The canopy is white. Thick, white satin. Like the curtain that falls on a scene of fierce Western violence, in cowboy and Indians movies at the Olympic Theatre. Moons and stars and pieces of yellow, gold-like slashes, representing flashes of lightning, are painted onto the canopy, as she lies on her back, and is able to see the heavens, the stars and the moons.
“Here we are,” she says.
He cannot concentrate on her words: his mind is watching the hollering, cheering long-haired Indians facing hordes of U.S. Cavalrymen at Little Big Horn; going over and over again, the spectacle of blood and screams, and the craziness of arrows thick as crows in a summer sky, when George Armstrong Custer letting-loose “the full force and pow’r of the Amurcan Arm-Forces” fell, and lay hidden, cowering from the black clouds of arrows coming after him, and hightailed it through the beautiful green fields of Little Big Horn, running from Sioux and Cheyenne warriors with Crazy Horse in front, leading them on a horse that had no saddle and no “sterps!”; and this made him sit and watch the movie three times, and marvel at the galloping film as the reinless horses roared and thundered round and round, men shouting at the top of their voices “like Indians,” like a merry-go-round . . .
“But did you hear the way that boy addressed his father?” she says. “‘Mr. Bellfeels!’ He couldn’t even call him Pop? Or Father? Or even Old Man? But ‘Mr. Bellfeels!’ The thrildren of the rich! It must be something about being white. But I will tell you, Percy, if Wilberforce ever come with that slackness to me! Waps! One box to his damn head . . . turn his blasted head behind his back! The rudeness! ‘Mr. Bellfeels,’ when ‘Daddy’ sound so much more nicer.”
She seems relieved to get this off her chest. Sargeant is not paying attention.
“Did I fall-off so long layingdown on this bed?” she says. “What were you doing, while I was dozing? Just sitting down there?”
“Travelling,” he says. “Travelling over life, and over land. A lotta things went through my mind whilst you were laying-down, first on your back, then on your stomach.”
“And you didn’t take advantage of it?”
And she laughs. But he does not.
“I didn’t take advantage of you.”
“Good.”
“But I wanted to,” he says. “Not the way it sound, not like take advantage of you, meaning carnal knowledge, or nothing so. But . . .”
“I am not a child.”
He gets up from the foot of the bed, and goes up to her, as she leans against the headboard; and she places her body against his, and draws him close to her; a little rough, through clumsiness; and her body touches the coarse black serge of his tunic and trousers, and she flinches a little from the bristles, and sneezes; then she flinches again, this time with more agitation as he puts his arms round her body. It is not an embrace. As he puts his arms to draw her within the strong, swallowing circle of what he wanted to be an embrace, she draws her white handkerchief from the sleeve of her dress, and sneezes into it, and passes it lightly, in two dabs, under her nostrils as he is circling her body with his strong arms clothed in the black serge; and for the moment his embrace is complete —it lasts for three seconds only—the fear returns to him and he removes his arms from her body, still fully dressed in the long flowing poplin, with her white stockings visible, and the brown-laced leather boots dangling over the side of the bed; contrition overtakes his body, and makes his lust fall, limber. Her feet do not reach the floor . . .
“What are we doing in my bedroom?” she says.
Shame covers his face; and he does not answer. He knows what is in his mind; and he knows why he is in her bedroom . . . he thinks of Gertrude, lying on her back, in the vast cane-brake, on the talkative bed of cane trash; her eyes closed; her arms held out from her body, as if she is on a cross marked into the thick, tickling blades of dried sugar-cane leaves, on a makeshift bed of trash that whispers with each move and thrust he makes into her sweet pum-pum. Gertrude moves away from his coarse, tickling black serge; and she holds out her right hand, and takes him down to her, down to her level, down to the trash; and slowly she unsnaps the shining silver buckle, with the Imperial Crown on it, and releases the thick, brown, highly polished and ugly leather belt, pulling it through the tabs slowly, insinuatingly slow; all the time his pulse is quickening, and his penis is stiffening, and the spasms of anticipation beating almost as fast as his chest; and then she uses both hands, three of four fingers on each hand, to move over the buttons of his fly; over all five black metal buttons . . . And he thinks of his mother as she did this to him, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, “fixing” him to face the world, to face his school; and to face Sundays, in his better go-to-meeting clothes, to “march yourself to Church!”, to sing in his little angelic soprano voice, in the Choir; conducting this training even earlier in his life, as she taught him how to use the toilet; doing this to him, week after week, into months, until he was thirteen years old, “and old-enough” to have learned all she had taught him about “fixing” himself proper . . . his fly is open; and her hand moves into his sliders, made from the coarse white cloth of a flour bag in which flour comes from Canada, made by the Village needleworker, and before that by his own mother—her hands in his sliders which do not have buttons; do not have a zipper; they do not have elastic in the waist; so, she puts her right hand into the vent, and holds his penis, which is no longer stiff, and is wet and sticky at the head.
