The Last Warner Woman (2 page)

The color purple was a strange choice for a doily. It was accepted on the island that anything designed to cover wooden surfaces—tablecloths, crocheted mats, or doilies—was supposed to be white. Pearline’s determination to crochet and knit in color—pink, blue, red, green, purple—meant that not a single one of her creations had ever been sold. The absolute failure of what was supposed to be an entrepreneurial endeavor did not upset Pearline. She considered herself an artist, and of the kind whose chief aim was to please herself. Every unsold item would then truly belong to her and she took great pleasure in finding a place for them in her room. It was a room that everyone in the village had toured and reluctantly admitted, despite being convinced that each individual item was ugly, that the combination was something wonderful. They said it was as if the child lived inside a rainbow.

Pearline’s mother, of course, tried desperately to dissuade her daughter from her useless and colorful habits. That very morning she had observed her daughter knitting the purple doily under a guava tree.

“Pearline girl, look on what you is doing nuh! It is just ugly. Nobody is going to buy something like that. You cannot afford to always be making things for yu own self.”

“Mama. I will get this one sold. I promise.”

“Eh! You can’t even look me in the eyes and say that. Girl, you is just wasting yu time. Who going to buy that from you? We even looking on the same thing? It is purple, girl.
Purple.
Who you ever see with a purple doily in them good, good house?”

“I say I will get it sold, Mama.”

“Saying you going to get it sold not going to get it sold, Pearline. You is only full of talk. Look at me, girl. Is high time you grow up. And don’t puff up yu face at me neither. I saying these things for yu own good. Me and yu father giving you money dat we never just pick up out a road. And we giving it to you only for you to make these … these purple pieces of stupidness that not going a damn place except inside yu room.”

Pearline’s ten fingers began trembling. They became useless, unable to continue the knitting that had happily occupied them moments before. She kept her eyes fixed to the ground, not wanting to look up. Her mother was also trembling in anger. She had not intended for this confrontation to become so big a thing, and yet she knew it had to become bigger still. Having embarked on this road, she had to walk its full length. So she stepped out of her slippers and onto the earth so her daughter would understand that the next words out of her mouth were serious.

“All right, girl. All right. You say you is going to sell this one? Well fine. Go and sell it. And I swear to you I will stay here on this piece of ground until that happen. Come thunderstorm or sunhot, I not moving. You hear me, child? Jesus Son of Mary would have to come down off him cross to move me. Cause is like you take me for some kind of poppyshow.”

Pearline finally looked up, astonished. She knew that this threat was real, for mothers were always doing things like that. Her mama would stay right there. She would not go inside to sit or to cook or to sleep. She would not go to the farm ground to work. She would make the neighbors pass and see her as rooted as the tree she was standing under, and she would explain to them that it was her daughter who had made her into a poppyshow. She would stay there, even for days, until Pearline had either sold the doily or come back and apologize saying
Mama, you are right. It is time I grow up.

So the Original Pearline Portious went off to the market, desperate to do what she had never been able to do before.

The market on a Saturday morning is always a brand-new city that rises, as if by magic, with the sun. Its newness, however, does not make it clean. It is a hot, stinking place full of that special breed of fly that remains unimpressed by the hands that constantly swat at it. The city’s lanes overflow with chocho, pumpkin, gungo peas, green bunches of callaloo, and pods of yellow ackee. Women shout from their various stalls, their foreheads glistening under their bandanas:
Yam! Dasheen! Cocoa!
—each one holding out a scale, weighing a pound of this or a half-pound of that, always careful to give a little extra so that customers, convinced that they had secured a bargain, would come back. The fish-women gather around concrete sinks and run metal files up and down the bodies of snappers and mackerel; bright silver scales jump into the air and land softly on the women’s heads like confetti. They call out,
Snapper! Sprat! Goatfish!
And an Indian man standing by a cart of cane, a sharp cutlass in his hand, sings out
Sweet Sugar Cane!—
though he isn’t quite as musical as the tall gentleman, his head wrapped in a turban, who walks up and down the lanes singing his one long note,
Brooomie, brooomie,
a faggot of brooms stretched across his shoulders like he was in the middle of his own crucifixion.

It was amidst such a cacophony that the Original Pearline Portious tried to advertise her purple doily.
Pretty doily for sale! Pretty doily for sale!
She pleaded and she jostled and she pushed it into people’s faces.
Ma’am, just take a look nuh. Look how it would look nice in yu house. Pretty doily for sale.

But no one paid her the slightest mind.

The market on a Saturday afternoon is always a quieter place than in the morning. The crowds have thinned. The lanes no longer overflow with produce. The ice from the fish stalls has melted and even the annoying flies, finished with their own shopping, have taken off. The vendors are more relaxed and throw their words easily at one another instead of at the customers. The best of their goods will have gone, and even they have a kind of pity for stragglers who are only now coming to shop and have to search through the best of their blighted goods.

But on the Saturday in question, there was one young woman still trying to make her first and only sale.
Pretty doily for sale! Pretty doily for sale! Please ma’am, sir, just take a look nuh. Look how it would look nice in yu house. Pretty doily for sale. I selling it cheap, cheap.

Still no customer paid her the slightest mind and it was instead the somewhat infamous shoe vendor, Maizy, who finally took notice.

Like many Jamaican market women, Maizy was a creature for whom derision was an art. So committed was she to this practice that there were days when she counted it a greater success to have landed the most insults than to have sold any pairs of shoes. To Pearline’s great misfortune it was this Maizy who now took notice of her, and of the ugly doily that swung dejectedly from her fingers.

Maizy nudged her neighbor, Flo. With a pout of her lips she pointed out the pathetic figure of Pearline. Flo grinned.

“Darling, is the same doily you have there selling from this morning, or is a wholeheap of them that you did bring? Please tell me is a wholeheap you did bring!”

“But Flo,” declared Maizy on cue, “you is a wicked, wicked woman to wish this child did make wholeheap
more
of that thing she have there selling. I can’t even call it a doily. You have no idea the damage that thing can do?”

“What you saying to me, Maizy?”

“Mi dear! It is sake of a purple something look just like that that cause my neighbor hog to drop down dead last week.”

“No!”

“Flo, God’s truth! If I lie, I die! My poor neighbor, Miss Esmi—the same one with the twist-up mouth—well, she come home last week and find a purple doily just like that one, fling down on her table.”

“But how something like that get there?”

“Must be her husband, missis! You know he blind from morning. Well must be him did buy it and put it down there fi her. Or else somebody was trying to work obeah against her. Well anyhow, Miss Esmi was so frighten when she see it there, she just pawn it up and dash it out the window. And that is how her hog get it and try fi eat it. Mi dear, as to how Miss Esmi tell it, the hog barely take one bite and, just suh, it collapse, keel over and dead! Imagine that, the hog dead from purple.”

“Lawd-have-mercy-sweet-Jesus, Maizy! You mean to tell me this girl here is selling a powerful Hog-Killer?”

“That is what I telling you, Flo. If she make any more all the hog in Jamaica bound to be dead by next week.”

Duly satisfied with their own wickedness, Maizy and Flo held their equatorial bellies, slapped their thighs, and began to laugh. Between gulps of breath, Maizy managed to turn to Pearline and say, “Mi dear girl child, I think is best you try your hand at something else, because …” she started laughing and hiccupping again, “it don’t look like sewing is fi you at all, at all.”

Pearline slouched and dragged her feet away from the two laughing women. But she continued to call out, with even less conviction now,
Pretty doily for sale. Doily for sale.

The market on a Saturday night was a lonely place. The crowds had vanished and the blue tarpaulin that had once been like a sky stretched over the lanes had been taken down and folded up. By then, the vendors had exchanged their mangoes and sweetsops and melons and whatever it was they could not bother to take back home, and one by one, they climbed aboard rickety buses and departed. Pearline alone remained, the salt wind from the sea whistling through the now empty stalls. A dog with pronounced ribs walked around the market sniffing out morsels of food. He approached Pearline and eyed her with
suspicion.
Pretty doily for sale,
she pleaded. But even he turned up his nose and walked away.

And so it was Pearline had come to the end of her childhood. Her mother was right; she had really believed that just saying she was going to get the doily sold would have got it sold. She thought it had been her attachment to the items that had shielded them from the desire of customers, but now she was forced to face the truth: not that her creations were ugly, but that the world was not a thing to have faith in. She understood it now for the blind, deaf, and uncaring thing it was. For had she not called out to it for a whole day, called until her voice was gone, and the world did not hear her. And had she not shoved the purple doily into the world’s eyes, but the world had not seen it. So it was with these thoughts that Pearline did exactly what her mother had wanted her to do: she grew up.

But maybe she was not ready for so sudden a growth. The poor girl’s mind short-circuited, shut itself down, and when she finally left the market she was in a deep trance. Her walk was a peculiar one, catatonic, and it led her down roads it had never been on before. She was like a ghost haunting the island, her head tilted to one side, her mind to another, and her feet simply following the road, marching in the direction of darkness, which is, of course, no direction at all.

She passed several hours like this. Dogs barked at her. Thieves avoided her. And then the sky, which had mostly been a deep navy blue, turned black, and then just as suddenly the darkness began to fade. It became silver with pink edges. Roosters began to crow, and this is where it happened, the Original Pearline Portious found herself standing on the same crest of a hill to which, in later years, Mr. Mac might take you. She looked down on the zinc roofs pointing up through the mist and made the decision. Despite what everyone had told her, she took the trail down toward the terrible place of sickness, a place she had never been to before.

The leper colony sat quietly and undisturbed in a valley between the Stone Hill mountains of St. Catherine. It was surrounded by a mile of green chain-link fence, ten feet high, which was supposed to be there for security. In another colony in another part of the world, thirty-two patients had crept up to their guards one night and in an ensuing battle of sores and nails and teeth and batons and limbs and guns, ten patients were killed, four wounded and one guard infected. When news of this episode spread, leprosariums all over the world began to build fences. The one which surrounded St. Catherine, however, was pointless. The fence was not topped by barbed wire; there was no guard patrolling its length; there were several trees that grew right beside it; but most significantly, there was a gate and it was always kept open.

In the history of the leper colony no one had ever tried to get out, and before Pearline Portious in 1941, no one had tried to get in.

The three zinc roofs belonged to three wooden bungalows. They faced away from the gate, so that when Pearline arrived all she could see were three broad wooden backsides turned dismissively toward her. But a man was kneeling in the dirt before her, muttering as his blue-veined hands slapped broken eggshells into the soil. Pearline walked over and her shadow fell on him.

“Yes, Miss Lazarus, what now?” the man snapped without looking up.

His voice was old. Pearline would find out later that his name was Albert Dennis and that he was unfriendly to almost everyone. But no one received the brunt of his bad temper more than Agatha Lazarus. The woman frequently snuck up on him like this, making herself known only as a shadow across his gardening, or a combination of smells he had come to despise: oranges she had just squeezed, lemongrass tea she had just brewed, and talcum powder she had
just patted onto her breasts to keep them cool. So when the present shadow did not make a sound—no request for eggs, milk, bottles of disinfectant, bandages—Albert looked up and found instead the Original Pearline Portious, shivering.

Now Pearline’s mother had been quite serious. She was going to stay under that guava tree come rain or sunhot. But before such forces could arrive and test her resolve—indeed, within just an hour—a more pressing matter from within her own body had already presented itself. It was 9:30 in the morning. She had eaten a rather heavy breakfast one and a half hours earlier. Now, like clockwork, she needed, badly, desperately, to shit.

Her sphincter muscles contracted in and out; she tried to fan herself; she sang a hymn; she farted loudly and pungently.
Oh Lawd, Oh Lawd,
she thought, until finally she shouted to her husband inside.

“Devon! Devonoooohhhh! Grab de chimmy pot from under-neat de bed! Mek haste!”