How to Love a Jamaican

by Alexia Arthurs

  My first morning in this country, I ate the bowl of cold cereal and drank the glass of orange juice my mother put in front of me, and my stomach cramped and pained and finally I vomited. The night before, sleeping in my new bed, all of it felt strange, as though I had stepped out of my skin and was watching myself from outside myself. When I was a little boy, I used to show off to my classmates that my mother was in America and she would soon send for me. But it became a story that seemed far off, less true, almost as though it belonged to someone else, so I stopped telling it. That first night, the woman who resembled a woman I used to know—because that’s how my mother seemed in the early days—showed me to my room. She opened a closet and showed me new clothes. She rubbed her hands against the dresser, pulling out drawers to reveal new socks and underwear. She explained that the entire bedroom set was new. In the woman’s face, I recognized the roundness of my grandmother’s face.

  My second morning in this country, my mother asked what my grandmother usually gave me for breakfast. I didn’t tell her porridge, which my grandmother prepared every school day, ignoring my complaints. My grandmother believed porridge was “proper food” for learning, since it was the kind of meal to keep a belly full until lunchtime. But I hated how full cornmeal porridge left me. I liked to run to school and it interfered with my speed. I also disliked the lumps and the fact that porridge always made me need to go to the bathroom in the middle of my morning classes. I hated shitting in school, because if you took too long somebody would always take notice of it and ask what you were doing, and then everyone in the class would start laughing.

  Instead, I told my mother what my grandmother made on weekends, and since then I’ve basically eaten the same meal every weekday morning. The exception is the pancakes with syrup my mother prepares from a box on weekends—another introduction to America that I dislike. I would prefer plantain and bread and eggs, but I don’t want her to feel bad. My mother worries what I will eat when I start college next fall. She says if I can get a little hot plate in my dorm, she will ship me plantains if I end up somewhere where I can’t find them. I tell her she doesn’t have to worry about that. I tell her I will eat American food when I have to.

  I have on my coat, my hat, and I’m pulling on my gloves when my mother walks down the stairs. She has rollers in her hair, and she’s wearing the lavender nightgown. Months ago, when she stood in front of the nightgown rack at the department store, my mother was running her fingers along the pink version of the lavender nightgown. She asked me which one she should get, and since the pink reminded me that there was already too much pink in her closet, I picked the lavender one. Not long after, my mother was drinking a cup of tea while I ate my breakfast. When she got up to wash the breakfast dishes, my eyes were pulled to the back of her nightgown. It took me a moment to realize that I was looking at blood. And it took me another moment to realize it was probably period blood. I quickly turned my face away, begging my mother to see the blood herself because I didn’t know how to voice those kinds of things to her. I heard her walk up the stairs, and before I left for school she had changed into another nightgown. Whenever she wears the lavender nightgown, I always remember the blood. Sometimes I look for evidence, the dull imprint of an old stain. There isn’t any. My mother comes over to put some money in my hand, as she does every Monday morning since she knows I like a beef patty and a cream soda from the Jamaican restaurant after school. She also gives me the letter to show my teachers. I fold it without looking at it and put it in my coat pocket. Then she is wrapping her arms around me and whispering a quick prayer because she watches on the news the ways in which America can swallow black sons. She still worries, even though I’ve done well in Brooklyn for so long already.

  Last night it snowed but only left a dusting. I’m watching where my boots make prints in the snow. The thing I hate most about winter, besides the cold, snow, and extra clothes, is how dark the mornings are. Because there isn’t light shining through my window, I stay in bed longer. I’m always tired until spring comes. The first year, I explained how tired I was and my mother thought maybe I had worms so she bought a special drink for me. The drink was meant to clean me out, which is why my mother asked me if I saw any worms when I used the bathroom. I told her I didn’t see anything, and because she asked when my stepfather and I were eating dinner, he started to choke because he was laughing so hard, and it took him a long time to finally say, “Why are you asking the man his business for?”

