The Girl With the Golden Shoes

by Colin Channer

  “I ain’t disbelieve you when you say you see what you say you see,” he told her in a silly voice that made her younger cousins giggle and her old grandmother laugh. “But all I know is that a man can’t breathe underwater no matter what he put on. I ain’t have to go to no school to know that.”

  “You know from the other day she start to read she getting different,” Roselyn said with a gentle tease. “She start to know everything—even things that nobody ain’t suppose to know until they dead. Because is only when you dead you can see certain things. I ain’t think it was a mermaid at all. I think she dead in truth and see a ghost.”

  “When she tell me that she teach herself to read, I frighten,” said Big Tuck with admiration. He tapped Estrella’s leg and handed her a cigarillo and his flask of rum.

  “Tuck, she’s a child, you know. She ain’t suppose to drink no rum. It ain’t have any beer?”

  “Rose, you ain’t see she’s a woman? Leave the blasted child alone.”

  “Tuck,” implored Estrella, smiling at him warmly, as she smoked and took a swig. “Look how long I tell you send me to school. But you only want keep me here to fish.”

  “Estrella,” he replied, easing Roselyn from his lap and taking on a more attentive pose, “if you was in town right now, and the boss man come and ask you what kind o’ work you want to do, what you would tell him, in truth?”

  “I ain’t know what kind o’ work there is,” Estrella answered promptly. “But I could work in a shop or in the bank. As long as you could count, you could do them kind o’ things. How hard them work could be more than selling fish? Things is things. If you could sell one thing you could sell another thing, as long as you know how it measure, and how much a measure is the price. And most things they sell in these shops ain’t have to measure. They just sell off a shelf one by one. All I would have to do is put them in a bag, make sure I give the right change, and don’t insult nobody, which to me might be the hardest part, because in truth it have some people who will agitate you nerves.”

  “Is where you getting these thoughts?” her grandmother asked. A tone of slight concern had seeped into her voice.

  “I have it in my head long time to do something, Grandma. But I just ain’t get the chance to even know what I could do. How I going to know? Who going tell me? Them people here?” She gestured broadly. “I ask the fellow that was doing man hoovers what I could do if I leave here, and he tell me I could do anything if I only put my mind.”

  “So,” her grandmother said, “you let a stranger tell you what to do with you life?”

  “You know it have a lot o’ educated dunces in this world,” Big Tuck pointed out. “Take Rawle boy. They send he away to university in the mother country and I hear he ain’t pass no exam. I hear is bare zero he getting up at the place there …” He paused to find the word. “Camron or Campton or Cam Ditch or some rass. That and Oxfam is the two biggest school they have in England they say. What kind o’ man get opportunity like that and come back with two long hand and no qualification…no doctor…no engineer…no barrister? That is why I keep myself right here. Rawle ain’t know the white man school hard like brick or he wouldn’t gone and fail. And he a white man too. Me? I stick with what I know. The fish in my blood. And Estrella, it in your blood too. If you let that go is death.”

  “If I stay here and don’t do nothing with myself then that would kill me worse,” she blurted, adding childish frills along her intonation. For although Big Tuck was funny, he was quick to take offense. And when he was upset he could be cruel.

  They ain’t understanding what I trying to say, Estrella thought. But maybe I should keep it to myself.

  She’d not been led to reading by a great ambition—that was something reading had produced. But this wasn’t easy to explain.

  A year before, in 1941, on a market trip to the capital, Seville, she’d wandered off while running errands, and had taken up a spot across the street from La Sala de Amor to watch the cars arriving with the idle wives of businessmen and English civil servants.

  La Sala, as Carlitos knew it, was the first of many mansions on the Queensway to be sold for business use. It was large and white, with thick limestone columns; and between the columns ran a lacy banister whose loops and swirls in black conferred a lingerie allure to anyone who dined on the veranda, basking in the currents driven by the celebrated fan, an engineering marvel that was bolted to the ceiling and whose giant wings, which had been woven in the previous century from a fiber that grew only in the Yucatán, made slow, gigantic swoops.

