Object Permanence
Image of Joanne C. Hillhouse, with two of her books in hand
Photo by Annetta Jackson, Intersect Antigua-Barbuda
I was travelling from Cuba to Antigua recently, and while navigating the hellscape that is Miami airport, rushing to make my connecting flight, I lost my grandmother’s bracelet. It’s actually two bracelets, of the silver bangle variety, but one got broken some years ago and I’ve been wearing the intact one solo ever since. I came into possession of these bracelets when I was a child, after my grandmother died. If you’ve read my first book The Boy from Willow Bend [1], you have some notion of how her death impacted me. While the book is not autobiographical, Willow Bend’s Vere’s navigation of that trauma and the lingering grief, is ripped from my life, fictionalized. I have also shared how I carry Tanty, as we call my grandmother, with me. One physical manifestation of this is the bracelets (or the one bracelet now) that I wear always.
… [At] school where we weren’t allowed to wear jewelry of any kind. I slipped them off at the school gate and into the side pocket of my pleated jumper, where I could touch them anytime I wanted, before entering the yard and lining up with the other girls for assembly. [2]
Of course, the airport strip-le-me-feel-yuh-up show at TSA has been a part of the inconvenience of travel for 23 years: off with the shoes, off with the belt, the earrings, the bracelets, now step into the scanner and let me look at your body one time, can I pat you down, okay turn around. This time while re-dressing in line at the gate to get onto the plane, I realized Tanty’s single remaining intact bracelet was missing. There was no time, no way to get it back. I stood in line trying to accept the reality that the bracelet was gone…and I just couldn’t. Emotion rocked my body; tears leaked from my eyes. As she was scanning my passport, I told the gate agent that I had lost something during the scan and asked if I could go back. She said, “You have 17 minutes”. I dashed back toward TSA and zipped through the DO NOT ENTER door and looked for and found a worker standing at the end of the conveyer repacking the trays. She was a Black woman (that seems important to me in retrospect) and I said to her, can you help me, I’ve lost my grandmother’s bracelet. I don’t know what emotion she saw on my body and face or heard in my voice or maybe in the way I phrased it (“my grandmother’s bracelet” communicating an emotional attachment to the missing object that she understood) but she tried to help me. In my experience, this is unusual in airports, American airports especially, and especially at TSA. She looked in what I imagine is their lost and found, and then tried to retrace my path while I spun around uselessly. Then, I saw it on the dirty floor across the way, its silver dull against the grey floor. I’m a Catholic-raised girl, I’m supposed to believe in miracles. If I didn’t before, that moment made a believer out of me. I grabbed the bracelet off the floor, and called out my thanks as I dashed back to the gate. I made my flight. Prayers up!
On the page, as in life, people (characters) have things that mean something to them; that come to symbolize things in the greater context of the story. For me, the key is not to force it (what a character’s thing is) but to discover it over the course of revisions.
For Gladstone and Corinne, who had sparred many evenings between their two huts with their mostly deflated ball, it was like play. Corinne even started styling off the way she did, twisting at the hip to tap the ball with her outer heel instead of her inner foot.
In “Freedom Cup”, a work still being revised but discussed quite a bit in my last residency article, “What Can Story Do” [3], that thing is – at first – the football. A core memory for main character Corinne is learning to kick with and from her dad.
“The ball doesn’t want to drop,” Atik, her original sparring partner, used to say to her when she was little and just learning the game. She would look at her father confused; she might be little but she was big enough to know that a ball didn’t want anything. It’s a ball. “It’s body ball,” Atik said, bouncing the ball, which had more air then, on his knee, then his shin, then, with a leg twist, his calf, then catching it in the hinge between his foot and leg, holding it there, then bouncing it once and, without warning, kicking it to Corinne, who angled her body so that it bounced off her stomach, then bounced on her leg, where she kept it bouncing, with a big grin on her face. First time she ever managed a catch and bounce. “The ball is a part of you,” her father said. “It want what you want. You can keep it up forever if you remember that.” She wasn’t able to keep it up forever, as Cora called them in for dinner soon after, but she kept that ball bouncing for a good long time.
No surprise that the ball became Corinne’s object. It’s not just about skill (though she is quite skilled with the ball). It is also, I can see now, also representative of home and family. Her skill with it becomes the thing that could give her her freedom, taking her away from home and family. More than a plot device, it is as much a part of her identity as my Tanty’s bracelets have become for me. This is true, too, for Charlotte in “My Mother’s Bracelets”. That I’m writing about this on Mother’s Day is unintentional but serendipitous.
The story begins with a crime and the bracelets.
…my mother’s silver bracelets have been my most precious possession since the day I stole them.
The story continues with a crime and the bracelets.
…the flash of silver, just before the officer slipped on the handcuffs, reminded me of my mother’s bracelets. Unremarkable bracelets – the kind poor people own so they can own something nice. I’ve worn them since I was a child.
