The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir (13 page)

I
hand the money over to Auntie and I tell her that Mummy says I am never to visit her there again. She slowly folds the money into a tiny square and then sends me to go and bathe.

The drain is blocked, so the tub is caked with greasy, foamy soap scum. I wipe the stained porcelain with toilet paper, trying to ignore the sinking feeling that my mother has left me here for good. I hope Delano is better off where he is. Maybe if I find him his father would let me come to live with them. When Andy starts beating on the bathroom door, I change my mind about bathing. He taps me on my bottom as I slip past him. I kick him and he laughs. I wish I were big enough to push his pimply face into the wall and break all his big yellow teeth.

The weeks pass and there is still no sign of Mummy. The summer holidays end and Elisha, Glen, and Diana start school. The house is lonely without them. While everybody is out for the day, I sit on the steps reading romance novels and trying to avoid Shappy and Andy. Finally, on the last day of September, Auntie calls me out onto the veranda. She lowers her face into her hands and sighs. The she tells me that it looks like my mother is not coming back for me this year. The maid at the guesthouse has told her that Hazel left Jamaica more than a month ago. The guesthouse threw her a big good-bye party. In my heart I already knew, but it makes my chest hurt to hear her say it.

Auntie taps the floor with her foot. “And you definitely cannot stay here without going to school. Your mother woulda never forgive me if she come back here and you cannot tell the letter
A
from bull-foot!”

The next morning we go to enroll me at the Chetwoood Memorial
Primary School. It is the only public Catholic school in Montego Bay. Glen and Elisha are already students there. Auntie stays in the office while I follow the small Chinese nun I have to call Sister Cecile to a big classroom to take the placement test. She makes me read aloud the story of Jesus’s birth. This is the closest I have ever been to a Chinese person. I wonder if she knows my father.

“Sister Cecile, you are Chinese, right?”

“Yes, Staceyann, my parents did migrate to Jamaica from China.”

“So your last name is Chin like mine?”

“No, it used to be Lee-Young, but when I became a nun I took a name in honor of a saint I admire. And that is why my name is Sister Mary Cecile.”

“So you have a lot of Chinese family in Montego Bay?”

“Yes, there are many of us, but my primary family is those who belong to the Franciscan order. But come along, now. We have been here for quite a while. It is time to get you back to your aunt.”

Sister Cecile tells Auntie that there is no more room in the grade five classes, so I will have to be with the bigger children in grade six. That means I will have to spend two years with Miss McBean. Auntie tells her that that is quite all right.

On the first day of school Auntie combs my hair and tells me that this is the last time she will do it. She says I will also have to wash my own clothes from now on. Diana, who looks very smart in her white Mount Alvernia High School uniform, is to make sure we get into a taxi. But the first taxi that stops she hops in and rides away. We stand among the large group of people trying to get to work. Every time a taxi stops, everybody runs and pushes forward. Glen slips inside the back seat of a white Lada and rides away. Taxi after taxi pass us by. Finally one stops and the driver calls out to Elisha. She shoulders her bag and runs toward the taxi.

The driver is Elisha’s uncle. He lectures us, “When me was a boy, five mile was nutten to me! I used to run it without shoes. Oonu children just lazy.”

The other people in the taxi nod. A man in a red tie asks, “So, Hector, the little dark one is you niece, right? Who is the other one?”

“Is Junior Chin daughter. You know the Chinaman who own the furniture store in front the police station on Barnett? She look like her sister, eh? When me see her first, me couldn’t believe that them have two differ
ent mother! Them is like twins! Dead stamp!” I am surprised to hear that I have a sister. And that she looks like me. I wonder how old she is.

We get off in front of Cornwall College High School for Boys. I offer the driver coins for the fare, but he tells me his good friend drives for my father, so I can keep my money. Through the fence, I see the boys on the track and field team doing jumping jacks. I look to see if Delano is among them.

The boys form a line and start jogging around the field. But Elisha is pulling me. “Stacey, come on! You want us to get in trouble because we late?”

We cross the street and cut through the main gates of Mount Alvernia to get to Chetwood. I sit quietly among the bigger girls scribbling away at their sums and looking at me suspiciously. