No costumes to get in the way, said Herman, taking my hand and leading me around the house.
I said: But there are other things to get in the way.
Not here. Not with us.
And now he took both my hands and showed me the study that was bare of everything except of books and a large picture of Saint Paul.
Saint Paul, I said as if Herman was introducing us.
Yeah. How did you know?
He’s one of the saints of the church I went to last week.
Oh, yeah. Where you lost the necklace I gave you.
I ignored him: You can tell Saint Paul by the pen and book he always carries. He’s a scholar and a writer.
That’s what my father says. Said he’s the patron saint of modern thought.
I did not think that it was rude of me, I just said what I thought to be true: Your father either makes things up or he lies.
Perhaps both, Herman said. He stopped holding my hands and embraced me from the back. This is why I loved him.
I breathed deeper than I should have. I looked at Paul. I felt Herman’s arms. I said: Paul was a martyr and that is the truth. There is nothing modern about that.
Do you like martyrdom?
Who likes martyrdom? Only the martyr. And then he loves it. Jesus, now that is a martyr. He’s my favorite saint.
Someone else would have laughed. Someone else would have let me go to slap his knee. Herman only held me tighter.
Saint Jesus, he whispered.
There were many prophets and saints. Jesus is one. Maybe he is the One. I do not know.
I allowed Herman to guide me out and toward the bedroom. I did not want to stay at that house for long. It reminded me of the Cathedral only that these gates were locked and the Cathedral was always open—except during Carnival when it was closed up tight. And only there wasn’t anything pretty here. Everything a blanched masquerade.
The morning of the parade we met at the graveyard in town. We all met there. The float was already there and decorated. On the refreshment truck the food was already on the burners and the drinks were already on ice. The graveyard was alive with us. People leaning on headstones as they fixed decorations onto their sequined military boots. Over by the tombs there was a makeup center set up. Someone painted my face yellow. The firefighter jacket was sleeveless. Someone else painted red flames on my arms. I swung my hose around so that the silver shingles shimmered. Herman did not want to paint his face. He only held the hose at his crotch as if it was an extension of himself. The sun dripped down onto my back, rolling down my neck. I blew steamy air from my lips to dry the glitter on my fire hat.
Testing, testing! The speaker coughed and a loud quarrel started from the entire costumed troupe against the music manager. We were unruly. That is how we were supposed to be. Peace is not a part of Carnival. Testing! And then a tune came pounding on. And the speaker hailed us as Crushers. And we screamed back. I stared hard at my headpiece, commanding the glitter to stay in place: Are you read-ay?
Herman and I grinned at each other, eyebrows smashing into our foreheads, and we followed the other hundred people toward the back of the float, a large cup of rum clenched in my hand. It was the Crushers’ turn to enter the parade. Our float edged forward. The air was thick and wound like melting glass. The sun dripped down, like it was something shedding itself. The music was churning, turning up, crashing through the sun and air. A huge red and black beetle with the face of a man hustled through our crowd toward another troupe that had started reveling long-time without him. We turned onto Main Street and entered the parade route.
The shops rose on both sides around us, they, too, dressed up with ribbons hanging from wide-opened windows and bows fixed to bolted Danish doors. First, there were just some people walking alongside us heading toward the front of the parade, heading toward the field maybe, where troupes would perform their dance arrangements to be judged for creativity, size, and costume. The Crushers did not have a dance arrangement. We did not believe in routines.
The crowds of paradegoers appeared as we tramped down the route. They had staked out their spots in that grassy section and those shop stoops since seven. They had set up chairs, blankets, and splinted wooden benches. They hid behind dark glasses and generous umbrellas and wide straw hats and building awnings. They brought with them coolers and transistor radios and old Carnival T-shirts and proud Caribbean-country flags and huge smiling mouths and children and cameras and camera film. Then there were faces everywhere and pictures snapping and plain clothes people I did not know throwing arms around and posing beside me. A few tourists dancing stiffly with each other and laughing as if in a glorious hell. Then natives grabbing our hips and waists, dancing close as if we were lovers and not strangers. Hips gyrating, waists oscillating, knees bending, feet stomping, hands stretching to grab the sky. Bodies moved and someone rushed Herman and me and hooked both our necks and spun us around, winded us down until our behinds near scraped the ground, then shook away into the crowd. Herman brought us each a rum and Coke. They make the rum from sugarcane, he said laughing.
