‘Suppose you could get more?’
‘Like two Dora backpacks?’
Uncle laughed again. ‘I will tell you what my father told me. Imagine your grandparents and their grandparents before them who got freedom but had nothing to show for it except memories, and some of them unhappy. And he tell me to think of what I’d give them to make their lives and their children’s lives better.’
‘Tell me what you got, Uncle!’ I was becoming impatient.
‘I coming to that, girl. I ask for land, and a big piece at that. I will never forget the look on the owner’s, Ms Rhys’s, face. It was disease multiplied, like she was dying and wanted to take me with her. But my father told me his forefathers had laboured on the Rhys plantation. The story goes that my great-grandmother receive a lot of money from the owner after he died, but they used the law to take most of it away from her.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘You got it or not?’
‘Ms Rhys grit she teeth and ask how much I wanted. I look she in the eyes and tell she I wanted twenty acres to start a business. The land where I grow the ginger lilies is that land.’
‘Wow, Uncle!’ I was impressed. ‘I will ask for land, too, then, so Mummy and Daddy can build a bigger house and Daddy can plant more thyme and Chinese cabbage.’
‘You can, though there ain’t as much as before.’
‘What happened to Ms Rhys?’
‘She was an old woman, and she passed on eventually. She still had she house, but her children move. Quite a lot of the white people send their children ’way, with lots of money, too. But those who couldn’t get their properties sell stay. Others never come back.’
Neither would I, I thought, if someone wanted to take my things away from me. I left Uncle’s house with a bellyful of fish cutters, a plateful for Mummy and Daddy and more questions than answers.
I went to church every Sunday with Uncle. The Rose of Sharon Tabernacle sat tall on a concrete base, its wooden bell tower pushing into the sky. The words 1799. Built by Slaves were carved in limestone above the back door and coated with mildew. I imagined for the first time men, as dark as a moonless night, joined by chains and chants, carrying boulders to be shaped and evened out. In between chants, they were singing, not fancy like our choir, but like how Uncle had sung at Auntie’s funeral, happy and sad mixed up together.
Pastor Waterford called the people who were going on the Plundering up to the altar. I waited for Uncle’s hand and we walked slowly to join the others. Pastor Waterford was small with a big voice. He read Deuteronomy 15, 12–14:
And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him.
His voice trembled when he said: ‘We’ve been robbed, forced to work, paid nothing for our labour, beaten and killed. GOD says this should not be so, and right-minded people agree.’ A flurry of ‘Amens’ sounded in response.
‘Don’t go cap in hand, like you begging. And don’t get caught up in the word “plunder” either. What you do today may never right the wrongs of the past but make the best of it, for yourselves and those who’ll come after,’ he ended.
Pastor Waterford pressed his palm against our foreheads and prayed. When he laid his hand on me he said quietly: ‘As young as she is, LORD, grant her wisdom and your protection.’ What he said next was no prayer. ‘This isn’t no excursion. Mind yourself and do what your uncle says.’
‘Yes, Pastor,’ I replied.
When I got back home, I was too nervous to finish my rice and peas and flying fish, but I still relished two red velvet cupcakes with frosting.
‘Look, don’t be vomiting all over the place when you go knocking on people’s doors,’ Mummy said as I was contemplating another cupcake. She dressed me in my blue and white checkered dress. The one I wore to do recitations at church harvests, when people would clap and laugh when I’d finished. She even smudged shiny fuchsia gloss on my lips. It tasted of bubblegum and I licked it off my wobbly tooth.
Mummy and I held hands as we walked over to Uncle’s house. When we got there, she hugged me, her mouth buried in my braids. ‘Be careful,’ she whispered. Her embrace was so long and tight that I thought I’d left an imprint of my body on hers. Eventually she let me go and my hand, still warm, fell into Uncle’s. We walked away, back down the grassy driveway. I didn’t look back at Mummy. I knew I wouldn’t go if I did.
