How to Love a Jamaican

by Alexia Arthurs

  There were fleeting moments when she felt strongly for Glenroy. His eyes were so pretty; a green-brown stunning and warm that reminded her of sunlight. He made her laugh—channeling the world through the gaze of his Jamaican upbringing. He could be sweet, bringing her a dozen mangoes or a dozen roses and a bottle of wine when he came to see her. These moments were thrilling, but they were as fragile as spiderwebs because in one moment Glenroy wasn’t too bad and maybe she could imagine loving him, but then in the next moment he reminded her that he was a man who couldn’t speak proper English. She wondered if this was the nature of love—if it wasn’t a feeling as determined and continuous as the world made it seem. She felt that it was a question she was too old to still be asking.

  Maybe she’d been in love once. If love is ever present, a cycle as rhythmic as the sun and the moon, she’d been in love once. There was Winston from primary school—as children they had played together, and later in high school, they were friends. He’d always been a sensitive, reasonable boy, the kind of man women like to confide in. He was the son of a farmer, often helping in his father’s grounds after school. He’d been her first when she was seventeen. Many a time she’d met him at the grounds in the early evening, his clothes filthy and his skin smelling like toil, but making love this way, lying together in the bushes, made the whole thing more exciting. The first year she left for college in Kingston, she made up her mind that she deserved a higher class of man, not the kind of man who came home from work with dirt under his fingernails. Later, when she returned to teach at one of the local high schools, there were numerous opportunities when she could have looked meaningfully at him and told him that after all he was the man that she wanted. All those years he had remained at the periphery, and although there were other men who passed through her life and other women who passed through his, it was clear to the both of them that he was only waiting on the word from her because as a young man he had decided that she was the woman he would love. Whenever she considered his devotion, the fact that his dream girl at nine and at twenty-five was the same woman, the narrowness of his scope, the lack of imagination, displeased her. It further proved that he was too simple a man. It would have been different if he’d traveled, educated himself, and seen what the world of women had to offer and came back for her. Now, that would have been romantic. For two years, she was certain that she was to marry a man who was to become a doctor, but nearing the end of their second year together, he moved to Cuba to study. It took her long to recover from the fact that he hadn’t wanted her to go with him and that he wasn’t interested in a long-distance relationship. It would be a full year before another man touched her.

  Finally, Winston married another woman, and gave her three girl children. Whenever Doreen went back home and they linked up, he would ask in a teasing astonishment, “You still nuh marry?” “No man good enough for you,” he had told her on her last visit, and though he was smiling and it was to appear that he was only teasing her, there was a deliberate heaviness to his words, a history to them, a told-you-so, and they stayed with Doreen for a long time.

  * * *

  —

  Sex with Glenroy, when it finally came, was surprisingly good. They played the game men and women sometimes play—Glenroy wanted it more, and Doreen was modest, and eventually with time, that being his third visit to Iowa City, he was able to seduce her. They had been surprised by the other’s passion. “How it go?” he had asked after the first time. “Oh,” he said remembering, “a lady inna di streets an’ a freak inna di sheets.” With the African man, Doreen had initiated things. She saw him and guessed that he might have a big penis, and it had been a really long time for her, so she had strategized the series of events that would find them alone in the department after everyone else had gone home for the evening. They’d only stopped because he told her that he was to be married to a woman from back home who was soon to move to America. Weeks later, while squeezing the mangoes on sale at Walmart, Doreen saw the African custodian out of the corner of her eyes. He was with a woman wearing a hijab, who was picking out onions. When he looked over and saw Doreen, he turned his face away quickly. Later when Doreen saw him sweeping the department floor, she asked why he hadn’t said hello at Walmart and he’d said that he hadn’t seen her, and this caused her to laugh long and loud and he made up his face and moved away from her. After that, whenever they saw each other, they pretended as though they didn’t know each other.

  “Glenroy knows how to use his penis,” she told a girlfriend back in Jamaica over the phone, and they had both laughed because it was the only good thing Doreen had ever said about him.

  * * *

  —

  Six months after the first phone conversation, Glenroy was driving from Kansas City to Iowa City every other week. Doreen kept going back and forth questioning what she was doing with him, and whether she was only with him to fill the time before a man of better substance, one who was more intellectually engaging, came along. In Iowa City, the pickings of eligible black men were slim, and she felt invisible to other races. Mostly she believed that for the time being she couldn’t do any better than Glenroy. But he could be sweet. He found her sexy, and frequently told her so. And there were moments when they were naked after sex when she thought that she might be able to love him. He would wrap one arm around her and they would talk about life back home—about people they both knew, about the state of the country, about their mothers who were still making life in Jamaica. They would laugh at so-and-so foolish person, at their younger selves, at the ignorance and arrogance and the hilarity of Jamaicans. Sometimes, it seemed that he’d saved her from the loneliness of the Midwest. She never felt more connected to him than when they were talking about Jamaica. What ever happened to so-and-so person? she might ask. And he would explain that the person was now married and living in Canada, or moved to another parish, or the same as they remembered him. “Life in Jamaica sweet,” Glenroy would say, would always say, and Doreen would agree because it was true. They were of the same generation, the ones who had left the Caribbean as adults for better lives, and they would spend the rest of their years making comparisons, making complaints, but when they thought about it, when they really considered it, every road led to America. They would build retirement homes in Jamaica.