And she squeezes it.
“Ohhh, Jesus-Jesus . . . Jesus!”
And into her hands splurts the thick liquid white substance of his come, reminding her of Quaker Oats Cream of Wheat.
“Come,” she says.
It is Mary-Mathilda talking to him: and not Gertrude.
“Come,” she says.
Down the back stairs, down the thirteen steps from her bedroom, pausing to take a white shawl from a poster at the foot of the bed, she walks with it trailing, like a bridal train; and the perfume from her fragrant and scented bedroom rises in his nostrils. This sensation has a great pull and influence upon his body and his mind. From here, from this sanctuary, and this prison, she leads him into the cellar. He is dressed in full uniform, except for his peaked cap.
She is once more lovely, majestic, in her long white dress; and dignified. He sees her in her true age.
He is safer here, outside her bedroom. Inside the house, with its splendour, he was collared and encircled, as he had been on the schooner going to Trinidad surrounded by sea and sharks. Walking like a blind man now, led by a woman, in this underground tunnel, he feels braver. Manny, who was working illegally in Amurca, until the Immigration people found him, and locked him up for two months, and then deported him back to Bimshire, had told Sargeant about underground passages and tunnels, sewers that contained water that came at you with the force and speed of a bullet. Some of this water in the underground channels was plain, simple water. Water you could drink, if you were that thirsty. The other kind was water you could not stomach, could not bare to smell, water that was thick and slimy, and more like a soup with dumplings and pieces of limbs and rotten vegetables, and pieces of meat in it; ordinary decayed meat. “Was a kiss-me-arse saniterry sewer, man!” Manny had said. Sargeant put his hand to his nostrils and stifled the imagined dirty, stinking smell of the underground tunnel. Manny rested his shot glass of rum on the counter, and blew his nose loud, in two short explosions. Just like the force of the water in the sanitary sewer had thundered through the pipes, he blew his nose into a white handkerchief, balled it up and pushed it into his back pocket. Manny had tried to hide in the sewer, and the roaring dirty water scared him, and he crawled out, and the Immigration people grabbed him; wet, shivering, smelly and smiling . . . “That was one city I was glad as shite to be deported out of! Philly. Or Philadelphia.”
Sargeant feels he is walking in this kind of underground tunnel that Manny had told him about, but without the water. Without the smell of offal. This passage has only the smell of damp coral st
one and cement, and the sourness of wet dirt. He feels safe here, although he does not know where he is, or where exactly she is leading him. But he is safer here, outside the encircling house, which has inhibited him from writing down her evidence. The world of the Great House has squeezed the writing down of her Statement out of his mind.
Now he thinks she is leading him to the scene; to the evidence; to reveal to him the motive. He has seen many such scenes, dipped in blood; scenes that are sometimes splattered with pieces of bloodied flesh and bone from the force of the blow or the knife; sometimes just scenes soaked in blood. But always, with these scenes, comes the natural and immediate desire to pewk, as if it is a kind of seasickness developed on land; to bring up whatever is in his bowels, to vomit, recoil from these graphic, dramatic, still-life duplications of emotion, of passion, and of hatred. Reproductions of life.
He walks behind her, in silence.
