March 2, 2014: Sometimes they got like this.

 

 

Miss Betty sighed deeply as she navigated her rusty pickup through the stone gates of the mansion. It’s a good thing Alvin wasn’t sitting next to her today, because when his wife sighed like that he liked to watch her rich brown breasts expand out of the neckline of her cotton wash dress and shine like two plump garden aubergines. Then he would reach over and brush her skin with the back of his hand, or perhaps he would grab a breast and squeeze.   “Too bad we gots to work today,” he’d say, sparkle in his eyes.

More often that not she’d push him away, concentrating on the cleaning that would need to be done at the rich folks’ summer place, making a mental note of the beds to be changed and the places where she would need to broom out the fine dusting of Bahamian beach sand that might have settled under the bamboo couches and in the corners of the kitchen.

But Alvin wasn’t here today to pester her and cause a ruckus in her determination—Alvin was off in Governors Harbour selling yesterday’s catch to the Roadway Restaurant, a nice mess of grouper, carefully cleaned and iced so they’d be ready for tourist lunches of fried fish with macaroni and cheese on the side. And to tell the truth, Miss Betty didn’t miss him: he was always wanting to do mischief on the big bed or sneak a quick grope in the kitchen pantry and then she’d forget what she was doing Alvin would never get all the windows washed and the light bulbs replaced.

Good to be working alone today, she said to herself, but all the same she felt a little nervous as she pushed open the back door of the silent house. “Peoples just shouldn’t be so rich,” she always thought when she entered the gleaming kitchen with its copper-bottomed pans hanging from the ceiling. Those pans always took her breath away, so different from her two own black iron skillets tucked safely away under the kitchen sink. “Skillets ain’t for decoration. They be for fry-ups and the greasier they is the more they is ready to use,” her mama would say, referring to that same cookware which was now Miss Betty’s most prized possession. “I got plenty of things for my own lifetime, and I ain’t got hardly nothing.”

Miss Betty didn’t expect the two young people to be awake when she arrived: she usually had a good three hours to clean before a dark tousled head appeared and a thick voice wondered if there was coffee and a croissant. Alvin would have taken bets on whether it would be the brother or the sister who straggled down from the upstairs bedrooms—Alvin liked to bet on almost anything, she mused: who would be driving the water truck or whether Barbie’s All You Can Eat would have pineapple duff, or whether it would rain before next Friday. Miss Betty didn’t exactly approve of Alvin’s betting, and she didn’t approve of leaving twenty-year-old twins alone in a winter home in the Bahamas, and she certainly didn’t approve of people who didn’t start their days until almost lunchtime, expecting her to clean up the leftover party from the night before—liquor bottles, pizza crusts, underwear draped over the furniture, broken glass.

She knew enough not to complain—once she had said something to the mother of the twins, staying at the cottage on a rare visit to see her children. “They get crazy sometimes,” the woman had said. “But they’re good kids—they’re just having fun on their vacation. If you can’t do the job….” And her voice had trailed off in an implied consequence.

So Betty kept her thoughts to herself most of the time and just concentrated on her own affairs, which were enough of a burden without adding anyone else’s troubles to her own collection of woes. She needed the job, which was really pretty easy most of the time when the owners we back home in New York someplace, and she knew enough not to let a good thing go when she had it.

Opening the kitchen scullery door, she took out the mop and cleaning bucket, not really thinking about the twins and the mess would find when she went into the living room and out onto the patio. So deep was Miss Betty in her own thoughts that she stumbled and fell heavily against the wall when she tripped over the bloody arm of the body stretched lifelessly across the pink ceramic tiles of the kitchen floor.

Writing Prompt: Patricia Ann McNair

March 23, 2014: They were in love.

 

 

“I don’ know what to do wid dat chile, I surely do not,”  Miss Betty said, lowering her considerable body into my rattan armchair. “I surely would ‘preciate an ice tea,  Miss Judith.  It be hot here, even for May.”

 

Obediently, I pulled a glass from the cupboard over the kitchen sink and poured some tea.  “Three cubes, or it gets like animal pee,” she reminded me, and continued, “She only eleven and she got breasts like a growed woman, and her period done been coming. I be her grandmother, but I didn’t sign up for this.  Pretty soon, I have another mout to feed, I betcha, and I can’t even feed the ones in my house now.”

 

I handed Miss Betty her tea.  “She doesn’t have to get pregnant, you know,” I said. “Haven’t you told her about how these things happen? “

 

“Course she knows, Miss Judith. All them kids do.” She replied, distainfully—and avoiding an answer to my question of who gave Shawnda information on motherhood and its causes.  “But she just sees all her friends doing it, and playing dress-up with them cute little babies, and she thinks it would be fun to have one of them all her own.”

 

“Sorta like getting a new puppy, isn’t it?”

 

“Zactly, Miss Judith.” Shawnda don’t see no difference between a new baby and a pet rabbit, and most of her friends don’t, neither. They likes to play house wid them little kids, and they don’t think about who’s gonna feed them  when they grows out of mommy’s milk.”

 

“Can’t you take her to the Free Clinic and get her on birth control pills,” I asked.

 

Betty looked shocked.  “The Bahamian government don’t give away them pills, you know. Bahamians is a righteous people, and the government isn’t going to keep you out of trouble.  You gots to do that yourownself, wid the help of Jesus.  And here’s the problem: when you is eleven, you is too young to understand Jesus. So’s these young girls, they gets their period before they got Jesus, and next ting you know is, Blam! They gots babies.”

 

Betty settled back in the chair and rested the bottom of the chilled glass against her considerable brown cleavage. “Oooh, dat feels so good.  It’s gonna be a long summer, even for Eleuthera.”

 

“Does Shawnda have a boyfriend now?” I asked, unwilling to be distracted from the topic at hand.

 

“I tink so, but you know kids.  They don’t tell grandparents nothing.  I think she sneaks out at night, though, even when I lock the doors.  And she and that Rodney, they do like to dance.  You know Rodney?  His ma is that gal what is deaf who goes to my church, and his daddy drives the water truck?  They don’t live together, though. His daddy be married to a woman over in Rock Sound and they got a bunch a kids.  Rodney, he’s a nice boy, polite and everything, but he ain’t old enough to support no kid, even if he knows to.”

 

“Well, Miss Betty, I’d guess you’d better give Miss Shawnda a box full of condoms, then, and hope she uses them.”

 

“Ifn I do that, she’ll think I means for her to have sex and she and Rodney will be going at it like rabbits in the bush.   I tink not!”

 

Betty hoisted herself out of my easy chair.  “Miss Judith,” she said.  “If you is going to give me such foolish advice, when I got this big problem, I will just have to come back later after you come to your senses. Thank you for the tea.”

 

She slammed the screen door behind her and I carried her empty glass to the sink.

 

Writing prompt: Patricia Ann McNair

June 3, 2013: The world never stopped.

Photo by Philip Hartigan

Her Mommy and Daddy were afraid to leave the island, and they never had. They were sure God took special care of Eleuthera Island where they lived, and he made it safe for His people. He gave them fish, and pineapples, and plenty of places to grow tomatoes and raise chickens. He gave them flowers, and tall willowy pine trees and birds that sang to them in the early morning.

God could be a strict parent, too, her daddy said. He brought fierce storms from the sea, and winds that tore at their houses and carried away what they had built. “It’s God’s way of sayin’ we be disobedient childrens”, Daddy told her. “When God get angry with us, he takes away the things we love more than we love Him. Then we gots to accept His punishment. God knows the best for us.”

After the sun went down and there was nothing to do because everything was dark, Daddy would tell stories until she and Mommy fell asleep. Sometimes they would be stories that the pastor in the Methodist Church on Lord Street would tell on Sundays and Daddy would use a big voice like Mr. Peter. Most times, though, daddy’s stories were the ones he knew from his own mama, stories about the devil and how he was right behind you all the time, ready to reach out and grab you when you weren’t looking and didn’t have a prayer on your lips.

“The Debbil, he looks for the weak ones,” Daddy would say, and he would tell about his own brother Sam who left Eleuthera and went to Miami, Florida, to find work and was hit by a car and died the day after he got there. “Debbil knew Sam should have stayed on ‘Lutra,” Daddy said. “That boy, he go off looking for money and womens, and he goes right to the place where the Debbil lives and the Debbil just takes him and he never comes back.”

And Daddy would almost always finish his stories with the same words: “You stay away from where the Debbil be hidin’, and you listen for what God wants, and you say ‘Thank you, Jesus’ every time you takes a breath.”

That was a good philosophy, as far as it went, but when Momma got sick and the air ambulance came to take her to the doctors in Nassau, Daddy was angry and sad. That first night she was gone he drank lots of rum and the next morning he borrowed money and left the island on the early morning airplane out of Rock Sound. She saw the plane go over the house as it left the island and she waved as hard as she could, but she knew her daddy couldn’t see her.

When he came home, he was alone and he was even angrier than before. “How can a man love a wife too much?” he yelled up at the sky. “How can You punish me for that? You are not a God who loves his children, you are the Debbil hisownself. I truly do hate You, and all You stand for.”

Daddy stood in the yard, yelling and waving a fist at the sky, and she was very afraid and stayed inside the house, waiting for the terrible storm of God’s anger.

But the world never stopped.

Writing prompt from Patricia Ann McNair

March 30, 2013: It warmed her.

 

“You all right?  Miss Judith?  You home? Hello-o-o?”

“Yes.  Out in back.   On the deck,” I call.

“I be coming around, then. Grammy sent you something.  I be bringing it.”

I sigh and shake my head, clearing it of sunshiny afternoon sleep.  Good while it lasted, I think to myself.

