How to Love a Jamaican

by Alexia Arthurs

  Just as I’m running past the biggest house in the scheme, where a white man and a woman Ann-Marie said tried out for Miss Jamaica live, Cobby comes on my mind. Just as how Ann-Marie says God whispers in her ear sometimes, warning that she’s going to buck up on the exact person she doesn’t want to buck up on. It’s with that kind of certainty that I know I will see Cobby today, even though I haven’t seen him from before Mama’s funeral, and he is not the kind of man you can easily catch to beg back for the money he begged off you for a long time now.

  * * *

  —

  There are pregnant women who say that they can feel the bodies pushing against each other, already in competition, as if to speak to whatever it is that erupts when one seed is no longer one, when one seed becomes two. As soon as I could piece any understanding together, I started reading and rereading the parts of the Bible where my name comes up. Because Rebekah felt Esau and Jacob fighting inside her, I always imagined Mama felt my brother and me, especially as we got older and started to turn in opposite directions. In my mind, if God spoke as clearly to Mama as He did to Rebekah, He would speak of the prophecy of two brothers not even opening their mouths to taste the air outside the womb and already struggling to stand taller than each other. Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one shall be stronger than the other people; and the older shall serve the younger. When I first read this, young as I was and only half understanding, a part of me knew it was too late, that Cobby had already beat me.

  I don’t think Mama, a true countrywoman, read ten books in her life. Even the Bible that sat on the dresser by her bed, and which Mama cautioned my brother and me never to put any other book on top of, I rarely saw her open. This would have been a surprise for anyone who knew Mama well, who saw that she was often the first one to get up when the pastor made an altar call or asked for a testimony. Yes, I grew up hearing Mama give testimonies in church, stringing the Bible verses she knew together to make points about salvation or waiting on the Lord, then ending the testimony with a hymn. She spoke too long and she couldn’t sing, the whole congregation seemed to sigh and my brother and I held our heads in shame whenever Mama made it to the front of the church, and she never missed an opportunity to testify.

  When we were growing up, Mama often complained that reading the Bible made her eyes hurt, so she would close her eyes for a little to relax them and then she would fall asleep. Sometimes Mama, my brother, and I would be walking down the road and Mama would ask, “A who dat a cum up di road? A Hyacinth dat?” Mama’s eyes bothered her. She needed glasses. I don’t know that Mama would have named us Jacob and Esau if the story was one that she read for herself. Sibling jealousy, parental favoritism, and familial deceit—I don’t know that Mama would have given us this legacy if she knew better. I imagine she heard the names of the biblical twins from various religious leaders her entire life attending church. Because she wanted to give us biblical names, when she pushed us out and saw that we were two, and male, Mama named my brother Jacob—Cobby—and she named me Esau.

  Mama said her whole life, as far back as she could remember, she was trying to see. She was always squinting her eyes and walking close to food or animals or people and using her hands to tell her what her eyes couldn’t. Which is why my long-dead grandmother often chastised Mama when she was a girl, “Yuh always have fi touch everyt’ing.” Mama’s favorite food was fried dumplings. She could always smell my grandmother frying the dumplings, but not until Mama could poke the cooling dumplings would she be satisfied. As a little girl, she thought everyone’s eyes saw the world as fuzzy as she did. This is why it never occurred to her to complain to her teacher or parents. The day Mama realized something was wrong, the teacher wrote a word she couldn’t see and then the teacher called on her to pronounce it. Mama guessed “cat” because it was one of the words that often came up in the teacher’s spelling lessons. The teacher might have looked at Mama funny, Mama didn’t say, but she heard the class laughing at her. Someone else was called to read the word and it was “mango.”

  Only in Mama’s later years did she get a good pair of glasses. Twice in the past someone had brought her reading glasses packed safely in a barrel from the States. The first pair Mama received because my grandmother begged a favor of a neighbor whose people were sending her a barrel. This pair Mama kept until two or so years after my brother and I were born—she always said she thanked God for letting her see us so clearly after she pushed us out. But one day, Mama left the glasses within reach of my baby brother, who broke them. For a long time after, Mama still wore the glasses, she just had them taped together, until the tape loosened hold and one of the lenses fell under her foot while she was walking. After that, Mama kept the other lens in her brassiere for safekeeping. She would hold the lens to the Bible when the pastor said to turn to a verse or when she wanted to look at the chicken back she was buying from the meat man. Mama got a second pair when I was ten years or so. She asked someone going to foreign to bring her back a pair of glasses. But the second pair was too strong, it pained Mama’s eyes, so she laid it on her dresser next to her Bible and continued keeping the lens in her brassiere.

