The True History of Paradise Read online

  She looks at Paul. His face, as usual, reveals nothing; it belongs among those expressionless yet alert faces on ancient Egyptian papyri, the face of some palace servant with large tranquil eyes, an almost pointed chin, and skin that is smooth shaven, brown like an old penny. His looks have never changed; his tightly coiled hair has always been close cut like a smooth carpet, even during the proud years of Afros; he has never lost or gained weight as far as she could tell. She looks at his hands on the steering wheel, slender hands, not the kind one expects on a farmer.

  “Lana is dead,” he said yesterday, so softly she wondered for a moment if she had heard correctly, but knew that she had. “I just called the hospital, Jean”—The hospital? She had no idea Lana was in the hospital.—“The nurse said she was gone. ‘Gone where?’ I asked. I didn’t think she could get up and leave so soon, but you know Lana. ‘Gone to the morgue,’ the nurse said, cold, just like that. Can you imagine?”

  A police jeep overtakes them. The policemen sitting in the back look lethargic, their limbs overly relaxed, as if they aren’t actually holding weapons.

  “Can’t get much hotter. Sorry ’bout the air conditioner.” It’s the first thing he’s said since they left the funeral.

  A wasp flies into the truck, buzzes around Jean, then frantically attaches itself to the windshield. Paul pulls over. The wasp starts buzzing around her head again. She’s allergic to insect stings.

  “Hold still.” Paul’s eyes follow the wasp.

  The jeep turns around and heads back to them.

  Paul squashes the wasp in a paper napkin.

  Two policemen saunter over. They don’t say anything; they just stare at them and at the truck with the authority they’ve been given to stare.

  “Step out,” one of them tells Paul.

  Jean tries not to look anxious.

  “You too, miss. Come on, step out, step out.” The policeman gestures with his rifle. “Stan’ up over there!”

  They stand at the side of the road as they’re told.

  The policemen in the back of the jeep assume an alertness they didn’t have before. They look at Jean, then Paul, then back at Jean, trying to figure out their relationship. Lovers? Or brother and sister? It’s a bold, libidinous look.

  The two policemen search the truck. One of them looks through Jean’s bag. She’s glad she’s got the U.S. dollars hidden in her clothes. He opens the passport, then looks at Jean.

  Paul decides it’s time to say something: “A wasp got in the truck, Sergeant. We just stopped to get it out. Didn’t want to have an accident, you know.”

  The sergeant looks at them as if he doesn’t speak their language. There is no sign of comprehension at all. It’s clear to Jean that they have no idea what they’re looking for. They take the passport back to the jeep and discuss it with the others.

  “Jesus Christ,” Paul mutters.

  Two small boys appear and the policemen send them to the corner shop for cold sodas and patties. Jean and Paul find a shady place on the sidewalk and sit down.

  Almost an hour later, the sergeant brings back the passport. “Alright, g’wan.”

  The police jeep takes off. Paul and Jean get back in the pickup. He sighs heavily. She’s afraid he’s going to back out, that he’ll say, Let’s turn back, this is too hard, too dangerous, but he starts up the engine and says with mock bravery, “Forward.”

  I might never see him again, she thinks. They will take the usual roads today, roads they’ve taken together many times, and that’s why it feels so odd: Jean and Paul driving to the country—too familiar to be called a tradition, too enjoyable to be thought of as routine. From Kingston to Trelawny and back again, how many times, over how many years?

  When she asked him a few days ago for his help, his unwavering yes assured her that she was doing the right thing. But is she? She is leaving her country. There are people here, souls, whom she never thought to be without. Her sister is dead; her dearest friend, Faye, lies in the hospital.

  I can’t change what has happened, she tells herself.

  She is merely a passenger. After Paul there will be unknown drivers, pilots, and finally, Alan, waiting for her. A passenger. She falls on the word like a penitent falling to her knees. It’s out of her hands. Pray, pray for a safe passage.

