The Star Side of Bird Hill

by Naomi Jackson

  “You know, I have an aunt in Queens. Jamaica, Queens. Is that near where you live?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Phaedra said. She had seen the sign for Jamaica on the taxi ride to JFK earlier that summer. Hearing Donna mention Jamaica, Queens, reminded Phaedra of how confused she’d been when she saw the sign, because the only Jamaica she’d heard of before then was the island Jamaica, and she didn’t think you could drive there.

  “Maybe one day when you’re walking around, you’ll see her.”

  “Maybe,” Phaedra said. She was hungry. She looked behind her to see that the pyramid of saran-wrapped sandwiches was gone. When Phaedra had first seen the sandwiches, she’d dismissed them, thinking she could wait until she got home to eat the food she knew Hyacinth was cooking. She was starving now.

  “I have an idea. We can be friends. We’ll hang out this summer. And then when you’re gone, I’ll write to you.”

  Phaedra found it hard to imagine being pleased by running into Donna’s aunt or responding to Donna’s letters. Still, Donna was kinder than any of the other girls had been to her so far. “That would be nice,” she forced herself to say.

  Donna offered her second cup of Tang to Phaedra, and she drank it gratefully. She politely declined the bread ends Donna pushed toward her.

  Later that afternoon, as they sat cutting pictures of Bible action figures from cardboard, in the same way that the girls had scanned Phaedra for weak spots before pouncing, they pressed the issue of their teacher’s potential beau. Angelique Ward hissed the s in Ms. Taylor’s name until her status as a single woman sounded like a curse. Slowly, because Ms. Taylor had trouble following the rapid-fire patois they spoke, the other girls said how nice she and Derrick looked leading morning prayers together, that they had noticed him looking at her in a way that seemed more than friendly, that his last name, Boss, meant that he would know what to do when the time came.

  Phaedra was happy to have the attention drawn away from everything that was wrong with her as they sat talking with the double doors open for breeze. She focused on cutting out a picture of Zacchaeus, the “wee little man” she knew well from praise song, while the other girls weighed in on the possibility of Ms. Taylor’s courtship.

  And then Phaedra spoke. “Yes, Ms. Taylor,” she said. “All now, he could be putting his hands up your skirt.”

  While the other girls’ expressions shifted from shock to judgment, Angelique Ward walked over to Phaedra with her palms planted firmly on her bony hips. She took a deep breath before spitting her words. “Phaedra Ann Braithwaite, it is only your sister who has made herself known for that kind of slackness.”

  Ms. Taylor, for her part, didn’t know what to do with Phaedra’s comment or Angelique’s swift punishment. After an uncomfortable silence during which the word “slackness” hung in the air, she dismissed all the girls except Phaedra. “Phaedra, is there anything you want to talk about?” Ms. Taylor said. She sat down next to Phaedra on the edge of the church hall’s stage, the angle and distance between them perfect for sharing a secret.

  “No, ma’am,” Phaedra said. Her face strained with the effort of not crying. There was so much that she wanted to say about her mother and her grandmother and Dionne and Chris. But then she remembered what happened when she told her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Friedman, about how her mother would disappear for days and that when she was home she would sit looking out the window or staring at the television screen. The sound of the police sirens when they came to take her mother away came rushing back to Phaedra, piercing the hill’s late-afternoon hush.

  “Are you sure?” Ms. Taylor asked.

  Phaedra said “No” again with more force. She walked out of the church hall, leaving Ms. Taylor alone amid the paper cutouts and folding chairs.

  HYACINTH’S MOTHER liked to say that even though she never learned to read, never went to college to be a nurse or a midwife or a doctor, that didn’t stop her from delivering every baby on the hill. She worked roots for everyone, even for those who said that obeah was backward and against their Christian beliefs, but would still find themselves at her doorstep under cover of darkness, seeking help with a man who suddenly had a hot foot or a taste for another woman’s pot, a womb that wouldn’t bear children, a son or daughter gone to the States or England and never heard from again. Hyacinth went further than her mother in school and knew enough to write and to read the Nation and her Bible. And for her, that was enough. She felt the hill as a magnetic force that pulled her close even when she was outside its bounds. The only safe place to travel was in your dreams, she thought. And despite her daughter spending almost two decades in what Hyacinth referred to alternatively as “foreign,” “up there,” and “that man country,” Hyacinth never stepped foot past Bridgetown. Everything she needed was in her yard.

  As soon as Phaedra was old enough to write, she wrote to her grandmother. At first, she just added a few x’s and o’s at the end of her mother’s letters. But soon, she was writing her own short letters every month, catching her grandmother up on what she was learning in school, which psalms she knew by heart, pretending that she’d made closer friends than she had. It was hard for Phaedra to reconcile the hardness in Avril’s voice when she talked about Barbados in general and Bird Hill in particular with the peaceful place Hyacinth described. But the different ways Phaedra and her sister saw the world in general and their parents in particular taught Phaedra that two people could feel different ways about exactly the same things, and that they could both be right.

  It was Phaedra’s grandmother who told her that she should start keeping track of her dreams. Her mother bought her a dream catcher at a powwow out at Floyd Bennett Field, and she placed it above her bed in Brooklyn, hoping to hang on a bit longer to the Technicolor pulse behind her eyes. Avril always told her that dreams were just another world we lived in, different from but related to the waking world.

  In her grandmother’s house, there was a carafe filled with water on the night table that Phaedra sipped from each morning to help her remember where her dreams had taken her. There was another glass of water beneath the bed to catch tricky spirits. The carafe was one way Phaedra knew that beauty was not something reserved for the wealthy, but a common, everyday kind of thing that was available to anyone with eyes open enough to see. Phaedra had taken to writing down her dreams, imitating her grandmother, who kept a notebook by her bedside for precisely this purpose.

  For days, Phaedra dreamed of schools of flying fish jumping out of the water, not unlike the ones she’d seen on Sunday afternoons after church when Hyacinth let her and Dionne go to the beach with the Lovings. The third day she dreamed of fish, she woke up later than usual, having slept in to savor the feeling of the sun on her skin and the light reflecting the fishes’ silver flesh. When she awoke, she wandered into the kitchen, where her sister and grandmother were mixing salt fish and flour together for fish cakes.

  “Good morning, Granny,” Phaedra said, hugging her grandmother from behind. She felt Hyacinth stiffen at her embrace, but she leaned in further to smell the nutmeg on her housedress.

  “Well, hello. I see Sleeping Beauty finally decide to wake. What sweet you this morning so?” Finally too uncomfortable, Hyacinth pulled herself free from Phaedra’s grip, making an excuse of reaching for the fish draining in a colander.

  “I had the best dream. I dreamed we were all at a picnic at Pebbles Beach and the flying fish were jumping so high it looked like they could touch the sun.”

  “Hmmm, have you ever thought that maybe you were just dreaming that because we’re going to the beach later?” Dionne asked.

  “We are?” Phaedra said, the pitch of her voice turning up with excitement.

  “Yes, darling. You don’t remember the church picnic is today?” Hyacinth looked out at the plants encroaching on the white hydrangeas below her kitchen window. “Looks like a whole army of weeds take over my garden. I don�
��t know how it is that I have two strong girls here with me and I still have to be bending down and cleaning up all the time as if I’m a young person.”

  “What do the fish in my dreams mean, Gran?” Phaedra asked.

  “It means a baby soon come. Take note, darling, and see if your dreams don’t bear fruit.”

  Phaedra looked out through the picture window at the bananas, which she still couldn’t call figs like everyone else did. The banana trees she’d imagined stretched their branches high to the sky, not fat and squat to the ground, heavy with fruit that turned purple like Jean’s skin before they ripened. Maybe the baby would come just like the fruit on that tree, she thought, upside down and not at all how she expected it.

  “So fish mean babies?”

  “You dream of fish and a baby soon come. Dream of a wedding and it’s a funeral around the corner. Dream of a funeral and somebody’s getting married soon,” Hyacinth said.

  Phaedra jumped when she heard the pop and hiss as Hyacinth lowered the first few tablespoons of batter into hot oil.

  “OK, OK, that’s all I can remember for right now,” Phaedra said.

  Phaedra left the kitchen wondering where this child might come from. Her absent wonder almost made her chores go by quickly.

