Eeona rested her foot on the one he said was the go and eased off the one he called the clutch. The car shut off.
But Franky had been thinking of metaphors. “A car is a like a ship,” he said. “You have to ride it easy over the waves.” He looked at Eeona for approval.
“I understand,” she said, staring out of the windshield and studying that white flag, the solitary stander on the green.
“Yes, now try again. Gentle over the waves. Your Papa was a boatman, you’ll know like instinct how this is to be done.”
“I know that I will never drive this car.”
And she never did. The car never started for her. It never went for her. They tried again and again. They tried for days. Anette got into the Datsun and took it for a spin to the market. Even Ronalda, a child, could at least get it to start.
The last mode of transport that Eeona had been able to direct was a stubborn burro named Nelson. No, she had not won out over the golf course. She had not outwon Kweku, a car driver who’d made her his powerless passenger. Some people would have taken this to mean they were destined to be pedestrian. Or destined to stay and be still and not wander, not be free. Given all the failures, Eeona would be forgiven for giving up.
But Eeona is not some people.
78.
The house Franky built was on the lower part of Garden Street. But it was still in the prime area. Right there on Bred Gade step street. Not too far from the Crystal Palace and Villa Fairview. If you just walked to the top of the step street, you could have the high-class view Eeona would have killed to cling to. It was only a short walk from the Anglican church. When the house was finally built, Anette, full of her married respectability and her position as history teacher at the Anglican school, had the priest come and bless it. This wasn’t her mother’s actually Anglican Anglican priest, but an American Anglican who laughed loudly and spoke quietly of ordaining women.
The day of the blessing was the last time anyone on island ever ate sea turtle, as the Americans had begun a conservation effort. Gertie’s engagement ring stood on her finger like a lighthouse, and, indeed, the man who had put it on her finger was the selfsame American who’d drunkenly driven her almost to the lighthouse so long ago. Hamilton chatted with the priest as if they were kin back on the Continent.
During the blessing, Eeona, who still lived in Savan, stood beside the priest with her body tight and straight. The priest, who was married, took a small step away from her when he bowed his head.
Eeona didn’t notice. She was caught in considering that she had finally done her duty—overdone it, actually. Little sister Anette now had a house and some land. Anette had even resisted Esau in the end. Eeona’s freedom time must now, certainly, be coming. Either that or it would never come. So Eeona made no one privy to her thinking this time. Already she had taken a boat over to the island of St. John, where she’d quietly eyed some land.
But this day of the blessing Franky unveiled his final domestic gift. It came in a box and it was heavy. He hauled it up the step street himself, from where it had been hiding in the back of his truck. He perspired in his suit as he heaved the box, for a home blessing was a suit occasion. Anette smiled and smiled and could not, despite her powers, figure out what this arrival could be. The children gaped just because it was a heavy box, though they could never have guessed what it was either.
Hamilton whispered into Gertie’s ear knowingly. Gertie’s face opened with surprise.
Eeona knew, as women who can make others worship them always know, that in the box was something that would gain as much attention as she ever had. It was something as dangerous as she had ever been. Franky rested the box down in front of the priest, took out his pocketknife, and sliced it open.
It was a TV.
“I knew it!” said Ham, punching his fist into the air.
The priest, who himself had seen TV in the States, laughed and laughed. He didn’t own a TV since moving to the island but how nice to have neighbors who did! He blessed the TV with more reverence than he’d blessed the house. Then Franky plugged it in and turned it on.
So television came to the Virgin Islands in the 1960s. An American named Joe West was selling the TVs for cheap and soon the entire island had them. Everyone could afford a set and the two stations West offered—a Spanish channel from Puerto Rico and an American station with a variety show and the news. It was the news that did it.
79.
The islands had been isolated for so long. The radio waves didn’t fly in anything past Puerto Rico. The last major contact with America had been the Second World War, when the boys came back with their stories of segregation, and with sharp chips on their shoulders. Some privileged few, like Dr. Jacob McKenzie, had gone to black colleges in the States for their degrees and come back smoking cigarettes. But TV was the worst America yet, and everyone had one.
Anette was cooking saltfish in the kitchen and it was stinking up the whole house. “Ronalda, see that Me and Frank ready for lunch.”
Anette continued cooking. Ronalda was the kind of child, for better or worse, who always obeyed. Anette added more of her husband’s pepper sauce. He would have to make a few more bottles soon. Anette didn’t know how to cook saltfish without it. Franky was at the lighthouse and she’d drive over later with the lunch. But as Anette was thinking this, she was suddenly aware that something was not right. It wasn’t that her house was quiet. It was that every house in town was quiet. Not that there wasn’t noise. There was screaming and water rushing and the sounds of a crowd. That, too, seemed to be coming from every house. She looked out of her kitchen window and into the living room of the neighbors. Mrs. Rockwell was sitting on her settee staring at the TV and chewing on an empty wooden spoon. Anette left her fish to burn and walked into her living room, where her children were also staring at the television.
There was a crime happening right now on the news. Men in uniform, official-looking men, were beating actual people with batons. Was there a fire? There were hoses blasting water. The hoses were blasting actual people around the street. Actual people were hiding behind trees, screaming, crying. Men in uniform grabbed at the people, detached them from the trees, from each other, from their purses and their hats.
