Eric put his feet up on the chair beside him. “You mean the class lines, don’t you? You’re surprised that black people can discriminate against their own.” When she nodded, he lowered his voice and looked around at the few customers. “You know, as one expat to another—I just want to call a spade a spade, no pun intended—one of the hardest things to get used to is the fact that black people can be just as prejudiced as white people. In America we divide people up according to race. You’re white, you’re black, you’re Asian, and so on. That’s what we’re comfortable with. Most tourists come out here expecting one of two things. Either the same thing that they’re used to back home, the same old race prejudices, or the idealistic kind of Bob Marley version of life—peace and love, you know.”
He looked at his scaly toes and twiddled them. “But what we have here, the reality, is that class is more important than race in this country. With Jamaicans, if you’re from a family that has been educated for generations, whatever the color, where they speak Standard English rather than patois, where they’ve gone to the best schools and colleges—then you’re upper class, or upper-middle at the lowest. It doesn’t matter if you don’t make a go of your life, as long as you’re from an educated family, you’re always considered up here.” He raised his hand, then dropped it. “The bad news is that if you were born down here, you pretty much always stay down here.”
“Can’t people work their way up?”
“A few people from the lower classes either have a successful business or get a profession, but that doesn’t make them upper class. It takes a few generations for that family to move into the upper classes. That’s just the way it is.”
“Rather like England, isn’t it? Our accent, our origins, our education determine what other people think of us. Until recently, if you were in the trades, in business, you were looked down on. Even today, although things are shifting a bit, if you speak with a rural accent, even if you make a lot of money, you’re thought of as rather crass, really.”
“A holdover, I suppose.”
“Where does race come in here then, or does it?”
“Oh, it comes in.” Eric nodded firmly. “Don’t worry about that. You tend to find the lighter-skinned people—the brownings, they call them—higher up the food chain. It’s been that way for a long time. But things have been changing. There are now educated people, high-class people, who are very dark skinned and in positions of power. It’s education and social background that count, ultimately.
Race isn’t as important. When it comes to marriage, a lot of those high-class people, black and brown, marry white people, so intermarriage isn’t a big thing. In fact, for some people it’s rather prestigious to marry a white person, regardless of their class. There used to be discrimination against white people during the seventies and eighties, so I hear, anyway, but that wave has died down and the old class prejudices have come back. You’ll even find black and brown upper-class people talking against each other sometimes.” He flapped his hand. “It’s all mixed up, kind of crazy.”
“How do you know all of this?”
“I get to hear all sides.”
“What status do you have, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Eric snorted. “White foreigners automatically fit into upper-middle or upper class, a throwback from colonial days, I guess—even more so when you’re a big fish in a little pond.”
“I’m not quite sure where I’d fit in,” the woman said, shaking her flaming head. “Not that it matters.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
* * *
The lone car was taking forever to pass. Later, she would recall it down to the smallest detail, was able to see, hear, and smell everything, to stretch time out and contract it like a rubber band, especially the approach of the car.
Rubbing one sandal against what felt like a mosquito bite on the other leg, Sarah waited to cross the road to Roper’s driveway. It wasn’t even noon, her watch was saying, but she’d finished painting for the day and packed up, among her accoutrements one of the thirty-six-by-twenty-four-inch sheets. The paper had seemed monstrous when she’d taped it to the board on her easel, but her new determination to get out of Roper’s house as quickly as possible had fired her up to make a start on the large painting.
The morning had been heavily overcast, the coconut leaves making an empty, rattling sound in the wind gusts. Unlike itself, the ocean’s aquamarines and turquoises had turned a solid mass of gray. Its life force seemed diminished without sunlight. The color of the sea was that of a dying human, she’d reflected while she painted it, ashen like her father in the hospital.
No one had passed on the beach today. No child had come, finger in mouth, to stare at her or her painting, and what little enthusiasm she’d started with was now gone. She’d awakened that morning determined to get done with her host’s challenge. No more dillydallying, she’d told herself. Her naive fascination with Jamaica was gone, helped in part by Roper’s behavior and Eric’s explanations. It was time to finish the painting and go home to the familiar. But other than a watercolor of a lusterless gray sea and sky four inches wide and six inches long in the middle of the sheet, the paper she’d brought was still largely blank. With a charcoal cloud darkening the air by the second, she’d packed up and trudged to the side of the road.
“Get on with it,” Sarah muttered to the approaching vehicle. The car slowed to a crawl, the occupants looking straight at her. She thought about crossing in front of it, but decided against it. She’d already seen drivers racing side by side down the narrow two-lane road, once seen an Ocho Rios taxi drive onto the sidewalk to overtake a car. It was an illogical country this place, a madhouse, and she would wait.
Danny hadn’t come today. He hadn’t come yesterday either. He’d explained when he dropped her off after their trip to Boston Beach that he had several appointments coming up. The excuses weren’t a surprise; she’d been waiting for them.
Things would probably come to a halt, she’d thought, after she admitted to not enjoying sex. Despite his gallant suggestion that they should continue seeing each other but be celibate, despite the dinner on Monday night and their day together on Tuesday, she knew that her sexual phobia, whatever it was, had put a damper on things. He was a virile man, Danny, a man who would want lusty sex with a willing partner, and she didn’t blame him. Of course, he wouldn’t tell her to her face what the cause of his absence was, because, even if he wasn’t schooled in the proper use of cutlery, he was a gentleman, unlike Roper.
If it had only been Danny’s pulling away, that would have been one thing, but it was the news he broke while they were paddling around at Boston Beach that had made her flounder, quite literally. He’d started talking about the small hotels he’d visited recently, saying there was one that he’d seen last weekend that he really liked, a hotel on a cliff.
“Did you go with Eric?” she’d asked.
“No, I was with Janet,” he’d announced with his usual honesty, sounding nonchalant. She’d let go of his shoulder and for a few seconds couldn’t touch the sand below. She’d had to paddle hard to stay afloat in the tossing waves, one wave covering her head and panicking her, while he plunged underwater, preventing further questions.
She still couldn’t think of an appropriate comment when he waded ashore behind her, but it was obvious why he’d returned to Janet. While they were toweling off, their backs to each other, he started to say something and stopped, changing it to tell her he had stuff to do over the next few days and would be busy.
“You’re a free agent,” she’d answered.
Last night, sitting alone on her porch in the moonlight, she’d decided, firmly this time, that she was going to stay away from Danny Caines. Not only did her host disapprove of him, which made it difficult to bring him to the house again, but he was quite openly having a relationship with two women at one time, one of them being her, the other woman not
to be messed with. It was too much like a telly drama. These kinds of things never happened to her, at least not until now. Her only comfort was that Danny had been honest with her, even if it was to confess his infidelity. Penny would have called him a rotten cheater. Roper would have called him lower class.
Her mind was made up. Despite her email to Penny the week before—the first in weeks—telling her she’d met an interesting man, despite her tentative foray into sex and the excitement she felt whenever she saw Danny, it was over. Fini, as her mother would have said. The only solution was to paint the bloody painting and get out.
She’d wanted desperately to tell someone, Sonja perhaps, about Janet’s tirade in the bathroom. Her decision had been to keep quiet about the incident, but in doing so she’d felt more alone than she’d ever felt, which was saying something, because aloneness had lived with her all her life. Since the bathroom incident, her sense of injustice had grown. Janet, Roper, and now Danny had merged into one alien behemoth and she was trapped, the damn painting blocking her exit.
Since her argument with Roper she’d stayed largely to herself, saying little or nothing at dinner and excusing herself before dessert on the grounds of having gained weight. Sonja was keeping a low profile, spending most of the day in her office, and Ford was rehearsing endlessly, the sounds of his trumpet filling the house, alternating between scales and wails.
The white car drew up alongside and stopped. Two men were inside.
“Yow,” the young man in the passenger seat greeted her, his arm raised. He looked to be in his early twenties and he had unusually square lips framed by an even squarer jaw. His hair was cut close to his head and shaped in neat points at the corners. Certain they were asking for directions, Sarah was about to tell them she was a stranger here herself when the man opened the car door and stepped out.
“May I help you?” she asked.
“Your name is Sarah?”
“Yes.”
“Then you can help me, yes,” the man said, in no hurry. On the other side, the driver got out of the car, both car doors left open, the engine running. Sarah’s heart began to pound in her chest and she stepped back.
“You coming with us,” the driver said. He was a bigger man, in his thirties, perhaps, his arm muscles swelling the white T-shirt. He wore a thin gold chain around his neck and several gold rings on one hand.
Sarah clutched her easel box between them. “No, thanks, I’m going home.” She looked quickly up and down the road but saw nothing, no cars, no people. A feeling of déjà vu sent a shiver down her spine.
“We just giving you a ride,” the square-jawed man said, and reached for her arm.
“I don’t need a ride,” she said, snatching her arm away, standing her ground, taller than the first man, the same height as the second. The younger man grabbed her wrist. She’d been here before, seen a man’s hand grabbing her wrist before, felt his fingers chafing her skin.
“We not asking you, we telling you,” the driver said in a growly voice, talking as if he was in charge. His eyebrows overhung his eyes, making them almost invisible. “You coming with us.”
She looked at the square-jawed man fiercely and tried to pull her wrist free, tried not to look afraid. “Let me go!”
The driver pulled the box and bag out of her hands. The stool he threw down. “Get in the fucking car.” He pronounced it focking, the brutishness of it never forgotten.
