Katani's Jamaican Holiday (6 page)

“River Mumma!” cried Selvin, startling all of us. I had been so wrapped up in the story, I was almost surprised to find that I was still on the veranda in the semidarkness.

“That’s what country people call a mermaid,” Olivia told me, in a soft voice.

“Thank you very much,” Cousin Cecil spoke sternly. “May I continue?”

I sighed and sat back in the chair. Yikes! Cousin Cecil was so uptight.

“Please do,” said Grandma Ruby.

“He didn’t remember that she would call to him forever?” I asked, then put my hand over my mouth as I realized I was interrupting.

“No,” Cousin Cecil answered. “He was dazzled by all
those jewels. He forgot about the legend that said the River Mumma would come back for her comb and would call to him until he returned it.”

Suddenly, the electricity returned, and we were bathed in the bright light from the veranda bulb. Blinking, we looked around at one another, as if we had been in a different world and were suddenly pulled back to this one.

“Right!” Cousin Cecil said. “That’s enough for tonight. I’ll continue the story tomorrow night.”

“Oh, no!” I groaned. “I hate cliff-hangers. Now I’ll be thinking about what happened to Orrin all night long.”

“Please, Dad, you can’t leave us hanging,” Olivia begged. “I never heard that one before. It’s still early.”

“Tomorrow night,” he promised. He had returned from being the mysterious storyteller to his usual stern self. “Besides, I want to have a little chat with Ruby before she turns in.”

An Invitation from Olivia

“Your dad is quite a storyteller,” I remarked to Olivia when we were getting ready for bed. “I bet he could go around to schools and everything. Kids love those kinds of tales. You know—the ones that are a little scary, but not too much,” I explained as I climbed under the covers.

“Yeah,” she replied. “My mom used to tell him she was going to start collecting his stories and get them published. He stopped telling stories after she died. Tonight, he was
almost
like his old self. Good thing you came. Him used to laugh a lot before. Maybe him laugh more now.”

Poor Cousin Cecil. I had never lost anybody close to me, and I didn’t even want to think about such sad things.

I wasn’t feeling sleepy, and neither was Olivia, it seemed.
This was a chance to get to know her better, so I asked her about her school.

“I love school!” she said. Her enthusiasm for everything kept reminding me of Maeve. “We have a three-day holiday from school this week. And on Monday, we’re celebrating Black History Month. My class is making a presentation on Marcus Garvey. You know who he is, right?” I shook my head. “He’s one of our national heroes!” Olivia explained. “He grew up in Jamaica more than a hundred years ago, and then he moved to New York to fight for civil rights. Anyway, I’m in the class presentation. You should come,” she told me. “My friends would love to meet you.”

I thought about it for a moment. Going to school on my vacation wasn’t exactly what I had pictured for this trip, but it might be kind of interesting to see what school was like in another place.

“Yes!” she said, clapping her hands and raising her fists in the air. It was a gesture I would see her make whenever she was excited or very happy about anything from then on.

Just as I was about to close my eyes I thought of Spotty and laughed out loud. “Are you crazy, laughing in your sleep?” she teased.

“I’m just thinking about that crazy Spotty,” I told her.

“He’s quite harmless,” she assured me. “Him just bumptious and show-off.” Olivia moved easily between English and patois. But I noticed that around her dad she only spoke English. Selvin and Enid also spoke patois. My ear was getting a little used to their pretty accents and I could mostly follow what they were saying without asking them to repeat too often. Soon I fell into a deep sleep with the sounds of patois, a vision of the River Mumma, and Olivia’s singing in my head.

W
hen I woke up the next morning, bright sunlight was streaming through the open window as I was remembering a lovely dream about blue water and shells and pretty little fish swimming around my ankles. It took me a few moments to realize that I was in Jamaica at my Cousin Cecil’s farm, high up in the mountains…far from a beach.

Olivia’s bed was already made and I heard sounds and smells coming from the kitchen, so I quickly made my bed and got ready for the day. I decided to wear my favorite tie-dyed T-shirt and my cutoff jeans. I also slipped on a pair of gold hoops. I mean, just because I was staying in the country didn’t mean I couldn’t glam up a bit.

As I fried my frizz head with a straightening iron, I wondered why Grandma Ruby hadn’t woken me up, until I remembered that Selvin had said he would pick her up at five o’clock to take her to the bakery. It was way past that, I was sure.

I went into the kitchen, where Enid was stirring a pot on the stove. “Good morning,” I greeted her. “Where is everybody?”

“Olivia say to tell you that she soon come. She gone look
after the goats. When she come, you will eat breakfast. You want some tea?”

I told her I would wait for Olivia. I hoped she wouldn’t be too long, as I was starving. I went onto the veranda and looked around. We were too far from the road for me to see anything, but I could hear vehicles and now and then loud talking as people went about their business. Lots of selling and talk of bananas going on. A little gossip here and there about some woman who sounded mean. Guess there were Queens of Mean everywhere. In my school we had Anna and Joline—those girls had nothing good to say about anybody.