Anette’s children were watching this. Ronalda, who was almost grown, was not blinking. Instead, her mouth was opening and closing silently, like a fish’s. Youme was sitting sideways as if she wasn’t really watching at all. Little Frank was patting Me’s hand, looking from her face to the TV.
Then the newscaster came on. “Downtown Birmingham, Alabama. Our men in uniform are attempting to restrain Negro protesters.”
It wasn’t until then that all of us anchored to our televisions realized that it had been white men in uniform against dark-skinned people. It hadn’t been clear what those people had done wrong. This wasn’t because we were feebleminded, it was because of the land we lived on. Because we were Frenchy and Danish and our white people hadn’t seemed capable of this behavior. Sure, the Americans we’d met were rude. What with their gatherings where they never invited us. But this was something else. The word Negro had never meant much to us, since even the darker of us claimed a mixed lineage. But now we could see that even those who looked as mulatto as anyone were there being blasted away.
Anette, to be sure, needed the newscaster to verify what even she couldn’t believe. Jacob had told her his New Orleans story. But did people really treat each other like this even when there wasn’t a war going on? Look here, brown-skinned people were doctors and lawyers. Look, she was a brown-skinned woman herself and she was a proper married lady. A teacher of history at the Anglican school that even some of the American children went to. Her husband, it was true, was a black man, but he had built this entire fancy house with a balcony wrapping around it. He was a Coast Guardsman and he was the keeper of the lighthouse. And he had green eyes.
Anette shook her head. Tha
nk God things in the Virgin Islands weren’t like that. Those Continentals were crazy. Anette stepped around her children, turned off the TV, and announced that food was ready. Longtime ready.
Anette left to take her husband his overcooked saltfish. She tried not to think much more about the news, but as she drove down the street, she could hear it blasting from the other houses. Negroes. Blacks. Whites. Freedom. When she left town and cruised up into the hills, she thought she was done with it. But when she reached Muhlenfeldt Point, a clutch of native Guardsmen were gathered outside the lighthouse. The men, in their casual uniform of khaki and dungarees, were in the uproar of a heated debate. It was clear that they, too, had seen the news. “Ask Mrs. Joseph,” one of the men said, gesticulating to her. “Her people from there. Ask her about the Anegada man who fight for Virgin Islands freedom. Ask!” He thrust his hands out to her.
But no, she had not heard anything about Anegada. “Really, Mrs. Joseph? It ain so that your people from Anegada? You must know ’bout that fisherman who just the other day was giving lectures ’bout all of we needing rights. You see the TV? America ain giving us. Them Anegadians went and take it from their British owners. We think we free ’cause we belong to America. But is them Anegadians and BV Islanders that have a taste of free.”
“I ain know my British side like that,” Anette said. She had never even considered that side before. “I never even been Anegada.” She couldn’t quite see how the Virgin Islands, British or American, connected at all to what was happening on the news.
“Mrs. Joseph, the Anegada protest man is probably family to you. Is because of that man that the British Virgin Islanders own their beaches and the land and the sand and the mangrove and the everything. Look we over here in the USVI. We think we free. But the TV, just look at the TV, and you seeing that we is the United States V.I. and that mean we don’t have nothing.”
It wasn’t true that the Anegada man protesting had happened just the other day. It was years ago. Some said it wasn’t a protest at all, but a melancholy lobsterman with a chronic broken heart for a woman who had left him for a sea captain. But it was true that he was a kind of fisherman and it was true also that the man was family to Anette. He was a distant cousin and he was also the man who Antoinette Stemme had left behind. Anette was a history teacher, but she hadn’t studied this history, despite the fact that it was only next door. There was no course where she could study Anegada history or Virgin Islands history at all. She taught American history and a general Caribbean history that focused mostly on the pirates of Jamaica. That is what there was for her to teach at the Anglican school.
Now Anette waited and listened to the men discuss the Belonger laws being pressed and passed in the British V.I. Though they all seemed to be on the same side, the men were quarrelous. Why we can’t have law that say this place belong to we? Laws that protect we, help we belong here, help we keep the V.I. the V.I. Why we can’t have first rights to buy land? Why we can’t have first rights to set up a hotel? Just like the BV Islanders could leave, go back, and still belong, and nobody can’t tell them different, we need that, too. You don’t think, Franky? You don’t, Fullmore? Mrs. Joseph, what you think?
“It’s an interesting discussion,” Anette said, but she couldn’t say much more. She’d been an orphan since she could remember and nothing had ever belonged to her except herself and now her children—but even the children were a temporary ownership, for they would grow and belong to themselves. The only thing she belonged to was Franky and even that . . . well, she knew that could be undone.
When Franky finished his lunch, he decided to drive her back into town, taking the long way through Barracks Yard, which was a seedy area with calypso blaring. But Franky felt good taking his wife through there because he was there keeping her safe.
Back at the house, Ronalda had served her siblings. Youme had brought a book to the table and only nibbled her food. Frank was busy stuffing himself so that he would for sure throw up. Ronalda could not eat at all. When their mother and father walked in, the children seemed uneasy.