“No!” she said, pulling away, tugging at her arm, feeling the man’s grip tighten. She wanted to say they had no right to do this, no right whatsoever, but her voice abandoned her. The younger man dragged her to the back of the car and yanked the door open just as the first raindrops came splattering down.
“Get in,” the driver ordered. “Don’t make me use the gun.”
He walked up close beside her, one hand raised to slap her. “Get in the raas claat car.”
Square Jaw shoved her into the backseat and her head was forced into a black hood as the smell of sweet, damp earth rose up and filled her nostrils.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
* * *
Opening the drawer all the way and lifting his briefs, Shad complained to invisible listeners. “Pshaw, man, the thing just disappear.” He patted the bottom of the drawer.
Two minutes later he found what he was looking for—the little plastic bag with his grandmother’s grave dirt. Better than any obeah man’s oil, his good luck charm went with him everywhere. He tucked the bag deep into his trouser pocket, walked through the living room, and was closing the front door when he heard footsteps coming up the steps.
“Evening, Dadda,” Rickia called in a tired voice. She was carrying her books, and the skirt of her school uniform had dirt on it.
“You okay?” Shad said, and reached out to his daughter’s arm and its fresh bruise.
“Matthew pushed me down.”
“That ignorant boy, he probably just like you. That’s what boys do when they like a girl. Tell him if he trouble you again, he have to face me, you hear? What happen to Joella?”
“She gone next door to pick up Joshua.”
“Okay, homework time now. No TV, you hear me?”
”Yes, Dadda. Walk good.”
Fingering the bag of red soil from the Holy Sepulchre Baptist cemetery, Shad started along the main road to his evening shift. He definitely needed Granny’s stubborn faith today, needed to remind himself of her prophesy that he’d be a man of means one day, because that day was looking further and further away, what with Janet upsetting the only man who wanted to put money into Largo. When he’d told Beth the story, she’d shaken her head over the shirt she was ironing. It was pure blackmail, she’d declared, and no good could come out of it.
Changing course, Shad turned down the lane where Janet lived.
“Hold the dog!” he called at the gate. He could see Janet having a beast prowling the yard.
“Who that?” a voice answered from inside the house.
“Me, Shad.”
“Shadrack Myers, what you want?” Janet appeared barefooted on the verandah in a half-sewn dress, the seams turned inside out. Chalk marks at the top of the dress hinted at a plunging neckline to come. Without makeup, her face looked shiny and tired, forty-year-old bags under her eyes.
He climbed the stairs and sat down. “I want to talk to you.”
Janet put her hands on her hips, the corners of her mouth turned up. “This the first time you ever come to my house since I come here from Port Maria. It must be something serious.”
“I want to talk to you about something that concern everybody in Largo, especially you.”
Janet crossed her arms. “What you talking about? I don’t have no time to waste today.”
“I don’t even think you know what stupidness you doing.”
“Look here, boy, I older than you. Don’t tell me what I can do.” She spun around to go inside, but turned to face him again. “What you come to tell me, anyway?”
“Sit down.”
“The dress have pins.”
“Sit down.”
After making a face at him, Janet went inside and returned wearing shorts. “I don’t even want to hear it, all this stupidness you think I doing.”
Shad looked at her in silence until she sat down with a pursed mouth and crossed her legs.
“I hear you make Danny promise—” he started.
“Is none of your business.”
“You know where this could end up?”
“With me going to America.”
“You realize you could kill the whole town with all this scheming to get a green card, and all the obeah you putting on Danny?”
“Is you talking stupidness now.”
“If he ever find out you put oil-of-whatever on him, you don’t think he going to get vex and leave Largo? You know what that mean? He is the on
liest man who ever interested in building up the town. Nobody else going to want to come down here, to this little hole at the end of the island. And if you get him vex and he gone back to America, you think we getting any hotel?”
The woman stood up and put her hands on her hips. “Just get out my yard, you hear me.”
“You just being selfish if you keep running the man down.”
“Leave my yard.”
“I leaving,” Shad said, getting to his feet. “But know this, if the hotel business fall down because of you, the whole town going to be after you. Everybody hoping to get little work and little money from the new hotel, and they going to know that is you kill they dreams. You not going to be able to sew nobody’s clothes, because everybody going to say is you put obeah on the hotel.”
Janet pulled in her bottom lip. “You just jealous. You think I don’t know you want to go to America, too?”
“If it go well, I happy for you,” Shad called behind him as he jogged down the steps. “But don’t come back to my bar if everything mash up. You not welcome no more. No more freeness—like how you never pay your bill—and no place else for you to meet American men in Largo. Remember that!”
He was striding down the main road, still hot from his meeting, when he saw a man sitting on the beach in red trunks, his naked back to the road. Arms resting on his crossed legs, he was perfectly still, staring out to sea like a fisherman’s widow.
The Sea Grape Tree Page 18
