Huracan E-Book

Diana McCaulay

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 509

Beschreibung

Leigh McCaulay left Jamaica for New York at fifteen following her parents' divorce. In the wake of her mother's death fifteen years later, she returns to the island to find her estranged father and the family secrets he holds. Her story is told against the background of two other McCaulays who arrived in Jamaica in the 18th and 19th centuries. As a white Jamaican, Leigh has to think about her own belonging. Back In Jamaica after years away, Leigh McCaulay encounters the familiarity of home along with the strangeness of being white in a black country, and struggles with guilt and confusion over her part in an oppressive history of white slave owners and black slaves. As Leigh begins to make an adult life on the island, she learns of her ancestors – Zachary Macaulay, a Scot sent as a young man to be a bookkeeper on a sugar plantation in 18th century Jamaica who, after witnessing and participating in the brutality of slavery, becomes an abolitionist; and John Macaulay, a missionary who comes to Jamaica in the 19th century to save souls and ends up questioning the foundations of his beliefs. Part historical and part contemporary literary fiction, loosely based on the author's own family history, Huracan explores how we navigate the inequalities and privileges we are born to and the possibilities for connectedness and social transformation in everyday contemporary life. But it is also the story of an island's independence; of the people who came (those who prospered and those who were murdered); of crimes and acts of mercy; and the search for place, love and redemption. Diana McCaulay is a Jamaican writer, newspaper columnist and environmental activist. She has written four earlier novels, including Dog-Heart (2010) and Huracan (2012), published by Peepal Tree Press. Both books met with critical acclaim and have broken local publishing records. Her latest novel, Daylight Come, will be published in September 2020.

Leseprobe

Huracan

A novel

by

Diana McCaulay

Peepal Tree Press

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2012 This ebook edition published 2020 Peepal Tree Press Ltd17 King’s AvenueLeeds LS6 1QSEngland

Copyright © 2012, 2020 Diana McCaulay

ISBN 9781845231965 (Print)

ISBN 9781845234980(Epub)

ISBN 9781845234997 (Mobi)

All rights reservedNo part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission

For Jonathan; Jamaican born 

“No tribe, however insignificant, and no nation, however mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not stolen.”

— Mark Twain, Following the Equator

“Now my disorder of ancestry proves as stable as the many rivers flowing around me. Undocumented I drown in the other’s history.”

— Olive Senior, Cockpit Country Dreams

BOOK 1REUNION

1986Kingston

“White gal!” the barefoot man shouted, pointing at her with a half empty bottle of white rum. He wore a vest and torn shorts and his eyes glared. Leigh McCaulay turned her head away – it was a familiar, damning description, echoing from her childhood. She watched the traffic light, which remained on red. She knew where she was – the corner of Windward Road and Mountain View Avenue, coming in from Norman Manley International Airport. She was not a tourist. She wanted to explain this to the man. I was born here. I am coming home.

“Pay him no mind,” Danny said. “Him don’t know better.” They had just met. He had been sent by her new employer to collect her from the airport.

The light changed and they drove on. The man remained where he was, leaning against an unrendered concrete wall covered with peeling, bleached-out posters advertising dances and plays. His anger seemed to have passed. He tipped the bottle of white rum to his head and Leigh could see his throat muscles working. How to describe him – poor man, sufferer, black man, rum head, bhuto, Jamaican man?

Her arrival had passed so quickly – the aeroplane descending through cloud, jerking and swaying, the passengers gasping in fear and surprise. Her seat mate had been wearing three hats, one on top of the other and he had prayed loudly, repetitively. “Fahda God, do mi beg you, tek wi down safe. Do, mi beg you. Do…” Then, the plane landing and the people clapping, the flight attendant welcoming returning Jamaicans, the good-humoured tussle to get hand-luggage, people standing too close in the aisles, and the moment when the aircraft door swung open and sunshine fell into the cabin, and then she was standing at the top of the boarding stairs, wanting to pause, to take it all in, the smell of the salty dense air of the Palisadoes spit, long grass waving, bleached at the ends, on the overgrown verges beside the runway, where, she imagined, animals might wander over to graze. Above it all, the Blue Mountains behind Kingston. But the people behind her pushed and murmured and kissed their teeth so she had to go down the stairs. Then she was inside the terminal building, in the long lines (the immigration officer stamped her Jamaican passport without comment), and the Customs Officer was bored by her duffle and backpack, then she was outside in the heat where noisy crowds pressed the barriers lining the walkway. This is a black country, she had thought, involuntarily, and was irritated at herself. But her eyes sought and found the only pale face in the crowd, a middle-aged man standing behind the rows of people, looking over their heads. She had walked towards him, but another man on the wrong side of the barriers reached for her bag and barred her way. “Taxi, miss?”

“No, thank you.”

“Me carry your bag,” he said, tugging at her duffle. He was a big man and his forced grin showed missing teeth.

“No, thank you,” she said, more emphatically. She pushed past him, wondering if she still sounded Jamaican. Americans had always been confused by her fair skin and Jamaican accent. Perhaps her accent had been watered down by the years away, though Jamaican voices were still what sounded normal to her. “I don’t have an accent,” she was fond of telling those who commented on her manner of speech. “You have an accent.”

She had stood a little apart from the crowds, catching her breath, hoping for a lull, a chance to process what had seemed enormous, but, as it unfolded, was really quite mundane. A woman returns to the island of her birth after her estranged mother’s death. She has been away for fifteen years. She has taken a job in Kingston. A simple narrative. No one else approached her and she felt conspicuous, as if a circle had been drawn around her that no one would cross, as if she were a teenager at a party, waiting to be asked to dance. The letter had said she would be met. Other people were being met, greetings were shouted, luggage was piled on the sidewalk, taxis and minivans pulled up, loaded and drove away. She fumbled in her pocket for the address of the place she would be staying, “with the Libbey family” the letter had said – perhaps she would have to find her own way there. She could no longer see the white man. Then her eye caught a cardboard sign that seemed to have her name – it had been written in ballpoint pen and was barely legible. She went closer to make sure – yes, it was her name. A lithe young man wearing a worn white shirt tucked into khaki trousers held the sign. He was looking beyond her at the porters and passengers coming from Customs.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m Leigh McCaulay.”

“Miss?” the man said, still looking behind her.

