Anna likes to say that her father was the first feminist she knew, and except for the one time he betrayed her mother, she never had reason to reverse this conviction.
Beatrice is also proud of what her husband did for the women on the oil fields. She has told Anna this. She has also admitted that though she had called her husband foolish, she admired his integrity when he refused to accept retainers from companies that didn’t want to lose him even though his memory was failing.
Beatrice is proud too of Henry Bishop. She calls him one of a dying breed of men who put people before their lust for money and power. So this afternoon, as Anna sits with her mother and father in the family dining room for their four o’clock tea, she hopes her father is right, that for a son of Henry Bishop her mother will change her mind.
Lydia serves them but she does not retreat to her room as she usually does when the Sinclairs have their meals. This time she remains in the kitchen, busily rearranging the dishes in the cupboards. Anna thinks she is worried about her mother.
“Don’t you want to have your tea in your room, Lydia?” Beatrice asks, unfolding her napkin and placing it on her lap. It is Beatrice’s considered opinion that helpers are gossips who will try all sorts of tricks to eavesdrop on their employers’ conversation.
Lydia shakes her head. “The dishes all mixed up in the cupboards,” she says. “I have to fix them.” Worry lines deepen on her forehead.
“Can’t you … ?”
But John Sinclair pulls his wife’s attention away from Lydia. He wants to talk about Henry Bishop. He hands her the platter of scones that Lydia baked in the morning and remarks that he isn’t at all surprised that Bishop’s son has done so well in America. “He was an ambitious man, that Henry Bishop. I remember when the men complained. They didn’t like it at all that they had to share their money with their wives. And God knows they almost started a riot when I said they had to give some of their severance pay to the mothers of their children even if they weren’t married to them. If it wasn’t for Henry Bishop, I don’t know if things would have worked out so smoothly. And now his son is a doctor. The head of surgery in a hospital in the States. Wasn’t that what Dr. Ramdoolal said?”
“I like Henry Bishop,” Beatrice says.
Anna waits. She is sure her father will seize this moment to find a way to convince her mother that she should go to the States for her surgery. Henry Bishop’s son will take care of her. She can trust him; he is her countryman. But her father does not say that. Instead he says, “Ramdoolal too. He is a big man here. Neil Lee Pak told me his father used to buy tomatoes from Dr. Ramdoolal’s father. Now his son is a doctor. No ordinary doctor, mind you. An oncologist.”
“Every doctor is an Indian today,” Beatrice says drily.
“Paul Bishop is a black man,” John Sinclair replies and sips his tea.
“Paul Bishop and his father are exceptions,” Beatrice says.
Anna glares at her mother. “Mummy, you don’t mean that?”
“What I said about Indian doctors? It’s true, isn’t it, John? You’ve been away too long, Anna. You don’t understand.”
Anna fights against the heat mounting in her throat. Her mother is ill; she must be patient.
“They are clannish in the way black people here are not,” her mother continues. “Indians are willing to sacrifice their own happiness to send one of their relatives to university. Did you hear what your father said? Dr. Ramdoolal’s father used to sell tomatoes at the side of the road.”
“I suppose he grew them on his family’s land,” John Sinclair says.
“On his five acres,” Anna adds, emphasizing
five.
Beatrice pretends she has not heard her. “I bet his whole family—his mother, father, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins—all of them stood back and did without so he could go to medical school.”
Anna is painfully aware that Lydia is listening to her mother. More than twice she has seen her glance in their direction. But Lydia shows no signs that she is offended. Worry lines still mark her face.
“Yet when that one relative comes back, he has to take care of the rest of the family,” John Sinclair says. His cup rattles against the saucer when he lowers it to the table.
“Dr. Ramdoolal doesn’t seem to mind,” Beatrice says.
“How do you know?”
“He seems to be doing well. He has a big office.”
“I don’t think he likes sharing his house with his parents and a whole gang of brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, and you don’t know which in-laws,” John says.
“You can’t be sure he’s sharing his house,” Beatrice counters.
