How to Escape From a Leper Colony
Page 21
“Saint Paul,” my father said as he’d said to me many times before. “He was a scholar and a writer.”
“Like you,” I said.
“Not exactly. He was a martyr, too. He died for his convictions. Not for himself, really. He died for people who believed what he believed. That’s how a martyr is different. A martyr sacrifices for a cause, for many people. And you know it’s often public, so that the people can know it’s their martyr.” He rubbed his chin. Looking suddenly like the professor he had been and not the bar owner he had become. “The Romans were foolish. If they had killed privately it would have been a lot harder to make martyrs out of anybody.”
“Will you leave?”
“The island? No. This is my home. Where else would I go?”
“What about the properties in D.C.?”
“No. I’ll build another bar. This is home. This is where human beings are meant to live. All human beings need this kind of beauty around them.”
I did not know what to say to him. Because he knew and I knew that not all human beings could fit on this tiny island. But I decided to stay and help my parents rebuild the bar. They were my people. Family. Family must be your people.
I stayed for two weeks but I did not hang out with Dutch. I did not look for Xica. And she did not find me.
Then I went back to D.C. I took part-time jobs and temporary internships. I would not commit. I started college again. Spring break and Easter break always coincided. I decided I would visit my parents around that time. Of course, I hoped to see Xica and at the same time I feared seeing her.
I have never seen her.
For the few months after my parents’ bar was burned down, I kept up with news on the island by reading various Virgin Islands Web sites. Then one innocent day I read of a new allegation that a black woman had been raped by a white man on St. John. My heart pounded and I wondered if the woman was Xica. They would not disclose her name. I ran to the bathroom and threw up.
Depending on the Web message board the truth was either that the black woman was lying or that she had been raped in retaliation for a white man’s bar being burned down, my father’s bar. Black women were raped by black men, but interracial rape was something that really was a crime after all. History, Xica would have told me. History makes it worse. The message boards were not shy. The sites talked about another rape, where a young black man had raped a white tourist woman right in front of her husband, then beat the husband nearly to death before running with all their diamonds. Now he was doing time in jail. One posting saw this as an injustice: “They found that black boy so quickly. Why can’t they find the white man who raped?” Another posted: “See, they did it to our white women first. It’s time we retaliated.” I felt sick thinking about who was they and who was we.
I could not imagine raping any kind of woman. So I could not see how forcing a black woman would make me worse than forcing a white woman but then I thought of the Cuban prostitute in Miami and then I would have to stop thinking.
I decided to make a sacrifice of myself. I started that Easter—a year after I’d left Xica. I have been doing this now for twelve entire years. Each year I visit my parents in their home and each year I make my walk. This year the man who sang “Legal” died. He was a diabetic—too much sweetness in life or not enough. He died but his song has come back to life. And this year I lift up my cross and hope beyond hope that Xica will find me and take me home.
10.
Cooper
I have a view of the sea. I have a view of the fort. I have a view of the bodies dancing wildly in the Carnival parade. I’m in jail. That is my geography. There must be something to this. This must be more than by chance. It is more than chance that this year the calypsonian who wrote Legal died. Diabetic coma, for real. Too much sugar or not enough. His songs were still number one on the Jou’vert route. People still lined up to dance up on a boat in the middle of the harbor with his band. But nothing like Legal ever again. Nothing that said I like Legal. Nothing that said we like Legal.
But this Carnival Legal has come back as a veneration because the islands are on fire again. In St. John someone scrawled “nigger” on the side of a car. “White people own this” on the side of building. I read it all in the papers. We’re all waiting for someone to burn something down again. Someone to reveal that under our beautiful Virgin Islands there is a whorishness now. That we’ve been selling ourselves. But not ourselves, really. The land. But the land is us. And even the men who pass through my cell don’t want to listen to my preaching. They want concrete proof that our culture is something worth keeping alive. Something worth us. And even then are we talking about culture or are we talking about ourselves? Are we fooling ourselves? The St. Johnians can’t even afford to live in St. John. Spray paint on a wall tells them that they don’t own a thing.
I watch the people in the troupes. They perform—nowadays they all have routines that they must practice for weeks. They bow or wave at the end and the audience, which used to just be called the crowd, claps properly. But then there are the Crushers. They don’t ever do a routine, but they always have the best costumes and they always seem to be having the most fun. Nothing legal about them.
I write “For you, all the pretty things” on a scrap of paper. I’ve written something to her every year since I’ve been in here, but this year I believe I see her. The Crushers are masquerading as the weather. She’s wearing yellow. She’s a sunny day. I swear that’s my diamond necklace glittering at her neck. I fold my note tight and pitch it down. I watch this tiny magic wand soar. I can’t tell if she’s bending to pick it up or if she’s bending to push her bum back against the man who is moving up on her. I plunge my hands out of the window because that is the only thing that can get out of the bars. She seems to be looking for me. I cup my hands to share the air with her.
