A week had crawled by like one-legger bugs, slow and painful. Every man left on the plantation buried their dead or plowed the burnt fields. In Mamaí’s trampled garden, I rooted for vegetables and used a pitchfork to turn over the rich black dirt to hunt yams.
Did the neighbors, like the Cellses, fare any better?
The lanky man by the name of Coseveldt, I didn’t see him after that night.
Whoop. Whoop. One of Pa’s overseers, Mr. Teller, blew a conch again. “We’ll finish up tomorrow, lads.”
The cheeky man with fire red hair brandished a pistol on his hip. “Go on back to your provision grounds and work on your own huts. We’ll start again in the morn.”
But Pa’s house wasn’t done.
I hit the hut’s wall, my fingers stinging against the rough mud plaster. They needed to nail up the missing roof sections. Pa’s house, the great owl house—large window eyes, shutter feathers sitting on spindly stilt legs to keep above the floodwater—looked abandoned, as if it’d been hit by another hurricane.
Why would Pa come back to this?
Mr. Teller watched the men leave, his fingers wrapping his pistol. He muttered, “Absentee planter.”
That was an insult to my pa.
Anger wound all about my hungry belly. I wanted to go to my bedroll, but sleep stitched Mrs. Ben’s face to my dropped lids. My gut growled. I’d only found two yams.
Two.
Folks ran off with the food Mamaí had grown. Thwack. I stabbed the ground with the pitchfork. Let it be an omen.
Entering the hut, I bent my head and went past Mamaí to my room. Lying down I stared out my window at the owl house, hoping to see shiny stars.
My baby sister coughed. It sounded scratchy and dry.
Should I get her water? There was only enough for morning. I didn’t think Mamaí wanted me away from the hut even to fill the calabashes at the cistern.
My thin braids fell about me. I tried to right them, hide them beneath my favorite scarf, a red linen handkerchief.
Red wasn’t the color of repentance.
Time to make amends. Sadder than a lone oriole’s whistle, I moved to the main room. Mamaí, singing to Kitty, sat on the floor, very near the spot where Mrs. Ben . . .
The blood in my veins pounded. In my head, I heard the guns again, saw her red tears. “Sorry, Mamaí. Forgive me for bringing death here?”
Nothing.
No words.
No nodding of my ma’s chin.
Nothing.
Kitty snorted, the noise like a tiny reed flute. Did my own sister think I wasn’t sorry?
“Pickney no hear wah marmi say drink peppa warta lime an sarl.” Mamaí’s Creole was about little ones suffering, drinking fire and bitter salty lime water. “Suffering is for you, Dolly, if you keep on. I don’t want that.”
My ma knew many languages, the old ones from Twi and Kikongo to French bits from Grenada, and chunks of Pa’s Irish. The mix of them people called Creole. She’d vary her words depending upon whose ear she had, but she didn’t talk enough.
“Forgive me, Mamaí.”
She lowered Kitty into a pile of blankets and fingered the corset strings of her yellow tunic. Her beautiful brown hands glistened with the sweet-smelling coconut pomade she’d concocted. “You’re too bold, Dolly. Your father calls it misneach, or pluck. I call you minseach, his Irish for billy goat. I fear the goat strength in you.”
“Isn’t it good to be strong? Cudjoe, the leader you’ve sung about, was he not bold? Was he not strong?”
“The true Cudjoe was strong. The Maroon leader bested them all and freed many. The false Cudjoes die horrible deaths.”
Mamaí seemed tired, very weary though no women had yet returned to work. They were to stay safe on the right side of the plantation, in the huts and provision grounds.
“Dolly, Cudjoe was a man. They didn’t want him strong. These men won’t let you be strong.”
I was small but I’d be more. “I want to grow big. I want to protect you until Pa returns. I want everything for us. The dreams I have are good, of houses, big ones. Fine clothes and boots, too.”
“Dolly, they won’t let you. They’ll find a way to hurt you, to take all you have until you are grateful for no more pain.”
Mamaí rubbed her elbows with the pomade she kept in the green calabash. Her skin shone in the candlelight. “No pain for you or Kitty. You must accept what we have. Suffer the bitterness in silence. It is the way.”
She waved me forward. I came as if she’d lowered a scepter.
“I died so that you can live. Don’t make my suffering in vain.”
What was she talking about? Mamaí was alive, sitting before me, talking, breathing.
I rushed and buried myself in her arms, clinging to her. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t let her go. My heart panicked, the rhythm in my chest raged like a drunk fool at celebration. “Don’t leave me, Mamaí. I’m sorry. I’ll be good. Anything.”
She brushed my slick curls, looping my poorly done braids in her hand. “I’m not saying this right. When you’re older, you’ll understand. All our women understand.”
“Don’t leave us, Mamaí. Don’t go to sleep like Mrs. Ben. Don’t. No. Mamaí.”
“Your pa won’t let me leave, and he won’t sell my daughters, not like my own pa. So no one is going.” She sat me on her lap and started loosening my hair. “The outside world keeps calling you. I will press Massa Kirwan to free you. If you girls are free, then I’ll live again, too . . . even if I have to stay as Kirwan’s chattel.”
Her words felt heavy, smothering. Mamaí’s voice was as wet as the rains of the hurricane. I grasped her neck like I was drowning.
“Mamaí, tell Pa you miss him. Maybe that will make him stay?”
Her eyes went wide. In the center, they held fire among the pretty tan rings and ash.
“There’s much you don’t understand. Dolly, you made a story in your head of how things are. I wish it were true. It’s not.”
I touched her face, the face that had my nose and the same shape of my deep-set eyes, but not my mouth or feather-thin hair. I got those from Pa. “Pa treats us good, better than the rest. You have the biggest hut. It’s nearest his owl house. I don’t understand.”
“Dolly, you’ll learn how small the world is for us. I hurt for you.”
I held my mother and let her sob all down my shift, but it was the closest I’d felt to her soul. Mamaí had shown me that secret place in which she hid. Now I knew when her face went blank, she’d fallen into a well of pain.
A song rose in my throat. The melody I heard her hum to me and to Kitty.
It took forever, but the joy of that wordless hymn ministered to me, to us. Her sobs stopped.
I wanted to be big someday. I prayed that I could take Mamaí and Kitty and show them Pa’s world. We’d follow the stars across the sea. I had to prove that we could have a piece of this big world. “I will get us my good dreams.”
Mamaí’s lips pressed tight. The fullness of them, pink and brown, were drawn to a dot like the bud of the Trinitaria.
“Sɛ wowɔ ahotɔ a, nna woyɛ ahotɔ ni. Only if you’re free . . . then you can be.” She said this, over and over.
The words drummed into my heart. I’d remember them and use their fire to go beyond our hut, beyond our provision ground, beyond Pa’s plantation.
Bam. Bam. Bam.
The door to the hut vibrated. Something angry wanted in.
“No. No.” No more violence. No more rebellion. “Go!”
“Shhh, Dolly. Shhh.”
We were unprotected. Promises and prayers did nothing. I’d left Mamaí’s pitchfork outside, lording over the empty garden. We were exposed. I wrapped myself about my mother and sister. I’d be their shield and die in their stead.