In the aftermath of Mrs. Braithwaite’s death, there was some debate regarding the circumstances of her passing. But whether she’d died or been killed, there was a whooping that went up when her will was read, as it decreed that all the slaves, including the unborn (because just then Marguerite, Hyacinth’s great-great-grandmother’s cousin, was inside her mother’s belly), would be free. The land on which they lived was passed to them as well. And although it was said that Mrs. Braithwaite was forward thinking, generous, extraordinary even, in her gift of posthumous manumission, she was in fact a woman of her time, having witnessed and survived the terror of Bussa’s Rebellion, when the death of even one white slaveholder was enough to threaten the way of life to which she and the rest of the plantocracy had become accustomed. She knew that she couldn’t take with her to the grave what she had once owned in life. Like the courage of the women in Phaedra and Dionne’s family, the celebration every July had been passed down for generations on the hill. Eventually the festivities were co-opted by the church.
Phaedra had inherited her fair share of fierceness from the women in her family. And so when it seemed like Father Loving was turning down yet another prayer avenue, Phaedra opened her mouth and spoke: “Lord God, Heavenly Father, please feed us with the food the cooks have prepared, especially the fish cakes. Amen.” And the hill women, who would normally have gathered themselves on a mission to correct a child speaking out of turn, simply chuckled and said “Amen,” because in truth hunger and heat were making close friends of their bellies and their backs.
“From the mouths of babes,” Father Loving said. He looked at Phaedra and she saw something like anger flash across his face even as his lips stretched wide across his teeth in a grin. Phaedra turned to Chris and he shrugged his shoulders; she remembered their unspoken pact not to discuss their parents.
In the requisite hour between feasting and going into the water, the adults’ heavy eyelids shuttered almost closed and the children who knew what was good for them sat in such a way as to preserve the neatness of their plaits and the pleats in their slacks and dresses. When they couldn’t stand it any longer, the children stripped down to the bathing suits they’d worn under their clothes because their mothers, suspicious as they were of germs, preferred the plain air to the public washrooms.
Dionne went off with Saranne to the changing rooms farther up the beach; they switched out of the dresses they’d arrived in and put on polka-dot bikinis, a matching set of swimsuits Saranne’s boyfriend had sent from Trinidad when she whined that she didn’t have anything to wear to the boring church picnic. Their tops covered the mosquito bumps Saranne had for breasts and Dionne’s ample bubbies. Dionne watched Saranne out of the corner of her eye, noting her flat stomach and firm arms. She was reminded of changing with her friend Taneisha for gym at Erasmus, the way she was comforted by her friend’s endless chatter that dulled the shame of having to undress in front of strangers. Dionne wondered for a moment what Taneisha was doing. It was Saturday and so it was likely that her mother, who made roti skins and cooked curry goat for women who called in orders from as close as Canarsie and as far away as Long Island, was already pouring oil into her pans and asking Taneisha to get the dough out of the industrial refrigerator that dwarfed their apartment’s small kitchen. Dionne shook her head then, because it hurt too much to think that she wouldn’t get a call from Taneisha that morning, which always began with the same question, “So, whatchu doing?” She wanted to forget Taneisha’s kindness in believing that she might actually be doing something interesting, rather than “nothing” or “watching TV,” like she usually said. That, and the fact that Taneisha always waited for Dionne to say something about her mother, instead of asking, was just part of what had made them such good friends.
“Eh eh, but it look like you real watching whatever movie you playing in you head,” Saranne said, pulling Dionne out of her reverie.
“Huh?” Dionne said, and then looked up to see Saranne was already halfway out the door of the changing room. She hustled, and trailed slightly behind Saranne as they edged farther down the beach, in the opposite direction of the Bird Hill picnickers.
The girls eyed and then circled their prey, a group of boys who sat on boulders that made the sea a calm lake around them. Dionne and Saranne could tell from the boys’ crisply pressed designer jeans and fresh haircuts that they were from town. They felt like their practiced coquetry had finally found a worthy audience.
Meanwhile, down the beach, the Bird Hill children and teenagers swam under the watch of a lifeguard while the adults napped in the shade. Hyacinth busied herself gathering aloe vera for sunburn and the women’s teas she made at home; she finished by collecting sea grapes, her favorite things on the beach. Nothing gave Hyacinth more pleasure than rolling the sea grapes’ seeds in her mouth so she could taste the sea and salt and fruit flesh all at once. She had her fill of them while the kids played in the radius of sand and water she’d circumscribed.
Looking at Phaedra and Chris, at first glance some people might have said they were both boys, Chris in his navy trunks and Phaedra in a pair of shorts and a sports bra and tank top Dionne had handed down to her. Phaedra felt a bit self-conscious at first, watching the other girls in their frothy-colored bathing suits with frills and ruffles. But it wasn’t long before Chris won back her attention with a challenge to see who could find the most sand dollars. That day, the sea was choppy, the waves bashing the shoreline like an angry god. The children swam just to the edge of where the lifeguards and their parents said they could go. White sea foam sprayed high above their heads, wetting and cooling them down. Phaedra was reminded of watching her father in the bathroom mirror in the morning, the dollop of cream that he put on her nose that she didn’t wash off until he was finished shaving.
It was easy to think about Avril in Barbados, but Phaedra had a hard time placing her father there. Errol never talked about Barbados much, always saying that you had to leave old-time things behind to get ahead, as if the key to surviving leaving home was to pretend it never existed. Phaedra wondered if Errol felt the same way about the life he’d left behind with Avril and Dionne and herself. Did he think of them, talk about them, or did they live in the shadows of his heart, along with his memories of home?
A few minutes before yet another round of eating was set to begin, when Phaedra’s and Chris’s pockets sagged with sand dollars and seashells, they emerged from the water and plopped on the sand in front of Hyacinth.
“Where’s your sister, P.?” Hyacinth asked.
“I don’t know,” Phaedra said, and shrugged.
“I don’t know, who?” Hyacinth said.
“I don’t know, Granny. I think she went off with Saranne.”
At the sound of that girl’s name, Hyacinth sprang into action. Hyacinth knew that Saranne had been sent to Barbados from Trinidad for the summer by her mother, who hoped that a dose of time at home might cool the fire beneath her clothes. Rumor had it that Saranne was pregnant when she came to Barbados, that she had stayed at a private clinic on the west coast to take care of it. Hyacinth didn’t know whether to believe the story about Saranne’s pregnancy, having never seen the girl for herself until she showed up one day at her house walking arm in arm with Dionne. As soon as she saw Saranne, Hyacinth noticed the way she walked, her chest and bottom thrust in opposite directions, an invitation to boys and trouble. Hyacinth didn’t like the way that Saranne was always brushing her bangs out of her eyes, either, because although she could see the heat bumps that the hair was hiding, she didn’t trust anyone who couldn’t hold her gaze. Having raised Avril, Hyacinth knew what she was looking at when she saw Saranne and she didn’t like it at all.
With all that in mind, Hyacinth walked across the sand to the cove where Saranne and Dionne stood up to their thighs in the calm, clear water so that the parts of their bodies that would most interest the boys were on display. A couple dips in the cold water mad
e their nipples poke through their flimsy bikinis, and Hyacinth was horrified that neither girl had enough shame to cover herself.
Phaedra and Chris walked behind her, taking small, fast steps for every one of Hyacinth’s determined strides. Hyacinth stopped behind the boulders and looked up at the boys sitting on top of them.
“Tell your sister to find herself here now,” Hyacinth commanded.
“Yes, please,” Phaedra said. She and Chris scrambled up the rocks. In less than a minute they were back.
“Dionne said she can’t come right now. She said she’ll see us after the picnic,” Phaedra said.
“I’m sorry?” Hyacinth said, not believing her ears.
“She said—”
“You stay here,” Hyacinth commanded. She hauled herself up to the table of slick, gray boulders. She had started bellowing Dionne’s name when she lost her footing and fell down into the shallow water, a few feet below where the boys sat, looking on.
The boy whose hands were resting on Dionne’s exposed shoulders laughed. And Dionne—who wanted nothing more than to be wanted by him, who had just finished asking whether the phone number he’d given her was really the number to his very own apartment—laughed too.
“Oh, so you think it’s funny. You’re going to see what’s funny when I fix your business,” Hyacinth said.
“You might want to fix yours first,” Dionne said and laughed again, pointing to where the white fabric of Hyacinth’s skirt pressed against the front of her big white panties. The gaggle cackled with her.
Hyacinth walked through the water like she was on land. She slapped Dionne in her mouth, and the laughs that were once with Dionne turned direction against her.
Dionne looked at her grandmother once she’d composed herself. A cold glare emptied out of the girl she had been when she arrived. “I don’t have to be here, you know,” she said.
“Oh, you don’t?”
“No, I don’t. My mother is in New York, and I could go home anytime. Besides, I have other places on the island I could go to.”
“Oh, is so grown you be? Well, when you find your mother, tell her hello for me. In the meantime, if you know what’s good for you, you will find some clothes to put on and come.” Hyacinth shook with anger, not fear; the water rippled as she moved through it.
Saranne stood smirking where she’d watched the whole scene unfold.
“I ain’t finish with you yet. You stay there, keeping company like that and watch what going to happen to you. Dionne, I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that you lay down with dogs—”
“You get up with fleas,” Dionne said.
“Well, all right then, you can say it but it don’t seem like you know it. I’m not telling you again to come.”
