Eden Burning

  Patrick was silent. Grown people didn’t talk about “beds” in front of boys. At least, Agnes didn’t. She would have washed his mouth out with soap if he had done so. “Dirty talk,” she would have called it.

  “Color,” the doctor resumed. “We think about it all the time, don’t we? Even when we don’t want to admit it.”

  “I don’t think about it,” Patrick said untruthfully.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “We never talk about it at home,” Patrick said.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t think about it, though. You’re lighter than any of us here.”

  Of course he thought about it even more than he realized. It was just always there. When he looked around the class and saw that his features were exactly those of the white boys, only the skin betraying the difference … How easy life would be, he thought, if one could remove the last trace of that other from the skin. And on the other hand, he could recall how it had thrilled him when Nicholas won the debate from a boy just out from England, a freckled red-haired boy with a haughty accent barely understandable. The triumph had thrilled him, not just because Nicholas was his friend, but because it had been a victory for color.

  “You are lighter than any of us here,” Dr. Mebane said again. “How do you suppose that happened?”

  Patrick felt a flush of shame. Whose shame? Not his own, surely. What had he to do with it?

  The doctor leaned forward. “You’re embarrassed. You shouldn’t be. There is a proper way to talk about these things. They are a part of life. And anyway, we are all men in this room. You shouldn’t be embarrassed,” he repeated kindly.

  But the doctor could not have known the full reach of his thoughts. He was thinking of his mother. That business about the white man and the mistress … She had been in France; the man who had fathered him had deserted her. And he was filled with anger toward his unknown father.

  Now color was becoming totally confused with sex. Yet they were two different things. His mother ought to have hated whiteness, after that. But there was a contradiction in her, the contradiction of which he had so long been aware. She was proud that estate workers coming into her shop called her Miss. He had asked her once why she was more polite to customers who were brown like herself, and so often curt with those who were very black. He had received not only a denial but such a lashing of her tongue that he never mentioned the subject again.

  But it was all around, in the very air. It came to him, lying awake one night, that even Dr. Mebane, for all his talk and insight, had betrayed his secret pride in his own light skin. A certain satisfaction had revealed itself in his smile and voice, belying the righteous indignation in his words. He is proud of those invitations to Government House, Patrick thought, and he felt an odd compassion, which would no doubt have astonished the doctor if he had known of it.

  Also, he saw that his pride was really shame. It was like despising oneself.

  The few years of schooling passed, flashing as they always do, so that when a long time later one looks back over them, only a few bright areas stand out in a sometimes serene, sometimes dull, sometimes fretful expanse of routine. In Patrick’s case, the particular brightness, in spite of anything, was Nicholas and his father’s cheerful house. Secondly it was Father Baker, who could always find time for a boy after school, who gave him hard things to do, long lists of books “to stretch the mind,” he said. “Read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall; hard going, but without it you won’t understand how we came to be where we are.”

  Father Baker supplied the lists, but Nicholas supplied the books, a glorious boxful each Christmas. (“Patrick, don’t be shy about accepting a gift. Don’t let’s be self-conscious with each other. I happen to have more money, no credit to me; it’s not important and don’t let it be.”)

  So he grew, in those vital years between thirteen and seventeen when it is said the best learning is done. Wandering about the island, he began to connect the things his eyes saw with the things he read or was being taught, all of these weaving and interlocking with each other into something that as yet had no design, but seemed to point toward one.

  During the long holidays before his final year, Father Baker gave an assignment: Write something about St. Felice, anything old or new, geological, commercial, anything. Father Baker gave difficult assignments.

  Patrick had at first no idea what to write about. He worried over it. Then one day it came to him. At home in Sweet Apple he had wandered down to the beach and there encountered his old friend Ah Sing. And for no reason he could explain, regarding the stone-black eyes slanted above the Chinaman’s cheekbones, it came to him that Ah Sing could just as well be taken for one of the Caribs who lived in their reservation on the far remote slope of Morne Bleue. But they have always been here! he thought, astonished. And Ah Sing comes from the other side of the world! How could that be?

  He resolved to learn more. Father Baker liked to talk about “intellectual excitement.” Patrick had probably never experienced what the teacher had meant, yet now, walking on the hard wet sand near the water’s edge, he thought he might be feeling it. “It is a kind of fire,” Father Baker had said. Yes. Yes. I want to say something about this place where I live, a strange place, when you think about it. All these so various and different people, living here, each in his layer, like those bottles of colored sand that is laid in stripes, apart! First there had been the Indians. This place had been all theirs, yet there was only a remnant of them left. You never heard much about them, other than the comment made by blacks that they had “good hair.” Sometimes you saw them fishing at night by torchlight at the river. Now and then you saw the men on the roads with their loads lashed onto their backs, it being beneath the dignity—that much he knew—of an Indian man to carry anything on his head. It was all right for women, but not for men. You saw them bringing their baskets to the market for sale, or more rarely, carrying bananas down the mountainside to Covetown. They didn’t go in for hired labor very much, and almost never worked on the estates. They gave an impression of silence and independence; a superior reserve was on their faces.

  Once he had made his way on foot to the place where they lived. He had expected no profound revelations, so he had not been disappointed to find merely what he had seen in any other inland village: two rows of shingled huts with tin roofs, some goats and some chickens scratching in a little garden plot behind each house. Some things were different: women pounding cassava in gourds and men hacking a canoe out of a cedar trunk. He had observed all these things, both the resemblances to and the differences from the life around them, and having done so, had not felt any further curiosity. Yet now he did.

  He went to the public library in Covetown. It was a fair-sized room, dusty in shafted sunbeams, up the stairs from the tax office which had once been the courthouse from which buccaneers were sent to the gallows. Happily, it contained an encyclopedia and a moderate collection of history books. On the shady side of the room Patrick sat down with a pile of books and began to take notes.

  The original inhabitants of the Leewards and the Windwards were the Arawaks, who came in canoes from what is now Guiana. They were a pacific people, farmers and fishermen. After many centuries—no one knows how many or how remote—-they were followed by the Caribs, coming possibly from what is now Brazil. These were a very different people, warlike and ferocious. Indeed, the word cannibal is said to be derived from their name.

  It has been fairly well established that many thousands of years ago, when a land bridge between Asia and America existed in the region of the Bering Sea, the ancestors of both these tribes had wandered across and slowly, gradually dispersed themselves …

  So it was true, then! These people and the Chinaman Ah Sing! He had observed it! And it was true!

  He read on.

  The Caribs slaughtered the Arawak men and married their women…. For many generations the men continued to speak the Carib language among themselves; although they understood the Arawak tongue, whi
ch the women continued to speak, they would never use it themselves. Hammock is an Arawak word. Hurricane is another.

  With a feeling of recognition, Patrick paused a moment. What pleasure in words! Written, the word hurricane even looked like the haste and ruin of the real thing which he had seen once, a few years before: whole villages blown to pieces and great palms uprooted like weeds, as the wind came roaring at 160 miles an hour from the east.

  He went back to the book and picked up the pen.

  With whiskey and some cheap ornaments, the European bought island after island from the Caribs. Not satisfied with ownership of the land, he pressed on for ownership of the native, but totally without success. The Carib would not be enslaved. Through mass and individual suicide, he defied the conqueror.

  Glorious courage, proud courage! Patrick was youthfully and deeply moved.

  After a week of diligence, he completed his notes, went home and began to write. He worked all day; when darkness came he set an oil lamp on the counter of the store and kept on.

  His mother complained. “You’ve been up half the night for three nights now!”

  “I have to,” he answered patiently.

  He had set it all in orderly mental sequence, so that his pen ran easily: history, adaptation to change, daily ways …

  At the top of the palm is a bush which looks like cabbage. Used as a shelter or a garment, it will keep a man dry in the heaviest rain.

  … know how to hypnotize an iguana by whistling to it so it can be tied up.

  … can shoot fish with a bow and arrow. Their bowstrings were made of liana vines, and the poison for their arrowtips, in warfare, was made of the sap from manchineel trees….

  Early explorers report on their swimming feats. It is said that they were fast enough to knife sharks undersea.

  … can still weave reed baskets fine enough to hold water.

  And their inner life:

  Long before Christianity, they had a belief in one central spirit of good, commanding the universe. Also, they had a concept of evil not unlike the early Christian belief in the devil….

  To sum up, I admire most their love of liberty. This is the reason, I think, why even now they will not work for anyone. They have no concept of rank, either. Again, even today, their chief lives in a house no better than anyone else’s. They never understood the European’s sense of hierarchy….

  When he had finished, it was the last night of the holidays. Having made a careful copy of his work, with no erasures, he went to bed, feeling tired, exhilarated, and also worried about the worth of what he had done.

  Two days later Father Baker summoned Patrick to his office.

  “Who helped you with this?” he asked.

  “No one.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Who could have?” Patrick questioned simply.

  “This is a scholarly piece of work,” Father Baker said. Thoughtfully, he riffled Patrick’s neat pages. “I never expected anything as thorough as this. You must have spent days on the research. What made you do it? Can you tell me?”

  Patrick hesitated. “It started because of the Chinaman Ah Sing. I’ve known him since I was four or five”—and he went on to tell about his first puzzlement over the Chinaman’s resemblance to the Indian. “Then I’ve been thinking, I guess I’ve always been thinking, about my own ancestors. You imagine Africa, you know—I suppose very inaccurately—but still you do. You think of cathedrals and those little English villages in picturebooks. All of that is in you. St. Felice makes pictures in your mind.” He was ashamed to say how he still thought in colors, so he said merely, “People like the Da Cunhas—Nicholas said the first ones here were Jews, the wanderers, the Bible people. What could have brought them here, too?”