These simple, silver bangle bracelets were coveted once upon a time, and not just in Antigua-Barbuda. References – smatterings, really – I found while writing this, broadly refer to the traditional West Indian bracelets; and to silver bracelets being worn for protection, or status (hand-crafted and molted silver as they are still by the likes of Bailey’s in Antigua [4]), or ceremony (a birth, for instance, as they were reportedly often gifted to children). There is a passing reference in an article by Antiguan-Barbudan historian Dr. Reginald Murphy, to “the silver ‘slave’ bracelets worn by many today [being] reflections of the manilla brass ones used in West Africa” [5].
Charlotte and her family have their own lore – some of it suggestive of broader social history.
“They were a Christmas gift from the Pereiras, the Portuguese merchant family Mammy cooked for,” my mother used to recite, and like a recitation, it got stuck in my head. “They were jewelers; so it was fine work. As if that could make up for that job that took her life early: day in day out bent over the big pot in their brick fireplace. No other house I knew had a fireplace like that. Mammy took a kind of pride in it. ‘Better than coal pot,’ she used to say. I don’t know ‘bout that. Heat is heat. But she was just proud to be the first in our family line to leave the cane field. Cane field, cane and cotton, was black people work them time. These bracelets made her feel special.”
Being a stay at home mom in a world where women like her mother broke their back working for others made my mother feel special. She never took those bracelets off, even when they didn’t match.
For Charlotte, they became a talisman of sorts through life’s key moments – including childbirth and surgery…
I only discovered after the pain had dulled to a sharp pull if I moved without thinking, that the bracelets had turned black while in Capheus’ care, black-black just so. I should’ve read the sign.
It, also, makes for moments of bonding – e.g. with the nurse whose home remedies helped her get the shine back after childbirth and surgery.
The bonding – like with me and the TSA agent who probably promptly forgot me – speaks to the power of these objects, when we find them.
My wrist was still bare. I’d scrubbed and scrubbed but could still feel the touch of the shackles. Though I’d stolen them in the first place, I didn’t feel worthy of my mother’s bracelets.
Of course, it’s not about the object, is it? In Charlotte’s case, it’s about the daughter she will never get to be for her mother, and about whatever glow remains of that relationship that never got the chance to fully mature.
I remembered my mother making Milo for me just so when I was a child. Afterwards, if it was too hot, and it always was, she would pour the brown liquid from cup to cup to cool it down; big arching motions that made her bracelets jiggle. There was froth on the surface of the warm tea when she was done that made it taste like a treat.
And in the end, in some way, shape, or form, they are a reflection of the self. Characters are not at all different from us when it comes to that.
When sometime later the belly disappeared like something sharp had pricked the balloon and nobody said where the baby was and her mother looked sad for a long long time, Becka knew better than to ask. Her father packed up the maternity dresses and unopened baby-things in to two cardboard boxes while her mother lay in bed and stared at the back wall. The boxes sat by the front door, until one day Becka came home from school and they just weren’t there. Becka sometimes crawled in alongside her mother, staying when she wasn’t shooed away. Sometimes she curled up in a corner with her crayons and when she ran out of blank paper, got into trouble with Teacher for drawing in her homework book. Her father always made sure she had drawing paper after that.
That’s from “The Girl who draws on Walls”, where we have a girl, Becka, whose mother is dying. Becka and Charlotte are almost the inverse of each other in that part of what Charlotte will forever miss is the connection she was never able to forge with her mother, while Becka is learning to let go of the mother whose embrace of her weirdness made her feel a little less weird herself.
When she draws her mother, her hand instinctively reaches for red and colours like that as if her mother is a fireball or lava. Something dangerous. Red scratches across the page. A fury of red. Sometimes she presses so hard on the crayon, the page tears a little; and that seems right too.
Becka’s object is a drawing pad any blank surface and colouring pencil anything to draw with. It is the bane of her existence that her efforts to draw her world are constantly misunderstood – relatable.
“It’s a lonely road life has carved out for you,” Nella says. “No one will ever really truly understand you and you’ll keep painting and painting trying to get through to them. You’ll fail. You’ll be alone. It’s good you start getting used to it.”
Becka keeps trying to connect – and it is an object, in the end, an art object, that aids her in doing so.
The object at play in “Omari: A Haunting” is unclear as the baby, the titular, Omari, is the only one who can see it; his fascination with a particular corner of the house is driving his mother, Mathilde, mad, mostly because she’s the only one who seems concerned.
She pointed it out to Sam, and he didn’t seem to think it was a big deal. “Woman, why you always looking for problems?”
“Something not right.”
“Like what?”
She was afraid to say it. Could someone have put obeah on her one child to drive her mad?
Of course, it’s not just about the corner –
Now, to Mathilde, the house felt like it was attacking her through her baby.
The house is the object and that in itself is a symbol for other things.
Three bedroom, open design, end to end back porch, and sprawling yard. Having grown up with this aunt and that godmother, now and again separated from her sister, always crowded by family, she liked the idea of space.
There are other objects; such as, the bottle used by the priest who had come to bless the house.
When had Catholic priests started wearing regular khaki pants and shirt-jacks instead of robes to perform rituals? And what was with the spray bottle? Like he was there to clean instead of bless her house. She remembered a silver metal thing from when she was little, at church; the way the priest would dip it and then throw – the water landing heavy and full like raindrops as he moved through the aisles, his lavishly embroidered robe swishing around about his ankles. When had ceremony become so…ordinary?
There are the protections she tries to procure for Omari.
Ma Pompeii gave her a pouch, told her to tie it to Mari’s chest until the leaves inside lost their scent.
There are other objects, like the frying pan… long story, read “Omari” when/if the book (my short story collection in progress) comes out. You’ll wonder, as I’ve done through each revision of “Omari”, if it’s the house-self that’s haunted, or is something else broken. The paranormal possibilities are what first drew me to the story, but, as with objects representing other things, horror is a genre in which the horror often represents something else. So, it makes sense that as I revised, the horror emerged as a portent of the mistrust and lack of harmony in Mathilde and Sam’s relationship – his dismissal of her concerns, her suspicions, possible post-partum. This is one of those stories I’ve enjoyed ‘playing’ with, finding the balance between what is and what may be; and it all started with the corner of a house they owned due to someone else’s misfortune.
Object is not, for me, intended just as a narrative plot point, a McGuffin [6]; it also helps anchor the story. It is the magnet pulling me back to the point, like turtles returning home to nest at the site of their birth. As my characters struggle to understand themselves at this point in their journey, it is their north star, whether they understand that or not. I mean I’m writing the story and it’s something I am discovering after multiple passes – including one story “Nevis at Sunset” that was on the chopping block but may now not be.
In “Nevis at Sunset”, I suppose the objects are the communication devices that facilitate unexpected connections, or, as the case may be, re-connections.
She and Rasheed had kind of danced around each other back in the day, a little too much waltzing not enough win’ing as it turned out. Before she knew it, she was back in Antigua, and they’d fallen out of touch. When his request to connect showed up a few weeks ago, she’d accepted it automatically, after checking his profile picture and seeing a greyer, more grizzled version of the boy he had once been.
A messy middle-aged Caribbean rom-com…ish – we don’t have enough of those; and that’s why I might keep it.
A story whose inclusion has never been in doubt for me, meanwhile, is “The Fire”, which begins with a house fire.
He was naked as he born, she was in a white nightie, and the house was on fire.
The burning house is an object, fire is an object, but it begins with a body part.
Russell’s ankle itched, right where the proud flesh rubbed against the side of his sandal. Still, a small patch of skin that was by turns irritated and numb was a small price to pay for his life. That’s what Yvie had meant to take, after all, when she’d doused him in kerosene and lit a match while he slept.
Like joints alerting someone that “weather out” as we say – as someone surely said in Antigua this past week, at time of writing, between the flash flooding, quake, and water spouts – the proud flesh on Russell’s ankle alerts him of danger. The story is experienced from his (unreliable?) point of view but she, Yvie, is there the whole time, her story revealed in his blind spots (because it does feel sometimes like that’s where we exist as women). To feel her that whole time was part of my challenge for myself writing “The Fire”.
With several of these stories, as shown, there is also the suggestion of the supernatural (and the superstitious and the ambiguity we have with regard to this in the Caribbean) – with “The Fire” and “Omari” perhaps most twin-like in this regard: the house, the cleansing, etc.
In these and other stories in this collection, you’ll find references to other ‘objects’ or characters, if you prefer, of Caribbean lore – jumbies, soucouyants, etc.
Luna wishes she was tall, tall as a silk cotton tree, or tall and agile enough to climb up one and rest there, maybe see far far to where she was supposed to go. But even if she saw one she’d be too scared to climb it. Mommy used to say jumbies lived there. “But not all jumbie bad. Some are ancestors, hanging round to keep an eye on things.”
Because these characters inhabit a version of the world as I know it (even if it’s a world gone to shit as in “The Event”, quoted above), they reach for objects that helped shape me; including a pair of silver bracelets.
I always believe that experience matters more than things but there’s no denying that the things we value, we do, usually, because they resonate emotionally. To extrapolate meaning from the objects that have some place of significance in my characters’ lives, I have found to be part of the work of understanding character and shaping story.
ENDNOTES
1 – Link to The Boy from Willow Bend’s first page
2 – Excerpt from unpublished work of short fiction “My Mother’s Bracelets”.
3 – Link to “What can story do?”
4 – Link about Bailey’s in Antigua, where jewelry like the silver bangles are made
5 – Link to “Mosaic of Cultures: Antigua and Barbuda’s Blended Heritage” by Reg Murphy, for The Citizen
6 – What is a McGuffin? – Ask Britannica
7 – As usual, I share some of what I was listening to during this leg of the residency on my Antiguan Writer YouTube channel, in the Residency 3 Playlist
8 – About the title: Object Permanence, per WebMD, “means that you know an object or person still exists even when they are hidden and you can’t see or hear them. This concept was discovered by child psychologist Jean Piaget and is an important milestone in a baby’s brain development.” Thinking of the objects we carry with us, even when we don’t, the emotional weight of them, made me hit on this expression and re-purpose it.
