Come. let us observe it now, the autoclaps. Begin in Beverly Hills. See how the blue Honda makes its way down the bumpy hill. And was anything ever more innocent than this, a simple car driving on a simple road? At the bottom of the hill it takes a right onto Monroe Road, Monroe Road that soon becomes the long curve of Wellington Drive, the road like a closed parabola. At the end of Wellington Drive, the car takes a right onto Mona Road and drives its full length, past the once tidy Mona suburbs on the left, Mona High School and the hockey field on the right, and then under the old cut-stone plantation aqueduct, and then past the old plantation itself, which is, of course, no longer a plantation but the University of the West Indies. But now, as we approach Augustown, we lose the car under a copse of trees and yellow flowers.
Zoom in, then.
“Right here is fine,” says Miss G.
So Mrs. G pulls the car up beside the kerb. “I love this time of year,” she says, dipping her head to look out of the car and up to the trees that grow along the pavement. “The exam trees are flowering.” By this, she means the poui trees. There is a saying on the university campus, When the pouis appear, exams are near, and indeed the trees are beginning to throw their batches of yellow flowers all over the road. It really is quite a beautiful harbinger.
Miss G opens the car door to let herself out, but Mrs. G reaches over to hold her arm for a moment. “Miss G, I just need to say what a pleasure it has been teaching you…well,” she laughs a little, “in the end, I haven’t taught you so much at all. I’ve just facilitated what your mind can do. But that has been a pleasure as well, just watching you accomplish things so easily.”
Miss G reaches around with her free hand and clasps Mrs. G’s hand. She nods and then says suddenly, “My boy-child, Kaia. I will bring him up to the house tomorrow. You should meet him.”
Mrs. G smiles. “Yes, I would like that.” And with this they part. Mrs. G turns the car around, and Miss G watches as the blue car becomes smaller and smaller until there is no car at all, just the road and the yellow flowers. Alone now under the poui tree, the helper feels herself transforming from the person of Miss G back into the person of Gina. It is only now that her heart starts to race. As Miss G, she does not feel very much. Miss G is a woman who keeps so much inside her. Miss G is a woman with secrets. But as Gina she allows herself to feel buoyant. She feels the exciting future not somewhere out there, but inside her own body, a certain lightness of being that could even allow her to float. It is beginning to spread inside her veins, this floating feeling, as if she could close her eyes right now and begin to rise, up, up, up into the air.
She thinks about the letter from the university, the university that she can turn to look on right now. She almost squeals. It is one of those moments you feel the need to pause, to touch the ground, to breathe in deeply, to take it all in, to make a memory or even a monument—this pivotal moment when you feel your whole world turning.
But the world has turned for her before, at this very spot, under one of these very trees. She did not know it at the time. It was that morning when Matthew stopped behind her and she had cursed him before she saw him, and then felt embarrassed, and then he had given her a ride to school. She did not know then that tiny moments change wide futures, that small axes fell big trees, that some days have more roads than others and some roads more distance. How appropriate, she thinks suddenly. How strikingly appropriate! It was Mrs. G’s blue Honda that had picked her up six years ago and carried her away from the future she had imagined for herself, and it is that same blue Honda that has just now returned her to it.
She does not regret her life. No. Let us be more specific; she does not regret Kaia. So many early mornings since his birth she has woken up in the dark in a cold sweat. She wakes up thinking of that other morning, the morning when he was born, and how she had held him over the toilet bowl, how she had almost stopped his life before it had really begun. It shames her, this memory. And it always comes back to her at the exact hour, pulling her from sleep. Is this what they call a blood memory? As if, at 2:35 each morning, a murderous intent still pulses through her heart, or an echo of something she never actually did.
When this memory comes back to her she lifts herself out of her bed and walks over to sit on the edge of Kaia’s small cot. She strokes his hair and wonders if there is some part of his unconscious being that knows this evil thing that his mother almost did to him. It is possible. She has read before about the vast chambers of the mind—how sometimes it remembers things it has no business remembering. But she thinks if there really is a part of his unconscious that knows the evil that faced him at his birth, maybe there is also a part of his unconscious that has forgiven her.
Gina tries to be a good mother. She has vowed to protect him. She believes she owes him this. Ma Taffy does not always approve. She says, “Give the boy some space, Gina. Give him room to grow his own backbone.” But how heavy is the weight of love, and how much heavier when it springs from a place of guilt.
On those dark mornings when Gina wakes up, she eventually goes down on her knees, the way women for years have gone down on their knees, and she whispers into Kaia’s ears, “You are worth it.” It sounds like a prayer, or a chant over his life.
And she really does believe this. She believes everything has been worth it. Meeting Matthew was worth it. And losing him; and dropping out of high school without a single subject; and being a simple domestic helper these last three years. It has been hard, of course. In the days following Kaia’s birth she would walk through Augustown with her head down, and the boys would sit there on the fence like high court judges and look on her, coy smiles on their lips, and she would suffer the weight of their contempt. See it there! She knew that was what they were thinking. See it there! You did gwaan like you was better than we. You say it right to we face that you was better than we. But look at you now. The higher monkey climb the more him batty expose. Ma Taffy never teach you that lesson? Eh? Well, see it there now! You learn it. And you couldn’t learn that from no goddamn book. You always act like your shit could make patty, like you did make to eat from high table but now you eating so-so scraps like the rest of we. But the days turned into weeks and into months and into years, and she has learnt how to lift her head up and how to meet the gaze of these boys with a look that says simply, Yes. I have learnt my lessons. And then a look that says something even larger and warmer and without judgement; a look that makes the boys ashamed and causes them to look away from her. So Gina believes it has been worth it, because Kaia is worth it. Because she has learnt things these six years, it is true, that she could not have learnt from books or with her brain. She has learnt heart lessons. Love lessons. She has grown up. She is only twenty-one but already she feels like a big, big woman.
Standing now under the poui tree, Gina closes her eyes and takes a breath in order to make a memory of this moment. She can smell what Ma Taffy had smelt hours ago—the mangoes and the cherries and the otaheite apples ripening together, and then all the vague but distinct everyday smells of Augustown: coal fires burning, turn cornmeal turning, crack rice boiling, the sweat of blackwomen standing over pots, the sweat of blackmen standing in the streets. But does she smell the sweet, choking smell behind it all? Does she smell what is coming?
No. She does not. She can hear it, though—the singing and chanting that seems to come from the primary school—yet she does not pay it much attention. Her fingers curl around the fat envelope. It is time, she thinks. So she walks now towards the house. And was anything ever more innocent than this—a simple woman walking on a simple lane?
The lane does not feel emptier than usual, and Gina does not notice the few passers-by who look at her with a sense of expectation. She comes at last to the house, and up there on the verandah she sees Ma Taffy and beside the old woman, a boy. For half a second she does not recognise the boy—or she recognises him the way we recognise people in dreams who sometimes wear different faces. She closes her eyes. She opens them again. Instead of a floating feeling, she feels a sudden flatness in her being. Just so. How a day can change just so. Her fingers are curling around the envelope in her hand. And then a shivering comes. A shivering rage. She remembers herself as a three-year-old girl, and the body of Clarky hanging under the mango tree. Did the breeze make the body swing like a pendulum, or did it remain perfectly still? She cannot quite remember. But she thinks of Kaia’s body, hanged. Who would want to hang her boy?
Ma Taffy is standing up. “Gina,” she says. “Gina, come here and let we talk this thing through.”
But Gina does not move from the spot where she is standing, and Kaia is running to her, his arms open. He is crying again. No. Not just crying. He is bawling, as if he has been saving it up all this time. It is a loud wailing sound—a cry that is not weak at all, but has backbone. And this time Gina does not tell him to stop as she usually does, but lifts him up into her arms and holds him close.
“I…never do nothing…Mommy! I wasn’t…rude…or nothing!” He explains himself through snot and tears and hiccups. “Is Mr…Saint-Josephs…cut…off my hair. And I…wasn’t even rude or nothing…Mommy!”
She kisses his cheek. It tastes of salt.
“Gina?” Ma Taffy says. “Gina.”
Still Gina does not respond. She lifts Kaia away from her and puts him back on the ground.
“I soon come back,” she says.
“Gina?” Ma Taffy calls to her, but Gina is already walking away, back through the lane, through the streets that are named as if marking a calendar—August Road, July Street, June Boulevard. She walks towards the school.
The crowd by the school gate is not as big now as it was an hour ago. One by one people have left; they have other things to do, other people to meet, goods to sell before the day is fully done, pots left on fires that need tending. They have also been told that old Sister Gilzene has died, so there is the funeral home to call, the body to move, the mattress to turn over and the furniture to rearrange so that the duppy won’t come back and haunt them. Also, Ma Taffy hasn’t come to join them with the boy. They had hoped she would. It would have given them more purpose—they could have held the boy and hugged him and wept over him and felt a greater sense of anger on his behalf. The teacher is also nowhere to be seen. They imagine he is cowering in some corner of the schoolyard. But without the teacher, and without the boy, there is nothing for them to group up against or group up in support of. After a while, the big feeling that set them marching and chanting at the gate feels a little foolish, the whole thing about the boy and his hair being cut just another unfortunate incident—spilt milk, really; nothing that affects the price of bread—so one by one they return to their lives.
As Gina walks the last stretch towards the school she does not pay attention to the people walking past her. But they notice her. They notice how she holds herself tight but her whole body is shivering. They notice how each of her steps presses an incredible anger into the ground, and how the white dust from the marl road rises up in little bursts and sprinkles on her feet. They run back towards the school. “Mama coming!” one of them shouts, and something is reignited, an energy that had dissipated; the focus they needed has finally arrived. Before, they were a hurricane without a centre. Now they can be pelting rain and gale force wind and red skies. They can be destruction and calamity and the bruggalungdung. They begin bellowing for the teacher again. “Send him out! Send him out! Make him answer to Mama!” They hold onto the gate and onto the fence and shake them.
The woman whose job it is each evening to sweep and mop the classrooms of Augustown Primary, and who is still lingering outside classroom 2B, hears the rattling of the gate and the fence. She hears the loud bang as they are torn down. She hisses to her dog, “Jeeezas Chrise, Jack Sprat! That sound like autoclaps!”