Uncle said it would be foolish to go back to the Rhys’s property, so we walked towards Harrison’s Cave past rows of tall fruit trees and flowered bushes kept safe by wire fencing and panting fluffy brown dogs whose barks crackled through the afternoon air. We could only visit places in the parish we lived in.
‘Uncle, I could ask for one of those dogs?’
‘You could, but not at this house. It’s not owned by a white person.’
‘It’s enormous!’
‘And it has a pool, too!’
‘You think whoever owns it got chosen?’
‘I hear not.’
‘So how their house is so big, Uncle?’
‘Not every white person live in big house and not every black person live in small house. If you work hard, have sense and say yes more than you say no, you could get far. The Plundering ain’t the be and end all. I know whole families that went Plundering and poorer now. See today as a start, that’s all.’
We walked uphill, past breadfruit trees that had spattered their fruit on the ground. ‘Don’t be stingy in what you ask for,’ Uncle said.
We came to a footpath that was overgrown with bush. It spanned the edge of Welchman Hall Gully. Leaves and branches from the tops of the tallest trees stretched onto the walkway. I stepped as close to the fire-truck red handrails as I dared before Uncle tugged my arm. The gully was so deep and thick, parts of it looked shadowed, even in the hot sunlight. For a moment, I felt sad. Mummy’s love for Daddy was like bush, overgrown and wild. When they fought their nostrils would flare and Mummy’s curly weave would tremble. Daddy would say things then, not about Mummy, but about another woman whose name I didn’t know. And Mummy would throw things at Daddy. Not plates or knives but food. Thick heavy slabs of macaroni pie. The broken cheesy noodles stuck to the wall like maggots pushing out of it long after Daddy had left the house to cool out on the block. If money could buy happiness, I would ask for some, for Mummy and Daddy.
The further we walked from the St Joseph side of St Thomas, the thinner and shorter the trees became and the greater the number of rum-shops and mini-marts. A man in a shop hailed Uncle and asked him to bring back something for him. ‘I hear you.’ Uncle laughed as we continued on our journey.
By the time we passed Holy Innocents Church, my dress was stuck firmly against my back. I wiped the sweat on my forehead. ‘Are we nearly there, Uncle?’ Not that I knew where ‘there’ was. He nodded and started to hum a tune, one I’d never heard. It sounded like something you’d hear in church, not to the bellowing strains of an organ but a tambourine. I started to clap my hands as we rounded the corner of the long road by Ayshford Hill. The village boys and men liked this road because they could race their cars, bicycles, minibuses and ZR vans along its straight and smooth surface. I liked it because I could see all the way to Bridgetown, over flattened hills and squat buildings, to the cruise ships docked in the harbour that from a distance were as small as toys. My hands started to ache from the clapping, but I didn’t stop, I wanted to quiet the thoughts swimming in my mind, about whether the Plundering would help white people to look Uncle in the eye and smile and not talk loudly over his voice.
As I was about to ask Uncle for water, we turned into a large yard sprinkled with tiny stones that crunched like Eclipse biscuits. I began to grind my feet slowly into the
gravel but stopped when Uncle shook his head. In front of us was a wooden door painted in a slick and bright blue. Metal hinges that were darker than molasses spanned half its width. The house was big, with windows in the roof shaped like arrowheads. And what Uncle called outbuildings were around the yard. A wooden patio wrapped itself around the front and side of the house, which was bigger than where I lived. I thought about all the cartwheels I could turn on it and wondered what it would be like to live here.
Uncle knocked softly on the blue door, like he had been here before. He knocked again. ‘No one’s home, Uncle?’ I asked, annoyed that my white checkered dress had gone to waste.
‘Wait a minute. They’re probably watching us,’ he said, stepping back onto the gravel and looking to the windows upstairs. He came back and knocked again, harder and with the palm of his hand. ‘I know you’re there. Open the door, please. It’s Cadogan and a little girl, my niece.’
A woman with red-brown hair pulled into a ponytail opened the door slowly. She wore glasses that made her green eyes seem bigger. Her hands and arms were zigzagged with wrinkles and brown stains. I looked at Uncle’s arms. His skin was smooth.