  There is an old woman in a wheelchair waiting at the bus stop, smoking a cigarette with gloved fingers. There are also the regulars, a mother with six children huddled up next to her. All of them look exactly like each other and nothing like her. The oldest boy helps the mother huddle the smaller ones, since her arms are busy holding the smallest one. All their names start with “Jah”—the mother is calling their names because the bus is pulling up. “Jahzalia. Jahmalia. Jahmajesty. Jahmarie. Jahzal. Jahdan.” The oldest boy is hauling the stroller onto the bus and the mother calls the names of all her children, worried that she will lose one of them. The eyes of everyone on the bus are forced wide open because the mother is loud and everybody is wondering at those names and all those children.

  The bus stops at the L train station and most of us, including the oldest Jah and I, get off the bus. But before he gets off, just before the bus doors open, he hollers bye to his brothers and sisters, and his mother pulls him up to her to kiss his cheek, smashing the youngest one between them. It is loud and very dramatic, even the bus driver is looking through his rearview mirror. The family does this every morning, as if they don’t live in the same house and see each other on a daily basis. Then the youngest is crying and the mother is holding him up to the window so he can see the brother who is standing on the sidewalk and waving one last goodbye.

  On the subway platform, the conductor speaks on the intercom, asking people to please let go of the doors. He says that another train is pulling up across the platform in two minutes, he says people are causing a delay and endangering themselves, but nobody pays him any mind. One lady was holding the doors open for a whole group of people, including me. Now a man is holding the doors open for the last stragglers.

  Every morning the same old lady walks up and down the train car, preaching and giving tracts to anyone who will take them from her. She seems to always pick the fullest car, the last one, weaving her way through and around people and never bothering to break her sermon to say “Excuse me.” After preaching, she prays for us and then she breaks into a hymn. The woman next to me hisses her teeth and says it is too early for all of this. Two girls, maybe two years younger than me, are leaning against the doors and laughing into each other, probably because the singing is so bad. The old lady tries to give a tract to a couple with dreadlocks but the man takes one look at the tract and says, “A white Jesus you a gi mi? Mi no bother wid nuh white Jesus.” The woman he is with laughs. Most everyone else is folded into himself or herself, sleep still in their eyes because they are holding on to the last free moments before work or school.

  I feel the letter in my coat pocket. Since I put it there, I haven’t forgotten its invisible weight. I can imagine the tidiness of my mother’s handwriting and the polite way of her words.

  * * *

  —

  When I was little, my grandmother and I lived in the house I was born in. The bed my mother used to sleep in when she was a girl was the same bed she gave birth in, a bed I would claim as my own for the eight years my mother left me with my grandmother. My placenta and umbilical cord were buried under either the ackee tree or the breadfruit tree. My grandfather buried them deep so no dog could get to them, but he died when I was still a baby and my grandmother couldn’t remember which tree it was. She always wanted to say it was the ackee tree but she really wasn’t sure.

  My name would have been Sylvia if I turned out to be a girl or Roy, after my father, if I turned out to be a b
oy. But when my mother pushed me out, my grandmother said that for a moment no one spoke and then the midwife, a woman with aging eyes, asked, “A light ’im light so?” No one who had seen how dark my father was would have asked that. “Samson,” my grandmother said. “We a go call ’im Samson.” My grandmother said she looked at my albino skin and knew I would have to be strong. That’s why she named me Samson instead of after my father, who she called a “cruff” whenever his name came up. Because the labor pains silenced my mother and my grandfather wasn’t interested in what they named me if it wasn’t after him, no one argued with my grandmother. My name is Samson Roy Johnson.

  When I lived with my grandmother, she used to take me with her down to Mermaid River. But I soon became tired of sitting around while she and the other women took care of business—selling the food they prepared, talking people’s business, and whatever else old women did that bored me. I was freed when my grandmother started leaving me at the house of a woman who watched children, and then I started school. After that, I hardly bothered to make it down to Mermaid River, and then when I went of my own accord, it was because of what Roger Boxx said.

