The Girl With the Golden Shoes (16 page)

With this, she pushed against the door and sprinted down the road, and when she reached the spot at which Savanna Ridge branched off to her left and she could see the loop of whitewashed stones around the cricket ground and the flutter of royal palms around the pond, she drew the knife and flung it in the bush and howled.

After this, she straightened up and walked again.

Mingled with the mist of sound suspended in the air above Seville she heard the slapping of her blistered feet against the rain-slick road and the drumming of blood inside her ears.

Is a fifty-minute walk to the market, she thought, and it have people there I could ask for something, a little money, a little water, a little
choops
o’ food to eat.

You granny ain’t suppose to come to town for days, and although them market people bound to know you people blame you for the fishing blight, they ain’t going know yet that they turn you out.

But what they going think when they see you with you clothes turn inside out, and smell you sour breath and hear the failure in you voice? They going want to know. And what hide in darkness must come out to light. So even if you ain’t going tell them, in time they bound to know.

She was deep in these thoughts and about to cross the road and take the Queens toward the harbor from the governor’s gate, when she saw a movement from the corner of her eye and skipped up on the verge.

With the steering of the Buick on “the other side,” St. William’s face was just a foot away. Speaking in
Sancoche
, he said, “You ain’t even know you size I’m sure.”

His eyes were red as if he’d been crying, and his nostrils quivered when he tried to stop his running nose.

“I ain’t wear no shoes before,” she told him curtly and began to walk again.

He caught up to her and stopped again as horns began to honk and other drivers cursed and ordered him to move.

Standing on the grassy verge, Estrella leaned against the car, put her elbows on the roof, and waved the cars behind him to go on. With her belly inches from his face, he stole a little of her musty smell, and feeling sentimental, wished to God that human beings were born with special pockets in the nose for keeping special scents.

When the cars had passed, she crossed the street. He scrambled from the vehicle and chased her, and she felt a secret pleasure when she heard his footsteps coming close.

“My wife have a lot o’ shoes at home,” he said, and took her by the arm. “Dress too. Blouse too. Skirt too. And I sure she have too much o’ anything a girl like you might want. You were right. You
are
right. What we did was wrong.”

“Thank you, Mr. Rawle,” she said, twisting from his grasp. “But I want you look at me and look at me good.”

“Okay …”

“I ain’t come to town to beg no alms. I come to get a job. And I might be doing the wrongest thing in the world, but I going ask you a favor. And if you can’t do it, you should tell me you can’t do it. Don’t make no false promise to me.”

“Okay …”

With a smile, she said in English, “Fuck off and leave me alone.”

“What?”

“I came to town to get a job, Mr. Rawle. I didn’t come to ask for charity from the likes o’ you.”

“You want a work?” he shouted as he grabbed her blouse.

“Let me go,” she said between her teeth. “Let me go. You better fucking let me go.”

She seized him by the neck and they began to grapple, breathing hotly in each other’s faces till he used his tennis grip to twist her arm, which made her lose her balance, and she fell.

“If you want a job, then ask,” he said, while pinning her down. “Who the fuck you think you are?”

She spat at him and freed a hand and reached into her pocket. But the fucking knife was gone.

From all angles, people rushed toward them, and he stood and waved them off. They hushed but didn’t move. They wanted to observe the drama as it turned.

“Just who do you think you are?” he shouted as he rose. “Tell me. Tell me now!”

He stood there feeling helpless but it came across as rage. The girl had spat his compassion in his face. And he needed her to see him as he knew himself to be—a man who wanted her to live in a different island from the one in which they lived today, a Mr. Rawle who was nothing like his father.

“I ain’t going beg you for a thing,” Estrella said when she was on her feet.

“You can cook?” he asked.

She brushed the grit from her elbows and watched his blue eyes.

“All poor people can do them things.”

“You can cook?” he asked again, glancing at his dirty clothes.

“Anything you want. Except fish.”

“And clean?”

“
That
and wash and press.”

Two policemen jostled through the crowd. St. William told them all was well. After making whispered inquiries they left him with the girl.

“And if you want,” he said, avoiding what he thought of as her
damn man-breaking stare
, “you could live in. It’s a big place. You could have your own room.”

Chewing on her pride, she told him, “But I’d need to start today.”

“You can.”

“And I’d like to start right now before anything else happen and nothing don’t work out.”

“You can start when we get home.”

When they reached the car, she asked him, “Could you teach me how to read and write proper? Even if you take it from my pay?”

He shook his head and offered her a Dunhill. She took it and they smoked.

When they’d begun to drive again, he took the road that led along the big savanna, and she looked out at the horses exercising on the track, their sharp hooves lifting dirt, and up above, the lovely houses on the ridge. Then St. William turned onto an avenue that led away from all of this.

They passed some newer houses, even larger than the ones along the rise, and they privately acknowledged in their separate ways that something had been started when they grappled, something that would complicate their lives.

“Wake me when we reach,” she said, and closed her slanted eyes. “I going catch some sleep.”

She hadn’t fallen fully into sleep when she began to feel the vehicle slowing down. When it stopped, she sat up lazily, awakened by the sound of conversation. Beside St. William’s window was a man. Grazing on the verge, there was a horse.

“Who’s that?” she asked him when the car began to move again, although she knew the answer by the rider’s voice and smell. He’d tipped his hat politely, but it didn’t seem as if he knew her; but she knew him by his scent. He smelled of rum, cedar shavings, and carbolic soap, but none of them intensely—and also, she believed, a little bit of her.

He was red like new pottery, with a long straight nose, and his tight cream pants were stained with grass and dirt.

“That’s Wilfredo Dominguez,” said St. William tightly, “and he’s coming from my house. My wife is there. You’ll meet her. My little son as well. Wilfredo is the finest carpenter you’ll ever meet. In fact he made our matrimonial bed.”

“I’m glad to know his name.”

“Are you okay?”

“No, sir, I’m not okay at all.”

“What’s the matter?”

She closed her eyes, hoping to reclaim the peace of sleep.

“I ain’t want to wear you wife old shoes, Mr. Rawle. I walk too far from country for that. I need a ride to Salan’s. I need to buy my own.”

“I thought you didn’t have any money.”

“I lost it. But is
your
fault, so you going have to give me back fourteen pounds and fifty pence.” Then she remembered the money from Wilfredo, whom she thought of as Simón. “Plus twenty pounds on that.”

“That’s a lot.”

“That’s my point.”

“I don’t know if I have that.”

“If you ain’t have it, put me out.”

“Okay. You’ll get it when we’re home.”

“Good. As soon as we get the money we going to Salan’s.”

“Well, you can’t go there like that. Maybe you should wait until you’ve had a bath and tried on something you could wear.”

“No, sir. I ain’t have that kind o’ time.”

“Well, I can’t go like this. And to get there you’ll need a car.”

She touched his shoulder.

“Listen me now, and listen me good. When we bathe and change our clothes, we going out.”

A
FTERWORD
by Russell Banks

We don’t see it attempted much these days, perhaps because American writers (and readers) are so blindered by standard-issue realism on the one side and escapist fantasy on the other, but Colin Channer’s
The Girl with the Golden Shoes
is a nearly perfect moral fable. It’s an ancient, essentially European literary form, the moral fable; but think of Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea
or Thornton Wilder’s
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
Think of Faulkner’s
The Bear
or Stephen Crane’s
The Red Badge of Courage.
Those are the modern American classics in the form. A more recent example is Cormac McCarthy’s
The Road.
Like them,
The Girl with the Golden Shoes
is a short narrative, shorter than a conventionally realistic novel, that is, but not so short as to be confused with a mere story. Like them, it’s set more or less outside of present time, yet is not meant to be read as historical fiction, and happens in a place that’s slightly outside the known or at least the familiar world. Even the title,
The Girl with the Golden Shoes
, calls to mind those old fables and fairy tales, pre-Christian European folk tales and medieval romances.