‘I could get a glass of water, please, ma’am?’ I asked.
The woman looked down at me and smiled, her lips the colour of sorrel and her teeth twisted together as if thrown into her mouth.
‘Of course, young lady. What about you, Cadogan?’
‘No, I’m fine, thanks, Rebecca. I hear your mother not doing so well. Please give her my regards.’
‘I will.’
We moved out of the afternoon heat, onto the patio. I held the heavy glass in both hands so it wouldn’t drop. When it was empty and I’d handed it back to her, the woman smiled, though I couldn’t see as many teeth as before. ‘How can I help you?’
‘I suppose you know why we’ve come, and this is awkward, I know. The little girl wants to ask you for something.’
‘And what about you? Don’t you want something, too?’ She looked at Uncle for a while and he held her gaze.
He pulled an envelope with gold raised lettering out of his back pocket. ‘I would like the contract to supply your guest houses for the next fifty years at the prices I’ve put in here.’ Uncle handed the envelope to her. She was very still then took it from him.
‘And you, what would you like?’ she said to me.
In my mind, I thought: For Mummy and Daddy to hug each other and smile. But then asked for the next best thing. ‘Ma’am, I would like a wall house with double beds and a big garden with a swing and trees for shade. I would like a big kitchen, and it must have an island so Mummy has enough space to make pizza. I would like my own room and a pink bathroom just for me. Mummy and Daddy can have their own, too. Not in pink, though. And I want peace in the world!’ I smiled and said, ‘Thank you. The end.’
‘You’ll have to give me some time to pull this all together –’
‘Yes, I know, but you could sign this in the meantime. Just so we all on the same page?’ Uncle said, stretching another envelope towards her.
The woman straightened a little. ‘All this is necessary? After all –’
‘It’s just a formality, Rebecca.’
‘I’ve never known you to be so formal. That’s what makes you so good to work with,’ she said.
‘Today, just for today, it’s different. Please, just sign here,’ he said, extending the pen to her, ‘then we’ll be on our way.’
‘You know this isn’t fair, and it certainly isn’t right.’
‘Where else I supposed to go?’
‘I don’t know. We went to school together, Cadogan. We’re friends.’
‘I know. But white people don’t treat me bad outright. They smarter than that. They just look down on you and block your path without you knowing it.’
‘We all live together on this island, and work together!’
‘But we ain’t together where it matters most. In homes, churches, in hearts. We separate into our little groups but we ain’t even equal. Yes, this plundering ain’t fair. So you got a better idea? And don’t tell me to work harder. I been working hard all my life.’
‘You’ve done well. Others too.’
‘We’re the exception, not the rule. Just like when Obama was president. Things didn’t get much better for the average black person in America and it wasn’t for lack of trying. Look, I understand what you saying. But my words like they passing your ears.’
Rebecca went quiet until she’d finished reading the paper Uncle had given her. Finally, she took the pen and signed. ‘I’d invite you both in, but I’m not sure what else you’d ask for,’ she said with a half-smile that managed to travel to her eyes. ‘It’ll soon be dark, and you should be going. Besides, the police patrol left a while ago. Shall I drop you home?’
‘Thanks, we’ll be good,’ Uncle said.
The whistling frogs and crickets had begun a steady chorus when we left. After we’d rounded a few corners, a group of men were leaning sluggishly against colourful pickup trucks as if they’d finished a day of working in the sun. Some of them had sticks stained a dark colour. ‘Good evening,’ Uncle said as we eased past them.
‘You think you would get away so?’ a voice called behind us. ‘That you just waltz up to our homes and ask for what you want? You have your line mark off. From before you’re born. You know where you start and where you ending. But you all keep trying to get off the line. Doesn’t it tire you out?’ He spoke slowly as if what he said he’d been planning for a long time.
We began to move fast, but when I looked back one of the men was walking towards us. ‘Leave them. We did what we came to do already,’ another man said. The others laughed hard.