  Paul turns on the radio. The American evangelist Reverend Peyton F. Peyton reads from the Bible—“My kingdom is not of this world.” Paul curses under his breath and changes stations. A cheerful locally made commercial for deodorant comes on, followed by another American evangelist. Paul turns off the radio.

  The sky is clear and there is no sign of the morning’s rain. In a matter of hours everything has become parched and dusty again. She looks at her city, pressing its image to her mind to last a lifetime, and as she does so it becomes a ghost city. In spite of everything, she loves it, the way one might love a dangerous, delinquent brother: the stunted shacks beside the affluent walls, the resilient street goats, and the bright hedges of bougainvillea. It’s Easter weekend, the rain has stopped, and Kingston’s million inhabitants all seem to be outdoors. Teenagers, liberated from school uniforms, walk the streets and shopping plazas, flaunting American styles. They seem oblivious to the state of emergency. Roadside higglers weigh, measure, and sell, in a disgruntled fashion, everything from hair ribbons to yams. A couple of dusty boys with sticks run through a gully, chasing a rat.

  At a stoplight Jean watches a fire burning in an empty lot. A goat tethered to a nearby fence tugs at its rope. It is at a safe enough distance from the flames but is nevertheless in a panic. The one-legged beggar who works this intersection limps deftly between the cars. His hair is matted and his bare chest is encrusted with dried mud. He stinks so badly that drivers throw coins on the sidewalk to keep him at a distance. Jean is momentarily stunned by the odor as Paul hands him something through the window. He puts it in an old Ovaltine tin and limps away, but not fast enough. The light changes. “Move outa de way, man!” “Chu man! Move you rass!” The drivers cuss and blow their horns. The beggar hollers back and threatens them with his stick. A driver swerves out of his lane and rams into another car. Everything breaks down. The light changes again. She will be caught here forever, some random violence making her a ghost in the traffic of this embattled city. She is jolted as Paul steps hard on the gas and speeds through the amber light.

  They come to a roadblock. Not police this time, soldiers. But whose soldiers: PNP? JLP? She never imagined living in a country where she wouldn’t be able to trust the people in uniforms.

  An army tank rests at an almost comical angle on the grassy roadside, its gun aimed point-blank at the blossoms of a poinciana. In the middle of the road, a man lies facedown with his hands bound. Another man with bound hands is being pushed into an army truck. Meanwhile, a Rastafarian carries on the business of selling Sno-Kones from a cart on which the words “No Worry Jah” are painted.

  A country bus approaches, blaring its horn and sending black fumes into the air. It leans precariously to one side, heavy with passengers, human and animal, mostly market women on their way to the city. The shouting begins. They’re intrepid, the market women. They have a reputation for vile cursing. The soldiers know and don’t want to be laughed at. So the minute the women begin—“G’way soldier-bwoy! Chu! Mek we pass. You cock only good fe piss”—they let the bus through. Then to save face, they turn on “No Worry Jah,” forcing him into the army truck. A group of ragged children descend on his Sno-Kone cart and drag it away.

  A fat, sweaty soldier, who seems to be the only one actually checking vehicles, peers into Paul’s truck and waves him on.

  At the crossroads Jean sees three john-crows perched on a telephone pole, smelling new death in the new day. A sign says “Spanish Town.” The old capital. It occurs to her that she is taking the same route the Spanish settlers took three hundred years ago when they fled from the English invaders.

  The road cuts through flat, leafy fields that smell perpetually of bu
rnt cane and molasses. They pass the old, defunct sugar mill; it used to be the first of many milestones for Jean when she and Lana were on their way back to boarding school after holidays. These fields were once part of a big slave plantation, and though cane still grows here, Jean has never seen anyone working in the fields. As a child she used to stare at the thick rows of cane and imagine slave ghosts, cutlasses in hand, working pitifully in a realm deaf to change.

  A burnt-molasses wind blows through the truck. The scent of unearthed history breaks the air at every landmark, and every familiar thing is a landmark for her today, not in the way of an edifice proudly drawing attention to itself but with the air of a forgotten ruin.

  They pass the Arawak museum, and she remembers a family outing. Lana had not wanted to go and showed it by lagging behind. Monica kept warning her: “Stop draggin’ you foot-bottom ’round de place.” Jean was scared by the silence, the sense of desolation around the broken, colorless pottery. The outing ended when Lana struck her forehead against a glass case displaying a stuffed iguana and the glass cracked. The two girls were shoved into the car, which in those days always smelled of sweet pastries. “Why you cyaan behave youself?” Monica scolded Lana, then turned on Roy: “We shoulda neva come here. All dis badda-badda over a dead iguana, you woulda tink is Queen Elizabet’ crown.” The parents started arguing and Lana sang out: “Is jus’ a big fat lizard.” Roy said that the iguana had been in Jamaica long before Columbus and was a reminder of the island’s early history. “I can’t stand history,” Lana said.

  As a child, Jean found it hard to believe that the Arawaks, who gave the island its name, Xaymaca, Land of Many Rivers, had been wiped out by the Spaniards. She thought there had to be a few surviving Arawaks in remote caves and mountains, men and women who were centuries old in their ways. For years she played with an imaginary Arawak boy she called Kawara. He spoke the sleeping language of volcanoes, and showed her how to hunt iguanas, build canoes, and pound cassava as his people had done before the Spanish discovery. She smiles to herself, grateful for the memory. She hasn’t thought about Kawara in years.

  They’re moving away from the hot, heavy air of the city, beginning their ascent into the green hills where there will be intervals of shade. She looks, as always, for the sign that says “Dove Hill” at the bottom of a dirt road, a road they will not take today. Her father took her there on one of their many impromptu expeditions. They had to leave the car at the bottom of the steep road and walk. It was a burning-hot day and the climb was draining. “Ancestry!” her father said when they reached the top of the hill. She had never heard the word before and thought he was talking about ants. Ahead were some broken walls in the overgrown foliage, with weeds and tufts of grass growing in their cracks. A plantation house had been there, he told her, and they might find buried silver. “Come, I show you something.” He led her by the hand through the tall grasses alive with lizards and insects, to the gravestone of their ancestor General Crawford, who had fought against the Spanish for the island. This was a true story, he said. Not many people could trace their family history so far back. His great-aunt used to show off silver goblets engraved with the letter “C” for Crawford. For Jean the persistent memory of that day was not General Crawford’s grave or the hope of finding silver, but something she came upon all by herself. Walking back, she felt something hard under her feet. “You find something, Jean?” They pushed aside the tall scratchy grass and saw a small gravestone. The words were whole and clear in the sun:

  SUSANNAH CRAWFORD

  1687–1692

  beloved daughter and sister

  She was also part of this true story, a white English girl who lived and died in this black slave country. Jean had no words at the time for how it captivated her, finding that buried daughter and sister among the green interstices of history.

  They are climbing high into the mountains. Smoke rises from the forest like burnt offerings: allspice, cedar. Lana is dead.

  Her sister’s death saturates everything. It is crucial that she go now. It is terrible now to go. Should she let herself be run out of her own country, her sister unquiet and confused in the grave? No one is more confounded by Jean’s decision to leave than Jean herself. She has always been of a slow, patient disposition.

  She looks out the window at the mountains as if something out there will convince her to stay or encourage her to go.

  Speak to me.

  Silence. Trees. Green, irreverent green, overgrowing centuries of secret ruin.

  Ghosts stand on the foothills of this journey. She smells their woody ancestral breath in the land’s familiar crests and undulations. She has heard them all her life, these obstinate spirits, desperate to speak, to revise the broken grammar of their exits. They speak to her, Jean Landing, born in that audient hour before daylight broke on the nation, born into the knowledge of nation and prenation, the old noises of barracks, slave quarters, and steerage mingling in her ears with the newest sounds of self-rule. On verandas, in kitchens, in the old talk, in her waking reveries and anxious dreams, she has heard their stories.

