Annie John Read online

  Once, in a game we were playing, something terrible happened. A man had recently killed his girlfriend and a man who was his best friend when he found them drinking together in a bar. Their blood splattered all over him. The cutlass he had used to kill them in hand, he walked the mile or so to the police station with the other customers of the bar and some people they picked up along the way. The murder of these two people immediately became a big scandal, and the most popular calypso song that year was all about it. It became a big scandal because the murderer was from an old, well-off, respected family, and everybody wondered if he would be hanged, which was the penalty for murder; also it became a scandal because everyone had known the woman and all had predicted that she would come to a bad end. Everything about this soon became a spectacle. During the funerals of the murdered man and woman, people lined the streets and followed the hearses from the church to the cemetery. During the trial of the murderer, the courtroom was always packed. When the judge sentenced the man to be hanged, the whole courtroom gasped in shock. On the morning that he was hanged, people gathered outside the jail and waited until the jail’s church bell rang, showing that the hanging was completed. Mineu and I had overheard our parents talk so much about this event that it wasn’t long before he made up a game about it. As usual, Mineu played all the big parts. He played the murdered man and the murderer, going back and forth; the girlfriend we left silent. When the case got to court, Mineu played judge, jury, prosecutor, and condemned man, sitting in the condemned man’s box. Nothing was funnier than seeing him, using some old rags as a wig for his part of the judge, pass sentence on himself; nothing was funnier than seeing him, as the drunken hangman, hang himself. And after he was hanged, I, as his mother, came and wept over the body as it lay on the ground. Then we would get up and start the whole thing over again. No sooner had we completed the episode than we were back at the bar, with Mineu quarreling with himself and his girlfriend and then putting an end to everything with a few quick strokes. We always tried to make every detail as close to the real thing as we imagined it, and so we had gone to the trouble of finding old furniture to make a desk for the judge and a place for the jury to sit, and we set out some stones facing the judge to represent both where the spectators might sit and the spectators themselves. When it came to the hanging, we wanted that to be real, too, so Mineu had found a piece of rope and tied it to the top bar of the gate to his yard, and then he would make a noose and put his head in it. When the noose was around his neck, he would grab the rope from above and then swing on it back and forth to show that he was hanged and already dead. All of our playing together came to an end when something bad almost happened. We were playing in the usual way when we came to the part of the noose around the neck. When he lifted himself off the ground, the noose tightened. When he let go of the rope to loosen the noose with his hands, that only made matters worse, and the noose tightened even more. His mouth opened as he tried to get breath, and then his tongue began to come out of his mouth. His body, hanging from the gate, began to swing back and forth, and as it did it banged against the gate, and it made a sound as if he were swinging on the gate—the very thing we were always being told not to do. As all this happened, I just stood there and stared. I must have known that I should go and call for help, but I was unable to move. Slam, slam went the gate, and soon his mother began to call out, “Children, leave the gate alone.” Then, hearing the gate continue to slam, she came out to us in a fury, because we were not obeying her, and she was just about to shout at us when she saw her child swinging from the gate by his neck. She screamed and rushed over to him, calling out to a neighbor, who came immediately with a cutlass and cut the rope from around Mineu’s neck. When his mother came and started to scream, only then could I scream, too, and I ran over to him with her, and we both cried over him as he fell to the ground. Much was said about my not calling for help, and everybody wondered what would have happened if his mother hadn’t been nearby. I didn’t know what to make of my own behavior, and I could not explain myself, as everybody kept asking me to do. I could see that even my mother was ashamed of the way I had behaved.

  It was this that I remembered as I saw Mineu’s face across the street, and so I walked over and said in my best, most polite young-lady voice, “Hallo, Mineu. I am so glad to see you. Don’t you remember me?” It was true that I was glad to see him. For just remembering all the things that he and I used to do reminded me of how happy I had been and how much my mother and everyone else adored me and how, when looking at me, people used to say, “What a beautiful child!”

  At first, he just looked at me. Then he said, “Oh, yes. Annie. Annie John. I remember you. I had heard you were a big girl now.” As he said this, he shook my outstretched hand. His friends stood off to one side, a little bit apart from us. They stood in that ridiculous way of boys: one leg crossing the other, hands jammed deep into pockets, eyes looking you up and down. They were whispering things to each other, and their shoulders were heaving with amusement—at me, I could only suppose. I thought that since he was someone I knew, he couldn’t really be like them, but as we stood, more or less speechless, in front of each other, I saw him glancing at them out of the corner of his eye, smiling in a knowing way and then looking back straight at me, a serious look on his face.

  Feeling ashamed, for I could tell that they were making fun of me, I said to him, “Well, goodbye then,” and I offered him my hand again.

  He and his friends walked off, their backs shaking with laughter—at me, no doubt. As I watched them, I wished that right there I could turn them into cinder blocks, so that one moment if you were walking behind them you were walking behind four boys and the next moment you had to be careful not to stumble over some cinder blocks. Feeling that in this whole incident Mineu had been cruel made me remember something. It was the last time that we had played together. In a game we were making up on the spot, I took off all my clothes and he led me to a spot under a tree, where I was to sit until he told me what to do next. It wasn’t long before I realized that the spot he had picked out was a red ants’ nest. Soon the angry ants were all over me, stinging me in my private parts, and as I cried and scratched, trying to get the ants off me, he fell down on the ground laughing, his feet kicking the air with happiness. His mother refused to admit that he had done something wrong, and my mother never spoke to her again.

  * * *

  I walked home, cutting through the churchyard of the Methodist church (my own church). Except for two lizards chasing each other across my path, I wasn’t aware of anything on the outside. Inside, however, the thimble that weighed worlds spun around and around; as it spun, it bumped up against my heart, my chest, my stomach, and whatever it touched felt as if I had been scorched there. I thought that I had better get home quickly, for I began to feel alternately too big and too small. First, I grew so big that I took up the whole street; then I grew so small that nobody could see me—not even if I cried out.

  I walked into our yard, and I could see my mother standing in the kitchen, her back toward me, bent over a bowl in which she was putting some green figs, their skins removed. I walked up to her and I said, “Good afternoon, Mamie. I have just come home from school.”

  My mother turned to face me. We looked at each other, and I could see the frightening black thing leave her to meet the frightening black thing that had left me. They met in the middle and embraced. What will it be now, I asked myself. To me she said, “You are late. It would please me to hear an excuse from you.” She was using that tone of voice: it was as if I were not only a stranger but a stranger that she did not wish to know.

  Trying to match her tone of voice but coming nowhere near success, I said something about being kept late for extra studies. I then went on to say that my teachers believed that if I studied hard enough, by my sixteenth birthday I might be able to take final exams and so be able to leave school.

  As if she knew exactly that I would come up with some such story, she said, “Perhaps
if I ask again this time I will get a straight answer.” I was about to make a feeble effort at protest, but then, in a rush, she said that she had been standing inside a store that afternoon, buying some buttons for a Sunday dress for me, when, on looking up, she observed me making a spectacle of myself in front of four boys. She went on to say that, after all the years she had spent drumming into me the proper way to conduct myself when speaking to young men, it had pained her to see me behave in the manner of a slut (only she used the French-patois word for it) in the street and that just to see me had caused her to feel shame.

  The word “slut” (in patois) was repeated over and over, until suddenly I felt as if I were drowning in a well but instead of the well being filled with water it was filled with the word “slut,” and it was pouring in through my eyes, my ears, my nostrils, my mouth. As if to save myself, I turned to her and said, “Well, like father like son, like mother like daughter.”

  At that, everything stopped. The whole earth fell silent. The two black things joined together in the middle of the room separated, hers going to her, mine coming back to me. I looked at my mother. She seemed tired and old and broken. Seeing that, I felt happy and sad at the same time. I soon decided that happy was better, and I was just about to enjoy this feeling when she said, “Until this moment, in my whole life I knew without a doubt that, without any exception, I loved you best,” and then she turned her back and started again to prepare the green figs for cooking.

  I looked at my mother—at her turned back this time—and she wasn’t tired and old and broken at all. She wore her hair pinned up in the same beautiful way, exposing the nape of her beautiful neck; her bent-over back looked strong and soft at the same time, and I wanted to go and rest my whole body on it the way I used to; her long skirt covered her beautiful, strong legs, and she wore shoes that exposed beautiful heels. It was I who was tired and old and broken, and as I looked at my mother, full of vigor, young and whole, I wanted to go over and put my arms around her and beg forgiveness for the thing I had just said and to explain that I didn’t really mean it. But I couldn’t move, and when I looked down it was as if the ground had opened up between us, making a deep and wide split. On one side of this split stood my mother, bent over my dinner cooking in a pot; on the other side stood I, in my arms carrying my schoolbooks and inside carrying the thimble that weighed worlds.

  I went to my room to take off my school uniform, but I could only sit on my bed and wonder what would become of me now. As I sat, I looked at the things surrounding me. There was my washstand, made for me by my father from pitch pine, with its enamel basin on top and matching urn filled with water underneath; there was my bureau, made for me by my father from pitch pine, and in it were my clothes; there was a shelf made for me by my father from pitch pine on which I kept my books; the very bed I sat on was made for me by my father from pitch pine; there was a little desk and chair to match at which I sat and read or did my homework, both made for me by my father from pitch pine. Each time my father had bought the wood for the furniture, he had taken me to the lumber yard with him, and I saw how he examined every piece of wood carefully before he accepted it for purchase. He would hold it first to his nostrils, then to my own, and he would say, “Nothing like a nice piece of pine, except perhaps a nice piece of mahogany.” Then I was not allowed to see the furniture in any stage until it was in its place in my room. It would be a surprise then for me to see it, and I would say to my father, “I see I have a new chair,” and he would say, “I see you have a new chair,” and then we would embrace, I kissing him on the cheek and he kissing me on the forehead. It used to be that when my father wanted to kiss me he would have to bend down to reach my forehead. Now, in the last year, I had grown so much that it was I who had to bend down so that my father could reach my forehead. My mother was taller than my father. Now I, too, was taller than my father. I was, in fact, as tall as my mother. When my mother and I spoke to each other, we looked at each other eye to eye. Eye to eye. It was the first time such a thing had come to me: my mother and I were eye to eye. For a moment, I was happy at the thought, but then I could see: what did such a thing matter? She was my mother, Annie; I was her daughter, Annie; and that was why I was called by my mother and father Little Miss.

  Sitting on my bed and thinking in this way, I swung my feet back and forth, and it was a while before I realized that when they swung back my feet would hit up against the trunk stored under my bed. It was the trunk that my mother had bought when she was sixteen years old—a year older than I was now—and in which she had packed all her things and left not only her parents’ house in Dominica but Dominica itself for Antigua. Her father and she had had a big quarrel over whether she would live alone, as she wished, or would continue to live in her parents’ house, as her father wished. Her mother, who had stopped speaking to her father a long time before, though they continued to live in the same house, didn’t say anything one way or the other. My mother and her father had had a big quarrel, and though my mother had never told me in detail the whole story, I had pieced it together from things I had overheard, just putting two and two together in my usual way. Inside this trunk now were the things, all of them, that had been a part of my life at every stage, and if someone had come upon it without having an inkling of what my life had really been like, they would have got a pretty good idea. As my heels bumped up against the trunk, my heart just broke, and I cried and cried. At that moment, I missed my mother more than I had ever imagined possible and wanted only to live somewhere quiet and beautiful with her alone, but also at that moment I wanted only to see her lying dead, all withered and in a coffin at my feet.

  The moment soon passed, and I got up from my bed to change my clothes and carry out my afternoon chores. My mother and I avoided each other, and it wasn’t until over our supper of the green figs, cooked with fish in coconut milk, that we looked at each other again. We did our best to keep up appearances, for my father’s sake, but our two black things got the better of us, and even though we didn’t say anything noticeable it was clear that something was amiss. Perhaps to cheer us up, my father said that he would finally make for my mother the set of furniture she had been asking him to make for a very long time now. In fact, the set of furniture had been a bone of contention between them. That brought a halfhearted, polite smile to my mother’s face. Then, turning to me, my father asked what he could make for me.

  It came into my mind without thinking. “A trunk,” I said.

  “But you have a trunk already. You have your mother’s trunk,” he said to me.

  “Yes, but I want my own trunk,” I said back.

  “Very well. A trunk is your request, a trunk you will have,” he said.

  Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.

  Chapter Seven

  The Long Rain

  Days before it was decided that I was not well enough to go to school, I walked around feeling weak, as if at any moment I would collapse in a heap. If I rested my head on my desk, in an instant I fell asleep; the walk to and from school wore me out, so that I moved at the speed of an old jalopy. Nothing unusual seemed wrong. I did not have a fever. No wild storms raged through my stomach. My appetite was as poor as it had always been. My mother, tugging at my eyelids this way and that, could not see any signs of biliousness. All the same, I was in no condition to keep up in my usual way, so I had to take to my bed.

  For over a year, no rain fell. There was nothing unusual about that; drought was such a big part of our life that no one would even make a comment on it. Then, each day for a week or so, the clouds overhead turned black. No rain came right away with the black clouds, bu
t then one day it started to drizzle, first in that annoying way of a drizzle, where it stings your face and your hands and your feet. That went on for a few days, when suddenly the rain started to come down in a heavy torrent. The rain went on in this way for over three months. By the end of it, the sea had risen and what used to be dry land was covered with water, and crabs lived there. In spite of what everyone said, the sea never did go back to the way it had been, and what a great conversation piece it made to try and remember what used to be there where the sea now stretched up to.

  In my small room. I lay on my pitch-pine bed, which, since I was sick, was made up with my Sunday sheets. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. I could hear the rain as it came down on the galvanized roof. The sound the rain made as it landed on the roof pressed me down in my bed, bolted me down, and I couldn’t even so much as lift my head if my life depended on it. My mother and father, sometimes together, sometimes separately, stood at the foot of my bed and looked down at me. They spoke to each other. I couldn’t hear what it was that they said, but I could see the words leave their mouths. The words traveled through the air toward me, but just as they reached my ears they would fall to the floor, suddenly dead. Most likely, my father said that it was all the studying I had been doing at school, that I had moved along from form to form too fast and it had taken a heavy toll. Most likely, my mother agreed, but she also would have said that, just to be sure, she would call Ma Jolie, an obeah woman from Dominica who now lived not far from our house, and who was recommended to my mother by her mother, Ma Chess, who still lived in Dominica. To the Ma Jolie idea, my father would have said, “Very well, but count me out; have her come when I am not here.”