The Summer We Came to Life (12 page)

BY THE TIME WE SHOWERED AND CHANGED, there was a field trip underway. Lynette stuffed us full of scrambled eggs while she filled us in on the plan. They wanted to check out the Garifuna village far down the beach. I was thrilled. Photographing the girls on the beach had given me the exact same idea.

Everybody squished into the Honda in a good mood. I sat on Isabel's lap and battled carsickness as Arshan steered us along the bumpy dirt roads.

Away from the shoreline, the roads were lined with humble concrete houses in various states of completion and upkeep. Chickens and goats wandered around as usual, but now we saw barefoot children piled atop rusty bicycles three at a time. Some houses served as makeshift grocery stores and others as impromptu beauty salons, no signs or advertising required.

Arshan pulled up to a drink stand. I got out to buy cold sodas. Kids stopped in their tracks to stare at us. A teenager
fell off his bike rubbernecking. The woman selling the drinks looked at me blankly, then looked past me at the car. She called another woman from the back, apparently just to alert her to the large group of albino aliens plopped down in their midst. They both pointed and laughed, seemingly unaware that I was human and could,
hellooo
, hear them.

A little girl ran up and poked me in the arm, then sprinted away cackling back to her pals, who cheered her bravery. I was used to being the only coconut-milk-colored redhead when I traveled, so I had been dare tagged before. I smiled and waved at the proud child, causing a relapse of tittering.

 

Armed with semicold drinks in the searing heat, we headed off down the dusty road, carefully avoiding chickens and startled cyclists.

“Okay, supposedly we cross this bridge into a more traditional Garifuna village,” I said as the houses started to thin out.

The “bridge” turned out to be a narrow sandy path with ocean on one side and a lagoon on the other. But sure enough, as soon as we crossed over, there were no more concrete houses, only round thatched huts surrounded by vegetable patches, spaced evenly along the edge of the beach.

“Wow,” Lynette and Jesse said in unison.

“Prime beachfront property, would you look at that?” Cornell exclaimed. “Honey, think I could pass for Garifuna?”

“Not with me as your wife, sweetie.”

“And why not?” Jesse said to Lynette. “I think any woman would do well for herself to hitch up with one of these fine homeowners.” She motioned at a shirtless man, built like Michelangelo's David, hoeing his garden.

“Jesse,” I said, laughing, “you live by yourself in a four-bedroom house. You telling me you would move into a stick hut no bigger than your bathroom?”

“No, baby, I'd build me a castle,” Jesse said. “In fact, what's the deal, why hasn't mansion building caught on out here?”

“Well, as I understand it,” I answered carefully, “the land belongs to those who can prove they've lived on it over a certain number of years, so that it remains in the hands of Garifuna. Though I'm sure there are rich evildoers trying to finagle a piece.”

“Like the place we're staying at?” Isabel asked pointedly.

“Maybe.” I hadn't thought of that.

“I wonder how many of them sell the land for profit,” Arshan mused.

“I don't think they're allowed.” I was trying to remember what I'd read. “Anyway, so far the Garifuna have held to tradition by choice and self-imposed isolation.” I looked out at the fields, at clotheslines strung with Levi's. “I would assume, however, things are changing.”

A pickup passed by with eight people sitting along the edge of the truck bed. It didn't look like a family, more like public transport. They passed close enough to touch.

“What an adventure,” Jesse said with delight.

“You know what I wonder?” Arshan said as the car turned away from the beach. “If they knew everything about the outside world, whether they would wish they hadn't known. Is it better not to know? To be content with fishing and vegetable gardens?”

“And a lack of proper health care or education?” Isabel snapped.

“Well, yes, that's actually what I meant, a place where death is just a part of life and education is for practical application only. I'm asking—would you think that there was something missing if you had no idea what?”

“Basically what you're saying,” I answered, “is that because these people appear primitive, you assume their conceptual thinking is primitive, that they don't ponder philosophical matters like purpose and meaning. I think that's ridiculous,
if not downright ignorant. Of course they speculate. It is the asking that has spurred all the technologies of modern day, not the other way around.” I took a quick breath. I had to calm down.

We were coming up on a larger thatched building with wooden stools, sidebars and tables. A sign said Restaurante Nany. “Look.” I pointed. “Maybe we can ask them ourselves. Appears we're not the first visitors from the outside world.”

A stooped old woman sat out front. Kids in tattered clothes played along the dirt roads. Around back I saw a hut backed up against a river, with a fenced-in rooster. “Come on, guys, we gotta stop.”

 

Our group of gringos sauntered into Restaurante Nany. A teenage boy approached us. He looked us over with a wrinkled brow, then turned to Cornell and asked him in Spanish what we wanted to drink.

Cornell realized the assumption and laughed. “I only speak French and English, brother. But I'll have a
cerveza.
That word I know.”

I started to jump in, but Jesse beat me to it, politely ordering six beers in flawless Spanish.

The boy laughed, like we were the funniest thing he'd seen in a long time. Children from the street came over and settled onto stools around us to watch the entertainment.

I discreetly took out my camera. I walked out to the road to photograph the restaurant. I took pictures of the carefully painted sign, the stools and tables made of sticks, the colorful dresses fluttering on a clothesline just outside the door. Through my lens, I watched Jesse tell a story that got everybody laughing. Except Cornell. I took the camera away from my eye. Cornell was sitting back in his chair, studying his surroundings. He had a look of almost sadness. Or wonder, maybe?

I looked around, too. It
was
pretty amazing, this city of
huts. The houses were constructed entirely of upright rows of branches stuck in the ground, held in place by a horizontal branch, and topped with dried palm fronds. You could almost see inside them through the slits. It must be awful when it rained. Everywhere there were clotheslines strung with tattered shorts and T-shirts. Out back were canoes and fishing nets or stick pens of animals.

Restaurante Nany was a coliseum in comparison. I could hear children playing in all directions, on a backdrop of ocean waves, and a distant drumming. The boy came out with two of the children, carrying Port Royal beers. I wondered how they refrigerated them. I suspected they'd been stored in the river. I tucked my camera into its case and walked over to take my beer from a little girl in a tattered pink satin dress. She ran away giggling. The first gulp of carbonation was a little piece of heaven.

I let out a loud “Ahh” and took in a satisfied deep breath. “What a cool place, huh?”

Cornell set down his beer too hard, and foam rushed to the mouth of the bottle. “It's just incredible to me—” he said, and stopped.

“Honey,” Lynette said in a manner that made me instantly nervous.

But it seemed to embolden him. “It's just amazing to me the far-reaching effects of the enslavement of the African people,” Cornell said, and snatched back up his beer.

When nobody responded, Cornell acknowledged our silence with a smirk.

“You mean the spread of Africa's vibrant culture to all parts of the globe?” Jesse asked, knowing damn well that's not what he meant.

Cornell snorted. “Well, no, Jesse. I meant families being wrenched from their homes, abused and killed, and then discarded in the middle of nowhere. Left to lead impoverished lives far from their history and ancestors.”

Lynette put a hand on Cornell's forearm. “Baby, I'm not sure that the Garifuna would feel that way. I was thinking how magical and lovely their lives look compared to ours.”

“Yeah!” Jesse agreed, smiling. “I think
we
may have gotten the short end of the stick.”

“Ah, yes, you mean the noble savage,” Cornell retorted, labeling us all racist imperialists with the raise of an eyebrow. Cornell looked from face to face, the lawyer in him clearly prepared and eager. He turned back to his wife. “You're right, dear. I mean, how would they know, right? Do you think the Honduran government comes out to inform them of the injustice, happily doling out reparations?”

“They don't have to,” I explained maybe a little haughtily. “The Garifuna are known for passing on their history through song and storytelling. They are very aware and proud of their heritage. The way they see it, they were never slaves. They were shipwrecked en route to slavery.” Looking at Cornell, I lost a little steam. “They're not purely African descendants anyway. They intermarried with the Aboriginal islanders of St. Vincent. Their culture never would have existed without the slave trade.”

Cornell looked at his wife, unsmiling. “So, if the cultures mix, then all is forgiven?”

Lynette looked stung and closed her eyes. “Not here,” she pleaded in a whisper, almost inaudibly.

Cornell shifted away from her and raised his voice. “Not here, Lynette? Not in front of our friends? In front of people who wouldn't understand my anger?”

Lynette's eyes shone with anger. “Cornell, get off it. Is this the part where you stake story rights to the African-American experience?”

“Don't I? Among this group?”

Jesse, who knew about this fight between the Joneses, took careful aim at Cornell. “What can you tell me about being a single mother in the early eighties?”

I caught the drift. “Or a woman turning thirty in the twenty-first century?”

Arshan surprised me by chiming in. “Or fleeing the Iranian Revolution?”

Cornell didn't look ready to back down, but as he looked at our faces staring him down—his
friends
, he seemed to be reminding himself—he begrudgingly nodded.

“The human experience is a solo enterprise, is that what you're trying to tell me?” Cornell reached for his beer, calmer. “But then you're also admitting that one's life experience is inseparable from an individual's gender, notion of social heritage and exper—”

“Goddammit, why don't you just say it?” Lynette's voice was like the sudden screech of spinning tires. “Say it, then! You're sorry you married a white woman. You should have married a woman like Sandra Miheso, a bona fide
African
. Someone who would
understand
you, who you could show off to your civil rights colleagues.” Lynette's eyes bored into her husband, but I could see she was shaking. She turned her head away as if she might cry.

For my part, I was shocked to the core.

As Cornell looked at his wife, his expression changed 180 degrees. “Is that what you think this is about?” He tried to put a hand on her arm. She moved it away. “Lynette,” he said, and brought his head close to hers. As he spoke, it seemed to dawn on him that he was telling the truth. “I didn't marry a white woman. I married
you
.”

Lynette lifted her chin, as Jesse and I both brought a hand to our throats.

Cornell appeared to have forgotten we were there, however. He had eyes only for his wife. “Honey, listen to me now. There
are
a lot of things I'm still angry about. Things I wish I could let go of. And there are certain things that may always be difficult for us to relate to each other about. I think, I hope, and I pray it will be different for the next
generation, for our daughter and our daughter's children. But no matter how much I preach about being misunderstood, I promise you right here and now that I do not regret spending my life with you. Or having my only child with you. Quite the opposite. You are the love of my life. And it has been an incredible, magnificent ride.”

Lynette's eyes glistened like the sparkling ocean beyond. She leaned over and planted a kiss on Cornell's cheek. Then she nodded, just once, but it was a nod that held a thousand words, a lifetime of their memories together in good times and bad. She turned back to the group, swiped at her nose and held up her beer.

“Jeez, you guys, no secrets amongst friends, huh? Cheers?”

Teary laughter rippled around the circle. We let out a collective sigh of relief and raised our bottles.

“Cheers!”

Lynette snuggled into Cornell's arms and the rest of us watched, satisfied that the balance of the universe had been restored. Kendra's parents' marriage set my bar for happy relationships. They were the dogeared photograph in my back pocket that I could hold up as proof that love works. Seeing them fight was akin to watching the Sphinx in an earthquake. An interracial couple in the sixties, in Virginia. I started to wonder what it must have been like for them. It
would
have been a bit like building a monument in the desert.

I noticed then the ancient woman was watching us somberly, but with a definite glint of amusement in her eyes. I pointed discreetly.

“Do you think that's Nany?” I smiled at the woman, and she smiled back.

“Se llama Nany, señora?” I called.

The woman nodded her head yes. Even in a faded house-dress draped over a sagging body, she exuded an aura of
wisdom. An even older man, with a bushy white beard, came up behind her. He said something loud in a language I didn't understand, then cackled in laughter. Nany gave an appreciative chuckle. The old man reminded me of a leprechaun, such was his agility. He looked to be about a hundred years old, but his step was as light and bouncy as if he walked on rainbows.