Strayed Child of Hairouna
Photography by Annetta Jackson, Intersect Antigua
Model: Jahshaya Nibbs
You tell yourself that peaches, when ripe, are close to mangoes. The pulp is sweet and juicy and the stone lies in the middle. Sometimes you close your eyes and pretend it’s a grafted, a Julie but you know this stone does not yield the same satisfaction when you grasp it with your tongue-- there are no hairs to suck, just the hard groves of a peach seed-- nothing more. When it’s summer you keep the windows open and let the air in. You can hear the earth breathe, the land exhaling, like it does back home; nearly feel the sweetness of a breeze gently swiping your nose, teetering on the window blinds, enough to make you feel like you could be in your verandah on a late afternoon, taking in the last of what the day has to offer. If you look up beyond the brick houses, above the cables and street lamps, you can see some semblance of a sky that is familiar. It is the same sky you know to be co-balt, with tiny clouds drifting over the green. When you take your morning rambles, you imagine these hillocks and dales, this heath and heather to be the giant mountains around which you and your sister Tay spent your childhood. Huge peaks kissing the sky and rich with the lush green fauna. Still lakes become oceans, little ponds the rushing rivers meandering down hilly slopes you call home. Except this is far from home. You live here but most times your mind is there, between the call of crickets and larbelles blazing at night; the sea foaming and frothing on black sand; the glorious heat of the sun in all its splendour.
You’ve made a truce with the cold-- learnt to respect the way it settles on your face and takes residence in your toes. You’ve learnt how to use layers to protect, to comfort. Your nostrils no longer burn from the thin polluted air, a far cry from velvety island air that cushions your breathing. You know what oils to use to keep your skin supple-- protect it from this harshness. People say when you go ah foreign your face does turn smooth.
You boast about your little island-- of black sand instead of the usual white; of diamond islets scattered like the tail of a kite beyond the main land. Your blood slightly rises to the surface of your skin when people proclaim ignorance of your tiny country’s existence, say they’ve never heard of it, call you Jamaican or look down on you as a small islander. And then you learn to savour it, to keep that slice of Yurumein all to yourself. They say you’re mad to leave the land of sun, sea and sand to dwell in a place where wind chills are knives. They cannot know sun, sea and sand come at a cost. Black sand is scorching; you must wear slippers on the beach because your feet will burn. Mama Ocean gives so much but she also takes. In a flash, her bright and sparkling turquoise becomes a dark and menacing navy, riddled with sargassum lashing out and reclaiming her land. There, the sun is not shy; it is a blistering type of heat that beats down on you mercilessly. Sunbathing is not a choice. You cannot always bask in its glory. When your child needs to eat, you do not spend your days leisurely strolling on soft stretches of sand. Instead you find yourself sweating in the sweltering heat of an office with poor air conditioning, working hard for little pay, barely enough to make the ends meet every month. When the weight of the pound feels sturdier than the dollar you are happy to swap the cocoon of emerald mountains for glassy skyrises. You know the streets will not be paved with gold. But they will be paved. Roads are uneventful here with their smooth asphalt and fresh paint; you’ve grown accustomed to the long expanse of flat grey tarmac. They are not the winding rugged ones at home, riddled with potholes that can make a journey a wild adventure.
“You tell yourself that peaches, when ripe, are close to mangoes.”
Artwork by L.E.M., Intersect Antigua
Every now and then you mouth the words of the National Anthem, ‘…home to me though I may stray’ and it feels like you have strayed, for what was meant to be a quick five years has bled into nearly ten. Long enough to forget why you came in the first place; long enough to lose connections you thought would never break. Distance and time have a way of eroding the frills of relationships- what remains will always be the core and where there is weakness it will never last. Tay, your sister is your core--your only link to things back home. You have tried to keep in touch every fortnight. “You okay?” you ask at the start of every conversation. You try to keep the slanting and lilting of your words at a minimum. You think you still sound Vincy, but the twang of a land you live in always finds a way of sticking to you like cashee. She teases you about it, says you “sounding like an English woman, careful yuh turn one. Dem English people crazy.” It’s the bluntness of your sister’s tongue that you miss. The way she is able to imprint her exact thoughts into her words, no qualms. It is the way of your people. “You geh fat eh! Watch how you round like ah English pound!” is what you hear the first time you return home for a short visit. You wince at the honesty with which people speak. You miss this. You have long grown used to the stiffness that pervades here, where people have learnt to live in subtext and subtlety and never the outright and frank. It’s the loudness of a bellyful of laughter that you miss too, an honesty of self you had there but suppress here.
‘You okay?’ you ask this time. When the flood of words in the cadence of Vincy parlance does not come rushing back over the line, you know something is different. You sense the faint crack in her voice when she answers, ‘Yeah, we good,’ and envision her fingernails sinking deeply into the bright red splotches of bumps forming on her arms, a tell-tale sign of her anxiety washing over her like high tide. When you were little, you’d sap the boils with fresh aloes and tell her not to worry. As the elder of the two you are wary of making known your own worry worms hatching in the quickening of your pulse. You want to say, “girl doh worry yuhself, things will be alright.” But you do not know if they will.
When you first hear about the signs of an eruption, you sigh with a morsel of relief because you are not there; your pulse quickens because you are not there. You look desperately at the colour divided map and see that your sister will not need to evacuate, yet a wave of helplessness washes over you as things begin to intensify. You want to say I told you. You should have left too. But now is not the time. You do not want to sound like one of them.
