Skin Folk Read online

  “Then them find out that Rita have cancer. She only live a few months after that, getting weaker till she waste away and gone. Lord, child, I thought my heart woulda break. I did wish to dead too. That first year after Rita pass away, I couldn’t tell you how I get by; I don’t even remember all of it. I let the place get dirty, dirty, and I was eatin’ any ol’ kaka from the corner store, not even self goin’ to the grocery. When I get the letter from the government, telling me that them cuttin’ off Rita pension, I didn’t know what to do. My one little pension wasn’t goin’ to support me. I put on me coat, and went outside, headin’ for the train tracks to throw myself down, oui? Is must be God did make me walk through the park.”

  “What happened?”

  “I see a ol’ woman sittin’ on a bench, wearing a tear-up coat and two different one-side boots. She was feedin’ stale bread to the pigeons, and smiling at them. That ol’ lady with she rip-up clothes could still find something to make she happy.

  “I went back home, and things start to look up a little bit from then. But pride nearly make me starve before I find meself inside the food bank to beg some bread.”

  “It’s not begging, Mr. Morris,” I interrupted.

  “I know, doux-doux, but in my place, I sure you woulda feel the same way. And too besides, even though I was eatin’ steady from the food bank, I wasn’t eatin’ good, you know? You can’t live all you days on tuna fish and tin peas!”

  I thought of all the tins of tuna I’d just brought him. I felt myself blushing. Two years in this body, and I still wasn’t used to how easily blushes showed on its pale cheeks. “So, what gave you the idea to start foraging like this?”

  “I was eatin’ lunch one day, cheese spread and crackers and pop. One paipsy, tasteless lunch, you see? And I start thinkin’ about how I never woulda go hungry back home as a small boy, how even if I wasn’t home to eat me mother food, it always had some kinda fruit tree or something round the place. I start to remember Julie mango, how it sweet, and chataigne and peewah that me mother would boil up in a big pot a’ salt water, and how my father always had he little kitchen garden, growin’ dasheen leaf and pigeon peas and yam and thing. And I say to meself, ‘But eh-eh, Johnny, ain’t this country have plants and trees and fruit and thing too? The squirrels-them always looking fat and happy; they mus’ be eatin’ something. And the Indian people-them-self too; they must be did eat something else besides corn before the white people come and take over the place!’

  “That same day, I find my ass in the library, and I tell them I want to find out about plants that you could eat. Them sit me down with all kinda book and computer, and I come to find out it have plenty to eat, right here in this city, growing wild by the roadside. Some of these books even had recipes in them, doux-doux!

  “So I drag out all of Rita frying pan and cook spoon from the kitchen cupboard, and I teach meself to feed meself, yes!” He chuckled again. “Now I does eat fresh mulberries in the summer. I does dig up chicory root to take the bitterness from my coffee. I even make rowanberry jam. All these things all around we for free, and people still starving, oui? You have to learn to make use of what you have.

  “But I still think the slingshot was a master stroke, though. Nobody ain’t expect a ol’ black man to be hunting with a slingshot down in the ravine!”

  I was still chuckling as I left Mr. Morris’s building later that evening. He’d loaded me down with a container full of stuffed rabbit and a bottle of crabapple preserves. I deactivated the screamer alarm on the car, and I was just about to open the door when I felt a hand sliding down the back of my thigh.

  “Yesss, stay just like that. Ain’t that pretty? We’ll get to that later. Where’s your money, sweetheart? In this purse here?” The press of a smelly body pinned me over the hood. I tried to turn my head, to scream, but he clamped a filthy hand across my face. I couldn’t breathe. The bottle of preserves crashed to the ground. Broken glass sprayed my calf.

  “Shit! What’d you do that for? Stupid bitch!”

  His hand tightened over my face. I couldn’t breathe! In fury and terror, I bit down hard, felt my teeth meet in the flesh of his palm. He swore, yanked his hand away, slammed a hard fist against my ear. Things started to go black, and I almost fell. I hung on to the car door, dragged myself to my feet, scrambled out of his reach. I didn’t dare turn away to run. I backed away, screaming, “Get away from me! Get away!” He kept coming, and he was big and muscular, and angry. Suddenly, he jerked, yelled, slapped one hand to his shoulder. “What the fuck…?” I could see wetness seeping through the shoulder of his grimy sweatshirt. Blood? He yelled again, clapped a hand to his knee. This time, I had seen the missile whiz through the air to strike him. Yes! I crouched down to give Mr. Morris a clear shot. My teeth were bared in a fighter’s grin. The mugger was still limping towards me, howling with rage. The next stone glanced by his head, leaving a deep gash on his temple. Behind him, I heard the sound of breaking glass as the stone crashed through the car window. He’d had enough. He ran, holding his injured leg.

  Standing in the middle of the street, I looked up to Mr. Morris’s sixth-floor window. He was on the balcony, waving frantically at me. In the dark, I could just see the Y of the slingshot in his hand. He shouted, “Go and stand in the entranceway, girl! I comin’ down!” He disappeared inside, and I headed back towards the building. By the time I got there, I was weak-kneed and shaky; reaction was setting in, and my head was spinning from the blow I’d taken. I didn’t think I’d ever get the taste of that man’s flesh out of my mouth. I leaned against the inside door, waiting for Mr. Morris. It wasn’t long before he came bustling out of the elevator, let me inside, and sat me down on the couch in the lobby, fussing the whole time.

  “Jesus Christ, child! Is a good thing I decide to watch from the balcony to make sure you reach the car safe! Lawd, look at what happen to you, eh? Just because you had the kindness to spen’ a little time with a ol’ man like me! I sorry, girl; I sorry can’t done!”

  “It’s okay, Mr. Morris; it’s not your fault. I’m all right. I’m just glad that you were watching.” I was getting a little hysterical. “I come to rescue you with my food bank freeze-dried turkey dinner, and you end up rescuing me instead! I have to ask you, though, Mr. Morris; how come every time you rescue a lady, you end up breaking her windows?”

  That Sunday, I drove over to my parents’ place for Thanksgiving dinner. I was wearing a beret, cocked at a chic angle over the cauliflower ear that the mugger had given me. No sense panicking my mom and dad. I had gone to the emergency hospital on Friday night, and they’d disinfected and bandaged me. I was all right; in fact, I was so happy that two days later, I still felt giddy. So nice to know that there wouldn’t be photos of my dead body on the covers of the tabloids that week.

  As I pulled up in the car, I could see my parents through the living room window, sitting and watching television. I went inside.

  “Mom! Dad! Happy Thanksgiving!” I gave my mother a kiss, smiled at my dad.

  “Cynthia, child,” he said, “I glad you reach; I could start making the gravy now.”

  “Marvin, don’t be so stupidee,” my mother scolded. “You know she won’t eat no gravy; she mindin’ she figure!”

  “It’s okay, Mom; it’s Thanksgiving, and I’m going to eat everything you put on my plate. If I get too fat, I’m just going to have to start walking to work. You’ve got to work with what you’ve got, after all.” She looked surprised, but didn’t say anything.

  I poked around in the kitchen, like I always did. Dad stood at the stove, stirring the gravy. There was another saucepan on the stove, with the remains of that morning’s cocoa in it. It smelt wonderful. I reached around my father to turn on the burner under the cocoa. He frowned at me.

  “Is cocoa-tea, Cyn-Cyn. You don’t drink that no more.”

  “I just want to finish what’s left in the pot, Dad. I mean, you don’t want it to go to waste, do you?”

  In 1971, the late Jamaica
n spiritual leader Imogene Elizabeth Kennedy (“Miss Queenie”) gave an interview. The words that Sammie hears are taken from Miss Queenie’s description of how she came into her power. The sections in Miss Queenie’s words are reprinted with the kind permission of Savacou magazine.

  AND THE LILLIES-THEM A-BLOW

  Lilies. Nasty, dead people flowers.

  Samantha held up the vase that she had found outside her apartment door that morning. Seven long-stemmed white lilies wafted their funereal scent over her. A single twig from a cotton plant, budding with little white puffs, set off the arrangement. Who the rass would send a cotton plant to a black woman? Like them never hear of ancestral memory?