  A man went mad down in Porus and chopped his wife with a machete, which was how Roger Boxx came to be in my class, since his people took him and his little sister to live with them. Everyone had heard about the woman who was chopped. My grandmother and I were eating fried fish and watching the evening news. She paused from picking a fishbone out of her teeth to say “Jesus,” almost whispering and elongating the word, in the way she did whenever she heard something painful and surprising or, sometimes, miraculous.

  Roger Boxx was the shortest boy in our class. The Monday he arrived he took over from Clement Richards, who had been the shortest boy in the class but made up for his height with his voice, which sounded like he was copying after his father, who was a Seventh-day Adventist minister. Nobody paid Clement Richards’s height any mind because they were invested in the way his voice sounded, in the highs and lows, the drama of it. Roger Boxx didn’t seem to have anything about him to level out his height, so nobody paid him any mind. He took up a space next to those of us who were never invited to play cricket. Silently, except when it came time to cheer, we watched the games from the edge of the field.

  After a week or so in our class, Roger Boxx and I were paired up as spelling partners. As soon as he sat down after pushing his desk next to mine, he told me that he had a Game Boy at home. I told him I had a three-legged dog named Delilah, who ate the pears that fell from our pear tree. We became inseparable.

  I remember how one time Roger Boxx said that he wanted to see Delilah but when we got to my house, she was nowhere to be found. This was because, as I suspected about the Game Boy, I didn’t have a three-legged pear-eating dog named Delilah. In fact, a man who lived down the road owned a three-legged pear-eating dog he called Trouble. The first time I asked about the dog’s name, the man told me Delilah since he knew my name was Samson. I didn’t confess any of this to Roger Boxx. We walked around the yard calling out Delilah’s name, and I told Roger that sometimes Delilah walked all over the district and then she might come home with somebody’s fowl in her mouth.

  This was how Roger Boxx and I, tired of looking for Delilah, came to be playing marbles in the front yard when he looked up and asked, “Who is dat ole woman?” I looked up quickly to see who was walking into the yard and my mind got stuck on the word “ole,” when I saw that he was talking about my grandmother. I never thought of her as old until he said it. Maybe because she raised me as if she was my mother since my own mother had been in New York for eight years already, working and making a way so that she could send for me. Or it could have been because my grandmother was big and tall, and even with gray hair she never seemed weak to me. Old meant weak to me then. The word surprised me, offended me, and put a fire under my tail, and so I decided that since my grandmother was old, I had a responsibility to help her more.

  * * *

  —

  I get off at Broadway Junction. The preaching woman gets off too, hauling two big bags with her. Just before the train stopped, she abruptly ended the hymn, gave everybody a last word about Jesus coming again and getting our lives right, and quickly stuffed the tracts and Bible into one of her bags. We go up the stairs and then the morning crowd swallows her. I follow the crowd that gets on the down escalator and walk a little way to the stairs that lead underground to the A and C train platform. The A train is pulling off but that’s okay. It’s really the C I need to get on.

  I sit next to a young couple sleeping on each other. It’s the only free seat. The girl’s legs are spread out across the guy’s lap, his arms are wrapped around her, and they look to be completely lost in sleep. Across from me, a woman is looking into a mirror and putting on her entire face. My mother’s voice comes into my head, so I smile. She would call the couple sleeping and the woman putting on her makeup on the train “slack.” She would be horrified. She would say that Americans don’t have any shame, and she would warn me, “Please, Samson, I didn’t bring you to this country to take up them ways.”

  * * *

  —

  The day after Roger Boxx called my grandmother “old,” instead of running off early to watch the cricket games in the schoolyard before school, I stayed behind. After I had eaten my porridge, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and put on my school uniform, I stood behind my grandmother in the kitchen with my hands in my khaki pants pockets. Standing around was the quickest way to become involved in whatever needed to be done around the house. “Here,” my grandmother said. She bumped into me as she turned around in our small kitchen. “Yuh look like yuh wan’ someting fi do.” She gave me a pan filled with big pieces of coconut to cut into the little pieces she used to make coconut drops. That morning, she had thrown coconuts against a big rock behind our house because it was the way she could bust a coconut open. I’d heard the coconuts being flung while I ate my porridge.

  When I got to school, Roger Boxx and the other boys, who nobody wanted on their cricket teams, were watching the last minutes of the game. Roger held his arms up to me as if to say, “Where were you?” I only shook my head, because explaining I had willingly stayed behind to help my grandmother cook wouldn’t make any sense to him. I took my place next to him and we watched the rest of the game together.

  After school, I told Roger Boxx that I couldn’t play marbles because I had to help my grandmother. He looked at me as if I wasn’t making any sense to him. After I walked out of the schoolyard, I turned around to see that he was playing football with a marble. I couldn’t see the marble from the distance I was standing, for all I knew he could have been kicking a small stone, but I knew it was a marble because we played football that way sometimes. I almost went back to play with him. I’d told him a half lie. I didn’t have to help my grandmother and she wasn’t expecting me. My plan was to go down to Mermaid River to help with the selling and, when the sun began to set, the packing up of the leftovers and bringing it all back home.

  In front of a yellow house was a tree and under the tree were three women standing huddled close to each other. I saw my grandmother before she noticed me. A big-boned tall woman, she was hard to miss. She was picking at something wrapped in a piece of foil, and then she, Mrs. Angie, and Mrs. Wright were laughing loudly, the kind of laugh that made their whole bodies dance. For a moment it seemed as though the woman laughing as if she didn’t have one fret in the whole world wasn’t the same woman who quarreled with me. Then my grandmother saw me and I saw myself in her eyes, a twelve-year-old boy prone to trouble since I sometimes didn’t know what to do with myself. She started walking quickly toward me and I could see the questions in her face. She wanted to hear what happened, what trouble I had gotten into, since I never made it down to Mermaid River after school.

  “Wah ’appen, Samson?” my grandmother asked, when she was close enough to call out to me.


  “Nothin’.” I shrugged my shoulders.

  My grandmother stood in front of me wearing an old faded church dress and an old purse, the handles of which were tied around her waist. I knew the purse was where she kept the money she made from sales and the mints she sucked on when she felt for something in her mouth. I grew up hearing her say, “Mi feel fah something” and then she would look for the purse so she could suck on a red-and-white-striped mint. I hadn’t seen the purse in some months and I missed it because I used to take money when I wanted to buy a suck-suck at the shop, or a mint when I too felt for something in my mouth. I had been taking money and mints from that purse my entire childhood and I always suspected my grandmother knew, but when she finally caught on she said, “O Lawd, O Jesus, O heaven cum down an fill mi soul, di bwoy a thief fram mi,” and then she started keeping the purse somewhere in her bedroom. Although it had occurred to me to look for it, I hadn’t built up the ambition, especially since the last time I went into my grandmother’s bedroom to look for something she hid from me, I hit upon the pail she used in the nights when she couldn’t make it to the bathroom. She had forgotten to take the pail out that morning and it occurred to me that I was looking at the entire meal she had eaten and drunk the night before. Usually, she emptied out the pail in the toilet in the early mornings before I even climbed out of bed. I couldn’t say why I was so annoyed at being greeted with her bowel movements. At first, I thought it was her negligence that upset me, but then I realized, plain and simple, that I was angry that she had left the pail and created the opportunity to disgust me. At the time, I didn’t understand why my grandmother was so angry when she came home to meet my annoyance and scorn. It was the complaint I greeted her with when she walked into the house. She wanted to know what I was doing in her bedroom, and if the pail bothered me, why hadn’t I emptied it myself. She wanted to know why I left the pail in her bedroom for the entire day for her to come home and throw it out. She wanted to know how I could scorn the woman who had cleaned my vomit and wiped my behind and changed the sheets when I used to wet the bed. The whole incident bothered and embarrassed me, and my grandmother was so angry that she left me to prepare my own dinner. I hadn’t gone into her bedroom since.