Eden Burning (10 page)

But it worked the other way, too, an odd reversal. Dr. Mebane said things he would not dare to repeat before Agnes.

“My great-great-grandmother was a slave for the Francis family,” he told the boys one day. “There’s an old estate on the other side of this island—you may have seen it—Eleuthera. Well, the details are vague, ‘lost in the mist of time,’ I believe the poet says. All I know is, her name was Cupid and her father was a son, or maybe a nephew, of the Francis family. This was toward the end of the seventeen hundreds. She must have been a beautiful girl. White women were scarce on the plantations, you know, and life was very dull. So the white master went to the slave woman and naturally he chose the best-looking, the healthiest. Sometimes there was a lasting love between them. He’d buy jewels for the woman, dress her in satin and lace. When there were children, the father freed them, manumitted them. It would have been scandalous not to do so. Some of these fathers were generous with money, with land or an education. So after a century or more, what have you got? You have a brown class. Brown, less brown, least brown.” The doctor smiled ironically. “‘Least brown’ even acquired the dignity of being addressed as Mr. or Mrs. Well, anyway, that’s the explanation of why the people who work on the sugar estate today are coal black and why,” he said, with a certain mocking tone, “why I am invited to teas at Government House. Not to private little dinner parties, mind you, certainly not. But when you’re in government you’re as good as anyone. Yes, it all goes back to the bed, when you think about it.”

Patrick was silent. Grown people didn’t talk about “beds” in front of boys. At least, Agnes didn’t. She would have washed his mouth out with soap if he had done so. “Dirty talk,” she would have called it.

“Color,” the doctor resumed. “We think about it all the time, don’t we? Even when we don’t want to admit it.”

“I don’t think about it,” Patrick said untruthfully.

“I don’t believe it.”

“We never talk about it at home,” Patrick said.

“Don’t tell me you don’t think about it, though. You’re lighter than any of us here.”

Of course he thought about it even more than he realized. It was just always there. When he looked around the class and saw that his features were exactly those of the white boys, only the skin betraying the difference … How easy life would be, he thought, if one could remove the last trace of that
other
from the skin. And on the other hand, he could recall how it had thrilled him when Nicholas won the debate from a boy just out from England, a freckled red-haired boy with a haughty accent barely understandable. The triumph had thrilled him, not just because Nicholas was his friend, but because it had been a victory for color.

“You are lighter than any of us here,” Dr. Mebane said again. “How do you suppose that happened?”

Patrick felt a flush of shame. Whose shame? Not his own, surely. What had he to do with it?

The doctor leaned forward. “You’re embarrassed. You shouldn’t be. There is a proper way to talk about these things. They are a part of life. And anyway, we are all men in this room. You shouldn’t be embarrassed,” he repeated kindly.

But the doctor could not have known the full reach of his thoughts. He was thinking of his mother. That business about the white man and the mistress … She had been in France; the man who had fathered him had deserted her. And he was filled with anger toward his unknown father.

Now color was becoming totally confused with sex. Yet they were two different things. His mother ought to have hated whiteness, after that. But there was a contradiction in her, the contradiction of which he had so long been aware. She was proud that estate workers coming into her shop called her Miss. He had asked her once why she was more polite to customers who were brown like herself, and so often curt with those who were very black. He had received not
only a denial but such a lashing of her tongue that he never mentioned the subject again.

But it was all around, in the very air. It came to him, lying awake one night, that even Dr. Mebane, for all his talk and insight, had betrayed his secret pride in his own light skin. A certain satisfaction had revealed itself in his smile and voice, belying the righteous indignation in his words. He is proud of those invitations to Government House, Patrick thought, and he felt an odd compassion, which would no doubt have astonished the doctor if he had known of it.

Also, he saw that his pride was really shame. It was like despising oneself.

   The few years of schooling passed, flashing as they always do, so that when a long time later one looks back over them, only a few bright areas stand out in a sometimes serene, sometimes dull, sometimes fretful expanse of routine. In Patrick’s case, the particular brightness, in spite of anything, was Nicholas and his father’s cheerful house. Secondly it was Father Baker, who could always find time for a boy after school, who gave him hard things to do, long lists of books “to stretch the mind,” he said. “Read Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall;
hard going, but without it you won’t understand how we came to be where we are.”

Father Baker supplied the lists, but Nicholas supplied the books, a glorious boxful each Christmas. (“Patrick, don’t be shy about accepting a gift. Don’t let’s be self-conscious with each other. I happen to have more money, no credit to me; it’s not important and don’t let it be.”)

So he grew, in those vital years between thirteen and seventeen when it is said the best learning is done. Wandering about the island, he began to connect the things his eyes saw with the things he read or was being taught, all of these weaving and interlocking with each other into something that as yet had no design, but seemed to point toward one.

During the long holidays before his final year, Father Baker gave an assignment: Write something about St. Felice, anything old or new, geological, commercial, anything. Father Baker gave difficult assignments.

Patrick had at first no idea what to write about. He worried over it. Then one day it came to him. At home in Sweet Apple he had wandered down to the beach and there encountered his old friend Ah Sing. And for no reason he could explain, regarding the stone-black eyes slanted above the Chinaman’s cheekbones, it came to him that Ah Sing could just as well be taken for one of the Caribs who lived in their reservation on the far remote slope of Morne Bleue. But they have always been here! he thought, astonished. And Ah Sing comes from the other side of the world! How could that be?

He resolved to learn more. Father Baker liked to talk about “intellectual excitement.” Patrick had probably never experienced what the teacher had meant, yet now, walking on the hard wet sand near the water’s edge, he thought he might be feeling it. “It is a kind of fire,” Father Baker had said. Yes. Yes. I want to say something about this place where I live, a strange place, when you think about it. All these so various and different people, living here, each in his layer, like those bottles of colored sand that is laid in stripes, apart! First there had been the Indians. This place had been all theirs, yet there was only a remnant of them left. You never heard much about them, other than the comment made by blacks that they had “good hair.” Sometimes you saw them fishing at night by torchlight at the river. Now and then you saw the men on the roads with their loads lashed onto their backs, it being beneath the dignity—that much he knew—of an Indian man to carry anything on his head. It was all right for women, but not for men. You saw them bringing their baskets
to
the market for sale, or more rarely, carrying bananas down the mountainside to Covetown. They didn’t go in for hired labor very much, and almost never worked on the estates. They
gave an impression of silence and independence; a superior reserve was on their faces.

Once he had made his way on foot to the place where they lived. He had expected no profound revelations, so he had not been disappointed to find merely what he had seen in any other inland village: two rows of shingled huts with tin roofs, some goats and some chickens scratching in a little garden plot behind each house. Some things were different: women pounding cassava in gourds and men hacking a canoe out of a cedar trunk. He had observed all these things, both the resemblances to and the differences from the life around them, and having done so, had not felt any further curiosity. Yet now he did.

He went to the public library in Covetown. It was a fair-sized room, dusty in shafted sunbeams, up the stairs from the tax office which had once been the courthouse from which buccaneers were sent to the gallows. Happily, it contained an encyclopedia and a moderate collection of history books. On the shady side of the room Patrick sat down with a pile of books and began to take notes.

So it was true, then! These people and the Chinaman Ah Sing! He had observed it! And it was true!

He read on.

With a feeling of recognition, Patrick paused a moment. What pleasure in words! Written, the word
hurricane
even looked like the haste and ruin of the real thing which he had seen once, a few years before: whole villages blown to pieces and great palms uprooted like weeds, as the wind came roaring at 160 miles an hour from the east.

He went back to the book and picked up the pen.

Glorious courage, proud courage! Patrick was youthfully and deeply moved.

After a week of diligence, he completed his notes, went home and began to write. He worked all day; when darkness came he set an oil lamp on the counter of the store and kept on.

His mother complained. “You’ve been up half the night for three nights now!”

“I have to,” he answered patiently.

He had set it all in orderly mental sequence, so that his pen ran easily: history, adaptation to change, daily ways …

And their inner life: