(no subject)

It is strange how the debris of colonialism wash upon our shores like shipwrecks leaving us to wonder what it must have been like, to pretend.  The stone cathedrals built to replicate some northern twin far away, stories of the batimamselle, the fine young French lady with her petticoat and fan, the Spanish and the English.  Our school was run by the Dominican sisters, ten of which were ravaged in a fire in the mid 1800s.  To wander in the old wing of the school is to smell dust and wood and to imagine cries of agony and prayers. The air is very heavy and cold.  One can almost hear voices.  I never went there alone.  With our Catholic mass and our holy rosaries and our little bazaars we were very colonial.

We cling now to a webbed mesh of the high and low, the new and old, the black and the white.  We sing those songs, all of us, the dispossessed.  When we dance it is with true abandon because we have been abandoned.  We set upon ourselves within our sea-ringed walls like caged beasts.  Out of this experiment there is the secret of the universe; the inevitable collide, and the resolution, but it will be a long time coming.

1 hour

The shoe

With the shoe in hand I started walking toward the house.  The man stood silently behind like a ghost and walked backward step by step.  I never saw him again.  It was true what he said about the snakes though, they came, every night, one black and one white, and died on my front step.  I was careful never to let the children play out on the porch after seven.

On this island everyone knows about Obeah, black magic.  The Hindus have Kali puja.  If your lover has met someone new, they have been the victim of obeah.  Someone got a raise at work, he has been visiting the obeah man.  If you are sick and want to get better you take a bush bath.  I didn't visit an obeah man, he visited me. 

I don't regret it.  My daughter is healed.  Life goes on as before.  Except for the snakes...and the pints of milk I leave on our doorstep every morning.  I must never forget that or they may take my daughter away.  I heard about the man (a carpenter) who wanted a very expensive house and they gave it to him, only after did they say that the price was his son.  That must never happen. 

The shoe remains in the locked cupboard; it is one of many secrets.  We are many faces and one, and we put them away in cupboards at night; it is like that here.