Not for Everyday Use Page 4

  My grandfather was the headmaster of the only school in a forested area in the middle of Trinidad. He’d had a classical education in the old colonial schools in Trinidad. He had studied Greek and Latin, and even after he graduated from secondary school, he continued to be tutored in classical Greek. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were his favorites. I too had studied Homer in secondary school, though by then Greek was removed from the curriculum. (Latin through forms one to five remained.) In my classes we read George Chapman’s translation of Homer, which Keats had praised, except in his poem Keats had made a mistake. It was not the “stout Cortez” with his “eagle eyes” who first “star’d at the Pacific”; it was the great Vasco Núñez de Balboa. Miffed that the British colonial ministry of education, which determined the textbooks for the schools, would allow children in the West Indies to be confused by Keats’s error, my grandfather promptly changed his name to Nunez in protest. All his children followed suit, except his second son, Winston, who was light-skinned and already under the wings of Presbyterian missionaries from Canada who promised to take him there. In Canada, my uncle found it easier to pass as a white man with the name Nunes rather than Nunez. He became a famous minister of an extensive evangelical congregation, married a white Canadian woman, and had “white” Canadian children. Neither his wife nor his children ever set foot in Trinidad during my grandparents’ long life.

  The dentist had asked me for photographs of my grandfather and father, and after examining them, he declared that they both had the Jewish nose, and except for the color of their skins, they could pass for Jews, my father a dead ringer for Saul Bellow, he said. If I had the photograph of my great-grandfather Antonio Nunes to show him, the dentist would have had more ammunition to support his conviction. But after my grandmother died, the photograph of my great-grandfather strangely disappeared. It had hung in the corridor of my grandparents’ house for years, that photograph of a Portuguese man with a perfectly trimmed black mustache and a long, curved nose.

  “You have the nose too,” the dentist declared.

  My nose is not as long or curved as some of my brothers’ noses, but I am often taken for South Asian Indian or Arab or Ethiopian. After 9/11, my brother Gregory had to shave off his beard. His resemblance to a relative of Osama Bin Laden was too strong. But no one had ever said that any of us looked Jewish. The dentist was certain though. “Of course your surname had to be Nunes,” he said. “I know it could not be Nunez. Nunes is a good Portuguese Jewish name.”

  Whether my great-grandfather Antonio Nunes was Jewish or not, I cannot say for certain, but I do know he married an African woman, Ann Rose Dormor, the daughter of a freed slave.

  Slavery had been abolished in 1834 in the British colonies, ending hundreds of years of free forced labor by Africans but leaving the plantation owners desperate for workers for the sugarcane and cocoa plantations. The British colonizers raked their colonies in China and India, promising passage back to the homeland or five acres of land to anyone who was willing to enter a contract of indentured labor for five years. They sought Europeans too. The imbalance between the white and colored populations in the West Indian colonies was too severe, too threatening. There were too few of them, too many blacks. What if the blacks revolted? So they promised Europeans large swaths of land on the islands if they would emigrate.

  When the Portuguese first came to Trinidad they were so poor and so unsophisticated that even the black people did not consider them white. But it did not take the Portuguese long to realize that in the colonies their skin color was worth money, and there was much to gain by aligning themselves with the British colonizer. They established the Portuguese Club in Port of Spain, the capital of the island, and banned all people of color from membership. In other words, the Portuguese decided to become white. James Baldwin, the African American writer, would observe a similar phenomenon in the United States. Jews, he was reputed to have said, did not become white until they immigrated to America where blacks were the ones who were persecuted.

  Antonio Nunes could have come to Trinidad simply to make his fortune, and not, as my brother Richard claims, to escape anti-Semitism in Portugal. But if indeed he was one of the Portuguese Presbyterian Jews who had converted out of fear of persecution, it seemed he had decided not to throw in his lot with them. Unlike many of the Portuguese, he did not go into the grocery business; he chose instead to work on the cocoa plantation. It was there his Portuguese son Antonio Nunes Jr. met my great-grandmother, Ann Rose Dormor.

  Ann Rose Dormor’s father had been enslaved, but when he was emancipated, he made sure that his only daughter was educated. Every day he drove her by horse and buggy from Arouca in the east to Port of Spain in the west, two hours each way, most of the trip on unpaved dirt roads, so she could go to Tranquility, the only school for black people that went beyond the elementary level. So we know that Ann Rose valued education. When her husband died, she made certain that her children were educated. One son, who kept the name Nunes, was an organist and a pianist. He immigrated to the US in 1919 to join the Louis Mitchell jazz band and was still a member when they played at the Casino de Paris in France. Later, he became a successful dentist in Harlem. Another son was my grandfather, Antonio Nunes/Nunez, who was a school headmaster and a forest warden.

  That the Portuguese man married my great-grandmother, an African woman, rather than live with her without the sanction of the law or the blessing of the church, as was common between a white man and a black woman, was a source of pride in our family. With such forebears, with great-grandparents whose marriage lasted until the death of my great-grandfather, with my grandparents’ as well as my parents’ many-decades-long marriages and their commitment to family, how could I have ended my marriage after two years even though I knew then it was doomed? How could I have pulled my son away from the home where his father lived? I’d had the good fortune to grow up with my father in our home; my father had had the same good fortune, and his father the same. So I stayed in my marriage until my son left for college. But I had no point of reference in my own life to know the kind of love a man could have for his wife that would lead him to offer his life for hers, even if in the depths of his heart he hoped he would not have to make such a choice. I did not have my mother’s good luck.

  Years later my son, riddled with guilt, would wonder if he had robbed me of the chance to find such love. I told him what my father had told my siblings and me: we had not asked to be born; he and our mother had chosen to have us. They were responsible for us, not the other way around. They owed us; we didn’t owe them. Still, I was envious of my parents’ good luck, their long-lasting marriage.

  5

  I am alone in the den, sitting on the sofa, sipping the fourth cup of tea I have had since I arrived a mere hour and an half ago. Jacqueline and Judith have gone to the funeral home to make the arrangements for my mother’s burial. My eyes are trained on the TV in front of me though I neither hear nor see what is on the screen. My head is in a fog, the impossibility of my mother’s absence blocking every other thought or sensation from entering my brain. This is my mother’s home. I am in her house, her den, watching her TV. How could the house exist without her! It is a cruel joke that bricks and mortar have longer lives than we, breathing intelligent beings. How they mock us, we who were their creators!

  I do not hear when Petra comes to the den until she speaks: “She tell me thank you.”

  I turn to face her. Her polished skin shines in the startlingly bright sunlight pouring through the kitchen door and down the corridor to the entrance of the den where she is standing, her face stiff with grief.

  “She tell me so last night. I don’t mean yesterday before she had a stroke and can’t speak. She tell me the night before. I was getting ready to leave and she come in the kitchen and say, Thank you, Petra, for all you did for me. God bless you. I loved Mrs. Nunez, don’t mind she sometimes get over fussy with me, but I loved her. Yes, that is what she did. She say, Thank you, Petra.”


  Petra’s eyes are open wide, as if propped up by invisible wires. She too cannot believe my mother is not here to fuss with her, to complain that the eggs she made in the morning are too hard, that there was dust in the corners of the corridor that she missed when she swept the day before. The film of moisture across her eyes glistens, but like me, she does not let the tears fall.

  What is it about us Trinidadians? Did we inherit the British fears too, the stiff upper lip meant to suppress hysteria inevitable if one surrenders oneself to the onslaught of one’s emotions?

  Or was it insanity we feared, that old canard about black magic in the Caribbean, about the tropical sun heating up the blood?

  The novelist Jean Rhys, a white Creole from the English West Indian colony of Dominica, would feel compelled to defend her people against that lie. In her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys takes on Charlotte Brontë, not at all persuaded to sympathize with Rochester, the Englishman who imprisons his white Creole wife, Bertha, in the attic. His wife had gone mad, Brontë’s Rochester explains to Jane Eyre, the pure Englishwoman. And Brontë leaves it to the reader to assume that it was Bertha’s West Indian upbringing that had brought on her madness.

  Not so, says Rhys. It is Rochester who drove Bertha mad, not the West Indies. When West Indian critic Wally Look Lai asks her why she wrote Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys is unequivocal: “The mad wife in Jane Eyre always interested me. I was convinced that Charlotte Brontë must have had something against the West Indies, and I was angry about it. Otherwise, why did she take a West Indian for the horrible lunatic, for that really dreadful creature? I hadn’t really formulated the idea of vindicating the mad woman in the novel but when I was rediscovered I was encouraged to do so.”

  And yet I cannot deny the rumors about my mother’s family. My father watched us closely as we were growing up. I was the first child he had with my mother, so he kept a particularly close eye on me. I was a nervous child, he seemed to believe. I am told I cried a lot when I was a baby; perhaps I suffered from colic. I know I had a sensitive stomach. I was all of ninety-seven pounds when I was nineteen, the year I first came to America. But I wasn’t a nervous child. I was an anxious child, anxious to please a father looking for fissures in the mask I wore to conceal my emotions and a mother needing to prove there wouldn’t be any. To get their approval, to put them at ease, I learned early to control outward expressions of my feelings, as I do now, remaining dry-eyed though it is mere hours since I learned of my mother’s death.

  But what about Petra? I doubt she had such demons in her family history. She stands in front of me, wreathed in grief, her eyes boring into mine, no tears, her bottom lip clenched between her teeth. She releases her lip only to repeat, “I did love her.”

  Did the British teach Petra to repress her emotions? Did they persuade us all with their talk about character, about how character distinguishes man from beast, about how the beast has no control over its reactions, but man, on the other hand, uses reason to suppress the passions?

  If the exuberance of our steel pan music, the sensuality of our calypsos, the raucous abandonment on display on the streets during our Carnival celebrating our joy in being alive, in being human, are any evidence, then surely the colonizers have failed miserably. Surely we know that to be human is to think and to feel. Surely we know that character is not shaped by the unnatural denial of emotions but by values such as integrity, compassion, justice. By our emotional response to the cold, steel edge of cruelty.

  Still, there is something about Trinidadians which crosses all levels of social class. Behind stone faces, behind the wide grin, behind the stoicism that Petra now displays, is a dam. When it fills to the brim, it explodes. Then run for cover if you are in the way of the people’s fury, their scorn, their grief.

  6

  Petra returns to the kitchen. Minutes later I hear the creak of my father’s bedroom door opening. He hasn’t been able to sleep. I take a deep breath and wait, anticipating his insistent demands for proof. My mother was alive when he left the hospital. He won’t believe she is dead unless he has proof, unless he sees her lifeless body.

  He is dressed in a tuxedo, the broad lapels on the jacket gleaming, the silken ribbon running down the sides of the pants reflecting the bright morning sun. “Daddy,” I say, alarmed, “what is it you have on? Where do you think we are going?”

  He looks at me bewildered, and suddenly my mind skitters to the time, mere months ago, when I had seen him wearing the very same tuxedo. I was in my parents’ home, sprawled out in shorts and tank top on a cushioned chair in the veranda, beaten down by the midafternoon heat. My mother had come running toward me, panting for breath, her face flushed. “Come, help me, Elizabeth. We have to get your father dressed.” She wanted him to go with her to the funeral of a man they knew who was active in their parish church—but my father, like me, was taking his afternoon nap.

  Is this the day my father is remembering, the day my mother helped him dress for a funeral? Is this why he is wearing the tuxedo? Have my words finally penetrated his brain, found a slit in the crust that has been imprisoning his memory? “Mummy did die,” I had said to him. “She died last night.” Has he finally accepted his wife is no longer alive, that she will not be coming home? Not ever?

  I had followed my mother into her bedroom that day. My father was curled up in the bed, his chest rising and falling softly with each breath he took. I did not want to disturb him. “Tell him he has to get up, Elizabeth,” my mother commanded when I hesitated. I knew that tone, that stern voice she used, and those lips, the top one clenched stiffly over the bottom one, deepening the ridges that cut down the sides of her mouth to her chin. I was over sixty years old, but that voice and that lip still had the power to propel me into action. It amazes me as I write this that at my advanced age I would have allowed my mother to intimidate me, but it is not age that severs the umbilical cord that links child to parent; it is death. So long as my mother was alive, I was her daughter, her child.

  I did my best to coax my father into sitting up. My mother was already riffling through his closet. “Here, Waldo.” She handed him a pair of pants. “Put this on.” It was the pants to a tuxedo outfit, the silk stripe down each leg shimmering against the dull black fabric. I could have told her then that a tuxedo is the wrong suit to wear to a funeral, but she would already have known that. She was in a hurry. Her hand had fallen on the first dark suit in my father’s closet. She didn’t have time to correct her mistake, to wait for him to change his clothes.

  My mother was one of the most stylish women I knew. Even in the days when my father struggled to put food on the table for a wife and their ten children (Judith was not yet born when money was scarce in our family), my mother was always fashionably dressed. She had an uncanny sense of style and could wear her skirts, tops, and dresses in such different ways that it was difficult to tell how few clothes she actually had. On Parents’ Day, I couldn’t wait for her to come to my school. She was always the best dressed of the mothers. But that day when my mother handed my father a tuxedo to wear to a funeral, being fashionably dressed was the last thought on her mind.

  “Come on, Waldo,” she hurried my father along. “I don’t want to be late. We have to leave now . . . Elizabeth! Elizabeth, let’s go now!”

  Did she expect me to drive them to the funeral? My mother knew how to drive, though she had not been behind the wheel of a car in more than fifty years. My father had taught her out of necessity. He had just been promoted in the colonial office of the Ministry of Labour, and it was difficult for him to find the time to take my mother shopping. One day, just months after my mother got her license, he decided to drive with her down Frederick Street to test her skills. Frederick Street was then the busiest street in our capital city, the epicenter of our department stores, fancy offices, and restaurants. From the moment my father got into the car he began haranguing my mother, as he usually did, about all the mistakes she was making. She was either going too fast or too slow; she hadn�
�t seen a pedestrian crossing in front of her, or she hadn’t stopped firmly enough at a stop sign. My mother did not say a word, but at some point she’d had enough. She stepped on the brake and the car came to a screeching halt in the middle of the road. Drivers honked their horns behind her. It was midafternoon and the sun was brutal. Air-conditioning in cars was not yet common on our island. “Move your car, lady!” the drivers shouted angrily. My mother ignored them. She opened the car door, got out, and without a word slipped into the backseat.

  I imagine my father was totally shocked, but more than that, he was mortified. They were in the middle of Port of Spain. Some of his friends and coworkers had surely been witness to my mother striding haughtily out of the car and my father sliding sheepishly over to the driver’s seat.

  How many times had I wished I had the courage to do what my mother had done, not just to stuff the mouth shut of some quarrelsome person, but to punish him as well!

  Now, my father is standing in front of me, dressed in a tuxedo to go to see his wife. “Are you ready to take me to the hospital?” he asks.

  I get up and switch off the TV. Will I tell him he has to change his clothes? Do I have the courage to say that his wife is not in the hospital? I can feel him behind me. I know if I turn around I will be a hair’s breath away from him. I step to the side and fiddle with the books on the shelf above the TV. When I do not answer him, my father says irritably: “You can drive, can’t you?”

  He knows I know how to drive, and though his question is probably innocent, once again I am flung backward in time, to another age when I was a teenager on the verge of adulthood. My father has taught my older sister and brother to drive. David, the brother under me, teaches himself. When it’s Jacqueline’s turn, the sister younger than David, my father teaches her too. He does not teach me. I am under scrutiny. He is looking for signs that the genes from my mother’s family have not been passed on to me. He cannot be sure I have nerves steady enough to maneuver my way through Trinidad’s narrow two-way streets, or whether my reflexes will be sharp enough to avoid colliding with the oncoming traffic.