Winnipeg, Manitoba, September 8, 1983
Important news never came by mail. Felicity’s agent and publicist took care of her professional communications. If they had anything important to tell her, they would call. Her lovers were not the letter-writing kind, and there was only one missive she wanted to read. The mail was for bills, junk, and desperate appeals for attention from people grasping at straws, seeking access to her without understanding that they were supposed to go through her agent. Her mother had left a pile of envelopes on the hallway table that Felicity was only now tackling, three days after her return from singing Magic Flute in Tokyo. She was still waking at three in the afternoon, her brain jumbled after flying through half the world’s time zones, and she sat at the kitchen table in her robe waiting for the coffee as she flicked through the envelopes.
The crest on the corner attracted her attention. Red, yellow and green; they were the colours of the Grenadian flag, currently flown by the Revolutionary Government of the People of Grenada, and its name was stamped underneath the image. This was the letter she had longed for over the past twelve years. Alone in countless hotel suites and dressing rooms, she had closed her eyes and manifested it sliding from the mail carrier’s hand into her black metal mailbox, the way she had been able to visualize so many of her professional successes before they happened. To Felicity, a dream was an item on a to-do list that would eventually be checked off — it was just a matter of when.
Her lungs gathered breath as if she were about to walk onstage, as if the introduction to her opening aria was already playing. She ripped the envelope open, pulled out a sheet of paper with the same crest at the top of it, and read:
Dear Miss Alexander:
Greetings, in solidarity with the workers on the land, from the Black Pearls of Freedom, the Revolutionary Government of the People of Grenada, led by the Honourable Neville Carpenter, Prime Minister.
You are receiving this letter because you are a performing artist of high standing with a known connection to the island of Grenada, and it is believed that you may be a friend of the Revolutionary government of our independent nation. The government wishes to increase its profile and standing abroad, and to that end, we are planning a showcase of music and arts for October 7, 1983, in St. George’s, Grenada, to which we will be inviting leaders from neighbouring countries and other sympathetic governments. We are hoping that you will participate by performing a few musical selections. If at all possible, your presentation should be on the themes of Black liberation, economic cooperation, socialism, land reform, or worker solidarity.
If you are willing to be part of this event, please contact the Minister of Leisure and Culture, the Honourable Melvin Cleveland, and we will add you to the program. Travel to Grenada will be at your own expense, but if the showcase is profitable, we will offer reimbursement.
Power to the people,
The Honourable Assistant to Melvin Cleveland
Frank Potts
So much of the letter was clueless. It was inappropriate to send a performance request directly to an artist at Felicity’s level — she was not a high school kid providing entertainment for a Mother’s Union tea. Her schedule was full for years, and it was only by coincidence that this showcase coincided with the break that she had engineered to do some coaching before singing her first Traviata at the Metropolitan Opera. And imagine asking a world-class artist to cover her own travel. It was laughable. Yet none of that mattered, because the letter signified only one thing — Claude’s government, the one in which he was deputy prime minister, wanted her to come to Grenada. Claude wanted to see her. He had finally responded to the letters she had sent him, belatedly accepting the offer he made to her at the sugar plantation in Vincennes. Claude’s absence was the one hole left in her life, and, like all the others before it, she had filled it. She had manifested the reality she desired.
The boys had made it, and this letter was proof of their success. Claude and Neville were heads of government on their beloved island, and Felicity, too, had reached the heights of her profession. Now they all performed on the world’s great stages; for her, the Met and La Scala, and for the boys, the United Nations.
Felicity’s mother stopped by with Aunt Rose, after work, before the girls came home from school. Felicity still sat at the kitchen table with another cup of coffee and her score of Linda di Chamounix; not the one that she had used for her Met debut six years ago, in which she had overzealously noted the stage directions above every measure, but the older copy from which she had sung her first student show in London. She had decided to perform its most glorious aria, “O luce di quest’anima,” at the showcase in Grenada.
Mom opened the door with her key and walked in as if this were her house. She didn’t bother with greetings or pleasantries. “Felicity!” she said. “You’re still in your pyjamas? And you haven’t combed your hair?”
“I just flew in from Tokyo,” Felicity said.
“Three days ago.” Mom looked around the kitchen and Felicity saw her assessing the dirty dishes in the sink, the takeout containers on the counter, the wilting plants she had never wanted in the first place.
“I’m still jet-lagged. I was working my ass off. Rehearsals every day for two weeks.”
“Language, Felicity,” said Mom.
