The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir

by Chin, Staceyann

  SCRIBNER

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  The names and characteristics of some individuals in this book have been changed.

  Copyright © 2009 by Staceyann Chin

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2008034022

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-5937-8

  ISBN-10: 1-4391-5937-8

  Selections of Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (Oxford University Press) have been reprinted courtesy of the author.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  For Bernice, who stayed

  The Other Side of Paradise

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part I

  Suffer the Children

  In Everything Give Thanks

  In My Father’s House

  Fret Not

  As for Me and My House, We Will Serve the Lord

  Be of Good Courage

  Dominion Over Every Living Thing

  But the Greatest of These Is Charity

  The Prodigal

  Provoke Not Your Children

  I Will Come Again

  Like a Thief in the Night

  The Word Became Flesh

  The Evidence of Things Not Seen

  Part II

  God Helps Those Who Help Themselves

  Put Away Childish Things

  As a Bear Lying in Wait

  Let Him Kiss Me…

  You Shall Have Treasure

  The Sins of the Father

  With the Kisses of His Mouth

  Take Up Your Bed and Walk

  Heaven and Earth Will Pass Away, but My Words Will Not Pass Away

  Part III

  The Beginning of Knowledge

  As a Man Sows

  Gave Themselves Over to Vile Affections

  Love as I Have Loved You

  Ye Without Sin Cast the First Stone

  I Will Make a Way

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  The front of the car was not designed for having sex. And Hazel did not want to think about the wet that would be left on the smooth leather seats afterward. What kind of man would bring her here for an intimate evening? He was a man of means. He could afford a hotel room. What did he take her for? She was not a whore. She was just a girl who needed a little help, that’s all. She needed his help, but she didn’t have to put up with this. It was time for her to go home. She reached out for the metal lever, but he leaned across her and pushed her hand away.

  He was upset that she wanted to leave. Then he was cajoling. They hadn’t even had a chance to talk, he said. Finally, she agreed to stay. But she let him know that she was not going to have sex with him in a car parked on the road somewhere. She was not that kind of girl. He seemed hurt by the suggestion that that was all he was after. Montego Bay is a tourist city. If he didn’t want to spend time talking to her, he would have taken her to one of the numerous hotels filled with Americans having vacation sex, he said. He asked about the romance novels he saw her reading all the time. He listened attentively when she told him how difficult it was to find a good job if you didn’t come from a rich family. Suddenly she was sorry that she had mistrusted him. She sighed and fiddled with the hem of her navy blue linen skirt. He wasn’t at all like she had imagined.

  Hazel forced herself to relax. She smiled and leaned against his chest. She told him that she wanted to make something of herself. Why shouldn’t a girl from Lottery have nice things like the women living in those big houses in Montego Bay?

  He had his limitations, but he wanted to give those things to her, he told her. His hand caressed the curve of her shoulders. She tried to pull away from him. She reached for the door again, but he held both her arms and eased her slowly toward him. She braced her palms hard against his chest as he placed the tiniest of kisses on her neck. She shouldn’t let him do this to her. She was better than this. Better than his pale hand on her breast, his red lips against her throat. Her soft “no” was swallowed as breath when he pushed the small of her back into the jutting door handle and placed his mouth over hers. She was better than this, she thought. She deserved a whole lot better than this.

  This story is the only one I have imagined that holds all the irrefutable facts while leaving room for my existence. My mother, the man she swears is my father, and the people who knew them then have very different accounts of what happened or didn’t happen between them. In each version my mother is young and beautiful and basking in the attention of the Chinese man she says is my father. Everyone agrees that they met at a bar. My mother has admitted that she thought the witty Chinese gentleman interesting, that even though he was short, he had a way with words and was unafraid to speak his mind. The men who frequented the bar say that the two of them enjoyed being in each other’s company. After that the details get sketchy.

  My mother was raised in the country, but three years living in Montego Bay had made her city-smart. Poor, young, and a single mother, she nursed a penchant for distinguished older men with money. The Chinese man she met in the bar was a fairly well-off married man with a reputation for liking young pretty girls. She insists that she did not know he had a wife. He recalls laying all his cards on the table. Other versions of the story suggest they are both omitting things. People say she spent a lot of time with him. She said it was only one date. Both of them recall an interaction in a parked car. An unspecified number of months later, my mother gives birth to me, half black, half Chinese. This is the loose skeleton upon which I have hung the beginning of my own life.

  The event of my birth, however, comes vividly to life. My grandmother’s frame settles into her chair when she describes the week she spent cleaning every inch of the Lottery Police Station in preparation for the Christmas holidays. “Every one of them police officers was kind to me, so me wanted to make things nice for them. So me was just working and working and working every day. But the day before Christmas, the police chief come directly to me and tell me, ‘Miss Bernice, you take care of us all year, please put down the broom. Go home and take care of your own sweeping. This is the season for family, go home and be with yours.’ Those days me could hear a little better, so me catch most of what him say.”

