A woman we know who takes a deep interest in clothes and the fabrics that they are made up in, and who, it seems, occasionally makes herself a dress or a pair of trousers or a blouse, invited us to go “look at some cloth,” as she put it. On our way, she said, “On the day I turned seven, my mother gave me a copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and in it she wrote, ‘To my darling daughter, with love, Mamie.’ And also she said, ‘Miss Doreen can take you now.’ Miss Doreen was a seamstress. She wasn’t my seamstress and she wasn’t my mother’s seamstress, though sometimes she was asked to make my everyday school uniform. What my mother meant by her taking me now was that I could begin to be her new apprentice. We lived on a small island in the Caribbean, and everyone I knew then was apprenticing to someone—the girls to cooks or seamstresses or housekeepers, the boys to carpenters or mechanics or men busy at some other thing that men do. My father was a carpenter, and some boy’s mother was always at our house asking if the boy could become my father’s apprentice.
My father’s apprentice had to carry my father’s toolbox and walk behind my father, and he couldn’t stop and talk to people while he was with my father. At the time I began with Miss Doreen, I already knew how to sew on a button, and how to sew two things together, using a simple in-and-out stitch. But that made no difference to her. This is what she had me do: for the first few months, at the end of every sewing day it was my job to sweep up the floors, which were always covered with threads and scraps of cloth; I dusted her sewing machine; and at the end of every week I polished its mahogany cabinet. It was almost a year before I could tie off the ends of threads on the wrong side of a dress, and then only if it was a child’s everyday dress. It was years before I was allowed to go to the store with a sample of cloth and buy the matching-color thread for it. I was fourteen years old before I was asked to hem a woman’s Sunday dress. In between all these things, though, she showed me how to make buttonholes, how to cut on the bias, how to make a gathered skirt, how to make pleats. When she worked, she would purse her lips; and she was very bony—her collarbones really stuck out. I would go to see her on Tuesdays and Thursdays from four to six when I had school, and from one o’clock to three o’lock three days a week during school holidays. I never saw her on weekends. She was a Seventh Day Adventist. She charged five shillings to make a woman’s dress and two shillings and sixpence to make a child’s dress. I haven’t seen her in years. I don’t know what it is she does now. I don’t know if she is dead or alive.”
At the fabric store, a large, barnlike room filled with rows
and rows of bolts of cloth stacked on top of each other in a disorderly way, our friend said, “It’s all been changed since I was here last. They used to keep linen here.” She pointed to a place where there were bolts of silky-looking material. “I haven’t been here in years, so everything must have changed. There used to be a man who worked here—I liked him. He was always so nice to me. He would always go in the back and bring me some piece of fabric that he thought I would like. Once, he showed me the most beautiful piece of French silk crêpe. It was pink with large blue flowers. I used to like to stand and watch him cut the cloth. He had little tufts of hair growing in his ears. Of course, the thing about this place is that you can find wonderful fabric, and none of it is too dear. Now I shall just walk by and look.”
Our friend walked along the aisles. She tugged at and shuffled between her fingers taffeta, silk, organza, wool, cotton, crepe de Chine, gabardine, wool challis. She held some of these fabrics up against her body, and she seemed on the verge of buying yards of red and pink plain cotton. She said, “None of this is really right. It’s none of it exactly what I want. I know just what I want. Or I will know it when I see it. What I guess I really want is some handkerchief linen. But they don’t have any handkerchief linen here. Usually, it costs fifteen dollars a yard. They have some nice gingham. I like gingham a lot, though only in a certain way. When I was little, I had many dresses made up in gingham. Some of them were decorated with braid and some of them with smocking. At my school, the girls were allowed to wear dresses on Fridays. Also
on Fridays, the person who was the best student for the week would receive from the teacher a small prize. It might be a two-tone rubber eraser or a special notebook, made in France. For a long time, almost every week I was the best student. If I wasn’t the best student, I was the second-best student, but usually I was the best. This made some other girls annoyed at me, and on one Friday afternoon, when I went into the bathroom, they came with me. Then they picked me up and tried to flush me away. Feet first, thank God. On that day, I was wearing one of my gingham dresses.”
—August 17, 1981