Xaymaca, Part Five

Back in College I took a course on Caribbean Literature, a class which made me fall deeply in love with the landscapes and cultures of the West Indian archipelago. When it came time to do my senior honors thesis, I chose to write about Derek Walcott's work, and so merged my three areas of interest: poetry, visual art, and the Caribbean. But prior to Walcott I fell in love with the work of three women: Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, and Erna Brodber. The last of the three, Erna Brodber, blew me away with her first novel Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. I wrote at least two papers on the book, trying to decipher its sometimes impenetrable poetic prose, and I have carried the image and metaphor of the kumbla with me ever since.

When Kei and I first met, one of the things that bonded us to each other was the fact that I had not only heard of Erna Brodber, but had read her work (which is often hard to get in the States). So I took great delight when he told me he knew her and that we should visit with her.

The trip to Erna's was breathtaking. We drove up, north of Kingston through Stony Point and Junction. If you've never experienced motion sickness, ride on the road through Junction. Its sharp turns and curves and fast ascent and descent make you clutch your stomach as you try to take in the lush canopy around you. There's even a spot at the top of the one climb where a cluster of buildings beckons you to pull off and rest before continuing. Passing thunderstorms and torrential downpours slowed us and forced our windows shut, but it was worth it to see the sudden waterfalls cascade off the hillsides. We crossed a narrow one lane bridge over a wide river where huge boulders broke up the river bed. I felt there must be a story in those giant shapes. Or at least one should make up a story for them to account for how they got there. After a wrong turn (take the low road, not the high road) we made our way to Woodside, where Brodber lives.

This is the front gate to Brodber's home and community project called “Blackspace”:

Rain struck again when we arrived, so we dashed inside and Erna made us some mint tea using leaves from her garden. She seemed to remember Aimee, or at least the program in Vermont that allowed Aimee to study abroad in Jamaica back in 1999. And once again, the mere mention of the fact I worked with Lorna seemed to immediately warm her to me as it did others—Lorna is clearly a revered figure here, at least in the literary and cultural circles to which I've been exposed, but I suspect beyond those circles too.

She gave Kei and me separate studies: he stayed in the Brown Study...

...and I stayed in the Brown Study (Tree):

This was my workspace:



Me taking a break from work on my bestiary:



It felt very much like a retreat. Here's another shot of the space:



Kei came to check out my digs:

Mine did feel a bit like a treehouse. As we walked from her kitchen, down the stone stairs cut into the hill side, the fragrance of guava overpowered my nostrils. I saw guavas on the ground and looking up at the guava tree I saw the biggest spiders I have ever seen, easily the span of my hand:

Kei says they eat mosquitoes. They look like they could eat a small bird:

They did get me thinking about Anancy tales, the African trickster stories often in Brodber's books (in the American South we know many of these stories, or the role of the trickster, in the Uncle Remus Brer Rabbit stories). I prayed the mosquito net over my bed would keep out any wandering spiders:

And their webbing is like rope. I accidentally walked into a strand on my way up from Book Space, Erna's little shop where people can buy copies of her hard-to-find books, and I bounced back before it broke.

We dined with Erna at 6 in the house. She made fresh guava juice from the guavas (I couldn't get enough!) and she's a strict vegetarian (“I haven't eaten flesh since 1980”) but her son Timothy made chicken for us meat eaters. He is a classically trained pianist studying music ed at SUNY Buffalo. And in that wonderful mix of modern and provincial life (like Right Said Fred's “I'm Too Sexy” blaring from the small house across the road), he was playing the video game Grand Theft Auto while we had tea earlier that afternoon. We spoke about the chickens she used to raise at the house, how they were named after British Queens, (the roosters had plain boy names), and the day Timothy came home looking for his favorite chicken only to discover it had been cooked for dinner. He couldn't bring himself to eat it, which got me thinking how difficult it is to eat something you've named. After dinner we settled down to watch Erna's guilty pleasure, the soap opera The Young and the Restless.

I should mention their magic cat, Jerry. Jerry is a slinky kitty. He has a white body with gray patches like islands or continents. When Terry (his sister? Mate?) abandoned her newborns, he became their surrogate mother and offered his body for warmth. But without the teat, they died.

Here's Jerry on my bed. I don't know where he was that night, but he had green stickers all over his head and ears. I groomed him, and he was eternally grateful, purring through slitted eyes:

Jerry evidently hasn't been pulling his weight around the house (read: catching mice) so Timothy has cut his food rations. This makes for a very loud Jerry as he begs for food all day. But Jerry is magical. He appears and disappears at will. One moment I turned and he was peering at me through the wood slat shutter on the window, literally a cat on a tin roof. The next moment I saw his shadow around the corner—he somehow made it inside to have his shadow cast from that angle, but when I turned the corner he was opposite the locked door, meowing, and not inside at all.

The next day, morning flooded Woodside with that early lemon light. Kei and I went for a walk before breakfast to see the Church which used to be the Great House for the area's plantation. We passed a stinking pile of Otahiti (pear-shaped, apple-like fruit) knocked down to the steam's banks by yesterday's storms, and we passed many school children. The boys wore a brownish almost khaki colored uniform, like boy scouts, and the girls white blouses and plaid jumpers. Two girls took particular notice of us: “Two white men! Whiteys!” Now Kei is clearly not white (as you'll see) and so we found it amusing that they used the term “whitey” to mean not just someone with white skin, but someone who was clearly a foreigner or not of their community.

The girls were Halyssa (the older; sounds like Alyssa but with an H sound) and Brit-tany (the younger, not pronounced Brittany) and Halyssa had no fear. She took Kei and me by the hand and let us right up to the Church, switching between patois and English as she warned me about the wasps and told me about the history she knew. Behind the church were many graves, and when she took a stone off one and through it, I warned her that the grave's duppy would come haunt her that night.

Here's Kei with Halyssa:

Here I am with both girls:

And here's the church:

They loved the camera. Halyssa asked me to take a picture of the man down the hill, in the field:

We finally encouraged Halyssa to get to school or she'd be late, and her sister Brit-tany, suspicious of us from the beginning, stood on the school hill with her hands on her hips and shouted “Halyssa. Come! Enough whitey!”

We walked down some other roads, past the community center, and took some more pics. Here's one of the distant mountains, and the Flame of the Forest flowers in the canopy:

And one of me:

We returned to Erna's and had breakfast. This time she brewed some lemon grass tea, again from natural plants in her yard, and we talked about how she didn't think I was American. She thought I was English, or at least European. This happened to me before when I was in Ireland and the people wouldn't believe I was American. “Too articulate to be an American.” Before we left I bought a copy of Brodber's new novel, The Rainmaker's Mistake and as we drove to the coast to start our day of beaches and waterfalls, the rain followed.

Next up: Ocho Rios.