ON BECOMING MOTHER

For years growing up in Clarendon there was no one else to rely on, just her mother. Her father had left her mother with four children to be with the young girl in St James. The young girl had promised to “fuck up” her mother if she ever came close to them. Julie had grown to understand the difference between being reprimanded for the trouble she gave, “I will fuck you up”, and the threat of obeah or acid that could tear away flesh from skin making it crumble like toilet paper does when it was soaked “I going to fuck you up”. A distinction she had to make as her mother shouted through the kitchen window, which quickly made her aware “that skin doesn’t need so much acid to strip, just the promise of it”.

The neighbor, the one her mother was constantly mumbling to- Miss Sarah, said that “it had to be obeah that made the man come back twice, and parked his aqua Lada at the front gate in full view for the neighbours”. Julie heard Miss Sarah just an hour after she had helped Ma Jones-Julie’s mother- with Saturday laundry. Saturday was the day for washing the white clothes after their week of soaking only the Saturday sun could give them back their color. Sarah had left the Ma Jones’ house to tell the women down by the shop the additions to the Jones’ situation. The ladies from the town were standing around with their heads hung low, bibbing like a kite struggling against the wind. They were clearing their throats like they did at church on Sundays when the pastor had touched their soul with some-one else’s truth. They each had their own case to point to from the visits to “Joneses yard” to the one time she had shouted in the square that she “did not fear sticks and stones”. AS the young Julie walked into the shop on that Saturday morning someone added “is cause she hav’ dem cream soda bottles and kette drum inna har front lawn”. They had stopped when they noticed her tiny frame on tippy toes with her long arms that supported dirty finger nails holding on to the wood counter asking for a pound of salt fish and two pound of flour.

Julie had raced home to her mother who had slapped her across the face for speaking ill of her elders. That night her mind raced over her mother’s white robe and the pencil that was stuck in her ear each time she went to church. It was not the sensation of the blow that had humiliated her instead she thought it was the image of her mother spinning to the drums with her cloths wrapped tightly around her that was doing the most embarrassing.

As Julie fell asleep she blamed her mother for her father leaving crying into the pillow to make sure that the tears did not touch the floor of the wooden house and awaken her mother. She had in her shame concluded that her father had to be mortified of a woman who acted like this, a woman whose power had made her corner store’s topic.

She promised herself between sobs that night to never become her mother, to never have children, to become more than a church going woman unable to keep her man, she would never wrap her head, or write with a pencil and lastly never to return the moment she leaves this district.

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Julie had imagined what his journey up the windy hills of Clarendon would be like. She imagined that Christopher being as angry as she supposed he’d be would be pouting about his chest pains the ones he felt when his “anger was squeezing his chest plates together”. He would pull over for a drink. She imagined it would have been twice. There he would spark up some conversation with the bartenders rambling ridiculous rhetoric, going even as far as to ask if he was wrong to want his woman in his home, if he did not look like a man who needed a wife and a mother for his two children? All this would have been just a slight release of his battles with himself from Kingston to Clarendon about his pride and this “damn woman. His version of the story would be that Julie wanted to turn Principal fi some country school”, to which he would quickly add “no it’s not that I don’t agree with woman liberation and all that shit but you tell me which man, would ever let his woman look after him. I not stay here. She coming home and that is that!”

After which she had envisaged he’d finish his drink wipe his mouth with his sleeve put on the blue cap which she despised sink his hands in his pants rear pocket pay his bill, storm out the door and return with the same anger to ask for another drink “to get him going”.

Julie’s old room was dark. There was only the dim light from the spirit kerosene lamp that hummed or rather hissed as it burned. The heat from the lamp kept the room warm. It was mid December and the wind that blew down the hill had within its embrace a stabbing chill tantamount to the ice winds of America. There was no television. This was her old room, returning was never in Julie’s thoughts.

But there was no where else to go. Julie had found it difficult to return after she met Christopher. Once in the bed room behind closed door she told him about her mother and about the rumors that she was a “reader lady”, praying she would never have to explain the powers of such a woman. She told him about the night on the bed she cried her self to sleep determined to leave the house just like her father and never return. The was she felt that she had left the Red Light District that night, and that she never wanted to return.

The community had changed since she had left. She had to ask for directions to the old house. Red Light District had over ten years transformed itself away from poverty and had increase is status with coffee. The government had endorsed its growth, as compensation for the babies that left behind from the exuberant officers based further up the hill in the cold regions of Newcastle. The government had put up retaining walls three feet high, made from broken stone, found in a river running through the district, broken with a hammer and a chisel (complimentary tools like cutlass and hoe) held together with a thick mixture of Carib cement without using one hand from the village. The district had moved away slowly from entertaining the virile men, to having men wake up and with remnants of sleep still wedging their eyes shut, putting on one of the two pants outside the shed, and depending on the day of production choose between machete and hoe after which they would make their way to the ground.

“Jus’ round di bend, you will see it you cyah miss it” the old man had said. It took her ten minutes before she reached the deep corner marked “Round the Bend” that led to the house. It had amazed her that the houses on this end of the parish now had names. Somewhere down the hill was Watergate. She would have to pay better attention to the insignias after this.

Julie knew Christopher. She knew that he would not have noticed anything. He would not have seen that the yard was well kept. The Poi’s freshly grown trumpets lay like carpet on the green grass. They called this grass carpet grass in Kingston. Running through it was a brown snake like path leading from the wooden latch gate up to the iron bar that coldly traced the front step of the pink walled verandah. The lawn remained seemingly unnerved by the precipice that was created by the 1988 hurricane named Gilbert. It had taken half the hillside leaving the house hanging precariously to the edge of the cliff, saved only by the praying and supplication of the occupants, assisted in part by the mortar, bricks, rum and chicken blood that built the foundation of the house. It would not cross his mind to look over the edge. But if he had buried his fear of heights and just glanced, he would have seen acres of young coffee trees in the valley, in some places masked by their counterparts of slender banana trees with tattered leaves and dark and crumbling roots. He would have been reminded of old women standing in the company of young children not their own. And he would have laughed. He would have thrown his head up and laughed stopping only when he realized that here in this place there were two valleys. He would have called the yard space a valley, as right behind him was the arc of the hill, like a rainbow. Loaded with trees that he never knew grew in Kingston, the ferns, the purple hibiscus plants and the morass that climbed the exposed arc of the hill transforming it into a painting of green and black evenly distributed across the canvas. Just maybe as he pulled the iron latch on the wooden gate he would notice the half bred kidney and blacky mango tree, filled with disease from bark to fruit; but not the white lime freshly painted on its bark as a cure from the speckled blackness that lingered there.

She was right for sure about this as he had missed it and dragged drops of the cure up the snake path and unto the concrete stairs that were unpainted and unpolished. With clenched fists he entered the bedroom where Julie sat. She was wrapped in her sheets, staring doing at the papers that fluttered in the light breeze that entered the room from the window left ajar.

Julie did not flinch. But her mind jittered the moment he walked through the door. She had to remain still as he with clenched fist shouted at her: “Look! I don’t care about this foolishness, yuh hear, you is my ooman and that is dat. What you want me to tell mi bwoys, when deh ask me bout me big shot girl? You tink I cyah tell dem sey you lef mi jus so?”

“Christopher you should not be here.” came quickly, practically midway into his ranting about his reputation.

“Why are you here Julie? Come home.” Julie had hoped that her leaving would have softened him; at least made him stop to think about her. Instead she found all he could give was a command. Nothing had changed.

“This is my home Chris” she whispered. Her hair moved with the wind. The wind’s efforts to ruffle the hillside were only evident as it ran through her well groomed locks. She noticed the way his fist clenched tighter, as he began to twist from the doorway to the bed. Much like a top, made from almond trees with thick thread would twist when left spinning: in, out, in and out.

“This is your home?”

“Yes”

“You sure you cyah come up wid a better answer? Look here try dis one: Kingston where your husband lives and works. The little house him jus’ fix up since you a go hav’ twins. How ‘bout that?”

