Big Island, Small Read online

  The word spite became a word I pondered incessantly. Like, why spite? There had to be another reason than just spite. Spite over what? Were people born spiteful? “Spite” isn’t a word used much on Big Island. People would more likely use “mean.” Was Thompson mean? He could be.

  Back then I didn’t understand why she compared me to Thompson. I remember wondering if there was a time I hit or slapped someone. Okay maybe in play to Chloe, my best friend in Grade 1, “I giving you one slap to the head if you don’t hush your mouth!” We were in the back of the playing field and I was the mother and she the child and I was imitating the adults around us.

  I can’t remember if I actually slapped or hit anyone like I saw Thompson do. Like the way he slapped Gary, the small boy next door, when he saw Gary up in the cashew tree. He gave him one slap across the head. Gary ran with the bag of cashews still looped around his wrist while Thompson was yelling, “Wait till your mother hear you picking my green cashew.” Or the time Thompson got irate at the dog up the road. The dog who shit in other people’s yards instead of its own. Thompson came up behind with his cutlass turned downside and slapped that dog so hard I could feel the slap and the yelp through my own skin. Or the time he played that game with his little brother, slapping the tops of Nevin’s hands too fast for any six-year-old to keep up.

  I realized much later Dolma wasn’t talking about me in that way, in the way of “spite.” She meant Thompson and I were similar because we shared the same colour. Perhaps she felt a great injustice was done to her by having such a black-skinned child and Thompson and I were to blame.

  Dolma hurled me toward Thompson. “Get out and take she with you. That way you can feel what it’s like to raise a child and not just claim a child.”

  “Me claim she? She don’t even look like me. I black so? You creeping with so many men you don’t know who child for who.” Thompson heaved me back.

  In that moment I recognized the difference between my baby cousin’s honey-brown skin and the cocoa-brown of my own. The cries of baby Jude lifting the roof. His tiny toes pulsing between my fingers.

  “What you doing to the child? Give me,” Dolma said. “And go fill those buckets!”

  Heading up the Bay, buckets tight by my side, face stuck to the mid-morning sun like I was daring it to look away. My mouth crumpled in a sneer, feet dragging over the cracked-mud path. “Fix your face girl. Such a pretty thing looking so sour. Come nah. That soft skin go turn hard like brick. Smile nah.”

  Just like that I’m thinking about Mr. Robbie. Mr. Robbie, his big-walled house peering over a fence of yellow-green-and-red splattered croton, his bicycle leaned up against barbed fence. The back of his van poking out his driveway, glistening silver.

  I jump out of bed the morning after the kiss, Dolma calling, “Sola you can’t hear? The phone for you.”

  JUDITH

  THE KISS TOSS ME in and out of sleep like I eat too much sugar the night before. The kiss charging through dreams; a horse crashing into fence after fence; a slippery emerald eel winding around arms and legs. The next morning in bed going through my apology. I’ll tell Sola the beer make me drunk. I’ll tell she I don’t know why I kiss she like man kissing woman. Or woman kissing man. I’ll use those words, man woman, woman man.

  Melina in my head again. “Why you go and kiss the gyal so? You’d never do that on Small Island. Big Island got you all free up and crazy or what?” A few girls back home stop talking to me ’cause I friends with Melina. Melina who not fraid to express she love for women, who not fraid to speak out when people spitting fyah on those who love same as themselves. Melina standing up for all people rights not just majority rights. “One Love my ass. People flinging ‘one love’ around like it’s what we believe. Hypocrites.”

  Melina who kiss me one day while we hanging out on the back step outside my bedroom. She want to know what happening between Drey and me.

  “We just friends, Melina.”

  “Friends? So you two never kiss?”

  “It’s not like that Melina”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not what?”

  “Why it not like that? You two together all the time.”

  I watch Melina like she has a point.

  “You like woman or what?” she say, while unfolding she legs, ankles swinging over the step, leaning over, lips on mine. “So why you not telling me to fuck off?”

  I smile. Melina’s mouth on mine again but this time instructing, “Nah gyal not like that, take your time. That’s too fast. Go ahead kiss me. Okay now kiss me again. Okay now leave your lips there. How you move fast so?”

  Melina and I hanging out lip to lip when Daddy’s voice pop from the front of the house, “Judith where is you? Grab the goats nah? I don’t want them tearing down the pea tress.”

  We leap from step as the goats appear. My heart tripping. Kiss confusing breath. Fabian rounding the corner.

  A few weeks later: quarter moon; purple sky. Drey slips his hand in mine fingers tighten like he holding more than my hand. We on Big Bay running sprints. Adrenaline pumping. Bare feet beating sand. Falling on our backs laughing. “Let’s go before we can’t see our way back,” he say while reaching for my hand again. We don’t let go till we reach the other side of the Bay. Drey lead me behind the Julie tree, kiss me like he too been practicing with Melina. Drey bending like a branch in the breeze reaching for me while I thinking about Melina, slow down gyal, not so fast man. Take your time.

  I want Sola to be Melina. I want Melina next door, Melina to have my back, Melina to exchange news from back home, Melina to get in trouble with, to preach the hypocrisies she see home and here. I want friend, sister, companion, connection to the other side, someone who understand my jokes. Someone from home.

  Morning arrive with sun galloping up the wall spreading shapes on the ceiling. I lay there long. I miss regular routine with Aunt Rachel. She gone before I wake. I miss our usual coffee, bagel, cream cheese and small talk before she leave for the university. After she leave I back in bed for another piece of sleep. But this morning different. First thing I do after I get up is dig through a drawer full of elastics, paper clips, sticky notes, scotch tape and pens to get to the phone book. A few flips and I find Atwater. There are two D Atwaters and the first one I call I know I score ’cause there’s a lady calling loud for Sola, loud with a Small Island tune. She either from Small Island or from the small islands next door. I think maybe Sola born here and that’s why she talk so distant. But I know we close. I just I don’t know how close after last night.

  SOLA

  THE NEXT MORNING WHEN Judith calls I jump out of bed and land in the middle of the kitchen in underwear and my orange shirt from the night before. Dolma is watching me like she knows something is different.

  “Where’s the phone?”

  She points to the counter, flour imprints along the handle. Oil spitting from the stove, balls of dough dropping from her spoon. I grab the phone between index finger and thumb, a piece of dough drops to the floor. I walk back to my room. “Good morning,” I say.

  “Sola?”

  “Morning.”

  “It’s Judith.”

  Damn. My heart, my breath speeding along like they’re not part of me, like they’re two cars racing down the road outside my window. The phone is cradled between my shoulder and ear. I pick up my clothes from the ground and start to fold. Judith is on the other end and I am waiting for the cars outside to pass.

  “Sola? You there?” she says.

  “I’ll call you back,” I say before letting the phone drop from shoulder to hand to bed. I continue folding shirts and then pants, slowly at first, meticulously, while rolling Judith around in my head like a slow stretch from side to side. Unfamiliar lightness. I float from bedroom to kitchen telling Dolma I’ve changed my mind about church.

  “Every Sunday you changing your mind.”


  “You’re always complaining about everyone at church and still you fight to go every Sunday.”

  “Sola it’s not the people I going to see it’s the Lord I going to praise! Who’s that on the phone anyways?”

  “A friend.”

  “A friend?”

  “Yes a friend. I do have friends you know.”

  “Well I haven’t seen or heard friends in a long time.”

  “Well that doesn’t mean I don’t have them.”

  I write Judith’s number down. Dolma watches me while flipping the last fried bake onto paper towel.

  Two hours later Judith and I are at the coffee shop behind the apartment and I am wishing I went to church with Dolma instead of listening to Judith joke about the night before, about the kiss, about the two vodka coolers making her drunk, making her gay. Then she’s asking me if I’m cool and I say, “I cool.”

  Then out of nowhere she asks if I have ever ridden on a roller coaster. Like riding a roller coaster is the next most natural conversation to flip to after last night. Before I can respond she’s talking about the coffee, “Damn this tastes like shit. How people think this coffee good? And people blocking traffic for this?”

