And I have to put that man who thief my child, absconded with my child, and Lord, I don’t mean to be mean and anti-motherhood and anti-my-offspring, but with your strength and guidance, I sure as hell am going to have soon, to put that child and father outta my blasted life, and get on with my own life. And I know you won’t hold that against me!”
Thinking of this made her tense and feel unholy, and even though she had sought to cleanse herself of the bad taste of this neglect, this abandoning of her child, she became nervous; nervous as she sometimes felt opening a door and knowing that inside she was going to see that a cat had mistaken her bed all day during her absence, when she was making a living for herself and earning money to buy vittles for the bastard cat, that the cat had shat on her bedspread. This kind of nervousness gripped her, and happily she reminded herself that she did not possess a cat. She had some difficulty getting the key into the hole. She could not see the key and she could not see the hole. Everything was white. Even under the eave, repaired four times for the year, by the landlord. She felt and guessed at the opening.
The smell of the rooms, closed up all day, came at her with a rush of blood to the head. But it was a welcome scent of life. Not like the extreme smell cleanliness gave her when she entered the mansion where she worked in the ravine. And she it was who had cleaned the mansion so thoroughly. And she it was who had made it smell clean; as if people who used the rooms did not live there. But she most decidedly lived here. Incense, which she burned before she left for work, placing it in the soft dirt in the green plastic pot of her favourite dieffenbachias, and left burning like a spirit in her absence, the incense she burned the moment she returned, to help kill the lingering smells of her cooking, especially when she cooked curry chicken and split peas and rice to share with her best friend, Gertrude, the incense filled her nostrils. And there were other smells: the detergents and the sprays that changed the smell of cooking into the faint fragrance of heather. And of course, the scents from the green bottles on the top of the water tank of the toilet, left with their mouths agape, their grey wicks like unhealthy tongues. And of Limacol she used to rub her arms and legs, up high between her thighs, when she felt a strong tension of anxiety or a touch of the flu coming on. And that of her perfume, which sometimes she left open, in her rush to be punctual, to be early enough to stop and chat with the jeweller and with Gertrude. It was the smell of close acquaintance with a room, with a chair, with the floor which was not level and which was covered in linoleum, over which she had placed scatter rugs thrown out by her employer mansion in the ravine.
The first thing she did after lighting two long sticks of incense she always bought from a black man dressed like an African in white robes and a white skull cap, and who called her “Sister” and to whom she said, without a smile, “I am old enough, you hear, to be your blasted mother, boy!” was to stand and inhale the rising wriggling smell of the line of smoke, and sneeze loudly and violently; and then she took the photograph of her child from her handbag. She placed it on the tall unpainted walnut dresser in the bedroom.
Her bedroom was cluttered. It was curtained off from the rest of the large room, the living area, by a screen made of vinyl. Before going to sleep, she always closed this concertina screen shut until it reached the latches which she locked, making certain her body was safe and could not be seen in the squeezed-off small congested room. “Too many oddballs roaming these days, and a woman like me, to be raped…” She leaned the photograph against a bottle of Limacol, which was one of several bottles and vials of pills for headache, for blood pressure, and for the small woman’s problem she suffered from, from time to time. Back in the living area, she sat on the sagging couch. The couch was placed against the wall that was shared with the neighbour people on her left side, as she came through the door, the east side, “that blasted side,” people who turned up their stereo full blast, and plagued her with reggae, “that heathen music” they played and played and which pounded away at her with its unrelenting beat and drove her mind into a vexatious numbness. But she never complained to them. “A Christian-minded person wouldn’t.” She never knocked on the wall with a broomstick handle. Never refused to say, “Good morning, my dear,” when she met them in the mornings, early and stiffened against the cold and saw them badly dressed for winter, or bright and blazing in colours during the summer, as if they were going to carnival, being Guyanese.
