Anna In-Between (11 page)

“The irony.” He is chuckling again. “That same Englishman who didn’t want to hire me because my skin is brown was the very one who, years later when I was working for the government, tried to do his best to get me to come back to the company. And guess why?” He grimaces. “Yep. Because my skin is brown. Imagine that, Anna.”

He stands up. He’s tired, he says. It’s been a long day. “Ready to turn in?” he asks Anna. She says she will sit in the veranda a little longer. “Don’t forget to switch off the lights,” he tells her. She says she won’t forget. He leaves, repeating under his breath in wonderment, “Imagine that.”

C
HAPTER 9

I
magine that
. Anna does not have to imagine. It was all too real for her. The Englishman came to their house and nothing was the same after her father accepted his offer—not their lives, not her life.

It is her father’s story but it is her story too, for in the end she was left without a country, without a place she could call home. It was not hard afterward, after those years in the Englishman’s country, to leave her island for America, to turn her back on all that was a part of her. Fruit, which before that time in the Englishman’s country, she could identify blindfolded by their smell: mango, sapodilla, pommerac, chennette, five fingers, doungs, sieca figs. Wild flowers, which before that time, blindfolded, she could name by touch: crown of thorns, cup of gold, firecracker, morning glory bush, chain of love, shrimp plant, spider lily. Birds, which before that time, blindfolded, she could distinguish by ear: kiska-dee, ramiea, picoplat, semp, chikichong.

“Pick a house, any house, it’s yours,” the Englishman said when he called. “Bring your wife and daughter. Drive around. We’ll meet for tea at the clubhouse. My wife will come.”

The Englishman’s country was not far away from where her father got his first job. It was up a hill, five miles from the oil fields where black men in tall rubber boots sank knee-deep in the soil, their bodies splattered with the thick foul-smelling oil that no amount soap would remove. Five miles from where black women emerged at dawn, leaving their crying babies behind to make the trek up the hill to clean toilets, wash dirty laundry, and wipe snot off the noses of sickly babies, not theirs. Five miles from where little black children played on slippery sand. Five miles from where oil spread like a tablecloth across the surface of the sea and shimmered with rainbow colors. Five miles from where dead pelicans bobbed in the glistening waves.

Along the road to the Englishman’s country the land was dotted with statuaries, giant iron dinosaurs, their stunted wings frozen in flight, cracks snaking down their sides, the spaces between them stained orange with rust.

“Pumps,” her father said when her mother asked.

“Why aren’t they pumping?”

“They shut down the ones that are close to the road,” he explained.

“But why?”

“They could be dangerous. They could cause a fire, and the houses …” He pointed to the road in front of them. Above, where it climbed the hill, metal roofs glittered in the sun between a thick forest of trees.

“Ah,” her mother said, blinded by the allure of the glittering roofs. “Ahhh.”

But Anna was not blinded by the glittering roofs. She had read the reports in the newspaper. The pumps that were inactive were not only those close to the road; almost everywhere on the oil fields pumps were not moving. The drillers had hit hard rock. Motors caught on fire and burned out. There was no more oil on the island.

“Poppycock!” the Englishman said. “Why would we hire you if that were true?”

Her father did not argue with him.

“You’ll be part of the administration,” the Englishman said. “Personnel manager.”

At the time, her father was working for the colonial government in the Ministry of Labor. He had left the English chemist years ago. Nine months was all he had managed to endure in the oil fields before he began to pine for the city, for the company of his family and friends, for a nightlife that offered more than shots of rum with the local drillers, crouched around a flambeau dug into the earth, the flames casting an eerie sheen on their oil-splattered bodies. He was young, just twenty. He wanted more.

He took the test for the civil service and passed with distinction. He was given a job in the Ministry of Labor, the first of the ministries the colonial government had opened to locals for positions in management, not a capricious decision. England is an island, miles away from the Caribbean; if trouble came, it would come from the workers. Local men in management would be a paean to appease the workers.

By the time John was hostage to Beatrice’s swaying hips, following her like a lovesick puppy dog for blocks along the main street in the city, he was already gaining the admiration of his boss, a colonial nearing retirement age, for his talent at labor negotiations. He was in his thirties when he accompanied the Minister of Labor to the annual conference of the International Labour Organization in Geneva. He was not yet forty when he negotiated contracts between the workers on the sugarcane estates and their employers. When the oil field workers unionized, he was the one they trusted to mediate their contract.

He got noticed. Sitting around the table representing his oil company was the very Englishman who had lied to him. The position is filled, he had said. But by the next morning the Englishman was forced to admit that skin color had nothing to do with the making of a chemist.

Now he was offering to triple her father’s salary. The perks? A house for his wife and a new car. “Not a Rolls Royce or a Bentley, you know.” He slapped John Sinclair on his back. “A Vauxhall, old man.”

It was the car her father had planned to buy.

He would have a chauffeur too, the Englishman said.

Mrs. Sinclair would be free to use the chauffeur whenever she wanted. After the chauffeur dropped Mr. Sinclair off at the office, of course.

Of course.

Now, in their new Vauxhall, the Sinclairs were on their way to pick out a new house. Past the silent pumps, the road wound around a bend and was then blocked by a long iron pole that ran across it. On one side of the road, the pole was attached to a lever operated by an officer in a stiff khaki uniform who sat on a white wooden stool. His partner, similarly attired, also sat on a stool, on the other side of the road. There was no covering above them, nothing to protect them from the full force of a fierce sun except for short-brimmed officers’ hats that barely shaded their eyes. Their dark skin, blackened like burnt toast, glistened with sweat. There was a spreading tree nearby, and perhaps this was where they took shelter from time to time, but they were sitting on their stools when John Sinclair brought his car to a stop. Both got up immediately and approached the vehicle. One officer went to the driver’s side, the other to the passenger’s side.

“Your pass?” the officer on the driver’s side demanded.

He didn’t have a pass, her father explained. They were here to meet the Englishman for tea.

Her mother leaned across her father, her arm crushing his chest. “And to pick out our house,” she said, barely able to contain her excitement.

The officer was unmoved. “You must have a pass.” A trail of sweat trickled down the side of his face. “You can’t go up the hill without a pass.” He walked back to the wood stool at the side of the gate. Under the stool was a notebook. He picked it up, flipped through the pages until he found the place he was searching for. He read what was written on the page, looked over at the Sinclairs, rubbed his eyebrows, looked back down at the book, pursed his lips, and returned to the car.

Her mother had turned to the officer on the passenger’s side of the car. She was still trying to explain their presence, their right to go beyond the pole. “You don’t understand,” she was saying. “We’re going to live here.”

The officer was not impressed. “You need a pass,” he repeated.

The officer with the notebook was now standing next to her father. “Look here,” John Sinclair addressed him in his best officious voice, “Mr. Hathaway must have left a note. You must have something in that notebook.”

The officer drummed the notebook on his knuckles.

It was closed except for the place where he had stuck his finger between the pages. He shook his head. “Like my partner say, you need a pass.”

“Let me see what you have there.”

“It have nothing in this notebook about you people coming to tea,” the officer said adamantly.

“I can’t believe … What does it say on that page where you have your finger?”

The officer opened the book. “If you want to know, if it go make you feel better, it have something about Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair, but nothing about you.”

This was just the beginning. Even their own people knew they didn’t belong. It was their island, but up the hill was the Englishman’s country.

The Englishman brought his wife to meet them. She came with an armful of catalogs. “You’d want to select furniture for your house,” she said.

“Yes, that’s another thing,” the Englishman said.

“You can furnish the house however you wish. It’s on the company.”

“Scandinavian,” his wife recommended. “It’s all the rage here. Pick it out now and Hugh can order it. You will, won’t you, Hugh?”

“The furniture will arrive before you move in,” the Englishman promised.

That was the way life was for the Europeans who lived on the hill: a house, Scandinavian furniture, a brand-new car, a chauffeur, servants. Then there was the club, the swimming pool, the golf course, the tennis courts. None of this meant for the locals. But times were changing; there were rumblings about independence. The Europeans needed their local man.

The house her mother finally chose was a two-story concrete building with large rooms. There was a shaded porch on the first floor and behind it, the living room and dining room, side by side, separated by a corridor, and in the back, a well-equipped kitchen and a laundry room. Upstairs were the master bedroom with its own bathroom, a bedroom for Anna, a bedroom for guests, and a study for her father.

The house was almost twice as large as their previous home; it had more rooms than any of the houses of her mother’s friends. But among the houses on the hill, it was not extraordinary. Her mother could have picked any house and the size would have been the same. What distinguished this one, however, was the sweeping driveway that began at a little-used road not far from the main road. Halfway up the driveway, on one side of the lawn, was a giant, spreading lignum vitae, tree of life.

“Used for syphilis,” her father murmured, lobbing off an innuendo that did not pass unnoticed by her mother.

She clicked her teeth and admonished him. “That’s unkind, John.”

“We didn’t have syphilis before they came,” her father retorted.

Her mother was not to be dissuaded. “Look at the flowers. They planted it for the flowers.”

Between dark green leaves at the tips of the branches of the lignum vitae, clusters of blue flowers bloomed in profusion.

“And for syphilis,” her father declared.

On the other side of the driveway was a flaming flamboyant tree, its delicate orange blossoms blanketing the lawn. A wood bench circled its thick trunk and leafy wide branches formed an umbrella above it. Mrs. Sin-clair said she could not have dreamed of a more perfect house, in a more perfect setting.

For four years the Sinclairs lived in that house on the hill, and at the end of those four years, Anna no longer had a country.

Two incidents: the first at the swimming pool.

They had just settled in. It was midday on a school holiday. The men were at work, the women and children at home. Anna was bored. Outside the sun was relentless, the air still and turgid. “Go for a swim,” her mother urged her.

At the club, next to the pool, women with various shades of hair—blond, red, black, brown—sat at tables under the shelter of enormous patio umbrellas.

They stared when Anna crossed the lobby of the clubhouse and walked toward the changing room. Chatter and laughter died down in waves. Only the squeals and shouts of children remained. “Canon ball!” Loud splashes. Laughter.

One woman got up. The heels of her shoes clattered noisily against the tiled floor as she made her way to a closed door at the back of the pool. She knocked and a brown-skinned man appeared. They exchanged words and then, leaving the woman behind, the man signaled Anna to approach him.

“Are you lost, miss?” he asked her.

“I’ve come to take a swim.”

“The pool is for the residents, miss.”

To be fair, he was gentle, Anna told her mother later. He didn’t raise his voice or try to embarrass her. “Actually, I think he was embarrassed for me. Here he was a brown-skinned man having to put out a brown-skinned girl from the white people’s club. Of course I told him who I was, and I said my name in a loud enough voice for the women to hear me.”

Murmurs rose from the chairs nearby.
The new colored
family.

When Anna emerged from the changing room, the pool was empty. Not a single child, not a single adult, remained in the water. That night, they drained the pool and refilled it with fresh water.

The second incident.

“Must I change schools?” Anna’s eyes were red from crying. “All my friends are in my school. I’ll have no friends in the new school.”

“You’ll make new friends,” her mother said.

The nearest high school to the Englishman’s country was ten miles away. A company van collected the children of the residents on the hill and they were driven to this private school run by European nuns. There were twelve children in the van on the first day, ten on the second, four on the third, only a thin boy, short for his age, and Anna on the fourth.

The Englishman offered a solution. He did not admit, of course, that the problem was caused by the people on the hill. He spoke as a friend, a father who had a teenager of his own. “My daughter would be furious if I took her out of her school,” he said.

He arranged for Anna to return to her old school in the city by the company’s tiny twin engine plane. Each morning at six, a car arrived at the home of the Sinclairs to take Anna to the airport. At the airport in the city, another car rolled up to meet the plane and Anna was driven to her old school. At the end of the school day, the car returned. There was no time for friends. And even when there was a possibility of time—say, the hour classes broke for lunch—her classmates could not understand how a local girl came to be treated as an English girl, or a French Creole. They were suspicious.
Roast
breadfruit,
they called her. Black on the outside and white on the inside.