“I’m the person you’ve come to meet. I’m Leigh.”

He stared at her then. “You come to Kingston Refuge?”

“Yes.”

“Miss McCall?”

“McCaulay. But Leigh is fine.”

“For Kingston Refuge?”

“Yes. For Kingston Refuge. Leigh McCaulay.” Why was he doubting who she was? “I was told I would be met,” she said, and the words sounded wrong, imperious.

“Me did think you…” Then she understood – he had been told she was a returning Jamaican and he expected a black woman. “Okay, Miss!” he said, suddenly energetic, reaching for her duffle. “Me is Danny.” He pointed to a place on the sidewalk. “You wait there. Little further up, past the crossing. Police don’t like if me stop on the crossing. Me get the car. Is a blue Toyota.”

“Thank you.” She walked away from the thrumming crowd. Why in the place where she had been born did her nationality require explanation? Yet the place was familiar, welcoming; the noise, the heat, the smell of things rotting. She thought of people walking their dogs in New York with plastic bags in hand, the twisting motion they made with their wrists as they cleaned up after their pets. Here no one picked up dog poop. She stood at the side of the road, her face turned to the sun.

They drove with the windows down, Danny’s elbow resting on the window. The car had no seat belts. A strong wind blew from the sea and Leigh wanted to stop as they drove along the Palisadoes, remembering how her grandmother had taken her there in the late afternoons, whenever her parents came to town. “What’s the point of that?” her father had asked. “We have much better beaches in Portland. Take her to the Institute for some culture.” Leigh’s grandmother ignored this. Generally a stickler for the proper attire for girls of her class – frilly dresses and patent leather shoes – Grammy had allowed her to wear pedal pushers and flip flops for their excursions to Palisadoes. She would drive her boxy grey car – an Austin? – onto the beach and Leigh would tumble out onto the grey sand of the spit that separated Kingston Harbour from the rollers of Big Sea. Palisadoes’ muted shades of brown and grey was very different from Portland’s jewel tones of emerald, turquoise and opal, but she had loved the arid strip of land with the occasional cactus; the clack of the stones as the waves surged over them. During those afternoons, she would search for the roundest stone with the most unusual colour, always disappointed when the stone dried out at home and lost its luminous glow. She used to think they were moon stones, fallen from the night sky and holding the light of the moon inside – until they were taken away from the beach. She wanted to ask Danny to stop, so she could walk on the grey stones of the beach, just long enough to collect a single one, to smell the sea as she readied herself for sleep that night, but she didn’t want to seem strange. She remembered that Nanny Ros used to throw her stones away.

Big Sea was as rough and the harbour calm as she remembered them. Across the harbour there were many new high-rise buildings, and the scars of construction on the green hills. Purple clouds massed behind the Blue Mountains and she knew it would rain. She was surprised by the pile of gypsum at Harbour Head and the dust-drenched cement works, not because they were new, but her memory had left them out. They drove past Rockfort and the mineral baths, past the rum shops and market women on Windward Road and the battered zinc fences and the goats in the streets, and Leigh remembered the weekend when her grandmother had taken ill for the last time, the illness that had released her father. He had taken Leigh to Kingston with him, she could not remember why. Grammy had asked him for steamed fish and mashed potato and Leigh had gone with her father to buy fresh fish at Rae Town, surely somewhere near?

“Is Rae Town near here?”

“The fishing beach? Further up. You want go there?”

“Not now. Maybe another time.” Fairlight. Fishing. Dad. Zoe.

The air no longer smelled of the sea, but of diesel fumes and old dust. When Leigh had left Jamaica, there had not been many traffic lights in Kingston and none in Portland. A boy approached the car on her side. “Miss, beg you a lunch money.” He wore only a pair of grubby shorts. Being asked for money was another suppressed memory. She was flustered and unwilling to reach for her purse. She had no Jamaican money. “Miss, do. A hungry…”

“Here, yout’,” Danny said. He reached across her and gave the boy a coin. “Why you not in school?” The boy tossed the coin into the air, caught it and ran to another car without answering. Seeing the boy took her back to going with her parents to see a ship docked in Port Antonio, one of the banana boats which took bananas to England and returned with pink-skinned tourists, the women in floral dresses and elaborate hats, the men in suits and bow ties. The visitors threw coins into the water and black boys dived for them. The coins spiralled down and the boys had to get to them quickly before they settled in the silt of the sea floor. She had wanted to join the boys, sure she could swim and dive just as well, perhaps better, but her father said it was not appropriate and her mother sighed and looked away, her eyes hidden behind her dark glasses.

By now her excitement had ebbed and she longed to be inside, out of the heat, with a drink in her hand. Lemonade. Passion fruit. June plum. Even mouth-puckering tamarind. “Do we have much farther to go?”

“No. Soon reach. You born in Kingston, Miss?”

“Portland.”

They had left the main roads and Leigh was no longer sure where they were. Then she caught sight of the mountains and knew they would guide her as she began to learn her way around downtown Kingston. The mountains to the north, the sea to the south. “Are you taking me to the Libbeys?” she asked. They were in an older residential community, the houses built close to the streets, many in poor repair.

“Umm-hmm. They not there right now but Miss Beryl expecting you. Father Gabriel say you start work on Monday, give you tomorrow to do some business, right?”

“Yes, I have to see a lawyer.”

“Me come for you Monday morning, show you where to go.”

“I’m sure I can find my way,” she said. “But thank you.”

“No, me come. ’Round eight-thirty.”

“Do you work at the shelter?”

“Eeh-hee.”

“What you do there?”

“Little of this, little of that.” He stopped the car on the street and Leigh saw a zinc-roofed house with a big mango tree in front. “Me bring you bag,” he said. Leigh got out of the car and stood in front of a narrow iron gate. A short flight of stairs led to a verandah enclosed by metal grillwork – there were no signs of anyone home. The front door was shut behind the grill and there were two wooden rocking chairs on the verandah amid a profusion of potted plants, some in old paint tins. “Miss Beryl!” Danny shouted from behind her, making her jump. He banged on the gate with a stone. “Open up!” No one came. “You wait here, Miss Leigh,” Danny said. “Me go find her.”

Leigh stood beside Danny’s car and the sun beat down. Another move to yet another place. Then the front door opened and Danny came onto the verandah with a key. He opened the grill gate and beckoned to her. She was up the stairs and out of the heat, just as the rain started.

The maid, Beryl, showed her to her bedroom and then to the kitchen where she pointed to a covered plate on the stove. “Supper,” she said. “Fry chicken. Mek sure you lock up good before you go sleep. See di key-dem here – front door and grill. Mr. Conrad and Miss Phyllis back tomorrow.” She spoke slowly, as if to a child, and then left quickly.

The room was simply furnished. A single bed pushed against one wall, covered with a white chenille bedspread and a mosquito net tied in a large knot above it. A bedside table with a lamp, sitting on a crocheted doily. A faded picture of the Last Supper, hung too high. A small wooden desk and chair. The chair was the type Leigh remembered from her school days, with a round seat and railed back – it would probably fetch a good price in an American antique shop. A worn armchair. A battered hanging press, with a spotty mirror on the front. There was a sash window without curtains; the bottom half was nailed shut and the glass had been painted white. She could see the rain through the open top half.

She unpacked her duffle. She had not brought much with her. When she had dismantled her New York life, she had seen just how rootless she was. She owned almost nothing – thrift store furniture, minimal kitchen equipment, a basic uniform of jeans and boots and sweaters. She did not buy books, preferring instead to join the local library in the cities she had intermittently occupied. She had once had a few photographs of her Jamaican childhood – her best friend Zoe, the Portland cove, the dinghy, her dog Rex, her mother, father and brother leaning on the verandah railing at Fairlight – but they had all been destroyed by a burst pipe in her first year of graduate school. At the time, she had been glad – she did not want to look at her father’s face, or her mother’s. And her much older brother, Andrew, was by then a stranger who sent Christmas cards from England signed “Best wishes”. When the sopping photos had been pulled from a pulpy cardboard box on the floor of her bedroom, she had thrown them out without regret. Her unencumbered life had once seemed as full of possibilities as it was empty of attachments, but when she packed to go home to the island she had left when she was fifteen, she had felt transient, someone who barely existed. She had moved through the world but the world did not move through her. Two unremarkable degrees, a series of supposedly socially useful jobs at soup kitchens and homeless shelters and health clinics, superficial college and workplace friendships, smiling acquaintances with pharmacists and grocery store operators, lovers who aroused her body but failed to know her mind. She was a ghost, but not even capable of a decent haunting.

Her boss had shown her the advertisement for the job at a homeless shelter in Kingston a few days after news of her mother’s death had reached her. He had shrugged when she told him she was leaving. “Going home, are you? Hope it works out. Keep in touch now.” Her last lover, skinny Kevin, had helped her haul away the few pieces of furniture she owned; he did not pretend they would ever meet again. Her apartment was no doubt already occupied by someone else, dreaming New York dreams. Now she was in another house owned by strangers.

She wondered whether she should eat, but wasn’t hungry. A sense of anticlimax had sapped her energy. She put the plate of food inside the noisy fridge, propped up with a slab of wood to compensate for the uneven floor. There was a pitcher of juice in the fridge but she wasn’t sure she should drink it. She poured herself a glass of water remembering how she had been embarrassed the first time she visited an American home, when she asked where they kept their drinking water. “Umm, in the tap,” they said, over-politely.

She wished she could go for a walk, but after Beryl’s warning to lock up good decided to leave this for another day. She went to her room and lay on the bed. The rain was easing. She was fine. She had been alone in many such rooms, it was what she did – Gainesville, Washington DC, Atlanta, Chicago, New York. She undid the mosquito net and let it fall and liked the cocoon it made. The beds at Fairlight had mosquito nets. Fifteen years. Fifteen years grounded; fifteen years a nomad. The first fifteen years she had slept in the same bed, in the same house, saw the same view; her birthright a house on a hill. As soon as she could, she would return to Fairlight. It had been sold, of course, but it would still be there; that was the thing about land; it paid no attention to its owners. The hill would be there and so would the cove and the sweep of the coast and the pale grey squalls far out to sea. The journey that churned like surf on sand was over. She was home.

Next day she took a taxi to the lawyer’s office. The Libbeys had not returned. A crowing rooster had woken her before it was light. She had found tea in the cupboards and a slice of hard dough bread in a chipped bread bin; she had eaten on the verandah, looking at the people on the street. Some nodded to her and she waved back.

The taxi driver smoked, dangling his right hand out the window. Traffic was heavy. She paid him with US dollars without calculating the conversion to Jamaican dollars and his thanks were effusive. He sped away in a shower of gravel before she could come to her senses and demand some of the money back. The morning was fair and she lingered for a moment in the street looking up at the lawyer’s office. She had not known what to wear for this meeting. A car horn blasted and she jumped onto the sidewalk. As the car raced by, the driver flung his arm at her in a familiar gesture of disdain. Nobody messed with Jamaicans. She smelled sewage and saw greasy black water pooled in gutters and potholes.

Inside the office, a short, brown man told her Mr. Bucknor was not available. He had been called away by a family emergency.

“But I have an appointment.”

“Indeed. But yours is a simple matter and Mr. Bucknor has authorized me to deal with it. I’m Turland Lambeth. Mr. Bucknor’s associate.”

Two surnames and a pompous manner to go with them. He invited her to sit in a neat office. The window behind him threw his face into shadow.

“We’re happy to finally make contact with you, Miss McCaulay,” he began, and she felt a flash of guilt. Her mother had died and she had not known. There had been no flicker of warning, no sense of foreboding, no dreams, waking or sleeping. She had not shed tears, had not felt sadness, regret or failure. Her mother, the mystery, would remain a mystery. When last had she thought of her, even in anger?

She wanted to explain to the lawyer, to say, I wasn’t close to my mother, or rather, she wasn’t close to me. She held her tongue.

“Your mother’s will is in probate. The process could take up to three years and…”

“How did she die, Mr. Turland?”

“Mr. Lambeth. My name is Mr. Lambeth.”

“I apologize. Mr. Lambeth. How did my mother die?”

“A car accident, I understand. You were not informed?”

“My brother wrote to me, but… here.” She dug into her backpack and handed the lawyer the letter. “Dear Leigh,” Andrew had written. “I am not sure this will find you, but I got a call from Jamaica yesterday. Mom died in a car crash. By the time you get this, the funeral will have been held. I was not able to go; big project at work. Isabella couldn’t take leave either, what with the kids’ schooling. I tried the last telephone number I had for you, but they said you no longer lived there. They had a forwarding address, but no phone number. I wish you would at least let me know where you are. Anyway, that’s the news. Mom died. I suppose this might come as a shock, but I’m not going to pretend we were close. Phone me if you are able to. Andrew.”

Turland Lambeth looked up. “Yes. Well. I don’t know the precise details of the accident, if that’s what you’re asking.” He folded the letter and returned it to her.

Leigh remembered her mother as a hesitant driver. “Where was it? Was another car involved?”

“Um. As I said, I don’t know the precise details. The file… it seems to have been temporarily misplaced.”

“The file is lost?”

“It is not lost. Were Mr. Bucknor here, the file would be available, but he had to leave so suddenly…”

“Then how do you know anything about my case?”

“Please, Miss McCaulay. Let me finish. This is a simple matter and I have been thoroughly briefed. Your mother’s estate is in probate. It will take a while. Her will was simple; she left everything to you and your brother, divided equally. Mr. Bucknor has written to him. Once you can establish your identity – a birth certificate would be best – I can advise you as to the size of the estate. Your portion of the money will be released once probate is concluded.”

“I don’t have my birth certificate,” she said. “I left Jamaica with a passport and it was renewed. My mother would have had my birth certificate.”

“Well, there were some papers and personal effects. Your father has them, I believe. Have you seen him?”

“Not yet. I arrived yesterday.”

“Failing that, you’ll have to reapply to the Registrar at Spanish Town. It can be a frustrating and lengthy process.”

“I’m not in a rush,” she said. “I live here now.

He raised his eyebrows. “Excellent. I hope you’re being careful – Kingston is a dangerous city. Especially for a young woman.”

“So I’ve been told,” she said. “How do you get paid?”

“Our fees will be deducted from the estate when probate is completed. Do you have a local mailing address?”

Leigh took the Libbeys’ address from her pocket. Better memorize this, she thought, if I lose it, I’ll have to go back to New York. The silliness of the thought made her smile.

“If that’s all…” Mr. Lambeth stood and she was dismissed.

Outside, she saw a bank on the other side of the road and she went in to change her money. She separated the US and Jamaican dollars into different pockets. No more happy taxi drivers. The rest of the day and weekend stretched ahead. She would take a walk. In the summers spent with her mother in Kingston after her parents’ divorce, she had not been allowed anywhere near downtown. Now she took in the modern office buildings beside the overgrown lots, the ruins of churches and warehouses, the piles of garbage overflowing from the sidewalks into the streets. She walked past a pile of red bricks at the side of the road. “Bricks, Miss?” the boy sitting next to them asked. A street sign said Duke Street. She wished she had a map. Then she saw the harbour ahead and was glad to have a destination.

She walked for hours, until the sun was directly overhead, realising the streets were laid out in a grid pattern with tiny, broken lanes in between. People sat on low walls or in the open doorways of rum shops; groups of men played dominos, slamming down the tiles; women selling goods – coolers, trays and baskets, fruit, sweets, cigarettes, drinks – sheltered under huge umbrellas or tarpaulins tied to the wrought iron fences. Ragged children peered from dark doorways. The lawyer had said Kingston was dangerous; Portlanders agreed: they were a cut above Kingstonians. Theirs was the most beautiful part of Jamaica, and the safest, and the most famous, gilded by its association with celebrities – Errol Flynn, Robin Moore of Green Beret fame, the Princess Nina Aga Khan. Leigh knew that in the first ever Tarzan film, Johnny Weissmuller had swung from thick lianas in the Portland bush. She was Kingston born – her mother had travelled to the Nuttall Hospital to give birth to her – but Portland grown. Could living and working downtown be as dangerous as they said?

There was nothing romantic about Kingston, but there was a noisy vibrancy that spoke of survival, of refusal to despair. Earthquakes had devastated the place more than once – when were the dates? There had been a fire too, and the city had been razed. Yet here it still stood, crumbling, smelly, teeming. A stray dog sniffed at her ankles and she held out her hand, but it flinched away.

People called to her – asking her to buy from them, begging, offering to walk with her. Her skin seemed to reflect light like a mirror, flashing into these people’s eyes; they either turned their heads away or demanded something from her. It had been the same as a child; then she had burned her skin in the sun, hoping to pass for brown, wanting unremarked passage.

She bought a coconut from an old man with a handcart who wielded his machete with terrifying skill, but his smile was sweet. She drank the cold coconut water with a straw as she walked, and when it was finished wondered where to put the shell. A Jamaican would just throw it into the next open lot. She would be considered mad if she got into a taxi with it. She was a Jamaican. She put the nut down in a clump of guinea grass and immediately a goat appeared and began to lick at the shreds of flesh around the opening. It was October and she knew the afternoon rain would soon begin. She congratulated herself on this knowledge, but then the skin on her arms itched and she knew she had got her first sunburn. Aloe vera. Nanny Ros would have called it sinkle bible. Maybe there would be some in the garden at Waverly Street.

She thought of her brother, Andrew, eight years older, an impossible gap when they were young. He had studied architecture in England and stayed there, married an English woman, had English children. She had not seen him since she had been in college, when he had visited her in Gainesville and taken her to dinner at a Red Lobster. Who had called Andrew with the news? Had it been her father? She thought of the last address she had for him in Trelawny. She had no idea what he was doing there. She thought of him standing on the jetty at Fairlight, waiting to tell her he was leaving her. Leaving them. She heard the crash from her mother’s bedroom and heard her own voice say, “Mummy?”

The Libbeys returned that night. “Leigh, right?” Phyllis Libbey said, walking up the front stairs with a basket full of produce. “How you spell that? Sorry we not here when you reach, mi dear, but we back now. This my husband, Conrad. Conrad! Which way him turn? Bet you him inspecting the pumpkin vine. Beryl give you everything you need? Come inside, nuh, lock the grill gate. You shouldn’t sit out here with it open, too many mad people on the street.”

“But isn’t Mr. Libbey still outside?”

“He will bawl out when him ready. What Beryl cook?” Phyllis peered into the three covered plates on the stove. “Huh. Fricassee chicken again. That woman have not one bit of imagination. I better boil up some yam or Conrad going complain ’til the middle of next week.”

