Letter to Mother Over in Away

Used with permission from the author

I’m alive today because of Powder, I want you to know that, Ma. You might remember him. Some call him Mad Eric. He walks about the village naked, carrying a rusty cutlass and with his body covered in white powder. Everyone says he’s crazy. People are so scared of him they scamper in the opposite direction when they see him coming. Powder saved me. Had I not run into him on my way home from school that day, you might’ve had to come home to bury me two years ago.

However, I know you’re more interested in finding out if I’ve made a decision than in what happened on the road between me and Powder, so I will come back to that. I’ve thought about it long and hard and have decided that my ultimate decision will be based on how you respond to this letter, how you answer a question I have for you. If that sounds arrogant, I don’t really care. What you might call arrogance is a self-confidence passed down from our ancestors. Like the brightness of my eyes. The body of my laugh. The shape of my feet, which Gran-Gran claims look like yams. I know that you’ve made comments to the family that you think I was crazy after I told you about my ordeal, so hearing that I believe in the ancestors will probably fortify that notion. Think what you like, but I have good reason to believe in ancestral spirits.

The dose of self-confidence they gifted me at birth was stolen by that man you call your brother, who, from now on and forevermore, I will only refer to as Shite-Eater because his breath smelled as if he ate shite for breakfast, lunch, and supper. I managed to retrieve my self-confidence under the threat of death, you can almost say. So, let me say this to you: after 12 years of you not seeing me, 4 years of not hearing from me, I may be a mystery to you, but I’m not delusional, nor crazy, no matter what you or anyone in this family might think.

I know you think that you’ve done a great job preparing this wonderful place for me and Jasmine in Harlesden. To you, going to England was the best thing you could’ve done, and working in a hotel alongside white people, the accomplishment of your life. You’re closer to your precious Queen and quite pleased with yourself, I bet, for rising so far in the world. From plantation labourer to sipping tea with Londoners in the Queen’s backyard. How glorious you must feel when you wake up in the morning. But you know what? I couldn’t give two farts.

If I do decide to come to England, I’m giving you notice that you will have to work very hard for me to forgive you. Getting that chance will depend on how you answer my question. There is my arrogance again, but you’ll just have to deal with it. As a show of good faith, I will let you in on few basic things about me, things you won’t know because you simply haven’t been around. White is my favourite color. My favourite singers are Marvin Gaye and Bob Marley. Recently, I acquired a passion for poetry, I guess because it can encompass so many deep emotions in a few words and my life is nothing if not a bottomless well of emotions. My favourite poet is William Blake, though he did not write my favourite poem. That would be: I Carry Your Heart with Me, by E.E. Cummins, probably because Pa-Pa used to recite it to me. He told me he used to recite it to you when you were a little girl, though it’s hard to believe considering how little of it, if any, you appear to have taken to heart.

When you abandoned me at five to go serve tea in the mother country, you left me in a culture cursed with self-loathing, and that is what those around me, in your absence, perhaps unwittingly, tried to feed me as nourishment for my spirit. It had poisoned them and you, and it almost poisoned me. But no matter how they sugar-coated it, self-loathing in my mouth could never pass for the chocolate flavour I imagined your love would have if I ever got to taste it.

A week after Pa-Pa, my protector, died, Gran-Gran sent me to live with Shite-Eater, separating me from the only other lifeline I had, Jasmine, who she kept with her. I know Gran-Gran told you she did it because I was too wild, too hard to control. Yes, I may’ve given her back-chat a few times, or refused to sweep the yard when ordered. And yes, I loved to play and would sneak out at night to go steal mangoes with the boys. Did that mean I deserved to be thrown into the lion’s den?

From that day, Shite-Eater embarked on a mission to break my will. For a while, I believed that though you hadn’t kept your promise to return ‘soon’ surely you would hurry back to rescue me from him. I hate to bring it up again but, at the airport, just before you boarded that B.O.A.C. jet that rainy Saturday evening, you said you’d send for us soon. I remember your words. You didn’t say “as soon as possible”, as you claimed later. You said “soon”. In my 5-year-old unnuanced universe, “soon” was the next two or three months. Perhaps, six months. A year at most. To me, soon didn’t mean 12 years. Soon didn’t mean I would get to be handed around like a toy until you remembered to reclaim me. It sure as hell shouldn’t have meant that I would become a slave to that degenerate sloth with no way of escape other than suicide.

Do you remember your response after I wrote to tell you that Shite-Eater took me to a cane-field and raped me? You wrote back that I was conceived in a cane-field. That was your gesture of motherly concern at the horror I’d gone through. A fucking history lesson! Beyond the abandonment, that response was a betrayal which has nurtured years of regret and loathing. That, dear mother, is the reason you didn’t hear from me for 4 years, the reason I never replied to any of your letters since, not until Jasmine excitedly informed me that you were planning to send for us. I couldn’t share her exuberance, but I understood. What I don’t understand, never understood, or may never understand, is how my conception story was your reaction to my cry for help. I was convinced that either you didn’t believe me or simply didn’t care.

After a lot of soul-searching and reading about our country’s complex past, I can say I understand perfectly the foundation of your inferiority complex, Mother, which made it easy for you to choose to abandon your children. The silent cry of displacement is our country’s legacy: children snatched from the arms of enslaved mothers; men sold from plantation to plantation, disappearing in the middle of the night; emigrants wandering the world (Panama Canal, Windrush, farm workers in North America) like hungry rats. You thought I would be safe, but how could I be safe when I was surrounded by demons and invalids born out of that pain? I needed woman-stories from your lips. I needed you telling me it was okay to be a wild child; that you would protect me as I explored the woods; that my breasts, my back, my eyelids, my entire body were works of genius and imagination which could not be unraveled without magic. Instead, I was left to the wiles of Shite-Eater, an invalid who looked in the mirror and saw a monster staring back at him and who thought that destroying me could destroy the monster in him.

Self-loathing is as pervasive in Barbados as the Anglican religion. They may be proud Bajans, but the women who demanded I bow to them as role models run as far away from their blackness as animals do from an earthquake.

Girl, why you don’t come out the sun? You en black enough already?

Do you think that’s the kind of advice I needed about the virtue of the skin I was born in? What’s the chance of comments like that instilling self-confidence in young girls?

Yuh know, you’d be a nice-looking girl if yuh wasn’t so dark!

Now, that one is a real frigging morale booster, don’t you think? After hearing that shite, you really want to go out and conquer the world.

Girl, yuh nose wide enough to hold a lorry! Where you mother find you?

That’s the one that really used to get to me. You almost become convinced that only fair-skinned, thin-nosed babies were born to mothers who raised them with love. The rest of us were found abandoned in the bush, to be raised by some kind-hearted soul. Talk about a kick to the womb! But it was that kick which made me determined to win. Fight back the tears or hide behind a tree and cry if you have to, but never let them see how much they’ve hurt you.

You were raised in this angry culture which probably made you hate yourself, and us along with it, so, I can almost understand how you could abandon Jasmine and me. Almost.

My high school teachers say I’m bright; some have even said I’m precocious, wise beyond my years. I passed eight o’levels this year, and I’m studying for A-levels. But sometimes, I don’t care at all about being precocious or even bright. I feel so broken. So totally broken. So raw. So angry. So disillusioned. But, I’m alive, something I wouldn’t have predicted two years ago.

I read somewhere that the body does what the body does naturally, no matter what your expectations might be at the time. That during rape, it responds the way it does naturally in fearful situations, or under acute stress, with rapid heartbeat and adrenaline release and there are times when this can lead to the manifestations of arousal. To some survivors of rape, learning that their body’s response during this inhuman act was out of their control might be a minor consolation, and could even help with healing, but while it addressed the confusion I felt when it happened to me, the information offered no solace whatsoever beyond that. Feeling as if your body is betraying you, or has betrayed you, is the loneliest feeling in the world. When you read romantic novels the way I did from the time I was about ten until age fifteen, you develop a clear sense of what love and sex are supposed to be like when you reach that stage in your life. Having someone come along and seize that fantasy right out of your grasp and contaminate it, then try to feed it back to you as something you desired, then there is no outlet after that but to question your sanity.

So, even though there were times when Shite-Eater thought my body was responding to his mashing, it was always just that. Mashing up my body. Was never anything more in my mind, no matter how many times he whined his love for me. Even as my vagina responded contrary to my wishes, acting as if no world existed beyond the secretion of its protective oil, it was still just mashing. Mashing up my body. About five times a week he would come to mash up my body, breaking down the door if I was impertinent enough to lock it. And every time, I felt defiled and abused and wished I could die during the act. Sometimes, I left my body behind, spinning my mind and spirit off to that place William Blake wrote about in a poem called The Little Girl Found. A magical place where I slept among tigers. A place where the earth tumbled off and Heaven began. A place where I was invisible to Shite-Eater’s foaming.