  “T’ree months from now we start talk marriage,” Glenroy had said after six months together, and Doreen had been so shocked by his presumption that she didn’t say anything. She smiled as though she was pleased.

  * * *

  —

  People back home didn’t understand why Doreen was still in school—she didn’t bother explaining everything that went into completing a PhD in economics, because it would have fallen on dunce ears. For some of her friends, her ambition impressed and amused them and at times provoked envy. “Eh eh! Look at the economist,” a friend breastfeeding her child said in a teasing way, when Doreen walked into her yard. Another friend looked at Doreen in a funny way and asked, “You nuh want fi have a baby?” She had said yes and hadn’t betrayed that if having a child was a possibility, she would have long ago crossed this goal off her list. And now even Glenroy was concerned with her uterus. “Aftah we marry, yuh ha fi hurry an’ get pregnant,” he’d told her.

  From when she was a little girl, Doreen had wanted to learn, and a degree in economics seemed like a practical choice. She believed that an education was what would separate her from her mother and her mother’s mother, women who lived such meager lives. In Iowa, her classmates talked of the cornfields as a way to signify that this was the kind of place their education had stolen them away to, but for Doreen the cornfields opened up her life to possibility, and anyway the cornfields were far enough away from town that she forgot about them until she got on the bus that took her the four hours to Chicago, where a friend from back home lived. It was disappointing to learn that Iowa City could give her little besides an education—she had hoped to
also meet a man, to marry, to have a child. Iowa was to take five years of her life, but she had already decided that she wouldn’t miss the place. Soon she was to begin the process of applying for jobs at universities across the country, because by next summer her teaching fellowship would have ended. It had crossed her mind that if she didn’t get a job for next fall, and university jobs were competitive, marrying Glenroy would be another way to stay in America legally, because by then her visa would have expired. With legal status, she would keep reapplying for jobs, and eventually realize the dream of becoming a tenure-track professor. Glenroy, it seemed, might be able to give her a few of the things she wanted. But at what cost? she often asked herself. What was the cost of marrying a less than ideal man?

  * * *

  —

  Doreen had wondered but she didn’t have the chance to ask because Glenroy was open about why his marriage to Crystal failed. The first time they met in person, he said that Crystal was nasty. “She wouldn’ clean. Nuh even her drawers,” he said. And then he explained how time and time again he had found bloody panties under the bed. “It easy fi cheat pon a woman when yuh cyaan respeck her,” Glenroy said, before explaining that cheating wasn’t in his nature but that no man wants to make love to his woman in a nasty house. He would go on to say that he suspected that something was wrong with Crystal, that she wasn’t too right in the head.

  * * *

  —

  For a long time, Doreen wouldn’t know that Glenroy was living with a woman and her children when he started visiting her in Iowa City. He’d left the fat woman, who brought him to America, for someone else, and had left the second woman for Doreen. He had tried a white woman and an African American, and realized that what he needed was a woman from back home. Doreen wouldn’t know any of this for a long time, and at first she was angry, but after some time she would wonder if every marriage wasn’t even a little convenient, because by then the baby was fat and pretty. When the little girl looked in her eyes in the soft way that young enough children look and look as though they are searching and seem to have found the person who can explain how the warm moist cave of a womb can become such a different world, it mattered even less to Doreen that her marriage managed to stand on the flimsy foundation she had for so long refused, deeming herself better than. When the child, who indeed she named Samantha, looked at her like that, it seemed that perhaps marriage was after all not the worst idea, and if it was, she reminded herself that a woman as resourceful as herself had options.

  WE EAT OUR DAUGHTERS

  My mother had two faces and a frying pot

  where she cooked up her daughters

  into girls

  before she fixed our dinner.

  My mother had two faces

  and a broken pot

  where she hid out a perfect daughter

  who was not me

  I am the sun and moon and forever hungry

  for her eyes.

  —AUDRE LORDE, “From the House of Yemanjá”

  Corrine

  The morning of the day my mother left my father for the first time, she played her Bob Marley records on his beloved record player. Back then my favorite song was “I Shot the Sheriff” and hers was “Is This Love.” We played and replayed our favorite songs, my mother adding to the coffee cups in the sink, and after lunchtime, she threw the record player and her wedding ring out the window, and finally, we got into a cab with the suitcase she had packed. What is it about first times? I remember that morning with the vibrancy of yesterday, but all the other times we left my father are memories that blur together.

  As a child, I used to examine my mother’s Bob Marley records. Why was she in love with him when she couldn’t stand my father? He was unkempt compared to my father, who believed that black people should be tidy so as not to draw negative attention. I decided that I was in love with Bob Marley too. This was why, when I met Christopher years later at a coffee shop in Berkeley, I joked that he was the ghost of Bob Marley, a reincarnation, my white boy, the lead singer of a reggae band when he wasn’t writing his dissertation on William Faulkner. And I, his Rita Marley—the joke went—without the infidelity.

  The day we met, I was sipping tea in a coffee shop while I read for one of my classes. I noticed the white man sitting next to me because he was nearly impossible to miss—his blond dreads were halfway down his back. I had forgotten about him until he leaned over to ask if I was enjoying my book.

  Now, I wonder if we would’ve become anything more than an encounter in a coffee shop if I hadn’t told him that I was Jamaican-born. This small fact, and I could tell that I’d become more interesting. What could a man brought up in an upper-middle-class family find to adore in a small island? Plenty. “Fuck resorts,” he told me that first day, and then he made an argument comparing tourism to colonialism that he’d had plenty of time to think about. His first trip to Jamaica he’d gone with Lindon, a friend from his undergraduate years at Harvard, an international student who invited Christopher into his family’s humble home. Sometimes I wonder what Christopher had been looking for, because if he hadn’t been looking for something, if his upbringing hadn’t been lacking in some way, he wouldn’t have nailed the island to the cross. I could never understand, as his parents and siblings were kind and loving enough. He saw that his classmate’s family didn’t have the kind of money his family had to squander—Christopher’s mother could walk into a shop because she felt like buying a new dress. When night fell, he and Lindon smoked herb and drank rum behind the chicken coop, and he was inspired by the clean air, the stars above, and the night’s darkness, thick and consuming and in this way unlike any night he had ever experienced. Of course, only ten days in Jamaica and he had managed to encounter a local beauty, who he talked to on the phone for six months until things simmered down.

  He didn’t become a devout Rastafarian until a few years into our marriage. He asked that I stop relaxing my hair, and instead of pants, I should wear long skirts. At first these demands didn’t feel like demands. They felt like requests, so I obliged. He asked why I continued to eat meat when I knew the benefits of a plant-based diet, and because this made sense, I cooked vegetarian meals for us, and for the children when they came along.

  “When yuh a guh lef’ dat madman?” my mother wants to know, whenever we talk on the phone. She says that I married a white man who doesn’t know the color of his skin. She says that it’s one thing to be with a Jamaican man who wants to run her life, which is referring to her preserved though unhappy marriage to my father without explicitly stating it, but that it’s another, worse thing to have a white man run my life. She says that her home is available when I’m ready to leave. I want to ask her, “Do you remember the first time we left? Don’t you remember that we kept coming back?” But there are certain questions a daughter doesn’t ask, and moreover, the past is the past now that she is almost content with my father, now that he is too old to beat her.

  This morning I get up as usual to blend the vegetables and fruits Christopher likes to drink for breakfast. He walks into the kitchen as the blender is going, and when he kisses the back of my neck, I turn around briefly to catch his blue eyes. For a moment, and there have been a million moments like these, I wish that he was just a white man comfortable with everything the world has and hasn’t given him. He pushes his dreadlocks out of his face, he pulls a glass from the cabinet and pours a glass of water, and I watch him.

  Renee

  There is a way to be cruel that seems Jamaican to me. But I’ve heard other islanders say the same thing, so maybe it’s a Caribbean thing. Though Africans and African Americans tell me that it’s a similar way with them, so maybe it’s a black thing. It’s saying exactly what you think, regardless of how it will affect the listener. Perhaps this is the language of the oppressed—the colonized, the enslaved. Maybe our kind doesn’t have time for soft words. My
friend, from Jamaica same as me, says that she prefers this to people talking behind her back. I don’t know that I agree.

  I knew that something wasn’t normal—or at least I suspected it. But I didn’t think of the words “eating disorder” until a therapist said it to me in my early twenties, and then I kept the words to myself because no one I knew would understand. And also: How to explain that I had an American disease, a white woman’s disease?

  There. We used to live there. Chester Street, but I’ve forgotten the house number. I could go look, but my body doesn’t feel like moving from this bus stop. See how that corner of Chester is a fried chicken spot now? I can’t remember what it used it be, but I want to believe it was another neighborhood grease spot, maybe Chinese. The other corner is the Associated supermarket. When I turn my head to look in its direction, it is as though I’m turning my head to look at history. The history I remember is my sister, my brother, and me walking behind my mother—she was still our mother hen then—on Saturday evenings to buy something special we ate while we watched television. Now, who should exit the supermarket but the man who lived and maybe still lives in the house next door. He nods my way and says “Hello,” but it has been twelve years since we moved and I can’t tell if he recalls my face. I haven’t forgotten him, young-looking and handsome, as if he hasn’t aged at all, brown-skinned like the president. You know how there are people who don’t know you but you know them? You’ve been watching them long enough so that if they bent their head over the bed you’re dying in when old age finally licks you, and even though your eyes aren’t what they used to be, you recognize them almost as clearly as you recognize the man you’ve been loving for longtime or the children you pushed from inside you. I couldn’t forget him because I memorized his ways for the two years we lived on Chester Street. I saw him every day walking the streets, always neatly dressed and stopping to say hello to everybody, helping old women carry their bags. That kind of guy. If you didn’t know that drugs messed up his head and that’s what keeps him polite and simple, you would see his ways and hear what he has to say and wonder what he’s doing in Brownsville with these other street boys.