Dionne motioned to one of the boys to throw down the bag where she’d stuffed her clothes. She didn’t turn back to say good-bye to Saranne or the boys, just walked out of the water in her grandmother’s wake, wishing the sea would swallow her whole.
PHAEDRA’S BODY PULLED at the light, testing the softer side of midnight. Hyacinth usually slipped out of bed in the middle of the night, careful to fit her rustle inside Phaedra’s dreams. This time, she troubled the quiet with the whoosh of her matchbook and then the sound of her oil lamp lighting. The flames’ shadows danced across the plywood walls and bounced off the zinc roof before coming down again. Phaedra stirred and looked through the sleep shrouding her eyes to see her grandmother standing at the foot of the bed, fully dressed in the indigo blue she wore to births, her kit slung over one shoulder.
“Well, you say you want to learn how baby born.”
“Huh?” Phaedra asked, wiping the cold from her eyes’ corners. She coughed on the thick smoke of the mosquito coil that was burning at the foot of their bed.
“Phaedra Ann, you have exactly five minutes to put on your clothes and come. You think Ms. Husbands’s baby going to wait on you to wipe the yampie out you eye?”
“Ms. Husbands?”
“Your friend Donna, her mother.”
“Oh.” Phaedra did not initially take the bulge beneath Donna’s mother’s clothes for a baby. When she asked her grandmother how she knew she was pregnant, she said that even with a fat woman, you could always tell by her ankles and sometimes by a darkening at her neck whether she was in the family way.
“Time waits for no one,” Hyacinth said, turning toward the door. “If you learn anything, you must learn that babies come exactly when they’re ready, not a minute later and not a minute before. There’s no such thing as rushing them out. Or pushing them back in once they come.”
“Back in?” Phaedra asked. She was still sleepy but curiosity got her out of her nightie and into her street clothes, which were folded neatly on a chair between the bed and the window. Even Phaedra, who was a lover of sleep, knew that this was something worth waking for.
The hush of the night enveloped them. With her grandmother by her side, Phaedra felt safe, sure that she knew where she was going, and that no harm would come to them when they were together. They walked for fifteen minutes before they came to a fork in the road and followed it to the right. Up ahead, three houses in, a light was on in the front room. On the gallery, a man sat smoking, the glowing ember of his cigarette the brightest thing in the darkness.
“I thought you would never reach. I called Ms. Zelma’s phone looking for you hours ago,” he said, his voice a grumble laced with relief.
“Everything in its own time. Find yourself somewhere to catch for the night and come back in the morning.”
In the dark, Phaedra couldn’t see the man’s face, but the voice’s commanding cadence put her in mind of someone she knew. She started to ask if the man smoking on the veranda was Father Loving, but thought better of it. Phaedra had learned that asking too many questions made grown-ups remember her age. As she was mulling over the identity of the man on the gallery, a groan unlike any Phaedra had heard before came from inside the house. Hyacinth took the three front steps gingerly, her walking stick stretched in front of her to ward off any sleeping dogs.
When they reached the scratchy welcome mat, Hyacinth said confidently, “Inside.”
Donna came to the door and turned on the porch light. She looked three shades paler than usual, her t-shirt stained with rum raisin ice cream, her hair uncombed. She who was usually so full of chatter opened the door silently and led them to the front room, where her mother was beached on a mattress on the floor. Phaedra was distracted momentarily from the hulking mass at the center of the room by the photographs that lined the walls, old-time pictures of black people, some posed in a photo studio, some with horses and donkeys, some in front of the church, all variations on Donna and her mother. Phaedra compared these images to the ones that lined the walls of her grandmother’s house, all graduation photos from kindergarten onward for Avril, Dionne, and Phaedra, a kind of shrine to their education, because Hyacinth said that even though she didn’t reach high school, every one of her girls would go to college.
“Get your nose out of your behind, child. Go boil some water and bring me clean towels,” Hyacinth said.
Phaedra did as she was told, backing out of the room with Donna in tow.
“There’s water on the stove,” Donna said.
“Did you boil it already?” Phaedra asked.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Mummy said it wasn’t time,” Donna said.
“Wasn’t time for what?”
“Time for the baby to come.”
“Why are you whispering?”
“It’s just this week I find out.”
“This week? You mean to tell me your mother was pregnant for nine months and you just now realize it?” Phaedra reveled in assuming the position of expert.
“How would I know?”
Phaedra stopped at what she thought was a
fair question. She used a long match to light the pilot like she’d seen her grandmother do, and set the water to boil. Donna crumpled into herself, leaning into the relief of someone more capable taking over, feeling the demand for her false competence subside. Phaedra moved past the kitchen and found the linen cabinet exactly where she expected it, just above her head on the right-hand side of the hallway outside the bathroom.
“Phaedra,” Hyacinth called with urgency from the front room.
The Star Side of Bird Hill Page 7
