Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel (26 page)

The islands had been isolated for so long. The radio waves didn’t fly in anything past Puerto Rico. The last major contact with America had been the Second World War, when the boys came back with their stories of segregation, and with sharp chips on their shoulders. Some privileged few, like Dr. Jacob McKenzie, had gone to black colleges in the States for their degrees and come back smoking cigarettes. But TV was the worst America yet, and everyone had one.

Anette was cooking saltfish in the kitchen and it was stinking up the whole house. “Ronalda, see that Me and Frank ready for lunch.”

Anette continued cooking. Ronalda was the kind of child, for better or worse, who always obeyed. Anette added more of her husband’s pepper sauce. He would have to make a few more bottles soon. Anette didn’t know how to cook saltfish without it. Franky was at the lighthouse and she’d drive over later with the lunch. But as Anette was thinking this, she was suddenly aware that something was not right. It wasn’t that her house was quiet. It was that every house in town was quiet. Not that there wasn’t noise. There was screaming and water rushing and the sounds of a crowd. That, too, seemed to be coming from every house. She looked out of her kitchen window and into the living room of the neighbors. Mrs. Rockwell was sitting on her settee staring at the TV and chewing on an empty wooden spoon. Anette left her fish to burn and walked into her living room, where her children were also staring at the television.

There was a crime happening right now on the news. Men in uniform, official-looking men, were beating actual people with batons. Was there a fire? There were hoses blasting water. The hoses were blasting actual people around the street. Actual people were hiding behind trees, screaming,
crying. Men in uniform grabbed at the people, detached them from the trees, from each other, from their purses and their hats.

Anette’s children were watching this. Ronalda, who was almost grown, was not blinking. Instead, her mouth was opening and closing silently, like a fish’s. Youme was sitting sideways as if she wasn’t really watching at all. Little Frank was patting Me’s hand, looking from her face to the TV.

Then the newscaster came on. “Downtown Birmingham, Alabama. Our men in uniform are attempting to restrain Negro protesters.”

It wasn’t until then that all of us anchored to our televisions realized that it had been white men in uniform against dark-skinned people. It hadn’t been clear what those people had done wrong. This wasn’t because we were feebleminded, it was because of the land we lived on. Because we were Frenchy and Danish and our white people hadn’t seemed capable of this behavior. Sure, the Americans we’d met were rude. What with their gatherings where they never invited us. But this was something else. The word
Negro
had never meant much to us, since even the darker of us claimed a mixed lineage. But now we could see that even those who looked as mulatto as anyone were there being blasted away.

Anette, to be sure, needed the newscaster to verify what even she couldn’t believe. Jacob had told her his New Orleans story. But did people really treat each other like this even when there wasn’t a war going on? Look here, brown-skinned people were doctors and lawyers. Look, she was a brown-skinned woman herself and she was a proper married lady. A teacher of history at the Anglican school that even some of the American children went to. Her husband, it was true, was a black man, but he had built this entire fancy house with a balcony wrapping around it. He was a Coast Guardsman and he was the keeper of the lighthouse. And he had green eyes.

Anette shook her head. Thank God things in the Virgin Islands weren’t like that. Those Continentals were crazy. Anette stepped around her
children, turned off the TV, and announced that food was ready. Longtime ready.

Anette left to take her husband his overcooked saltfish. She tried not to think much more about the news, but as she drove down the street, she could hear it blasting from the other houses. Negroes. Blacks. Whites. Freedom. When she left town and cruised up into the hills, she thought she was done with it. But when she reached Muhlenfeldt Point, a clutch of native Guardsmen were gathered outside the lighthouse. The men, in their casual uniform of khaki and dungarees, were in the uproar of a heated debate. It was clear that they, too, had seen the news. “Ask Mrs. Joseph,” one of the men said, gesticulating to her. “Her people from there. Ask her about the Anegada man who fight for Virgin Islands freedom. Ask!” He thrust his hands out to her.

But no, she had not heard anything about Anegada. “Really, Mrs. Joseph? It ain so that your people from Anegada? You must know ’bout that fisherman who just the other day was giving lectures ’bout all of we needing rights. You see the TV? America ain giving us. Them Anegadians went and take it from their British owners. We think we free ’cause we belong to America. But is them Anegadians and BV Islanders that have a taste of free.”

“I ain know my British side like that,” Anette said. She had never even considered that side before. “I never even been Anegada.” She couldn’t quite see how the Virgin Islands, British or American, connected at all to what was happening on the news.

“Mrs. Joseph, the Anegada protest man is probably family to you. Is because of that man that the British Virgin Islanders own their beaches and the land and the sand and the mangrove and the everything. Look we over here in the USVI. We think we free. But the TV, just look at the TV, and you seeing that we is the United States V.I. and that mean we don’t have nothing.”

It wasn’t true that the Anegada man protesting had happened just the
other day. It was years ago. Some said it wasn’t a protest at all, but a melancholy lobsterman with a chronic broken heart for a woman who had left him for a sea captain. But it was true that he was a kind of fisherman and it was true also that the man was family to Anette. He was a distant cousin and he was also the man who Antoinette Stemme had left behind. Anette was a history teacher, but she hadn’t studied this history, despite the fact that it was only next door. There was no course where she could study Anegada history or Virgin Islands history at all. She taught American history and a general Caribbean history that focused mostly on the pirates of Jamaica. That is what there was for her to teach at the Anglican school.

Now Anette waited and listened to the men discuss the Belonger laws being pressed and passed in the British V.I. Though they all seemed to be on the same side, the men were quarrelous. Why we can’t have law that say this place belong to we? Laws that protect we, help we belong here, help we keep the V.I. the V.I. Why we can’t have first rights to buy land? Why we can’t have first rights to set up a hotel? Just like the BV Islanders could leave, go back, and still belong, and nobody can’t tell them different, we need that, too. You don’t think, Franky? You don’t, Fullmore? Mrs. Joseph, what you think?

“It’s an interesting discussion,” Anette said, but she couldn’t say much more. She’d been an orphan since she could remember and nothing had ever belonged to her except herself and now her children—but even the children were a temporary ownership, for they would grow and belong to themselves. The only thing she belonged to was Franky and even that . . . well, she knew that could be undone.

When Franky finished his lunch, he decided to drive her back into town, taking the long way through Barracks Yard, which was a seedy area with calypso blaring. But Franky felt good taking his wife through there because he was there keeping her safe.

Back at the house, Ronalda had served her siblings. Youme had brought a book to the table and only nibbled her food. Frank was busy stuffing
himself so that he would for sure throw up. Ronalda could not eat at all. When their mother and father walked in, the children seemed uneasy.

You see, Papa Franky was in the Coast Guard. Papa was a man in uniform. His dress blues, the ones with the sweet silk tie at the front, were hanging right now in the closet. The idea that people who guarded you could also be the people that you needed guarding from was nothing anyone should have to learn, but that is what the children learned that day. What the islands learned that day—the Coast Guardsmen included. The same thing that makes a man dive into the sea for your rescue can make him hold your head underwater.

Ronalda could not eat the tough saltfish. She could not be an example for the younger ones. She chewed and chewed, but the saltfish would not go down. Of course, she never ate saltfish again. Which was confirmed for Ronalda as the right thing to do when in college at Howard University, she learned the history of the salted codfish, brought from New England cheap to feed the Caribbean slaves. She would think of how Caribbean folks ignorantly sought out the slave food as a delicacy and thought nothing of eating it along with some dumplings and green banana. Ronalda would never think lightly of things again. She would let the world eat her from the inside out.

As Ronalda saw it, Papa Franky was a Coast Guardsman, but he was only Frank’s real father. Youme’s father wore a uniform, too. A white lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck. Youme said he even sometimes wore it at home, walking around his house, like it was his skin. One father was supposed to guard the people, the other was supposed to save them. But Ronalda’s father wore the worst kind of uniform. One like the men on the news. He was in the Army. When Ronalda’s real father came to visit, he would pat her on the hand like a stranger. He would drink a beer and laugh with Papa Franky. “That’s my wife serving us drinks, Franky. I never signed those papers. I just loaning her out to you.” As if he could just steal Mama away.

Eeona didn’t believe in living on loans, though she’d lived in this unbelief most of her life. But times were changing fast. Unlike the new islanders coming from all over the Caribbean, Eeona was an American citizen. By birth, we all were. This was all that was needed to qualify for the public housing designed by our very own Saul McKenzie. “Are you suggesting I live among the common public?” Eeona had said with disdain when Franky suggested she buy into the housing project.

“Eeona ain never leaving Savan and don’t try and make sense of it.” That was Anette, dismissing and misunderstanding. Because soon after the housing development was filled, the homeownership loans were offered. Eeona quick-fast left her government job and took her savings and her pension and left for the sister island of St. John. Within the year, Eeona’s inn had risen out of the ground like a manifesto. She was gone. Well, just an hour away, but still. Now Eeona owned the land. She owned the inn. In that way, they belonged to her. She had made her own inheritance. Just so.

At three stories high, Eeona’s inn was, and is, the tallest building on the side of St. John known as Coral Bay. For now it was attracting tourists from the Dominican Republic and Trinidad and even the mainland of America. Much later it would be listed in
Gay & Lesbian Outings
as a safe place for lovers of all kinds to room and board.

St. Johnians were of a different sort. Though they were Virgin Islanders, they were also from a tiny island where most people could still remember when the first white man arrived to live. In fact, the first white man was still alive and still living there. More than half of the island was now U.S. national park, which was supposed to keep out the big hotels, but this hadn’t quite turned out the way St. Johnians thought it would. The hotels couldn’t come, but neither could one go for a swim in the waterfall down
by Reef Bay or sleep on the beach down by Caneel. Those places belonged to someone now. The United States Federal Government, to be exact. Which meant it didn’t belong to we.

St. Johnians were understandably protective and private. But they liked living in homes where the trees eased over, the branches bursting into the doors like welcomed guests. They welcomed Eeona like she was a part of nature. They called her “Madame Bradshaw,” because that was how she introduced herself. Now she was exactly who she wanted to be. Who she told people she was. She had learned to do this from Kweku Prideux. On St. John she was the daughter of Owen Arthur Bradshaw, whose death and sunken ship were still major points of reference. But she had also taken the title of someone who might have been married to the captain. Neighbors quickly shortened Madame to Mada. Which sounded so much like Mother.

Mada Eeona would only leave Coral Bay, where the ghosts of her own long-dead deeds were welcomed into her spinster bed at night, to return to St. Thomas and visit with the child that made her forget her other almost child. She always arrived unannounced, and if she stayed, she always slept in the same bed with Eve Youme.

In their one bed together she would tell Youme the real, but not true, stories of the Bradshaws. Things Eeona would never tell to anyone. She would not even tell them to Youme, really. She waited until the girl was asleep so that they went into her dreams: Antoinette’s perfect sewing skills and Owen Arthur’s perfect handsomeness. The tables made of St. Croix wood and the rocker made of mahogany. The fish caught right on the water that swept toward the house stairs. The beef brought to their yard, still
alive as cow, from Tortola. The eight-legged mansion on the hill and the spider man who lived in it. Eve Youme would know the stories and not be sure quite how she knew them.

Ronalda, in the bed over, would lie still and strain her ears to capture bits and pieces that Eeona whispered into Youme’s ear. There was never enough for Ronalda to put things together and know the stories. There was never enough for Ronalda. Ronalda, of course, would be the one who left for America. Just one body on the boat of us who left, because things had not been passed down to her, things had not been passed her way.

And then there was Anette. Standing just beyond the doorway like a spy. Listening to her sister’s hushed fables. Villa by the Sea had always been forbidden to her, even in talk. And now Eeona was just spilling it. Anette was thinking she should stop her sister. Thinking maybe that her sister was a kind of danger to her family, there whispering stories about their kingly history. Anette and Franky were trying to instill a sense of equality, especially given the seeming lack of it in America. But Anette just stood trying to hear because she wanted to know. She stood there until Eeona’s story voice was replaced by the steady breath of sleep.

Anette approved when Eeona told the children more fantastical stories out in the open. Anette had begun to keep the TV off more often, because now she didn’t want any of the children watching the glass-and-flimsy wood box without her supervision.

Eve Youme had just become a teenager when Eeona told the story, out in the open, of the Duene. The children were all in their regular orbits: Eve Youme at Eeona’s feet, Frank just beyond, and Ronalda running errands for her mother. Auntie Eeona had arrived, like she always did, without announcement. She would call at the door, “Inside,” and then she’d be in. Sometimes she would bring a nice thing to eat. Sometimes she just brought the stories. Eeona sometimes told of the Cowfoot Woman and of Anancy, but not today.

“The Duene are the ones of us who protect the wild places. The women
live in the ocean and the men on the land. Their feet are turned backward, so you cannot tell if they are coming or going. They are capable of slicing you to pieces with their thoughts alone.”

Eve Youme concentrated hard on her breathing. She wanted it to match the rhythm of her aunt’s words. Ronalda came in the door and stood by, listening. Now Auntie Eeona was speaking of a male Duene who had a smooth bald body. He’d fallen in love with a female Duene with winglike hair. “The Duene were allowed to mate, you understand,” said Eeona, though the children didn’t really understand, “but love had been forbidden to them. The secret Duene lovers loved with abandon. However, this love tethered them to the bay, for their worlds met there on the beach. They made children who could swim and walk and love, but had to keep their love a secret.”

Anette, listening above her onion chopping, sat up straighter and arched her head. Eeona sounded winded, which was not like her. “Your grandmother,” Eeona said to the children, “told me this story when I was a child.”

But as Eeona said that, she felt and then she knew it was not true. She’d never heard that part of the story before. A bald boy Duene and a wing-haired girl Duene falling in love? It seemed Eeona had just made up the story. Just right there. Just like that. Now Eeona couldn’t remember what her mother had actually told her. Instead, something was happening to her, something like a little storm brewing in her brain. She thought she’d escaped her episodes since claiming her land and building her villa-inn. But now Eeona reached behind her own neck and released her hair of its pins. She did not do this for the children. She did it to regain her strength, for something was not right with her. Not exactly right.

“Now,” Auntie Eeona began again, “who protects the wild things?” She asked the room, even as she moved her head in such a way to feel her own hair waving along her back.

But the children did not answer, for a kind of spell of thinking had been cast over them, which is another thing stories can do. Youme leaned back
onto her elbows, her face disappearing into a shadow. A rooster crowed at the moon from a neighboring yard. Out in the street a man called to a friend in greeting. Franky came in from keeping the lighthouse and greeted everyone, stopping to blink at his sister-in-law with her hair down like a deep well a man could jump into.

Anette came out into the parlor to greet her husband, but then went to her sister instead and gathered the elder woman’s hair back into a bun. Eeona allowed this then looked at her sister without meeting eyes. “I shall go lie down,” Eeona announced.

The three children had heard the story of the Duene lovers, but they interpreted it differently. And it does not matter, ultimately, what they heard or even what they knew. It is how they interpret the story that will make all the difference.

Ronalda didn’t think protection of the wild things was needed.
People
needed protection. Just look at what was happening in the States. Ronalda, who was heading to college in just a few months, made up her mind to leave all this island foolishness behind.

To Frank, the Duene were martyrs to their love and to the wilderness. They were heroes. They were like Superman, like on TV.

To Eve Youme, the Duene were in conflict with what they were. But perhaps it was an honorable conflict. One that allowed for abandon. If so, then they were something like herself.

And this is all that is needed for each child to become what he or she will become. But first Ronalda left. Then Mary came. Then Eeona disappeared. Finally, the Joseph family would gather on a beach, as lovers
do.