And then, one afternoon as Tammy handed her the usual cup of tea, steaming the way she liked it, with just enough milk but not so much that it was tepid, Anna noticed, or thought she noticed, a slight trembling in the corner of Tammy’s mouth. She did her best to pretend she had not seen it, but her assistant stood in front of her, her arms crossed over her tiny waist, her eyes trained on the floor, rocking back and forth on her heels.
Anna had to pay attention. She shut her office door, pointed to a chair, and invited Tammy to sit and tell her what was making her so unhappy. Is it something I have done? She had not treated Tammy well. Perhaps she was to blame.
No, nothing you have done, Tammy said. You have been more than good to me. So kind.
Then what?
I’m so ashamed.
Ashamed?
I lied to Tanya.
Lied?
I told her I needed this job. I don’t need this job.
Anna did not understand. Is that why Tanya hired you? she asked. Because you said you needed a job?
Not exactly. I applied for the job and she chose me because I was qualified.
Was it your resume then? Did you lie about your qualifications?
No, I didn’t.
Then what?
I’m rich. My family is filthy rich.
Anna winces as she recalls how relieved she felt, how vindicated. There was something about the girl. Smiling as if she had no care in the world!
A tear dripped down from Tammy’s saucer-shaped eyes. I live in a penthouse near Lincoln Center, she said. I have a summer home in the south of France. My family has mansions in South Africa. The tear grew fatter. More followed, long wet lines trailing down her cheeks, pearling on her chin before they fell drop by drop onto the collar of her blouse.
Anna handed her a tissue
.
Tammy blew her nose and wiped her eyes. Do you think what I did was wrong?
Anna shrugged. There are no laws against rich people applying for jobs, she said.
You know what I mean, Tammy sniffed. I mean, do you think what we did was wrong?
We
? But Anna already knew who she meant. The coloreds, the ones neither black nor white in South Africa.
In Robbens Island where Mandela was imprisoned, black South
Africans were forced to wear short pants even in the dead of winter.
Indian South Africans were given long pants.
If we didn’t do it, someone else would have done it, Tammy said.
In the dead of winter, black men trembled like frightened little
girls, bodies betraying strong minds, bare hands rubbing bare calves,
useless to stop the trembling. Black men are boys, Verwoerd and his
henchmen declared. Boys wear short pants. Boys who have not yet
reached the age of twelve, who have not yet matured into men, wear
short pants.
Knees froze, hands froze.
My father said we did the blacks a service. Tammy folded her hands on her lap. She had stopped crying. How else would they get the goods they needed? They couldn’t shop in Johannesburg. They had to come to us. She spoke with confidence now. We were fair. We did not overcharge them. Not one penny. We gave them a fair price for the goods they bought from us. We had to calculate the cost to us, of course. We could not charge the same amount you would pay for sugar in Johannesburg, of course.
And for milk?
The merchants in Johannesburg charged us more. We had to pass on the costs. Then there was transportation. We needed lorries to bring the goods. And the risk …
The risk?
I don’t know what you know about South Africa in those days, Anna, but it was not a safe place. People got killed. Women got raped.
I thought that happened to the black South Africans.
I mean us. If they caught one of us …
One of us?
A white person was not safe in the black district.
But you are not white.
Oh, I know in America I am black, but in South Africa I am colored, and colored people in my parents’ day, during apartheid, could be attacked by the blacks just the same way whites were attacked by blacks.
Why would they do that?
Attack us, you mean?
Yes, why?
Because we are coloreds.
Yes, but why because you are coloreds? Anna fought against a sickening sensation rising in her stomach.
Because we had certain advantages.
Five acres. That’s what the English colonizers gave the Indians on her island. The French Creoles, of course, got land too, many times five acres. With Emancipation, European slave owners had lost the free labor that had made them rich. There had to be reparations. They had to be compensated. The blacks? They got nothing. Wasn’t their freedom reparation enough?
