“Race track?” Beatrice feigns puzzlement. “Are we talking about horses now, Anna?”
Anna is not fooled by her mother’s pretense at ignorance. “You understand very well what I mean, Mummy. I don’t have to explain. And like Daddy said, you also have to take into account that immigration affects the way people see the world. It changes their mindset. Indians were immigrants. They came here of their free choice, with the sole intention of working to make a better life for themselves than they had in India.”
Beatrice sits back in her chair. “That was a long time ago,” she says. “Three or more generations back. I don’t see much difference between what you and your father are saying about the psychology of immigration and my saying that ambition is in their genes.”
“It’s racist, Mummy.”
“There you go with all that black and white talk from America.”
“Racism affects the very lives of black people in America,” Anna says quietly. “It affects where they live, what kind of education they get, what jobs are open to them, whether they go to jail or not. In America, it matters a lot if you are black or white. It matters if you would be given the right treatment from doctors or hospitals …”
As her last words reverberate in her ears, Anna sees her mother’s eyes shoot wide open. But the words have left her tongue; she cannot take them back.
“Not that …” she begins. “Not that this happens to all black people.”
Too late. Her mother’s hand jerks forward and the teacup she has brought to her lips misses its mark. Tea spills down her chin. She grabs her napkin and presses it against her mouth.
Anna tries again. Unwittingly, she has fanned her mother’s fears. Since they left Dr. Ramdoolal’s office, they have not spoken about her mother’s refusal to go to America for surgery, but Anna realizes now, and too late, that while she has been pontificating—for that is what she has been doing—her mother has been thinking of little else.
“I knew it. I was certain of it. The doctors … the hospital. In America … I knew it was like that. That’s why I won’t go there. I won’t, John.” Her mother’s voice wavers.
John Sinclair reaches for his wife’s hand. “It’s your best chance, Beatrice,” he says soothingly. “Neil agrees with Dr. Ramdoolal. He told me so. He says the hospitals there are the best.”
“I won’t go,” Beatrice repeats, so softly Anna only guesses that this is what she has said.
“It would be best, Beatrice.”
“They see only skin color there. I know it. Anna has just said so herself. I won’t be treated the way they treat black people there. I won’t be treated as if I am not a human being, as if I am a subset …” Her voice rises from a whimper to a whine.
Anna is stunned by this sudden transformation in her mother. She is ridden with guilt for her part in it.
“I won’t, John. I won’t.”
“It’ll be all right, Beatrice. I’ll be there,” Anna’s father croons.
Her mother begins to cry. She shoves away her plate and plants her elbows on the table. “I won’t. I won’t.” She brings fists to her eyes. Tears drain down her cheeks. “I won’t.”
By late afternoon, alone in the veranda, Anna has stopped blaming herself. She knows it wouldn’t have made a difference no matter what she had said. Her mother’s views are firmly entrenched. She cannot change her. Her mind was already made up in Dr. Ramdoolal’s office, made up years before from the collage of images on the news from America beamed nightly on her TV into her bedroom: black people relegated to slums in the richest country in the world; black people on drugs in the richest country in the world; black people a minority of the population but filling the jails of the richest country in the world.
She won’t go, her mother says. But Anna knows she must.
From the corridor leading to her parents’ room she hears Lydia calling out to her parents. “Goodbye, Mrs. Sinclair. Mr. Sinclair.” Lydia’s footsteps retreat to the backdoor and Anna hears more voices. She gets up to look and she finds Singh standing near the backdoor, his hands gripping the handlebar of his bicycle, holding it steady.
“Singh!” Anna is surprised to see him so late in the afternoon. He arrives at dawn but he is always gone by three.
“I come back,” Singh says sheepishly.
“How long have you been here?”
“I let him in,” Lydia says.
“Does my mother know you are here, Singh?”
“I didn’t want to disturb her,” Lydia answers for him. “I know she sick and all. And she was crying at teatime.”
“That’s okay, Lydia. You did the right thing. It’s just that you came in so quietly, Singh. You usually ring your bicycle bell.”
“Lydia see me before I did have a chance to ring de bell.”
“You have a message for my mother?”
“I bring she some orchids.”
“Orchids?”
“Two plants. I put dem in de back.”
“She was expecting them?”
“No, the wife send me. She say madam like orchids and I must bring she two new plants since she sick. De wife say it make she feel better.”
Anna is so touched she can barely speak. “Thank you, Singh,” she manages to say. “Thank your wife for me and my parents.” She wants to say more but language fails her.
“I know madam from a long time.” Singh’s eyes scan the ground. “I work for she many years now. De wife don’t know she, but me and de madam go back years.” He pauses, and when he speaks next, he is looking straight at her. “She have a good doctor?”
“The best,” Anna says.
“My wife say she should go to Dr. Ramdoolal. He’s de best doctor.”
“It’s Dr. Ramdoolal, Singh. That’s who Mummy is seeing.”
All that talk about Indians and Africans, and Singh and his wife thinking no more about her mother’s color than about the color of any other frightened, sick woman, bringing her a gift because they think it can ease her pain, her fears. Caring nothing about whether she is Indian as they are, or African, or whether, like so many on the island, she is unable to distinguish which threads, from which ancestors, from which parts of the world, from which cultures, have woven together to form her physical features.
B
ut the convictions persist. There is something about Indians, something in the genes that has made them so successful.
Anna paces the path between the rosebushes and the stone façade of the house. Singh has gone; Lydia has gone. A peaceful quiet has descended over the house. The sun is setting, sinking slowly behind the mountains, leaving a palette of reds that will be erased in minutes, replaced by an ink blue sky. Inside, her parents talk. Can her father convince her mother? Can he persuade her that the news on television and in the newspaper tell only one side of the story in America, mostly the worst side?
Can she?
For the third time Anna passes the same rosebush. This time she stops, and like her father had done the morning before, she slips her hand under a pink rose. It is in full bloom, already poised to give way to the buds clustered on the stems around it. Its petals, loosely attached to the center, fall apart in her hands. She brings them to her nose and inhales. Her head swirls, her thoughts flitting from the dying rose to her sick and aging mother. Why couldn’t she have let her mother win their argument? Why couldn’t she have been more considerate? How painful it must be for her mother to confront the possible end of her life, the cancer gnawing away at her flesh.
But her mother is wrong. Genetic explanations for differences among people are dangerous. They led to the European and American enslavement of Africans for more than four hundred years, to the horrors committed under Hitler, to the horrors in Rwanda, to the horrors in the Congo and the Sudan, to the horrors in Iraq and Bosnia. Yet her father’s theory about the psychology of immigration does not sufficiently explain why the Indians have done so well on her island. They came from India with nothing, just the clothes on their backs, a few rags tied up in bundles. Perhaps some came with family heirlooms, gold bracelets and trinkets, but these had personal value to them; they would not sell them. Still, Anna will insist, they were given advantages. The English gave them land, permitted them to keep their families, their culture, their religions, intact. The Africans were stripped of everything. Even their bodies were not their own. The Indians were never chattel.
Anna remembers the pretty Indian young woman from South Africa, an intern assigned to her at Equiano Books. Everywhere she went, everywhere she turned, there she was with a smile, a wave, a greeting. Good morning, Ms. Sinclair. Good day, Ms. Sinclair. Good night, Ms. Sinclair. Can I get something for you, Ms. Sinclair? Can I do something for you, Ms. Sinclair? So polite, so ingratiating. A sycophant. She suspected her of ulterior motives.
Anna had recently been appointed to head Equiano Books, Windsor’s imprint for its books by writers of color. She had to answer only to Tanya Foster, the publisher of Windsor, who promised that this requirement was merely a formality. Equiano Books would be independent of Windsor. Anna would be free to acquire new titles and to determine the amount of money given as advances to writers. She would be given a special budget for marketing, money for brochures, money for advertisements in major print media, money to send her writers on tour. The fantasy dream of editors. She would have more autonomy than even many of the senior editors in the company.
This was no altruistic, charitable, goody-two-shoes move on the part of Windsor, Tanya Foster explained. It made practical sense, good horse sense, for Windsor to launch Equiano Books. “Profit. That’s what I am talking about, Anna. We smell money in an untapped market.”
