The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir (16 page)

I
know that if I want to get out of Paradise I have to find a way to go to high school. If I end up at a secondary school I will be stuck doing needlework and home economics, with no chance of ever getting a college education. But high schools cost money and my mother has not sent one penny since she went away almost two years ago.

Andy says that since I am almost eleven years old, I am old enough to get a man to pay for me to attend Mount Alvernia. I want to ask Delano if his father could help me, but since we never speak when we pass each other on the street, I don’t know if that makes any sense. The most he will do is wave. I am so worried about the money, I can’t sleep at night. Finally, I ask the school secretary if I can just have a word with Sister Cecile. As soon as the door closes behind me in the office, I burst into tears.

“Come, come, now. There is nothing that cannot be solved with the Blessed Virgin and our Lord and Savior. What is the matter, my child?” Sister Cecile’s voice is clear and kind.

“Sister, I want to go to high school, but I don’t have any money! My father is rich, but he is never going to come and save me. My mother doesn’t remember that she has any children, and the boys who live in my auntie’s house are trying to rape me every day! I have to go to high school, Sister Cecile!”

Sister Cecile’s yellow wrinkled face is still while she listens. She tells me she can’t do much today, but if I pass my Common Entrance the nuns might have a word with my father for me.

After school I go back to the store to visit Uncle Desmond. He smiles when he sees me. “Come in, come in, man. Come meet your two cousins. Lief and April, this is Stacey, Uncle Junior’s daughter. April, take her round the back and show her where oonu like to climb up.”

Lief, who is eight or so years old, nods at me and then disappears. April is a pretty little girl of about six years old wearing the white uniform of Mount Alvernia Prep School. “Come on, Stacey.” She takes me by the hand and drags me past my father’s office to the stack of mattresses in the back.

“Okay, just hold on to the plastic covering and pull yourself up to the top. And try not to tear the plastic. People don’t like to buy mattresses that are not covered.”

After much huffing and groaning, we settle onto the crackling plastic-covered stack of mattresses. April digs into her pocket and pulls out a handful of coolie plums. She hands me half of the small tart fruits and looks me up and down. “So you are my cousin, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“What you mean, you don’t know? Is either you are my cousin or you not. Don’t Uncle Junior is your father?” I chew the tangy flesh of the plum so I don’t have to answer. I wish I were dressed in a crisp white uniform too.

I
turn to my books with a fury. In October I study every evening until there is no light to see. November brings long days at school doing mock math tests and multiple-choice questions and reading comprehension from morning till the dismissal bell rings. As soon as we are done, the tests are graded, and the top results are announced right there in class.

In the first week of tests, Miss McBean calls my name for every exam. I walk to her desk and proudly collect the sheet of paper with the big red
100%
written on the front. Every time my name is called I feel I am marching closer and closer to being at Mount Alvernia High School for Girls. I can’t wait to see the back of Chetwood.

The whole class prepares for the Common Entrance Examinations with extra lessons after school. The children who do extra lessons do better on the actual exam. But the lessons are very expensive and Auntie
does not have the money to pay every week. I ask Uncle Desmond to help. He gives me enough to pay for the whole term. I tell Auntie that Miss McBean says I can do the extra classes whether I have the money or not.

“You see, Stacey. God makes a way for everything.”

I nod and turn back to timing myself on the take-home mock exam.

After my extra lessons, I spend the evenings eating coolie plums with April at the shop. One evening, just before the Christmas holidays, Uncle Desmond pulls me aside and tells me that today my father is working in the back office, so we should leave the mattresses and play near the front of the store, “because I don’t want to get into any more hot waters with him, you hear?”

I nod, but I hover near the office, waiting to catch a glimpse of my father. Auntie Joan catches me peeking into the office and sends April and me to get an egg sandwich from the store across the street. When we come back, the office door is open and Uncle Desmond tells us we can play on the stack of mattresses again.

I tell Auntie Joan, “I wish I could just go home with you and April and Lief. I wish Uncle Desmond was my father.”

She puts her hand on my back. “Stacey, listen to me. It doesn’t matter who loves you or who doesn’t want you now. You do well. You keep to those books. You are very bright. I hear you are getting nineties and hundreds on the mock tests. Just keep at it and one day you will show everybody what you are made of! And everybody will want you then! But it is getting so late, and I don’t want you out on the street too late. Them boys out there getting crazy.”

When Auntie asks why I am so late coming home, I tell her that Miss McBean kept us or that I couldn’t get a taxi. She says she hopes all this late traveling helps me to get into my first choice for high school.

You are allowed two choices for high school. The better I do on the exam, the more likely it will be that I will pass for one of the two girls’ schools that everyone picks: Mount Alvernia High or Montego Bay High. All the boys want to go to Cornwall College, where Delano is. If I lived on the other side of Paradise, in the neighborhoods where the children climb into shiny cars and go to school at Mount Alvernia Preparatory School, I would definitely pass for my first choice. All the children who go to Alvernia Prep will pass for good schools. Their parents have the
money to pay for the extra lessons taught inside the very high schools they want them to attend.

Christmas day passes without any mention of my eleventh birthday.

When we get back to school in January, we have only a few days before we take the Common Entrance. On the morning of the exam, Auntie gives me a new eraser and two no. 2 pencils. Elisha wishes me luck.

Auntie tells her that the exam has nothing to do with luck. “Everybody in Paradise knows that she is very, very bright. She is a bright child. I know she will do well. She study hard and last night me say a special prayer for her.”

I am surprised and happy to hear that Auntie thinks I am bright. I tell myself I will try harder to make her even more proud of me.

Inside the classroom, which the invigilator refers to as the
examination room,
all the chairs are lined up in four long rows. We cannot speak to each other. We are to write only when we are told and to stop when we are asked. The soft rustle of paper is eerie in a room usually alive with the sound of arguments and beatings and laughter. I finish the math questions and we are given Mental Ability next. When that is done we get a break for lunch. I eat my banana chips alone and head back in at the sound of the bell. The English test is so easy I finish before everybody in my room.

On my way home, I see Delano on the opposite side of the taxi stand. I wave and he motions for me to come over. My heart is beating so fast I can hear the blood pounding inside my ears. I fiddle with my no. 2 pencil in my pocket and cross the street. Up close he looks the same as he did when we left Westmoreland, except that his hair is much shorter. I stand in front of him, surprised to see that we are the same height. It has been almost two years since we have stood this close. I want to hug him and kiss him and tell him about my terrible life in Paradise, but he casually leans against the wall and asks, “So how was the exam?”

I wish I could touch his hair, but instead I step away and put both hands in my pockets. “It was very easy. I think I passed.”

“Okay. Me did know that me pass long before, but me never say anything to anybody. Sometime is good fi just hold your mouth and wait.”

Our eyes meet, but he quickly looks away. “All right, Delano, I won’t say anything to anybody.”

He straightens his epaulet. “Anyway, you know where me live now?”

“No.” I want to ask him if his father is good to him, if he has heard from Grandma, but he seems so uncomfortable standing there that I just smile and wait for him to continue.

“Is at the foot of Mount Salem Hill—the blue house with the big veranda. Me reach home ’bout five o’clock every evening.” He fixes his epaulet again. Now he looks like he is in a hurry to get away from me. “You can come check me if you have the time. Just let me know when you coming first. All right?”

Inside my pocket I grab a handful of my thigh. I don’t know how he expects me to let him know before I come. We do not have a telephone and I don’t know his number. I start to ask him for his phone number, but he is already walking away. I know he doesn’t really want me to come and see him. I know he is just inviting me to be nice.

“Okay, then, I will come one day,” I shout after him.

“All right, you better go on home before it get too late,” he shouts back, and adjusts his backpack.

“Delano—” I walk after him.

He stops and sighs before he turns to face me. “Yes?”

“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing. Have a good evening.”

“Thanks,” he tosses back. “All right, then, Stacey, take care.”

I climb into the red hatchback Lada taxi and slam the door. I wave. He does not wave back.