Was it our fault? Tammy shifted her body to the edge of her chair. She pressed her body forward, closer to Anna. It was the whites who made that system, she said. They were the ones who prevented the blacks from shopping in the white stores.
In the prison, facing a common enemy, the Indians rallied to
support the blacks. If the blacks must wear short pants, they said,
we will wear short pants too. Fearing a riot, the white South African
guards caved in. But outside, in the real world, it was different. After
Independence, Indians latched onto their British passports and immigrated
in droves to England. Idi Amin was a cruel, brutal dictator
and the choice he had given the Indians between keeping their
British passports and filing for a Ugandan passport was really no
choice, but in every former colony large numbers of Indians made
the same decision. Fearing reprisals? Perhaps it was a fear that was
well founded. They had been treated better, made to think of themselves
as superior, the blacks as inferior to them, deserving of their
scorn. Yet even in America and in Canada, where they have no reason
to fear reprisals, Indians from the Caribbean choose to live apart
from black West Indians.
Anna requested a transfer for Tammy. Guilt and resentment, not fully articulated but solidified, had formed a hard stone in the chests of both women which neither was able to loosen.
And why resentment on her part? Did she, like her mother, resent the success of the Indians in the detritus of the postcolonial worlds the British had left behind? What else was Tammy’s family to do? Walk away from an opportunity? Did it matter that their opportunity came on the backs of black people, from the humiliation and suffering they were forced to endure?
All in the past, Anna says to herself. All in the past. And she makes her way to the back of the house, to the garden, where Singh has left two orchid plants, a gift his wife has urged him to bring for her mother.
It is a new day on these Caribbean islands, and perhaps in this her mother is right: Perhaps it is America that has taught her this sensitivity to race. Perhaps it is America that has made it impossible for her to forgive an innocent girl whose offense was no more than bearing the burden of her parents’ past.
Here, where she is now, where she was born, where she once belonged, where she longs to belong again, the children of this past make peace with what had happened before.
Is it geography that makes this forgiveness possible? Do tiny landscapes surrounded by water force intimacy among people who do not look the same, who have brought with them cultures that are not the same?
Dr. Ramdoolal, an Indian, advises her mother, refers her mother to Paul Bishop, whose great-grandparents came to the island bound in chains from Africa. A doctor now, Dr. Bishop has surgical skills that Dr. Ramdoolal, without need of prompting, acknowledges are better than his own.
Dr. Neil Lee Pak, whose father is Chinese and mother is African and Indian, is her parents’ good friend. Singh, an Indian, barely eking out a living from the land, feels sympathy for her brown-skinned mother who counts among her foreparents indigenous Amerindians, Europeans, and Africans.
America, the melting pot, and everywhere cities are divided into the distinct patches of an elaborate quilt. From the center the colors fan out, black turning to shades of brown, café au lait, then white as the colors reach the suburbs.
What is it? What is it that makes the island of her birth so different, so truly cosmopolitan? For if geography were all, if that were all it took to explain her island, to explain Ranjit Ramdoolal, Paul Bishop, Neil Lee Pak, and the many bloods that run through her parents’ veins, then Manhattan, itself a tiny island, connected by bridges to the rest of America and to the world by an ocean, should be a true melting pot.
Not so. At lunchtime in the primary schools throughout the five boroughs of New York City and across the country, children, not yet adolescents, congregate in groups around tables, skin colors as defined and circumscribed as the black-and-white squares on a checkerboard.
It is late. Anna leaves the orchid garden. The busyness of the day is over and the evening air vibrates with quiet anticipation. Night is yet to come and now it is time for family, time for dinner around a table with husband, wife, and children. Time to resolve petty arguments. Time for her to put aside her quarrel with her mother.
She climbs the steps and opens the kitchen door. Her father is waiting. “It’s half past six,” he says.
Time for dinner, time for the sandwiches Lydia has prepared.