  Not until I attended UWI, and I brought her into the city to see where I was living and going to school, did Mama go to an eye doctor, who checked her eyes and prescribed glasses that catered to her vision needs. “A neva see so good inna mi life,” Mama said. When she put the glasses on for the first time, her whole face was smiling. “Dis is how God mek mi eyes before sin clog it up.” Later when I visited her, I saw that she kept the new pair of glasses next to her Bible, and when I pointed this out and asked her why she wasn’t wearing the glasses, she said, “A mi Bible glasses dat.” At the time, I was annoyed that she allowed me to use the money I could have used for textbooks to buy a pair of glasses that she wasn’t wearing. When I knocked on the door holding the little plastic bag containing a package of tripe, I expected Mama to answer the door with the glasses on her face. That day I sat in my annoyance, and finally it lifted and hovered over me and mixed with the smell of the onions, garlic, and tripe. I watched as Mama took the lens from her brassiere to check the tripe. Then she was lifting the boiling pot cover and using the lens to check on the dumplings and green bananas.

  * * *

  —

  Mama is buried five months now and Cobby didn’t come to the funeral. I have no doubt he received the news. I don’t know why he didn’t come, but I wasn’t surprised because this is the kind of man my brother is. I even asked Lennox, my wife’s brother, to be a pallbearer in case Cobby didn’t show up. Days before the funeral, I drove to the houses of the various women my brother has children with, since apparently he sometimes keeps the mothers as lovers. I imagine this quiets their concerns about his inability to financially care for his children. But none of the women had seen Cobby recently. One of them suggested he might be in jail again for reckless behavior while overdrinking. All of them complained about him; one of them started to cry. I opened my wallet and not one of them refused the money.

  I’m watching Ann-Marie drop the dumplings in the oil, gently so as not to make the oil jump up on her. I’ve been sitting here at the table for twenty minutes now, since I walked into the house and sat down still wearing my suit. Ann-Marie can tell that something is paining me, but she is allowing me to dwell in it as long as I need to. That’s how I know I married the right woman. Ann-Marie respects my need for silence. Before I met her, I had only been with one other woman, Roxanne, who had to fill every silence, wanting to know, “Why yuh face look so?”

  Soon I’ll tell Ann-Marie what’s bothering me. But right now it stretches over me, and I want to hold it in my hands a little longer. Just like how God whispered, I saw Cobby today. I went for lunch with my secretary, Scarlet, a big-boned woman who I love like a sister. She loves food like no woman I’ve ever known, which is why Ann-Marie and I laugh
at her and call her Love Food Scarlet behind her back. We were in the market looking to buy jerk chicken from one of the men who roast meat in steel drums when Scarlet said, “But dat man fava you?” I looked over, immediately worried she meant Cobby. There he was, hungrily eating a mango and talking, gesturing as if what he was saying was important. He is the kind of man who displays importance while talking foolishness. The man he was talking with appeared to be the bus driver. My brother has never had grand ambitions for himself. For a living he takes a small cut from the bus driver for the customers he rallies together so that they get on his driver’s bus instead of someone else’s. No wonder he can’t support his children. From the way he was opening his mouth to laugh, I could see the two missing teeth on his left side. He was laughing, his whole body bent over, laughing like a man who doesn’t have one fret in the world. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe his children aren’t his concerns when he puts his head down at night. I always thought of him as having less shame than I have. I fixed my teeth as soon as I left the country and got my first job. “That’s my brother,” I said to Scarlet. She must have heard in my voice that I didn’t feel like saying anything else, and then I was walking away, even as she stood there watching my brother. We bought the chicken and walked back to the office. Neither of us brought up Cobby.

  The last time I saw him, he was in the middle of chasing a woman. It was during the busiest time of Mandeville Square, when the day is ending and people are heading home from their various commitments. I had just come out of the supermarket because Ann-Marie called me that afternoon and asked me to bring home a few packets of banana chips and cream sodas. She had been sick with the flu and heavy food wouldn’t stay in her stomach. When I exited the supermarket, I saw Cobby talking to two other men in front. A young woman passed by, Cobby grabbed after her hand and held on to her fingers, and the woman pulled her fingers free.

  But when she turned to face my brother, anyone could see that he flattered her. From where I was standing, I couldn’t see Cobby’s face, but I could see the young woman’s face shining under the sweet words of my brother. He always knew what to tell women, even Mama. “Mama, mek mi help yuh carry dat bag.” “Mama, mi like when yuh do yuh hair so.” “Mama, mi was telling mi friend dat none of dem mother look as good as my old lady.” He knew the right combination of words to open them up, so that even though they could see that he was a womanizer, they could forget for a sweet little while until the belly came along and my brother grew scarce and the women wanted to kick themselves for getting involved with him in the first place.

  Mama used to talk about a “mash up” kind of love. This kind of love would often lead to some kind of slackness involving a married man or a pregnant schoolgirl or a woman dealing with a man everyone told her not to deal with. Mama used this term around her churchwomen friends when they discussed various people who were led from the road to Calvary because they couldn’t quiet the way their hearts would pinch them.

  The one time I experienced mash up love was with a girl named Jordan, who lived with her grandma down the road. When I discovered her in church one day, when I saw the little red bows on the shoes sticking out from the legs further down in the pew, my head traveled up from the prettiest pair of shoes I ever saw to the sweetest face I ever saw. She had just moved from America, since her parents thought it would be valuable if their fourteen-year-old left the jungles of Brooklyn to be educated in the Jamaican way by her grandmother. The girls in the church simultaneously admired and despised her. When they weren’t complimenting her clothes and accent, they were talking about how she thought she was better than them, which seemed to be completely unfounded since they couldn’t provide any examples but just agreed with each other that Jordan was “bad mind.” I stood next to them behind the pit toilet at the back of the church, pretending I wasn’t listening but was waiting until they finished talking so I could tell one of them that her mother sent me to call her.