He wishes that Gertrude had taken him into her arms, that he had got to know her better, and more intimately. After taking her to the fields for the past five months, he still does not know her; foreplay does not alleviate nor soften the brutal fierceness of their screwing and fooping. Gertrude would not know, would not have known the word foreplay. She was always, like him, in too much of a hurry; too hot; “I wet-wet, man!”; couldn’t wait to get him inside her; too frequently in a hurry against the chance that a man might wander into the canes to fire a pee, and detect them sprawled out, half-naked, her maid’s uniform pulled up above her knees, and his policeman’s trousers still on his legs, not even pulled down to his knees; two buttons on his fly open; tunic, boots and cap still on. Gertrude was always concerned, when they fooped in the humid afternoon, about being late to prepare dinner for Miss Mary-Mathilda and Mr. Wilberforce. Miss Mary-Mathilda and Mr.Wilberforce both liked to eat at seven-thirty; except on Saturdays when they ate at four; and at two on Sundays.
Cobwebs lick his face, like sprays of rainwater sprinkling him.
The walls of this tunnel are sweating and crumbling; and dust drifts down like flour through a sieve when he touches the wall. She has taken a lantern from a nail on the disintegrating wall, lights it, and he sees that the tunnel is the width of his arms outstretched; and he fumbles in a long pocket at the left side of his trousers for his searchlight; and switches it on; and she rests her left hand on his arm.
“Turn off your searchlight,” she tells him. “I have the light.”
The tunnel is damp and has loose gravel on its floor. The lantern shows him spiders and webs with spiders in them and cockroaches, brown and long as a thumb, and fat.
He steps on one, and its body cries out in a soft, slightly muffled crunch.
She holds his hand.
“I will show you something,” she says.
He had never found this kind of solace in Gertrude: not when he took her bubbies into his mouth, as Manny had coached him to do; but at that first application of the lesson, he bit on them, a little too hard, by mistake; and Gertrude screamed, and said, “Christ, you giving me cancer, with your teeth?” And then she was sorry. “Suppose somebody hear?” And then, she started to cry.
Not when he dug into her, in his strong impatience. Not when she cooked steamed flying fish and cou-cou, for him, one Friday night. Not when they walked the two miles to the Factory, on Wednesday nights in Crop-Season, on moonlight nights, late; like lovers, and not one word passed between them, did he find the peace in their relationship.
Mary-Mathilda, on the other hand, feels as close as an affection that is years old.
She releases his hand. And walks ahead. One step ahead. He feels he is alone in the tunnel; cut off from the world, not the world of the Great House, or that of the tumbling schooner cutting through the waves in the Gulf of Paria, but a world of loneliness and very high-strung resentment. He feels the full meaning of her released hand. And it gets the better of his emotions, and changes the feeling of isolation into a feeling of raw, strong violence.
It is large and dangerous, because in this tunnel, he is also inside the belly of the land, under the North Field, in which he has lain on his back so many times, especially at night when the skies are dark, dark, blue, and the stars come out with a clearer melody as if they were singing to him and to Gertrude; when he would point at the only three stars he could name for her: the Big Dipper, Orion, and the North Star, each time he fooped her in the North Field, and she had said, each time, “Yes, yes. You’s a bright man, Sarge. Yes.”
“I learn all these things from books written by Amurcans. Astronomers and other men of sciences, send-down for me by Ruby, my daughter up in Brooklyn; and from Mr. Edwards, my teacher at Sin-Davids.”
And once, as he lay looking into the black sky at the Big Dipper and at Orion, he emptied his heart to her; and told her his deep secret. He had pulled a piece of sugar-cane trash from the ground, and he tore the dried, brown, tasteless leaf, thick as a toothpick, with his teeth and said, “After me and you done, I like to lay-down ’side o’ you here, in this damn cane field, and look up in the skies. And you know what I does-be-seeing?”
“Orion, and the Big Dipper,” she says.
“Amurca! I does-be-seeing that big powerful land, that land with all that wealth and riches and jobs for people like me, and people like you, Gertrude. Coloured people. Amurca is a country for people like you and me. Black people, or coloured people. A fellar born in Jamaica, by the name of Marcus Moses Messiah Garvey, say so. We should escape to Amurca. And then, Africa. This place Bimshire, where we born-and-raised, as comfortable as it is, is not meant as a habitation for people of our kind. This place, a colony of Englund, is made specially for Plantation-people, and to ’commodate Bellfeels. And your mistress, Miss Mary-Mathilda. Not for real black people, even though Mary-Mathilda isn’t a white woman. Whenever people who was slaves are brought to a place like this, rule’ by the English, a colony, and then are let-go and freed; after they are freed, you know what they do?”