Po’s bronze face and dark eyes look down at me.  “Here,” he says, offering me a Styrofoam food box, the kind with a clamshell cover on it like you get at restaurants when you can’t eat all your meal and ask to take the rest home ‘for the dog’. These boxes, indestructible as cockroaches, are everywhere on this little Bahamian island: in take-away restaurants that are run out of family kitchens; in tiny grocery stores selling homemade bread pudding or cinnamon rolls; and at church suppers where for $8 everybody in town gets well-done steak, mac and cheese, ear corn, peas and rice, homemade bread, red pop, and a contribution to the plastic flower arrangements which decorate the graves of the newly deceased.  I picture the landfill, wherever it is hidden, as a giant pit dug out of  the coral rock, littered with Styrofoam bits and plastic shopping bags caught in the branches of scrub pine trees.

But I digress.  Po is bringing me some fresh red snapper which he and his grampy caught early this morning.  He holds it out to me.  “Put it in the fridge right away,” he says, a ten year old using his grandfather’s sternest voice.

And then, more softly, “And Miss Judith, could I have a glass of water. Please?”

I lift myself out of the chair and start to the kitchen door.  “And, please, Miss Judith, some of those candies?” His voice is a soft whisper, as if by asking very quietly and politely, his requests will somehow be more acceptable.

If Brenda, my friend and Po’s grandmother, were here she would snap, “You quit begging, Renaldo! You ‘bareass me!”

But she is busy with her day job of cleaning rooms in the town’s single rooming house, so I deposit the box in the refrigerator, pour a glass of water, and snag a couple of Hershey kisses for my buddy.  “Too much junk food, PoPo,” I tell him.  He doesn’t argue: it’s what I always say, especially when I see him at Bert’s for the Best Grocery, spending his lunch money on a candy bar and a bag of chips.

“Tell your grampy that I thank him very much for the fish.  I will have it for dinner.”  I sink back in my chair to continue my sunbathing until it’s time to grill my meal.

We both fall quiet, watching the turquoise blue of the Caribbean. To break the stillness, I ask, “What are you having for dinner, Po?”

He shrugs, reaches in the pocket of his cutoff jeans, and pulls out two crumpled Bahamian dollar bills. “I’ll go to Bert’s,” he says. “Get me something.”

I guess that in the Bahamas it’s only the white-skinned winter people who lounge in the sun and eat grilled fish.

February 10, 2013: In the light…

“Miss Judy,” Brenda calls. “Miss Judy, where you be?” And then I hear, “Lordy, that girl ain’t never home.”

I look up as she puffs around the corner of the garden shed. “Of course I’m home, Brenda. What’s wrong with you? I am always home…just sitting in the sun is all.”

She gives me a disgusted look, rolling her soft brown eyes heavenward. I see the whites underneath, clear against her dark skin. She huffs, “Ain’t no right minded Bahamian woman gonna sit in the sun in the heat of the day. You gonna get The Stroke! You gonna wither up worse than a old sour apple. White girls shouldn’t be out in the sun like that.” She plops her sizable body into a lawn chair under the awning, her cotton shift dress hiked up and straining against the spread of her thighs.

“I been working, Miss Judith. ‘Deed I has, all morning for Miss Barbie. It’s her washing day.”

What that means is that it’s like any other Wednesday in our little Bahamian town: laundry is always done on Wednesday. Nobody’s sure why Wednesday was chosen in Tarpum Bay—Washing Day is on Thursdays in Wymn’s Bight, and on Mondays in Governors Harbour. But here, Wednesdays are a community tradition, a day when the fortunate hang their clothes outside their houses, and the less fortunate argue over the few working washing machines in the Laundry Mat on the hill behind the Sunshine General Store.

Whatever one’s economic status, Washing Day is usually a two-day affair. There really isn’t enough water to go around if everyone’s trying to wash clothes at the same time: only a weak, rusty trickle appears from the rubber hose that serves our houses as the access from the water main running under (mostly) the street. Then, assuming there’s water or enough working machines in the Laundry Mat, the women hang their clothes out in the back yard. They call across the fences as they work, walking back and forth carrying heavy baskets to their clotheslines, their skirts fluttering in the breeze from the sea.

“You all right today, Miss Culver? You all right?”

“I fine, praise Jesus. You all right?”

“Yes m’am. But my boy, he is poorly today. Home from school, he is.”

Then a week’s worth of gossip is exchanged between neighbors. “You hear about Miss Neal? Her Sugar is ver’ bad. They say she’s gonna have to have a operation on her feets!”

Brenda and I are quiet, listening to the lilting voices of the women. We already know most of what’s being called across the property lines—it’s a tiny village, after all, and nearly everyone is related in one way or another. But still, it’s comforting to get the news and to hear it again and again as it travels up and down our street.

We sit in the mid-day heat, and I finally move my lounge chair into the shade alongside of Brenda.

“That’s enough,” I say. “I am never gonna have skin the color of yours.”

We both laugh—it’s an old joke between us, the white lady from Michigan with wrinkled skin, bare feet and plenty of time for sitting through the heat of the day and the lovely brown woman born in a Caribbean island shanty and who has never taken a vacation in her entire life.