Zadie Smith - White Teeth

‘My side,’ said Clara tentatively. ‘I guess the English in my side. My grandfather was an Englishman, quite la di da, I’ve been told. His child, my mother, was born during the Kingston earthquake, 1907. I used to think maybe the rumble knocked the Bowden brain cells into place ’cos we been doing pretty well since then!’

Joyce saw that Clara was expecting a laugh and quickly supplied one.

‘But seriously, it was probably Captain Charlie Durham. He taught my grandmother all she knew. A good English education. Lord knows, I can’t think who else it could be.’

‘Well, how fascinating! It’s what I say to Marcus – it is the genes, whatever he says. He says I’m a simplifier, but he’s just too theoretical. I’m proven right all the time !’

As the front door closed behind her, Clara bit her own lip once more, this time in frustration and anger. Why had she said Captain Charlie Durham? That was a downright lie. False as her own white teeth. Clara was smarter than Captain Charlie Durham. Hortense was smarter than Captain Charlie Durham. Probably even Grandma Ambrosia was smarter than Captain Charlie Durham. Captain Charlie Durham wasn’t smart. He had thought he was, but he wasn’t. He sacrificed a thousand people because he wanted to save one woman he never really knew. Captain Charlie Durham was a no-good djam fool bwoy.

A little English education can be a dangerous thing. Alsana’s favourite example of this was the old tale of Lord Ellenborough, who, upon taking the Sind province from India, sent a telegram of only one word to Delhi: peccavi , a conjugated Latin verb, meaning I have sinned . ‘The English are the only people,’ she would say with distaste, ‘who want to teach you and steal from you at the same time.’ Alsana’s mistrust for the Chalfens was no more or less than that.

Clara agreed but for reasons that were closer to home: a family memory; an unforgotten trace of bad blood in the Bowdens. Her own mother, when inside her mother (for if this story is to be told, we will have to put them all back inside each other like Russian dolls, Irie back in Clara, Clara back in Hortense, Hortense back in Ambrosia), was silent witness to what happens when all of a sudden an Englishman decides you need an education. For it had not been enough for Captain Charlie Durham – recently posted to Jamaica – to impregnate his landlady’s adolescent daughter one drunken evening in the Bowden larder, May 1906. He was not satisfied with simply taking her maidenhood. He had to teach her something as well.

‘Me? He wan’ teach me ?’ Ambrosia Bowden had placed her hand over the tiny bump that was Hortense and tried to look as innocent as possible. ‘Why he wan’ teach me?’

‘Tree times a week,’ replied her mother. ‘An’ don’ arks me why. But Lord knows, you could do wid some improvin’. Be tankful for gen’russ-ity. Dere is not required whys and wherefores when a hansum, upright English gentleman like Mr Durham wan’ be gen’russ.’

Even Ambrosia Bowden, a capricious, long-legged, maga village-child who had not seen a schoolroom in all of her fourteen years, knew this advice was mistaken. When an Englishman wants to be generous, the first thing you ask is why, because there is always a reason.

‘You still here, pickney? ’Im wan’ see you. Don’ let me spit pon de floor and make you get up dere before it dry!’

So Ambrosia Bowden, with Hortense inside her, had dashed up to the Captain’s room and returned there three times a week thereafter for instruction. Letters, numbers, the bible, English history, trigonometry – and when that was finished, when Ambrosia’s mother was safely out of the house, anatomy, which was a longer lesson, given on top of the student as she lay on her back, giggling. Captain Durham told her not to worry about the baby, he would do no damage to it. Captain Durham told her that their secret child would be the cleverest Negro boy in Jamaica.

As the months flicked by, Ambrosia learnt a lot of wonderful things from the handsome captain. He taught her how to read the trials of Job and study the warnings of Revelation, to swing a cricket bat, to recite ‘Jerusalem’. How to add up a column of numbers. How to decline a Latin noun. How to kiss a man’s ear until he wept like a child. But mostly he taught her that she was no longer a maidservant, that her education had elevated her, that in her heart she was a lady, though her daily chores remained unchanged. In here, in here , he liked to say pointing to somewhere beneath her breastbone, the exact spot, in fact, where she routinely rested her broom. A maid no more, Ambrosia, a maid no more , he liked to say, enjoying the pun.

And then one afternoon, when Hortense was five months unborn, Ambrosia sprinted up the stairs in a very loose, disingenuous gingham dress, rapped on the door with one hand, and hid a bunch of English marigolds behind her back with the other. She wanted to surprise her lover with flowers she knew would remind him of home. She banged and banged and called and called. But he was gone.

‘Don’ arks me why,’ said Ambrosia’s mother, eyeing her daughter’s stomach with suspicion. ‘ ’Im jus’ get up and go, on de sudden. But ’im leave a message dat he wan’ you to be looked after still. He wan’ you to go over to de estate quick time and present yourself to Mr Glenard, a good Christian gentleman. Lord knows, you could do wid some improvin’. You still here, pickney? Don’ let me spit pon de floor and…’

But Ambrosia was out the door before the words hit the ground.

It seemed Durham had gone to control the situation in a printing company in Kingston, where a young man called Garvey was staging a printers’ strike for higher wages. And then he intended to be away for three further months to train His Majesty’s Trinidadian Soldiers, show them what’s what. The English are experts at relinquishing one responsibility and taking up another. But they also like to think of themselves as men of good conscience, so in the interim Durham entrusted the continued education of Ambrosia Bowden to his good friend Sir Edmund Flecker Glenard, who was, like Durham, of the opinion that the natives required instruction, Christian faith and moral guidance. Glenard was charmed to have her – who wouldn’t be? – a pretty, obedient girl, willing and able round the house. But two weeks into her stay, and the pregnancy became obvious. People began to talk. It simply wouldn’t do.

‘Don’ arks me why,’ said Ambrosia’s mother, grabbing Glenard’s letter of regret from her weeping daughter, ‘maybe you kyan be improved! Maybe ’im don’ wan’ sin around de house. You back here now! Dere’s nuttin’ to be done now!’ But in the letter, so it turned out, there was a consolatory suggestion. ‘It say here ’im wan’ you to go and see a Christian lady call Mrs Brenton. ’Im say you kyan stay wid her.’

Now, Durham had left instructions that Ambrosia be introduced to the English Anglican Church, and Glenard had suggested the Jamaican Methodist Church, but Mrs Brenton, a fiery Scottish spinster who specialized in lost souls, had her own ideas. ‘We are going to the Truth ,’ she said decisively when Sunday came, because she did not care for the word ‘church’. ‘You and I and the wee innocent,’ she said, tapping Ambrosia’s belly just inches from Hortense’s head, ‘are going to hear the words of Jehovah.’

(For it was Mrs Brenton who introduced the Bowdens to the Witnesses, the Russellites, the Watchtower, the Bible Tract Society – in those days they went under many names. Mrs Brenton had met Charles Taze Russell himself in Pittsburgh as the last century turned, and was struck by the knowledge of the man, his dedication, his mighty beard. It was his influence that made her a convert from Protestantism, and, like any convert, Mrs Brenton took great pleasure in the conversion of others. She found two easy, willing subjects in Ambrosia and the child in her belly, for they had nothing to convert from .)