D
inner, such as it is—chicken sandwiches and lemonade—passes uneventfully. Anna and her parents are polite to each other. They make no reference to their disagreements at teatime. After dinner her father goes to his bar in a corner of the veranda and packs the empty soda bottles inside a carton. Tomorrow he will exchange them for a carton of new ones. Her mother retires to the den. Anna washes the dishes. When she is finished, she walks past the den on the way to her room. The TV is on. She hears voices. A man shouts angrily. A chorus behind him responds.
“Anna,” her mother calls her to the den. “Come, see this.”
She hesitates. She knows without looking what her mother wants her to see. Their argument at teatime will resume if she responds. She does not want to be dragged into a quarrel again.
“Come. Look, Anna!” Her mother is insistent. Anna has no choice. She must go.
She enters the den. Her mother points to the TV screen. The channel is turned to a cable station in America. The nightly news from New York.
“See! See! Listen,” her mother urges her.
Anna sees, she listens.
“How long?” a gray-haired black man chants. “How long will we continue to take this abuse, this attack on our people? This morning, just hours ago, a good man, a decent man, a father, a husband, killed by the police. Murdered in cold blood.”
The man is wearing a dark suit. He is standing behind a podium erected in front of a limestone building. A multitude of microphones, like daggers, are pointed toward him. To the man’s right is a taller gray-haired black man. He is wearing a black Nehru jacket. To his left is a soft-skinned, plump black woman. Her eyes are blank, her mouth slack. She is already dressed in black, already in the mourning clothes for a husband dead only hours.
“Murdered!” the man in the dark suit shouts.
Behind the two men and the woman, a crowd. Anna glimpses one or two white faces, no more.
“How long?” the man chants again. The crowd roars.
“Shot down like a dog by the NYPD! His poor wife.”
The woman wails. Her cries rise above the shouts of the crowd, a knife cutting a bloody swath through the night air.
“Like a dog. Like a common dog!”
“Black men are under attack in America!” someone from the crowd shouts.
“All black people are under attack!” another person yells. The crowd roars again. Their words are indistinct, but their anger is palpable.
“Well, we are not going to take it anymore!” says the gray-haired man. “We won’t sit still while they gun down our sons and daughters, our men and women. We won’t stand by and do nothing!”
Her mother cranes her neck forward. She is looking intently, listening intently. “See. See what I told you, Anna.”
“Remember MLK!” a man yells.
Anna walks toward the TV. “Mummy, let’s go to bed,” she pleads.
Her mother leans back on the couch. She presses her hand to her mouth and looks up at Anna. Her eyes are watery. “I told your father,” she says. “I won’t go there. I won’t.”
Anna switches off the TV.
D
r. Neil Lee Pak arrives early in the morning to accompany them to Dr. Ramdoolal’s office for the first of Beatrice Sinclair’s rounds of chemotherapy. Lydia pushes the button that opens the electric gate and Neil drives up the driveway and parks behind John Sinclair’s car. He comes into the house by the back way, through the family entrance. The Sinclairs are having breakfast, seated at their usual places around the table.
Beatrice greets him. “Oh, Neil,” she says, “you needn’t have come through the backdoor.”
Neil grins good-naturedly. “So I’m not family anymore? You want to treat me like a stranger?”
“Silly man,” Beatrice says.
She is cheerful this morning, no hint of the terror the evening before that stretched her eyes wide open and made her clasp her hand to her mouth so that the words when they came out were muffled:
I told your father. I won’t
…
But John Sinclair has confided to his daughter that her mother has spent most of the night praying in the bathroom. She has not slept a wink, he said.
Anna would never have guessed it. There are no dark circles under her mother’s eyes that would surely be under
her
eyes had she not had suffificient sleep.
Her mother’s hair is meticulously coiffed, the sides brushed back and the ends flipped up stylishly at her ears. She is wearing a rose pink linen dress that highlights the red undertones of her skin. The dress, her color, both give the impression of a woman who is well rested, healthy. It seems impossible that under that dress, in her mother’s left breast, a demon is multiplying, eating away her healthy flesh.