“I won’t know these things, Sarge!”
“They choose to remain right there in the slave colony! Those slaves. Those people, now the ex-slaves, could never find peace. It is as if their spirits and their ghosts was telling them that for them to get peace, and real freedom, they have to trace-back their steps, even to re-embarking on ships like the HMS Bounty, and journey-back to places like Mali and Elmira Castle that Manny tell me about, where they were first brought from, in chains, in the first place. You understand what I am trying to tell you, don’t you, Gertrude?”
“Your words over my head, Sarge.”
“I trying to put this simple. I don’t believe in this slavery business that everybody say was happening ’bout-here. I don’t think it ever exist, in-true. Not on the scale of Jamaica. A couple o’ black fellars get their arse lick-in, a couple o’ times, yes. But whole-scale slavery like what they have in Amurca, no! Not in a English colony, Jesus Christ. I know the English. The English won’t do a thing like that. You know what I mean?”
“You using words that you hear from Manny, words ’bout Mali and the Castle. But I don’t know, Sarge, I don’t know.”
“Words have to suit thoughts, Gertrude.”
“I don’t know, Sarge.”
“Words have to suit deeds, Gertrude.”
“I never hear you talk this-way before,” she said. “And your words frightening me. But I still like to hear them, though. They make me feel . . ...Well, they make me feel . . . feel like somebody.”
“Some people living-’bout-here make the mistake of calling Bimshire a black country.”
“I think you should draw the line, there, Sarge. These ideas is Manny ideas,” Gertrude said. “These is dangerous ideas. You had-better be careful, ’cause if the Plantation hear you walking this- way, and even you being a police yourself, you don’t know what they would do . . . like in the Riots, when they shoot people . . .”
“What you frighten for, Gertrude?”
“I thought you was starting to tell me about the stars
. Orion and the Big Dipper. You have to watch your career, ’cause they thinking of putting Crown-Sargeant rank at your disposal. A couple Friday nights ago, while serving dinner . . . I would hate to know that you throw-that-’way . . .”
“But Amurca, Gertrude! Amurca. Notwithstanding with all its colour prejudice and serrigation, with all its black fountains for Negroes and white fountains for whites, nevertheless. Water is water. Jesus Christ, Gertrude, water ain’t got no colour! At least, not the water we does-drink here in Bimshire. So long as it clean, and cool, ’cause in Amurca, the South does be hot as shite, according to Manny . . .
“But Amurca, Gertrude-girl! I argue it is still a more better place to live, and that it more better for a man to know where you stand with white people than to live in a place like here, where every man must know what his rightful place is; like Golbourne, and Pounce, like Clotelle and even Manny, and like me. Miss Mary-Mathilda over there in the Great House is different. Her complexion with the right amount o’ white face powder and cosmetics, could carry-she-cross the Coloured Line. And she could pass. But living in Amurca is different than living in a place like this, where if you was to make a lil mistake in behaviour, and anybody, the Vicar, the Solicitor-General, the managers o’ hotels, anybody that white, the Plantation, anybody, feel they have a right to tell you that you are stanning-up in the wrong place. I hear a lil white boy, eight years at the most, one day tell Naiman, a big-big kiss-me-arse man, to move off the sidewalk, so he could pass! Naiman is forty-something, going ’pon fifty.”
“If you’re white,” Gertrude said, “you’re right.
“If you’re brown, you can stick around.
“But if you black, you gotta stay a waaaaay back!”
“Where you hear that?”
“Mr. Wilberforce. He says it all the time. He says it like if it’s a song he is singing. Says he first heard it up in Amurca. God, I like the way Mr.Wilberforce talk sometimes! If I didn’t know that Bellfeels, a white man, was Mr.Wilberforce father, from some o’ the things that boy says, I would have argue, before I knew the facts, that Mr.Wilberforce is a black man, even-although he look white. Though, after all, he almost white, and could pass, anytime.”
The Austin Clarke Library Page 34
