BY THE TIME I was about seven or eight years old I had memorised quite a few songs and poems. I believe that I recited my first poem in public when I went with my mother to a wedding. This was the same wedding where the groom asked me to sit with him and pretend that I was his little sister.
The groom was seated by himself on a straight-backed chair at the far end of a verandah where guests were gathering at about 7.30 one Saturday morning.
A morning wedding, not held in a church, a ceremony performed not by a minister but by a justice of the peace, a bride who wore a short dress with a veil that did not cover her face. Even a seven-year-old child knew something was not usual about that.
‘Behave,’ my mother had said. ‘Sit there and behave.’ And then she’d disappeared into the bedroom to help ready the bride for her entrance.
‘Hello,’ said the groom as I walked by him on a reconnaissance mission to see if there were any children my age at this wedding that I could play with.
‘Hello, sir.’
‘Guess what? I have a sister who is just about your age.’ ‘Where is your sister? Is she here?’
‘No, I wish she was, she is in St Lucia where I’m from.’
The groom sang his words more than spoke them.
‘May I see your doll? My little sister has a doll’s house; I made it for her.’
I’d looked up at the groom when he said that. You could tell he was tall even though he was sitting down. He had a bony, handsome face and he was sweating hard although it was a cool December morning. He kept mopping his face with a blue handkerchief that matched his tie.
I showed him the doll. It was medium-sized with dark brown hair and amber-coloured glass eyes; the doll stared straight ahead when handed over to the groom, who admired her dress, which was a matching version of the yellow taffeta dress I was wearing.
‘This is a really nice doll. Did you make her dress yourself?
‘No, my mother made my dress,’ I said, fanning out the pleats in my skirt. ‘And she made the dolly dress too.’
‘I help my little sister to dress her dolls sometimes, and sometimes I help her to put them to sleep.’
‘In the dolly house that you made for her?’
‘Yes. Could you do something for me?’
‘I don’t know, what do you want me to do?’
‘Just please hold my hand for a bit. I’m nervous. I don’t really know anyone here. Maybe you could just pretend you’re my little sister?’
‘Alright.’
And I took a seat beside him in one of the chairs set out around the edge of the verandah and let him fold my small hand with its chewed seven-year-old nails into his large left hand that was sweaty and shaking.
‘How come nobody in your family came from St Lucia?’
‘It’s too far, and there wasn’t enough time. Let me show you how far.’
The groom took a pen and a sheet of paper on which some words were written, from inside the breast pocket of his jacket. He turned the paper over, and on the blank side he drew an arc, he then filled in the islands, naming them as he drew them. He started with Jamaica, which was near Cuba, then he filled in Haiti and kept drawing a lot of smaller islands all the way down to the bottom of the paper where he said Trinidad and Tobago is located close to Venezuela. Then he showed me St Lucia, where he was from, and finally he drew in tiny Barbados off by itself, almost off the right-hand side of the paper, and he explained that there were no other islands after Barbados. He then said something I’ve never forgotten: ‘The next stop after Barbados is, guess where?’
‘I don’t know I am not good at geography.’
‘That’s okay, I’m a teacher, I’ll tell you. The next stop is Africa!’
Then he explained how it had taken days and nights to travel from St Lucia to Jamaica by boat.
After the groom had drawn the first map of the West Indies I’d ever seen, we sat there in silence while I thought about sailing to Africa from Barbados. Then one of the bride’s many brothers came over to the groom and said in a gruff way, ‘Your time now.’
The groom gave my hand a slight squeeze, turned and looked me full in the face and whispered, ‘Thank you.’
Then he got up and walked with the bride’s brother along the length of the verandah out on to the front lawn, over to where a small table draped with a crocheted cloth had been set up under a mango tree. There was a vase of lilies and a bible set out on the table and it was there, at this al fresco altar, when the bride had been led forth from her room wearing a short dress and shoulder-length veil, that my mother later described as a cocktail length gown of off-white guipure lace with a fingertip veil, that the wedding ceremony was performed.
At the reception there were many speeches, but as the groom had nobody there to speak up for him, I asked my mother if I could recite a poem. I did not tell her that I now considered myself the groom’s little sister, but I stepped forward and recited Leigh Hunt’s ‘Abou Ben Adhem’ which I’d been made to memorise at All Saints School:
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:—
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold…
The groom stood up, and with a big smile thanked me for those ‘lovely words’, then he took the creased paper on which he had drawn the map of the West Indies from inside his breast pocket, and read the words he’d written about promising to take care of his beautiful bride and reassuring her family that he would do everything in his power to make her happy in their new home in St Lucia.
Years later, I overheard her mother telling someone that the marriage had not lasted. The bride and groom had gone back to St Lucia to live, but the bride had been miserable because those ‘small island’ people there had been so hostile to her. She’d left the marriage and taken her child with her, travelling from St Lucia back to Jamaica on a big new ship named the Federal Palm, one of two given by Canada to the West Indies Federation to help facilitate freedom of movement between the islands.