Annie John Read online

  When Mr. Nigel laughed and his laughing turned out to have such an effect on me, I leaped out of bed and cast myself at him with such force that it threw him to the ground. Then, in a burst of chat, I told him all these things as they rushed through my mind: about my father’s great-grandfather, and about himself and Mr. Earl and Miss Catherine. He took it all in as if he were a disinterested party, as if it were all news to him.

  * * *

  I don’t know how long it was after this that Ma Chess appeared. I heard my mother and father wonder to each other how she came to us, for she appeared on a day when the steamer was not due, and so they didn’t go to meet her at the jetty. She and my mother stood at the foot of my bed looking down at me and whispering to each other. They tugged at and smoothed down each other’s clothes when they wanted to make a particular point. When Ma Chess leaned over me, she smelled of many different things, all of them even more abominable than the black sachet Ma Jolie had pinned to my nightie. Whatever Ma Jolie knew, my grandmother knew at least ten times more. How she regretted that my mother didn’t show more of an interest in obeah things. Ma Chess never took a bath in just plain water and soap. She took a bath, once a month or so, in water in which things animal and vegetable had been boiled for a long time. Before she took this bath, she first swam in the sea. As she leaned over me now, she poked in the same way Ma Jolie had. Then she said to my mother, in French patois, “Not like Johnnie. Not like Johnnie at all.” She stood at my mother’s side again, and they continued to tug at and smooth down each other’s clothes.

  When my mother was thirteen years old, her brother John died. He was twenty-three then. My mother and her sister worshipped him, his own mother worshipped him, and after he died they all said that life would never be the same. They talked so much about him and in such a way that sometimes I was sure that he had just stepped out on an errand and would be returning at any moment now, that I would see him rounding the corner with the special gait they said he had of skipping along every few steps. Almost everything he ever owned or wore was kept in a large trunk in Ma Chess’s room, and when I went to visit her, Ma Chess, pretending to air out the things in the trunk, would show all of it as if it were part of a great exhibition. When they spoke of him to me, they would say “your Uncle Johnnie,” as if he hadn’t died long before I was born. My mother remembered all the jokes and games he played with her so well that she played the same jokes and games with me, and if I seemed not to understand what was happening she would say, “Well, your Uncle Johnnie did that to me,” to clear up the mystery. My Aunt Mary married a man, Monsieur Pacquet, her parents could not stand, but he was a man Uncle Johnnie had met in Roseau when taking in a crop of green figs and had spoken extremely well of to his sister. When Uncle Johnnie got sick, Ma Chess was sure that a doctor was the last thing he needed. Pa Chess was sure that a doctor was the one thing he needed, and Pa Chess got his way. For two years, Uncle Johnnie lay in bed, each day looking rosier and rosier. Then one day he died. On the day he died, he had never looked better. When he died, a large worm bored its way out of his leg and rested on his shinbone. Then it, too, died. From that day on, Ma Chess never spoke to Pa Chess again, even though they lived in the same house. She never said a word for him or against him, and if his name came up she would absent herself in spirit—and in body, too, if his name continued to come up. Pa Chess not only oversaw everything about the funeral, he even preached a sermon—the usual thing: about everything happening for the best, people meeting again and living in eternal bliss. Ma Chess did not attend the funeral, though she visited the grave on special occasions. She had all her clothes made up in black cloth—the only color she wore from that day on.

  Ma Chess settled in on the floor at the foot of my bed, eating and sleeping there, and soon I grew to count on her smells and the sound her breath made as it went in and out of her body. Sometimes at night, when I would feel that I was all locked up in the warm falling soot and could not find my way out, Ma Chess would come into my bed with me and stay until I was myself—whatever that had come to be by then—again. I would lie on my side, curled up like a little comma, and Ma Chess would lie next to me, curled up like a bigger comma, into which I fit. In the daytime, while my mother attended my father, keeping him company as he ate, Ma Chess fed me my food, coaxing me to take mouthful after mouthful. She bathed me and changed my clothes and sheets and did all the other things that my mother used to do. Ma Chess and my father kept out of each other’s way—not so much because they didn’t like each other but because they didn’t see the world in the same way. Ma Chess once asked my father to tell her exactly what it was he really did, and when he said that he was off to build a house she said, “A house? Why live in a house? All you need is a nice hole in the ground, so you can come and go as you please.”

  * * *

  It rained every day for three and a half months, and for all of those days I was sick in bed. I knew quite well that I did not have the power to make the atmosphere feel as sick as I felt, but still I couldn’t help putting the two together. For one day, just as mysteriously as my sickness came, so it left. At the same time, just as mysteriously as the rain came, so it left. It stopped raining for a day, it stopped raining for two days, and then it stopped raining altogether. Drought returned, and, except that the sea was bigger than it used to be, everything was the same again. When the sun started to come out once more, my windows were thrown open and the heat and light rushed in. I had to shield my eyes, I was so unused to seeing everything. The rain had ruined my mother’s garden and some fruit trees; a few clothes my mother forgot in her ironing basket had grown mildew; and a foundation for a house my father was building had washed away. My mother restored her garden and the fruit trees; she knew of a way to remove mildew from clothes, and they were restored also. My father put in a new foundation and continued building the house. When it became quite clear that I really was getting better, Ma Chess left, and in the way she came, too: with no announcement and on a day when the steamer was not due in port.

  One day, I was taken outside for the first time in a long while. When I stepped on the ground, it didn’t move. The sounds I heard didn’t pass through me, forming a giant, angry funnel. The things I saw stayed in their places. My mother sat me down under a tree, and I watched a boy she had paid sixpence climb up a coconut tree to get me some coconuts. My mother looked at my pinched, washed-out face and said, “Poor Little Miss, you look so sad.” Just at that moment, I was not feeling sad at all. I was feeling how much I never wanted to see a boy climb a coconut tree again, how much I never wanted to see the sun shine day in, day out again, how much I never wanted to see my mother bent over a pot cooking me something that she felt would do me good when I ate it, how much I never wanted to feel her long, bony fingers against my cheek again, how much I never wanted to hear her voice in my ear again, how much I longed to be in a place where nobody knew a thing about me and liked me for just that reason, how much the whole world into which I was born had become an unbearable burden and I wished I could reduce it to some small thing that I could hold underwater until it died. Disguising how I felt, I looked up at my mother, tilted my head to one side, and smiled, and this pleased her. Walking back to my room, my mother and I both silently noticed that I now towered over her. I was so unused to this that I made my already stooped back—which came from bad posture, and which no amount of scolding could cure—look even more so. During my sickness, I had grown to a considerable height—almost equal to my grandmother’s. In bed now, I had to double myself up to fit properly.

  Soon I was able to return to school. Because of my new height, I needed new uniforms and new shoes, for my feet had grown also. I had the skirt of my uniform made to a length that ended just below my calves. No one quarreled with this, for we were always being urged not to show our legs. I could not do anything about my shoes, for we could wear only one special kind bought at one special store, but I bought a hat whose crown and brim were too big for me, and when I wore it m
y head was held down and it was hard to see my face. Walking to and from school, my long-skirt uniform hanging on my thin form, my head held down, my back curved in an exaggerated stoop, one arm held behind me and resting on my lower back, the other anchoring the bag that held my books, each step I took purposely timid, I created such a picture that apparently everyone talked about me. Or so I was told by Gwen, formerly the love of my life, now reduced to an annoying acquaintance. Along with all that, I acquired a strange accent—at least, no one had ever heard anyone talk that way before—and some other tricks. If someone behaved toward me in a way that didn’t meet with my approval, without saying a word I would look at them directly with one eyebrow raised. I always got an apology. If someone asked me a question, I would begin my answer with the words “Actually” or “As a matter of fact.” It had the effect of allowing no room for doubt. I left people’s company if they said or did something I did not care for, and I had made my presence so felt that when I removed myself my absence was felt, too. Many girls wanted to show me up, and tried, but all attempts failed. I could see that everything about me aroused envy and discontent, and that made me happy—the only happiness I knew then. I never mentioned my sickness, and if the subject came up I made the appearance of not caring to talk about it. When I finally wished to say something, I would say, “During the time of my illness.” How I loved the sound of the words as they rolled off my tongue, and it wasn’t long before I made all the other girls wish that they would get sick also.

  Chapter Eight

  A Walk to the Jetty

  “My name is Annie John.” These were the first words that came into my mind as I woke up on the morning of the last day I spent in Antigua, and they stayed there, lined up one behind the other, marching up and down, for I don’t know how long. At noon on that day, a ship on which I was to be a passenger would sail to Barbados, and there I would board another ship, which would sail to England, where I would study to become a nurse. My name was the last thing I saw the night before, just as I was falling asleep; it was written in big, black letters all over my trunk, sometimes followed by my address in Antigua, sometimes followed by my address as it would be in England. I did not want to go to England, I did not want to be a nurse, but I would have chosen going off to live in a cavern and keeping house for seven unruly men rather than go on with my life as it stood. I never wanted to lie in this bed again, my legs hanging out way past the foot of it, tossing and turning on my mattress, with its cotton stuffing all lumped just where it wasn’t a good place to be lumped. I never wanted to lie in my bed again and hear Mr. Ephraim driving his sheep to pasture—a signal to my mother that she should get up to prepare my father’s and my bath and breakfast. I never wanted to lie in my bed and hear her get dressed, washing her face, brushing her teeth, and gargling. I especially never wanted to lie in my bed and hear my mother gargling again.

  Lying there in the half-dark of my room, I could see my shelf, with my books—some of them prizes I had won in school, some of them gifts from my mother—and with photographs of people I was supposed to love forever no matter what, and with my old thermos, which was given to me for my eighth birthday, and some shells I had gathered at different times I spent at the sea. In one corner stood my washstand and its beautiful basin of white enamel with blooming red hibiscus painted at the bottom and an urn that matched. In another corner were my old school shoes and my Sunday shoes. In still another corner, a bureau held my old clothes. I knew everything in this room, inside out and outside in. I had lived in this room for thirteen of my seventeen years. I could see in my mind’s eye even the day my father was adding it onto the rest of the house. Everywhere I looked stood something that had meant a lot to me, that had given me pleasure at some point, or could remind me of a time that was a happy time. But as I was lying there my heart could have burst open with joy at the thought of never having to see any of it again.

  If someone had asked me for a little summing up of my life at that moment as I lay in bed, I would have said, “My name is Annie John. I was born on the fifteenth of September, seventeen years ago, at Holberton Hospital, at five o’clock in the morning. At the time I was born, the moon was going down at one end of the sky and the sun was coming up at the other. My mother’s name is Annie also. My father’s name is Alexander, and he is thirty-five years older than my mother. Two of his children are four and six years older than she is. Looking at how sickly he has become and looking at the way my mother now has to run up and down for him, gathering the herbs and barks that he boils in water, which he drinks instead of the medicine the doctor has ordered for him, I plan not only never to marry an old man but certainly never to marry at all. The house we live in my father built with his own hands. The bed I am lying in my father built with his own hands. If I get up and sit on a chair, it is a chair my father built with his own hands. When my mother uses a large wooden spoon to stir the porridge we sometimes eat as part of our breakfast, it will be a spoon that my father has carved with his own hands. The sheets on my bed my mother made with her own hands. The curtains hanging at my window my mother made with her own hands. The nightie I am wearing, with scalloped neck and hem and sleeves, my mother made with her own hands. When I look at things in a certain way, I suppose I should say that the two of them made me with their own hands. For most of my life, when the three of us went anywhere together I stood between the two of them or sat between the two of them. But then I got too big, and there I was, shoulder to shoulder with them more or less, and it became not very comfortable to walk down the street together. And so now there they are together and here I am apart. I don’t see them now the way I used to, and I don’t love them now the way I used to. The bitter thing about it is that they are just the same and it is I who have changed, so all the things I used to be and all the things I used to feel are as false as the teeth in my father’s head. Why, I wonder, didn’t I see the hypocrite in my mother when, over the years, she said that she loved me and could hardly live without me, while at the same time proposing and arranging separation after separation, including this one, which, unbeknownst to her, I have arranged to be permanent? So now I, too, have hypocrisy, and breasts (small ones), and hair growing in the appropriate places, and sharp eyes, and I have made a vow never to be fooled again.”

  Lying in my bed for the last time, I thought, This is what I add up to. At that, I felt as if someone had placed me in a hole and was forcing me first down and then up against the pressure of gravity. I shook myself and prepared to get up. I said to myself, “I am getting up out of this bed for the last time.” Everything I would do that morning until I got on the ship that would take me to England I would be doing for the last time, for I had made up my mind that, come what may, the road for me now went only in one direction: away from my home, away from my mother, away from my father, away from the everlasting blue sky, away from the everlasting hot sun, away from people who said to me, “This happened during the time your mother was carrying you.” If I had been asked to put into words why I felt this way, if I had been given years to reflect and come up with the words of why I felt this way, I would not have been able to come up with so much as the letter “A.” I only knew that I felt the way I did, and that this feeling was the strongest thing in my life.

  * * *

  The Anglican church bell struck seven. My father had already bathed and dressed and was in his workshop puttering around. As if the day of my leaving were something to celebrate, they were treating it as a holiday, and nothing in the usual way would take place. My father would not go to work at all. When I got up, my mother greeted me with a big, bright “Good morning”—so big and bright that I shrank before it. I bathed quickly in some warm bark water that my mother had prepared for me. I put on my underclothes—all of them white and all of them smelling funny. Along with my earrings, my neck chain, and my bracelets, all made of gold from British Guiana, my underclothes had been sent to my mother’s obeah woman, and whatever she had done to my jewelry and underclothes woul
d help protect me from evil spirits and every kind of misfortune. The things I never wanted to see or hear or do again now made up at least three weeks’ worth of grocery lists. I placed a mark against obeah women, jewelry, and white underclothes. Over my underclothes, I put on an around-the-yard dress of my mother’s. The clothes I would wear for my voyage were a dark-blue pleated skirt and a blue-and-white checked blouse (the blue in the blouse matched exactly the blue of my skirt) with a large sailor collar and with a tie made from the same material as the skirt—a blouse that came down a long way past my waist, over my skirt. They were lying on a chair, freshly ironed by my mother. Putting on my clothes was the last thing I would do just before leaving the house. Miss Cornelia came and pressed my hair and then shaped it into what felt like a hundred corkscrews, all lying flat against my head so that my hat would fit properly.