“You do not want to sound as though you have found all the answers from the vantage point of a place where people do not know the weight of a looming hurricane, the violent pulse of an earthquake, the threat of volcanic earth imploding. ”
T
hese are the people who live ah foreign who miraculously develop X-ray vision, scrutinising any and every local matter, making it known through the clicking of fingers and tapping of screens. They call the people stupid, ignorant for enduring many things. This place is not a real place they say, how do they survive? People should recycle more, there’s so much waste on the island they say. It is a privilege to step away and see what does not work, it is easy to forget the struggle when you’re too busy compartmentalising your waste: green boxes for cardboard, grey for plastics and red for glass. It is easy to look like you’re doing the right thing because your neighbours seem to be doing the right thing, never mind you always end up buying a plastic bag when you go shopping and grimace when the paper straw goes soggy in your mouth. You do not want this type of amnesia. You do not want to sound as though you have found all the answers from the vantage point of a place where people do not know the weight of a looming hurricane, the violent pulse of an earthquake, the threat of volcanic earth imploding.
The first time you saw snow it was not the white powdery crystals you had seen in magazines and TV. On the day of your arrival, you had caught the tail end of a heavy fall-- 15 inches to be exact. What was once a thick blanket of glaring white ice had now begun to melt into blackened slush, invisible and treacherous to those who cross its path. And now when images of ash dropping in from the sky, forming snowy sheets across the narrow streets, filling up deep gutters, weighing down mango trees, blanching up the verdure of the village you still call home, you wonder whether you needed to journey across the Atlantic to witness this wonder of nature in the first place. You used to tell people about the volcano in your island with a kind of pride, the life source of the island-- a natural phenomenon that humbles even the most arrogant. Is it still active? People would usually ask. Could blow at any time you respond. You did not realise it would blow in your life time, that Morne Soufriere would open up her bowels and unleash her earth fire on the land of your birth. You and Tay grew up hearing stories about ’79, how your family had to move to town. Where your mother met your father, how you came to be, and your sister later on, daughters of Soufriere, conceived in the aftermath of an eruption.
Tay’s reticence unnerves you. “I packing some things to send, you hear?” You tell her. You know she will need enough to tie things over in the coming weeks. You chuckle at the irony of sending bodow, clothing and other items sent in the ’79 eruption. ‘You geh bodow?’ Tay would ask, the mischief dancing in the corner of her tamarind eyes, a common joke you would use when either of you wore something new. The first time you packed a barrel and sent it home, you beamed with pride. It helped to know you could be there for Tay in ways that mattered. You wrapped each item carefully, gifts proffered to pad the crater that exists between the two of you. And now you desperately try to find what you can to fill a barrel now. Tinned sardines and Tuna, toilet paper and pads (Always is what Tay uses), evaporated milk, corned beef (Exeter is what Tay likes) bottled water. Stashing and stuffing the unsaid into a large cylinder. Packing and squeezing your guilt away, until each pocket of the cylinder is full. Bubble wrapping apologies for leaving her all alone. You wish you could send more. It does not help that pay day is two weeks away. Still, one, one bread fill basket, and combined with what you moneygrammed two weeks ago, you know that she will not go hungry. But what for the mind? You spend each day glued to the screen replaying and refreshing stark images of thick volcanic plumes billowing through the sky, and the unrest of the people below curdling as they grapple in the funk of it all. Tay will not be okay, despite her terse words over the line.
You always feared a dark time. In the dead of night, a ringtone can be a harbinger for ill or pending doom. It’s what you feared might happen when you left her alone. Two branches parting ways, the roots entrenched in a rich and textured childhood soil. How many dark times have you survived together? Maybe the time you both swam out too far at sea and struggled to make it back ashore, the waves crashing in on you, sputtering with the pain of saltwater in your nose. Or at Uncle Eddie’s funeral when you both touched his stiffened face in curiosity; you thought his jumbie had taken residence in the small room you shared; you both swore you saw sheddings of his dreadlocked beard under the bed. Maybe it was the time your Father left you all, led astray by his rum and the whims and charm of another country gyel; you don’t remember when you stopped asking for him, only the debut appearance of Tay’s blisters and the squirming of worry worms beginning to form in your stomach.
But you both know the darkest time yet was when diabetes took its final toll and killed your mother. The picture of her gaunt face is now etched in your mind, replacing the warm nutmeg skin and soft cheeks you once kissed. “When Soufriere erup’, everybody in de family was frighten until!” She would say, “but all I could see was the beauty of God on Hairouna, land of the blessed, de land just giving birth. Like me the year after. My Soufriere girls,” she would say. “That’s why I name you Abelia, my breath of life, and Taylor my eternal beauty, clothed in salvation.”
In this dark moment, you want to defy time and space and skip across the ocean, wrap your arms around her, tell her she is not alone. You want to say you are sorry you left her by herself. You want to say you had to go; you had to be and breathe without the stifling hold of your mother’s memory. You want to say you wish you could be there, to help clean up the ash. Instead you close your eyes and hope and pray for telepathy.
“Thanks Abbe, appreciate it. You know this whole thing reminds me of mommy. She woulda say how de land giving birth again. She also would be proud to see how much you helping me out. I know things not easy with you, but we go get through it again.”
Tears try to make their way out of your tightly squeezed eyelids. In the cadence of her voice you find the relief you have been searching for. This is home.