How to Escape From a Leper Colony (27 page)

I wonder if Xica would have loved me forever if I had played the rabbit. She always said she loved me because I seemed transient. But what if I’d let her kill me in the stadium? “Remember, you said you loved me. You can’t love me only because I am transient.” That is what I wanted to tell her. What if I don’t fit in here? What if I don’t feel totally comfortable around black people but I still want to live on the island? Live with you. Is that a crime? What if I love you even though I don’t understand you? What if your pussy is made for a black man and I’m too small and that’s why you were always with other guys? Is that a racist thing for me to think? Even if it is, does that mean I didn’t love her? That I don’t still love her?

I live in D.C. again. I’m dating any girl who will have me, which means I seem desperate. So girls call me up in the middle of the night to have sex but none of them want to be seen with me in the morning. I left the island that same month I left Xica. But then not a year after I was gone someone burned down my parents’ bar in St. John. My father called me and said, “The niggers finally burned down the bar.” Just like that. He’d forgotten I’d dated Xica. Or maybe he’d never known. But my father doesn’t usually use that language. He was only mad. He’s not really racist.

There was something about his “finally” that made me think that he must have always felt uneasy. Felt he wasn’t wanted. The bar was called Crusoe’s. Xica once told me that she hated that. But I’d never read
Robinson Crusoe
so I didn’t know what she meant. But it dawned on me after my father hung up that maybe she’d burned down the bar. I could see her doing it. I could see her laughing and dancing and pouring kerosene on the bar stools. And I could see her run, her back hurting but running anyway, as the bar went up in flames. And I remembered the song, “kill the rabbits,” and I knew that the hunt was on. And I want to tell her, “It’s all right. It’s all right. I deserve it. I saw you for a flash on the TV curled up on the ground in the middle of the street. The camera flashed away but I knew it was you.”

“They want us gone,” said my father when I arrived on St. John to help them with the bar. I met with him in the study of my parents’ house. “But I’m not going anywhere. I help this damn place. I bring industry. I hire people. What would those people do without me? This is bull. These ungrateful nig …”

“Who?” I could not think of any islanders my father had hired except the woman who cleaned his bar and the one who cleaned our house. So I asked him. “Who?”

“Who what?”

“What locals have you hired?”

“Herman. This is not going down easy. It’s not right. Just because they’re black doesn’t mean they can’t be wrong. They’re like Hitler. They only want their own around them. They’re more jingoistic than a damned Texas Republican.”

“But we have so much power.”

“We’re not rich, Herman.”

“I mean just by being here. We’re just here. We take up space but we don’t …”

“Are you here to help me or harass me, Herman? You have no idea how the world works.” He leaned forward and slipped a book from one of the shelves. He looked at it and then passed it to me. “Read this.” It was a book he had written,
Strangers in Their Own Homes: A History of Christian Martyrdom.
He was not a writer but he and my mother had been professors, he in religion and she in literature, before retiring. Part of a professor’s job was writing books. I took the book but I did not intend to read it—though I did, eventually. Now I looked up at Saint Paul looking down at us. Religion had never been anything more than academic history to me.

“Saint Paul,” my father said as he’d said to me many times before. “He was a scholar and a writer.”

“Like you,” I said.

“Not exactly. He was a martyr, too. He died for his convictions. Not for himself, really. He died for people who believed what he believed. That’s how a martyr is different. A martyr sacrifices for a cause, for many people. And you know it’s often public, so that the people can know it’s their martyr.” He rubbed his chin. Looking suddenly like the professor he had been and not the bar owner he had become. “The Romans were foolish. If they had killed privately it would have been a lot harder to make martyrs out of anybody.”

“Will you leave?”

“The island? No. This is my home. Where else would I go?”

“What about the properties in D.C.?”

“No. I’ll build another bar. This is home. This is where human beings are meant to live. All human beings need this kind of beauty around them.”

I did not know what to say to him. Because he knew and I knew that not all human beings could fit on this tiny island. But I decided to stay and help my parents rebuild the bar. They were my people. Family. Family must be your people.

I stayed for two weeks but I did not hang out with Dutch. I did not look for Xica. And she did not find me.

Then I went back to D.C. I took part-time jobs and temporary internships. I would not commit. I started college again. Spring break and Easter break always coincided. I decided I would visit my parents around that time. Of course, I hoped to see Xica and at the same time I feared seeing her.

I have never seen her.

For the few months after my parents’ bar was burned down, I kept up with news on the island by reading various Virgin Islands Web sites. Then one innocent day I read of a new allegation that a black woman had been raped by a white man on St. John. My heart pounded and I wondered if the woman was Xica. They would not disclose her name. I ran to the bathroom and threw up.

Depending on the Web message board the truth was either that the black woman was lying or that she had been raped in retaliation for a white man’s bar being burned down, my father’s bar. Black women were raped by black men, but interracial rape was something that really was a crime after all. History, Xica would have told me. History makes it worse. The message boards were not shy. The sites talked about another rape, where a young black man had raped a white tourist woman right in front of her husband, then beat the husband nearly to death before running with all their diamonds. Now he was doing time in jail. One posting saw this as an injustice: “They found that black boy so quickly. Why can’t they find the white man who raped?” Another posted: “See, they did it to our white women first. It’s time we retaliated.” I felt sick thinking about who was
they
and who was
we.

I could not imagine raping any kind of woman. So I could not see how forcing a black woman would make me worse than forcing a white woman but then I thought of the Cuban prostitute in Miami and then I would have to stop thinking.