  The vase was beautiful. Clear, round as a gourd, with smooth ridges fluted up its sides, the solid weight of the glass spread a pleasant warmth through her hands. Someone had filled it with warm water to encourage the scented blooms to open wide. Not to her liking, but someone had taste.

  There was a plain florist’s shop card hanging from one stem. It read, One day, I remember one day I find some lillies, and I plant the lillies-them in row, and one morning when I wake, all the lillies blow. Seven lillies, and the seven of them blow. Samantha felt the skin at the back of her neck prickle, like duppy walking on her grave. She stepped quickly back inside her apartment, locking the door and sliding the chain home. She took the vase into the small living room, shoved a bag of groceries aside to put the vase on the coffee table. She should unpack the bag soon—hadn’t she bought strawberries or something last night?

  The lilies nodded in the direction of her mother’s intricately patched quilt, hanging kate-a-corner on the far wall. She really should straighten it, brush off the film of dust that clung to its top edge.

  Not that that would help the rest of the apartment much. A bra was draped on the bookshelf, one strap hooked over a hand-rolled beeswax candle in a cast-iron holder. Like a dingy cotton ball, a dust bunny circled in an unseen draft in the corner of her living room by the door. Last night’s dirty dinner plate sat on top the TV, a half-eaten carrot stick glued to its surface by a wet smear of congealing butter. Tucked under the plate, three glum sheets of scribbled notes gave Samantha a surge of guilt and panic. “A Chronological History of Provincial Government Support of Neighbourhood Centres in Ontario’s North” was little more than a title at this point. And it was due today.

  She went into the bathroom to commence the daily business of transforming herself into a semblance of a young career woman. She dressed and left for work, leaving the flowers pumping out their faint, sweet scent.

  “Hey, Sam.” Grant’s cheerful face peered around the wobbly grey room divider that separated his desk from Samantha’s. He must have nicked himself shaving again. A pinch of bloody cotton clung to his chin. “How was your weekend?”

  “Could’ve been worse. Can’t talk long, though. I’ve got a five P.M. deadline on this damned report. Why the hell does Barnes care if Asswipe County Community Centre got a $2,500 government grant in 1968 to repair their roof, huh?”

  Grant chuckled. “Well, you know. What Barnes wants, she gets. Well, I better leave you to the joys of capital spending in our neighbourhood centres.” He ducked out of sight, and Samantha returned to pounding at her computer keyboard, peering irritably at the screen. Nasty-smelling cologne Grant was wearing today, like rotting flowers.

  Samantha slipped the finished report under Barnes’s door at 4:48, but she still had to strike that administration budget and prepare the overheads for tomorrow’s staff meeting on electronic access. Everybody else would leave at 5:00, but she’d be working late again. She went back to her cubicle, sat down, hit a button on her keyboard to wake her terminal up. On the screen she read, seven lillies I plant and the seven of them blow. And I leave and go down in the gully bottom to go and pick some quoquonut. And when I go, I see a cottn tree and I just fell right down at the cottn tree root.

  This was too fucking bizarre. She was the only West Indian in the office. She’d only been away from her desk a second. Who could have typed those words and what the hell did they mean, anyway? She deleted the document, switched her computer off, stood up, and grabbed her purse out of her desk drawer. Screw this. She was going home early tonight.

  The city air managed to smell almost fresh in the blustery spring evening. Samantha decided to walk home, a nice half-hour stroll. She couldn’t avoid the tourist trap of the busy Yonge Street strip, though. It was a Monday evening, but Yonge Street never closed, was just as noisy as it would be on the weekend.

  Three storeys tall and painted bright blue, a record store brayed out the latest dance hits. A video arcade squatted beside the store, a cacophony of flashing lights and bells. In its dark interior, wild-eyed young men and women pounded the levers on the video machines, feverishly jerking their bodies against the consoles with each hit, doing battle with monsters. The photos plastering the façades of the strip clubs displayed impossibly thin, impossibly busty women. A Thai restaurant faced a Columbian coffee shop, which was flanked by a franchise burger place, which overpowered a minuscule West Indian roti shop, which, despite the competition, was jammed full of customers.

  People on the streets moved very slowly, walking three or four abreast, gawking, dawdling. At the corner of Yonge and Gerrard paced a young, gangly white man with stringy brown hair and wild blue eyes. The hem of his white robe had a rime of mud and salt. A smattering of people were watching him, waiting to see what he would do. He put a megaphone to his mouth and continued his harangue:

  “… and when the Lord comes, brothers and sisters, and he asks what were your deeds on this Earth, what words will you speak? Will you be able to tell our Lord, in the night, in the cottn tree come in like it hollow, and I inside there. And you have some grave arounn that cottn tree, right rounn it; some tombs. But those is some h’old-time h’African, you understand? Have you accepted the Lord as your Saviour in your hearts, brothers and sisters?”

  Samantha felt her entrails curl tighter into her gut, her scalp prickle with gooseflesh. She couldn’t have heard correctly. Looking back once over her shoulder at the Holy Roller, she hurried into the World’s Biggest Bookstore, headed for the first quiet section. She paced up and down the rows, stopping here and there when a book caught her eye, paging through it half-heartedly before returning it to the shelf.

  Maybe he had been Jamaican, that man?

  The book drew her gaze by its sheer size. Too tall for the shelf, it had been put in at an angle. She eased the large, heavy volume down. It turned out to be a massive essay in photography of the various styles of adornment across the African continent.

  Samantha eased the book open and ran her hand slowly down a full-page colour photograph of a young Berber woman in desert dress: a blue, billowing robe, lacy black designs painted on her bare feet and open palms, five or six stylized silver crosses around her neck, orange-sized balls of amber pinned into her hair. With her forefinger, Samantha traced the geometric outlines of the handbeaten crosses, each one different. She turned to the back cover. It cost more than she made in a day’s work. She made to return the book to its shelf. Took it down again. Walked over to the cash register. “On my credit card, please.”

  She let herself into her apartment, kicked her boots off at the door, and went straight into the living room to throw herself onto the love seat. If anything, the flower arrangement on the coffee table looked more fresh than it had this morning. She could now see that the vase was not perfectly round, and that it was seamless, encysted here and there with tiny air bubbles. The vase was mouthblown glass. The flowers had that graveside beauty, but the wonderfully imperfect vase was a treasure.

  Who would have sent her such a lovely gift? Her friend David? She called him, but he only said, “Not me, girl. You getting bouquets from a secret admirer? What’s the card say? Tell, tell!”

  “Some weird shit about lilies blooming, and it’s written like, well, kinda like my grandparents talk.” Maybe her grandparents had sent it. But h
er grandmother hated lilies too. Samantha called them, just in case. No, not them either. After a guilty promise to call more often, and a reassurance that she was dressing warmly as the days got colder, Samantha rang off, sat back on the couch, and opened her new purchase.

  And was lost. Dinner forgotten, she spent hours curled up on the couch, reading the big book she’d bought. The master jewelers of Benin had been carving tiny, intricate brass and gold figures through the lost wax method for centuries. Ibo men wear their wealth in the form of intricate beaded corsets. Fulani women endure the weight of huge brass anklets because they like the seductive sway that it lends to their hips. Fulani men dye their lips and put kohl around their flirty eyes, wear all their sparkly finery on festival days to attract mates.

  Samantha wandered into her bedroom, still gazing at the open book. The sweet fragrance of the lilies scented the air right through the apartment. No matter what room she was in, she was aware of their presence.

  It was late. Samantha put the book down and went to bed.

  The clock radio blared its wake-up call. Samantha thumbed from alarm to a radio station and sat up in bed, eyes closed. In her half-awake state, it was a moment before her mind registered the tune coming from the radio. A capella, a little girl’s voice sang threadily off-key:

  Sammy plant piece a corn in the gully, mm-hmm.

  An’ ’ee grow till ’ee kill poor Sammy, mm-hmm.

  Sammy dead, Sammy dead, Sammy dead-oi, mm-hmm.

  Sammy dead, Sammy dead, Sammy dead-oi, mm-hmm.

  Samantha threw the radio to the floor. It cracked apart, then went silent.