Over supper, Leigh learned about the Libbeys. They had two grown children, neither of whom had stayed in Jamaica, so they rented out their spare room and bathroom to foreigners – Peace Corps or social workers in Jamaica on short-term contracts. Conrad Libbey seemed to be about seventy. “Retired civil servant, me dear,” he said, “worked for forty years with the Ministry of Agriculture. They thought I would stay there until they had to sun me, but I left when the time was right.” He winked at Leigh. Phyllis was perhaps ten years his junior, wearing a tight, flowery dress cut low over an ample bosom. “Had enough, Leigh?” she said, passing the bowl of yellow yam again.

“More than enough, thank you.”

“You have plans for the weekend? I got some shopping and errands and you could come with me, see something of Kingston,” Phyllis said. “Church on Sunday; of course I know sometimes Americans don’t go to church, but you’re welcome to come. Six-thirty sharp.”

“Thank you – but I probably don’t have the right clothes for church,” Leigh said. “I’d love to drive with you, though, get my bearings a little.”

That night, the house was full of human sounds, muffled coughs, the scrape of a chair, low voices. Leigh smiled into the darkness. She made a list in her head. One, find out how my mother died. Two, find my father. Three, go to work. Four, find my way around Kingston. Five, go to Portland, see Fairlight. Six, find my friends. Seven, put down roots. Right down to bedrock.

There was no eighth item on the list.

On Monday morning, Danny rattled the padlock on the grill gate just after eight. The Libbeys were not yet up but Leigh was ready. She was glad of the lift. It marked a difference – no one in America had come to show her the way, ever, unless you counted college orientations. Danny was dressed as he had been at the airport, but his face looked scrubbed and there were a few drops of water in his hair. He smiled as she got into the car. “You have a good weekend, Miss?”

“Leigh, Danny. My name is Leigh. No need for the Miss.” He turned down the radio. “No, leave it,” she said. “It’s fine.” He smiled at her again but left the radio down low.

They crawled through traffic. Vendors sold newspapers on street corners and Leigh thought she would subscribe to a Jamaican newspaper. “I went to Duke Street on Friday,” she said. “Is Kingston Refuge near there?”

“One street over. How you did get to Duke Street?”

“Taxi. Then I walked around until the rain started. Went down by the harbour. Got sunburned.”

“Sometime you have to careful where you walk downtown,” Danny said. “Aii Jelly!” he shouted as they went past a coconut seller. Leigh looked around to see if he was the same seller she had bought from, but the man’s face was lowered and she couldn’t tell. She was going to tell Danny about her dilemma over the shell, but she decided not to.

“Where you from, Mi… Leigh?”

“Told you already.” She wondered if he was testing her. “From here. Born in Kingston, grow in Porty.”

“Never been to Porty.”

“Is beautiful. I want to go and see my old house.”

“Where you mother and father come from?”

“Here too. Born here.” This was a tedious and familiar line of questioning.

“Four generations,” she would say, though she was sure only about three. “My great grandfather was a Scottish missionary.” Not some estate owner, was what she meant. A missionary. Someone who left his comfortable home and travelled to the Indies to preach to the people. A good man. She knew almost nothing about the man. Missionaries were controversial, but they were definitely better than slave masters.

“For true?” Danny said. “A missionary?”

“Yes.”

“Where him live?”

“I don’t know,” Leigh said, and the admission seemed slightly shameful.

“Where him grave is?”

“Don’t know.” She knew Danny was waiting for an explanation. “I left Jamaica when I was fifteen, my parents split, my mother took me away. Maybe I’ll look for the missionary’s grave.”

“So where you parents?”

“My mother died couple months ago. Car accident. My father

– he’s somewhere in Trelawny. I have to find him.” “Never been to Trelawny neither.” “Tell me about the refuge.” “What you want know? Is a place for homeless people, give them food, place to stay, if them want. Most of them don’t want to stay. Run by some priests.”

“How is it funded?”

“How you mean, funded?”

“How it get money?”

Danny shrugged. “Dunno. Sometime they have barbecue, that kinda thing.” He seemed uncomfortable with her questions and she became silent. A man suddenly stepped in front of the car and Danny braked sharply. The man wore only tattered material wrapped around his waist, almost a loincloth. He was barefoot and filthy and thin, his hair long and matted.

“Danny!” he yelled. He appeared delighted rather than alarmed. “Wha’ gw’aan? Who dis?” He peered through the windshield.

“Guinep! After me did nearly kill you! You think you can beat out and duco?”

The man threw his head back and cackled. “You a good driver, Danny-boy. You nah kill me.” Danny shook his head and drove on.

“Guinep, you called him?” Leigh said.

“Eeh-hee. ’Cause that’s all him eat. Him nearly dead when guinep season done. Every year him nearly dead.”

“Does he come to the shelter?”

“Sometime. But not when guinep bearing.”

“How are you settling in, Leigh?” Father Gabriel asked, a month later.

“Fine, Father,” she said. “It’s good to be home.” This last statement was expected. Jamaicans who had never left the island expected deference from the prodigals. They, the faithful, had stuck it out – the politics, the crime, the poverty, the flirtation with socialism, the austerity programmes, the empty supermarket shelves. They had not run. They had not had the benefit of a foreign education. They were born yahs, grow yahs, never left yahs. They were the tough ones, the ones who deserved Jamaica.

“How’s your accommodation?”

“Fine.”

“You get along with the Libbeys?”

“Absolutely. Everything’s fine, Father.”

“What about your family here? Have you connected with them?”

She sighed. She preferred American workplace boundaries. Father Gabriel was an old-school Jesuit priest; if she let him, he would have patted her head. “About to, Father,” she said and left him. She had telephoned her father once, but the phone had not been answered.

Kingston Refuge was run by the Roman Catholic Church – one of a variety of programmes they ran for the poor – visits to shut-ins, a homework programme for children, a Sunday school. Their offices and the shelter were located in a shabby old building on East Street, partly brick and partly concrete. It was in poor repair, but from its high ceilings, trimmed with crown moldings, and the sweep of its sash windows it had obviously been important, but no one working at the shelter knew its history. The Institute of Jamaica was further down the street and she decided that sometime she would go to see if there were any documents on the old buildings of downtown Kingston, or maybe records about missionaries who had come to Jamaica.

There was not all that much to do at the shelter, and she quickly understood that her position was a condition of their funding, even though the priests thought it unnecessary. The shelter had a few bunk beds, bright new bathrooms, lockers for people to store their possessions, and a games room where their users could play dominoes and, occasionally, table tennis. Two meals were provided – a proper cooked lunch at noon, served in Styrofoam containers, which Leigh often encountered littering the streets – and soup with a hunk of hard dough bread at six.

Although her title was Director of Programmes, she found she was merely in charge of registering those who used the centre – this was another requirement of their grant – and those who used the centre were profoundly suspicious of this step. Leigh suspected they would double their clientele if no one had to register. The form required an address and even a signature – for homeless people! Many of those who staggered through the doors could not read and were ashamed of their illiteracy. Leigh soon found herself offering to sign for them, using her left hand. She sat at a desk in a corner, facing the entrance, in charge of the buzzer that would release the glass door so that those deemed sufficiently unthreatening could enter. A drop-in centre, she thought, where there were far too many obstacles to dropping in.

“How do I tell if someone is threatening?” she had asked Father Gabriel, when he first explained her role.

“Well, their eyes.”

“What about their eyes?”

“And whether or not they have a weapon.” He pointed at a big sign on one wall – “Absolutely no weapons of any kind.”

“Suppose the weapon is hidden?”

“You’ll soon get the hang of it,” he said, waving his hand at the top of her head, remembering just in time the newfangled ideas about the role of women. By the end of her second day at work, Leigh knew that most of the people who came in could not read the sign about weapons. So she pressed the buzzer for anyone who could stand – it was irrelevant for those who lay like rubbish on the sidewalk outside. Guinep walked by at least once a day, waved at her, grinning wildly, but never came in.

Danny worked at the shelter doing odd jobs – cleaning, driving, even helping with the cooking on occasion. He had walked with her through the nearby streets each lunchtime during her first week, introducing her to the vendors. Seya who sold bananas, oranges and ground provisions from country; Alberta, for warm bottled drinks and cheese crunchies; Carmella for sky juice; and old Jelly, the coconut seller, her coconut seller. Danny told them Leigh was his friend, and they should not overcharge her. After that, the vendors often gave her a brawta, a tangerine or an extra squeeze of syrup on her sky juice. When Danny walked with her, the bold stares of the men and the comments on her colour lessened.

From one of her co workers, Delilah Mendez, Leigh learnt that Danny came from Jordan, a so-called garrison community. She had read about these communities in the USA, and now in the Gleaner she followed the stories about near universal unemployment, vandalized schools, reprisal killings and fights over turf. Kingston Refuge gave opportunities to poor youths – Danny was a beneficiary. He had made it through his all-age school, was functionally literate but that was about all that could be said about his education. He had never known a father and had seen his two older half-brothers murdered in the street in the crossfire of warring gangs before he was twelve. He slept in a small room at the back of the house on East Street and was anxious to please. Good material, Delilah said. He was twenty-two, slim and long-limbed, the bones of his skull visible under his skin. Leigh noted the slight flattening at his temples, the curve of his cheekbones, the cleft of his chin. His eyes were light brown and slanted upwards at the corners. He smiled easily; the inside of his lips were pink. An American volunteer at the shelter had left him her Walkman and he was never seen without it. Leigh thought she should feel motherly towards him, but she also thought about slipping his shirt off his shoulders and running her fingers over the tight skin of his arms, right the way down to his fingers. She pushed those thoughts away – she had no intention of making any of her old mistakes.

She was determined to like her slow job and her slow life with the Libbeys. Her rent included breakfast and dinner; mealtimes were strictly observed and began with prayer and hands held. She regressed to being a schoolgirl. Once Phyllis even asked if she had remembered to wash her hands before coming to table. She tried to tune out Phyllis’s incessant chatter about church gossip, and Conrad’s rants about politics. He hated Prime Minister Edward Seaga, and inveighed against his policies, the rising debt, the ever-devaluing dollar. Everything in Jamaica was in terminal decline.

But after her solitary years in America, she found the close attention of the Libbeys comforting. It would chafe in time, and then she would move on, but for now she liked the zinc-roofed house, which was no better or worse than its neighbours. She liked the rooms crammed with furniture and knick-knacks, the uneven green-flecked floor tiles, the muttering fridge, the riotous garden where Conrad waged a constant war against the fowls from next door. She liked the verandah where the Libbeys sat every afternoon, drinking lemonade or coconut water, listening to the radio, exchanging greetings with their neighbours, picking dead leaves off the potted plants. Conrad had bought home a rocking chair for her within her first week – so the verandah now had three chairs.

But there was nothing to do at night. The Libbeys wanted her home by dark. Too dangerous to be downtown then. They hated it when she walked anywhere. Leigh had found a convenient lift with Delilah, who drove right past her street to and from work. Delilah left at five p.m. precisely, so she was home by five-thirty and the evenings lay ahead. She would help herself to a drink from the fridge and sit on the front step, enjoying the soft light of late afternoon. After supper, the Libbeys retired to their front room, in front of a small colour TV and watched old American sitcoms. Leigh said her good nights and went to her room. She showered, then lay on her bed, staring at the square of the night sky through the top of the window, listening to the sounds of traffic and the croaking lizards, rasping in call and response like competing preachers at their pulpits. Dogs barked and sirens sounded. Her mind was empty. She never really knew what time she fell asleep. Often she woke, imagining she heard the sounds of her childhood, the clank of oarlocks, the bubbling of the hull of her dinghy skimming over the water, and the crash of shattering perfume bottles, jewellery, compacts, lipstick, hairbrushes on the day her father left her mother.

She had been in bed that day, reading Black Beauty. It was a Saturday, and normally she would have been out – on her bicycle to the Port Antonio market to buy food for a cookout in the bush, or in the dinghy trying to row around Alligator Head, which would take her into the calm waters of San San Bay, and up to the Little Island, where she could beach the dinghy and climb to the top and look out over the reef to the indigo sea, shading her eyes, hoping to see Cuba, just ninety miles to the north. Rowing around Alligator Head needed the calmest day possible – she had only made it around the headland a few times. But she was recovering from an upset stomach and her mother had decreed that she should stay in bed one more day, on a diet of ginger ale and dry toast. She was bored and restless. She was usually alone on Saturdays – Zoe, had work to do at home. When Leigh had been younger, she had read storybooks about English children, and they’d had to do “chores” like Zoe. Leigh never had to do chores. She had demanded a chore from her mother, but when she discovered this involved sweeping and dusting and ironing and folding clothes and cooking, she became less enthusiastic. It had sounded better in the Famous Five books. Zoe had to do those things for her mother and her five brothers and sisters, but Zoe did not seem to mind.

Leigh heard a crash from her mother’s dressing room – she called it her boudoir. “Mummy?” she called. There was no answer. She was breathless. There was something about the crash that suggested that this was not an accident, not the careless knocking over of a bottle of perfume. “Mummy?” she said again, and walked to the door of her parents’ bedroom suite. She knocked gently and there was still no answer. She walked in. She was wearing her new cotton pyjamas, a little large, taken out from the storage cupboard as a treat for her illness, and the top slipped off her thin, sunburned shoulders. She adjusted it and ran her fingers through her hair, to avoid a lecture on her appearance. Her mother had taken her for a haircut that year and her hair was very short. When longer, it was untidy, verging on not being “good hair”.

“Mummy?” she said for the third time.

Her mother turned her blotched face towards her and Leigh took a step back, because she had never seen her mother look anything but composed and painted. When she swam on calm summer days, she did not get her hair wet; she held her hand high, with a cigarette between her fingers, using an awkward one-armed dog paddle. This woman with swollen eyes and quivering mouth and uncombed hair was not her mother.

“What happened?”

Her mother held up a piece of notepaper. “He’s left us. Your father. He’s left us. He’s run off with some bimbo.” Leigh saw her mother’s cosmetics on the ground – that was the crash she had heard. Her string of pearls had broken. She must have swept them to the floor. “Shh, Mummy,” she said. “Don’t cry.” She hovered, confused. “Shall I get you a hankie?”

“Go and play, Leigh,” her mother said. “I can’t deal with you now.”

Leigh backed out of the room. It could not be true. Her father would not have left, not without telling her good-bye. Her stomach clenched and she thought she needed the bathroom, but she swallowed and her gorge settled. In her room, she tore off her pyjamas and pulled on her bathing suit, now too small and stretched out, the cloth faded. Her mother had given her permission to leave the house. It was going to be a Saturday like any other.

She ran down to the cove and straight into the water. She swam out to sea, thinking of islands, perhaps an uninhabited one. Her favourite story was Robinson Crusoe, because it reminded her of herself and Zoe. She could see them alone on an island, she the captain; Zoe, Man Friday. They would eat coconuts and lobster and have adventures.

The salt water stung her eyes and she rolled on her back and floated. She could hear underwater sounds, strange clicking noises that her father had not been able to explain. She knew they were the voices of fish. She floated into a cold fresh-water bubble welling from the sea floor and shivered. She churned her arms and legs to mix the icy fresh water with the warm salty sea. She looked to the shore and saw her father standing on the jetty. He was dressed in a suit and tie and she knew then it was true. He was leaving them. He was leaving her. She put her face in the water and settled into a steady crawl, away from him, heading for the open sea. Maybe she could swim all the way to Cuba.

Leigh remembered this as the day her mother cried, and how, later, she used to sing those words in her mind to the tune of “American Pie”. Her father left just after the summer holidays had begun, the summer of 1970, and by that September, Leigh was no longer at school in Portland, but was boarding at the Hampton School for Girls in St. Elizabeth. Her dog, Rex, had been given away to a family with a farm where, she was told, he would be able to run free. She knew this was a lie. Fairlight had been sold and her mother was in one of Kingston’s first apartment buildings, defiantly entertaining a twenty-five-year-old lover.

“You find your father yet?” Phyllis Libbey asked. They sat on the verandah, drinking lemonade. The afternoon sun poured through the burglar bars and made patterns on the floor.

“Not yet. Been busy at work. Called a few times; no answer.” Leigh hoped this was brief enough to discourage further questions.

“You been here more than a month. Family important,” said Conrad Libbey. “You have a famous name.”

“I do?” Leigh knew Conrad fancied himself a historian.

“Are you related to the abolitionist or the Lord?”

“Neither, as far as I know. My great grandfather was a missionary.”

“Wasn’t there a McCaulay who died a few months back? A car crash in Montego Bay?”

“Montego Bay? My mother was killed in a car crash, but I don’t know where.”

“Wasn’t just a car crash… Didn’t they…?”

“Shh, Conrad. Some things not good to talk,” Phyllis said.

“What do you mean, some things not good to talk?”

“Pay him no mind. Him read death notice ’til him fool. Don’t know McCaulay from McIntosh. It was a lady name McIntyre him was thinking of.”

“McIntyre, yes,” Conrad agreed. “Somebody else.”

“My church sister,” Phyllis said. “Carla McIntyre. Moved to Mo Bay and bam, dead. You never know the hour or the day. Bad things happen in Mo Bay. Godless place.”

“Where’s Beryl?” said Conrad. “Me thirsty. That woman always missing in action.”

Beryl, their helper, was a stout woman with a vacant manner. Leigh had learned the word “maid” was now considered demeaning. Beryl came to work every day before seven, changed in a small, outside bathroom into a blue uniform with a white apron, set the table, prepared breakfast, cleared the dishes, washed and dried them, cleaned the house, did laundry by hand on Mondays and Thursdays, sitting on a stool in front of a large tin pan, hung out the clothes on the line in the back, prepared lunch, served it to Conrad who was nearly always home, and cleared it away. Only then would she sit and drink a heavily sweetened cup of tea. Then she made the day’s fruit drink and began supper. She left the supper dishes on the top of the stove, the food portioned on each plate, each covered with a thin white towel. At six, Phyllis covered each plate with another plate and put them all into a slow oven. Leigh often found the food only barely warm and cooked with too much oil. Once a week, on a Friday night, Beryl made dessert – home-made ice cream, which she churned in a green bucket, or sweet potato pone, banana bread or coconut jelly, sprinkled with brown sugar. On Sundays, the Libbeys had a big, late lunch; supper was buttered white bread with a cup of cocoa. Leigh had gained weight since being in Jamaica.

