A young woman we know writes:
I grew up on an island in the West Indies which has an area of a hundred and eight square miles. On the island were many sugarcane fields and a sugar-making factory and a factory where both white and dark rum were made. There were cotton fields, but there were not as many cotton fields as there were sugarcane fields. There were arrowroot fields and tobacco fields, too, but there were not as many arrowroot fields and tobacco fields as there were cotton fields. Some of the fifty-four thousand people who lived on the island grew bananas and mangoes and eddoes and dasheen and christophine and sweet potatoes and white potatoes and plums and guavas and grapes and papaws and limes and lemons and oranges and grapefruits, and every Saturday they would bring them to the market, which was on Market Street, and they would sell the things they had grown. This was the only way many of them could make a living, and, though it
sounds like farming, they weren’t farmers in the way a Midwestern wheatgrower is a farmer, and they didn’t think of the plots of land on which they grew these things as The Farm. Instead, the plots of land were called The Ground. They might say, “Today, me a go up ground.” The Ground was often many miles away from where they lived, and they got there not by taking a truck or some other kind of automotive transportation but by riding a donkey or by walking. A small number—a very small number—of the fifty-four thousand people worked in banks or in offices. The rest of them—the ones who didn’t grow the things that were sold in the market on Saturdays or work in the factories or the fields, the banks or the offices—were carpenters or masons or servants in the new hotels for tourists which were appearing suddenly all over the island, or servants in private homes, or seamstresses, or tailors, or shopkeepers, or fishermen, or dockworkers, or schoolchildren. All of these different people doing all these different things did this one thing: they were all up and about by half past five in the morning, and they did this without the help of an alarm clock or an automatic clock radio. Every morning—workday, Saturday, or Sunday—the whole island was alive by six o’clock. People got up early on weekdays to go to work or to school; they got up early on Saturday to go to market; and they got up early on Sunday to go to church.
It is true that the early morning is the most beautiful time of day on the island. The sun has just come up and is immediately big and bright, the way the sun always is on an island, but the air is still cool from the night; the sky is a deep, cool
blue (like the sea, it gets lighter as the day wears on, and then it gets darker, until by midnight it looks black); the red in the hibiscus and the flamboyant flowers seems redder; the green of the trees and grass seems greener. If it is December, there is dew everywhere: dew on the painted red galvanized rooftops; dew on my mother’s upside-down washtubs; dew on the stones that make up her stone heap (a round mound of big and little stones in the middle of our yard; my mother spreads out soapy white laundry on these stones, so that the hot sun will bleach them even whiter); dew on the vegetables in my mother’s treasured (to her, horrible to me) vegetable garden. But it wasn’t to admire any of these things that people got up so early. I had never, in all the time I lived there, heard anyone say, “What a beautiful morning.” Once, just the way I had read it in a book, I stretched and said to my mother, “Oh, isn’t it a really lovely morning?” She didn’t reply to that at all, but she pulled my eyelids this way and that and then said that my sluggish liver was getting even more sluggish. I don’t know why people got up so early, but I do know that they took great pride in this. It wasn’t unusual at all to hear one woman say to another, “Me up since way ‘fore day mornin’,” and for the other woman to say back to her, with a laugh, “Yes, my dear, you know de early bird ketch de early worm.”
In our house, we got up every day at half past five. This is what got us up: every morning, Mr. Jarvis—a dockworker who lived with his wife (she sold sweets she had made herself to schoolchildren at the bus depot just before they boarded buses that would take them back to their homes in the country) and
their eight children in a house at the very end of our street—would take his herd of goats to pasture. At exactly half past five, he and his goats reached our house. We heard the cries of the goats and the sound the stake at the end of the chain tied around their necks made as it dragged along the street. Above the sound of what my mother called “that early morning racket,” we could hear Mr. Jarvis whistling. Mostly, he whistled the refrain of an old but popular calypso tune. The words in the refrain were “Come le’ we go, Soukie, Come le’ we go.” If we heard only the crying of the goats and the sound of their chain, we knew that it was Mr. Jarvis’s son Nigel, a rude wharf-rat boy, who was taking the goats to pasture.