  “Where you from anyways?” I say.

  “Small Island,” Judith says. “Your people from the Islands too right?”

  “Small Island,” I say.

  “I knew it. I knew it. That’s fucking insane. What part the island you from?”

  “Lavenville. Up the Bay.”

  “Well I’s from the Parish before you. Top Village. You born here?”

  “I was born there. On the Bay. I moved here when I was nine,” I say.

  “Well you sound like you born here,” Judith says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “How long it take you to lose your language?”

  “Lose my language? My language is English. Just like yours. Although you sound like you were born on the block, like you’re trying to hold tight to country-people English. I’m sure teachers back home taught you better than that.”

  “Country-people English? You talking like you from Town when you from country too and what the hell girl. You talking like you know me. You know me?” Judith asks, irritated.

  “Both your parents from Small Island?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You sure broken English is your language?”

  “Broken? You’re joking right?”

  I suck my teeth and say “never mind” like Judith and I’ve been friends longer than a day and night. Like she’s been on my case for years and I on hers. I can tell she’s angry. I can tell she wants to say more but instead she lowers her head while getting up, clasps her hands behind her back and walks out of the coffee shop. She says we can walk to the fair from here. In silence we walk, her a little bit behind.

  While the heat curls up my neck, I slow down to the pace of Judith. I think of Mr. Jessamy, my Grade 5 teacher at St. Matthews Anglican Primary School, telling his students, “Don’t ever think you less than those people over there,” his arm stretching far and north, a north much farther than the splatter of northern islands sweeping the two seas. Mr. Jessamy tells us if God were to sew up the small islands on this side of the world we would be larger than that Big Island over there. Mr. Jessamy telling us how the Indigenous people of that land know, long before the world claim continents, Big Island is an island too and they call that Big Island Turtle Island. “So don’t you forget, we all just a bunch of islands big and small occupying space on the sea.” Mr. Jessamy would agree with Judith. Mr. Jessamy would say our language is not broken.

  But it’s in the way Judith says I lost my language that makes me feel like I did something wrong and am still doing something wrong, like I’m being shamed and in turn shaming Mr. Jessamy, like I’m disappointing myself and him. Mr. Jessamy once worked two seasons picking apples and farming tomatoes on Big Island. My cousin Mikey said they sent him back because he led other migrant workers to speak out against poor housing conditions and low wages. They had a whole set of Small Island workers housed up in an old farmhouse — eight guys to one room — with walls so thin you could hear the melody of tired men snoring a chorus of broken band instruments. Mikey imitated Mr. Jessamy, “And not those rooms you see in the movies you know. We talking small like we in prison. The boss moved out furniture to fit more mattresses.”

  Mikey shared many stories passed down to him by Mr. Jessamy and other friends who farmed other people’s land on Big Island. “I hear they make them men work six days a week, ten hours a day.” Mikey said they booted Mr. Jessamy off Big Island so fast he didn’t have time to gather his pay or say goodbye to the same friends who sealed their mouths so tight you’d think they had secrets they couldn’t even tell themselves. “Mr. Jessamy not easy oui! Revolution fall apart in his own country so he move to a next to start his own!” Mikey laughed.

  Mr. Jessamy made it clear to his big-eyed devoted students, “We all just a set of islands on the sea so don’t let no one make you feel small because we not small at all.” Someone said they heard Mr. Jessamy in the bathroom during the break singing in a low dead tone, “Forever forward. Backwards never.”