  She laughs when she remembers his words: “Sometimes a woman needs to feel her own dust sticking to her sweating face.”

  At twenty-three, my mother spent her evenings out and about. That Christmas Eve she got home a little after midnight. As soon as my mother stepped in, she started complaining about a pain in her stomach. Grandma always pauses dramatically here. She rubs her chin and mentions that she had been nursing a slight suspicion that my mother was with child. But since Hazel was good at secrets, she wasn’t entirely sure.

  She watched my mother drop her bag on the veranda and head toward the outhouse. But before she got to the door she doubled over, panting. The way she was holding her belly made Grandma ask her if she was pregnant. She shook her head no. But Grandma knew she was lying. So she held on to her and told her to stoop and do whatever she had to do right there. “Stacey, I wish you coulda see her! Your mother is such a prideful woman. She tell me no, that she is not a wild animal to be using the floor as a bathroom.
She was so vex with me, but I wouldn’t let her out. She had to bend down right there on the floor. In no time, you was born. Your mother look on her wristwatch and tell me that since it is after one o’clock, your birthday is Christmas day proper. Same day as Christ Jesus of Nazareth.”

  Grandma says that I was smaller than any baby she had ever seen. But I had all my fingers and toes, so she quickly cut my umbilical cord and wrapped me in my two-year-old brother’s baby blanket. My mother told people I was that small because I was premature. But Grandma secretly believed that it was because Hazel, in an effort to hide her pregnancy, used strips of cloth to flatten her belly during the pregnancy. When Grandma tried to hand me to my mother, Hazel took one look at my face and said she was too tired. Then she fell asleep.

  People had to be careful when they held me. The neighbors all thought I was going to die. Miss Cherry, the local expert on premature births, said I wouldn’t live for more than a week. Three of her six children were dead on account of being born before their time.

  “A baby that born too early need to be inside a glass thing they call a incubator!” she pronounced. “A baby born more than two months premature can’t live without that machine. And this baby look like it born about three months before time. If it live, it will be a miracle or a mistake.”

  Grandma pauses here to remind me that God does not make mistakes. For when I opened my mouth to cry, everyone had to admit that a baby with that much lung capacity did not sound like a baby that was destined to die. “Stacey, the whole of Lottery could hear you bawling! And when me was cleaning the blood off your face, you was fighting me like a little bull. Me just tell everybody fi keep them mouth shut because this little girl here going to live and live and live till the good Lord see it fit to call her back home.”

  There are days when I yearn to know exactly what happened to spark the very beginning of me. But in the absence of the most basic facts, I have had to create my own story and, in many ways, set my own course. The story that follows is the journey I remember. It tickles me to think that from my very first breath, everyone expected me to stop breathing. Against the odds, I surprised everybody. And I must admit that in some of the moments of my life so far, no one has been more taken aback by my own breath than me.

  Part I

  Suffer the Children

  Everything good always happens to my big brother, Delano. He starts school for the first time tomorrow. He is the one with the father in Montego Bay. He is the one who is a boy. And he is the one who gets to wear a full suit of khaki tomorrow morning. The only things that we share are our deaf grandmother and a mother who has run away and left us.

  Grandma presses the face of the iron onto the damp clothes and the smell of fresh rain on dry dust fills the small room. His new school uniforms are just back from the tailor. She smoothes the wrinkles from the khakis as she mutters a word of prayer. “Lord, I beg you, deliver me from the heat inside this house. Jesus, watch over these children mother. Keep her safe in your bosom.” She wipes the sweat from her shining forehead and turns to me. “Stacey, the Good Book tell us, In every thing give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. Father God, bless these children and keep them, make your face shine upon them. Lord, you know they need food to sustain them, shoes…”

  Grandma prays all day long. I say amen when she is done, but I know that many of the prayers won’t be answered. God works in such mysterious ways that you never know which prayer he will answer. When I pray, I just ask for one thing. That way God can’t pick and choose what to give me. He has to give me the one thing I ask for.

  When each crease is as sharp as a knife, Grandma drapes the khaki suit over the back of the wooden chair. Then she runs the iron swiftly over my only church dress. When the iron is stored safely away, I jump to the floor and race to find my brother.

  Unawares, he corners invisible thieves and shouts orders with his gun at waist level. I tap him on the shoulder. “Delano, everything is ready for you first day at school tomorrow.”

  He presses the imaginary trigger, delivering a round into my belly.

  “Delano! You listening?”

  “Stacey, me shoot you already! You dead! You can’t talk anymore, because you dead!”

  “Delano, how me must be dead if me wasn’t playing no police-and-thief with you? You hear what me say ’bout you clothes them?”

