Many years ago, soon after my baby sister was born in America, my family returned home to Trinidad, my birthplace, for my father’s brand new job. I was five years old, and having lived most of my life thus far in the United States, I was looking forward to living in a house on the beach, in the country where my mother and father had taken me on holiday so many times before to visit their moms and dads. And now, a new home with a baby sister! It was a very exciting time.
We quickly settled into our gray house at the end of a dirt road, with the fruit bats that rustled inside its ceiling, its sandy backyard and the sea beyond. The house was old and creaky (and, truthfully, the bats somewhat scary), but it was on the east coast of the island, and the sun rising up over the sparkling Atlantic Ocean every morning really was quite breathtaking, even to my very young eyes.
Soon after we arrived, my mother employed Jean, a large, older woman who kept her hair tied up in a colorful scarf. She had a strong propensity for loud laughter, which was somewhat unfortunate, for Jean had approximately two teeth left in her entire head. I was both horrified and fascinated by her toothless grin. She helped my young mother with the housecleaning and the cooking — and boy, could she cook — and she babysat my sister and me when my mother needed to run into the village to do errands.
One very early morning, I felt her gentle hands shaking me awake.
“Come, dahlin’.”
“What’s happening?” I asked, sleepily.
“Come. Yuh goin’ wit’ me dong de beach. Come.”
I awoke, and Jean helped me get dressed. My mother was busy tending to my infant sister, and my dad had already left for work. The sun had just cleared the horizon and was rising in the sky.
Jean and I went through the sliding glass door into our back garden and through the gate onto the beach. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“We goin’ an’ buy some fish. Yuh hear dat?”
I listened and heard a loud low noise on the morning breeze.
“Yes. What’s that?”
“Das de fishermen. Come. We go help dem pull seine.”
“What’s ‘seine’?”
“Oh gawsh, you could ask question, eh? Come nah man!”
We began walking in the direction of the sound. Eventually I discovered its source: a man was blowing through a conch shell.
“Why is he doing that?”
“He tellin’ everybody de fish here. Come, leh we go wI’ de fishermen.”
I looked where she was pointing. There, standing among the breakers, were several men, pulling a huge net, or seine. They leaned backwards against the tension of the ropes, and villagers were coming onto the beach, grabbing a length of the net and pulling along.
Jean and I walked into the lapping waves. She grabbed the net and gave me a section. “Now, pull!”
I pulled. It felt like the net wasn’t moving, and I leaned, using my entire body to pull against the tension, just as the fishermen were doing. One of them, pulling next to me, looked into my eyes and smiled. He didn’t have many more teeth than Jean.
We pulled and we pulled, and slowly the seine started making its way to the beach. As the water became shallower, the fish appeared, silvery, gasping for breath, flapping around in the morning sun.
After about twenty minutes of pulling, all the fish were on the beach. I was stunned at how many there were, and how many shapes and sizes. In addition to fish, there were a few stingrays and hammerhead sharks. I felt somewhat sad — thinking that just hours earlier they were swimming around in the ocean, minding their own business, and now they were lying here on the beach, slowly losing their lives. But I wasn’t permitted to think about this too long: Jean grabbed my arm. “Come, child, we have to hurry, or de best fish will be gone.”
The fishermen had quickly set up a makeshift fishmarket out of nowhere. Scales to weigh the fish appeared, and the villagers were pointing out the ones they wanted to take home.
“Boy, gimme two carite dey, yes? No, no, not dat one, de one dey! Yes, dat self … how much?”
“Yuh have any crab? Ah makin’ a callaloo tonight, de man comin’ home, ah haf tuh have crab, yes? Fus he go leave meh!”
Jean quickly chose a huge redfish and paid for it, as the man cleaned and wrapped it up in paper. She took the package and took my hand as we went home.
“Yuh had fun?”
“Yeah,” I smiled. “That was cool.”
“Good. We go make dis fuh dinner tonight for yuh mummy and daddy.”
Many years have passed since that day on the beach with Jean. Since then, I’ve traveled all over the world, but every time I visit a country or experience a new culture, I think of that day. That day represented my first adventure alone, my first feeling of independence, my first real exploration. It was the first time I was experiencing something and crafting opinions for myself, without my parents’ thoughts or outlook framing my own.
It was indeed the first time I discovered that by leaving what was familiar, what was comfortable, I could learn more about myself and my heart. It was an intoxicating feeling.
A feeling that all these decades later, I still crave.
“I’m different because I can fly a glider plane and I dream in different languages.”
“I’m different because I lived in the Amazon for 6 years. I even saw a piranha bite a woman once.”
“ I’m different because there were more people in my first college class than in my entire home town. This fact has helped shape my world view: no matter where I go, of everybody I think as family.”