After Carnival is over and the Village is packed up and the rides are dismantled, I think about my martyr. On Easter Sunday, just two weeks before Carnival, I had watched him heave the wood across his shoulders. It could have looked to a car driving by as though the martyr was no martyr but simply a Frenchy kid hauling wood for some secret Carnival thing. But it has always been obvious to me that the wood was not just wood. I can see from up here that the wood is shaped like a cross. And the man is dragging it to no fixed destination. He is simply dragging it up Waterfront. He is not trying to get it anywhere. The dragging is the purpose. I imagine that he must start out at Havensight, where the tourists arrive. Perhaps it is the place where he had first arrived. Where he and his family first disembarked from a cruise ship and into the openness of the Virgin Islands. It seemed a friendly and colorful place, then. Filled with my people who spoke a bizarre English and screwed their mouths in such a way that they seemed drunk or high.
He thinks the sun makes the people drunk, the salt ocean breeze makes the people high. It was a drug place to my martyr when he first arrived. It was a place of hallucination. But what I see every Easter is not hallucination. The man walks with a cross on his back. And the damn cross is heavy and he walks anyway. Past my jail. It is not a walk of full martyrdom, really. No one is meant to see. He is doing a private penance. And why do men walk with crosses on their backs? The answer is the same no matter where they might be or where they might be from. For love, of course. Nothing else is worth it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to the following places where these stories have appeared in some form:
“How to Escape from a Leper Colony”—winner of the Boston Review Fiction Prize
“The Saving Work”—winner of the Kore Press Chapbook Prize, and the Best African American Fiction 2009
“Street Man”—The London Magazine
“The Bridge Stories”—winner of a Pushcart Prize and published in Sonora Review
“Canoe Sickness” (under the title: “A Busy London Pavement”)—Global City Review
“Where Tourists Don’t Go”—Story Quarterly
“
The International Shop of Coffins”—excerpts published in American Short Fiction, Transition Magazine, and Akashic’s Trinidad Noir anthology
I could never thank everyone. I hope this will suffice—
Many thanks to the communities of writers where these stories were worked on: the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Callaloo Workshop, the Rice University Parks Fellow program, Voices of the Nations, Kore Press, Caribbean Cultural Theatre, and the Cropper Foundation Caribbean Writers Workshop.
Thanks to those who read and helped beyond the call of duty or classroom: Jonathan Ali, Bobby Antoni, Cyd Apellido, Diane Bartoli, Jericho Brown, Vincent Cooper, Justin Cronin, Maryse Condé, Kwame Dawes, Junot Díaz, Andre Dubus III, Percival Everett, Ben Fountain, Patrick Freeman, Elizabeth Gregory, Cristina Henriquez, Arvelyn Hill, Gaelen Johnson, Tayari Jones, Greg Jowdy, Ron and Susan Martin, Nina McConigley, Kevin McIlvoy, Roy and Pouneh McMaster, Keya Mitra, Antonya Nelson, Elizabeth Nunez, Sigrid Nunez, Emily Pérez, Velma Pollard, Emily Raboteau, Danzy Senna, Jonathan Strong, Addie Tsai, Gemini Wahaj, and Lois Zamora; and to my elementary and high school teachers, most especially Dr. Rodio and Mrs. Ignatius. Thanks to Fiona, Polly, Katie, Erin, and the other wolves who made this book possible. Thanks to Elise and Sandy without whom there would be no book.
Thanks to the writer I know as Anexus Corban, who lent his name but bears no other resemblance to my Anexus. Thanks to my aunts, uncles, and cousins who have been champions always.
Every artist needs others who have come before and are willing to selflessly turn back to bring another along. I have been blessed to have Kathy Cambor, Vincent Cooper, Chitra Divakaruni, and Claudia Rankine.
To my loves: Eva Lorraine, Zachary Gundel, and Reggie McGarrah.
Finally and most, to my grandmother, Beulah Smith Harrigan—the one who told me stories.
TIPHANIE YANIQUE is from the Hospital Ground neighborhood of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. She was the Parks Fellow/Writer-in-Residence at Rice University and Fellow in fiction at Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in creative writing and fellowship residencies with Bread Loaf, Callaloo, Squaw Valley, and the Cropper Foundation for Caribbean Writers. She is an assistant professor of creative writing and Caribbean literature at Drew University and an associate editor with Post-No-Ills. She lives between Brooklyn, New York, and St. Thomas.
This book is made possible through a partnership with the College of Saint Benedict, and honors the legacy of S. Mariella Gable, a distinguished teacher at the College.
Previous titles in this series include:
Loverboy by Victoria Redel
The House on Eccles Road by Judith Kitchen
One Vacant Chair by Joe Coomer
The Weatherman by Clint McCown
Collected Poems by Jane Kenyon
Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship
by Nuruddin Farah:
Sweet and Sour Milk
Sardines
Close Sesame
Duende by Tracy K. Smith
All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems by Linda Gregg
The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song by Ellen Bryant Voigt
Support for this series has been provided by the Lee and Rose Warner Foundation as part of the Warner Reading Program.
Book design by Connie Kuhnz. Composition by BookMobile Design and Publishing Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free paper.