Julie watched him race to the verandah. From there he shouted that he is not leaving “this shit hole” without her. Julie thought she heard something break. It sounded like the crack of a twig. As she glanced in the direction of the verandah, she saw it happen quickly: he shivered, and shuddered. It seemed the earth shifted slightly under his feet causing him to be pitched to the floor. His fist still clenched, broke his fall before it gave way to the weight of his numb body. She heard it break; like a tree broken by the winds of a hurricane. As his head collided with the red tiles of the verandah, the sounds and the colour of the night raced across her eyes. Her heart stopped, freezing her tears and shouts with it. She sat there wrapped in the sheet, unable to breathe.

It had happened. Her worst fear had come true. She had tried to not move from the time she heard the car turn up the steep hill. She had replied softly and ambiguously to his commands. She had clutched her bible, she had prayed; yet still outside her door there he was, lying flat on the shining red floor. She had emerged earlier today convinced that Christopher would show up and had applied the red die to the floor of the porch, and minutes later, after she was sure it had dried, knelt down with the coconut brush and made sure she could see her face in its sheen. Her mother had taught her to do this many years ago, aided by the tamarind switch she kept soaked under the bed in the enamel pan.

Today as she shone the floor she wondered if her mother was being honest. Would she really have damaged her husband?

She could not help thinking.

She could not help thinking. For the last twelve years, since the day he had held her as she fainted at her younger brother’s -Jason – funeral: from the heat, the lack of food and the sleepless nights when she was just twenty years of age; he had only hit her. Not once did he cheat on her. He had hit her two times. Both times he was drunk and she was tired. The last time she had told him no when he asked her to have sex. That night he had hit her around the house for what felt to her an hour but was actually five minutes, then dragged her from under the table, then combined each blow with the axiom “dis pussy is mine”, spread her legs, tore away her panties, made a sign of the cross as he held her head and squeezed himself inside of her. It was a month later she realized she was pregnant.

It had taken her nine weeks after that night to decide to leave to pack up the same bag, which she had proudly stolen from her mother’s closet one year after Jason’s funeral when she moved in with Christopher. Leaving him was harder than writing the letter to tell him she was pregnant to remind him about his promise to never ask her for children, to accuse him of the hatred act. She had even labeled it rape. She had buried her pen into the paper so that he could turn the paper and read her disgust. She had told him in no less words that he had made her a prodigal whore. A woman unable to hold on to her dignity forcing her to return to a house to which she had sworn she would never return worst than she had left since now she was pregnant. Then as an end all she had said “don’t come looking for me or your twins, since you have stripped me of my dignity the night you lay me bare and inserted semen that has without delay carved me into the woman my mother has wanted me to become-her”.

The day she returned she ran into her mothers arms. She had told her that the day she found out she was pregnant, things had changed inside her. Her stomach had twisted and it seemed that each time she retched she despised Christopher. “It hard,” her mother had consoled her “fi a vomit out yu tripe and nuh think bout di man who fling discomfort pan you. When I memba you fadda I glad fi you- dat man never deserve me, but I did love him bad, bad. So till I brede fi him four time. But gyal you see man, a jus so dem tan, all dem good fa… a brede an lef dem ooman. You have a good man you stay wid him no matter how him beat you. A better him beat you dan lef you one a look after di pickney dem.”

What else was there to do? Her anger had burnt her past: she had become a baby again running to her mother when her younger brother had torn up her homework. She would lie. She would say whatever it took to get her mother to act. She told her that Christopher was sleeping with the woman who had cleaned her house for years. She had without a twitch in her eyes, the sign her mother used to tell if Julie was lying, signed his death wish.

Her mother chose this room for the lighting. It was never too bright. It was dark enough to compliment her mother’s desire for her to be invisible.

“Come. Your room dark that way when you say the Lord’s Prayer tonight he cya find you and you will sleep well”.

Her mother had instructed her to pray for deliverance for two days by the humming light of the green spirit lamp.

As she lay in her old bed she felt her confidence erect in her. She wanted her mother to hurt him the way the neighbours had said she could hurt anyone who was unfair and unjust. She wanted her mother to put up the cream soda bottles, to wrap her head to pray and chant until Christopher lay in the bed wrinkled and withered from the waist down. She had not wanted him dead, just quiet.

As she fell asleep the thought of her husband a vegetable on the front porch looking for relieve, she felt her hatred fading. She no longer wanted to say her prayer she wanted Christopher to come quickly to whisk her away, to promise he would never drink again and love her forever. With sleep in her eyes Julie prayed to God that her sins be forgiven. With each prayer she wrote down the lines to a hymn she had learnt at Sunday school. As she awoke she read Psalm 51 five times with the white sheet wrapped around her body. This was not a ritual her mother taught her, she made it up certain that she had the gift to. Hoping that this being the first time she every asked the spirits for help that they would ignore her mother’s request. Then to sooth her mind she polished and shone the floors early that morning when sleep evaded her eyes, leaving the image of her decapitated husband on her mind. On her knees it could have been called supplicating while she hoped her husband coming to rescue her from her mistakes. Her confidence in her plot had taken a walk and had left he shame and regret as companions.

She wanted nothing to happen to her husband. The desire to be home had faded. But her pride stopped her from telling her mother. Her fear stopped her from returning the man she wanted to be with.

It was within the minute that Christopher in anger stormed out of the room unto the verandah fell unto the floor that Julie heard the shout of Mass Sidney the younger brother of her Grandfather John Noel shouting for her to come to the verandah. She would admit to being still from fright, but so still that she had altogether missed her granduncle’s appearance. “Julie one man lie dung like sey him dead pan di front porch.”

He came into the dark room with his hoe slung delicately across his back, the brown shirt tied at the back, his pants legs tucked into his water boots, right hand bulged out his pocket as if it held on to something. Growing up Julie was convinced that it was in his pocket that the old man kept his pride. It seemed right that it would be there that Sydney would keep it, right there in his pocket just between his fingers. He repeated her name with his petition for her to come and look at his discovery.

“Julie child, why you nah move? Girlie call di doctor, nuh!”

“Yes… Call di doctor”

“A who dat out de chile?”

“Christopher…Christopher Manson”

“You husban’”?

“My husband”

He left the room and went out to the verandah, and shouted from there “You call yet? Call Doctor James ‘im closer, an’ nothin’ not out there what ‘im ca’nt ure. Julie child this man nearly never make it up here you know. Him did los’ just out a the square. Is me direct’ him up …up the hill. Eh, is good ting him reach other wise is over the ditch him would a reach. Jus’ ten more minute an you husband would a itch up in a one a them tree an bush. Good as los’ same place you father nearly loss when you did baby.”

Julie had moved from the bed and had put on her housedress wiping away her tears as she stepped on to the verandah, to see her husband, a mechanic born in Kingston unaware of how things worked in the hills of Clarendon, almost motionless on the ground. It had not taken much time for him to move. Yet the effects of the fall had left him stunned. Julie moved him to the lounge chair on the verandah as they waited on the doctor to arrive.

Standing beside him waiting on Doctor James to arrive, she listened to Sydney tell of all the strange things he had seen in this little place. “That’s why, you know, child I always walk peaceful. Try not to make no body hate me. That’s why I live so long an no drop dung like this man here. I wonder wha’ him do to make him drop jus so”

“Syndey stop it. He fell. His Kingston heels are not used to the way we country people shine we floors,” she said, as Syndey removed his rosary, from his pocket.

“Eh! Miss Julie when since you is country girl.”

Julie pondered how much she had become her mother, while wanting to not be her. Did she have the power to control her fate to defy her desire for her man? It was no longer about the way Julie would grab her hips each time she was annoyed, or the way her “s” seemed to always fall off the start of the words, so that the words ended up sounding disabled. Neither was it about the way she hated, Ma Jones had taught her how to hold hate as tight as a wrestler’s grip, or softly like the way a mother would hold a new born; and no matter the feel it would be appropriate to the person’s size and sin. This was what she was, how she had become her mother. Still Julie wanted to have been the woman whose head tie and pencil defined her. The woman whose man somehow returned twice after some “jesy ears gal catch him wid some soup”; even though she swore it was not for any supplication, or all night prayer since she told him to leave.

It had taken some time before Doctor James had arrived and insisted that he be immediately placed in bed. Julie chose the room adjacent to her room. Christopher had pulled her head to him and whispered, “You mean a lot to me. I love you”. Yet all she wanted to hear was, “I promise I will never drink again”. As she sat by his bed, watching him, she thought didn’t he look like a man who needed a wife and a mother for his two children? She fell asleep in the chair across from the bed.