An Embarrassment of Mangoes (14 page)

“Look around,” he says. We are two of just a handful of whites. Of course we were dead easy to recognize.

Castries has a reputation for being a tough town. So when we leave the stadium, I don’t really want to walk the dark streets alone, back down to the bus station. I’m not even sure we can find the way. Almost immediately, though, we see a 1A bus and flag it down. The driver stops, but shakes his head as I start to climb on. The bus is empty, except for a young woman in the seat next to him. “I’m not goin’ direct to deh station,” he says, waving me off. I press: “We don’t mind if it’s not direct.” He shrugs, “Well, you can come along if you want.”

What ensues is an amusement-park ride up the steep and narrow streets that wind mazelike above “downtown” Castries, accompanied by reggae at ear-splitting volume. Even with my limited mental map of the city, I know we are most definitely not heading anywhere near “deh station.” Eventually, we pull over in front of a small house, the bus seemingly perched at a 45-degree angle at the side of the road, and the woman disappears inside. The driver leaves too, and we’re alone in the hot humid darkness; in the middle of nowhere, in a purportedly dangerous city, in what I now realize is an off-duty bus. Above the booming reggae, we can hear voices in the shadows. We are a mugging waiting to happen.

But
nothing
happens. The girlfriend eventually returns with a small suitcase and the driver climbs back in and starts the motor. He shouts good-bye to his friends, and we head back down the winding streets, reggae still blasting. He pulls up in front of the bus station, where an on-duty 1A bus is waiting. “How much do we owe you?” Steve says. Once again, the driver shakes his head and waves us off. “Nothing. I didn’t bring you direct to deh station.”

Lambi and Lobster

Mammie was a great cook—the best . . . We didn’t have to buy eggs or vegetables, only people who lived in town bought things like that. What you didn’t have in your garden you got from your neighbors. If you needed to buy fish you would just stand in front of your house and listen out for the conch shell blowing.

MARGUERITE SHERIFF, ABOUT HER CHILDHOOD IN GRENADA;
“A RIDE ON THE BOARD BUS,”
THE MELIBEA REVIEW,
MARCH 1998

“Would you like some mangoes?” a woman’s voice sings out from across the road, as we stand and admire a tree that’s positively
dripping
ripe fruit.

Steve and I are in the middle of a game we play whenever we go for a walk lately: Let’s pretend we can buy a piece of property in Grenada; what would we choose? We have fallen in love with this island at 12 degrees north of the equator since arriving here a few weeks ago. Now south of the hurricane zone, south of the box, we’re planning to stay put for a while, and I’m beginning to relax. We arrived ten days after the insurance company’s deadline for being outside the box—a meaningful deadline only if a statistically challenged named storm had hit during that time, which (of course) it hadn’t. In Toronto, missing a deadline by ten days would have seemed the end of the world. Now it seems a fine accomplishment.

This sweet little stretch of land, a sweat-breaking, fifteen-minute hike up the steep, potholed road from the dock at the village of Lower Woburn, is a strong contender in our let’s-buy-some-island-property game. Along with a sweeping view of Clarke’s Court Bay and, beyond that, of Hog Island and
Receta
calmly at anchor, it promises more mangoes than we could possibly eat, as well as papayas, breadfruit, and coconuts.

We might have missed the accompanying house entirely, though, if not for the woman’s call. Tucked back from the road, it’s almost invisible behind the umbrellaed tops of the coconut palms and the long-fingered leaves of a breadfruit tree. But when we turn toward the sound, we see a bit of blue-green wall with a smiling middle-aged woman, her dark hair drawn back in a bun, framed in a window.

Although my hanging baskets back on board are overflowing with mangoes, it seems rude not to buy some from this woman with the lilting voice, after being caught drooling at her tree. So I call back, “Yes, please,” and we puff our way across the road and up an almost-vertical drive—so steep it makes the road look flat. The climb is immediately complicated by the appearance of a rambunctious pothound of indeterminate bloodline, who seems intent on snapping at anything that moves—in this case, my heels, toes, and ankles. “Stinky,
come here
.” The voice is musical even when it’s angry.

The drive flattens out into a sort-of carport—corrugated metal roof, open sides—with bits of outboard and drying fishnets scattered underneath and chickens pecking at the far end. Beyond it is the wooden, one-storey house, raised a good 8 feet off the ground on cinder blocks. Up a flight of steps and through the open door, a young man sprawls on the floor, watching a small TV, the only furnishing visible in the room.

The smiling woman waits by the steps, already holding a bag of at least half a dozen ripe Julie mangoes, the local favorite. She wears a white T-shirt emblazoned with Michael Jackson’s face, which she’s paired with a long flowered skirt and the ubiquitous island footwear, rubber flip-flops.