When Olivia came in, she was deliriously happy. One of her goats, Lily, had given birth to two kids. She had put them into a smaller pen away from the others.

“How’s Spotty?” I asked sarcastically.

She grinned. “He’s okay. I keep the kids away in case he gets any funny ideas. He’s a strange one. Once, he wouldn’t allow anyone near the kids, even the mother. Don’t know what that crazy goat expected those babies to do.”

She went to change her clothes, and then we sat down in the kitchen to a breakfast of boiled green bananas and salted mackerel cooked in coconut milk with lots of onions and tomatoes and pepper. Enid called it “run down.” All the meats here were cooked with a lot of seasonings. There was also a hot drink they called “chocolate tea”—a thick, muddy kind of cocoa. I didn’t much care for this breakfast. I really wanted cereal, or a nice big piece of Banana Bliss, but I tried to eat enough to be polite.

I could hear Grandma’s voice in my head saying,
Katani, at least try what’s being offered.
Grandma Ruby was definitely old-school about manners and things. But fish for breakfast? Hello! I couldn’t wait to tell Charlotte about this. She’d
be impressed that I actually took more than one bite and didn’t utter one word of complaint. Charlotte said if you were going to be a world traveler, you had to be open to all sorts of new things. Even things that seemed a little yucky or weird.

Just as we finished eating, Selvin drove up. “Ruby could use some help now,” he announced. “You can come with me when I am making deliveries later. And wear your swimsuits underneath,” he added mysteriously.

At last, I thought. Beach! My kind of action!

Bakery Bliss

Aunt Faith’s bakery was about a mile away from the farm. I was kind of shocked when I saw the home of Nana’s Banana Bliss. You know how you can imagine things and then they turn out to be way different? I guess I was thinking it would be like Montoya’s bakery back home. Not even close.

The Bliss Bakery was a rectangular, bright turquoise brick building, narrow in front and long at the sides. Inside, there was no place for customers to sit and enjoy the baked products like at Montoya’s. Selvin saw my look of disappointment and explained: “This strictly a place where they bake Banana Bliss. Then we drive all the Bliss to the fancy resorts. The customers eat it up.” He laughed at his own joke.

As we walked in, Olivia pointed out Selvin’s house—a small cottage over on the side. “Aunt Faith used to live here too, until my mom died, then she came to live with us,” Olivia told me.

“Where’s Selvin’s family?” I whispered to Olivia as soon as I was sure he couldn’t hear. I had been wondering about this for some time.

“His wife and son migrated to England to be with her
family after they divorced,” she whispered back. “He save up so his son can come here once a year.”

“How come they got divorced?” I asked, even though I knew it wasn’t any of my business. But I really liked Selvin and wanted to know.

“His wife just miss her mother and family too much. Selvin tried to live in England, but he said there was never any sun and the people didn’t smile too much, so him come back to Jamaica to help Aunt Faith and my father.”

As we entered the bakery through the front room, I saw that it was a kind of office with two desks—and a computer! I couldn’t wait to ask permission to use it to send a message to the BSG. They must be wondering what had happened to me. They would never believe that I had been in Jamaica for a whole day and I still hadn’t been swimming! I didn’t think the horseback riding counted. But first I wanted to see if I could grab a slice of Bliss. The sweet smell of banana was driving me wild.

When we entered the oven section of the bakery, I let out a huge hoot. Grandma Ruby was covered in flour dust, from the plastic cap on her head to her plastic overshoes. Even her eyebrows looked floury. Lucky I brought my camera—this memory was a keeper. Everybody at home was going to love seeing Grandma Ruby as the Baker Lady of Jamaica.

“I’ll clean up later,” she joked when she saw me gaping at her. “A bag of flour burst all over me.” Then she started laughing. Soon everybody in the bakery joined in. If only the kids at Abigail Adams Junior High could see their principal now.

“Whew!” she exclaimed. “What a morning! It’s going to be short.” She nodded to Selvin. “We lost some time cleaning up the flour disaster.”

Grandma Ruby made a mistake?!
She caught my surprised look. “Yes, Katani, your grandmother is capable of messing up…literally messing up,” she said, and she blew some flour off her shirt.

“No problem,” Selvin said with a smile. He was a very easygoing person. “I’ll just deliver to the customers we really can’t afford to lose. No worry,” he added. “It will get easier.”

Grandma Ruby frowned, and I couldn’t tell whether it was because she wasn’t sure it would get easier, or because she thought she should have gotten it right from the beginning. That was probably it, since she was a perfectionist. And I was just like her. I hated making mistakes too. I went over and gave her a hug because I know that’s what she would have done for me. She leaned her head on my shoulder and hugged me back. It was then that I realized for the first time that I was almost as tall as she was. Wow, I must have grown this year without even knowing it.

Two women helped wrap the breads and put them in boxes that Selvin then loaded inside the back of the van onto racks. Each box held about ten loaves. I guessed there were two hundred loaves in all. That seemed like a lot, but I wasn’t quite sure.

Then Grandma Ruby introduced me to her helpers. One was Miss Gloria, and the other, a much younger woman, was called Precious. They nodded at us and continued their work. Miss Gloria kept tapping her watch. She obviously wasn’t interested in any idle chitchat. “Precious, dem customers need their Bliss. We got to get a move on.” It was clear that people were very serious about business in Jamaica.

I asked permission to use the computer to send a message to the BSG, and Grandma Ruby said it was fine. It took
a while for Olivia to make the dial-up connection, so it had to be a very short note because Selvin was ready to leave.

A Bit of Jamaica-style Shopping

We soon arrived in Ochi, which is what Jamaicans call the town of Ocho Rios. While Selvin delivered Banana Bliss to the distribution depot, Olivia and I went to the gas station to get a soda to go with our warm slices of Bliss that Precious had snuck to us before we left. The place was super busy, with small and large tour buses and taxis and private cars zigzagging everywhere. There was even a cruise ship in the port, one so big it looked like a gigantic apartment building floating in the water. “Olivia,” I said, sighing, “doesn’t that ship look so glamorous? Can’t you just imagine all the beautiful people dressed up in fancy dresses and dinner jackets?”

“Girl”—Olivia looked at me like I was crazy—“the sun has gone to your head.”

“Maybe.” I laughed. I realized that I was beginning to sound like Maeve, who loved all things romantic and fancy.

Suddenly, Olivia spied two of her school friends and called them over. They skipped across the street, dodging cars and taxis, and she introduced us. We chatted for a little while—I mostly listened, because they were talking in patois so fast I couldn’t keep up. Olivia told them I would be coming to their school on Monday. As they were leaving, they reminded her about the green blouse for her costume.

“Help!” she exclaimed. “I completely forgot. And Aunt Faith is not there to make it for me. What am I gonna do?”

If I’d had a sewing machine, Grandma Ruby and I could have helped her in a second. But not having a solution, I shrugged.

“I’m going to have to buy one today,” she decided. Happy day! That meant I would get a chance to go into the stores. I couldn’t wait to get a look at the local styles.

We went looking for Selvin, who gave her some money and told her to be as quick as possible. We crossed the road, which was a death-defying exercise because there was no pedestrian crossing and traffic was wild—cars honking and lots of people pulling out in front of one another. A couple of people yelled at us, but Olivia just grabbed my hand and zigzagged us across the road. Good thing Grandma Ruby wasn’t around for this scene. I breathed a sigh of relief when we reached the other curb.

As we ducked in and out of shops I pulled out my Island Inspiration notebook and started taking notes.

Some of the stores carried large pieces of cloth that could be used as headwraps. Everything was brightly colored, lots of green and red and purple and yellow flowers and birds, and these amazing abstract designs on the materials. I saw a piece of cloth in the black, green, and gold colors of the flag and thought it would make a fabulous skirt.

“It hopeless to try to find anything here!” Olivia finally declared. “I’ll ask Selvin to stop at one of the little towns on the way.”

Selvin wasn’t happy about stopping before he started his other deliveries, but he was sympathetic about Olivia’s problem, so in the next town we stopped in a side street.

On the sidewalk was a man dressed all in white. “He’s a Rastafarian,” Olivia whispered when she saw me staring. His head was wrapped in a high turban, to hold his dreadlocks, I supposed. His loose, long-sleeved shirt hung to below his knees, like a short gown. His pants were baggy, and he wore sandals. His beard was thin and kind of ragged. Around his neck, hanging to waist length, was a sash to die for. It was intricately woven in the red, yellow, and green Rasta colors, with a shiny gold border ending in a fringe, which glistened softly when the sunlight caught it. He looked very regal, like someone from another time.

“Broom, Princess?” he asked in a very polite voice as I paused to look at him. “Jah-Jah order this one specially fi you.” He held out a roughly made straw broom.

“No thanks,” Olivia replied as she took my arm and drew me away.

“Respect,” he replied in a resigned tone.

“He’s a bobo dread,” she whispered. “They live in the hills and make and sell the best brooms on the island, but we already have enough brooms.”

Olivia was getting anxious to find her shirt so we headed into another store. Finally she found the almost perfect shirt in the perfect color green. It wasn’t exactly what she wanted, but she said that if the collar were cut off and the neckline lowered, it would work.

“Olivia,” I told her, “I can def fix this for you. A little needle and thread and you’ll have a completely new shirt.” I do a ton of sewing at home, so I wasn’t too worried about the job.

The Patty Wagon

Selvin had bought us something called “patties” and fruit drinks before we started our delivery rounds. I was practically drooling from the yummy smell. He had bought three beef patties—two for himself and one for me to taste—as well as three callaloo patties, two for Olivia and one for me. Callaloo is like spinach with smaller leaves. Earlier they had showed me some in a basket that a woman on the sidewalk was selling.

My first taste of a Jamaican patty! Scrumptious! A patty looks like a half-moon-shaped turnover, but the crust isn’t as flaky as a turnover’s, and it’s filled with a spicy meat or vegetable stew. Selvin explained that at first you could only get beef patties, but now they were made with a variety of meat
fillings and different vegetables. A patty and a drink was a regular lunch for many Jamaicans, he explained.