  “Everybody have clothes—that is nutten fi talk ’bout! Now you is the thief and me is the police. Brapbrapbrap! Me just shoot you so you haffi dead!”

  I fall to the floor and close my eyes tight, wishing it were me going to school tomorrow. I don’t want to be dying here on the floor. I want to be starting a new life with pencils and books and new clothes made especially for me.

  Grandma pokes her head out to the veranda. “But Lawd Jesus! Stacey, get up off that floor! And come inside here right now!”

  Two plastic teacups of hot mint tea sweetened with condensed milk sit on the table. Delano blows into his before he sips. I take a sip and burn my tongue. I look to Delano for help. He sucks his teeth and reaches over for my cup. “Stacey, you have to blow on it like this, and take a little at a time. If it still too hot, give me back and me will blow it, all right? But don’t take all night fi drink it. Remember that Grandma have to wash the cup them before we go to bed.”

  Nighttime in Lottery is both magical and scary. There are no streetlights. By sundown everything is so black and quiet I worry that I won’t ever see or hear anything ever again. I drain the cup and follow Grandma out into the soft darkness of the yard. Under the moonlight, the backyard does not look like the one I know. The cool night breeze makes the leaves of the banana trees wave about like strange night-praying people. The bigger trees look like duppies. Duppies are the unsaved souls of dead people. Grandma says that we shouldn’t be afraid of duppies. “The Bible tell you that a duppy can’t do anything to a child of God.”

  I am still afraid because Delano says that there are some really terrible people who live for the Devil when they are alive. They kill other people and blaspheme and behave like the lawless people of Sodom and Gomorrah. When these children of the Devil die, they are so unwilling to pass over into the eternal fires of hell that they stay here on earth and walk about at night, frightening anybody who happens to see them. The mango tree looks like a big fat devil-duppy waving at me. But then I hear Grandma singing. I can’t see her in the dark, but her clear, sweet voice floats across the pitch-black yard.

  Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

  Let me hide myself in thee;

  Let the water and the blood,

  From thy wounded side which flowed,

  Be of sin the double cure;

  Save from wrath and make me pure.

  When we get back inside, we find Delano sitting on the just-ironed clothes. Everything is squashed between his back and the chair. Grandma grabs him. “Delano, get up from there! You nuh see the press clothes them behind you? You want fi look like crush callaloo tomorrow?”

  Delano sighs and throws his body onto the bed. Grandma smoothes out the clothes and lays them flat on the table. “Only God know why you would sit down on the clothes me just fix up for you! Delano, you getting too big for dat kinda behavior! You is a big boy now, near five year old—and going to school! You have to do better than that, man!”

  I want to hit Delano in the head for messing up his clothes. I am not big enough, but if I could, I would sit on him and twist his arm until he says that he is happy to be going to school tomorrow. He just sits there on the edge of the bed picking at his toes. I touch Grandma’s arm and carefully mouth to her, “I wouldn’t do that to my school clothes, Grandma. I would do better than that.”

  “Stacey, me wasn’t talking to you. Now kneel down there so oonu can say oonu prayers.”

  Morning arrives with Grandma shaking the sleep out of our droopy eyes. The two of us strip naked and pad out to the dew-covered backyard. Delano tosses a pebble at the stray fowl drinking from th
e zinc pan filled with water. Delano puts salt on our toothbrushes. Shivering, I push the brush back and forth across my front teeth. I hate brushing my teeth. The hard bristles bruise my mouth and the salt burns the cuts. I reach down to rinse out my toothbrush, but Delano grabs it and adds some more salt. “Brush the back one them! You want to have rotten teeth?”

  Roosters crow as Grandma thoroughly lathers us from neck to toes. Her hands move quickly as she washes the suds from our shivering bodies. I am happy when she finally wraps us into one warm, squirming, toweled bundle. We sit with our feet dangling from the bed, eating one slice of hard-dough bread, half a boiled egg, and a cup of fever-grass tea.

  Delano looks like a big boy in his khaki suit. I am so jealous I want to yank off his brown and white shoes with the tan laces. Grandma wets his hair and parts it down the middle. Then she combs the sections neatly behind his ears. His head glistens in the sun. Because my hair is not as straight and pretty as Delano’s, Grandma has to use Vaseline when she braids it. Delano gets a long pencil, which Grandma has sharpened with the kitchen knife. I want a pencil too, and my own khaki uniform.

  On our way to the schoolhouse we pass Marse Jeb’s yard, the police station where Grandma works, the big church with the pretty glass windows, and Marse George’s yam grounds. The school is a bright blue house with two tiny windows in the front. A tall woman, whom Grandma calls Miss Sis, meets us on the steps. When she reaches for Delano, he shrinks from her and hides behind Grandma. She stoops and smiles at him. That all her teeth are the same exact size scares me. I join Delano behind Grandma’s skirt. Miss Sis pokes her head around Grandma’s legs and smiles again.