the full force a billion ball bearings. At such times I prayed that the world remain intact; prayed that my prayers would be heard by the man above and the answer favourable. Favourable? Ha! All I got for my trouble was more drama as fiery fingers of lightening vented its anger all over the land.
So what had I learnt from that? I learnt that at times like these it was best to scramble under Iris’s bed and hide from the demons of the skies that posed a threat to my life. And yes, I had also needed an explanation for the chaos that happened so casually above me, so from beneath the bed and above heaven’s din I questioned Iris loudly, only to be told that ‘God is arrangin’ his furniture, so chile, don’ worry.’
Worry? Man, God it seemed was arranging his furniture in competition with a do-or-die hashish-smoking poltergeist, and I was being told not to worry? I was petrified of the petrifying God who, according to what I had observed after reading Iris’s bible, seemed to punish anyone for the least infraction. I blamed Iris. No, I did not blame her because of God’s love for dishing out punishment left, right and centre. I blamed her because had she not started educating me in His strange and frightening ways at three years old I would have had no reason to pose unanswerable questions to her at five and a half. ‘Mam,’ I began, knowing very well what the answer would be. ‘God, he have angels?’
‘Of course God have de pretty lickle angels.’
‘Den why de angels don’ arrange de furniture for Him, Mam?’ was my not unreasonable question.
‘Because ...’ I waited for an answer, but Iris seemed terrified of crossing the heavenly red light. I continued to wait, and for what seemed like eons she sat mesmerized at the edge of her bed watching marble-size drops of rain fall from the leaking roof into her battered tin pisspot. To me it was obvious. She was petrified of saying anything that would ‘upset’ the Almighty and, as I watched her in that mute and pitiful state, I was forced to use my budding imagination to craft a picture of the troublesome God.
And there He was, exactly like the pictures in the holy books had manifested him: a bleached and timeless man in timeless bleached attire, wearing a long bleached beard. I saw that old man clearly. He was not arranging His furniture but was throwing impossible large boulders with immense force on his unbreakable marble floor. I also saw the white beard grinning from ear to ear and, frightened of Him as I had been, I was far from pleased with the image of him grinning while frightening me in the offing. ‘Mam,’ I repeated, ‘de angels would make less noise if God let de nice lickle angels arrange de furniture for Him?’
‘Look chile!’ she began, her eyeballs now halfway into the half-filled pisspot while searching for an appropriate answer. Seconds passed. Finally she provided an answer that was pleasing to herears. ‘God works in mysterious ways!’
Those thoughtless words had my little brain vibrating with unreligious questions that said, Man, God’s mysterious ways are dangerous and, why was He trying to destroy our little island? Those questions should have stopped with me, but I passed them on to Iris who seemed frazzled by my inquisitiveness. Lucky Iris. I was about to drop more unanswerable bombs on her plaited locks when God stopped the raucous that had passed for the arrangement of His furniture. And the world went deafeningly quiet. Now that His rain, wind, lightning and thunder had ceased, Iris, happy as the duck that had laid the golden egg, seized the opportunity and dumped the rainwater from the battered pisspot in the roaring, brown, débris-filled river. Next she poked her head out of the window. She looked up to the sky. What was she seeking? Assurance from Noah’s little white dove waving a little white flag indicating that the turbulence was over? God’s broken furniture tumbling down from the heavens? None of those things she saw; just a clear blue sky that had her thanking God for the cessation of the hurricane. And I was baffled. Why? Because beyond my understanding was why she had not asked God this simple question: why had he unleashed such a merciless hurricane on us? Still, I was relived, because the nastiness had disappeared to some distant land with a strange name called Florida, or so I was told. The hurricane’s disappearance to Florida however was of little concern to me, for the elements had left behind numerous dead and battered bodies in their wake that had to be quickly disposed of. The elements had also destroyed most of the town’s infrastructure that, they said, was beyond the government’s ability to repair.And yet, a few of comparative affluence, fearful of being the victims of robbery and violence, unanimously and angrily urged the government to take action by putting the people to work! Again, how was that possible when there were hardly any funds in the government coffers?
One man, an eccentric with a shrunken grapefruit for a brain and a lob-sided face, who by some quirk of fate just happened to be the leader of the opposition, claimed to have the answer. To solve the nasty business of poverty, a war, he said, had to be fought. Obviously most thought his statement a joke. But when faced with the question of what sortof war he had in mind to rid the island of poverty, the politician declared straight face and unabashed, ‘Simple. Shoot the poor!’
Shoot the poor? Once again some thought his ridiculous proposition a stunt; a cheap political gimmick; but others more desperate and hanging by the skin of their skin saw things differently and took matters in hand. As a result, one moonless night the politician with riotous ideas was captured, was stripped, was gagged, was flogged and, without as much as God-have mercy-on-his-soul, was hastily dumped in the blackness of Caribbean waters. Yet the disappearance of the loony politician was of little help, for austerity refused to disappear.
Thanks once again to Alver and Anthea, who from abroad had provided financial succour, Iris and me had a sufficient amount of food to put our empty stomachs to rest.
Only once, and that was during the war, had I known hunger. Iris as usual had been hanging her drab dresses on the line in our postage-stamp-size backyard; my stomach, earnestly believing that my throat was cut, complained bitterly. I strolled up to Iris. I handed her the urgent message in three gruelling words. ‘Mam, Ah’m hungry.’ Sad in voice and momentarily helpless, Iris said gloomily, ‘Earl, dere’s nuffing to eat.’ Fair enough. But how was my stomach to know that? Still starved for food, my stomach continued to grumble as much as my tongue and I went back to Iris and complained about my stomach’s complaint. My face must have registered that pathetic look that belonged on the face of a seal, because her answer, though she knew it would make little sense to me, was short and concise. ‘Earl, de worl’ is at war.’
De world is at war? Holy goats! I had no concept of the world in any meaningful way and had even less concept of war, all I knew at that particular moment was that I was one inch away from expiring from hunger, so I cried, and I bawled, prompting Iris into action. Concerned, she cast aside her faded frocks and went about scavenging something. Somewhere in the land of nothing she found a piece of something that she expertly doctored and handed to me. In times of hunger no one questions the quality or quantity of the food, so I happily bit into the lifesaving something, crunched, swallowed and temporarily my unaccustomed hunger was curbed.
Many years later, while browsing in the local market, I recalled that day of hunger and wondered why there had been nothing to eat during the war. In every corner of the market were mangoes, oranges, bananas, plums, star apples – all kinds of food. Breadfruit, the staple diet of the Caribbean was to be found everyone’s backyard, so why was there a food shortage that day? I shrugged, not knowing the answer – until one day while I happily eavesdropped on a conversation between two men reminiscing about the war. Listening carefully, in one quick lesson I learnt that food had been hoarded and sold on the black market. That was when the penny dropped. The essential penny to drop in the hands of the black-marketeers, Iris had been without. Later, much later, I would learn a great deal more about the fruit that tasted like nothing at all on Earth.
See, an article that I had read in some obscure magazine in the library, said that a certain globe-sailing Captain Bligh had been responsible for the myriad breadfruit trees that had been planted on the island. In 1793, the article had stipulated, to solve the problem of feeding the Caribbean
