Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

When they made it near the water, Errol’s girlfriend slipped out of her cover-up to reveal a two-piece bathing suit that showed off her large breasts, the sight of which made Hyacinth draw in her breath. Something about Evangeline’s breasts seemed like a call to competition for which Dionne was woefully underprepared, and for the first time that summer, Dionne saw a woman she considered more beautiful than herself, almost as beautiful as her mother. Dionne felt newly self-conscious in the polka-dot bathing suit she’d so proudly worn at the church picnic a few weeks before. She kept her t-shirt on, claiming that it was cool in the shade of the sea grape trees where they parked their beach towels.

In spite of the tension that drew them together on its taut cord, no one could maintain enmity in the face of sunshine and water. Eventually, after Dionne and Phaedra digested the food that their grandmother made them eat before leaving the house in case “wunna father decide he not coming again,” Hyacinth let them go into the water. She and Evangeline watched as Errol entertained the girls with underwater cartwheels. Phaedra stayed close to the sea’s edge, jumping with each new wave and searching for sand dollars and seashells to add to her collection.

Dionne pretended to be a weaker swimmer than she was so that Errol would show her how to float and how to breathe between strokes. Floating with her father’s hand beneath her back, Dionne wondered if the sky was this pretty in Brooklyn, since she’d never taken the time to look up at it and see for herself. Barbados, with no apartment buildings or office towers blocking her view, was beautiful. She marveled at the vastness of the sky and sea, and at her smallness in relation to them. She would have stayed floating like that forever, admiring the clouds. But he let go without warning, and she went under. Dionne’s heart raced when her feet couldn’t find the ocean floor. The moments that she flailed beneath the surface stretched like infinity before Errol dove under and hoisted her onto his shoulders.

Hyacinth watched Errol dunk and then rescue Dionne; she calmed an urge to go in and drag her granddaughter away from him. She tried to laugh with Evangeline when Errol and Dionne emerged from the water spitting and coughing between guffaws, but the best she could do was to purse her lips and take note that this kind of behavior was exactly the reason she’d decided to come down to the beach with the children.

A breeze teased the hem of Hyacinth’s long white skirt and a memory was conjured in her mind’s eye. Hyacinth noted that the last time that she’d had a real sea bath was forty years earlier, when she thought baptism might cure her of her destiny, or at the very least secure the love of her husband, Kenny, who was a member in good standing at Bird Hill Church of God in Christ, and courting her then. Kenny insisted that he wouldn’t marry any woman who wasn’t baptized in the church, and then waited patiently for months while Hyacinth decided whether or not to do it. He listened as Hyacinth explained that she was mad at God for taking her grandmother from her, that her church was getting quiet in the grove of guava trees just past her house, where she retreated to on Sunday mornings while all the other hill women and some of the men were praising the Lord. He heard all of Hyacinth’s grievances against God and the church and organized religion, but still, he maintained that his heart couldn’t cleave properly to a woman who hadn’t been washed in the blood of the Lamb.

When she met Kenny, Hyacinth didn’t trust her heart. What she’d thought was love with the first man who courted her turned out to be that man’s desire to consume her; the fire of what Hyacinth thought was first love had burned her. But Kenny was patient, happy to chip away at her defenses one day at a time. Maybe it was the fact that he didn’t want to change her, or that he kept all his promises, from the time he said he would pick her up when they went out together to the way he’d built the house they lived in by hand, just as he’d said he would. And so even though there was so much that was difficult about him, there was so much that Hyacinth was willing to forgive in her husband because he loved her as she was and did exactly what he said he would do.

When she was young, Hyacinth believed that she had a choice about whether or not to heed the call that beckoned her mother and her grandmother before her, to work roots and deliver children as she’d been taught. Hyacinth, who was not given to doing things because people recommended them, who in fact was least likely to do the things recommended to her, needed to have a reason besides Kenny’s insistence to be baptized. She settled on her belief that maybe baptism in the church might change the course of her destiny. Never mind that none of the women in her family, saved or not, had been able to sidestep the heritage that was theirs. Hyacinth thought she would be the first. Hyacinth’s mother’s and grandmother’s work and their aloneness — their men barely lasted long enough to see their children born — were two fates Hyacinth wanted to avoid. And so, she was baptized on Easter Saturday 1949, in the water just at the bottom of the hill. By Palm Sunday of the next year she and Kenny were married.

But no amount of holy water or determination to resist her destiny could turn Hyacinth’s feet from the path on which her steps had been ordered. Kenny died soon after Avril’s thirtieth birthday, a few years after Phaedra was born. The work that Hyacinth had been ambivalent about all her life would be the thing that sustained her once she no longer had her husband or her child to depend on. Within a few months of her husband’s passing, Hyacinth was delivering babies and handing out advice and tinctures to the hill women who sought her out, as the women in her family before her had done. Just as she was trying to remember what song they’d sung when she was dipped into the water that Easter Saturday, she found that she couldn’t, and the lost memory bothered her.

A few feet away from Hyacinth, Errol’s woman sat with her breasts and exposed belly button turned up toward the sky. She spoke first.

“I never had a chance to meet your daughter, but from everything Errol says, it sounds like she was lovely.”

“You clearly haven’t known Errol long enough to know when not to believe his lies.”

“It all seemed true to me. He said she was a great mother before she got sick.”

“Sick?”

“Errol said that she suffered from depression, that he’d wanted to stay with her but then she turned away from him. He said that eventually he just couldn’t take it anymore.”

“I’m sure you would believe any version of history that makes Errol a hero.”

“I don’t see why he’d make that up. He said that for days and days she could barely get out of the—”

“Why are you so interested in my child?” Hyacinth said sharply.

“I don’t know, really. I guess it just seems like I’d know Errol better if I understood why his last relationship didn’t work out. She’s always been like a ghost haunting us. I guess she really is one now.”

Hyacinth sighed, remembering that this was what she liked least about Americans, their desire to pry open shut doors. They liked unearthing things. And the silence where Hyacinth spent most of her time unnerved them.

“Well, I guess we all have ghosts, don’t we?” Hyacinth said.

“We do.”

And with that Evangeline saw the shutters of Hyacinth’s openness close and felt their conversation come to an end.

• • •

ON THE DAY Errol was to take the children to choose their costumes, the sun was hot, the kind of hot that had over the course of the summer turned Phaedra’s scalp a deep, dark brown, imprinted the crisscross of her jelly sandals on her feet and the underside of her Cabbage Patch Kids watch on her wrist. Hyacinth knew that seeing Errol meant a break from the children running in her garden, singing the VBS songs they knew by heart so blasted loud she was sure even the good Lord would shush them, and making weapons out of Pine Hill Dairy juice boxes. Because while Trevor and Dionne’s relationship had soured, Phaedra and Chris still got on famously and were always giving either Hyacinth or Mrs. Loving a headache with their enthusiasm for everything from salting slugs to chasing lizards to stealing ackees from the Jeremiahs’ tree. Donna rounded out their crew, and it wasn’t unusual to find her at the top of a fruit tree, taking instructions from Phaedra and Chris about which ones to shake down. Still, Hyacinth would take the children bothering up her head any day over the questionable parenting of her former son-in-law.