This occasional treachery committed by my body reassured and encouraged Shite-Eater. Not that he needed any encouragement. I’m convinced he would still have raped me had I bled like a stuck pig each time, which sometimes I did. The shame I felt created a thick slimly feeling of ugliness which was like a rope around my throat.

Which brings me to Powder. That day I ran into Powder, I was on my way home from school prepared to end it all. I had stashed some rope behind the pig-pen and was rushing to retrieve it before anyone else got home. My plan was to sling it over the mango tree in the yard and… well. But there he was, standing in the middle of the road, a naked white wraith, with his rusty cutlass dangling at his side. We were the only two on the road. Everyone else had scattered in whatever direction took them to safety. This road was the shortest way home; to turn around and take a longer route would’ve made it difficult to get there before Shite-Eater’s wife (the hunchback, I called her). She worked at a school nearby and usually got home around the same time I did.

What were the chances of Powder letting me pass? I’d never heard of anyone challenging his majesty of the road. What would he do if I asked him politely to let me by? What if I told him I had an important rendezvous with destiny? Would that be enough to sway him? Maybe I could sneak past. His face harboured a drunken expression, and he was thin, almost drawn, with muscled calves and long but stiff-looking legs. I was athletic and nimble; surely, I could outrun this drunk fool.

And then, the thought hit me. Why run at all? Why not let Powder do what I was going to do myself anyway? Perhaps to die at Powder’s hands was my destiny. It certainly would be far more dignified. Like a sacrifice to whatever demons lived in Powder’s head. As I stood thinking these things, fighting the urge to pee, I became acutely aware that the merry chirping of blackbirds in a nearby soursop tree sounded like laughter. And at that moment, I thought about you for some strange reason. I remembered the way you used to sing in the yard when you washed clothes, especially on Sunday mornings. The raw exuberance in mimicking Aretha Franklyn, when briefly you forgot that you were the always-stern mother raising two little girls in a one-room apartment, and was just a woman yearning for love and respect. And then, I wondered if you missed me.

A gust of wind blew up dust from the unpaved road as Powder inched towards me. In the bright sunlight, he looked like a moving museum piece, his naked painted whiteness reminding me of pictures I’d seen of tribal Africans in a National Geographic magazine. I can’t say that my mind was made up either way (to run or to stay and die), but I know I did not or could not move. Fear had rooted me to the spot. I stood there stiff as the sea cliffs as he crept closer with that big knife in his hand.

I whispered to myself: Girl, cover your face so his eyes don’t make you pee yourself (village lore had it that looking into Powder’s eyes made you pee yourself). Peeing oneself, even on the doorstep of death, could not be dignified. I quietly began to recite “I Carry Your Heart” but, it was hard to look away from his orangey-red eyes which seemed to radiate a light that pulsed past my eyelids and into my mind, quickly erasing all memory of my pain and replacing it with a magical sense of hot iron.

He stopped within a breath of me and flicked his tongue out like a lizard. “Who you?”

I managed to whisper my name.

“Where you going, Oneida?” He asked.

“I… I going home.”

“You know who I is?”

I nodded.

“You en frighten fuh me?”

What possessed me to say no? Couldn’t tell you, but that’s what I said. No. Big and bold. Maybe it was the rum fumes coming off him that drunkened me. Or, that sense of hot iron infiltrating my mind; or, as I now believe, it was the ancestors bracing my spine. I shook my head first, and then, even though my heart felt as if it wanted to fly through my mouth, I whispered the word. No.

He laughed and flicked his tongue out again. Maybe he was a lizard who had shapeshifted into a man.

“You see this cutlass in my hand?”

I’d used up all my courage. My voice was now dead. I nodded.

“And you still en frighten?”

I shook my head.

“People ’bout here does call me Mad Eric. You know why?”

He didn’t wait for me to answer, which I appreciated because I couldn’t.

“Because I does walk with duppies,” His voice sounded as if he had hot soup in his mouth. “But Mad Eric en my name. My name is Manjack. I don’t mind them calling me Powder, but not Mad Eric. You hear me?”

Again, I nodded.

He rubbed the cutlass against my cheek. “I proudly admit to walking and talking with duppies. They tell me things. They got knowledge for people who can open their ears. And they protect me from malicious people. People saying I mad because them en got the power I got. Them en know the things I know. Them en see the things I see. Them en hear the things I hear. And them jealous. You tell them this the next time you hear them saying that I mad. Tell them that Manjack know who he is.”

My urge to pee had fled, but I continued to squeeze my legs together because it seemed to give me the confidence to look him in the face.

“Yuh know why you en frighten for me?”

Again, he answered his own question without waiting for my response.

“Because you en from around here. Me neither. I en from around here. And I believe you will be able to hear things that others can’t hear. Just like me. You going be able to see things that others can’t see. Just like me. Me and you is the same. Like two roses. You know why rose trees got pimplers? To protect the roses. Because people always want to cut them off. And you know what does happen to a rose when you cut it off the tree. You understand what I saying?”

I nodded.

“We special. Don’t ever forget that,” he gurgled. “How old you is?”

“Thirteen,” I managed to gurgle, almost as if I’d caught his soup-in-mouth disease.

“I want you to promise me something. Promise me you going to live. Live your own life. You hear me? You’s a beautiful girl. And you going to do great things in life. I see it in your eyes. Just go and live yuh life and the ancestors will protect you.”

I’m not sure if he could read the reaction on my face when he uttered those words, but you could’ve knocked me down with a cotton ball. I was beyond stunned. You see, I was given that advice, in almost those identical words, about two years before.

“You go ‘long now,” Powder finished. “And don’t leh them steal your power. Don’t leh them destroy you.”

I picked up my feet and ran all the way home. Powder’s eyes and words had completely obliterated the idea of the rope from my mind. In fact, I did not even go looking for it then or any other time.

That night, I did not eat, though that’s nothing unusual. In my room (my jail, I call it), I sat in a corner reliving that eternity on the road with Powder, still dazzled by the memory of hot iron, and by how identical in style and content his advice was to that which Pa-Pa gave me about a month before he died. Right after I passed that 11-Plus exam, to be precise. Yes, the person who advanced that same counsel was my grandfather just before he died.

Whenever I want to find a happy place in which to disappear, I think of Pa-Pa. I still recall his coming back from Cuba in 1965, though I was only seven. I remember his white suit, which Gran-Gran said made him look like an angel. He smelled like coconut oil, a fragrance that still makes me smile whenever I encounter it. Almost immediately, we became a team. He took me everywhere with him. Even down into the gully searching for roots and leaves to make his teas. He taught me the names of the different bushes and grasses and their uses. Maybe that’s why Botany is my favorite subject in school. Pa-Pa inspired a love for the usefulness of plants which I one day will turn into my profession.

Apart from his knowledge of herbs and roots, Pa-Pa brought back to Barbados a very African-centric world-view. He identified as African, and was proud of his dark complexion, of his spread-out nose, of his knotty hair. He told anyone who’d listen that Africa had produced great civilizations, created great art and music; and had established philosophies and religions which encompassed the wonders of human existence.

Pa-Pa loved me in a way that almost made up for not knowing my father. He gave me the best hugs a girl could want and was as gentle a spirit as ever walked on two legs. And the way he walked, oh my! Gliding along as if on wheels, and so erect and regal that he seemed to be about ten feet to me though he was barely five feet tall. I remember how his beard and mustache tickled when he kissed my cheeks, and how he always rubbed coconut oil in my hair.

I loved listening to him. His round, musical voice drew you in, mesmerizing you like the music of stones falling gently into a well full of water. Whether talking about his days in the regiment while fighting the great war in Europe, or telling stories about his days cutting canes in Cuba after that war, Pa-Pa made magic with words, and that has always stayed with me.

Reciting “I Carry Your Heart with Me” during battle kept him from being scared, he used to say, and I can hear his warm voice now reciting it as he applied White Ace on his shoes. He wore white a lot, which I loved. Other people though, including Gran-Gran, took issue with it because she associated it with Pa-Pa’s Santeria’s beliefs which she claimed was obeah work.

In school, I heard nothing about Barbados’ freedom fighters like Bussa or Nanny Griggs who rose up against their slave oppressors, but I could (still can, unfortunately) rattle off the names of the Tudor monarchs from Henry the Seventh to Elizabeth the First, or recite the names of Henry the Eighth’s wives and when they died. Though we’re supposedly now an independent country, the Queen of England is still our Queen. What kind of shite is that? The way I see it, we, Bajans, are dark-skinned Anglo-Saxons, educated and programmed to forget about our bitter-tasting past, which is why we all seem to suffer from a kind of zombie syndrome. Alive, but not truly living.

Pa-Pa was different. After ten years in Cuba, where he became an initiate in the Santeria faith, his desire was to activate a path to our ancestral memory and thereby reclaim part of our lost African spirit. That people laughed at him for saying these kinds of things never fazed him. Gran-Gran told him many times that she wished he’d stayed in Cuba. Pa-Pa cared little about what others said about him. And, boy, did they wash their mouths on him. All over the village. His name kept rum shops and backyard gatherings buzzing. Speculation about his whereabouts became the hottest topic on any given day. All his movements were closely monitored, to the point where people started following him whenever he walked the streets in all white and sporting his polished mahogany staff. When I was with him, I soaked up the attention we got. Vain me, believed all that attention was due to my presence. Oh, the fantasies a little girl can create in her mind.

Pa-Pa put the knowledge he picked up in Cuba about different roots and healing herbs to good use when he came back to our village because many people still couldn’t afford to go to regular doctors in town. Before long, people flocked to Pa-Pa for help with their problems with lumbago, or gout, or cuts that wouldn’t heal. And while he administered medicine for their broken bodies, he gave counsel to their wrecked souls. He told them they were intrinsically beautiful and born with beautiful spirits despite the wretchedness of their circumstances. He tried to instill in them that they possessed within them all that was wise, compassionate and pure. Eventually, while some jealous people still called him an obeah man or the crazy Cuban, though he wasn’t even Cuban, his wisdom began to have a deepening effect on everybody around him.

One evening, about a month before he died (Pa-Pa left this world with a deep disappointment that you didn’t come back when you found out he was sick), Pa-Pa took me for a walk down on the beach. It wasn’t yet night, but the light was frail enough that the eyes could be tricked into thinking the horizon was dissolving into the sea. We sat on a thick knotty log lodged at the point where the grass greeted the sand and looked across at the old lighthouse. The sea was calm and friendly. I saw some boats with white sails circling on the water, but they were far away and looked like birds dancing midflight.

I remember Pa-Pa asking me how old I was.

“But you know I old I is, Pa-Pa,” I replied.

“Girl, I ask you a question,” he grumbled.

“Eleven, Pa-Pa.”

“I want you to promise me something.”

“What?” I said.

“Live your own life, you hear. Don’t take credit for nothing nobody do, and don’t begrudge nobody else’s accomplishment. Live your own life. You hear me?”

“Yes, please,” I said.

“You is an African, understand me. Don’t let nobody tell you different. And don’t let nobody make you ashamed of who you is, either. One day you will understand what I saying. You is a beautiful girl. Inside and out. And you will go to great heights. I see it in your future. Just live your own life and the ancestors will protect you.”

“Yes, please.” I spun a modest smile, but I was dancing inside. Even if I didn’t get what he meant intellectually, I felt the emotional and transformative weight of what he was saying.

You see now the similarity between what Pa-Pa said to me when I was eleven and Powder’s advice two years later? Surviving that encounter with Powder showed me one thing. Spirits were real. I was convinced that Pa-Pa’s spirit spoke through Powder. Pa-Pa saw that I was losing the battle for my sanity, that I was about to give up and stepped in to save me. I cried that whole night. I cried for myself. I cried for you and I cried for Pa-Pa. But most of all, I cried with joy because I realized that I was meant to live. And live I shall.

After Pa-Pa’s intervention through Powder, I would begin and end each day immersing myself in memories of Pa-Pa talking to the villagers as he administered his remedies to their maladies. I began to re-imagine myself as a fierce warrior: my legs became the peeled trunks of mahogany trees, sturdy enough to handle any storm, and my slender arms invincible ropes of determination. Infused with Pa-Pa’s spirit, I climbed from the well of despair Shite-Eater dropped me in every time he raped me, taking my battered body to the pipe in the yard where I washed the stink off me. Then my warrior spirit would guide me to the safety of sleep. Two illegal abortions later, I’m still alive.

Which brings me to the real point of this letter. Before I make my decision I need you to answer this question: Why is it that nobody ever fought for me? Not my aunts. Not my grandmother. And most of all, not you. The only person who fought for me was Pa-Pa. From beyond the grave, he brought the power of the ancestors to protect me. He was the only one. Nobody else. Especially you. You never fought for me. Why is that, Ma? Why did you not fight for me? Was I not worthy? Did I have no value whatsoever? Even if you didn’t believe me, you should’ve fought for me. Fought to at least make me believe I was worthy of love. That is what burns me. Eats away at my inside. Probably worse than anything Shite-Eater ever did to me. You did not fight for me.

Despite everything, despite my anger, I know that I love you. How we move forward will depend on you, so I’m looking forward to hearing your answer. I hope it turns out well for both of us because at the end of the day, you’re still my mother and I still want to believe I belong to you.

Your daughter,

Oneida