  I told Mikey I preferred the smallness of the island to any big fancy place they were planning to send me. A place everyone I knew as a kid dreamt of going, even if it meant not coming back. I heard of many people who left and couldn’t return because they overstayed their visa. Like Ms. Maggie, who left her last three babies with the bigger set of children thinking she could feed them from over there. Ms. Maggie’s older son, Joshua, died unexpectedly from kidney failure a couple months after Ms. Maggie’s visa expired and she couldn’t come back to bury her eldest. She knew if she came back it would be the last of her travels to anything bigger than the small island she was born on. Or Mr. Ferro’s son, Dillon, who left with a white woman he met on the beach and never came back. And even though he was legal after marrying the same white woman he still couldn’t come back to bury his dad because his wife used up their savings to renovate the house. Or Ms. Lonna, who left her crippled son, Devon, with her sister Marion, Marion who died in an accident a few years later, sliced by the propellers of a boat that sped by too close while she was bathing. They said Ms. Lonna was afraid to come back because she met a Small Island man on Big Island and he lent her money to help pay for her sister’s funeral. She couldn’t disrespect the man’s generosity and so she let the neighbours on the corner and her other sister, the one who lived in Town, take care of her crippled son.

  “Times hard,” I heard my grandmother, Tay, say once, “Times so hard people would trade their souls for a barrel stuffed with bags of rice, can food, cheap electrical appliances, shiny white and black school shoes, pounds of clothing passed out to relatives back home.”

  The silence while Judith and I walk, the fluke that we are from the same island, the stark differences between us have me thinking of back home, reasons why people leave, why people return, why people stay. I think about how Dolma left me, left me so fast I didn’t have time to lift a word in protest. She left me with a kiss to the cheek and a smile so broad I thought she was on her way to Town to jump up for the carnival. I doubted Judith came to Big Island because she was forced to, or in exchange for barrels stuffed with things. And yet, there she is walking like she’s still under the Small Island sun. Walking like she is larger than the sea we’re all floating on.

  JUDITH

  “WHERE SHE FROM? WHERE you from?” in my ears from the day I born. “Small Island,” I tell people over and over, “mi navel string buried here,” I say just like my daddy, Fabian, teach me. I proud to claim Small Island language, the language woven from many mothers: French, Spanish, English, African.

  Fabian say, “We Small Island people don’t know who to call Mother. Some claim Mother England depending on what side of history you choose
to forget. Mother England, the most wicked Mother Boss. The dread Step Mother. The mother who force she self on us the longest, the fiercest.” And then he say, “There are some of us still claiming our mother roots, our Mother Africa. And some want to blame she for selling she children, but who can blame a mother when nightmare turn real and the world thiefing she children faster than she can hide them.”

  I am on Fabian’s side, the side of Africa. I grow up Rasta even though I grow up Buddhist too. Mom Buddhist.

  So what if my mother from Big Island? I still 100 percent Small Island. Dad Small Island. My aunties Small Island. My cousins and uncles Small Island. My dogs, cats, goats Small Island. Things I love, mangoes, sapodilla, tamarind balls, guava cheese, soursop and sweet milk, coconut jelly, johnny bakes, sweet potato pudding, ginger beer. Water blue as sapphire, caramel-coloured sand, hills and valleys looped and licked with all kinds of greens. Neighbours missing you even if only a day pass since they see you last. Elders still expecting to be greeted, “Good Morning,” “Good afternoon,” “Good Evening.” The hum of people’s day-to-day soaring through open windows. Everybody knowing somebody who know someone who know you. All Small Island and all part of me.

  I am Fabian and Pauline’s daughter born in the Village, born Christmas Day with a pot of pumpkin soup on the fire, dogs barking in the yard and Uncle Ambrose drinking rum on the back bench. Sometimes people who don’t know me call me White Rasta, Tourist, Indian, Chiney, Coolie, Half Caste. And the people who do know me call me Judith or sometimes Judy or Baby Ras or Fabian’s Daughter, or the child born in the house on Christmas Day, or poor child who lose she mother so early.

  Most people think the reason we live in a small board house, eat mostly what we grow, drive secondhand broke-up cars ’cause we only have Fabian’s salary to live on. They see Mom’s work not work at all but a strange hobby. Many people in the Village can’t understand why anyone would want to spend their time making masks out of garbage from the side of the road and beach. Some say Mom dealing with spirits and she making masks like she dealing in witchcraft. Sometimes church people call them work of Satan and walk their kids fast past our house as if the masks hanging from our veranda working magic. Mom sell she artwork on Small and Big Island.