You see, Papa Franky was in the Coast Guard. Papa was a man in uniform. His dress blues, the ones with the sweet silk tie at the front, were hanging right now in the closet. The idea that people who guarded you could also be the people that you needed guarding from was nothing anyone should have to learn, but that is what the children learned that day. What the islands learned that day—the Coast Guardsmen included. The same thing that makes a man dive into the sea for your rescue can make him hold your head underwater.
Ronalda could not eat the tough saltfish. She could not be an example for the younger ones. She chewed and chewed, but the saltfish would not go down. Of course, she never ate saltfish again. Which was confirmed for Ronalda as the right thing to do when in college at Howard University, she learned the history of the salted codfish, brought from New England cheap to feed the Caribbean slaves. She would think of how Caribbean folks ignorantly sought out the slave food as a delicacy and thought nothing of eating it along with some dumplings and green banana. Ronalda would never think lightly of things again. She would let the world eat her from the inside out.
As Ronalda saw it, Papa Franky was a Coast Guardsman, but he was only Frank’s real father. Youme’s father wore a uniform, too. A white lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck. Youme said he even sometimes wore it at home, walking around his house, like it was his skin. One father was supposed to guard the people, the other was supposed to save them. But Ronalda’s father wore the worst kind of uniform. One like the men on the news. He was in the Army. When Ronalda’s real father came to visit, he would pat her on the hand like a stranger. He would drink a beer and laugh with Papa Franky. “That’s my wife serving us drinks, Franky. I never signed those papers. I just loaning her out to you.” As if he could just steal Mama away.
80.
Eeona didn’t believe in living on loans, though she’d lived in this unbelief most of her life. But times were changing fast. Unlike the new islanders coming from all over the Caribbean, Eeona was an American citizen. By birth, we all were. This was all that was needed to qualify for the public housing designed by our very own Saul McKenzie. “Are you suggesting I live among the common public?” Eeona had said with disdain when Franky suggested she buy into the housing project.
“Eeona ain never leaving Savan and don’t try and make sense of it.” That was Anette, dismissing and misunderstanding. Because soon after the housing development was filled, the homeownership loans were offered. Eeona quick-fast left her government job and took her savings and her pension and left for the sister island of St. John. Within the year, Eeona’s inn had risen out of the ground like a manifesto. She was gone. Well, just an hour away, but still. Now Eeona owned the land. She owned the inn. In that way, they belonged to her. She had made her own inheritance. Just so.
At three stories high, Eeona’s inn was, and is, the tallest building on the side of St. John known as Coral Bay. For now it was attracting tourists from the Dominican Republic and Trinidad and even the mainland of America. Much later it would be listed in Gay & Lesbian Outings as a safe place for lovers of all kinds to room and board.
St. Johnians were of a different sort. Though they were Virgin Islanders, they were also from a tiny island where most people could still remember when the first white man arrived to live. In fact, the first white man was still alive and still living there. More than half of the island was now U.S. national park, which was supposed to keep out the big hotels, but this hadn’t quite turned out the way St. Johnians thought it would. The hotels couldn’t come, but neither could one go for a swim in the waterfall down by Reef Bay or sleep on the beach down by Caneel. Those places belonged to someone now. The United States Federal Government, to be exact. Which meant it didn’t belong to we.
St. Johnians were understandably protective and private. But they liked living in homes where the trees eased over, the branches bursting i
nto the doors like welcomed guests. They welcomed Eeona like she was a part of nature. They called her “Madame Bradshaw,” because that was how she introduced herself. Now she was exactly who she wanted to be. Who she told people she was. She had learned to do this from Kweku Prideux. On St. John she was the daughter of Owen Arthur Bradshaw, whose death and sunken ship were still major points of reference. But she had also taken the title of someone who might have been married to the captain. Neighbors quickly shortened Madame to Mada. Which sounded so much like Mother.
81.
Mada Eeona would only leave Coral Bay, where the ghosts of her own long-dead deeds were welcomed into her spinster bed at night, to return to St. Thomas and visit with the child that made her forget her other almost child. She always arrived unannounced, and if she stayed, she always slept in the same bed with Eve Youme.
In their one bed together she would tell Youme the real, but not true, stories of the Bradshaws. Things Eeona would never tell to anyone. She would not even tell them to Youme, really. She waited until the girl was asleep so that they went into her dreams: Antoinette’s perfect sewing skills and Owen Arthur’s perfect handsomeness. The tables made of St. Croix wood and the rocker made of mahogany. The fish caught right on the water that swept toward the house stairs. The beef brought to their yard, still alive as cow, from Tortola. The eight-legged mansion on the hill and the spider man who lived in it. Eve Youme would know the stories and not be sure quite how she knew them.
Ronalda, in the bed over, would lie still and strain her ears to capture bits and pieces that Eeona whispered into Youme’s ear. There was never enough for Ronalda to put things together and know the stories. There was never enough for Ronalda. Ronalda, of course, would be the one who left for America. Just one body on the boat of us who left, because things had not been passed down to her, things had not been passed her way.
Land of Love and Drowning Page 26