  It wasn’t long before I used every opportunity to walk past Jordan’s grandmother’s house or to cut through their yard. Sometimes I wasted my time because the yard was bare, but other times I saw Jordan washing her and her grandmother’s clothes in the yard. I always waved to her and she waved back, and sometimes we exchanged pleasantries when she initiated it. The whole thing fueled and devastated me because we never moved toward any kind of familiarity.

  Instead, Jordan told the other girls from church that I was following her around in school and church, and even showing up in her yard. When the news came back to me, I stopped walking through her yard, and when I walked past her house I looked straight ahead. Later, I couldn’t be upset with Cobby when he and Jordan’s name started running together, because I had never told him I loved her. By this time, we were moving toward manhood, Cobby sprinting faster toward it. Although he and I weren’t close like we were as boys, I knew he respected me. Just like how he wouldn’t have allowed the boys in our district to laugh at me because I enjoyed reading, wasn’t any good at cricket, and was never linked to any kind of intimacy with a girl, he wouldn’t have become involved with Jordan if he knew I wanted her.

  Jordan was the girl Cobby got pregnant when he was sixteen, a little more than a year after she’d left her home in Brooklyn. They said that although her period refused to greet her for two months, Ms. Honey only put two and two together a week before Jordan was supposed to return to Brooklyn. Ms. Honey had taught Jordan how to wash clothes with her hands, whispering to Mama that at first her granddaughter couldn’t even wash her panties without a machine and shaking her head because it was troubling to her how foreign caused people to pack up their dirty drawers, allowing them to sit before they could stuff them into a machine with the rest of their clothes. Ms. Honey was thinking she did a good job squeezing the slack American ways out of her granddaughter when it hit her that she hadn’t seen any evidence of her granddaughter’s period in two months. In the barrels her daughter sent from foreign, packages of maxi pads were included, and Ms. Honey had shown Jordan how to wrap the used maxi pad in old pieces of newspaper. But Ms. Honey hadn’t seen Jordan go into the drawer for newspaper in weeks.

  Jordan never looked in my brother’s direction nor he in hers, they were never seen together, but everybody knew. Here was a fifteen-year-old with hardly any breasts in front of her carrying my brother’s child. Mama was probably the last to know. Because she presented herself as such a pious figure in the community, no one knew how to tell her. But eventually it reached Mama’s ears, and she threw the bucket of dirty water she used to clean the floors on Cobby. He walked out of the yard, his clothes dripping, and he didn’t come back until three days later. By then, Mama didn’t seem as angry anymore, although for a long time she carried a burden in her face, which seemed to me to encompass the gravity of the whole thing but especially the shame my brother had brought on her shoulders, revealing her family as spiritually flawed.

  My brother was seventeen when Jordan had the baby. It squeezed out of her without any life in it. But this was all talk, since none of us saw the baby. One week Jordan was pregnant in church, and two weeks later she was back in Brooklyn. No one said it but I could see the relief in the faces of Mama, Cobby, and Ms. Honey. Soon after, Mama testified in church. I don’t remember what she said, but I remember that Cobby, who has started coming to church again, was listening because I saw that their eyes were making four, they were talking to each other. Cobby didn’t get another woman pregnant till he was twenty.

  * * *

  —

  We were so different from early on. Mama said I was a quiet baby, while Cobby cried if she wasn’t looking at him. Mama used to tell people a funny story about how she used to put a big teddy bear on the dresser so that Cobby would think someone was in the room with him. It worked for a while and then he wanted more than someone’s presence, he wanted Mama’s hands on him. This was her way of telling how he always loved people from the beginning. I was the opposite. Mama
used to describe my personality as “funny.” I was afraid of anyone I didn’t know, and even the ones I did know. Cobby would walk forward to meet people but I always stayed behind with Mama.

  Then in grade school Cobby couldn’t keep his behind in the seat for five minutes. He wasn’t a bad child, everyone liked him, classmates and teachers alike, he just lived a careless life—always forgetting to do his homework, to study for exams, to bring his lunch from home—and it might have seemed worse when compared to the neatness of my life. Later, when I scored the highest on the common entrance exam, the church helped to send me to college.

  Still, everyone preferred my brother. People respected me but they preferred him. Here was Cobby, with his big laugh, and the way his eyes took in everybody, making even old churchwomen nobody paid any mind feel seen. Here was Cobby, cracking jokes and memorizing the names of even the least of people. He had friends all over. Here was Cobby with the same face as me, yet the way his face and his body filled out, maybe because he always had a big appetite, he was better to look at. People would look past me to rest their eyes on the other twin. They could barely tell us apart, and yet somehow Cobby begged to be looked at.