Prospero's Daughter (18 page)

Gardner looked up. “Thank God they don’t land here,” he said, voicing the opposite of what I was thinking.

I scratched my head on the spot where the feather had grazed it. I must have looked particularly stupid doing that because he laughed. “Not to worry,” he said. “I need your brawn, not your brains, Carlos.”

I helped him put more boxes of seedlings on the makeshift shelf he had built under the tiny apron of the awning where the roof extended past the wood siding of the shed. When we were finished, he began to hum again, the same merry tune he was humming earlier. He was happy. Something had pleased him. What? In a minute he told me.

“She can read,” he said. I was walking behind him. He stopped and turned to face me. He was smiling to himself. “Yesterday,” he said, “she read a whole book.”

I did not know what to say. I could not say I had taught her, that she had learned to read from me. I did not know what he would do if he found out we had been together.

“I don’t mean a baby book,” he said.

I wiggled my toes in the dirt under my foot.

“
That,
Carlos,” he said, repeating the movement of his finger to his temple, this time probing his skin, “takes intelligence.”

I pretended with my silence that I had none of that, but a few days later he would decide that I was not as unintelligent as he had assumed, that perhaps brawn was not all I had.

I had taught Virginia one of my favorite poems. It was not one of my father’s poems. It was an Englishman’s poem, a poem I called my tiger poem.
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night.
When I read it to Virginia she loved it, too, and learned it quickly. I had not thought to tell her that she should not recite it in her father’s presence. I assumed that she understood, as I had, that her father was not to know I was teaching her. We had always been careful to hide the books I read to her. So I did not believe she intended to have him hear her. She had gone for a walk with her father and the poem spilled out of her mouth by accident, she said. It was too late, after he had heard her, to take it back.

I remember it was a particularly magical night at the end of the dry season, just before the start of the wet. Four days earlier it had rained, not just at midday, which would not have been unusual, but early in the morning, a soft patter at dawn that rocked me deeper into sleep and earned me ten demerits when Gardner banged on my door. And again in the evening it rained, a sudden outburst as though the floor of the heavens had crashed open, weighted down by the tons of water it had stored for weeks. The vegetation, dry, parched, hungrily soaked up the rainwater. Everywhere green shoots sprouted from dry brown stems, and ropes of vine came alive on the tops of tall spreading trees. So it happened on our island at the beginning of the wet season, this sudden blinding blaze of green, overnight it seemed, exhilarating until weeks later, the rain never ceasing, constant, the green turned into a tangle of impenetrable vines, suffocating big trees, drowning weeds and wild grass in the pools of water that collected between stones and boulders, breeding grounds for mosquitoes. But the rain that had fallen four days ago had not returned. The dry season sun had come out and evaporated the dampness, so there was green without the mud, sun-baked air without a drop of moisture in it, and the path leading down to the bay was dry, passable, though gloriously lined with new bushes.

I would have given anything to walk to the bay that night, to feel the crackle of twigs beneath my feet, to see the green flickering in the moonlight, the stars twinkling above in the indigo sky. But I had to help Ariana in the kitchen. Gardner, his own master, was free to do as he pleased, and it pleased him to take Virginia with him on his walk that night. From the kitchen window where I was gazing longingly at the silvery cobwebs the moon had intertwined across the bushes behind Gardner’s garden, I saw them coming toward the backdoor, Gardner’s stride long and purposeful, Virginia’s short and quick, trying to keep up. Gardner stormed into the house and headed for the kitchen. He pulled me by the scruff of my neck and made me stand before him.

“Who taught it to you?” he hollered.

Virginia, by this time, had caught up with him and began to whimper in the background.

“ ‘Tyger, tyger, burning bright.’ Who taught it to you?” Gardner repeated.

He had to know, not Ariana.

“My mother,” I said.

“Your mother?” He brought his face close to mine. “The party girl?”

“She taught it to me.” My voice shook.

“Blake? She taught Blake to you? Party girl?”

I could smell his breath. Tobacco and ganja.

“He can read, Father,” Virginia was saying to him.

“Read?” The word spluttered from his mouth.

“He knows, Father.” Virginia tugged his shirtsleeve. “He knows.”

“Knows what?”

I do not think I would have had the courage to have persisted if he had looked at me as sternly as he looked at her, but she was not deterred, my brave Virginia. “Big books, Father,” she said.

“Big books?”

“His mother showed him how.”

“Showed him?” But he was no longer shouting. I think at that moment he was trying to reconcile his picture of my mother, the whore thrown overboard by sailors, with the other picture his daughter was insisting he see.

“I read my mother’s books,” I said.

“Your mother’s books?”

“He has a lot of books, Father.”

“Your mother had books?” He licked his lips and passed his hands through his hair.

I nodded.

He pulled a chair out from under the kitchen table and sat down. “Where? When?”

I stumbled through answers. She bought the books in Trinidad, I said. She read them to me.

How did she know about Blake?

She said she read the books in school.

In school?

Virginia had run to my room and now she was back, waving a book in her hand. Blake’s
Songs of Experience.
She gave it to her father. “Ask him to read it, Father.”

He shoved the book in my direction. I took it from him.

“Tyger, tyger, burning bright / in the forests of the night . . .” I read.

“He memorized it,” he said.

“No, Father.”

“Turn the page,” he ordered me.

I turned it.

“Here. Read this one here.”

I read it: “A little black thing among the snow: / Crying ‘weep, weep,’ in notes of woe! / ‘Where are my father and mother? say?’ ”

He got up, grabbed my arm, and dragged me to his room. “Here. Here.” He picked up a thick book that was lying on his bed and opened it. “Read this page here.” I read the passage he pointed out to me, struggling with a word or two, but managing to read it correctly though I did not understand a word I read. It was a passage from Shakespeare, a play that was to become my favorite. When I was done, he sat down on his bed and rubbed his chin repeatedly. A strange smile spread across his face, not a smile really, a grimace, as though something deep inside of him was paining him. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Yes, yes.” Then not to me, nor to Virginia, nor to Ariana, who was now standing in the doorway wringing her hands, he muttered, the smile lines at the corners of his eyes spreading to his temples, “He can read. The little savage can read.”

I became his experiment from that day on. And from that day on I no longer hated him. Before he put me out of his room, he swore he would turn me, little savage that I was, into a human. Nature may have destined that I should make my living with my brawn, but with his help we would confound nature, challenge her, make her bend to his will, not to hers. He would succeed where the alchemist had not. He would turn brass into gold.

Something about England, he said. Something about rats’ legs and about a serum to grow human limbs.
No matter. No matter.
He shook his head and his eyes grew misty. He drew me to him. I feared he would kiss me and I stiffened, but he stroked me, caressed my cheek, and made much of me. He would teach me new words, he said, so I would know my own meaning. Yes, yes, that was what he would do.

ELEVEN

BUT I KNEW my own meaning, and the English I spoke conveyed well enough to Lucinda and Ariana all that I meant.

It was true that I did not speak like Gardner. I spoke English with an accent like my father’s, with a Trinidadian accent. My mother’s English was similar to Gardner’s, for though she had been raised by an Algerian nanny, her parents were English, and though she had lived in Algeria, it was in an English enclave there. But my mother loved the music of my father’s accent and encouraged me to imitate it. When my father died, it was natural for me to continue to speak the way he did. Then, too, Lucinda was taking care of me and Lucinda was Trinidadian. But I picked up habits from her that Gardner despised. I dropped my
th
s, replacing them with
d
s, and my subjects and verbs rarely agreed.

My vocabulary, no doubt, before Gardner taught me, was inadequate, but my thoughts were clear, rational. I knew who I was; I knew what was mine. I did not forget that the house we lived in and the land it stood on were not Gardner’s, that my mother had bequeathed them to me. And when I was old enough to understand my father’s poetry, I did not forget the warning so evident to me in his verses: The English had not come to save us; the English had not come to help us.

I was standing next to Gardner when he gave his version of how my house became his to the doctor who had allowed him to stay in his house before he occupied mine. Almost a year had passed and this was the first time the doctor had visited my house. He never came when my father was alive nor in the months before and after my mother’s death. Lucinda said he was jealous. Not of our new house. He had his own house in Trinidad. Bigger and better furnished than ours, she said.

“Then jealous of what?” I asked her.

“Of your father,” she said.

I thought, perhaps, he was in love with my mother but I could not have been more wrong. He hated my mother, and jealousy was the wrong word to use to describe his feelings for my father. He disliked him; he resented him for living with my mother and hated her for sharing her bed. Later, I understood that it was insecurity, fear, that made him a stranger to my house.

The doctor had attempted to come before. More than once since Gardner had moved in with us I had spied him grunting and puffing up our incline to the house. He was a heavy man, short, his legs two stumps that seemed barely able to carry the burden of his huge stomach. He would pick his way through the rough path, grabbing on to the thin stalks of bushes when he stumbled, and then staggering as he tried to prevent himself from falling when the bushes, too weak to bear his weight, bent almost to the ground. Before he was halfway up the path Gardner would see him and he would send me rushing down, always with the same message: He was not there. He was in Trinidad. Another time, perhaps.

I never thought the doctor much minded when I brought him Gardner’s lies, for by the time I would reach him, his face would be so red, his clothes so damp with perspiration, his breathing so shallow that he seemed relieved, not unhappy, to turn back.

That day he managed to reach the edge of my front yard before either Gardner or I had seen him. If Gardner was nervous, worried he could ask questions that would leave a trail to his past in England, he did not show it. He greeted the doctor warmly, though I noted that he was careful to keep him on the porch and not allow him inside.

“Never been here before,” the doctor said, lowering his body into the rocking chair, “but I can tell you’ve improved the place.”

“I plan to put down a lawn,” Gardner said, gesturing to the yard he had cleared of every single bush and tree.

The doctor fanned himself with his hat. “Just that you know, I didn’t approve of what was going on here,” he said. “I don’t condone that kind of behavior.”

His condemnation of my parents pleased Gardner immediately. He sent Ariana to fetch them lemonade but he kept me by his side. “This is their bastard. Carlos.”

The doctor did not need to be introduced to me. He had seen me often enough, but he shook my hand. “I don’t know why she lowered herself like that,” he said.

He didn’t seem to care that in my presence he was belittling my mother.

“Oh, she was already lowered,” Gardner said, and showing an unusual deference to me (for I was sure he had more to say about my mother), he leaned over to the doctor and whispered something in his ear.

“Ahh,” the doctor said, straightening up, “but that black man was also too out of place.”

“Yes.” Gardner grinned wickedly at me.

They had arrived on common ground though different routes had taken them there. I would hear the doctor’s expression
Too out of place
many times on my trips to Trinidad and I would know eventually exactly what he meant. My father was too out of place to cohabit with a white woman. He was too out of place to have a child with her.

The doctor was talking about class, of course, but he was also talking about color. The two were intimately intertwined in the Caribbean, threads of the same cloth. To pull one was to loosen the other, to unravel the fabric completely.

Men and women who insisted on behaving like my father and my mother created confusion for people like the doctor. For the doctor was light-skinned and he counted on the value ascribed to his color to bequeath to his children his place in society.

The European colonists had set the rules. They had discovered that they could use gradations in skin color to replicate a class system that would give them ranking impossible for them to attain in their own countries. Here, they realized, color, not bloodlines, could make one a lord. White skin alone was all the credential they needed for entry to the upper class. The rest followed. Light-skinned natives with straight hair got admitted to the upper middle class; brown-skinned natives with curly hair to the middle class, but black-skinned natives with kinky hair found themselves firmly relegated to the lower class. (Years later I was not surprised to discover that Napoléon reintroduced slavery into the Antilles because he was desperate to quell rumors rampant in the English press claiming that black blood flowed in his veins and Josephine’s, gossip based solely on the fact that he was born in Corsica and she in Martinique. Napoleon hoped by his cruelty to prove he had no connection to Africans.)

Gardner had no such problem. He was certain he was white, but he also knew that whatever pretense was made in the colonies, in England, where people were white, his skin color had no value. Yet he believed in the absurd notion of race, the classifications of Homo sapiens based on skin color, hair texture, bone structure. He believed my father’s black skin determined his nature, “his race,” and so made him a different kind of a man, a subcategory of Homo sapiens. My mother could have been rehabilitated, but there was no hope for my father, confined and defined as he was by nature.

“I could never understand why she would want to change the nature of her own child,” he said to the doctor.

The doctor was puzzled. “Nature?” he asked.

“Giving her child African blood,” Gardner explained.

The doctor’s eyes skated over to mine, I thought in fear that I would say something, strip him naked in front of Gardner, reveal him for who he was: a colored man passing. I could tell that African blood ran in his veins. There was too much olive in his skin, and his cheekbones flared in too familiar a way, in the way I remembered my father’s.

“So how did you get the house?” The doctor seemed anxious to redirect Gardner’s attention. “His mother was already dead before you came, wasn’t she?” Then, as if he were afraid of Gardner’s answer, he supplied one of his own. “I suppose you had a previous agreement, yes?”

“Yes, a previous agreement. You could say that. She left the house to Lucinda.”

To his credit, the doctor’s eyebrows shot up. “To her housekeeper?”

“The boy was too young, you see,” Gardner said. “He couldn’t take on that responsibility. Sylvia gave the house to Lucinda so Lucinda would take care of the boy. And Lucinda, you see, gave . . . No, not
gave,
” he said, correcting himself. “Lucinda
sold
it to me.”

“Sold it?”

“She was dying. Cancer. I treated her. She was grateful. The money’s Ariana’s and the boy’s, of course,” he said, glancing at me, his eyes hardening, challenging me to contradict him. “I use it to take care of them.”

“Ahh,” said the doctor.

What had made the doctor say
Ahh
so quickly? Why had it taken Gardner so little to satisfy him? I have pondered these questions many times and each time I arrive at the same conclusion: The thread that connected the doctor to whiteness was too flimsy for him to take the chance of alienating the Englishman. He would confirm that he belonged to Gardner’s white race by acting as if he believed that knowledge and truth resided with him, that knowledge, truth, intelligence were intrinsically invested in white skin. Even if he doubted Gardner, he would agree with him. He would say
Ahh.

As the doctor was about to leave, Gardner said something that shocked me. He said he planned to send me to school. My jaw dropped, my eyes rounded in surprise, but the doctor became animated. I think if he had the slightest doubt of Gardner’s honesty, the last traces of his uncertainty evaporated when Gardner declared his intentions for me.

“You hear that?” he gushed, turning to me. “School. The nice doctor plans to send you to school.”

Even for Gardner the doctor’s enthusiasm was too much. “When he is ready,” he said sternly.

The doctor reached into his pants pocket and pulled out his handkerchief. “I hope you’ll show your gratitude,” he said, wiping his mouth and narrowing his eyes at me. “Or else, it’s off to the orphanage you go.”

My mother had read me stories about the horrors of the orphanage. I did not want to go to the orphanage.

But Gardner had lied. No money had passed from him to Lucinda. All the money he possessed he had stolen from me, money my mother had given to Lucinda to save for me. I believe that even before the storm brought him to our supposed rescue, his mind was churning out his devilish scheme. For my house was magnificent and the doctor’s house, where he first stayed, was old and windswept. There were cracks on the concrete pillars, and tufts of tall wild grass grew in sporadic bunches across the stone-filled dirt yard.

I do not know when Gardner first thought of making his garden, but if it had occurred to him that it would be here, on our isolated island, in the tropics, that he could renew himself, start again, at least through his daughter, he must have found the doctor’s stony land discouraging. When he climbed up the hill to my parents’ house, he must have been pleased to see my father’s fruit trees. Perhaps, though he claimed to despise the fruit trees and had cut them down, it was this fact, the existence of the trees, that had given him hope. The doctor’s land was useless but above it he believed he would find fertile soil.

How pleased he must have been to learn that my parents were dead. How lucky he was when that storm almost destroyed our tiny island. The gods put a gift in his lap; he used it to trick us.

And hadn’t his people done it? Hadn’t they left icy winds and chilly rains to come here and everywhere the sun warmed the land? Hadn’t they found righteous reasons to justify what they had done?

The first lesson Gardner taught me, when he discovered that I could read and decided he would give me the means to express my own meaning, was about the right of his people, their manifest destiny, to rule the world. He spread a map of the world before me. “Here. Here. There.” With the tips of his fingers he jabbed at spots on the map: India, China, Africa, the lands of the Turks and the Arabs, islands and continents spread apart by the great seas and oceans. His people had brought civilization everywhere, he said. “Without us, these places you see would have nothing.”

In the years that followed, I learned to wear a mask over my face, an invisible barrier that Gardner could not see. At first, I did not wear this mask to deceive him; I wore it because I wanted to please him. I did not want my face to register my anger when my blood churned from something he said or something he ordered me to do, or to reveal the loathing in my heart when, forgetting his oath, he called me his savage. I wanted to reassure him, I wanted him to feel secure in his presumptions, convinced of his superiority over me and people who looked like me. For he had much to teach me and I was eager to learn. I made a bargain with him in my mind: in exchange for knowledge, I would let him presume. I would let him believe that he understood me better than I understood myself, that he knew my desires before I knew them myself, that he could predict my ambitions, my dreams, the things I would want, the things I would fear, the things I would like or dislike. He could show me who I was and what I was capable of becoming. He could write a book about me and teach me about myself.

He never suspected me. He was too certain of himself, too enamored with the project he had conceived to reinvent me, to care how I felt or if he offended me. I was his chance to redeem himself after his failed experiments in England. He was determined to civilize me, to improve my coarse nature.

The daily schedule he set for me was different now. He wanted me to have time to read the books he assigned me and to be free in the evenings to study with him. I was no longer required to help Ariana in the kitchen or with her housework. I had to wake up earlier, at four in the morning, and go with him to the garden. We returned for breakfast, after which he tutored Virginia in his bedroom for an hour, and then I went back with him to the garden until lunchtime.

But he did not change his habit of napping after lunch, nor of requiring Ariana to spend an hour with him in his bedroom.

When he woke, he returned to the garden. He did not take me with him. I did not know what he did when he went to the garden. I knew he took his gnarled cane with him and his book, the one bound in red leather and embossed with gold letters. Many times, looking up from my books, I saw him dancing around the flower beds, the velvet cloak he had worn that evening when he frightened me flapping in the wind over his back, the cane raised high in one hand, the red leather book in the other.