  He gained confidence. “This island where we live is so small! Yet there are so many different kinds of people living here, come from all over, living together, and yet apart, not knowing one another. I was thinking: Can the whole world be like this, too? With people wandering from one place to the other, really all part of each other, but not wanting to be?”

  Father Baker was looking at him so intently that Patrick stopped. Had he been making an idiot of himself?

  Then Father Baker looked away. Patrick observed the ropy veins at the man’s temples, the soiled and shabby gown, then followed his gaze out the window to where voices were competing on the playing fields.

  Soon I shall be gone, he thought, and felt a painful emotion. Gone from friends and books, gone from the civility of this crowded little office and the man, the sort of men, who sat here.

  Father Baker turned back to his desk, picked up a pencil, and made a little circular design. Then he spoke.

  “What do you plan to do with your life, Patrick?”

  “Well, get a job …” He had thought, or his mother had thought, he might apply at Barclay’s Bank. The tellers were mostly light blacks, which would be, of course, anybody’s definition of Patrick. “Maybe in a bank,” he said.

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  Suddenly a new thought came. It was so powerful that it must have been in him for longer than he knew. “What I’d really like is to teach. To read a lot and teach. Like you—not the priest part, though,” he finished awkwardly, and was ashamed that he had perhaps been tactless.

  “I understand. You’d have no difficulty getting a certificate to teach grade school when you graduate from here. But a boy like you should really go to England, to university. It would be a nice thing if you could go with your friend Nicholas, wouldn’t it?”

  Yes it would. But maybe Father didn’t know how little he had. Maybe he thought Patrick was another Nicholas.

  But no. “You surely would be able to get a partial scholarship.”

  That wouldn’t be enough. His thoughts flew, then stopped. No matter. Whatever he would need, it would be more than he could afford.

  “Well, think about it,” Father Baker said as he stood up.

  The new idea burned within Patrick in spite of himself. He did not speak of it to Nicholas, partly because he was a private person, even with his best friend, and partly because he was realistic and it made no sense to waste time talking of impossibilities. But he walked down to the wharf and watched the ships, even the interisland schooners, with a kind of longing that he had never felt before.

  One evening at home something compelled him to speak. “My teacher said my paper about the Caribs was excellent.”

  Agnes nodded. “Very fine. Very fine.”

  “He thinks I ought to go to England. To university.”

  “He does? Maybe he’ll give you the money for it?”

  “I could get a partial scholarship.”

  “And the rest?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I don’t know either. I think you’ll stay here and get yourself a nice job and be grateful. Get foolish ideas out of your head.”

  Patrick flushed. Yes, it was only a fancy, a thing to be dismissed. But it clung to him. And he thought of Mistress Ogilvie, herself barely educated, teaching by rote the kings and generals of Europe—nothing, incidentally, of that great “dark continent” on which her pupils had originated; he compared her with the masters at Boy’s Secondary and was shocked by the comparison. But if you were to set those masters beside the great scholars at Cambridge? What then? All the knowledge in the world, just bottled up in a few small places, uncorked for the few to drink! He thought of the laborers in the cane fields, who knew nothing. He wondered whether the folk in the great houses, men like old Mr. Kimbrough or—or the Tarboxes of Drummond Hall, for instance—might not, in their way, be as ignorant, knowing nothing much beyond the walls of their fine houses.

  He felt a restless, cold discouragement.

  “You want to go, don’t you?” Agnes asked abruptly one night.

  “Go?” he repeated.

  “To England! To university! What are we talking about?”

  “We aren’t talking at all,?
?? he said angrily, “because it’s not possible and I know it isn’t.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said, a few days later.

  “Right about what?” he asked, raising his head from his homework.

  “Nothing. I was thinking out loud.” Then she resumed, “What I meant was, right not to talk about your going overseas.”

  “I am right. And I don’t want to hear it again!”

  “Don’t talk to me like that. I don’t like your sassy voice.”

  He didn’t look up and she went out of the room.

  But a week or two afterwards she said to him, “I’m going away for a while, closing the shop. There won’t be much to see to, but whatever there is you can see to it while I’m gone.”

  His first thought was, She must suddenly be homesick for Martinique. “Where are you going, Maman?”

  “To New York.”

  “New York!” he cried, in astonishment.

  He saw by her familiar sly smile that, in spite of her brusqueness, she was enjoying his surprise.

  “Yes. I’ve business there.”

  “Business in New York? How will you get there?”

  “On a freighter.”

  “Are you coming back, then?”

  “Well, naturally I am! I have a little personal business, that’s all! Do I have to tell you everything?” she complained. Then she touched his head. “There’s nothing to worry about. You just stay here and do your work properly. I’ll come home in a few weeks. And when I do, things will be different.”

  FIVE

  Teresa, long afterward, was to remember the day by its colors: dim greens blurred through an intermittent, melancholy rain over the low New Jersey hills. It was her habit to see places and persons in color: her husband a troubled, cloudy gray and her children rosy, tender as petals. Eleuthera had once been a blue luster, but was no more.