  The Queens, as people called it, was an upward-sloping mile that started at a square beside the harbor and ended at the governor’s imposing gate.

  In Spanish times it had been known as the Paseo, and was the site of much parading by the rich. In its center was a flowered median lined with rows of royal palms, curving trails with benches made of heavy wood, and gas-illuminated globes that seeped a misty sentimental light.

  That day, as she watched the wives arriving for their lunch, Estrella recognized a chauffeur as a man who often bought fish from her grandmother, and she tried to make a sale.

  “Oyi!” she shouted from a bench beneath a tree. “It have some good jack and parrot today. Nice bonito too. I save up some for you. When you finish you should come.”

  With his finger quickly brought across his lip, the man, whose job was marked by nothing more official than a visor, tossed his head, inviting her to cross the street. There, he introduced her to another driver as “the smartest little girl you’ll ever meet.”

  “What kind o’ woman you calling little girl?” the man replied. He wore a pith helmet and an ivory jacket with a scarlet sash.

  “She overgrow,” the man she knew remarked. “Overgrow and overripe.”

  “Is the fish she eating make her bottom juicy so?”

  While the drivers talked about her as if she wasn’t there, Estrella watched the people on the grand veranda, dreaming, and by accident observed something designed to be unseen.

  When a husband moved across the veranda to greet a friend who’d just arrived, a waiter slipped his wife a note that had been scribbled by another man, a quiet diner seated by himself across the aisle.

  The reaction to the written word was something that the girl had never seen. The lady’s face, which before the note had been as plain and inexpressive as an egg, began to crackle with a smile.

  It was a smile that wasn’t triggered by the mouth, that only ended there, that looked as if it had begun somewhere inside the woman’s liquid core. And that was when Estrella knew that writing was an elemental force, like hurricanes and floods, and began to visualize the stream of words she’d like to share with someone she loved.

  That very day, she stole the first of many books, a language primer slid beneath the skirt along an aisle in McSweeney’s, followed by a lesson here and there in phonics for a penny, which she took on credit from an eight-year-old girl who worked behind the counter in her father’s Chinese shop.

  However, in the weeks that followed her encounter with the diver, Estrella’s greatest problem wasn’t books. It was the Star.

  Before she’d begun to read, the daily paper was a thing—a thing a mother used to line the box she turned into a cradle; a thing a child would fold to make a hat when it would rain; a thing that everybody used to wipe their bottoms; a yellow thing you picked out of the garbage when you went to town; a thing for everyone to use.

  But in the weeks that followed her encounter, Estrella had begun to keep some papers for herself.

  Because no one believed her story, she began to read the papers with the single-minded effort of a lawyer on the quest for vindicating proof. And to her family and neighbors, it appeared as if she’d pulled away.

  It unsettled them to watch her reading…smiling to herself…whispering fancy words…her finger pointing all the time…her head bowed like she praying to the damn rass thing.

  If you play you drum or pluck you cuatro when t
he gal was reading one, she’d walk away. What kind o’ thing is that? And when she come back after she done walk away and you ask her what it really have inside that thing, she only want to tell you things ’bout other places—like where we from ain’t place.

  So although they were amazed that one of them had learned to read, they also felt as if the girl had put them under siege, a sense that if they didn’t act, then history would remember them as people who’d watched and waited while their way of life was slowly laid to waste.

  As days turned into weeks, Estrella found herself preparing fish beneath the almond tree alone. People whispered. When they had too much to drink sometimes, they’d lob their blazing words.

  Is them things you reading in them papers have you head so tie up. You think we born big so we ain’t know how children can be devious? If is you dead mother telling you things to come and confuse us, well, is a good thing she gone.

  Intimidated by their parents and confused, the children who’d been with Estrella when the diver waded from the surf began to doubt what they’d seen. Pressured by his parents, a boy began to spread the rumor that Estrella had confided that the story was a hoax. Two girls swore on a Bible that they’d seen a mermaid flopping on the shore, long hair, gold comb, and all. But most of them just shook their heads when asked and mumbled that they didn’t know, that yes, they were there, but didn’t see, that so much time had passed.

  Through all of this, Estrella found a way to manage. But when her younger cousins, candid children, told her that it might be better if she went away, she left the hammock where she slept with them and made a bed inside the broken body of an old canoe left rotting just outside a cave, fifty yards beyond the almond tree.

  While this was happening in San Carlos, a tepid winter in the North Atlantic caused a shift in ocean streams all around the world, and the swimming patterns of the fish in the West Indies were disrupted for six weeks.

  Each island had its range of local explanations. But in this corner of this island, there was only one. And after forty days of empty nets, the elders called a meeting on a desert cay.

  “Big Tuck,” the meeting started, “there’s a problem in you house, and as a man you have to fix it.”

  They were sitting in a circle by a sea grape tree whose twisted branches formed a dome.

  “Is not you flesh,” they argued when he told them that he couldn’t do what they were asking. “Everybody else who live here in some way or other is blood. The fish in we blood and it not in hers. And you is the very one that say she look you in you face and tell you right in front o’ Rose that if she stay here she going dead.”

  “Well, that ain’t what she say exactly,” said Big Tuck, who had true, natural feelings for the girl.

  “Tuck, what the rass you talking ’bout? This is forty days o’ judgment. Forty days o’ blight. The only time I see people round here holding they head like they ain’t know if they coming or going was that long time when Mount Diablo look like it was going blow. Tuck, when you old like we you have to accept that we could see the signs. And every man in this place here seeing the signs right now. And you is one o’ we, Tuck, so you bound to see them too.”

  “You ain’t have to say nothing like that,” Big Tuck replied. He took another drink, but couldn’t keep it down. “You ain’t have to test me if I is one o’ you. I is one o’ you in truth.”

  He wiped the trace of spit and vomit from his mouth.

  “Is you bring Rose here to live,” someone accused. “And is Rose bring she here. And Rose own story is a mix-up too. She born in Trinidad, then she gone and live in Cuba, then she come here with a baby saying the mother die in childbirth and no father ain’t there. Tuck, how so much mix-up going on in you house?”

  “You see sign?” the one who’d mentioned the volcano pointed out. “The gal kill she own mother. What she would do to we?”

  “Tuck, if you get the feeling that you ain’t able to manage,” said the oldest one among them, “put the pressure ’pon you wife.”

  On the morning that she had to ask the girl to leave, Roselyn passed the line of huts belonging to her neighbors and walked into the water till it caught her at the knees. She was dressed in white, a flowing dress with puffed sleeves and a turban. In her ears there was a pair of silver hoops.

  In a calabash gourd lined with a swatch of gingham cloth in white and blue, she’d placed some silver coins, red flowers, a watermelon slice, and a jar of molasses. And as the gourd bobbled on the waves, she sang hymns to Yemoja asking the orisha for prosperity and safety for the girl.

  The neighbors watched her furtively, peering through their barely open shutters and the cracks between the boards that made their huts, unhappy but relieved as Roselyn heaved her heavy body past the anchored, striped canoes, then came upon the almond tree, where she stopped for a moment before running back into the sea to put her earrings in the calabash.

  “My heart feel like it going to burst,” she told Estrella when the deed was done. “But since you curse the fish is only blight. Why you had to spit in God face? Now, he giving everybody bad eye.”

  Sitting on the edge of her broken canoe with her elbows on her knees, Estrella answered with a quiet pledge: “One day I going come back here and all o’ you going look at me and frighten. That’s all I have to say.”

  Square-jawed and trembling, Roselyn put her hands across her ears and heaved away.

  “I not going live and dead in no shack in no place where nothing don’t happen,” said Estrella, standing up to shout. “Mark my words. Something big going happen to me. And you lucky you even find me anyway. You lucky you find me here this morning. I already make up my mind to leave this place…to go my own damn way. And that ain’t no jest. That’s the gospel truth.”

  In the hut, Roselyn did as she’d promised Tuck the night before. She lay down on the bed beside him, listened to his snores, and took a dose of poison that would kill her in her sleep.

  Later, during the hour of siesta, while Big Tuck and all the neighbors found it hard to sleep, Estrella sat beneath the hut to pack her things. She didn’t have a lot, but she couldn’t take it all, because she didn’t have a bag. So she packed what she could carry in a basket, which she slung across her body with a length of rope, unaware, like Big Tuck and all the neighbors, that Roselyn was dead.

  As she walked along the empty beach, Estrella felt the glare of eyes, which encouraged her to fortify her walk with more authority and grace. She pulled back her shoulders and stuck out her ass, and used a hand to dab at any hairs that might have loosened in her plaits.

  When she came upon the almond tree, unsure of what would happen and wondering what to do—she’d never seen a person being banished in her life—she saw two fellows sitting in a red canoe.

  “Hey, Estrella. How you doing? Come here. I want to talk to you.”

  “Come where?” she answered with a knowing look.

  She stood, arms folded, water lapping at her shins.

  “Well, it look like you going out. I just was thinking to ask you if you want a ride.”

  “Don’t fret ’bout me, Alston. I could take care on my own.”

  She spat in punctuation, cut her slanted eyes, and stomped away.

  “Estrella. Where you going? Come back here. It ain’t have no other way.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “You have to come, Estrella. Make it simple. Don’t make it turn a fuss.”

  She spun around.

  “If I had my own boat is one thing. But I ain’t going nowhere with the likes o’ you. I would rather climb the cliff.”

  “Well go, nuh. See, nuh. Climb the cliff and break you neck and dead.”

  “Alston, you is a blasted dog.”

  As she stomped in the direction of the cliffs, she thought, How I could sit in a boat with Alston and Perry and act like nothing ain’t happen? Them is fellows I know all my life. I know them men children. Them men even put talks to me a few times when their wife wasn’t about. And i
n truth, I even do a little feel-up with that Alston there one time. Man is man, eh. After all o’ that, he expect me to go with them in a boat so they could carry me ’way like I is some piece o’ filth? Before I go with them I’d rather climb this cliff and get my death. Then what they going to say?

  The limestone cliff was high and sheer, a little under ninety feet, and flecked with blinking crystals. In certain spots, the roots of hardy plants came dangling out of fissures in the rock, and as she climbed, Estrella Thompson, who was too scared to look below, felt around with shoeless feet for little gaps or sills to hold her weight.

  Hand over hand, her body taut with dogged anger, her sweating face so deep in focus that it was serene, slipping once or twice, she reached the top.

  Without looking down to see the depth from which she’d come, or stare in triumph at her neighbors, who’d spilled out from their huts across the sand, the tall, strong-bodied girl began to sprint across a field of guinea grass toward the world she thought contained her future, moving through the gulf of green as swiftly as a marlin that had snapped a fishing line.

  She wore a purple dress with long sleeves and puffed shoulders that were fraying at the seams. In her deep patch pockets bounced her gutting knife and money that she’d stolen from Old Tuck.

  With fifteen pounds and fifty pence, she planned to buy a pair of shoes, the first ones in her life; after this, she would present herself correctly for a job.

  III.

  Like a beetle on a trail of gum, the stubby, silver bus was crawling north along the wild Atlantic coast. Estrella stared outside the window, a strong out-pointed cheekbone pressed against the dusty windowpane.

  From the cliff, she’d walked and run eight miles through grass and scrub and climbed through woodlands strung with vines; there, little monkeys skittered on the limbs of trees with overlapping leaves that blocked the heat and light.

  When the forest opened up, she’d seen a narrow road below her, curling in a double bend then gathered in the grip of interlocking slopes.