Authors: Annie John
As we were playing out these scenes from the old days, the house would swell with the sound of my father’s voice telling one story after another of his days as a famous batsman with a cricket team, and of what he did on this island and the next as he toured the Windward and the Leeward Islands with his teammates. In front of my mother’s friends also, we put on our good faces. I was obedient and nice, and she asked nothing more than that I show the good manners she had taught me. Sometimes on Sundays as we walked back from church, perhaps touched by the sermon we had just heard, we would link arms as we strolled home, step in step with each other.
But no sooner were we alone, behind the fence, behind the closed door, than everything darkened. How to account for it I could not say. Something I could not name just came over us, and suddenly I had never loved anyone so or hated anyone so. But to say hate—what did I mean by that? Before, if I hated someone I simply wished the person dead. But I couldn’t wish my mother dead. If my mother died, what would become of me? I couldn’t imagine my life without her. Worse than that, if my mother died I would have to die, too, and even less than I could imagine my mother dead could I imagine myself dead.
I started to have a dream. In my dream, I walked down a smooth, unpaved road. The road was lined on either side with palm trees whose leaves spread out so wide that they met and tangled up with each other and the whole road was shaded from the sun, which was always shining. When I started to walk down the road, my steps were quick and light, and as I walked these words would go around in my head: “My mother would kill me if she got the chance. I would kill my mother if I had the courage.” At the beginning of my walk, as I chanted the words my voice had a happy note, as if the quickness and lightness of my feet signaled to me that I would never give her the chance. But as the road went on, things changed. I would say the same words, but slower and slower and in a sad way; my feet and the rest of my body became heavy. It was as if it had dawned on me that I would never have the courage with which to kill my mother, and then, since I lacked the courage, the chance would pass to her. I did not understand how it became so, but just the same it did. I had been taught by my mother to take my dreams seriously. My dreams were not unreal representations of something real; my dreams were a part of, and the same as, my real life. When I first had this dream, I became quite frightened of my mother, and I was so ashamed of it that I couldn’t bring myself to look directly at her. But after I had had the dream again and again, it became like a second view to me, and I would hold up little incidents against it to see if this was her chance or that was my courage.
* * *
At school, I had had a great change. I was no longer in the same class with Gwen; I was now in a class with girls two or three years older than I was. That was a shock. These girls didn’t offer the camaraderie of my friends in the second form. They didn’t have the give-and-take, the friendly pull-and-shove. They were constantly in strict competition for good marks and our teachers’ affection, and among them insults ruled the day. And how vain they were! Constantly they smoothed down their hair, making sure every strand was in place; some carried mirrors in their schoolbags, and they would hold them at an angle to see if the pleats in the backs of their uniforms were in place. They actually practiced walking with their hips swinging from side to side. They were always sticking out their bosoms, and, what was worse, they actually did have bosoms to stick out. Before I got to see these girls close up—when I was just observing them as they walked to and fro, going about their business—I envied the way the air seemed to part for them, freeing itself of any obstacle so that they wouldn’t have to make an effort. Now I could see that the air just parted itself quickly so that it wouldn’t have to bear their company for long. For what a dull bunch they were! They had no different ideas of how to be in the world; they certainly didn’t think that the world was a strange place to be caught living in.
I was at first slowed down in my usual climb to the top by the new subjects put before me, but I soon mastered them, and only one other girl was my match. Sometimes we tied for first place, sometimes she was first and I second, and sometimes it was the other way around. I tried to get to know her, feeling that we had this much in common, but she was so dull a person, completely unable to hold so much as a simple conversation, and, to boot, smelled so of old rubber and blue ink, that I made myself unable to remember her name. I could see the kind of grownup person she would be—just the kind who would take one look at me and put every effort into making my life a hardship. Already her mouth was turned down permanently at the corners, as if to show that she had been born realizing that nobody else behaved properly, and as if also she had been born knowing that everything in life was a disappointment and her face was all set to meet it.
Gwen and I walked home from school in the usual way and did the usual things, but just the sight of her was no longer a thrill to me, though I did my best not to let her know. It was as if I had grown a new skin over the old skin and the new skin had a completely different set of nerve endings. But what could I say to poor Gwen? How to explain to her about the thimble that weighed worlds, and the dark cloud that was like an envelope in which my mother and I were sealed? If I said to Gwen, “Does your mother always watch you out of the corner of her eye?” her reply was most likely to be “My mother has a knack for keeping her eye on everything at the same time.” And if I said, “I don’t mean in that way, I mean—” But what would have been the use of going on? We no longer lived on the same plane. Sometimes, just hearing her voice as she ran on and on, bringing me up to date on the doings of my old group, would put me in such a state that I felt I would explode; and then I remembered that it was the same voice that used to be, for me, some sort of music. How small she now looked in my eyes: a bundle of who said what and who did what.