  4

  Rebecca Landing (née Crawford)

  1682–1751

  I lived in Dove Hill until the age of eleven. I did not realize, at first, that I lived in a paradise as lovely as that one in the Bible. Flowers outbloomed the seasons; fruit ripened on the trees all year long. The rivers were cool and fresh. We were children of the sun, my sister, Susannah, and I. She was my sole companion. We were not permitted to play with the Negro children.

  Like that legendary garden, ours had a Forbidden Tree. This tree bore neither fruit nor flower, only small black pods. Seba, our nurse, picked one of these pods one day, rubbed it vigorously against her apron, and placed it in my hand. It burned horribly, and I dropped it.

  “Satan’s eyeball,” Seba said. “Hot like hell.”

  Seba said this was the Punishment Tree, and if we misbehaved we would be lashed by tongues of fire like the wicked slaves who were punished there.

  There were so many un forbidden pleasures on the plantation however, that this Satan tree (as Susannah and I often called it) held no temptation. I spent countless hours playing with Susannah and riding with my father. We rode daily to the river. The waters were considered excellent for our health, as they contained medicinal salts. We went to the river early, before it became too hot, to a special pool where white, lanternlike flowers provided privacy and shelter. The water was so pure that we saw our feet and the pebbles beneath. I must seem to you to be describing some fairy scene or peep into Elysium. It is possible, of course, that these images appear more radiant through the mist of remembered happiness, but I do not think so.

  On the seventh day of June, sixteen hundred and ninety-two, the world changed.

  We woke that day, before sunrise, dressed, and drank our morning chocolate in the darkness. It was the day before my tenth birthday. We were going to visit some friends of my parents and stop at my grandmother’s home in Spanish Town on our return. She was to come back with us to Dove Hill for my birthday. There was to be a celebration. The Negroes would be given a half-day holiday, and my father had promised them a hog and some rum. Dove Hill had been under a cloud for several weeks and it was hoped that this celebration would lift all our spirits.

  There had been a punishment: A slave had been whipped to death. I cannot remember what his crime was, but it must have been abominable because for several days there had been much talk about it among my father and his friends. I heard him say that it was a miserable thing to have to lose a whole man, but in the long run better than inviting insurrection. This punishment, while merely inflicting wounds of a corporeal nature upon the Negro, sorely affected the minds and domestic tranquillity of our family. You see, I accidentally witnessed the punishment. The slave’s face impressed itself upon my inward eye and caused me great distress. I had seen that pitiful expression before, in illustrations of the Scriptures. To think that a Negro, a slave, who was by no means i
nnocent, should remind me of our Lord’s suffering! My mother scolded Seba for not protecting me from that brutal sight. My father disagreed with my mother and reminded her that I was not an English girl but a Creole like him and had sooner or later to become accustomed to such things. Their contrasting views, as usual, erupted in bitter arguments which threw the entire household into disturbance.

  But this trouble was now behind us, and the plans for my birthday had an uplifting effect upon us. I was especially looking forward to seeing Nana, my father’s mother.

  It was uncommonly hot for that time of day, and within hours the sky was glowing red. We feared a hurricane, but were already too far on our journey to turn back.

  At Caymanas, we stopped at a public house for some light refreshment while my father went off on some business. It was a great relief for my mother, Susannah, and me to escape the suffocating heat. Susannah had been irritable all morning, whimpering and insisting that my mother hold her like a baby even though she was five years old.

  The owner of the inn, a Mulatto woman, was very talkative. She lavished many compliments upon our pretty Susannah. I was accustomed to being excluded from such compliments, being quite plain to begin with, and furthermore having the disadvantage of being born with my eyes severely crossed. Persons were inclined to turn their gaze from me, and I understood that it was disconcerting for them not to know whether I was looking at or beside them. She said her daughter had just given birth to a son and was having a difficult lying-in. There were several nearly White children around who were apparently the Mulatto’s grandchildren. She served us limeade, and she and my mother spoke about birthing, or rather, the woman spoke to my mother. She said, “It is astonishing, ma’am, how fast the Negro gals on the island do breed and how quickly they recover from their lying-in.” It was quite different with the Colored ladies, she said. My mother said that she had heard physicians make similar observations.