My body obeyed the music. No do-si-do. No spinning in a circle. Obey the music. Boom, Boom. Bam, Bam. All inside the Jamband. The music says to obey nothing but your body. Slave to nothing but the rhythm. Hands in the air if you know you’re here. Be here. Be present. Don’t let anyone take away your being here. The rabbits are coming! I took Herman and kissed him wetly. We laughed. We screamed. We touched each other as if we were not in public, as if we were not in the middle of the street. Whenever the song came on I found him. I wrapped myself around him so he would know that he was safe.
Rabbit killers are not the same as rabbit traps. Rabbit killers face the prey. They want the victory to be their own and not the heroism of a metal contraption. The wild clowns are the perfect rabbit killers. In the parade they do not even conform to the definition of troupe. They make their own costumes. They do not have a theme. They never have a routine. They may travel in packs. They may travel in pairs. They are the embodiment of the song.
A gang of them came with bells screeching like a hurricane on their sneakers and on their big loose suits. Some with mouths sucking on baby bottles or whistles through a hole in the stocking mask, others with their screen masks down over that first facade—totally anonymous. No velvety suit matched another, no unison in purple and orange and red and green. The suits cut wide so that the bodies appeared slight—perhaps no body within all the clothes. The spirit inside hidden by layers of cloth—no neck, no hair, no fleshy fingers. Gloved hands outstretched, gripping whips of fraying rope and black tape. Whistle in mouth now. The wild clowns made no other noise but their frenzied bells shaking and shrill whistles screaming and their whips smacking the ground as we let them crash through our troupe and join our mad bacchanal.
I must have known some of the masked spirits. I must have gone to school with many of them. I couldn’t identify them but they could tell me easily despite my red face paint. This made me feel as if the asphalt under my feet was growing soft. They had whips. Long thick whips tied with heavy black tape that dragged on the ground like fat sleeping anacondas. The whips cracked as if electric when the clowns snapped them on the hot ground or in the hotter air.
The wild clowns moved side to side.
I moved my waist in a circle. I held my hose and acted as if wetting them down. One pretended to be pushed back. I laughed. I was drunk. I was suddenly unsure if I was moving my hips to the right beat. One clown lifted his knees up high, hands out wide; he seemed to be flying like a frantic and colorful bat. And my mind, maybe my body, swirled with sweet rum. I wanted to stop and take a rest. Legal was playing. They say we are too rude. They say we are too rough. They say we cause confusion. And that we never get enough.
The wild clown cracked his whip at my feet and made me skip back. He did not speak. He raised his whip, the snake cracking and cursing at the sky. Now he jumped from one foot to the other, following the music. I could not foll
ow. My head was spinning. My back was beginning to burn. I put the flat of my hand onto the skin of my back. The wild clown reached his gloved hand into my face and moved a piece of stray wet hair that had been blocking my eye.
He stepped back, the bells on his sneakers making a ruckus I could hear even above the song. He raised his whip in the air above me and I felt my shoulders cave in and eyelids snap and I crunched down onto the ground. That this wild clown was a he I did not doubt.
I stayed on the ground, resting in a way that felt comfortable even though I was curled up on the asphalt. But I could not stay there. It was Carnival. I was in the middle of a parade. A costume police officer tapped me with her glittering baton stick and pulled me up. She was wearing dark oversized shades with rhinestones along the rims. I thought then that I should have chosen police officer over firefighter. Get up. Go on the side if you need a break. You going get trampled here.
I got up and I looked for Herman. But I could not find him. For the rest of parade I looked for him. I could not find him. He had left. And this seemed right. But what was wrong was that he did not take me. Perhaps I could have fit in his suitcase if had tried.
Did I look for him afterward? No. Perhaps I was interested in being found for once. Perhaps he moved to Alaska. He liked being in places where he did not belong. Perhaps I should have gone to Alaska to find him. I never went to his gated house again. I never talked about him to anyone. I thought about him every spare moment I had. I have had many spare moments.
Years after Herman had left, a small package arrived at my grandfather’s house, and not in the post-office box as such things should. I came upon it when opening the door for my morning walk. A small square wrapped in brown paper. It had no postage, but there it was on our step as though it might be a pet waiting to be let in. I knew to go to my room. I knew to unwrap it there in the privacy of my bed. It was wrapped in more and more paper like nestled dolls. And then finally the prize tumbled out as though an afterthought. A diamond necklace. I touched its rough edges and smooth surfaces. The silver clasp was smudged and the diamonds dull, as though it had been in that box for a long time. With the collar of my mother’s blue polyester blouse, I carefully rubbed it to a shine.
Now I wear the diamonds for the men who are brave enough to let me call them Papa when they join me in the back rooms. I wear the diamonds like a costume. I think of Herman when I wear it.
And now this Carnival, Legal is back. And now I know it is more than just a good song to work up to. I am jumping with the Crushers. Not because I have been faithful all these years. That is not my way. I jump with a different troupe every Carnival. I do not party all year long. I save it up. I help my grandfather with the costumes now. I pick the troupe I want by the costume I like the best. I do not walk around kissing men and collecting boyfriends anymore. So many of the men see me in the street and scream at me and tell me that I broke their hearts or they whisper in my ear at a restaurant where I am by myself listening to music and tell me that they know I am the One for them. I do not think only of Herman. I am still young, not much past thirty. I think of all those boys and men I’ve kissed, though only Herman has a name in the memories. I cannot remember the other names or faces. I only remember their mouths. I only remember if they held on to me as we kissed or if they let me go easily afterward.
The brace I wear feels like a straitjacket and perhaps it is. I sleep in it even—except when I am sleeping with a man, which is not so often. My grandfather has never liked anyone in the back room where they might see his work and attempt to sabotage any of his costumes. I respect this a little more now. Plus, men do not often want to come to the back room. My mother’s clothes lie across the bed like limp bodies and make men feel flaccid. The little children’s feathered chicken feet or the Zulu warrior spears make the men uneasy. I sleep with a pillow between my legs when a man is not there.
I take off the brace on Easter Sunday and practice my hip rolling until Jou’vert morning. After food fair when I have eaten all the bull foot stew I can take before noon, I know I am ready for the parade. If the calypso that year is good, the question really is if the parade is ready for me.
This island is like an entire world. But now I have made a circle. I am back with the Crushers. And I am back wanting to hear Legal, because that is the song this year. It too has made a circle. And I am wilding out on the Waterfront. And suddenly there is a piece of paper flying around my head like a mosquito. And it looks like glitter or like a stray piece of costume. But as it falls I stoop to pick it up. I hold my back because I have stopped dancing and I can feel the burn coming on. And it is a note and it says: For you, you all the pretty things.
I felt him. Herman? But he did not answer me. I stood among the other people dancing around me. I stood still as parents tell children to do when they are lost. I let the pain in my back come. I thought of my mother leaving me behind in a pile of clothes. I thought of being abandoned. I opened my mouth and called for Legal. Play Legal! I don’t want to be anywhere else but here.
9.
Herman
When I flew back to D.C. my seat was toward the front and the cockpit door was open, revealing all the black dials and red buttons. I heard the pilot order into his microphone. It was not for us, the passengers, to hear. It was for the control deck or someone else on the ground. “Kill the rabbits,” he said. I leaned forward to listen for more but nothing else came. I leaned instead on my window and watched the D.C. runway beneath us. A row of bright white lights flickered and then went off. Home, I thought.
