Triangular Road: A Memoir (9 page)

“I has to watch she like a hawk.”

I once witnessed one of those fleeting resurrections. My aunt, moribund on her planter’s chair, suddenly turned one day to where I was sitting nearby and, peering at me, said “Adrie?” (Adrie had been Adriana’s pet name as a child.) “Is you, Adrie . . . ?” The old woman’s eyes, the whites stained tobacco-brown with age, carefully parsed my face. Again: “Adrie . . . ?” Then, before I could react, her mind abruptly shut down again.

Adriana, who had recently died, would not have been pleased to learn that she and I looked so much alike.

The ironies and absurdities of my family history! A rumhead of a grandfather—a brilliant craftsman, yes, but a rumhead nonetheless—who had been named after Queen Victoria’s consort. Then, a little dictator of a grandmother who had so impressed me at age seven that I would forever memorialize her in my work. An aunt who had rejected Big America to remain on the little two-by-four island as a common hawker. An uncle in Brooklyn who, having converted the several brownstones he had accumulated into rooming houses, now lived rich as Croesus on Long Island—he and the other West Indians like himself responsible, in part, for creating the near-ruin of an inner city now called “Bed-Stuy.” Then there were all the other Clement family members, known and unknown, dispersed widely across England, Canada and elsewhere.

At the same time, there was the lacuna, the missing chapter in the manuscript of my life, as it were, created by Sam Burke, a man who, for whatever reasons, refused to ever speak of father, mother, sister or brother; who wouldn’t even
name his birthplace on the island, aside from dismissing it as “some poor-behind little village buried in a sea of canes, a place hidden, forgotten behind God’s back.”

The same was true of him. Everything about Sam Burke was also “hidden behind God’s back,” and remained so, I discovered, when I tried tracking down his family and birthplace while in Barbados. Each attempt on my part proved futile. Until, the old unforgiving anger with him flaring up again, I abandoned the search, telling myself in my bitterness that Sam Burke might not even have been his name, but an alias he had concocted out of the raw sugar in the hold of the freighter that had brought him, a stowaway, to New York.

Again furious with the father I continued helplessly to love.

Abandoning the search, I began filling in the lacuna Sam Burke represented with other, adopted “kinfolk”: with, for example, “the incorrigibles” in Barbados long ago who had somehow withstood the whipping post and the pillory. I claimed them among my progenitors. Also, “the
twenty-and-odd negroes” at Point Comfort, Jamestown, Virginia, who had been exchanged for so many sacks of meal and salted meat before being led off to centuries of John Henry work. Next: little Olaudah Equiano, the captured eleven-year-old boy-child from Yoruba Land who had arrived traumatized in Barbados in 1756, only to be transshipped to Point Comfort also. Years later, Equiano, the man, would write a best-selling narrative of his travails once he managed to purchase his freedom.

Then there were the 132 sick and ailing chattel cargo in the hold of the
Zong,
a British three-master bound for the Caribbean in 1781. The entire lot had been disposed of at sea, the ship owners calculating that the insurance money from the loss would be far greater than the sale of the chattel in their condition.

On reading of the Zong Massacre, as it was called, I promptly added all 132 of the drowned to my gene pool.

 

 

T
he bimonthly trip upcountry to Scotland always ended at a place called Bathsheba,
where I caught the bus back to town. From my aunt’s village, a delightfully solitary walk alongside the Atlantic led the way to Bathsheba. To my right rose the “Scottish Highlands,” where the old planter and merchant class, as well as their heirs and descendants, had built large, airy summer homes whose wraparound verandas stood open to the trade winds. To my left, the Atlantic repeatedly flung its high, swollen grayish-green waves onto the shingle beach with a cry each time that might have been taken from the Book of Lamentations.

The Atlantic: an entire ocean permanently sitting shivah.

Usually accompanying me on the walk was a flock of plovers come to play a game of tag. Alighting well ahead of me up the beach, they would remain put, supposedly oblivious to my approach, until of course I drew too close for comfort. They would then dramatically take to the air, cawing, laughing, only to alight further on to await me again.