  THE BIRD HILL CHURCH of God in Christ 75th Anniversary picnic was a highly anticipated affair. For months before it happened, the head of the church picnic committee, Mrs. Gumbs, made announcements from her seat in the third pew, much to the annoyance of the elders who said they didn’t want to strain their ears or crane their necks to hear what she was talking about. Mrs. Gumbs, mother to Clotel Gumbs and four other children with equally stingy portions of character and ambition, stood her ground, saying that she was neither usher nor deacon nor reverend and therefore did not belong in the sanctuary except on Saturdays when she cleaned it with the others from the Women’s Guild. It was this kind of obsequiousness that got the gullets of Hyacinth and the other hill women. Phaedra could hear but did not listen to Mrs. Gumbs’s long speeches because by then the service had usually gone on for three hours and she could practically taste the cookies from the after-service repast; just the thought of sugar melting against her tongue and the maraschino cherry at the cookie’s center, which she always saved for last, made Phaedra ache with longing.

  Phaedra marveled at the elaborate headpieces Mrs. Gumbs wore, intricate concoctions with beads and plumes and straw that drew attention away from the massive chest and stomach that she wore with a kind of pride, having appointed herself the mother of the church. Some of the words floated through Phaedra’s haze of hunger and boredom—“rousing success” and “pitch in” and “many hands make light work”—but mostly Phaedra was fascinated by Mrs. Gumbs’s matronly swagger, which was so different from the kind her mother had. Phaedra looked at the peacock hat Mrs. Gumbs wore on the last Sunday before the picnic and whispered to Chris that he might have to go hold down the bird before it flew off her head. She realized that she was being uncharitable and straightened up a bit when her grandmother shot her a look that Phaedra knew wasn’t nearly as deadly as the ones she normally gave her. She’d overheard Hyacinth talking to Ms. Zelma, saying that she was surprised Pauline Gumbs had not yet sat upon and crushed up the little piece of man she called a husband.

  Phaedra’s stomach grumbled with anticipation on the Sunday before the picnic when she heard all the items on the menu: stew chicken, rice and peas, cook-up rice, flying fish, pudding and souse, yam pie, macaroni pie, potato salad, fried chicken, and Phaedra’s favorite, fish cakes. For the whole week that followed, Phaedra imagined the food she’d eat at the picnic. It was easy to forgive Mrs. Gumbs’s droning on about the powers of fellowship and the gift of Christian community when she called out the food in a way that made Phaedra see, taste, and touch it.

  The day of the picnic came and everyone was at church at the appointed hour, just after eight o’clock when the sun hadn’t yet got going. They lined up beside the school buses with beach towels and beach chairs, coolers brimming with ice and drinks, long aluminum pans filled with food, napkins, and paper towels and painkillers, diapers, and changes of clothes. They were wearing outfits they had waited for weeks to show off, only to shrug off compliments with words like “this old thing” and “just something I had in my closet.” Looking at the hill people assembled, you would have thought they were leaving on a long journey to see Jesus Christ himself, even though it took at most two hours to drive from Bird Hill in St. John to Folkestone Beach on the west coast.

  Trevor offered Dionne a ride in his father’s air-conditioned car, but she declined, citing plans to take the bus with her new friends. She was glad she could give them as the reason for saying no, because the truth was that Trevor’s pouty, accusing looks annoyed her; and his mother, who insisted that she be driven because she couldn’t tolerate noise, was just too much to be around. If she were being honest with herself, Dionne might have said that Mrs. Loving’s sullenness reminded her too much of Avril, that she felt naked beneath the microscope of her intense gaze.

  Dionne boarded the bus, muscling her grandmother’s giant pan of potato salad to the back where the other girls were sitting. Accidentally on purpose, she knocked her sister in the head.

  “Ow,” Phaedra squealed.

  “You know I didn’t hit you that hard,” Dionne said.

  Then Dionne asked Chris, who was sitting next to Phaedra, “And you, how’d you manage to weasel your way out of the family caravan?” Dionne kept walking when Chris started to say that he was there to help Phaedra carry Hyacinth’s pan of fish cakes.

  The excitement that day was infectious and even Dionne, with her practiced nonchalance, found herself giggling with her new friend Saranne and the hill girls who stuck to them like honey. The teenage girls, minus Clotel Gumbs, who sat next to her mother, huddled together so that they could gossip and squeal when the bus hit bumps and potholes. The girls listened as Saranne spun tales about her boyfriend, a big-time record producer in Port-of-Spain who she bragged not only called her every evening at her aunt Trixie’s house, but also had written her love notes every week since she arrived. The girls sighed with envy at each turn in Saranne’s romantic fable. And because Saranne—with her eyes spaced far apart in a way that would have been ugly on another girl, her skin the color of wet sand, hair that ran down her back, and slim thighs that never rubbed together like the Bird Hill girls with their legs grown thick by yard work and cornmeal—because Saranne was beautiful and had a Trini accent that made words tumble from her mouth like song lyrics, no one poked holes in her story or mentioned the rumor that this very same boyfriend had gotten Saranne pregnant and that this was the reason her mother had sent her to live with her cousin Jean and her aunt Trixie in Barbados for the summer. Everyone was in a light mood that day, and listening to Saranne’s stories, and Dionne’s tales of her boyfriend Darren back in Brooklyn, whispered just loud enough so that the girls could hear but the adults could not, made the hill girls feel like they could borrow some of what boys saw in Dionne and Saranne.

  The trip ended when the bus rumbled up to Folkestone and let its passengers out in a dense cloud of diesel exhaust. The church people unloaded their things and stood staring at the grove of manchineel trees, two new public washrooms and tennis courts, and beyond them, the sea. Then they seized upon the picnic tables, acting as if someone else were fighting them for space at ten on a Saturday morning. Dionne and her crew stood back, trying to distinguish themselves from the country ways of their mothers and grandmothers and brothers and sisters, until their armor of teenage cool was cut through by threats to break their you-know-whats right then and there if they didn’t bring themselves over where they were supposed to be, and promptly.

  Once everyone’s food and belongings were laid out on the tables, it was time for a prayer. Phaedra hated how holy the hill women and some of the men became when they came together under the auspices of church f
unctions. And this time was no different, as the hill women fell over themselves in an effort to prove their godliness, taking the baseline level of Bajan gentility to a fever pitch. Phaedra thought that Father Loving’s prayers to bless the food and the cooks and the church family and the sea and the fishermen and our nation’s leaders would never end. Ever since she’d seen Hyacinth and Dionne making fish cakes earlier in the day, her heart had leapt with single-minded focus toward devouring them. And so as she endured Father Loving’s endless entreaties to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Phaedra soothed herself by imagining how the oil, batter, codfish, onions, and pepper would explode in her mouth.

  Father Loving wound through his prayers, and Phaedra felt Chris fidgeting next to her. Phaedra and Chris were still friends, though sometimes the tension between Dionne and Trevor was thick enough to slice with a cutlass, and that meant that they couldn’t all hang out together anymore. Chris had been waging a campaign for closeness during the bus ride, holding Phaedra a moment longer than necessary when the Bird Hill caravan veered too close to reckless drivers on the south coast road. Now Chris slid in when Phaedra was defenseless, her head bowed respectfully. Phaedra felt Chris’s leathery fingers creep toward hers, but she swatted him away before he could take her hand in his. When Chris’s hands were a safe distance away, she heard Father Loving starting up again with more fervor, this time with a plea that the children of Bird Hill would not forget where they came from, that the blood of Jesus and of their people that was shed for them would not have been shed in vain.

  The Bird Hill Church of God in Christ picnic was held every third Saturday in July. If you asked some of the old people, like Hyacinth, they would tell you the real story, that the church had only taken what the original seven men who founded the hill did to celebrate their emancipation, and made it their own. They would also tell you that Bird Hill was once a community of freedmen, born when the local slaveholding family was wiped out by a series of unfortunate events. Pneumonia whipped through the white Braithwaite children like fire in a cane field. A boating accident took the overseer. A mysterious illness rotted the patriarch from the inside, bloating him until one day his belly ballooned to three times its normal size and his lips cracked and eventually stopped letting air pass through. Mrs. Braithwaite found herself without a child, husband, or another white person of her class to talk to. She looked out upon the fields and saw herself outnumbered by big strapping women and men grown strong on provisions and pork fat. Mr. Braithwaite was a firm believer in keeping his property in tip-top shape, and it was not unusual for the Braithwaite boys, as his male slaves were called, to take first prize in running and boxing competitions with the other plantations. Soon after her husband’s death, Mrs. Braithwaite was consumed by a rot similar to the one that took her husband, although in her case she got smaller and smaller, well past the slim-waisted figure she cut when she was first married. The disease progressed quickly, and in a matter of days, she emitted such noxious gas that her servants took her commands from well across the room where she lay wasting away. The old-time hill women would tell you that Phaedra and Dionne’s great-great-grandmother, a heavy-footed woman with sour sops for breasts named Bertha, spoke the spells that ruined her masters and their progeny, that it was Bertha’s daughter who leaned over Mrs. Braithwaite’s ailing body and said plainly, “She deading.”