Beryl unlocked her childhood memories – so much of her growing up had been supervised by maids and gardeners. Her Nanny Ros wore a white cap and starched apron, and smelled of thyme. She had only bottom teeth and Leigh used to sit on her lap and count them. When she wanted to be rude, she called her Seven-tooth Nanny. It was Nanny Ros who woke her, got her ready for school, packed her lunch, and walked with her to the gate. She was collected by a neighbour, but it was Nanny Ros who was waiting at home for her. She allowed outdoor play until four o’clock, then it was time for “tea and tidy”. It was Nanny Ros who walked with her to the cove and stood waiting while she paddled or threw stones into the sea, who told her tales of the fearsome galliwasp – should Leigh ever catch sight of this awful reptile, race for the nearest water! – who told her of River Mumma lurking under bridges, particularly the Flat Bridge on the Rio Cobre, waiting to suck you down so you drown, and of the Rolling Calf with eyes like headlights, signalling all manner of calamity. Leigh never repeated these stories to her parents; even when very young she knew they were somehow unacceptable, stories from a people not her own. She never developed a phobia of lizards, she approached Flat Bridge without a twinge of fear, and never, ever dreamed of the Rolling Calf.

She remembered their laundress, Laverne, who sang hymns as she bent over the wash pan; and the gardener Ken, who showed her how to catch peenie wallies in a bottle to light the corners of her room at night, where to feel for janga under the big rocks in Portland’s many streams, how to climb trees and stalk the lizards she did not fear, using a noose constructed from the fibres of coconut trees. It was Ken who cut and stripped the branches of June rose bushes and made her bows and arrows; Ken who, when she approached puberty, pulled her onto his lap and slid his fingers under her shorts. He had kissed her with an open mouth too, she not yet twelve; the taste of his tongue made her feel sick, and she ate an entire box of imported marshmallows to replace Ken’s taste with something else. She had not thought of that moment behind the garage in years. Watching Beryl at work in the kitchen brought it back, the black people moving like shadows in and out of Fairlight, the dinghy, the cove with its crescent of white sand and the tickle of seaweed on her feet, her skinny body buoyant in the water, her bicycle, her slingshot, the grass quits that fell to her increasingly well aimed stones, and Zoe, her fishing buddy, and the bread man who brought hard dough bread and bullas in a mule cart. He had one day offered her a ride in his cart, his black hand grasping hers to help her up, his palm dry and hard as stone. This had caused trouble when Nanny Ros found out. “Him touch you?” she demanded, holding Leigh’s shoulders too tightly.

“Ow!” she said. “You’re hurting me! He just helped me into his cart.”

“Him touch you anywhere?” Leigh shook her head, understanding suddenly that the kind of touches Nanny Ros worried about were the kind Ken had administered under her shorts, right in her own garden. Bad things could happen even though the fences ran around the base of a hill and your house was right on top.

Growing up, she had accepted the household staff as normal, as if the house somehow came equipped with such people. Everyone had maids; at any social gathering a fair amount of conversation was devoted to the subject – how laundresses could no longer iron, not in the way they used to, how it was best to give them the old kind of iron, the ones that had to be heated in a coal pot and used with thin pieces of cloth to protect the clothes, because maids simply could not handle electric irons; who had been fired because she was found entertaining a man while on duty; who had walked off the job without notice; who had come to work with her children – well-mannered and neatly dressed children, but still… And who had committed the cardinal sin of stealing – leaving for the once-a-month weekend off with a bag of sugar or even a leftover chicken leg just beginning to grow mould. Such transgressions had to be met with the harshest discipline, or where would it lead.

Leigh listened to these conversations more uncomfortably as she edged into her teens; Zoe was the daughter of a maid. She did not want to have to supervise a maid, but this seemed to be her destiny. She did not want her white skin that attracted envy and dislike and the possibility of violence. She loved her home on the hill, but knew it was in some way bound up with the colour of her skin. She loved to sit on a rocking chair on the verandah to watch the weather sweep across the sea, loved the fair light that fell through louvre windows making stripes on her bed, loved the tangle of trees around the house, and the cove, her cove. But she did not want the girls at school to know where and how she lived.

Leigh carried the laundry tub into the back garden at Waverley Street. It was nearly dark and Phyllis had warned her that clothes might be stolen. She was not a good washer. Her hands were weak and she couldn’t make the right squishy noise, nor wring out the large items, especially her sheets. Somehow she always managed to drop or trail something in the dust. But what was she trying to prove by doing her own laundry by hand? In America, she had either taken her clothes to laundromats, or the buildings she had lived in had washers and dryers in the basement. Washing her own clothes made her forsake her jeans – they were too hard to wash, scraped her knuckles and took too long to dry. She was slowly replacing them with light cotton trousers, bought from sidewalk vendors on Princess Street – a place Phyllis had told her was strictly off limits to decent people.

Her mother would not have approved. She would never have sunk her manicured hands into a tub of laundry. She would have made a sound of great irritation and told her she was depriving someone of a job. Warned her about ruining her hands.

She had been reminded of her mother’s friends when Father Gabriel invited her to a cocktail party shortly after her arrival. She had bought a cheap dress and evening shoes on Princess Street – she had not worn a dress since childhood. She went with Delilah to the party at an uptown hotel, an old coffee plantation, Delilah had told her, and feeling awkward, she had stood amongst the groups of glittering women and distracted men. The men had no interest in her at all; they were making business deals. The shiny women ignored Delilah, standing at her side, but they spoke to Leigh.

“What brought you home?” they asked and Leigh mumbled a response. They did not ask why she had left.

“You’re working at the shelter on East Street!” Leigh agreed that she was. Eyebrows went up, heads were shaken, and advice given about never walking the streets alone, about being home by dark, and getting a car as soon as possible. “It’s dangerous down there,” the women said, fingering their necklaces.

“Many good people live there,” Leigh said. Delilah pinched her arm, which she understood to mean, be quiet. No, she would rather have cocoa tea and patties than this gin and tonic world.

She dropped the clothes in the wash pan, watching them balloon as they trapped air. She needed to contact her father – why was she procrastinating? The slowness of her days filled her with lassitude. There was no hurry. He did not know she was here.

She had learned the address she had for him was for some kind of farm in Trelawny and she wondered how he had come to be there and why he was in possession of his ex-wife’s personal effects. Her parents’ break up had been acrimonious. Had he attended her mother’s funeral?