Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel (34 page)

In the inn in Coral Bay, Anette could see her sister’s frame lean forward—as if for battle. But instead of saying anything, Anette just sat there with tears raining down her face.

“Come, Anette. Give yourself some air. I want you to see what I’ve finally done. Open the balcony wide.”

Anette sucked her nose in and bunched her eyes. Then she stood and reached her hands to the balcony doorknobs. With a pull, she let in the light and the breeze. The curtains winged around them.

The scissors were in Eeona’s lap. The dark and light tresses were already gone from her head, already gathered in her hands. Her head, with the fine scars of an old lovemaking in glass, gleamed in places like a cut diamond.

“Your hair. What the ass?” And it was true that it was intense. More—it seemed insane.

Eeona’s face was not a young woman’s face. She was an older woman now. Beyond middle age, really. Her mouth opened and released a breezing sigh. “I was a child and I only wanted . . .” But she shook her head. The words were not working. Her hands were full of her own hair. Those hands were now reaching toward Anette as in offering. Without her hair, Eeona’s face was all there was to offer. And Jesus, she was beautiful. Only now she also seemed as though she were either wise or an acolyte. Both seemed as though they might be the same thing.

“Sister?” Anette asked in a quiet way that said all the shock and sadness. But still Anette stepped forward to meet Eeona, because she was the little sister, after all. She took the silver hair. The hair was heavy and soft. It was the weight of a child and Anette cradled it. Now Eeona dusted the small curls of the hair from her own shirt and lap. She did it with her
fingers, shaking and slow. She regained her composure as Anette pressed the hair to her own chest.

“There,” Eeona said finally. She wiped her face with a kerchief. She nodded her head now. Nodded and nodded until finally the words came out. “Anette, we are selling the inn.”

Anette’s tears were storming out of her eyes.
Crazy witch,
she wanted to say to her sister. But she kept her composure. “Relax, Eeona. You’ve had an episode. Your mind is not true. This inn is what you’ve always wanted. You just said, it’s your villa . . .”

“Nettie, I am moving to Anegada.”

“No.” Anette was still standing. The balcony was right there beside them. “I need you, Eeona. I need my family.” She hugged the hair from the breeze.

“You have your family.”

“But Eeona. Right now you don’t know real from not real. But is okay. I going take care.”

“Oh, Nettie. If only I had sent you to be raised on Anegada. Perhaps you would have been able to walk through mountains instead of carry them on your back.”

Anette felt uneasy with the nickname Eeona kept using. Had she overheard Jacob use it? Anette’s fingers slipped in and around the hair. “But Eeona, you can’t just up and go. I need to know things. I need to know about what happened with Papa. What happened in our old house? Come, Eeona. The truth. I have real frigging questions.”

“Do stop cursing. It is quite unbecoming. Besides, I am taking Eve Youme with me. You may visit. We will write letters.”

Anette felt the tightening between her shoulder blades. “You gone bazadie. Now go to hell. Nobody taking my child from me.”

“She is not a child anymore.” Eeona breathed out. Pushed her shoulders back. “To be frank, Nettie, Anegada needs her. I suppose I need her as well.”

Anette couldn’t catch her voice fast enough. “If you had just speak the
truth back when we was young.” Anette’s voice was rising. The hair was against her breast. “And if you had, maybe I would never had get knot up with Jacob and none of this bullshittiness would have happened.”

“Yes, Nettie. That is true.” Eeona said this without her face releasing any expression.

“
That is true?
That’s what you have to say? After I love up the wrong man. After our birth house come a restaurant and people throw us off a beach on our very own island . . .” The hair began to slip out of Anette’s arms. This made them quiet for a moment.

“Nettie, do you know why they call it Anegada?”

Anette felt that maybe none of this was real after all. Right here and right now was a thing reeled in from her subconscious. So was that time in Hibiscus Hotel. So was Youme’s deformity. Jacob himself was a dream. She was still a child in her parents’ house. Maybe Anette was the one going crazy. She shook her head now, as if clearing her ears of water. “Eeona. I teach history. I know Anegada is the land of drowning because of all the ships that crash into it. Our father’s ship included.”

“That is good, Nettie, but you are wrong. It is because of the land itself. It is the land that is of the water and that is how it has survived.”

Anette had never been to Anegada. In truth, she had only read about it in the “Pirates and Piracy” section of the world history textbook. It was also the only section where the Caribbean was mentioned at all. Hundreds of wrecks still soaking in its shores, she remembered. Anegada was not a place one moved to. It was a place people avoided out of fear. Anette whispered to her sister. “Youme sick, Eeona. She has that thing, you know.” She lowered her voice. “That obeah thing. The magic thing.”

“Nettie, on Anegada there are others like her. She can come to understand herself.” Eeona turned to look at the beveled mirror fastened to the wall. “Isn’t that the most you could want for the child?”

Anette turned with her sister as though the decision was there in the reflection.

There was Eeona’s neck and there were her shoulders and there she was. And finally Eeona was a woman who was fierce and elegant and the queen of somewhere—a woman men would always swoon over. Anette shifted her eyes to look at herself. And she saw that she had that in her, too.

A wind washed in from the balcony. Anette opened her arms and the hair floated out and away like it was nothing more than air.

He meets her on a beach that is shaped like a lover’s heart. But instead of sealing off into a pointed tip, the bay is a heart that is open. The sea waves in and out of the heart, as with any love. They will always meet there in the morning. No one is silently picking whelks on the far end of the beach. Not anymore. Someone had actually been robbed right there on the sand recently. But now it is early in the morning. The sun still rising and the air blowing cold. The water is even colder. Everything is covered with the blue of the blanching dawn sky.

They are not the only ones on the beach. There are also two Americans who have lived on the island for many years, close by in one of the big Peterborg houses. They are jogging in a pair. There is also a figure doing capoeira bends and balances by the rocks. The manager and assistant of the beach concession are already there, speaking Spanish to each other as they unpack frozen hot dogs and veggie burgers.

The woman sits on a bench. She doesn’t lean back provocatively as she might have done if she were younger and wanted to show off her neckline. She does not look about anxiously waiting for him, hoping he will turn up. She knows he will come. He always does. And anyway, she has a sense of arrival. She isn’t wearing a white dress nor is she wearing a red dress with big yellow flowers. She is wearing a gray linen pantsuit, one that matches
her silver-speckled red hair. In her hand she cradles a small bag of stewed cherries.

She has taken off her shoes. There are little hairs of silver glinting on her toe knuckles. The sand feels good running through and over her feet.

The man comes walking up the beach in his leather shoes. He is wearing a very fine gray suit, but with the jacket over his shoulder and his sleeves rolled up. He wears a suit every day even when he isn’t working. And he still works, even now that he could retire. But there is no one to take over the medical practice. All his six sons have gone into Wall Street business where there is more money. They have left him and his wife alone in their big house in the hills. His sons are only phone calls from America. They are only the occasional visit with a new lovely girlfriend, and they never stay very long. Except for the youngest, he still comes home for Carnival. In college in the States, he has learned to play the steel pan. Jacob smiles, thinking of this son in particular. With children there is always the possibility of a small reincarnation or a large redemption.

Anette watches her feet dig into the sand.
Sand,
she thinks,
is a kind of land that flows like water.
Ronalda had called last night purring about her husband, an American from Florida. Together, they make peanut brittle for a living. Anette hadn’t been able to boil water at the same age. Frank Junior is teaching in Grenada. He will visit soon, likely bringing one of his tough-talking Marxist friends. A letter from Youme arrived yesterday afternoon from Anegada. And though Anegada is just there across the ocean, all letters have to be routed through Puerto Rico, and so the letter has taken two weeks in the coming. Anette has it in her lap like something childlike or something sacred. Which are the same thing.

Jacob is carrying one anthurium. Not a rose or a lily. Not an orchid. The flower still has its long stem. Its thick petal is strong and pink like a woman’s private flesh. The elaborate pistil surges from the crease in the heart-shaped petal.

Anette sees him coming and doesn’t move toward him. She only
watches him approach. After all these years she still loves the way the tall sandman walks.
Like a mangrove moving,
she thinks.

“Nettie,” he says, when he is close and can see all the features in her face.

“Yes, it’s me. Why you ain wearing your glasses?”

“This is for you.” He hands her the flower. On his long golden arm there are fine silver hairs, sparkling in the new sun like glints of light. Anette wishes she could put the flower in her hair, but her hair is thin and the flower might slip out. Instead she holds the anthurium in her hand as he sits beside her, his long mangrove legs stretching forward. She passes him the bag of stewed cherries. He thanks her by grazing her shoulder with the tips of his fingers. Together they read their daughter’s letter, as is their ritual.

She will be the first to leave that morning. It is her right; he had left her first so long ago. She will get up silently and walk to the phone booth and ask her friend Gertie to leave off nursing Hamilton and pick her up.

Some minutes after, Jacob will climb into his smooth car, push play on his cassette player for the old Irving Berlin tune, this version sung by Sarah Vaughan because Jacob likes to hear it from a woman.

They will go back to the homes with their spouses.

Jacob will kiss his wife’s forehead before slipping back in beside her. He will close his eyes and see Anette’s silver hairline where the red has faded and imagine he had kissed Nettie instead. Anette will go home to Franky who will be up tending to his papaya trees. She will start breakfast. She will fry his eggs with the right amount of pepper sauce that he likes. He will ask how Gertie is holding up with her husband’s illness and Anette will nod, fine, fine. While the eggs are sizzling in their pool of butter, Anette will think to herself that she doen’t even know how Jacob Esau likes his eggs.

But for now, Jacob is with Anette, and they are reading a letter from the child they made together. Just two people who have been in love a long time sitting on a bench with their daughter’s words swimming before them. And now Jacob and Anette are pressed together as the cool comes in from the ocean.

This novel is, in some part, a response to Herman Wouk’s novel
Don’t Stop the Carnival
, which also features the Gull Reef Club and the characters Sheila and Hippolyte. In my novel the club is where
Girls Are for Loving
is filmed. While all of that is fiction, the film is not.
Girls Are for Loving
was filmed in the Virgin Islands and came out in 1973. It stars Cheri Caffaro.

I first knew about both the Wouk novel and the Caffaro film from my grandmother. I rented the film long after I’d written my scenes set at the club, but my sentiment still feels accurate to me. The film is soft porn, but the locals participating in the movie were unaware of the sexual element. The scene in my novel never actually happens in the movie, and there is no native couple in the advertising. In my fictionalization I have also changed the date of the filming, making it more than a decade earlier, in order to keep the desired chronology.

Both the Caffaro film and the Wouk book were early, and lasting, portrayals of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

—

I have taken some great liberties with names and times. Characters’ names are drawn from names that would have been common in the Virgin Islands
at the time, but they are not meant to be connected to any particular person or family present in the V.I. then or now.

Gertie’s American beau and eventual husband is based on Hamilton Cochran, a U.S. diplomat who lived in the V.I. during the early 1900s.

Frenchtown, called so now, would have been called Carenage at the time. Nowadays Frenchtown is also spelled French Town.

Lindbergh Bay (often spelled “Limberg” or “Lindberg”) during Anette and Jacob’s time may still have been called Mosquito Bay. It slowly lost its former name after the aviator Charles Lindbergh landed on the island during his 1928 goodwill tour.

Eve Youme’s name is borrowed from the author, illustrator, and all-around cool human Youme Landowne.

The reference in the opening chapter to rain having legs comes from the poem “Noche de Lluvia, San Salvador,” by Aracelis Girmay.

The herbal abortion techniques that Rebekah offers Antoinette are made up. These things do, of course, exist, but I am not privy to them.

Formal schooling in the U.S. Virgin Islands was started by the Moravian Church and then contined by the Anglican/Episcopal Church. Other church schools and the public schools followed. My telling of Anette’s and her compatriots’ schooling is fabrication for the sake of simplicity and is not meant to reflect our history.

Part of the University of the Virgin Islands sits on land that was once St. Thomas’s major golf course. Golfers still practice on the Herman E. Moore Golf Course land there, which is close to but not across from Brewer’s Bay (also spelled Brewers Bay), as I suggest in this novel. UVI is, in a way, bordered by two beaches. Brewer’s Bay to the west (near where Franky tries to teach Eeona how to drive) and Lindbergh Bay to the south (where Anette and Jacob first make love). The course might be more accurately described as being across from Lindbergh Bay. In the novel, I avoid explaining the geography in detail so as not to distract the reader.

The Anegada protest mentioned briefly on page 260 actually occurred two decades before this conversation at the lighthouse.

The Positive Action Movement, a political and cultural organization in the V.I., is somewhat the guide for the BOMB.

The Free Beach Act won by the BOMB really does exist. Officially it is called the Virgin Islands Open Shorelines Act.

My great-uncle Sigurd Petersen, Sr., was stationed in New Orleans while serving in the Army. His story inspired sections of this book, though my story of the V.I. men in New Orleans has been passed down to me from numerous retired military men of Port Companies 872 and 873. In this fictional telling I use the number 875 to signal that it is neither the real 872 nor the real 873.

—

David A. Melford’s words come from a pamphlet, “Ninety Wrecks on Anegada, 1643–1853,” warning visitors to the Caribbean. Melford has since updated his research to now include 134 wrecks . . . and counting. Many estimates of the number of submerged ships on the Anegada reefs bring the account to six hundred or more.

The Alton Adams lyrics are from the “Virgin Islands March,” considered our national or territorial anthem. Adams, a native of the Virgin Islands, was the first bandmaster of African descent in the U.S. Navy.

Derek Walcott is quoted from his October 11, 2012, lecture at El Museo del Barrio in New York City. This was the entirety of his response to the question: What makes Caribbean literature unique?

The eponymous protest song “LaBega Carousel” from which I quote is in the quelbe tradition of my fictional Markie and the Pick-up Men. In the Virgin Islands the song is sung by local musicians such as Stanley and the Sleepness Nights, Jamesie, Lashing Dogs, and others. It tells the story of an early-twentieth-century protest that arose because a carousel owner,
Mr. LaBega, paid his workers only a very small wage. In response, people boycotted the carousel by finding other opportunities for revelry—walking around the town and drinking rum. The song is generally credited as having no one single author.

Habib Tiwoni’s verses are from the poem “Al-Habib” in his collection
Islands of My Mind
.

I am indebted to too many texts to mention here. The following, however, were indispensable:
Rum War: The U.S. Coast Guard and Prohibition
by Donald L. Canney;
These Are the Virgin Islands
by Hamilton Cochran;
Take Me to My Paradise: Tourism and Nationalism in the British Virgin Islands
by Colleen Ballerino Cohen;
Time Gone
by Lynda Wesley McLaughlin;
The Men of the 872nd Port Company and Other Stories
by Richard A. Schrader, Sr.;
St. John Backtime: Eyewitness Accounts from 1718 to 1956
, compiled by Ruth Hull Low and Rafael Valls; and
Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers
by David Wright and David Zoby. I owe much to the painting of Camille Pissarro.

—

Here’s some personal history: My great-grandfather was a ship captain. His ship, the
Fancy Me
, went down off the coast of what was then called Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic). As was the tradition, he refused to abandon his ship until everyone else was saved. He drowned with his wreck. Families across the V.I. were affected, and the sinking of the
Fancy Me
is a major historical moment in the V.I.—our
Titanic
. My grandmother was the captain’s youngest child. After her father died, her mother left for America, but she returned sick and died soon after. My grandmother was raised by her eldest sister. Eventually, my grandmother married, had her first child, and divorced. Then she had my mother. My biological grandfather was a young man who would eventually become a
doctor, a well-known radiologist in the Virgin Islands, though originally he’d wanted to be an obstetrician. His mother, my great-grandmother, taught piano.

When my mother was very young, my grandmother married a fireman. Along with my grandmother, this man (my grandfather in all ways except the biological) raised me.

My grandmother’s family is originally from Anegada. When she was in her eighties, I took her there as a gift to her. She had never been there, but she had always heard about that beautiful place. While there we visited Flash of Beauty and found my grandmother’s grandmother’s grave.

My grandmother was a children’s librarian. A large part of her job was telling stories, which she did with us (her children and grandchildren) often. Most of the historical facts in this novel were initially gathered from her.

The rest is magic and myth—fiction, as we call
it.