“Flower!” said Aunt Rose from the hallway. “It’s so good to see you. Welcome home.” She opened her arms, and Felicity rested her head on her warm, solid chest and breathed in the fruity scent of her hair oil, the sweetness of the baby powder she sprinkled on her damp skin after a bath, and the faint aroma of onions.
“Josiah will be happy to see you too,” Aunt Rose said. “He’s getting out on Monday.”
“How long has it been again?” Felicity asked.
“Almost a year,” said Aunt Rose. Almost a year since Felicity had spent the last hours of Thanksgiving with Josiah at Jack’s place. A flush spread through her body. She squirmed in her seat and stared down at the letter from Grenada. She tried to remember what else she had been doing a year ago. Pining for Claude and preparing to sing Candide in Sydney. After that, flying to Amsterdam for a recital, and pining for Claude. Working on a plan to fly to Chicago to record a blues album and make private music with Russell Pinto. Aunt Rose would have spent the past year praying for her son, having not yet realized the ineffectuality of her actions, and playing her blues records, which she called her “crying music.”
Felicity lifted her head from Aunt Rose’s embrace and picked up the letter from Grenada. “I’m glad you came by, Mom,” she said, “because I was about to call you. I got this invitation to sing in Grenada. I thought it might be nice if you and the girls came.”
“Grenada?” Mom sounded as if Felicity had asked her to go to Iran, and not the country of Mom’s birth. “Why on earth would you sing in Grenada?”
“The government is having an international showcase of Grenadian talent from home and abroad.”
“This invitation is from the government? You mean Neville Carpenter and his gang?”
Felicity slammed the letter onto the table. “They’re not a gang, Mom! They’ve increased employment and literacy rates. They’re using more land for agriculture — they’re doing really good things.” She regurgitated everything she had devoured from the newspapers, all the information she had gleaned listening to radio talk shows as she sat in the back seat of one cab after another.
“And rounding people up and throwing them in jail,” said Mom.
“That’s not true. That’s just their enemies trying to make them look bad. Anyway, they’re better than Percy Tibbs was.”
“I don’t know about that,” Mom said. “You know there’s a song, ‘Lord have mercy, bring back Uncle Percy.’”
“The Black Pearls of Freedom have massive popular support. And they took power from Tibbs in a completely bloodless coup. Tibbs was killing people.” Felicity shuddered as she recalled the soulless eyes of a man who cared for nothing but holding power for its own sake.
“Never mind all that,” Aunt Rose said. “You’re in Canada now. We live in the best country in the world. We have freedom here.” Felicity was infuriated by her aunt’s ability to speak such a blatant lie, when just two years ago, Aunt Rose’s own son had been beaten so badly by Winnipeg police that he almost died.
“What do the Black Pearls want with you?” Mom said to Felicity. “I wouldn’t trust those people. Why are you even considering helping them?”
“I knew Neville Carpenter in university, remember I told you? And some of the others in his government.” Felicity looked at her discarded score, longing to pick it up and fill her head with the beauty of “O luce” instead of this bothersome conversation.
“I don’t know why you were wasting time with that when you had your studies to attend to. Perhaps if you had done better in your classes, you could be teaching today instead of having to travel all over to sing, no steady job.”
“Oh, no, Dolores,” said Aunt Rose. “Felicity is doing so well, and we are all so proud of her. You’re a wonderful teacher, but Felicity is using her gifts, just like Corinthians tells us to do. She’s a credit to our race.”
“That’s exactly it,” Felicity said. “The Grenadian government recognizes me as a musician of Grenadian heritage and they want me to perform, and I want to do it. It would be nice for Mara and Adele to come with me. They’ve never seen Grenada. I’ll be busy with rehearsals so I thought if you came you could show them around.” She ran her fingers along the fold of the letter, trying to hide her discomfort at the thought of being alone with her daughters.
“I don’t want anything to do with Neville Carpenter’s government,” Mom said. “I don’t support Communists.”
Mom had staked her position, and she would not retreat. With her or without her, Felicity would go to Grenada, and she would bring her girls. It was time she told them the truth about their origins.
After Mom left, Felicity pushed aside the cold cup of coffee. She stood up and paced the room. She was desperate to see Claude, but she feared seeing him. Her skin had retained the memory of his, but her heart had grown knotty with scars. Twelve years since she had last seen him in Grenada. Eighteen years since they had met in London, when she was eighteen and he was twenty-one.
Felicity should have known that it was useless trying to talk to her mother, but there was one person who had never failed her. She called Jack before she went to see him. Abby had begun insisting upon it when she ended the separation, instead of merely complaining about Felicity’s visits. “But Abby, we don’t do that,” Felicity had said, relying on their old bonds of culture and community, since that was all she and Abby had now.
Abby’s face tightened, and the shadows settled under her eyes. “We?” said Abby. “You are the one coming to my house to talk to my husband. I’m not coming to your house.”
“You could if you want,” said Felicity. When they were children, Abby had spent almost every weekend with Mom, Felicity, Aunt Rose, and Josiah in the little bungalow they had shared. Abby’s house was even smaller and held the whining mouths of her many siblings and the clothes iron that in her mother’s hand sent bruises marching across Abby’s back. Felicity’s home was a respite for Abby, and Felicity, with no friends at school besides Josiah, had relished the time with her church companion. “We were like sisters, Ab,” Felicity had said. “You met Jack through me. You knew he was my friend.”
“Friends,” Abby had said. “I don’t know what you are now, but it isn’t friends. You call before you come.”
So Felicity called. “Sure, Fizzy,” said Jack. “Come on over. We’ve finished supper.”
Jack was unshaven and his hair straggled loose from his ponytail. Felicity’s eyes swept across the guitar occupying a seat at the kitchen table and the plate before Jack, scraped clean. She smelled tomato sauce. Homemade; Abby never bought the jarred version. “Pasta?” she guessed. She hadn’t made anything for supper. The girls would get home to find her gone, as was her normal state, and they would fend for themselves.
“Lasagna.” Jack got up and retrieved another plate from the cupboard. “Your favourite. Kept some for you.”
“Abby must be pissed she made it, now I’m here to eat it.”
“Come on, Fizzy.” Jack passed a trembling hand across his eyes.
“Where is she?”
“Lying down,” Jack said. “It’s her … you know.” Felicity swallowed the rush of envy, the fear that Jack and Abby would get what they most desired, the relief that it wasn’t going to happen for at least another month.
“Sorry,” she said. “Do you want me to go? Do you need to be with her?” Please say no, please say no, she chanted to herself.
“It’s okay, Fizzy. I think she just needs some time alone.” Jack spooned a slice of lasagna onto Felicity’s plate.
“Well, she can fucking cook, anyway,” Felicity said. Then, chastened by the real sorrow in Jack’s eyes, “You guys could adopt.” She knew Abby wouldn’t. I’m not a child thief, Abby had said when Felicity made the same suggestion to her. Felicity wanted to shout that having children wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, that Abby was lucky to be freed from domestic slavery, that she could have her life to herself. Jack could too, and instead he was wasting time moping about not having something that was not worth having.
Jack said, “I worry that if Abby and I —”
“If you have a kid, they’ll be like me,” Felicity said. She told herself not to be bitter even as she said, “An outcast.” Half Black and half white. In Canada, indistinguishable from the other Blacks — called the same names, sniffed at by the other parents in the same way. In Grenada, pointed at for being “red-skinned,” for “acting sociable,” for thinking she was better than everyone else. In London with Claude, suspected of being a trophy, or evidence of his hypocrisy, always feeling that she had to work harder to make people realize that she had only ever been Black. That the Ukrainian man who sired her, of whom her mother had spoken only once to tell her that he was dead, had no impact upon her allegiances. But Jack would not be like Felicity’s absent father. He would be at the centre of his child’s life; a child who would carry not just Jack’s blood into the world, but also his wisdom. In a haze of anger and grief, Felicity had renounced white men a year ago, but she could not give Jack up.
Felicity felt a welling in her throat and lowered her head. Jack had seen her tears countless times, but these ones were just for her. She picked at the label on her beer bottle, noticing that it was time for a manicure.
“You’re not an outcast, Fizzy,” Jack said. From under her eyelids, she saw his Adam’s apple jump, and he smoothed fine, stray strands of hair from his face. “But never mind me. What’s going on with you?” He got up again and returned with another beer for each of them.
She had allowed herself to get sucked into Jack’s problems and had forgotten why she came over in the first place. “I got this letter, Jack. From Claude.” She passed it across the table.
Jack’s head bent over the page. “This isn’t from Claude. It’s from Frank Potts. He works for Claude. Claude’s the deputy prime minister.”
“You know what I mean.” Felicity stifled the urge to kick him.
“Hmmm.” Jack shed the role of frustrated husband and transformed into pastor and counsellor. “What does this letter really mean to you?”