Beside the couch, covered with a printed
cloth down to the floor, a cloth of frayed edges, like tassels, was a table covered by the same printed cloth. The cloth had a design of roses. Red roses. She loved roses. That’s how it had happened in her landlord’s back garden. She had been attending to his roses and talking to them as any decent gardener would when the neighbours, not knowing roses or gardeners or decent people, told the police that there was a mad woman in the backyard talking, going mad over the bed of red roses. That call to the police had required all her Christian forbearance and tolerance to forgive them. After the police had left, she had come in and gone to bed for two days of lying in the dark with her eyes closed. Fully dressed, fully clothed, watched over in the dark by her photographs on her table, framed photographs of her child, in various stages of his growth and development; and also a Bible; a vase with more red roses, this time artificial; a book, Women, which Gertrude had given her as a birthday gift last year; a small panda which she had bought for her child, two years ago. And a large teddy bear which Gertrude had also given her, this time for Christmas, last Christmas. She slept with the teddy bear between her legs, to give her warmth and to keep her company.
She opened the Bible.
She knew which chapter, which verse, which book, she wanted to read. After the incense, and the photograph, the Bible was the first thing she turned to when she returned home from work. Even after a rousing three-hour service, stormy as a revival each Sunday at her church, every Sunday at two o’clock, she turned to her Bible, and sometimes, too, after the midweek prayer meetings and Bible study. She knew the words of grace, the words of repentance, the words required and printed in blood and in gold in the Bible and which words of absolution for herself she would choose.
She opened the heavy, dog-eared book at Hebrews, Chapter One. She passed her little finger down the right-hand of the page, a pointer for her eyes, over the first verse, over the second verse, mumbling the words in speed to herself, but audibly. When she passed her pointing finger over the third verse, it was what she wanted. She began to read aloud. And she said, “God wants to hear a sinner’s voice.” She had said the same thing aloud one Sunday in church, when the woman beside her had touched her sleeve, an admonishing touch, because she had been reading aloud, following the Collect as it had been read by the pastor. “God wants to hear a sinner’s voice.”
… when he had himself purged our sins… Yes, Lord! …sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high!… Praise his name!… being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they. Your precious Word. Yes, Lord!… For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee?… Yes, Lord! I am thy humble daughter… This day have I begotten thee?… Lord, if only your Word had said forgiven, instead of begotten! But it is your Word, and I have to accept it. She shook her head from side to side.
“Hebrews, Chapter One, Verses Three, Four and part o’ Five,” she said, as if she were in church, as if she were the pastor informing the congregation of the passage of Scripture to be read. “Hebrews,” she repeated. “Now, I am going on my two knees before thee, to ask forgiveness for today, and what I do and did not do today. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, Thy kingdom come…”
It was time for the telephone.
“And how you this evening?”
Gertrude was on the other end. She would put the world right tonight, as she did every night; and discuss work, employers, life, as it was passed by in the street, the jeweller, a conversation which lasted very often for two or three hours when they were happy and swimming in the sweetness of gossip, a conversation that would be about themselves: woman to woman. Tonight, her voice was high and happy; her spirits had been refreshed by her prostration before God.
“I just got up off my two knees, just brush them off, as a matter o’ fact to get the dust and grains from biting into my flesh, after saying my prayers, dear. Well, my dear, some thoughts passed through my head today, on account o’ that man I works for, that I had to prostrate myself before my Maker and ask why I becoming so evil and sinful in this blasted city.”
It was seven-thirty. Gertrude would be in her small kitchen, cooking peas from a can, mashing the Irish potatoes which she liked, and which she ate every day, and frying the steak which she also liked, round steak, which she cooked with a little salt and less pepper, and a bottle of imported beer, Lowenbrau. And before bed, a crystal glass of brandy, Hennessy. Gertrude, unlike herself, had no guilt about not saying her prayers before “she hit the sack.” But it was only seven-thirty , and the night was still young enough for their long conversation.
“Why you don’t let me make you some curry with some hot peppers and put some vim in you, eh? What about tomorrow night? I notice the last time you eat a mountain, and you didn’t complain, and still you saying to me you can’t use hot thing? Girl, you always eat my food with a hearty appetite. If we were closer, living closer, I could warm up the pot right now. But mentioning it now, as I crossed this door a few minutes ago, the snow, eh? And I haven’t even taken off my coat. I notice just a little smell of curry in this place, and before you could snap your fingers, I had to light some incense, yes, and it must have been that that crossed my mind to make me ask you if you would really like some tomorrow. Yes, I make it hot, to put some vim and vigor in you, girl.”
She smiled as she listened to Gertrude’s protestations about making the curry, if it’s not a problem, if it’s not imposing, if you making it for yourself, well, in that case. And not too hot, just right, cause it sets my mouth on fire.
She unbuttoned the three buttons on her winter coat. She loosened the blue warm scarf round her neck. She pulled at the deep blue woolen blouse, and the thick polyester brown slacks, making herself comfortable. A tam-o-shanter of emerald green, homemade and knitted with an amateur knitter’s touch, with a large round ball of blue wool in the middle of the skull, was still on her head.
“Mr. Iacabucci, poor fellow, eh? That poor man is still on my mind. Something I was listening to on the radio, down in the ravine house, say it happened the Sunday when the wife was at the hot stove. I think I heard the voice in the radio say that there was three bullets fired at that poor man. The first one missed. And hit the ’luminium lid clean off the pot o’ rice-and-peas. Those strong, fat red beans we cook in our rice-and-peas. That thing bout the ’luminium lid off the saucepan o’ food is the first ounce o’ truth I heard, from all the things that came over the radio and the television. Something worrying me for the last few weeks concerning that man I work for? I am not sure he isn’t one o’ we, yuh! Anyhow. He is so often times under the weather. I would say that the police is guilty of attempts at ’sassination. Plain and simple. I had cooked some of that rice-and-peas with the Jamaican kidney beans for you once, didn’t I? Yes, man. We were watching a hockey game that Friday night! Were you at your television when they were asking for more bigger guns to protect the police from criminals like Mr. Iacabucci? Criminals who threaten their life with a garden fork, muh dear. I bet you, when the truth does come out. And it may take ten years before the truth comes out. The truth concerning people like me. I am not talking about the regular, everyday truth regarding people like you and me, I meaning the real truth like the words of the Bible, I would lay my bottom dollar on it. When the pure truth comes out, in ten years, I bet you they confess and admit that Mr. Iacabucci only had a lil spade, made outta tinning, in his blasted hand before those two police go gunning at him. Now, they asking to bear more bigger guns to bore more bigger holes in innocent people.”
She remained silent, angry in her silence, agitated as her friend answered her, in words that came from afar, strange even in the way they sounded. She remained silent, listening to the voice she had known for so many years, telling her she was wrong, that the police are there to “protect you and me” – and it made her sad to know that this voice, and these words, were coming from perhaps the only person, woman or man, in this city, in this count
ry, in the whole world, for she had given up Barbados, whom she ever trusted. And still, there was this wide gulf in the way they saw ordinary things.
“It is pure and simple, a case of ordinary sinfulness, Gerts!”
“No, darling. It is merely law and order. And we must have that. Imagine what it would be, if there was no law and order!”
“Gerts, I’m going to tell you something now. And don’t get me wrong. But Gerts, if I didn’t know you, I would wonder if you wasn’t a blasted racist, like the rest of them.”
She could hear heavy breathing coming through to her ears. She could feel the hot breath of the breathing. She could see Gerts’ eyes, gone smaller, like slits, and see how her face had become red. Gerts’ face always went red when she was overjoyed, when her favourite hockey team scored a goal; or, when she was embarrassed by a dirty joke; or, when she had an orgasm. She had confessed all these things.
She ignored Gerts’ breathing silence and looked at the face of her child framed on the walnut dresser, the child who had been dragged across the border to America by his father. She was longing for him. She took off her winter boots, using one foot against the heel; and then the other.
“May I ask you a personal question?”
“About Mr. Iacabucci again? Or about me being a racist?”
“About neither.”
“Have you decided on the ladies’ watch at the jeweller’s, at Vladimir?”
“That thief? Vladimir smiling with me every morning as God send, and trying at the same time to rob me. I compare the prices down at Eaton’s, Eaton’s selling the same ladies watch cheaper, and Eaton’s don’t know me, and Vladimir smiling with me every morning.”
They Never Told Me Page 8