One day when we were walking home, taking the lane with the big houses hidden behind the high hedges, Gwen said to me that her brother Rowan had mentioned how much he liked the way I had conducted myself when I was asked to read the lesson in church one Sunday. She then launched into a long speech about him, and I did what was fast becoming a habit when we were together: I started to daydream. My most frequent daydream now involved scenes of me living alone in Belgium, a place I had picked when I read in one of my books that Charlotte Brontë, the author of my favorite novel,
Jane Eyre,
had spent a year or so there. I had also picked it because I imagined that it would be a place my mother would find difficult to travel to and so would have to write me letters addressed in this way:
To: Miss Annie Victoria John
Somewhere,
Belgium
I was walking down a street in Belgium, wearing a skirt that came down to my ankles and carrying a bag filled with books that at last I could understand, when suddenly I heard these words come out of Gwen’s mouth: “I think it would be so nice if you married Rowan. Then, you see, that way we could be together always.”
I was brought back to the present, and I stopped and stood still for a moment; then my mouth fell open and my whole self started to tremble. All this was in disbelief, of course, but, to show how far apart we were, she thought that my mouth fell open and my whole self trembled in complete joy at what she had said to me. And when I said, “What did you just say?” she said, “Oh, I knew you would like the idea.” I felt so alone; the last person left on earth couldn’t feel more alone than I. I looked at Gwen. Could this really be Gwen? It was Gwen. The same person I had always known. Everything was in place. But at the same time something terrible had happened, and I couldn’t tell what it was.
It was then that I began avoiding Gwen and our daily walks home. I tried not to do it so much that she would notice, but about every three or four days I would say that being in my new class was so demanding and, what with one thing and another, I had things to clear up here and there. I would walk her to the school gate, where we would kiss goodbye, and then, after some proper time had passed, I would leave school. One afternoon, I took another way home, a way that brought me through Market Street. Market Street was where all the stores were, and I passed by slowly, staring into the shop windows, though I wasn’t at all interested in the merchandise on display. What I was really looking at was my own reflection in the glass, though it was a while before I knew that. I saw myself just hanging there among bolts of cloth, among Sunday hats and shoes, among men’s and women’s undergarments, among pots and pans, among brooms and household soap, among notebooks and pens and ink, among medicines for curing headache and medicines for curing colds. I saw myself among all these things, but I didn’t know that it was I, for I had got so strange. My whole head was so big, and my eyes, which were big, too, sat in my big head wide open, as if I had just had a sudden fright. My skin was black in a way I had not noticed before, as if someone had thrown a lot of soot out of a window just when I was passing by and it had all fallen on me. On my forehead, on my cheeks were little bumps, each with a perfect, round white point. My plaits stuck out in every direction from under my hat; my long, thin neck stuck out from the blouse of my uniform. Altogether, I looked old and miserable. Not long before, I had seen a picture of a painting entitled
The Young Lucifer.
It showed Satan just recently cast out of heaven for all his bad deeds, and he was standing on a black rock all alone and naked. Everything around him was charred and black, as if a great fire had just roared through. His skin was coarse, and so were all his features. His hair was made up of live snakes, and they were in a position to strike. Satan was wearing a smile, but it was one of those smiles that you could see through, one of those smiles that make you know the person is just putting up a good front. At heart, you could see, he was really lonely and miserable at the way things had turned out. I was standing there surprised at this change in myself, when all this came to mind, and suddenly I felt so sorry for myself that I was about to sit down on the sidewalk and weep, already tasting the salty bitterness of my tears.
I was about to do this when I noticed four boys standing across the street from me; they were looking at me and bowing as they said, in an exaggerated tone of voice, pretending to be grownup gentlemen living in Victorian times, “Hallo, Madame. How are you this afternoon?” and “What a pleasant thing, our running into each other like this,” and “We meet again after all this time,” and “Ah, the sun, it shines and shines only on you.” The words were no sooner out of their mouths than they would bend over laughing. Even though nothing like this had ever happened to me before, I knew instantly that it was malicious and that I had done nothing to deserve it other than standing there all alone. They were older than I, and from their uniforms I could tell that they were students of the boys’ branch of my own school. I looked at their faces. I didn’t recognize the first, I didn’t recognize the second, I didn’t recognize the third, but I knew the face of the fourth one; it was a face from my ancient history. A long time ago, when we were little children, our mothers were best friends, and he and I used to play together. His name was Mineu, and I felt pleased that he, a boy older than I by three years, would play with me. Of course, in all the games we played I was always given the lesser part. If we played knight and dragon, I was the dragon; if we played discovering Africa, he discovered Africa; he was also the leader of the savage tribes that tried to get in the way of the discovery, and I played his servant, and a not very bright servant at that; if we played prodigal son, he was the prodigal son and the prodigal son’s father and the jealous brother, while I played a person who fetched things.
Once, in a game we were playing, something terrible happened. A man had recently killed his girlfriend and a man who was his best friend when he found them drinking together in a bar. Their blood splattered all over him. The cutlass he had used to kill them in hand, he walked the mile or so to the police station with the other customers of the bar and some people they picked up along the way. The murder of these two people immediately became a big scandal, and the most popular calypso song that year was all about it. It became a big scandal because the murderer was from an old, well-off, respected family, and everybody wondered if he would be hanged, which was the penalty for murder; also it became a scandal because everyone had known the woman and all had predicted that she would come to a bad end. Everything about this soon became a spectacle. During the funerals of the murdered man and woman, people lined the streets and followed the hearses from the church to the cemetery. During the trial of the murderer, the courtroom was always packed. When the judge sentenced the man to be hanged, the whole courtroom gasped in shock. On the morning that he was hanged, people gathered outside the jail and waited until the jail’s church bell rang, showing that the hanging was completed. Mineu and I had overheard our parents talk so much about this event that it wasn’t long before he made up a game about it. As usual, Mineu played all the big parts. He played the murdered man and the murderer, going back and forth; the girlfriend we left silent. When the case got to court, Mineu played judge, jury, prosecutor, and condemned man, sitting in the condemned man’s box. Nothing was funnier than seeing him, using some old rags as a wig for his part of the judge, pass sentence on himself; nothing was funnier than seeing him, as the drunken hangman, hang himself. And after he was hanged, I, as his mother, came and wept over the body as it lay on the ground. Then we would get up and start the whole thing over again. No sooner had we completed the episode than we were back at the bar, with Mineu quarreling with himself and his girlfriend and then putting an end to everything with a few quick strokes. We always tried to make every detail as close to the real thing as we imagined it, and so we had gone to the trouble of finding old furniture to make a desk for the judge and a place for the jury to sit, and we set out some stones facing the judge to represent both where the spectators might sit and the spectators themselves. When it came to the hanging, we wanted that to be real, too, so Mineu had found a piece of rope and tied it to the top bar of the gate to his yard, and then he would make a noose and put his head in it. When the noose was around his neck, he would grab the rope from above and then swing on it back and forth to show that he was hanged and already dead. All of our playing together came to an end when something bad almost happened. We were playing in the usual way when we came to the part of the noose around the neck. When he lifted himself off the ground, the noose tightened. When he let go of the rope to loosen the noose with his hands, that only made matters worse, and the noose tightened even more. His mouth opened as he tried to get breath, and then his tongue began to come out of his mouth. His body, hanging from the gate, began to swing back and forth, and as it did it banged against the gate, and it made a sound as if he were swinging on the gate—the very thing we were always being told not to do. As all this happened, I just stood there and stared. I must have known that I should go and call for help, but I was unable to move.
Slam, slam
went the gate, and soon his mother began to call out, “Children, leave the gate alone.” Then, hearing the gate continue to slam, she came out to us in a fury, because we were not obeying her, and she was just about to shout at us when she saw her child swinging from the gate by his neck. She screamed and rushed over to him, calling out to a neighbor, who came immediately with a cutlass and cut the rope from around Mineu’s neck. When his mother came and started to scream, only then could I scream, too, and I ran over to him with her, and we both cried over him as he fell to the ground. Much was said about my not calling for help, and everybody wondered what would have happened if his mother hadn’t been nearby. I didn’t know what to make of my own behavior, and I could not explain myself, as everybody kept asking me to do. I could see that even my mother was ashamed of the way I had behaved.