Now I dream of kissing Xica. I think of sitting on her bed in her crazy house and our faces touching. Seeing who could hold out. How long we could feel each other’s breath—hers coming fast and light, mine coming long and heavy—without reaching for a kiss. She always lost because she always wanted to kiss. Said it made her breathing better. I think now that she was sick really. That she was ill in her body and maybe in her mind, but despite that I still know that not being there for her after the parade was the greatest sin of my life. The greatest cowardice. Cowardice is a sin. I was not there after the parade to hold her when her body shook with pain from being on her feet all day. I did not even watch the parade on the TV, except to laugh or grunt at the women every now and then like the other men in the bar.
I wonder if Xica would have loved me forever if I had played the rabbit. She always said she loved me because I seemed transient. But what if I’d let her kill me in the stadium? “Remember, you said you loved me. You can’t love me only because I am transient.” That is what I wanted to tell her. What if I don’t fit in here? What if I don’t feel totally comfortable around black people but I still want to live on the island? Live with you. Is that a crime? What if I love you even though I don’t understand you? What if your pussy is made for a black man and I’m too small and that’s why you were always with other guys? Is that a racist thing for me to think? Even if it is, does that mean I didn’t love her? That I don’t still love her?
I live in D.C. again. I’m dating any girl who will have me, which means I seem desperate. So girls call me up in the middle of the night to have sex but none of them want to be seen with me in the morning. I left the island that same month I left Xica. But then not a year after I was gone someone burned down my parents’ bar in St. John. My father called me and said, “The niggers finally burned down the bar.” Just like that. He’d forgotten I’d dated Xica. Or maybe he’d never known. But my father doesn’t usually use that language. He was only mad. He’s not really racist.
There was something about his “finally” that made me think that he must have always felt uneasy. Felt he wasn’t wanted. The bar was called Crusoe’s. Xica once told me that she hated that. But I’d never read Robinson Crusoe so I didn’t know what she meant. But it dawned on me after my father hung up that maybe she’d burned down the bar. I could see her doing it. I could see her laughing and dancing and pouring kerosene on the bar stools. And I could see her run, her back hurtin
g but running anyway, as the bar went up in flames. And I remembered the song, “kill the rabbits,” and I knew that the hunt was on. And I want to tell her, “It’s all right. It’s all right. I deserve it. I saw you for a flash on the TV curled up on the ground in the middle of the street. The camera flashed away but I knew it was you.”
“They want us gone,” said my father when I arrived on St. John to help them with the bar. I met with him in the study of my parents’ house. “But I’m not going anywhere. I help this damn place. I bring industry. I hire people. What would those people do without me? This is bull. These ungrateful nig …”
“Who?” I could not think of any islanders my father had hired except the woman who cleaned his bar and the one who cleaned our house. So I asked him. “Who?”
“Who what?”
“What locals have you hired?”
“Herman. This is not going down easy. It’s not right. Just because they’re black doesn’t mean they can’t be wrong. They’re like Hitler. They only want their own around them. They’re more jingoistic than a damned Texas Republican.”
“But we have so much power.”
“We’re not rich, Herman.”
“I mean just by being here. We’re just here. We take up space but we don’t …”
“Are you here to help me or harass me, Herman? You have no idea how the world works.” He leaned forward and slipped a book from one of the shelves. He looked at it and then passed it to me. “Read this.” It was a book he had written, Strangers in Their Own Homes: A History of Christian Martyrdom. He was not a writer but he and my mother had been professors, he in religion and she in literature, before retiring. Part of a professor’s job was writing books. I took the book but I did not intend to read it—though I did, eventually. Now I looked up at Saint Paul looking down at us. Religion had never been anything more than academic history to me.
How to Escape From a Leper Colony Page 20
