My name is Angel Liang Fowler. People call me Dev. Short for Devil. My relatives all said, “That’s no angel, that’s a devil.” So they called me Dev. You can call me Dev, too. I don’t like it but I’m used to it.
I was just a baby when my mother died in the fireworks explosion.
I don’t like fireworks, or any loud sounds. I can handle the cannonball fruit exploding because it’s nature and I grew up with it. But any loud human sounds? I don’t like them.
My mother died and there I was — squawking, colicky, not a good baby. A good baby is one who is quiet and sleeps all the time. A good child is one that no one ever hears from. Who decided that? If I could go back, I’d make more noise, not less. What did being quiet ever get me? And the truth is, even if I had been a better baby, they still wouldn’t have wanted me.
My mother’s parents didn’t want me because I didn’t look enough like my mother. My father’s family didn’t want me because I looked too much like my mother. And my father didn’t want me because he wanted to feel sorry for himself more than he wanted to take care of me.
I know this is true because they all told me to my face. To others, they’d say I was too much trouble, or I’d be better off in town instead of in the village. But to me, they’d say, “You have too much Chinese in your face.” Or, “Your skin is so dark. Your mother’s skin was beautiful and yours is so ugly.” My father would just look at me and say, “Take him away.” And he’d open a bottle of rum and take a long drink.
Back and forth I went, between my mother’s family and my father’s family. I picked up some schooling. Taught myself, mostly. One of the old men in the neighborhood took me under his wing, coached me in arithmetic and grammar, got me ready for high school. He said we owed it to our slave ancestors to become educated because they couldn’t be.
I think maybe his eyesight wasn’t so good and he couldn’t see how worthless I was. That’s why he was so kind to me. Or maybe he was just a kind man. I’m hoping to get the chance to ask him when all of this is over.
I spent most of my childhood away from my father. He would pop around every now and then, and I’m pretty sure he gave my relatives money to help feed me and all that, but he never spent any time with me.
Then, when I was ten or so, Dad got religion.
He’d had a bad bout of drinking. He was lying in some street, swimming in vomit and his own pee. As he told it later to anyone who would listen, he looked up and saw an angel from God. She was dressed all in white. She told him, “Jesus loves you,” and he was all healed.
He wasn’t, but you’ve figured that out already.
This angel was really a human woman. She was with the Jordanites. Are they still around? They dressed all in white and held services out in the open, like on Bourda Green or Stabroek Market square. They preached on street corners, too. That’s how my father got involved. He was passed out drunk on the corner where they wanted to hold a service.
They treated Dad really well, those Jordanites. They helped him get sober. They cleaned him up and fed him and found him a decent room to live in. He got saved and then he came and got me from my relatives’ house.
There were no books in my father’s relatives’ house except for the Bible. To get me out of their way, Dad’s relatives would say, “Go sit in the corner and learn a Bible verse.” I learned a lot of Bible verses!
When my father saw how many verses I knew, and how easy it was for me to learn them, he bought me a white suit and paraded me out at services. And I liked it! People didn’t care that I was ugly. They cheered when I quoted Colossians 3:2 or Luke 10:19, or whatever they wanted to hear.
But Dad got thirsty again. He needed money for drink so he got the brilliant idea of using me to get it. Away from the Jordanites who had saved his sorry life, he put me out on the street in my white suit to quote Bible verses and collect money like a trained parrot. He’d tell people the money was for the Lord, but he spent it on bottles.
I knew it was wrong. I was happy to be with my father when it looked like he really wanted to be with me, but as soon as I figured out that he was just using me, I was done. But I was a kid. What could I do? I started mumbling my Bible verses so people wouldn’t pay much. That just got him mad.
In the end, Dad was his own undoing. He got thirstier and thirstier and needed more money than I could bring in.
One day I woke up to find that he’d sold my white suit and everything else I had, except for the skivvies that I wore to bed. He laid in a stock of hooch and yelled at me to get out.
So I left, in nothing but my underwear.
I slept in the tool shed at the school. The caretaker gave me a pair of trousers and a shirt. I exchanged work for food. I managed to get my diploma. No one came to watch me graduate. I took my diploma home to show my father. He was dead. Killed himself. He’d been dead for some time. The flies were terrible.
I was seventeen.
Flies and fireworks. I hate them both.
The next years blurred by. I worked. I did every job I could find. Moved cargo on the docks, cut sugar cane, cleaned out ditches that were clogged with mud and sewage. Hot, nasty work! It was the Depression, which hit Guyana like it hit every place, but there was work for those willing to sweat and suffer. And then the war started. More work for more people. Easier work. Better paying. For a time, I guarded boats loaded with bauxite before they were shipped out to the United States. Bauxite was used in making fighter planes. All kinds of work. I saved my money.
I married your great-grandmother in 1942. Her name was Indra, and I knew her from school. She was very smart. Could have run the country. Should have run the country. She proposed to me! I was astonished that she asked, and because of that, I said yes, even though I probably shouldn’t have. I wanted to love her, and I acted like I did. Maybe I did love her. I was always kind to her. I never drank. I knew how to behave. But deep down in me there was a pit of loneliness, and I didn’t know how to get out of it.
A year after we were married, we had a son, Barnabas. He was your grandfather.
Indra’s family was from India. They came to Guyana several generations before, as indentured servants. When Barnabas was a baby, there was famine in Bengal. Indra and I joined a committee to bring people from the famine zone to Guyana. It was a lot to take on, but we knew how to work, and to work for something good. Well, we were young. It made us happy. It was good.
The newcomers from Bengal brought with them terrible stories of starvation, of animals and people dying in the streets. Some also brought leprosy.
Leprosy was already in Guyana. It was everywhere. But we think my wife caught it from the people she was helping. It wasn’t their fault. They didn’t know they had it.
First she got white patches on her skin. She ignored them. She was busy. She cared for our son and so many people, and leprosy never crossed her mind. Eventually, she couldn’t ignore it any longer. She went to the doctor. He sent her to live in the leprosy hospital in Mahaica. Our son was raised by the nuns in the Lady Denham home just outside the gates of the hospital. It was a home for the healthy children of leprosy patients. The children who had leprosy lived in other homes, inside the fence.
I stayed behind in Georgetown. I had just gotten a good job, assisting a shipping supervisor at the dockyards, and we thought Indra would get better and come home. I worked hard and spent very little money on myself. I visited almost every month. Each time I did, I took presents. Indra liked those little tins of peppermints, and white nightgowns with yellow ribbons. Barnabas got toys and new clothes, although I don’t think he liked them. I often saw other children wearing the clothes and playing with the toys.
Sometimes I helped out the nuns by doing small repairs around the grounds, painting sheds, installing new window screens. Barnabas followed me around, helping when he could, talking, talking, talking. He didn’t notice that I never knew what to say to him. How does a father talk to his child? Mine almost never talked to me.
Barnabas didn’t notice. He was happy doing all the talking and telling joke after joke. The jokes weren’t always funny, but I always laughed. It was something I could do for him.
Later, when his mother passed away, he came back to Georgetown to live with me. He had no jokes left. I didn’t know how to help him find new ones. I didn’t know how to help him do anything.
I tried to be a better father to my son than my father was to me. I tried to let him know he was important. I tried to keep him safe. But I wasn’t there for large parts of his life, and I don’t think he ever forgave me. I should have taken a lesser-paying job closer to the leprosy hospital, so that I could see him every day.
My father failed me, and I failed my son.
The pressure of that failure pushed me down.
I waited until my son was far, far away.
Then I killed myself.
As soon as I did it, I wished I hadn’t.
But by then I was dead.
It was too late to change my mind.