I pull out my cruiser’s wallet, a sandwich-sized Ziploc stuffed with small bills and change. “Nooooo.” That enchanting voice again. “These are a gift. I don’t sell mangoes.”

We start to chat, and eventually learn that Evette
does
sell fish, lobster, and conch, although she doesn’t have any today—and she’s not really trying to sell us anything anyway. She introduces us to her daughter, Gennel, fourteen, a tall sturdy teenager with the most beautiful eyes, who is timid at first but gradually begins to chime into the conversation. We’re also introduced to a tiny herd of alternately shy and giggling little girls, neighboring kids Evette watches while their mothers work. Alisha, Morrisa, Dessian, and Bria, all four almost the same age and size, all four with elaborately braided and baubled hair, all big eyes and big smiles and buckets of crayons. I try to keep them straight: Alisha, white hair baubles, red shorts—or is she red baubles, white shorts? Just when I think I’ve got it, they jump around and change places and I make a mistake—much to everyone’s amusement. And we officially meet the aptly named Stinky, who is now finding the dangling straps of my backpack irresistible. As Evette swats him with a flip-flop, she gives us her phone number and we promise to return in a few days for some conch.

I
t feels
soooo
good to know we can linger on this island as long as we want, to be able to tell Evette we will return to her house in a few days, without qualifying it by adding, “unless the weather is good, in which case we’ll have to head off.” No more timetable for a while, no more leaving a place before we’re ready, because we have to outrace the calendar. We had toasted our arrival here with a bottle of champagne purchased in St. Martin, as a double rainbow—a sure sign of good luck—arced overhead, one end disappearing into the luxuriant green hills that are Grenada in the rainy season, the other fading into a curve of creamy sand beach. We have been gone from Toronto 323 days—and 102 of them have been spent at least partially in transit, including a medal-worthy (for me) twelve nights underway.

W
hen we next tackle the hill to Evette’s house, I’m toting our insulated cooler bag. I’d managed to determine on the phone that, yes, today Evette has “lambi”—the Creole word for conch—although her musical accent is almost impenetrable without visual cues to help. Grenadians in general (and Evette even more so) lengthen and soften their vowels—“Ann” becomes
Ahhhhnnn
—and don’t pronounce the “th” combination: “three” becomes
tree
, “the” becomes
deh
. Add in the Creole words, the singsong cadence, and the unaccustomed grammatical constructions, and Ahhhhnnn havin’ trouble on deh phone . . .

There’s a lambi dish I want to make, but I don’t even know where to start. A few days earlier, we’d eaten lunch at the Little Dipper, a five-table, almost entirely open-air restaurant tucked amidst the foliage beside the road about a quarter mile from Evette’s house. The conch was stewed, rather than fried or cooked on the grill as we’d had it in the Bahamas. The sweet, tender meat floated in a fragrant brown sauce with a hint of curry, and it had none of the rubber-band chewiness of undertenderized or overcooked conch.

Evette immediately knows the dish, and getting her to share the recipe with a stranger isn’t a problem: It’s just that there
isn’t
a recipe. She cooks by feel, not exact quantities—which makes it tough for those unfamiliar with the ingredients, and the local language. How much is a “tip”? How can I tell “counter flour” from “baking flour”? What is the mystery herb that sounds like “siveantime”? Distracted by the ever-present Stinky, who today has focused on the straps of my sandals, and not wanting to impose with endless questions and admit either total ignorance or inability to understand Grenadian English, I don’t ask. Still, I do positively confirm that I need to “wash” the lambi in lime juice to start, “burn” brown sugar to get the dark, rich sauce, and add “a tip” of curry powder for flavor. But I’m going to have to figure out for myself how to put it all together.

At least these conch are already out of their shells, thanks to Evette and Dwight, the twenty-something young man we had glimpsed on our first visit. Raised by Evette almost from birth, he’s the one who dives for the seafood she sells to help support the family. But we still have to do the cleaning and pounding. I give the job to Steve—seems only fair, since I’m doing the cooking—and having seen the effect of the process in the Bahamas, he heads to the beach, armed with a plastic cutting board, freshly sharpened knife, aluminum meat mallet, and pliers for pulling off the conch’s slimy skin. He returns more than an hour later in a foul mood. While he was working on the lambi’s skin, the mosquitoes and no-see-ums were working on his—“at least where it wasn’t covered in conch goo,” he mutters.

Dinner puts him in better spirits. I stew the lambi as I think Evette suggested, with onion, pepper, and coconut milk, and serve it over rice, with steamed “spinach” on the side sprinkled with a bit of freshly grated Grenadian nutmeg. At least that was what the emerald-green, arrowhead-shaped leaves were called in the market. But they have a delicious smoky taste, quite unlike the North American vegetable. (Months later, I discover that “spinach” here is actually an entirely different species of leafy green.) The lambi, meanwhile, isn’t exactly what we remember from the Little Dipper, but we agree it’s mighty fine. The conch is tender, the sauce a deep brown . . . just rather more sweet than rich.

Y
ou put
how
much in?” Evette asks. I tell her I put about a quarter cup of brown sugar in the lambi sauce. “I burned it, like you said, and added it to the lambi and the other seasonings.”

She is aghast. “Noooooo.” That captivating singsong voice. “You just want a bit—maybe a spoonful.”

Great, but what size spoon? She indicates on her finger—probably between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. Hmmm. No
wonder
the sauce was a little sweet.

It’s a couple of days later, and we’ve hiked back up to Evette’s, this time with a package of walnut brownies I’ve baked as thanks for the mangoes, which have long since disappeared. (And which, since we know the season won’t last forever, were quickly replaced in town by more.) We haven’t seen brownies—or any chocolate baked goodies—in the island stores and I figure they’ll be a novelty. They are, although Gennel recognizes them instantly. “Dere’s a picture in my schoolbook,” she says shyly, referring to the text she uses in home economics. “But I never ate one.” Though cocoa is an important crop on Grenada, the dried and roasted beans are almost all exported to factories in Europe for further processing. The few that are left behind are ground until they’re soft, and the mushy mixture is rolled by hand into sticks or balls. In this form, the chocolate isn’t suitable for eating or baking—it’s mostly grated to make hot drinks.
Real
chocolate, the kind we know, is imported and expensive, Evette explains.

This trip, I’m determined to ask all the questions I should have asked the first time around. When Evette rhymed off the ingredients for the lambi, she had included salt and pepper, as well as seasoning and a seasoning pepper. The seasoning pepper was easy: The bushes they grow on—Evette has one alongside her house—look like they’ve been decorated for Christmas, and the market tables in St. George’s are full of the tiny green, red, and sometimes orange jewels. A Caribbean cross between a sweet pepper and a hot pepper, they add the flavor of a hot pepper when chopped and tossed into the stew pot—without nearly the bite. “But what do you mean by seasoning?” I ask.

“You know, seasoning salt,” she replies. I picture a jar of a spice blend like Mrs. Dash, and make a note to pick some up next time we’re in town. I had figured out the mystery herb “siveantime” on my own, during our last trip to market, when I spotted some green bunches on the tables: Sive, or cive, is West Indian chives, stronger-flavored than their North American counterpart, closer in size and taste to our green onions. They’re used to season stews and curries, as is thyme, so the two are helpfully sold together—a few stalks of sive tied with string to a couple of branches of fresh thyme—and talked about in one breath, “siveandthyme.”

Meanwhile, Evette tells us to call her by her “home name,” Dingis—“I was a very small baby, and dingis are little boats”—and lets on that she has a reputation as a
very
good cook. Since I’ve made it clear by this point that I’m no slouch in this department back home, and that I’m very interested in learning Grenadian cooking, Dingis is keen to help. There’s a strong subtext here, however, a reason she feels she
has
to help me with my cooking: Like Aunt Keva, Dingis has decided that my husband is very skinny.
Too
skinny.
Dangerously
skinny. Couple that with the fact that we are childless—a married woman of my age?—and Dingis smells trouble on the horizon. Whatever my cooking skills, Steve is obviously not being properly fed. Unless I learn how to cook good (read: island) food, I’m not going to be able to hold on to my man: I need to fatten him up to keep him happy. Even with her accent, even with the Creole words, I have no problem understanding this. The message is loud and clear.

“Do you know coo-coo?” This time Dingis tows me straight into her kitchen, which is under the house and mostly open-air to keep both cook and house cool. It’s pretty basic—a few open wooden shelves with pots and plates, a couple of stools, a low wooden counter, a fridge, and a small four-burner stove hooked up to a propane tank. The most prominent appliance is the large, new chest freezer plugged into an outlet on the house. There’s no water in the kitchen itself: The tap (cold water only) and the wash-up area are outside, overlooking the road. Even though we haven’t been invited inside the house yet, it’s obvious there’s no direct access to the kitchen; you have to go outside, down the steps, and between the cinder-block pillars to stir the stew or get a snack.

Several blackened pots crowd the stovetop, and I’m hoping Perry and Noel’s aphrodisiacal man-trapping soup, still a mystery to me at this point, will at last be revealed. But no, Dingis cuts several squares from a battered metal pan: This “coo-coo” (that’s indeed the way it’s spelled) is a Caribbean version of polenta. “You boil some coconut milk and then you put in your cornmeal, and you stir it, stir it, stir it,” she sings. When it thickens, pour it out into a pan, allow it to cool, slice, and eat. Some versions include okra; this one is plain. Some are made with water, this one with coconut milk—
much
richer. “It’s good fried, too, with a cup of hot cocoa tea,” Dingis explains. Nothing like upping the fat quotient.