The teasing birds, the inconsolable ocean, the misnamed hills, the burning-hot Cyclops eye of the midday sun all led finally to a high rocky outcropping—a
cliff really—that brought the beach and the entire shoreline to an end and deposited me at Bathsheba.

Bathsheba was the name of practically every feature of the landscape here, including the high cliff, the village adjoining the cliff where the bus stop was located, and even the modest hotel on top of the cliff, although the hotel’s name was actually the “Atlantis.” Its airy veranda was my watering hole after the long walk in the hot sun. I always began with a tall glass of ice water. A leisurely gin-and-tonic then followed, or, sometimes, a rum-and-ginger, “demon rum,” in memoriam to Prince Albert Clement, master cooper.

Bathsheba was also the name assigned to the final stretch of beach below the hotel where several massive limestone boulders, long blackened by time, stood tall in the roiling surf. Stonehenge. The assemblage of huge rocks was a West Indian Stonehenge, I decided, whose provenance and purpose lay open to the imagination. An earthquake or a hurricane millennia ago might have dislodged them from the “Scottish” hills and sent them hurtling down to the shoreline. Or, in a
superhuman show of strength, the original Amerindian or Carib dwellers of Barbados might have placed them there to ward off all invaders from the sea. And it had worked, at least here at Bathsheba, given that centuries ago, when the first merchant ship arrived from Goree or Guinea, Elmina or Whydah or the Bight of Benin, the Stonehenge barrier at Bathsheba had forced it to hightail around to leeward and the mild-mannered Caribbean to find a landing site.

Although the Scotland visits were a much-needed break from the writing, I invariably brought the work along in my head. There was much cutting, revising and fine-tuning still to be done. Moreover, part of my mind was also taken up with the next book I intended to write. This new book, another novel, was increasingly taking over my thoughts. The idea for it, the seed, had come to me literally by accident. On one of my first trips upcountry the bus I was on had been held up by an accident on the narrow country road. One of the huge lorries used to transport the harvested sugarcane to the mills had side-swiped a parked lorry being loaded at the roadside.
No damage had been done; yet a full-scale shouting match was underway between the work crews on the two lorries. There was more “Gor blimmuh this, Gor blimmuh that!” (untranslatable) to be heard. More “Wha’ de shite this, Wha’ de rass-hole that!” Along with much posturing and displays of menacing gestures. All of it pure theater.

What interested me more than the men and their histrionics were the women “headers” at the scene. These were the women who worked in the fields during “crop-time,” their job to tie the freshly cut canes into great bundles weighing hundreds of pounds, which they then carried on their heads across the fields to the lorries waiting at the roadside. This usually called for a long walk in the hot sun. A group of these women, the hundreds-weight load of canes on their heads, stood nearby angrily demanding that the crew on their lorry stop their quarreling and come help them unload. (They could neither hoist nor lower the bundled canes on their own without seriously injuring themselves.) Left ignored on the sidelines, the women, exasperated, soon also started cursing,
adding their own “gor blimmuhs” to the verbal free-for-all.

One of the headers, though, remained silent. A stringy, raw-boned woman with large, badly splayed feet, she appeared to be oblivious to the shouting match around her and, strangely, even oblivious to the overload of canes on her head and the searing midday sun. Indeed, the woman seemed entirely removed from everything and everyone around her—her gaze was that distant, that detached. It was almost as if she had
physically
turned away from the present scene, the present moment, and, the huge sheaf of canes on her head, was walking back toward another place and another time altogether. Or so it seemed to me. Her unsightly feet taking her back to some past event that I imagined was of far more importance than the squabble at the roadside.

From her eager stride, it had to be a momentous event, one that had perhaps promised her and those like her something better than canefields, hot sun and work as headers during the crop season. And she, for one, would steadfastly refuse to engage the present, the here-and-now,
until that long-ago promise was fulfilled. The set expression on her face declared as much.

And what might have been the momentous event to which she remained so faithful? Might it have been the Easter Sunday morning uprising of 1816 that I had read about at the Barbados Museum and Historical Society? The rebellion had been led by the legendary, the “incorrigible” Bussa (his chattel name was simply “Bussa”) and his equally “incorrigible” coconspirator, the house servant Nanny Griggs. Plotting together, the two had managed to assemble a force of some four hundred and more from the surrounding plantations. Then, come Easter dawn, with the planters attending the sunrise service, the chattel forces had struck. The rebellion failed, as did many others on the island from the beginning. Nevertheless, Bussa and Nanny Griggs are considered the Nat Turner and Toussaint L’Ouverture of Barbados. They also occupy a prominent place in my improvised ancestral tree.

Years later they would also serve as inspiration for my second novel,
The Chosen Place, the Timeless People.

F
inally, after almost ten months, the revisions were done. I had achieved, I felt, a tighter, more focused, less self-indulgent manuscript. Eager to show Hiram Haydn what I had accomplished, eager also to begin the new novel I had in mind, I prepared to leave for home. The day before my flight, I went up to Scotland to say good-bye to Aunt Branford Catherine. She would have died by the time I returned to Barbados. But no matter: I would encounter her alive and well, her buying-and-selling hawker’s mind completely restored, in every West Indian and African marketplace I was to visit over the coming years.

Back in town that last day, I went for a long sea-bath in the afternoon. (A farewell dinner with my pro-independence friends would follow in the evening.) This time I chose the most glorious of the beaches along the leeward coast, a seemingly endless littoral with sand a pale beige verging on white and water so pure it truly looked as if it could cure whatever ailed you.

Tragically, by my next visit, this entire coastline would have metamorphosed into an upscale version of a Miami-style beachfront, with one luxury
hotel after another arrayed up its length, along with mansion-style retirement homes for the expatriate rich and famous: aging movie stars (Claudette Colbert), retired British royalty (Sir Ronald Tree). Moreover, the mansions and five-star hotels had been constructed in such a way along the coastal road that it would be virtually impossible for ordinary Bajans to gain access to the beach for a sea-bath on a Sunday morning. An entire section of the island’s coastline would become off-limits to its citizens.

Thankfully, the day before my departure, the beach was still its unspoiled self and accessible to all. For a time, I did a lazy crawl close to shore, feeling unburdened for the first time in months. Then, turning over, I floated for awhile—arms outstretched, eyes closed, face raised to the sky and its huge day star—floating as if simply allowing the warm, amniotic waters of the Caribbean archipelago to take me where they willed.

The islands were to become something of a home away from home for years to come.

W
hen news arrived that
Brown Girl, Brownstones,
that first novel of mine, had won a Guggenheim Award, the most generous and prestigious literary prize after the famous Pulitzer, the first thing I did was to phone Mr. Hughes and again thank him for having written one of the letters of recommendation that, I’m sure, helped me to secure such a bonanza of a grant.

Next, I immediately made preparations to head back down to the West Indies. Money on the order of a Guggenheim would buy me far more time there than all the small grants I had received to date, including the paltry advance from Random House five years earlier. This time I chose the island of Grenada, which was even farther down the archipelago than Barbados. At a scant 133 square miles, it was also smaller than the island that was so special to me. However, while
Barbados, over time, had been pretty much reduced to a single, flat, undifferentiated field of sugarcane, Grenada was a small but gloriously variegated volcanic beauty of cratered mountains, shapely green hills, waterfalls, rivers, rainforests and valleys replete with every kind of tropical tree, foliage and vegetation imaginable. Watercress that could cost a small fortune in New York grew freely along the country roads in Grenada. As for the air: It was redolent of the nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and other spices that were the island’s economic mainstay, along with the inescapable sugarcane.

Almost fifty years have passed, yet I still vividly remember driving along a valley road in upcountry Grenada where the tall stands of bamboo on either side of our car met overhead to form an endless green-and-gold triumphal arch.

Grenada. It suggested the Eden the world had once been.

Given the substantial money in my purse this time, settling into “Eden” was on a much grander scale than before. Instead of being a mere boarder, as in Barbados, I rented a house of my own, a completely furnished old-style Creole country house,
with large airy rooms, tall jalousied windows and a spacious veranda overlooking a garden that, in turn, bordered the main road that led to Grenada’s capital of St. George’s a few miles distant.