Timothy of the Cay (6 page)

Tante Hannah said the "floating tombs" had bare wooden decks where the slaves were shackled, lying on their backs, many still naked. The cattle and hogs that were carried to slaughter for food weren't chained—only the slaves. But they sang songs of rebellion and love in tongues no white guard could understand.

The gullie cried
cha-cha-chi
and took off, flying upward.

In the soft darkness, Timothy again imagined those ships with their great white sails driving them westward, looking so pretty and peaceful, hiding the misery below.

Almost half the slaves died before they tied up in St. Thomas, Tante Hannah said. They were thrown overboard for the sharks to eat.

What happened then? Timothy wanted to know.

There was another long sigh. "De
bukras
fattened 'em up, doctahed 'em, den sol' em to wark de crops."

Her papa died nine years after being marched off the ship, at age thirty-one. Her mama lived five more years. "I warked longside 'er till she dropped ovah, weedin' cane. Papa died diggin' hols foh plantin'."

Chains still on them? he asked.

Tante Hannah laughed hollowly. "No, Timothy. No. Dere wuz nowhar to run."

They were never freed? he asked.

They died before that happened, she answered.

He'd been shown their conch-shelled graves at Estate Alborg. He'd been told that Master Alborg was a better master than most. But Tante Hannah still went back there only once a year, at Christmas, and then it was only because Timothy would be given a bag of candy from Denmark.

She sighed deeply and reached over to touch his hand.

"Ah 'member de day we got freedom. July third, 1848. De day before, we'd rung de estate bells an' blew on conch shells to tell de gobernor we wanted freedom. De nes' day, 'bout two tousand slaves circled 'roun Fort Frederik sayin' dey burn Saint Croix less dey freed. De gobernor came dere an' say, 'Yuh now free...'"

The wattle-and-daub huts where the slaves had lived at Estate Alborg had long been destroyed. But slavery still hung over the plantation like an evil cloud.

Tante Hannah finally said, "Timothy, dey still tink we slaves, eben tho we free. Dey tink we don't 'mount to much. Dey still tink it an till dat change, we still in chains. Dat's why de
bukra
boy got your job."

So it
was
because he was black, not because he couldn't do the work. He thought about that awhile and then asked if he had any slave blood in him.

Tante Hannah's low laughter was turned inward as much as outward. "Ebry mahn, womahn, an' chile wit black skin in de New World 'as slave blood."

He asked her why they talked differently from the
bukras.
"Dat, too, goes way bock," she said.

People from at least twenty-five tribes had landed in St. Thomas, many of them talking in different languages. To understand each other, they began to use bits and pieces of the white man's tongue. "Dey now call it pidgin Engleesh..."

Timothy stayed awake for another hour, thinking about what it would have been like to be a slave. He was too young for his own papa and mama, whoever they were, to have been slaves. But this night he felt Slave Coast blood in his veins.

No wonder there was something familiar about the chants of the coal women at the wharves.

No wonder he felt his own feet move when Tante Hannah danced on Emancipation Day, celebrating the anniversary of the day when the governor freed the slaves.

Now he knew it was all inside him and would never go away.

My father called the refinery clinic. The doctors there, all from Holland, were the best on the island. They served sixteen thousand workers.

"At two o'clock," I heard him repeat.

When he placed the phone down, I asked, "Do they have an eye doctor?"

"Yes."

The name of the eye doctor was Boomstra, and he seemed more interested in what had happened on the cay than in my eyes. Kept asking me how I'd survived.

After X rays were taken and developed, he hummed to himself while examining me, asking me exactly when I thought my sight had begun to fade, asking my mother if she'd seen the blow to my head. She hadn't.

It was Timothy who'd figured out what had glanced off the back of my skull: a piece of timber that had come loose when the lifeboat was launched. It had hung up awhile, then fell on me when I was in the water.

"How much swelling was there?" Boomstra asked, speaking with a thick Dutch accent. He sounded elderly. I pictured him with white hair, a white mustache, a big nose, and thick glasses.

I said there was a big lump for a few days, and I'd had bad headaches.

He finally asked all of us if he could speak frankly. He knew how old I was. I wasn't a child. Even before my parents answered I said, "Yes."

He nodded and chose his words carefully. "If you want to see again I think you face a very serious operation by a neurosurgeon. And there is no guarantee that it will be successful."

My mother gasped. "No guarantee?"

"The optic nerve is in the back of the head. I believe it was damaged by whatever struck the skull."

My heart beat faster. I'd had my tonsils out when I was eight. "You said serious..."

"Phillip, any operation where the body is invaded has risks."

Always to the point, my father asked, "Where would you recommend we take Phillip?"

"Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, in New York. There's a specialist on staff who is world famous for this type of procedure."

"Tell us about the operation," my father said.

"I'd rather let an expert explain it."

My mother's voice wavered as she asked, "Has he done this before—to a child?"

I didn't feel like a child anymore.

Dr. Boomstra replied, "I don't know. But he is world famous. Lars Pohl."

After a silence, my father said, "We need to think and talk about it."

Boomstra said, "I understand."

We thanked him and a few minutes later were on our way back to Scharloo.

As we drove along, all of us thinking of the same thing—the surgeon's knife—my father said, "If Dr. Boomstra was right, the final decision will be yours, Phillip. We'll both tell you what we think but it'll be your decision."

"We'll get other opinions," my mother interrupted.

"Of course," he answered.

"Where?" I asked.

"Anywhere," my mother said. "And other doctors may not agree with Boomstra. They may have other ideas. It may be just a simple operation."

Or
I might never see again
, I thought.

We talked back and forth for days, and then, in October, made the decision to go to New York. My father called Boomstra, asking him to contact the "world-famous" neurosurgeon Dr. Pohl.

"When will we go?" I asked.

"As soon as possible. We'll fly," he said, making it sound like an order.

I'd noticed he seemed more forceful since the
Hato
sinking. He didn't let my mother push him around. This time she didn't object to flying. She had no desire to end up in the sea again.

A while later, after Boomstra called back, my father phoned Pan American Airways and booked a flight for my mother and me the next week. Only two seats were available; he'd follow two days later. Stew would have to be boarded in a kennel.

New York City had always sounded exciting. I'd seen it in photographs and picture-show newsreels. On the radio I'd listened as the announcer said: "From our studios in New York, we bring you..." Now I could only feel it, hear it, smell it, on this cool October morning.

Rush hour, footsteps, people around us everywhere. Traffic starting, stopping. Horns blowing. Squeaks and rumbles below us as we walked over subway gratings. Exhaust fumes mixed with food odors. Constant noise, so different from the quiet of the cay.

Living in sleepy Virginia, I'd always wanted to take a train to New York. See Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall. See Times Square at night. Walk along Fifth Avenue and Broadway.

Now I was here. Our hotel was the Commodore, on Forty-second Street, by Grand Central, in the middle of Manhattan.

That first morning, Mother decided to take a walk before we caught the subway to Dr. Pohl's office at Columbia Presbyterian. I think she wanted to take my mind off what might be said. I held her arm tightly, bumped now and then by pedestrians.

She'd been to New York before and described things as we went up crowded Forty-second. When we crossed Fifth Avenue, she said, "Look, there's one of those big double-decker buses..."

Like others, she kept forgetting I couldn't see.

Ever since that afternoon in the refinery clinic I'd thought a lot about what the neurosurgeon
might
say: "I'm sorry, Phillip, an operation won't help." Then I'd go to a school for the blind. Learn braille. Be sightless forever.

So I wasn't very much interested in double-decker buses. Going to Dr. Pohl's, holding a large envelope with the Curaçao X rays, I was frightened of the unknown.

Soon we went down the steep stairs into the subway tunnel, me taking uncertain steps, bumped again by people. The thick air smelled like battery acid. The trains screeched. The platform shook. I wanted to go back to the street.

I'll forever remember that long ride, sitting there swaying side to side, listening to the harsh noises. Uneasy as the train jerked and burrowed underground, I hoped we could ride a bus back.

Aboveground thirty minutes later, we were told that Dr. Pohl was in surgery but wanted more X rays before talking to us anyway. The ones taken in Curaçao were probably okay, his nurse said, but he wanted his own. He'd talk to us after looking at them and after my father arrived. That would be tomorrow. The nurse escorted us downstairs so my skull could be photographed.

Another twenty minutes with the technician saying to move my head this way or that way and we were back out on 168th Street, soon to board a bus for midtown.

Crazy as it sounded, there was something I wanted to do this humid day. Every since I'd seen it in a magazine I'd wanted to go up in the Empire State Building, the tallest in the world. A hundred and two stories, I remembered, over a thousand feet up. The magazine said that on a clear day you could see in a circle for two hundred miles.

When I said I wanted to go up there, my mother said, "But, Phillip, you can't see anything."

That I well knew, but we could take the elevator up just the same, and she could tell me what was out there—New Jersey, Brooklyn, Connecticut; the rivers, the ocean. "I want to feel the wind."

"Feel the wind? That doesn't make sense, Phillip," she said.

I was silent a moment, then said, "Haven't you ever done anything that didn't make sense?"

"I try not to," she said.

***

On the eighth floor of the Commodore, the night sounds from below were muffled. We'd had dinner two hours earlier and the nine o'clock news had just finished, the announcer saying that the marines were fighting a desperate battle against Japanese troops on Guadalcanal Island, in the Pacific. The war was always present these days.

My mother switched off the radio, and I heard the click of her bedside lamp. Then she said good-night.

I said good-night too, thought awhile, then added, "I want to go back to the cay."

I'm sure she was frowning over at me. "Back to that island? I should think you'd never want to see it again."

"I didn't see it, Mother. I couldn't see it. That's why I want to go back—if the operation works."

"You can't be serious."

"I am. I want to walk around it, see where our hut was. See where I fished and dove for
langosta.
See Timothy's grave..."

She was silent a moment, then said, "His grave? It would seem healthier to me if you put it all out of your mind. Think only about getting your sight back. That's the main thing, not some tiny, remote island and a grave."

I doubted she'd ever understand. I said, "Mother, I want to thank him again."

She said, "You can't thank a dead person. You have to say thanks while they're alive..."

I kept silent.

"Phillip, he's dead—gone! There are no such things as guardian angels. There is no communication from heaven. Or from hell. Maybe you need another kind of doctor." There was anger in her voice.

I didn't answer.

Then she let out a long sigh and said, "When I unpacked your bag last night I found that knife in the bottom of it. Any reason you brought it along?"

"For luck," I said.

"A knife will bring you luck?"

"Timothy's knife." I thought it might.

"I think you're possessed by that man. You know how many times you've talked about him this past week?"

"I loved him," I said. "I love him now."

"You loved a Negro?"

"Yes."

It was as good a time as any, up in that hotel room, far from the Caribbean, to ask, finally, "Why don't you like black people?"

There was a moment of silence. She seemed about to explode. Then: "Did I ever say that?"

"You've said it in many ways, Mother. You'd make a face when I mentioned them. You told me to stay away from them..."

"They're different, don't you know that? My grandmother knew it, my mother knew it, and I know it. They have their own way of life. That's why they live in a separate part of town."

Her grandmother knew it, her mother knew it, and she knew it?

"Maybe it's because we don't want them to live in our section," I said.

"That's nonsense. Most don't have the money to live in our area. And they wouldn't live around us even if they could."

"Why not?" I asked.

"They have their own music, their own food, their own way of dressing, their own way of talking, and they live happily in their own sections. Do you think Timothy would want to live in Scharloo?"

I had no idea. "He might." But I didn't think he'd want to live next door to my mother.

"Are you afraid of them?" I asked.

"Let's just say I'm uncomfortable around them."

"Why? Did any black person ever do anything to you?"

"Phillip, don't question me," she flared, the old tightness back in her voice.