But we still heard steps behind us. Uncle stopped and bent down to me, his fingers digging into my shoulder. He told me to run to the nearest village, taking the shortcut, and to call Daddy and the police and tell them to come. I only moved when he shouted, ‘Run, Fina!’ and pushed me away.
My heart pounding, I jumped into the prickly field spread out like a corn-coloured tablecloth and started running uphill to get help for Uncle. I had eased into a rhythm when my foot caught onto something and I flew into the grass, my arms outstretched as if diving into the sea. I got up quickly, and tried to brush mud and stalks off my dress (Mummy would be vex), before realising I was missing a shoe. I saw the body when I retraced my steps.
It was a young, slender man. He was naked. At first, I thought he was sleeping or that he couldn’t hold his liquor and had collapsed into the field after his friends had stripped him. But then I saw the blood and lots of it. In the fading light, it shone like oil and oozed from his nose and ears, even his eyes, which were wide open and rooted on a spot behind and above me. His hands lay neatly on top of each other, kept in place by thick rope. The rest of him, his legs, his feet, were twisted in positions I’d only seen cartoon characters achieve. His doggie was flopped to one side. My shoe, its remaining sequins twinkling, rested between his thighs. I bent over and vomited. I started crying after when I realised my tooth had dropped out, but with no time to look for it, I stumbled through the rest of the grass to the village.
Daddy told me they found Uncle later that evening, bloodied and confused, on the fringes of Welchman Hall Gully. I saw him the day after he came out of the hospital. He almost looked the same. When I grabbed onto him, his embrace was loose and slid off, and his eyes didn’t quite meet mine. I was scared to ask what had happened after he told me to run. Instead, I helped to fry some flying fish, almost burning them, and made cutters stuffed with lettuce, tomato and pepper sauce. We were eating in a hungry silence when Uncle said quietly: ‘You too young to be this afraid. It’s OK for an old man like me, but not for you.’
‘I wish we hadn’t gone,’ I blurted out. ‘Everything seems different.’
‘Because it is. But different doesn’t have to mean worse, not forever.’
We settled into an unsteady contentment after that. But st
ories of the Plundering spread through the village for weeks. Mummy said that the boy I’d tripped over had gone and asked a white man if he could marry his daughter. Understanding what had happened was like the thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle I got for my eighth birthday, exciting at first, before the novelty wore off while the challenge didn’t. I’d left it half finished.
Mummy explained that Shamario (Mario to friends and family) had wanted to marry the McConnies’ daughter. They had both studied fine arts at Barbados Community College and first met there. ‘Even though they coulda walk to each other’s house,’ Mummy said, shaking her head. The girl lived in an old cottage in a large plantation yard in Hopewell, and Mario in a cluster of chattel houses on land where sugar cane once flourished.
Mario would carry the girl’s black leather portfolio bulging with charcoal drawings and pose as a model for her life drawing classes. And they would eat lunch on the wooden artists’ bench outside the cafeteria, even though it was the one where the white students always sat. He wanted to design houses and she wanted to be a full-time artist.
He saw his selection in the Plundering as a sign from God, to ask what he’d been afraid to ask on every other day. Mummy had heard that Mario dressed as if going to church – in polished black leather shoes with laces, pants with seams ironed in, a bright blue cotton shirt from Manshop and his father’s favorite aftershave.
‘Anyway I hear that his mother had told him that he was walking into a settled death. And you know what that boy did, he laughed and tickled her under she chin, promising to return,’ Mummy said, her voice trailing. The police said he’d been beaten badly, others that his doggie had been sliced off. I’d overheard this part of the story later, not from Mummy, but was afraid to say it wasn’t true. No one was ever charged, though the police arrested some men.
I moved into the new house with my pink bathroom with Mummy and Daddy. Mummy went to the same college that Mario had gone to and did international cookery. She and Daddy quarreled, but not as much as before and sometimes I saw them holding hands. Daddy dug holes and planted beds of thyme, cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes and green peppers that ran for acres, and sold produce to supermarkets.
So Many Islands Page 3