“It just seems like it’s meant to be,” she said. “I’m always booked up, but then this fall, I’m set to debut Traviata and I book off time to go to New York and coach it and, boom, an invitation from Grenada.”
“You should go, if you really want to.” He reached for his guitar. “It’s just that I saw on the news that there’s talk of an invasion. The Americans are getting fed up with your friend Mr. Carpenter. They say he’s building a runway to land Russian warplanes. You’d better come back in one piece, or” — he grimaced, cast his gaze upwards towards the bedroom — “I don’t know what I’ll do.”
After returning from Jack’s place, Felicity raised the letter from the Revolutionary Government of Grenada to her face. Brushing the paper across her cheek, she wondered if Claude had touched it before it was placed in its envelope. If his fingers had lingered where hers now rested. She imagined those fingers running along her arm, the scent of him filling her nostrils. But the letter held no further clues.
She ordered pizza for dinner. When Mara and Adele came down to eat, she told them about the invitation. “What do you think? Do you girls want to go to Grenada?”
“Can I meet my dad’s family?” Adele asked. “And see his grave?”
Felicity had denied Adele her history long enough. “Yes,” she said. “You can meet your father’s family.” It had to happen sometime, she told herself.
“Well, good for you,” said Mara. She kicked at the table leg.
“You don’t want to come, Mara?”
“What does Grenada have to do with me? My dad lives in Alberta, but I never get to see him.”
Felicity gulped back her nausea. There was no room for Brian in her head just now. “You will,” she said. “After.” That also had to happen sometime.
“I don’t want to go to Grenada,” said Mara. “I don’t even fit in with the Grenadian League.”
“What do you mean, you don’t fit in?” asked Felicity. Years ago, her mother had enrolled both girls in the Grenadian League dance group, which performed traditional Grenadian maypole and harvest dances for cultural celebrations.
“I don’t look like the other girls,” said Mara. “She does.” She pointed at Adele.
Felicity understood Mara. At fourteen, her eyes had been opened to the difference in skin tone between herself and her eleven-year-old half-sister.
“Can I stay here with Grandma?” Mara asked. But Felicity needed her mother to come to Grenada. She didn’t want Adele tagging along to rehearsals and the meeting she hoped to engineer with Claude. Adele was too young to leave alone with family members who were strangers, separated not only by distance and time but by another ocean of resentment and bitterness.
“I’m going to call Grandma and talk to her again,” said Felicity.
The calypso music was so loud that Mom couldn’t hear Felicity at first. When she realized who it was, she called, “Just a minute, Rose.” Back with Felicity, she said, “I have company, Felicity.”
“I hear that.” Felicity twisted the phone cord around her fingers. “How come?”
“I meant to tell you when I was there,” Mom said. “The school’s making me a principal. First Black principal in a school in Manitoba. I thought you and I could have a nice dinner to celebrate with Rose and the girls, but then I invited some of the ladies from church to my place instead.”
Cackling laughter spun down the phone wires. Felicity had been excluded from her mother’s moment of triumph. Her mother had found better company. “Congratulations, Mom.” The words sounded dull, even to her ears, although she meant them. She could see now how hard her mother’s struggle had been, raising Felicity by herself, insisting on their dignity, clawing her way to an education in a world that barely acknowledged her humanity. A thought formed, and Felicity said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to go back to Grenada and tell them about it?”
“They told us never to come back,” Mom said. “Don’t you remember? After my mother died.”
They had not discussed that day. Felicity was ten. Her mother had taken her back to Grenada because her grandmother was dying, and Mom’s sisters were angry because Grandma had died when they had all gone to a workers’ strike meeting, leaving Felicity and Mom alone in the house with her. Their fury was compounded by Mom’s failure to call a priest for the last rites, which they blamed on the fact that Mom had left the Catholic faith to become a Baptist. “I doubt they remember that,” Felicity said. “I don’t think they meant it.” She cast another glance at the letter. “Anyway, that was over twenty-five years ago. You’re a principal now,” she said. “You’re president of the Grenadian League. Shouldn’t you sometimes see the country you’re always talking about?”
“I suppose,” her mother said.
Felicity’s mother had lived in Canada for almost forty years, and she still called Grenada home. Mom was born there, but Felicity had entered the world in Winnipeg. She had never felt that she belonged in this flat, cold prairie town, and yet she had not left it; her house and her family were here. Her own life was lived between hotel rooms, getting in and out of planes and cars that flashed from stage door to stage door. Even though she had only been to Grenada twice, Felicity imagined that scrap of green floating on the blue skirts of the ocean as her home too.