I decided to make a sacrifice of myself. I started that Easter—a year after I’d left Xica. I have been doing this now for twelve entire years. Each year I visit my parents in their home and each year I make my walk. This year the man who sang “Legal” died. He was a diabetic—too much sweetness in life or not enough. He died but his song has come back to life. And this year I lift up my cross and hope beyond hope that Xica will find me and take me home.

10.

I have a view of the sea. I have a view of the fort. I have a view of the bodies dancing wildly in the Carnival parade. I’m in jail. That is my geography. There must be something to this. This must be more than by chance. It is more than chance that this year the calypsonian who wrote
Legal
died. Diabetic coma, for real. Too much sugar or not enough. His songs were still number one on the Jou’vert route. People still lined up to dance up on a boat in the middle of the harbor with his band. But nothing like
Legal
ever again. Nothing that said
I
like
Legal.
Nothing that said
we
like
Legal.

But this Carnival
Legal
has come back as a veneration because the islands are on fire again. In St. John someone scrawled “nigger” on the side of a car. “White people own this” on the side of building. I read it all in the papers. We’re all waiting for someone to burn something down again. Someone to reveal that under our beautiful Virgin Islands there is a whorishness now. That we’ve been selling ourselves. But not ourselves, really. The land. But the land is us. And even the men who pass through my cell don’t want to listen to my preaching. They want concrete proof that our culture is something worth keeping alive. Something worth us. And even then are we talking about culture or are we talking about ourselves? Are we fooling ourselves? The St. Johnians can’t even afford to live in St. John. Spray paint on a wall tells them that they don’t own a thing.

I watch the people in the troupes. They perform—nowadays they all have routines that they must practice for weeks. They bow or wave at the end and the audience, which used to just be called the crowd, claps properly. But then there are the Crushers. They don’t ever do a routine, but they always have the best costumes and they always seem to be having the most fun. Nothing legal about them.

I write “For you, all the pretty things” on a scrap of paper. I’ve written something to her every year since I’ve been in here, but this year I believe I see her. The Crushers are masquerading as the weather. She’s wearing yellow. She’s a sunny day. I swear that’s my diamond necklace glittering at her neck. I fold my note tight and pitch it down. I watch this tiny magic wand soar. I can’t tell if she’s bending to pick it up or if she’s bending to push her bum back against the man who is moving up on her. I plunge my hands out of the window because that is the only thing that can get out of the bars. She seems to be looking for me. I cup my hands to share the air with her.

After Carnival is over and the Village is packed up and the rides are dismantled, I think about my martyr. On Easter Sunday, just two weeks before Carnival, I had watched him heave the wood across his shoulders. It could have looked to a car driving by as though the martyr was no martyr but simply a Frenchy kid hauling wood for some secret Carnival thing. But it has always been obvious to me that the wood was not just wood. I can see from up here that the wood is shaped like a cross. And the man is dragging it to no fixed destination. He is simply dragging it up Waterfront. He is not trying to get it anywhere. The dragging is the purpose. I imagine that he must start out at Havensight, where the tourists arrive. Perhaps it is the place where he had first arrived. Where he and his family first disembarked from a cruise ship and into the openness of the Virgin Islands. It seemed a friendly and colorful place, then. Filled with my people who spoke a bizarre English and screwed their mouths in such a way that they seemed drunk or high.

He thinks the sun makes the people drunk, the salt ocean breeze makes the people high. It was a drug place to my martyr when he first arrived. It was a place of hallucination. But what I see every Easter is not hallucination. The man walks with a cross on his back. And the damn cross is heavy and he walks anyway. Past my jail. It is not a walk of full martyrdom, really. No one is meant to see. He is doing a private penance. And why do men walk with crosses on their backs? The answer is the same no matter where they might be or where they might be from. For love, of course. Nothing else is worth it.

Special thanks to the following places where these stories have appeared in some form:

“How to Escape from a Leper Colony”—winner of the
Boston Review
Fiction Prize

“The Saving Work”—winner of the Kore Press Chapbook Prize, and the
Best African American Fiction 2009

“Street Man”—
The London Magazine

“The Bridge Stories”—winner of a Pushcart Prize and published in
Sonora Review

“Canoe Sickness” (under the title: “A Busy London Pavement”)—
Global City Review

“Where Tourists Don’t Go”—
Story Quarterly

“The International Shop of Coffins”—excerpts published in
American Short Fiction, Transition Magazine,
and Akashic’s
Trinidad Noir
anthology

I could never thank everyone. I hope this will suffice—

Many thanks to the communities of writers where these stories were worked on: the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Callaloo Workshop, the Rice University Parks Fellow program, Voices of the Nations, Kore Press, Caribbean Cultural Theatre, and the Cropper Foundation Caribbean Writers Workshop.

Thanks to those who read and helped beyond the call of duty or classroom: Jonathan Ali, Bobby Antoni, Cyd Apellido, Diane Bartoli, Jericho Brown, Vincent Cooper, Justin Cronin, Maryse Condé, Kwame Dawes, Junot Díaz, Andre Dubus III, Percival Everett, Ben Fountain, Patrick Freeman, Elizabeth Gregory, Cristina Henriquez, Arvelyn Hill, Gaelen Johnson, Tayari Jones, Greg Jowdy, Ron and Susan Martin, Nina McConigley, Kevin McIlvoy, Roy and Pouneh McMaster, Keya Mitra, Antonya Nelson, Elizabeth Nunez, Sigrid Nunez, Emily Pérez, Velma Pollard, Emily Raboteau, Danzy Senna, Jonathan Strong, Addie Tsai, Gemini Wahaj, and Lois Zamora; and to my elementary and high school teachers, most especially Dr. Rodio and Mrs. Ignatius. Thanks to Fiona, Polly, Katie, Erin, and the other wolves who made this book possible. Thanks to Elise and Sandy without whom there would be no book.