The day broke, and Ma Taffy lifted the as-yet-to-be-named boy-child and surveyed him as carefully as a cartographer might survey a new piece of land. She ran her fingers over his tiny toes, his fat legs, his little penis. She felt his arms and pulled each of his ten fingers. She did her examination with great care, learning the shape of the boy and making sure everything was as it should be.
Then her fingers found his face. The baby opened his mouth and gurgled. It was a pleasing sound.
Ma Taffy smiled as she felt his lips, his eyes, his nose, the shape of his forehead and his cheekbones. She stopped short. She ran her fingers over his face again. And then again. She didn’t know why this new revelation surprised her even more than the fact that Gina had been pregnant all along.
Gina was observing this examination. At first she turned her own face to the window as if ashamed, but then she turned back and pulled the boy out of the old woman’s arms.
“I going to call him Kaia,” Gina said. The words came out with more obstinacy than she had intended, but she was answering a question Ma Taffy had not yet thought to ask, or rather she was refusing her permission to ask it. For it was true what Ma Taffy had said the night before; the girl was becoming a woman and needed a space for her own secrets. She had reopened the door between herself and her aunt, but only partially.
“Kaia?” Ma Taffy asked.
“Yes. Kaia,” Gina said with finality.
Ma Taffy bit her lips.
Kaia. Zulu for home, though Ma Taffy did not know this. Instead, she knew of Kaya as weed—ganja—or else, Kaya as hair. Thick, nappy, African hair, a kind of hair that this boy certainly would not have. It was a strong, African-sounding name. A Rasta name. Ma Taffy began to think about names, and the fact that she had changed her own from Irene to Irie. She had given herself her own Rasta name. She disliked that so many of her people walked around with names like Lisa or Robert or George—names that tried to diminish the greatest part of who they were, of their history; names that weren’t even names, but erasures. And maybe this was her hesitation with this name, Kaia—that it, too, seemed to be an erasure. It was trying to rub out part of the child. And did it matter, Ma Taffy wondered, that the part of him that was being erased by his name was the part that could make life easier for the boy? Or maybe she felt that a Rasta name was the kind of name a man or woman had to find on their own. You couldn’t just be born with it. You had to grow into it. It could not be passed down so simply from parent to child. Ma Taffy felt a complicated thing inside her, but she did not have the words to unravel or make sense of that thing, and on this occasion she did not know how to ask Gina for the words she was seeking.
If they had been able to talk about it—if Gina hadn’t closed the door on these questions—she would have explained to Ma Taffy that it wasn’t the child’s half whiteness she was trying to diminish. Not exactly. Rather, it was a specific man—a boy, really—that she was trying to forget.
One of Ma Taffy’s most constant bits of advice to her girls was this: Make a fool kiss you, that is one thing, but to make a kiss fool you! That is even worser. Don’t make no man turn you into no fool! Sometimes she replaced the word “kiss” with something even cruder.
Gina had taken this advice seriously, and was cautious around boys. She wasn’t prudish, for this was not Ma Taffy’s intention. She kissed boys when she felt like it, and twice she had made a boy touch her in her private place. But there was a line that had to do with her own mind and her own comfort, and no one was able to push past that. As well, Gina believed Ma Taffy’s words—that she could be anything she wanted to be—and she was determined to be someone who would rise up out of Augustown. The boys from the community were therefore unattractive to her. Sometimes they accused her: “You think you better than we! Don’t it? Bright gyal from the ghetto.” And Gina would nod. “I don’t think I better than you. I know it.”
The Augustown boys had no chance and they gave up trying, but the grown men were more determined. There was something about a schoolgirl in her uniform that made them act all silly. Gina had ripened to a perfect age, and each man felt he wanted to be the one to pick her. When she walked to school they would whistle and pssst and offer her all manner of things: clothes, money, trips. On school mornings, Gina was therefore never surprised when a car would slow down behind her and then pull up alongside her, a big man with his face outside the window, his tongue outside his mouth, sometimes grabbing for her. She was used to all this. So when she heard the car slow down behind her on that fateful morning and then pull up alongside, she took a deep breath and, without even turning her head, she shouted, “Why you don’t go home and fuck yu blasted wife and stop bother school pickney?! Yu raas pervert, yu!”