J
une comes and my full name is printed in the
Jamaica Gleaner
alongside the thousands of other children who have passed the Common Entrance Examination. I have been accepted to Mount Alvernia High School. I know I will look beautiful in my white uniform in September. I wish there was a number to call my mother and tell her. I remember how pleased she was when she found out Delano had passed.

Auntie says she has no idea how she will manage with both Diana and me in high school. I ask her if she thinks I will be able to go. She tells me not to worry. She will find the money for me to go. She says she has a little money put away somewhere. She was saving it for a rainy day.

“Auntie, what if I ask my father to help me?”

“No! No! No! Your mother tell me not to allow you to go there! And
she must have her reason. She tell me that that man is the living Devil. I am not sending you to beg them nutten!”

“But what we going to do, Auntie? I know you don’t have a lot of money to send me to high school. What me must do? Me need book and uniform and shoes and—”

“Wait, Stacey, wait! You are a young girl, yes. And you don’t have anybody. But you have a chance to get a good education. Anywhere me must get the money, me will make sure you can go. Me glad you pass. Sometimes me sit down outside on the veranda and wonder what is to become of you. Your mother going to have to answer to God for how she treat you and your brother.”

“Me don’t care ’bout her, Auntie. She can drop down dead and me wouldn’t care! I hope she live to suffer like how she make we suffer.”

“Stacey, you cannot talk about your mother like that. The Bible tell you to honor your mother and your father. Sometime you look at a thing and you cannot see inside of it! Your mother was a different person when she was young, you know.”

I sit on the floor and look up at her. “What you mean, Auntie? You did know her when she was in Jamaica?”

“Lawd, you wouldn’t like to see how she was pretty when she was small! I remember when she used to come to the market to visit me mother.”

Auntie stops and shakes her head.

“She used to come round to the stall and say good evening to everybody. She was such a nice little girl. She grow up same way to be a pretty young woman. Even after she have Delano she used to bring him come to see me down here in Montego Bay. Everybody wanted to hold him. He was such a white little boy. When him just born, him eye them was blue, blue, blue.”

“She did ever carry me come to look for you, Auntie?”

“No, man. She leave the island a little bit after you born. From she start keep company with you father, she become a change person.”

“What happen to her, Auntie? Why she change?”

“Cho, man, you too love old people story. Me only want to tell you not to worry. Me cannot buy the world and all its riches fi you go to school, but me will provide what me can. Now get up off the dirty floor and go inside.”

The next morning I go to ask Sister Cecile if she has spoken to my father. She tells me that she thinks Mr. Chin might be willing to sponsor a child for high school. She suggests that I go to my father and talk to him.

“Stacey, the Lord might just be planning something we don’t know about.”

I can see myself standing in the sea of girls in white uniforms and speaking standard English all day long without being teased for it. The girls at Mount Alvernia do not speak the dialect to each other. All their words are said the way they are written in the dictionary.

The sixth-graders get out earlier than everybody else because they have no end-of-year exams. That means I get home long before Glen and Elisha. Usually if I am home by myself I sit on the steps outside, but today the sun is so hot, I have to take refuge in the living room. I doze off reading. I awaken to Shappy sitting down on the couch beside me holding his erect penis. I swallow my fear and slowly close the book. I force myself to walk casually to the door. Then I dash out into the yard. Without pulling up his pants, he follows me outside and chases me around the yard until he catches me. His fingers are steel cables wrapped around my arms.

He drags me halfway up the stairs, muttering, “You take my money and give it to the FBI. We’ll see what the president going to do about this now.”

I grab hold of the rails and wrap my legs around the veranda gate. I cannot let him get me inside the house. Unable to budge my body, he begins to kick me. The pain shoots electric through my body. I scream and try to turn my face away from the blows. When I can’t hold on to the rails anymore, he lifts me up and tosses me over the rails. I fall into a heap on the rocky ground below. My back is cut and I am bleeding so much the blood frightens me. I wonder if anything is broken, but everywhere hurts, so I can’t tell. I struggle to get up.