every now and again she made her way to the city to see us and I still spent all my summer holidays with her in the country.
When Grandy found out I’d passed my exam, she’d be as pleased as my mother, maybe even more so; she was forever telling me that if I wanted to become somebody-in-this-here-Jamaica-place I had to go to high school; if I did not go to high school, dog already eat my supper.
“Your grandmother will tell all of her church sisters! Everyone within a one-mile radius of her front yard will hear about you – her bright-bright granddaughter who get scholarship! Perhaps,” my mother finished, on a quieter, more ominous note, “one of us will complete her education at All Saints High School!”
I looked closely at her, hoping she wouldn’t fall into one of her moods when she blamed me and my father for not becoming the doctor she always wanted to be; not having her house in the hills. My mother had been going to All Saints, was in her last year when she met my father who twisted up her head, turned her into a fool and, before long, Mama was in-the-family-way. She was forced to leave school, and that was not the worst of it, for she had to fight with my father to acknowledge me. There was a steely determination in her face, as she repeated, “One of us will graduate from that school!”
There was a loud knock at the door.
“Who is it?” Mama called.
“Well, who do you expect it to be?” a woman’s rough voice called back good-naturedly. “Is only me, Rachel! Let me into the house before I freeze to death out here in this cold morning air!”
Rachel was Mama’s best friend in the yard and I knew, sooner or later, she would turn up at our door.
“Don’t tell me,” Rachel said, “Gloria pass her examination!”
Rachel was a short stout woman, very dark, wearing a pale-pink nightgown over which she’d thrown a sheet to ease off the cold. Most of the women in the yard did not like Rachel because she was a “night-woman”, but Mama was friends with her, even over my grandmother’s objections.
“After all,” my grandmother would say in one of the heated arguments that erupted over Rachel, “You know what she does for a living! If you not careful, people might start thinking you do the same thing too!”
“When I was sick the other day, she was the only person in this yard who came to see how I was doing. Even made dinner for Gloria and me. Take her good-good money and buy us parrot-fish for dinner. I could’ve been dead and none of those other people came to see what was going on with me, let alone make us dinner. I telling you, Ma’ Louise,” Mama raised her voice so the other people in the yard could hear, “Rachel is the only genuine person in this place!”
“Just a little flu, nothing much!” my grandmother replied. Then, as if she’d heard what Mama said for the first time, Grandy turned to her and asked, in a fierce whisper, “ You mean to tell me you eat from that nasty-dirty woman? You mean to tell me you put the food she give you into your mouth?”
“What make her nasty, Ma’ Louise?” Mama was really angry now. “Her dishes always well clean, she carry herself neat and tidy. Her house even cleaner than mine! What make her so nasty?”
“You know what I mean.” Grandy lowered her voice so I wouldn’t hear what she was saying. “All them mens.”
“She combed Gloria’s hair, ironed her uniform, and got her off to school for me for two whole weeks. That’s all I care about!”
“Still,” Grandy insisted, “she’s not the type of person you should be associating with. You have Gloria to think about! You have to set an example for your daughter!” They both looked over at me, sitting at the table by the window, fiddling with my homework, pretending not to be listening to what they were saying, though they knew full-well I was listening to every word that came out of their mouths, and they both ended the conversation. Once I was outside the house the argument would begin again.
I loved Rachel. It was not only that she helped us out when Mama was sick; even before that she always had a kind word or a fruit for me. She smiled at me at the standpipe and always put me in front of her when we were in line to catch water. I knew a lot of sailor-men came to visit her when their ship was in on Thursday evenings, that everyone talked bad about her because of this, but that didn’t matter to me. As far as I was concerned, people in the yard were just jealous of Rachel because of the pretty things she had in her house. Her bed was always made up with a silk and lace bedspread from abroad; her floor was polished a bright red colour, and there were the flowers, the plastic flowers of many different colours she bought in the flea market downtown and arranged over her bed, around her dresser, in the cracks in the walls. And there were the postcards, lots and lots of postcards, from the sailor-men after they’d gone back home.
Whenever she got a new postcard Rachel would call me over to read what it said. I would carefully pronounce every word, telling her exactly what was written. Sometimes, when something in the card was to her liking, Rachel would laugh out loud and ask me to read again what her suitor had said. She’d then say it over and over to herself as if committing it to memory. She listened carefully to every word that passed my lips and if the tone of the letter changed, she abruptly ended the letter-reading session, saying we were getting into big-people-things and she would ask one of her big-people-friends down at the wharf to read the rest for her. She never failed to compliment me on my reading and encourage me to continue doing well in school. A kind of sadness would come over her then, and one day she said to me, “Yes, if there’s one thing I would encourage any young woman to do, it’s to do well in school.”
“Yes!” Mama waved the newspaper at Rachel, “Gloria pass her common entrance for All Saints High School!”
“Well this is good news!” Rachel passed her eyes briefly over the newspaper before turning to flash me a big broad smile. “Is no surprise to me you passed your examination, Gloria, for everybody know you’re a very bright little girl. Still, this is well done, well done of you!” and she took her hand out from under the sheet and handed me a navel orange before pulling me into her arms.
I loved going into Rachel’s sweet-smelling arms almost as much as into my mother’s. I would lay my head against Rachel’s chest and listen for the steady, even beating of her heart, as I sometimes did with my mother. Just the sound of her heart pounding steadily away gave me the most comfortable feeling in the world.
“You must be the only child in this yard who pass her common entrance examination. Everybody will be jealous of you, but most especially Miss Christie who believes her Denise is the brightest and best thing around town, although we all know differently. There is reason to celebrate today, if not too loudly. Gloria, you did well. You did very, very well.” She wrapped her arms so tight around me the many gold bangles she wore jingled loudly.
“But you don’t think…” my mother stopped, “you don’t think nobody would try to do anything to Gloria?”
By “anything” she meant – would someone put an awful curse on me so I would die a frighteningly horrible death before I even started attending All Saint’s High School? Would I suddenly get an itch, scratch it, and have the itch turn into a sore that would never heal? I could see the thoughts racing around my mother’s head. After all, her face seemed to say, bad-minded-people put a curse on her father when he came back to Jamaica from Panama with all of his Colon money – and look what had happened to him. The young-green-man had fallen down dead one day, for no reason. No reason at all. Bad-minded-people.
“I tired telling you,” Rachel said, exasperated, “obeah