She spun around then, ready to see the man’s stunned face and take whatever abuse he was going to mete out. She was taken aback, then, to see a boy, hardly older than she was, behind the wheel of a blue Honda. And he was smiling at her. She was not prepared for such a thing. This white boy was smiling at her.
“I don’t have wife or pickney,” he said, half laughing, “but you look like you’re rushing. You want a lift?”
She stammered. It was embarrassment more than anything else that made her get into the car.
The boy examined her uniform, the maroon crest on the breast of a khaki tunic. “I guess you’re going to Mona High?” he asked. It was a long walk in the sun but barely a three-minute drive.
Gina nodded uselessly. She knew how to resist the boys of Augustown, and also the men, but this boy seemed to come from a world far, far away.
They said little on that first, short car ride, but the next morning his car pulled up behind her again. And the morning after that. And after a short time Gina would just wait for him at a regular spot—under a poui tree, its yellow blossoms falling into her hair.
His name was Matthew, and over the next week she learnt that he had just finished high school—Campion College—and was taking a year out before going off to university abroad. He was helping his parents for the year, doing odd jobs for them, so every morning he dropped his mother at work in Augustown and then borrowed her car for the day to do the errands he had been assigned.
They talked about little things—Matthew, about his errands; Gina, about the classes she had to take. Sometimes Matthew quizzed Gina on the subjects she was studying. He did not mean to be patronising, but realised he had been whenever he was taken aback by the fluency of her answers. Sometimes Gina explained concepts to him that he had never fully understood himself, and he began to look at her differently.
“You know,” he said one morning, “you’re just as bright as any of the kids at Campion.”
“And why that should surprise you?” she snapped, for she understood more than he did. This boy could only make sense of her if he compared her to the people from his world. But she was not from his world, and she did not want him to forget that. “You feel that is only uptown people that supposed to be smart?”
“It’s not that,” Matthew insisted. “I was just wondering how you ended up at Mona High. Come on, Gina…be honest. It’s not a good school. You could have gone anywhere.”
“Well, maybe I don’t have Campion money.”
“It’s not about money,” he shot back. To some extent he was right. In the island’s Grade Six Common Entrance exams, students could pick whichever high school they wanted to go to. School fees were the same across the island, so as long as a child got the grades, they could get into the school of their choice. Few people would have put down Mona High as their first choice. It was the kind of school that accepted the remainder of students, those who didn’t get the grades to attend the schools they had actually picked.
“I didn’t think too much about what school I wanted to go to,” Gina confessed. “My two cousins, they’re like my sisters. They went to Mona High, so that’s where I chose.”
“Well, that’s a pity.”
“Excuse me?!”
“I’m sorry, but it is.”
“And why exactly is that? Because I don’t go to no snobbish uptown school?”
“No. Because…I don’t know.” Matthew paused. He knew he was putting his foot right back into his mouth, but he shrugged and risked it. “Maybe you could have achieved more if you had gone to another school.”
“Achieved more?” she was still incredulous.
“No. Not that. But had more opportunities.”
“But Matthew, if I get the same grades at Mona as you did get at Campion, then what difference it make?”
“Yes, I suppose,” Matthew conceded and said no more. But even then, a big and uncomfortable truth started to sit between them. This was Jamaica, after all. He knew it and she knew it. Where you were born mattered. Where you lived mattered even more. And if you were born in the wrong place and also lived in the wrong place, then where you went to school mattered as much as water matters to a thirsty man in the desert. It made a difference.
But they ignored this thing that was sitting between them, this incredible distance between their two worlds. It made no sense in the small confines of that blue Honda. It made no sense in relation to how close they were beginning to feel towards each other, and how much closer they wanted to get. The daily drive from the poui trees to Mona High School went on for weeks, and something like love began to grow in that car.