We weren’t the only ones who got up to the sound of Mr. Jarvis and his goats. Mr. Gordon, a man who grew lettuce and sold most of it to the new hotels and who lived right next to us, would get up soon after Mr. Jarvis passed. He would throw open all the windows and all the doors in his house, and he would turn on his radio and tune it to a station in St. Croix, a station which at that hour played American country-and-Western music. It may have been from this that my mother developed her devotion to the music of Hank Williams. Mr. Gordon was very nice to my family, but that didn’t prevent me from deciding that he resembled a monkey, and so I nicknamed him Monkey Lettuce. I called him this only behind his and my parents’ back, of course. We never tuned our radio to the station in St. Croix. Instead, at exactly seven o‘clock, my parents turned on our radio and tuned it to the station on our island. A man’s voice would say, “It is seven
o’clock.” Then another voice, a completely different voice, would say, “This is the BBC, London.” Then we would listen to the news being broadcast. At around that time, we sat down to eat breakfast.
Between the time I got up and eight o’clock, I would have helped my mother fill her washtubs with water, swept up the yard, fed the chickens, taken a bath in cold water, polished my shoes, pressed my school uniform (gray pleated-linen tunic, pink poplin blouse), gone to the grocer (Mr. Richards) to buy fresh bread (two fourpence loaves, one each for my mother and father; a twopence loaf for me; and three penny loaves, one each for my little brothers) and also to buy butter and cheese (made in New Zealand), gone to Miss Roma to have my hair freshly braided, and eaten a breakfast of porridge, eggs, bread and butter, cheese, and hot Ovaltine. By that time, it was no longer early morning on our island, and half an hour later, together with two hundred and ninety-nine other girls and three hundred boys, I would be in my school auditorium singing, “All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small.”
I now live in Manhattan. The only thing it has in common with the island where I grew up is a geographical definition. Certainly no one I know gets up at half past five, at six o’clock, at half past six, at seven o’clock, at half past seven, at eight o’clock. I know one person who sleeps all day and stays up all night. I know another person who has to take a nap if
he gets up before noon. And how easy it is, I have noticed, to put a great distance between you and a close friend if you should call that friend before ten in the morning.
I wake up, still, without an alarm, at half past five. In the neighborhood in which I live, it is very quiet at that hour. It is not romantic at all to hear nothing in the city. At around six o’lock, I begin to hear the sound of moving vehicles. Trucks. I know they are trucks because the sound I hear is a rumbling sound that only trucks make. The sound sometimes comes from streets far away. If I get up and look out, I might not see anyone. If I see anyone, it is almost always two or three men together, dressed identically, in tight black leather pants, a black leather jacket, a black leather cap, and black leather boots. They will walk very quickly down my street as if they are in a great hurry. When I look out, I never notice the early light playing on the street or on the brownstone houses across the street from me. In Manhattan, I notice only whether it is sunny and bright or cloudy and gray or raining or snowing. I never notice things like gradations of light, but my friends tell me that they are there.
Between six and seven, I sit and read women’s magazines. I read articles about Elizabeth Taylor’s new, simple life, articles about Mary Tyler Moore, articles about Jane Pauley, articles about members of the Carter family, articles about Candice Bergen, articles about Doris Day, articles about Phyllis Diller, and excerpts from Lana Turner’s autobiography. I know many things about these people—things that they may have forgotten themselves and things that, should we ever
meet, they might wish I would forget also. At seven o’clock, I watch the morning news for one whole hour. I watch the morning news for two reasons: it makes me feel as if I am living in Chicago, and on the morning news I see and hear the best reports on anything having to do with pigs. I don’t know why the morning news makes me feel as if I am living in Chicago and not, say, Cleveland, but there it is. I love Chicago and would like to live there, but only for an hour. Some days, after watching the morning news, my head is filled with useless (to me) but interesting information about pigs. Some of the information, though, is good only for a day. Then, for half an hour, I watch Captain Kangaroo. I love Captain Kangaroo and have forgiven him for saying to Chastity Bono, when they were both guests on her parents’ television show, “Now, let me lay this on you, Chastity.” Surely a grown man, even if he is a children’s hero (perhaps because he is a children’s hero), shouldn’t talk like that.
Then it is half past eight and no longer early morning in Manhattan, either.
—October 17, 1977