The untapped market was the market of people of color, African Americans in particular, but also the newly arrived immigrants from so-called underdeveloped countries.
“To my way of thinking,” Tanya Foster had said, “Pat Robinson is so far to the right, he has fallen off the scale, but he has a point. White people are not making babies. There are places in Europe with zero population growth. Zero! Italy, Norway, places like that. We don’t want to be caught unprepared here at Windsor. We want to be at the head of the line. Equiano Books is a sound investment. Publishing, you know, is about the bottom line. Yes, we have to say all those high-minded things about literary expression, continuing aesthetic traditions, advancing the culture, promoting values, but at the end of the day what matters is profit. We are a business. We are not some sort of affirmative action program. We buy—in our case, books—and we sell. We buy because we think we can make money when we sell. And we think Equiano Books can increase our bottom line, bring us profits. There are readers out there we haven’t reached. People of color we have not tapped. We need to reach them, Anna, and we will with Equiano Books. Some people may not like what I say, but I’ll tell you this, in the next fifty years America will not look the way it looks today. People of color will be in the majority and Windsor must be ready to take advantage of this fertile new market.”
Equiano Books was named for Olaudah Equiano, the author of the runaway eighteenth-century best seller
The
Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus
Vassa, the African, Written by Himself
. The title of the imprint was a main factor for Anna in sealing her decision. She convinced herself that a publishing imprint named after an African with the fortitude to survive the brutality of slavery and the intelligence to write one of the most incisive literary works about that dark period in America’s past had to be one whose motives, understandably profit driven, were surely also based on a genuine interest in people of color. It soon became clear to her, however, that Windsor’s choice of a name for its new imprint was simply a marketing strategy, the bright idea of some loafer-tasseled young Ivy Leaguer who remembered the name from an African American Studies course he was required to take, and liking the sound of its multiple vowels, recommended it to Windsor. The word was mellifluous, he said. Besides, it had the advantage of proving that the publishing company was sensitive to African American culture.
Windsor published two novels to test the market for the sort of books it had in mind for Equiano. One novel about gang warfare in the Bronx—or the ’hood, as Windsor boasted on the jacket cover—pitted blacks against Latinos. The other novel told the story of a woman struggling to raise three children fathered by three different men, all who abandoned her. The novels were a hit. They quickly became best sellers, making large profits for Windsor. Anna’s job was to publish more of the same. The company’s position was that only people with dark skin had the ability to capture in words the authentic experience of people of color, and only people with dark skin were able to guide these writers into producing such work. Black people had “soul,” Tanya Foster declared. White people did not have access to “soul,” a theory apparently based on the inherent powers of skin color. So, after four months on her new job, Anna was not the least surprised when, barely able to suppress her glee, Tanya Foster said to her, “You’re going to be real pleased with me, Anna. I’ve found you an assistant. All the way from Africa. From South Africa.”
Tammy Mohun was African indeed—South African— but she was not a black South African. She was a “colored” South African, an Indian with flawlessly milky brown skin, big, saucer-shaped dark eyes that she made seem even larger with the black ghee she pasted on the top and bottom of her lids, a tiny mouth, a nose prominent on her small face, and thick shining black hair caught in a braid that fell down the length her back.
“My family’s been in South Africa since the eighteenth century,” she said to an astonished Anna. “Africa is my home.”
Anna could not explain fully to herself why she felt a strong resentment toward Tammy Mohun. She was a sweet girl, anxious to please, always with a smile for her, a compliment for a blouse she wore, a skirt, a suit, the way she fixed her hair, willing to bring her sandwiches from the deli at lunchtime, to make tea for her in the afternoons. And she was a hard worker, not objecting when Anna asked her to review a manuscript the fact-checker had already worked on or to research some arcane detail. Without a murmur, she took stacks of manuscripts home on the weekends and returned each Monday with extensive notes on what she had read. That she felt somehow tricked by Tanya Foster did not fully explain Anna’s simmering hostility toward the girl. But there it was. Each time Tammy approached her, smiling as if she never had a care in the world, Anna would become irritated for no reason at all. She would begin pushing papers across her desk or would speak roughly to the poor girl about some minor detail she had overlooked.