Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel (3 page)

My mother was jealous of me. Mama would often take me to her rooms where there was a mirror. She would bid me sit up straight beside her before the looking glass. She peered from my face to her own as if searching my face for a history of herself. She was very pretty, but I was the more lovely. I say that only because it was a fact.

My mother also feared for me. She feared that I would become a woman who depended on her beauty and so did not develop her skills and talents. It was not enough to be beautiful, she said. A woman must be able to create beauty. Mama made sure I learned to weave straw, sew clothes, and crochet bags. These were all skills that might come in handy when beauty would not.

I do believe, however, that Mama’s stories also had their power. Their telling was also a skill, albeit one only displayed for me. The story of the Duene was used to warn me. If a woman was not self-possessed, she was in danger of the wildness. I knew my mother suffered from this. Episodes, we called them. Papa described the episodes as a bit of rebellion and impetuousness. My mother, as everyone knew, had run away from her island of Anegada to marry my father. She had barely known Papa. Mama had wild and wandering tendencies. I always knew I had the same.

In order to tell her story, Mama would sit in her rocking chair. It was a fine rocker, made by hand from a strong stick of mahogany. It was one of the things I was most sorry to see go when the drowned lands took my father. In the big drawing room, lamps would flicker about us. Our shadows would reach long behind our backs. Often, Miss Lady stood over me braiding my hair for bed. My father would sip a short glass of rum and watch my
hair being tamed. I have always known that my real skill is my own beauty, despite what Mama said.

When Mama began to tell a story, Papa would rise and take a turn around the room. This would be terribly distracting to me. The sound of his sipping his drink made me want to place my own finger in his mouth. Now that I understand envy, I understand that perhaps he was jealous of this time that Mama had with me. With his free hand Papa would stroke his earlobe. When on his stroll, he would arrive at the door and lean against the chest where Mama displayed her treasured porcelain figurines. Then he would slip out of the room.

Mama never asked if I wanted to hear a story. She would be unassumingly sewing an accent onto a dress and then she would look up at me. She began with the female Duene who live in the sea of the Anegada Passage. They sink ships with their singing. They are tall with thin angular legs that push like fish through the water. On parts of their bodies they have scales the colours of precious metal. This hides a bit of their bursting beauty when they come to land.

The men live only on the land of our sister island, St. Croix. The males are as chiseled as stones and as brown as bark. They wait on the land for the mating season when the women come to them. The Duene men live mostly in Frederiksted, where the inkberry trees grow wild and hide them. They do not swim. Sometimes Mama would say that the men hide extra legs in their breasts. That they are arachnids, like Anancy. Sometimes she would say that they hide wings in their shoulders, and that they fly.

There is only one thing the men and the women have in common. Their feet face backwards. This is so it is difficult for humans to track them. The Duene do not want us to follow them because they protect the wild things from our destruction. The women protect the sea. The men protect the land.

Mama said that even when you see the Duene you cannot tell which way they are going. They will seem to be running away from you just as
they are rushing forwards to chop you down. Though the Duene will not harm humans who do not harm the land or the sea, it is best to avoid them because one does not always know when one is doing harm. The Duene have no mercy. They will drag you by your hair into the sea. They will pluck your extremities from your body as we pluck petals from a flower for love-me, love-me-not. The Duene do not love us. They love only themselves and the wildness, Mama said.

Here, she would pause in her sewing to look directly at me. “The wildness is many things besides a gathering of trees or a pooling of water.”

I came to understand that the wildness could be inside of me.

Madame Antoinette Bradshaw, wife of Owen Arthur, mother of Eeona, was at the Lovernkrandt house for a ladies’ tea party. Mrs. Liva Lovernkrandt, the wife of the former rum maker, had just returned from a month in America. At the tea she wore a large floppy hat made of what Mrs. Lovernkrandt called felt. Everyone had to lean forward to get a better view of her. She was also wearing a dress without a girdle, which caused her to resemble a sack of yams. Later the women would giggle at her behind her back. But not Antoinette.

“New York,” Mrs. Lovernkrandt began, pausing to sip her tea, “is the classy capital of this new world.” She rested her teacup into its saucer. “Look, ladies. Look at these classy fashions.” She retrieved an armful of magazines and spread them out on her new coffee table. The other women hurriedly picked up their teacups to make room. The magazines were glossy, with bright colors. The women on the covers wore lipstick that was red, and smiled with big straight teeth all showing. Their skin looked all one pale color, like a skinless Irish potato. They wore high heels. They
exposed not just their ankles, but their entire calves, their entire knees. On one cover the words “Snag Mr. Right!” were written along the bottom. The model on that cover was displaying a little box held with a garter against her thigh. She was retrieving an actual cigarette out of the box. It looked like she might set the words on fire.

The women at tea leaned over the magazines but didn’t touch them or open them. Mrs. Lovernkrandt leaned back and gave her guests her floppy gaze. She smiled, but with her mouth closed, more demure than the American women. Then she called for her own maid to bring out the “animal.” It took two people. The maid carried it by one arm and the Lovernkrandt’s man-about-the-house led it by the other. The ladies around the table gasped: “Oh my. Is it alive? Keep it away from me!” But Mrs. Lovernkrandt stood and walked up to the furry specimen. She slipped her arms into its body.

“Imagine!” she exclaimed. “A coat made from little soft animals. You feel like a Viking lady gliding across the Arctic. And you need one of these with how cold it is in New York City. Colder than Denmark, I’m sure.”

The other women looked skeptical but Antoinette leaned forward. “What kind of animal is it?”

“Fur,” said Mrs. Lovernkrandt, and she ran her hand down the front of the coat.

“What does a fur look like?”

Liva Lovernkrandt was ready for Antoinette. She knew it was Madame Bradshaw who would be the most curious, the most envious. “A mongoose, Antoinette. Just like a mongoose.” But, oh dear, she was beginning to sweat underneath the coat. Liva slipped out of it and gestured for it to be taken away. “And they have shoes made of snake’s skin and eyeglasses rimmed with the backs of turtles,” she continued, now dabbing her perspiring brow with a handkerchief. “Antoinette, you can only dream. Perhaps next time I depart, I should take the gloves you embroidered for me.”

The other women turned to nibble the imported digestive crackers
and sip the tea, for they were all aware that Antoinette Bradshaw had never been to America, and wouldn’t it be something if her gloves got there and she never did? But Antoinette’s mind was already dreaming. Oh, it was unfair that women could dream at all. There she was, the very Madame Antoinette Bradshaw, wondering what it would take to create coats of mongoose hair. Would American women wear that? Might she convince Liva Lovernkrandt to take more than one pair of gloves, perhaps a chest of gloves, to give as gifts to stylish New York ladies? The gloves might serve as a kind of announcement. Or perhaps Antoinette and Owen would, after all, send Eeona to the States for a fancy finishing school. Antoinette would insist, absolutely insist, on accompanying her daughter. Then Nettie would invent a reason to stay for a while. First, she must master mongoose coats. Then the women who wore her gloves would commission her. Later she would make garters rimmed with the backs of sea turtles. Ones that every woman of class would want to wrap around her thigh. Now Antoinette looked down at the woman on the magazine, the one ready to blaze. Mr. Right was not the only thing worth snagging. When Nettie left the Lovernkrandt house, she went to take the hot-pepper tea so this damn hardheaded baby would finally burn out of her.

Let me tell you something I know about Anegada. Because I learn plenty somethings with this hard head of mine. I don’t remember nothing of my life before I turn four years old. But I don’t need memory. A historian, that’s me after all. I ain never been Anegada, but I know enough.

In all my years I have never want to chase a child. I had want every
child I ever conceive. But not every woman have that in she. I can’t speak for those women. But I know that Anegada wasn’t no place to do nothing except make love. I mean, you know the place? You seen even a postcard of Anegada? It too pretty. Like heaven and hell marry up and birth all the beauty goodness and badness could possibly make. You hearing me? When you raise up in that place, like how Mama had raise up in that place, you only know about beauty and how to make it. And lovemaking is a beauty making.

So it ain nothing to imagine that Antoinette Stemme had come pregnant when she young. Probably for a nice boy, a lobster fisherman, who have legs like bronze. And if this is so, you can’t blame she. Everybody loving and beautifying and the man sweet and tender. Besides they have maybe fifteen girls and fifteen boys on the whole island. Of course, they going to meet up and mix up and mate up. And all of them is the most beautiful people you ever dream.

And we could just imagine what is they life back then. Fishing is life. Eating lobster twice a day is life. Swimming is life. That sound like leisure for any of we in the big city of Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas. But for them then? No. Because there ain no hospital in Anegada. No doctors. If you deading, you going to dead. Can’t blame nobody. No police, no lawyers, no court. Because that’s the place. Perfection but with a hole in the middle. Is not a island really. Is a atoll. You listening?

So when a young captain get he young ship catch on the coral . . . what? Even if we just making this story up, we could easy say that is like the Anegada girl named Antoinette is a siren. And her mother and father love she like the land and they want the best for she. They done realize the girl have vision for she self beyond what the atoll know how to manage. So they convince the captain, and it don’t take much for the young captain Bradshaw. Sure, he know that she have the other boy baby in she body. But the girl sweeter than lobster. The captain, he know ’bout bush. He the kind of man know all about woman things. Swift as anything captain and girl wash that
other man baby away. The captain ain know that he teach his wife the very thing she going use against him for the entirety of they marriage.

So he gone with her. Love her till the day he dead, but also he own her in a way. Because of what he could make her do. Leave her fiancé. Get rid the not-yet-baby. Leave her Anegada land and never return.

I ain saying this is the way it happen with my parents. This ain true history. I just saying that given what we know about the place and about the time, my version seem to have a truth somewhere. Is just a story I telling, but put it in your glass and drink it.

Antoinette lay in bed and knew she was awake. Her eyes wanted to open but she resisted. She knew what would happen. Instead, she lay with her arms spread wide open as though she were about to scoop up a child. Her legs spread wide as though to take a lover. Both these postures were the problem. Even though her eyes were closed, even though the mosquito nettings draped down, tenting the bed, the orange glow of the sunshine still seeped through her eyelids. She could hear the sea outside the window. She could hear the eager humming of the mosquitoes just outside the net.

Antoinette curled her fingers into a fist. That is how small the child inside her was now. She had bled red blood and still the child, no bigger than her fist, remained. She must win this one. This one was stubborn, but she must win. There was already one child. She’d done that—given Owen the girl. Enough.

You see, Antoinette had vision. With another child she would surely lose herself. How did other women do it? Seven children. Twelve children. Even her mother, married to her fisherman on that tiny atoll, had had only her.

And just then, as Antoinette thought of her dead parents and the island of Anegada where the sun set at her feet, her eyes fluttered open before she could stop. The light hit her full-on. The nausea that came was fast and hard. She raked the netting aside and leaned over the chamber pot. She pitched out last night’s supper, now reddish, even though they’d had mutton with mint jelly and fungi with avocado pear. She flopped back onto the bed, breathing hard. Her eyes slit, half open, letting the sun come at her gently now.

She was married well, despite her brownness and meager upbringing. She had a daughter and a house and a maid-cook. She had a man-about-the-house who also brought fish to their door. And they were all Americans now. They would be allowed American passports someday soon. Eeona was growing up fine, just fine. Owen had taken a mistress, but what landed man did not have an outside woman? Genteel women such as Madame Bradshaw were supposed to be still. Perhaps Antoinette Bradshaw was just selfish.

But Antoinette made a fist again. This time she raised the fist into the air and slammed it down into the soft of her belly. She cried out. But she did it again. She cried out again but still she struck herself again and then again. Suddenly Miss Lady was at the door, knocking and knowing. “Madame Bradshaw. I could come in? You having the illness?”

Madame Bradshaw was infamous for how quickly she could lose a baby. Bed rest, the doctor had said when she was carrying the one after Eeona. But she lost that one despite the bed. She’d drowned that one in her womb actually, but who could prove that? Fresh sea breeze, the doctor had said for the next, but Antoinette had pitched that one, too. Then bed
and
fresh air he had said, so Antoinette had been made to stay in bed all day and all night with the windows flung open. That baby made it to the quickening. But then stilled. Was stilled.

“I’m fine,” Antoinette called to Miss Lady, but Miss Lady flowed in anyway. She had tea and bread, which she left on the nightstand. She gave
Madame Bradshaw a hard look. “This one must be a girl. Stubborn,” she said, before taking away the chamber pot. Antoinette narrowed her eyes. Miss Lady knew Antoinette had other plans besides children. But Sheila Ladyinga could at least pretend as though she didn’t know—that would be more proper. She must be on Owen’s side, as the women in this household always would be. Antoinette leaned up on her elbow. And what was in this tea? Likely something to make this baby strong. Antoinette stopped drinking the tea. The bread was malleable. She ate and dreamed.

She daydreamed of her and her husband walking around the milk-and- honey streets of New York City in bright green iguana-skin shoes. But slowly it came to Antoinette that she had not heard Owen Arthur come in last night. Perhaps he had been with his tart. The witch, that obeah woman, Rebekah. Rebekah who could have baby after baby after baby and still play that piano and still sell lime and mesple in the market. A low-class market woman who had simply married well and whose husband had left her. But not Antoinette. She might have entrepreneurial dreams but she would not lower Bradshaw as Rebekah had lowered the McKenzie name. True, the McKenzie name was not as high as Bradshaw to begin with. The McKenzie men married well, but there wasn’t a ship captain among them. Either way, Antoinette’s endeavors would cause her family to rise, not recede.

Antoinette sat up and went to her writing table. She wrote a note telling Liva Lovernkrandt that she was coming straightaway to pay a visit to discuss private business matters. She called for Miss Lady to deliver it. Sheila Ladyinga could read; Antoinette would not have had a maid who could not. So Miss Lady could be trusted to knife open the note and believe that indeed Madame Bradshaw was going to Mrs. Lovernkrandt’s just now. And Miss Lady could be trusted to relay this false information to Owen if questioned. Madame Bradshaw was not going to the Lovernkrandts’ immediately. She was going to that very Rebekah McKenzie. Owen’s witch woman.