In my new school I would be wearing a four-pleated box skirt and a cream-coloured blouse edged in burgundy – not the navy blue tunic and white blouse I had worn all my life. I would not be free to pick and choose whichever shoes I felt like wearing, but would be required to wear dark brown shoes with dark brown socks every day. And there would be all those students I did not know. Students from preparatory schools. A bubble started forming in my throat that kept growing larger and larger. My eyes began to sting and burn. Before long, the walls of the principal’s office dissolved in tears. Already change had begun to set in. This morning as I’d walked into class, an eerie silence settled over the entire room. I didn’t know what to make of the silence. Were my classmates happy for me? Were they sad for themselves? I made to walk over to the group of girls who’d been my friends for the past six years, but they closed the circle and left me standing outside of it. One of the girls, Raphaelita, a girl who had stayed at my house when her parents first left for New York, whispered, loud enough for me to hear, “And I guess she thinks she’s all that!”
The group broke into laughter.
“I’ll be going to New York soon, anyway,” Raphaelita bragged, “and I don’t need to go to any stupid high school in Jamaica!”
I turned from Raphaelita to Natasha to Nicole, but they all screwed up their faces, letting me know I was no longer welcome in the group. The tears came and I started fumbling in my pocket for the handkerchief I usually carried, but it wasn’t there. I was making such a mess of everything.
“Come now, Gloria,” the principal said, coming from behind his desk and putting a heavy arm around my shoulders, “this is a day of celebration, not tears. You can always come back to visit us, you know.” He handed me his handkerchief. “In fact, I insist on it. Promise me you’ll come back to see us. Right, Miss English?” he said, looking over at my teacher and winking.
Looking at the principal through the heavy curtain of my tears, I suddenly did not care if he was really a rum-head as most people said he was, that he could be found singing loudly in bars all over Kingston every Friday night after he got paid. I didn’t care if Miss English acted more English than the real English people did, pretending she couldn’t speak or understand a word of plain Jamaican patois. I was suddenly ashamed of the times I joined in the laughter and made fun of the way she walked, her two knees knocking against each other. None of this mattered any more.
When I got a hold of my crying the principal handed me a brown paper bag. Inside were three books: two Nancy Drew mysteries (my absolute favourites!), and a book by someone I did not know, an H.G. De Lisser, who, the principal said, was from Jamaica. I took the books out of the bag and ran my hands over the hard covers, tracing the spines. In my mind I could see the words tumbling over each other, swift like the river near Grandy’s house after a hard shower of rain. I would read each book twice. They would become part of my personal stash. I would never lend them out.
“Thank you so much,” I finally managed to say and smiled up at the principal.
“You’re very welcome!”
It was the end of April. Before long I would be off, spending my summer holidays with my grandmother in the country. Sophie, Monique, Junie and that girl Yvette were all there. Plus there was Nilda and Denise in my yard. Who needed the girls at school anyway?
Three women were standing outside the yard, talking, as I walked home from school that evening: Miss Christie, Nadia Blue, and Miss Sarah.
Miss Christie lived in one of the cottages in the back of the yard near the standpipe with her daughter Denise who’d just had a baby. Five years ago when Miss Christie moved into the yard, everyone wondered who this yellow-skinned green-eyed woman with her red-skinned hazel-eyed daughter was. It was obvious she came from some kind of class and standing. Gradually the story came out and Mama’s sympathy was rewarded with a performance.
Miss Christie had disgraced her Upper St. Andrew family when she got pregnant by a married man, a well-known businessman much older than Miss Christie who made sure both she and their daughter were well taken care of. While he was alive, Miss Christie lived in an apartment in New Kingston with helpers to take care of their every need – Denise attended one of the island’s best preparatory schools.
During this time Miss Christie kept pressing the man to leave his wife; to marry her. “Karl, I can’t stand this life I leading any more! You and I both know you no longer love the old witch you call a wife – if you ever did. So why don’t you leave her? Why don’t you just pack up your things and move in with us?”
“In time,” Karl kept promising. But the man never left his wife, and after a while Miss Christie got used to him staying with her a couple nights and going home the other nights. Over the years there were many terrible fights with the wife who accused Miss Christie of being a home-wrecker, of flaunting in her face the many things Karl bought her. Worst was the time the wife found out where she lived and turned up at the apartment in New Kingston.
“You will never get him!” The wife flung at the closed door, all the neighbours looking out. “If you think you’ll ever get him, you’re dreaming some kind of dream.”
The wife was a tiny Chinese woman, no more than five feet tall, and Miss Christie had been surprised how loud her voice could be. She’d let the woman carry on outside her door for as long as she could, hoping she would get tired and go away, but after a while she saw that if she wanted the woman to leave, she’d have to shame her in front of the people gathered outside.
“I have him more than you do!” The wife brandished her gold wedding band. “What you got to show for yourself? If you had any decency, any decency at all, you would let this married man alone and his children!”
“I got this apartment to show!” Miss Christie replied triumphantly. “I have this apartment, the car outside, all the furniture I could possibly want and a bank book full of money!”
“You think so eh?” The wife was frothing at the mouth. “Well, I will show you who have this apartment! I will show you who have the car outside! I will show you who really own the furniture inside of that house! As for the bank book full of money!”
The wife was close to tears. She could not believe Karl was doing this to her. Her father had made Karl, had given him everything he now had, and this was how he had chosen to repay her? When she first brought him home, her family nearly had a heart attack. A black man. Lin had brought home a black man. And not even a nice brown-skin black man, but one as black as midnight. They tried talking her out of it. Asked her to consider-the-consequences-of-her-actions. The “confusion” of any children. The-difficulty-of-fitting-in. But Lin turned out to be more stubborn than even they knew. Stuck by Karl, bore him five strong boys (whom the grandparents now adored), and her parents had given Karl the money he needed to start his now-flourishing business and this was how Karl had decided to repay her? Karl would be sorry. So very sorry.
Miss Christie was not prepared for what happened next. In fact, she hinted late one night to my mother, when they were both sitting outside on the verandah and talking, it was down right suspicious. For the strapping healthy man just keeled over one day in his office and died. Not even one month later. His secretary came in and found him with some green thing coming out of his mouth.
“Just