“You’re right. I don’t know for sure. But do you see how many families live in that compound at the end of our block? There must be three generations of Indians in those small houses that circle the big house there. And those five Rolls Royces in front of Maresh Ali’s lawn? I would bet there are at least five families in that house.”
Beatrice butters the scone on her plate with studied care. “All I can say is that ambition is in their genes.” Her eyes remained fixed on the scone.
Anna looks over to the kitchen. Lydia is no longer working on the cupboards. She is bent over the sink, noisily washing pots and pans. Anna knows she has heard her mother and is banging the pots against each other deliberately. She is upset but she dare not complain. Anna calls out to her above the clatter and the stream of water gushing from the faucet. She wants her to hear what she has to say. “Lydia, can you bring me the cheese? I like cheese with my scone.”
Lydia turns off the faucet and the noise dies down. When she brings the cheese to the table, Anna says loudly, “Some of the most successful black people in the States are West Indians. I don’t mean West Indians from middle-class families.” She is addressing her mother, but Lydia is her intended audience. “I was at a West Indian dinner-dance in Brooklyn a couple of months ago. Many of the people there were no different from Henry Bishop, people who didn’t go to secondary school, or if they did, they went to a trade school. But you should’ve heard when they began talking about their children. Sons and daughters who were doctors, lawyers, MBAs working at Fortune 500 companies, other children in university, some at Ivy League schools.”
“And why are you telling me this, Anna?” Beatrice asks, the buttered scone balanced on her outstretched hand.
“It’s not about genes, Mummy. Indians don’t have the monopoly on ambition or success. Or brains for that matter.”
“As I have to keep reminding you, Anna, you’ve been away too long. Look around the island. The Indians own the shops, the cinemas, the restaurants. Indians even have their own steel pan orchestras. Now isn’t that a joke? I mean if it was something black people had, it was steel pan. After the war, it was black people who figured out how to take those empty oil drums that the white people threw away and make music out of them. Now, the Indians have taken over. I hear the best steel pan orchestra these days belongs to Indians. And it’s not only steel pan. You want a doctor, he is Indian; you need a lawyer, he is Indian. You need someone to build your house, or to build roads, they are Indians.”
John Sinclair, who so far has kept his lips firmly shut as his wife and daughter argue back and forth, says quietly, “It’s the psychology of immigration.
” Beatrice spins her head around toward him. “And what is that supposed to mean?”
“People act differently when they migrate,” he says carefully. “They leave their homeland because they want to better their circumstances. They are willing to make sacrifices. To work hard.”
“In America, there are people who say that West Indians are more ambitious than African Americans,” Anna says. “I tell them, go to the Caribbean and they will see how many unambitious West Indians there are. African American businessmen living in the Caribbean quickly find out it’s hard doing business with people who like nothing better than to party and drink rum.”
Lydia giggles. In the heat of the argument, no one has noticed that she has not returned to the kitchen and is standing not far behind John Sinclair, taking in every word.
“Lydia, really!” Beatrice Sinclair snaps. “If you don’t have something to do in the kitchen, why don’t you have your tea in your room?”
Lydia leaves but with a wide smile on her face.
Beatrice waits until Lydia’s footsteps fade, then she says to Anna, “What you say does not disprove my point that the Indians are different. I still say ambition is in their genes.”
“But it
does
disprove your point, Mummy. The Indians were immigrants.”
“Psst. They were born here.”
“Their grandparents and great-grandparents came from India.”
“And black people’s grandparents and great-grandparents came from Africa. So much for your immigrant theory,” Beatrice says triumphantly.
“You forget the essential difference, Mummy. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you.”
“Slavery. She is talking about slavery, John.” Beatrice throws open the palms of her hands and gestures in exasperation to her husband. “Everything is to be blamed on slavery. Well, Africans weren’t the only people who were made slaves. Almost every country at one time had slaves. The Chinese had slaves, the Indians, the Amerindians, the Arabs. What about the Jews, the Israelites? Should they blame their problems on the slavery that happened to them years ago?”
“It was not the same.”
“What was not the same?” Beatrice’s tone is scathing.
“The experience was not the same,” Anna says.
“You mean suffering is different depending on whether you were Chinese or African?” Her mother does not conceal her disdain. “You mean the experience of being whipped and chained and forced to work for no money for someone who owned you is different depending on the color of your skin or where you came from? Is that what you are saying, Anna?”
It is not what she wants to say. What she wants to say is that human suffering is human suffering. We are all the same. We all share the same desires, the same fears. We all want to survive, we all want to be happy. This is what she believes. “But …” she begins.
Her mother, the inquisitor, does not allow her to continue. “But?” She narrows her eyes. “So tell me, Anna, how is it different?”
“It’s different when you are treated as chattel.”
“Chattel? What’s chattel?” Beatrice’s eyebrows converge.
“Property, Beatrice,” John says. He glances at Anna and brings his lips together in a tight round
O
, signaling her to stop, to end their quarrel.
But Anna does not retreat. She will redeem herself. She will not stop now. “Only African slaves were treated as chattel,” she says. “Only African slaves were treated as if they were not human beings, as if they were a subset of homo sapiens, not the real thing. The slave owners bred the Africans like cattle, they separated them from their families. They used them whenever they wanted to, just as they would use their cattle. They branded them with hot irons.”
Beatrice sucks in her breath. “Branded?”
“This is not conversation to have at teatime,” John Sinclair says and places his hand on his daughter’s wrist. “Let’s talk about something else.” He looks over at his wife. “Okay, Beatrice?
” Beatrice is still struggling with the image Anna has planted in her head. “And they did that too? The freed slaves who had slaves?”
Anna is surprised by the question. “You knew about that?”
“Your father told me. Didn’t you, John? Didn’t you say that even the Africans who were enslaved in America enslaved other Africans once they were freed?”
“Only a few of them did that, Beatrice. It was not common practice. It was the rare freed slave who did that.”
“And the ones who did, did they brand their slaves?”
Anna knows of no evidence that African slaveholders in America did not brand their slaves, but neither does she have evidence that they thought of their slaves as a species that was essentially different from themselves. How could they?
“They didn’t treat their slaves as chattel,” she says softly. “They didn’t treat them as if they were not human.”
Beatrice lowers her head and focuses on the food before her. Only the sounds of metal knives and forks against the dull, hard surface of the plates break the quiet around the table. Anna thinks her mother has accepted her answer. Their argument is over. Then, abruptly, her mother looks up. “The Indians didn’t have it much better,” she announces.
She has misjudged the silence. Her mother has been thinking of a response all along; she is not ready to give in. “They
chose
to come, Mummy. That is the difference.”
“Still,” Beatrice murmurs.
“You can’t deny that being brought forcibly in chains on a slave ship is not the same as choosing to leave your country of your own free will. The Indians were dying of poverty in India. When the British came with their offer of five acres for five years of indentured servitude on the cane fields, they jumped at what seemed to them like an opportunity of a lifetime to change their lot. Dr. Ram-doolal’s father may have sold tomatoes at the side of the road, but his family had five acres the British gave them and they had a chance to make something out of it.”
“So what you are trying to tell me is that immigration …” Beatrice turns to her husband. “What is it you said, John?”
John surrenders. He has not managed to convince either of them to change the subject. “The psychology of immigration,” he says and spoons sugar in his tea.
“So the psychology of immigration is in their genes? Is that right, Anna?”
“When slavery ended, Africans had nothing, no money, no property. Nothing. They were set free, but to do what? To live where? Certainly not to go back to the cane fields where they had suffered. The Indians had land. They could build a house, even if it was a shack made out of mud and coconut fronds. It was
their
shack, on
their
land. They owned it. The Africans owned nothing. Indians could plant yams, edoes, cassava on their land. They could grow their own food. They could sell tomatoes and make some money. The Indians had an advantage Africans never had. Before the race started, they were put far ahead on the race track.”