The protagonist is individualized, yes, a recognizable Afro-Caribbean country girl of the early 1940s born and raised on a recognizable Caribbean island that’s a little like Cuba, a little like Jamaica, and a little like Hispaniola or Trinidad, yet none of the above. She’s a spunky, intelligent girl named Estrella—ah, yes, the star—poised at the exact end of childhood and the exact beginning of adulthood. But she’s from a world that does not recognize adolescence; that is to say, a world way older than ours, in which there are children and there are adults and nothing in between; and thus, of necessity, she seems flattened somewhat, a pre-modern “type”—or better yet, an archetype. Estrella is the archetype of the innocent provincial youth who one day sets out for the big city, here called Seville, to find her fortune and her fate. To become
somebody
. It’s usually a boy on this journey, rarely a girl, but Channer knows that archetypes are gender-blind. And given his tripartite theme of dependency, trust, and betrayal (about which, more later), it’s a more intriguing tale morally if it’s about a girl. She’s adopted, sort of, raised by her grandparents, which is to say she’s a child without real parents, a foundling without a binding self-defining family, making it necessary for her to locate her true identity outside the family, to find it even, as is typical, outside the community she’s been raised in. For the community has cast her out. The reason being—again, typically—she’s the solitary bearer of a curse, the unintentional cause of widespread, otherwise inexplicable suffering in her village. This makes her an exile, a wanderer who can’t go home again. Condemned to travel the open road, she will be tested and tempted, and the tests and temptations will create her character, which, by the end of her tale, will be different than it was at the beginning. By the end, no longer a child, no longer innocent or naïve, after many trials and tribulations, Estrella will have arrived at adulthood, wise and walking in a state of grace that is apparent to all who meet her there. Still dependent (she’s a black woman, after all, and this is a racialized society, and sexist); but no longer trusting. She’s protected therefore against betrayal and thus is able to place a wholly legitimate claim on those emblematic golden shoes. It’s
Cinderella
and
Sleeping Beauty
and
The Frog Prince
all rolled into one. With a little
Huckleberry Finn
and
Tom Jones
thrown in for good measure.

Well, it’s all fine and dandy, all well and good, to admire the ease and intelligence with which Colin Channer has engaged the ancient and honorable, essentially European tradition of the moral fable, and important to praise the way he’s introduced into it elements that are native to the Caribbean archipelago and therefore to the African diaspora, bringing it up to date and speed, as it were, and in the process reinvigorating it. He’s creolized the form, given it a strictly New World DNA without cutting off its Old World roots. That alone is an extraordinary achievement. But we ought also to admire the apparent ease and intelligence with which he has addressed a modern (actually a post-modern, post-colonial) linguistic conundrum: the problem of representing on the page the music and clarity of creolized English, which is, of course, the language his characters think, argue, make love, and dream in—except when they happen to be speaking to their colonial masters or to the inheritors of the masters’ linguistic standards of excellence and correct articulation. The problem is that if one is a writer from the Caribbean, one has to write both. It’s a challenge that few of Channer’s literary forebears, even great writers like V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, have been able to meet, and few if any of his contemporaries. Perhaps only the polyphonic Caryl Phillips has solved this problem as effectively as Colin Channer.

The perennial question for Caribbean writers is how to represent creolized English (or French or Spanish) without making of it a mere dialect, a diminished version of the mother country’s mother tongue—that’s the problem, the post-colonial problem: to somehow use and abuse the language of the oppressor in order to both subvert the oppressor’s mentality and tell a tale that’s true to the teller’s deepest, most intimate experience. Channer is the master of this bait-and-switch. Look at how skillfully he slips between the two kinds of diction and grammar; check his smooth moves as he slides his narrative in and out, ringing the changes from subjective to objective point of view, following the float from first person to third, simply by switching language tracks from creolized English (a Caribbean patois) to so-called standard English and back again: