Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

“You believe all those old-wife tales Granny tells you?” Dionne said.

“Old-wife tales?”

“All those stories about working roots and spirits and death and so on. I heard you begging Granny to reveal the secrets of the universe earlier.”

“Yeah. So what, you’re saying that her stories aren’t true?”

“I thought that you were smart enough not to believe everything you’re told.”

“I don’t see any reason why Granny would lie.”

“Let me ask you this. If Granny knows so much, why can’t she fix what is wrong with her own daughter?”

“You don’t think she at least tried?”

“Well, if she did, clearly it didn’t work. One month in Barbados and already you’re turning into a ninny who believes everything they hear. Not everything is just a matter of walking by faith.”

“I need to pee,” Phaedra said. She tried to push past her sister into the bathroom, but Dionne planted herself in the door frame.

“You think you know everything. It’s complicated. And I know more than you do.”

“Did you hear something from Mommy?” Phaedra asked, a tense crackle in her voice where her certainty would usually be.

Dionne pulled her sister into the bathroom, an echo chamber where sound bounced off the walls but didn’t travel to the other rooms. It was the closest thing the girls had to privacy.

“I heard Granny talking to Ms. Zelma yesterday. She said, ‘Something tells me that my child is coming home soon,’” Dionne said in her best imitation of Hyacinth’s voice. She closed the toilet seat so she could sit down.

“When?”

“She didn’t say when. Granny heard me coming up behind her so she stopped talking.”

“You really think she’s going to come?” Phaedra asked, forgetting momentarily that Dionne was her tormentor.

“Of course she will, of course,” Dionne said.

Dionne pulled Phaedra close and felt her sister’s tears start as a pulsing in her chest. As Dionne held her, Phaedra smelled her sister’s new scent, a combination of salt from the corn curls she was always eating, sticky fruit juice, and something else, something their mother smelled like, neither entirely sour nor exactly sweet. Held in her sister’s embrace, Phaedra was reminded of a picture where Dionne was holding her on her hip. She was two and Dionne was eight, and you could tell that Phaedra was too heavy, but Dionne was determined to carry her. Avril was in the background of the photo, staring off into the distance, transported. Phaedra always thought it was strange that she’d only seen pictures of Dionne holding her, never her mother. But she still knew what being held by her mother felt like. At least she thought she remembered.

“If she’s coming, why doesn’t she at least call or send a letter?” Phaedra said.

“Mommy is very busy. She’s looking for work and a new apartment for us, one with a window seat like you like.”

Phaedra smiled, remembering the bay window where she sat daydreaming after school until her mother yelled at her to change into her home clothes.

“How do you know that?”

“Granny gets letters from her every week, and she reads them to me.”

“Why just you? How come nobody ever tells me anything? And if Mommy’s sending you letters, how come I’ve never seen any of them?” Phaedra asked.

“Because you whine like that,” Dionne said. She walked out of the bathroom in a huff.

Phaedra watched her sister as she left, the lavish spread of flesh between her thighs and lower back, her hair that had become unruly, the thick curls standing up and off her head before sticking straight out over her neck. The windows of her sister’s openness were getting smaller and smaller with each passing day.

Phaedra stopped for a moment to consider what her sister had said about their mother, the way she had insisted Avril was not an absent mother but a busy one. She wondered whether there was a difference and, finding no distinction she could discern, focused on the relief of finally using the bathroom instead.

IN BROOKLYN, Barbados was bimshire, a jewel that Bajans turned over in their minds, a candy whose sweetness they sucked on whenever the bitter cold and darkness of life in America became too much to bear. Avril, while she reserved a healthy amount of disdain for Bird Hill and its people, still felt something like love for her country, and she wanted at the very least to keep up with what was going on there. Almost twenty years into living in the States, she had no illusions of moving home and starting over again like the other women she knew who went home every year, packed barrels and kept up with phone calls, went to the meetings of the old boys’ and old girls’ clubs of their high schools where fattened, impoverished versions of themselves showed up in the harsh lights of church basements in Brooklyn, picking over the grains of famous stories from the old days and new stories about who had done well or not well at all in what they liked to call “this man country.” In the same way that Avril had never been a good West Indian girl when she was home, she was not a good West Indian woman abroad, not given to cultivating a desire for and a connection to home that smacked of devotion. Still, she told Dionne and Phaedra that no matter what she felt about Bird Hill, it was important that they spend time with their grandmother, and get to know the place without which they would still be specks in God’s eye.

Phaedra got her sense of what it might mean to go home one evening in Brooklyn. She was seven when she made the mistake of complaining about having to eat chicken for dinner every night. Avril’s eyes turned from their usual doe brown to the shiny black beads they became under the influence of brandy or the winds of a changing mood. “You think life’s hard here? Try life at home,” she said.

Phaedra knew better than to respond to what she knew was not a question. She went back to pushing withered chicken strips around on her plate. And then she felt her chair give way beneath her. Suddenly, she was on the floor and the full heat of her mother’s rage was on top of her. Avril hovered over Phaedra, seething, trying to decide what to do with her.

“You think people at home eat meat every day?” Avril asked. She dragged Phaedra down their apartment’s long hallway, holding her by the flesh at the top of her right arm, talking the whole way. “You want to go home to live with Granny? Let’s send you home and see if you like it there.”

Avril flipped on the light in the girls’ bedroom and rifled around in their closet for suitcases. Phaedra didn’t dare offer to help by telling her mother that they were stored beneath the bunk beds. Avril found one eventually, a red valise coated in a thick layer of dust.

“Let’s see what you should bring. You’ll only need light clothes there,” Avril said.

She climbed a step stool and pulled down the bin with Phaedra’s and Dionne’s summer clothes, then emptied its contents into the suitcase and zipped it closed.

“You want to go home?”

“No, Mommy,” Phaedra said, hoping her lesson would end there.

“Too late now,” Avril said. She shoved the suitcase toward Phaedra, then unlocked the door to the apartment. Avril pushed Phaedra and the suitcase into the cold hallway, all the while repeating her classic line, “Who don’t hear will feel.”

“Please, Mommy, I’ll be good, just let me come inside,” Phaedra said to the closed door, even after she’d heard her mother turn up the volume on the television to drown out her noise.

Phaedra stood at the doorway for the better part of an hour, shivering. Neighbors — a man with a pregnant wife who looked like she was about to give birth to a fully grown person any day — passed by. The man asked if she was OK and Phaedra just nodded at the wonder of his wife’s belly and turned toward the door to hide the holey shorts and thin tank top her mother had pushed her outside in. Phaedra sat down on the suitcase. Each time she heard the strains of the elevator, she prayed that no one would get off on their floor.