How to Escape From a Leper Colony (24 page)

I will blame my mother. Let me say that living my first year, quite literally, in a suitcase, did me in. In first grade I could not touch my toes. I could do a split and that was thought remarkable by the boys in class. But I could not touch my toes. No one kept track of this inability, except me. In middle school it was the rave to build a body pyramid for pictures. I could never hold anyone on my back. And I was always thought too tall to be the point person. In the pictures of that time I am the pretty thing in the front doing the split. My legs open to the ground.

I always walked very erect. I breathed shallowly. It was thought that walking with my back straight and breathing deliberately was another way I flirted—because once a reputation has been assigned, everything is attributed to it. I could sit only at the very edge of a chair, so that the sharp muscle of my buttocks alone held me up and that was thought to be a way of saying come hither. In truth, if I did not walk straight I could not walk. If I did not breathe shallowly I could not breathe. If I did not sit at the edge of a chair I could not sit. My back was in a constant tremor of pain. Either it felt as though something deep in the muscle was ripping asunder, or it felt as though the spine itself had been lit on fire. When I was feeling the one pain of tearing I longed for the relief of the other pain of burning. But I was never without one. No one knew of this pain. I did not speak of it. It seemed as normal as getting my period every month. Something that happened. Something expected. Something that one did not talk about. The only thing that made the pain stop was something that was not unlike the thing that made bleeding once a month stop. Let us call it slackness. Rudeness. Bad behavior. Call me a slut.

I graduated from high school but I did not walk in a graduation ceremony. It did not seem right to claim one school as my alma mater. Colleges in the States would not have me. My transcripts were too confusing. My grades did not match. I may have been an A student in history one semester at one school, but then there was a D in history at the next. I looked as though I was many people, and I was. I was someone who had traveled. I had traveled my island. I knew it. I knew it like the back of my hand, and when I thought this I did not mean it as a cliché. I meant that my hand was a thing decided by history. That my hand was colored and shaped by something that time had decided. But that my life was about defying that history. And I meant that I knew the land of my island as I could know a book I might read.

One of my many teachers once said that history has no influence on land, that land is outside of history. He lied or he was mistaken. History has carved down mountains. History has drenched out rivers. History has made the land, and the land has, when under duress, made history. The land had decided that there would not be slave plantations on it and so we in St. Thomas did not have plantation history. No sugarcane for men to slash and suck. That is what women were for. No one and no thing is unmoved by human history and it is a sad, sad truth. But that Carnival the land had decided to defy history. And this, like my body, was a bit of an impossible thing—but an admirable thing as all impossible things are.

But of course I could not be the only one like this. I could not be the only one with this wandering need. This one who longed to be packed in a suitcase and taken. Herman was such a spirit. He was a student. He was living on loans. A year in Texas at a community college. A year in Hawaii at a public university. Before the Virgin Islands he had thought about Alaska. Maybe Eden is a cold place, he said. But then he said that he was home now. That maybe this place was his home. Maybe, he said, he could spend his life traveling this small place and that would be enough. This is what he told me on the ferry ride. That we first spoke on water and not land is a symbol of something. But he was not like me, exactly. He was telling a lie that even he did not believe. He only wanted to be like me. But I did not know this at the time.

He was in the Virgin Islands because his parents had bought a house and a bar. They had arrived on a cruise ship and had decided that there were some niche places here with people like them and that they could live here without having to change themselves too much. They could live what might be called the good life and it did not matter that most of the people they found here, the people who were not like them, but rather were simply characters in this good life, were people who disappeared bit by bit every time people like them arrived. It did not matter to them that their existence meant a space that was absent of our existence.

Herman was white and I was black—we are still so. That he wanted to be like me said something about him. It said that either he did not understand how the world worked, did not know that he was born with the Great Advantage of pale skin (though it is not an advantage, it is only a genetic mutation, but let us put that aside, because it has been put aside long before us), or that he did not want his advantage.

To me he did not have a past. To me he was a transient thing who simply appeared and I expected him to disappear any minute, so I fell in love with him. And I took him to pre-Carnival soca fêtes and on Jamband boat rides at night. We would be packed in by the heavy crowd and I always won the coveted corner of the rusty barge. It was dark there. As the calypso started up a woman could push her man into the corner and turn her back to him, roll her hips and ripple her waist, hoist up her leg and loose the burning and ripping of her back into the bass of the rhythm box and the lyrics that we called awesome.

He was like watching a pageant with the different segments of sportswear, evening wear, and cultural costume. In one day Herman could be a white newcomer, a Frenchy liming in Frenchtown, a local kid grinding on his woman at a jam session. He knew to stay put. He knew to push his pelvis out and sway it side to side. He knew to follow my lead on the dance floor. This is the way you dance to soca, I told him once and then never again: you always follow the woman. He wore dark colors. He wore a hat low on his head. My aunts and uncles who visited the island in abundance during Carnival called him light-skinned so as not to insult me by calling my boyfriend white. He knew to hold me in the backseat of my car after the party when I curled into a ball and my back burned and tore all at once and I cried and he wiped my tears and said the right thing: Don’t ever be ashamed to cry in front of me.

I brought Herman to my house. Carnival does not end at this house. All year long bands and troupes come to my grandfather and he keeps their ideas in drawers alongside his rolled-up socks. His costumes compete against each other to win King of the Band. Every year a Carnival Queen contestant hires him and her sponsors pay him a year’s salary to ensure that she wins at least the cultural costume segment.

This is where I would bring Herman. We would make love among the empty costumes that hung in my closet. Those costumes would be living things and it was as if I had many lovers. I felt in control and wild at the same time—in control of my wildness. I felt as though my own clenching and releasing was like an injection, an elixir, a cure.

We visited once with a glittering set of jagged red dragon wings that filled an entire wall of my room. The wings shook as if in flight if we just breathed on them. Herman climbed inside the costume and he became a dragon. Shimmery and scaly and attached to a set of wheels because the wings, though they threatened to launch, were too heavy to be carried on the back all up the parade route. Even for someone with a strong back like Herman’s. Herman rolled the dragon cautiously around the cluttered room and I watched him and instantly I wanted to be a maiden in a high tower. And then Herman climbed out and he climbed on top of me and I said: Pull my hair down. Call me Rapunzel. And he said: I feel strong. I feel powerful. And when we left we could not believe that my grandfather had made the dragon with his own hands. And when we left there remained little curls of my hair that were quite unlike Rapunzel’s long blond ropes.

That Carnival there was also an entire array of Oompa-Loompa candy cane costumes because one school troupe in the children’s parade was doing a vapid Charlie and the Chocolate Factory theme. They hung limp and tiny in my closest. The curling pointed shoes still being worked on up until the day after the food fair because they had to be sized perfectly and children’s feet, it seemed, never stopped growing.

My man was brave. Herman said he wanted to be in the Carnival parade. Herman said he wanted to process down the road. Jou’vert wasn’t what he wanted. In that you didn’t get to put on a costume, really. Your costume was cutoff jeans and sneakers, maybe a fine layer of mud to keep you cool. And perhaps Jou’vert was too dangerous, with those crazy young boys elbowing their way through the crowds. Causing fights. But in the parade the costumes were elaborate. They didn’t just make you feel different—they made you a different person, maybe even a different species. You might be a dragon or an Oompa-Loompa for a whole day. I said I would help him. I said that together we could join a troupe. And we did.

I had not been allowed to join the Crushers until I was eighteen. I do not know if this was Carnival rules because the Crushers was a troupe of the adults’ parade, or if this was Crusher rules. The year I was eighteen was the year of the lyrics, kill the rabbits, kill the rabbits, kill the rabbits, each sentence a higher octave than the last so that it was more of a taunting than a war cry. Nothing was to be killed with blood. We would kill them with the rhythm. That year was also the year of Herman. That “them” meant my boyfriend was something I understood. But I was not thinking along those lines. I knew he wouldn’t last; like all the others he would clutch a suitcase and leave. So I would not wait until next year when perhaps a more benign song was in rotation. I wanted him in Carnival. I wanted him to be one of the pretty things.

We joined the Crushers. We went down to their base and picked out costumes from the sketches tacked to the walls. Their theme that year was professionals. Firefighters and police officers and the military. Did it seem that Herman wanted us to be in the same uniform? I didn’t care. This is the Crushers, I told him. We don’t have to stay in order. We don’t have to stay in our section. We can mingle. We can jump on a steel band truck and pung some tenor. We can sit on the side. We can even jump up with another troupe if we want. I wanted to be a firefighter. That he also wanted to be a fighter I took as a coincidence. We both liked the felt hats and the shiny red jackets. I especially liked the hose that we got to hold. The Christmas tree icicles that came out the front like sparkling water. The song the Crushers chose for the road march, the song our d.j. would play when we entered the field, would be Legal, with its revolutionary lyrics and its can’t-be-avoided beat. We did not even need to vote on it. What other song was there that Carnival? In the fêtes when the call came on to kill the rabbits, it did not matter if I was dancing with Herman, I would fashion my arms as if holding a rifle and crouch down low—bouncing, bouncing all the while. It did not matter if I was dancing with Herman; he would crouch down with me.

But then he asked me in my bed one night: Why kill the rabbits.

What do you mean?

Kill the rabbits. What does it mean? Why rabbits?

Just something the singer made up.

Maybe I’m paranoid. Am I?

I moved my body so that I leaned into his chest. I pulled his arms around me so he could feel protective and strong: You’re fine. It means nothing. It’s a game.

What kind of game, Xica?

I lowered my head so he could kiss my brow. I wanted him to call me his little girl. I thought on childish things: It’s from Bugs Bunny. Elmer Fudd hunting Bugs Bunny.

I could feel his arms tighten and then slacken around me. Perhaps he wanted to push me off my bed—to the floor where he’d already pushed the old clothes that I kept on the bed like a teddy bear or security blanket. Perhaps he wanted me gone.

But Xica, in the cartoon Elmer Fudd never gets Bugs.

See, it’s a joke. It’s a game.

Elmer is a joke, Xica. Elmer can never catch Bugs. It’s as bad as Coyote and Road Runner. Elmer gets made a fool of. So killing the rabbits is what foolish people do. The rabbit always wins.

I pulled myself away from him. And looked into his eyes. They were blue and I wished then that they weren’t. Any other color but vapid, white-only blue. I asked him: What do you mean?

I mean if the white people are rabbits, then you’re Elmer Fudd.

That’s not what it means. That’s not what it means at all. Stop trying to figure it out. It’s code. It’s code that you can’t figure out.

Perhaps he thought I meant you as in anyone. But I meant you as you and not me. Either way, he reached out for me and turned me back into his chest. I felt my back press onto a set of hard buttons on his shirt. I curved my spine into his belly. I let him protect me because this is what parents do: protect because it makes them feel strong.

6.

Xica was my girlfriend before I even knew I liked her or that she liked me. I saw her eating in a tapas bar in Cruz Bay. She was listening to some jazz guy from St. Thomas playing an upright bass and saying “Oh, oh, oh” over and over again. She was in a yellow dress that was shiny and out of date—out of place in the tapas bar. Everyone was leaning over a tiny plate of mussels or Brie. She sat at the edge of a bar stool, her back so straight that she reminded me of a librarian. It was painful to watch her. Everyone clapped and someone even hooted when the bass guy took his break. I didn’t think of the woman in the yellow dress again. I ate my mussels. I tipped the barman well. I walked out. Outside under a lamppost the bass player had a glass of white wine in one hand and Xica in the other. I stopped. I hadn’t seen this kind of thing with the black people here. They were more discreet than this. More stuck-up in a way. Not a bad way or anything. They just didn’t kiss in public or even hold hands. The white people did that. Hell, I did it. They were the only black people in the street—this little part of St. John being frequented mainly by white locals and tourists. I couldn’t stop watching them. Then the bass player stopped kissing and looked at me. He made a noise that was kinda like his instrument. Then the woman looked at me. I wondered vaguely if she was an African American perhaps. Or a prostitute. Perhaps she was from D.C. She might even have been Ethiopian like so many black girls in the D.C. that had been home to me. She was beautiful in the way they were.