what or who Tumela was. I suspect she was a woman of strong and secret powers. For years I tried to find out more, but could discover nothing in the archives in Kingston, and not even the longheaded grandmother remembers. Through many searches I came upon a book that mentioned a Tswana word, "Tumelo," meaning "faith," and I did wonder if Tumela was Tumelo and people had come to Jamaica from southern Africa—Botswana or Lesotho, not just West Africa after all, because Tswana is a language spoken in the south. I rather like the thought of a woman named Tumela. A dangerous, unfathomable woman, our very own Nanny of the Maroons, one who belonged altogether to us, we one. Miss Tumela Riding, in tall black boots and her skirts hitched up to ford a red river, her hair the same wild hemp as her riding crop. Skuy! Hiya! Di image seduce mi.
And Rachel had said no, the revenants' cooking is not a cry for love, not a sign of lack but a declaration that their God Is. The real God, 1 Kings 18:39, not the god of the ones who kill them with hot rod and old wuk, who done dead himself, can't see, speak, nor hear, nor stop from pursuing—check verse 10 plus 2 verses back, 10 fi perfection and 2 fi di two gods inna contest, si who win; the old duppy dem tallawah, that is all. And I was ready to believe her, even though she is the same one who would cuss them dutty raw and exorcize them rapid if they come into her house. Miss Tumela Riding, I decided early, was a woman whose God could see and speak and hear and stop Lucifer himself from pursuing, if she had a mind to it.
Tumela Gut was a different kind of place from Ora, which was a town and the parish capital. Ora had a cinema, a regatta, a country club, a hotel, a high school (where we went), a high church (meaning Church of England), bustling narrow streets, cars, blaring bus horns, the chakka-chakka noise of a thriving market town, a cache of white people (meaning people straight from England, not backra, not homegrown), and a tiny middle class with pretensions. Ora also had the sea, not as a distant shimmer but right there, beating low against the seawall that was almost level with the street along which we walked to school.
Yet some would say Ora wasn't all that different from Tumela, not that far from the canepiece or the bush, both running equally on rumor and gossip and a long history under the sway of King Sugar.
In one of his earliest drawings, when he was nine years old, just after we started going to the high school in Ora, Moshe drew the two of us standing with split faces, like moons on wane, half turned right, the other half left, at a signpost on a road saying This way to Oracabessa-on-Sea on the right, This way to Five Districts on the left. We belonged to both places, as far as it was possible for either of us to belong anywhere (which was not very far), though he less than I.
Not until much later did it bother me that he had drawn our faces opposite to each other—where the right side of his face looked toward Ora, the left side of mine looked in the same direction; where the left side of his was toward the five districts, mine was toward Ora. Like images in a mirror, where you cannot get over to the other side where your reflection is.
But we were children of both places, Moshe and I, and like Ora and Tumela, completely opposite and yet like twins.
You can imagine it was hard growing up between this district and this town where every day he was mocked and admired for his skin—not so much skin but the absence of it (for his color was really because he was born before his skin was finished making); not so much admired if you are thinking of admired in the way that is meant by the twenty-two categories of words of approval that substitute for it in Mr. Roget's thesaurus, words like adore, appreciate, cherish, commemorate, delight in, distinguish, dote upon, honor, idolize, love, laud, venerate, worship, praise; not admired as in the four columns of ten synonyms under each of the twenty-two categories—but admired as in their antonyms: review, surveil, gaze, observe (keenly, as in pinning to the wall), eat up, size up, get down on, get high on, get off on, gaze, gawk, survey, put down as, price, put away. Assess, estimate, take the measure of, behold. Tag, typecast, inspect, peer at (but not see), wonder, look fixedly at in wonder.
Growing up under the crushing weight of this negative admiration, which sometimes became pity and even sometimes acclamation, almost like he was being hugged (as in "after all is said and done, him is one a wi"), he might have been able to bear all this—for cruelty and ambiguity were never an exception in our part of the world, but a rule—and even the daily surveyance, the intense look under the microscope, the two-faced giving of succor for the wounds so cruelly inflicted, he might have accepted as in their own way a kind of love.
But in the end, when he went away, it was not because of any of this but because of another trouble altogether, which made us inseparable and kept us apart. Yet I think the two things—his lack of skin and this other trouble—were one and the same, sides of the same basic coin. Judas silver.
It is only left to say that my part in all of this—to tell you what happened to us, in the way it happened—was always fated, though when we began, it was not only Moshe, but both of us, who could not speak.
It is totally fitting that we met and fell in love on our first day of school.
Chapter II
"Sit," she commanded without speaking, patting the bench beside her, her uniform skirt spread out around her like a queen's robe. The stiffly starched navy-blue pleats made him think of a peacock's feathers. Their preening matched her hair, which was done up in short, fat plaits and decorated excessively in the fashion of the time, with a fantastical array of ribbons and clips.
Many years later, when he was in art school, he saw a portrait of Queen Elizabeth the First in peacock costume, and he thought that he had been right about her even then, all those years ago. She did resemble a queen, in the way she carried herself. But he adored her more as a goddess than a queen. Yet the most thing was, she was his friend.
Obedient to her command, he sat, taking care to leave enough space between them so he wouldn't mash her pleats. He wriggled himself into a comfortable position, still sucking on his right thumb and without removing his left hand from under his shirt where it was kneading his navel, as it always did when he sucked his thumb, the perfect coordination of comfort that he had known in all of his six years. The two of them were suck-fingers.
She sucked her left index finger, her right hand feeling her navel under her skirt which was rucked up in the most unladylike manner in the midst of its queenly spread. The middle pleats would no longer be immaculate when she got up from the bench. She sucked the tip of her finger daintily, like an upper-class lady sucking on a pipe pretending it was only a pose. He, on the other hand, stuck his entire thumb in his mouth, and bunched his hand so that two fingers could fit up his nostrils. It was a sign of their two personalities: he wanted everything immediately, viscerally; she ambushed and claimed everything in a more circuitous way. And yet he was timid and held his wants in secret even from himself, and she was tallawah and fearless, with horned hair and bold, flashing eyes.
They came here every recess to watch the chickens.
"Dah one-deh deh call egg," she announced, again without speaking, pointing to a large Dominican hen that had detached itself from the clutch and was strutting around the coop, making the familiar rhythmic noise in its throat, like coconut husk being rubbed on a grater. It meant that the hen was about to lay. "That one is summoning eggs."
Arrested, the two children leaned forward, their eyes glued to the disturbed hen. The other hens ignored her, sitting sleepy-eyed on their own eggs or pecking desultorily at the feeding troughs in the hope of dislodging some overlooked grain of corn or slice of coconut from the morning's feeding. From his perch above the ground the rooster flapped his wings, once and again, his eyes bright and expectant as they followed the hen.
"Shi
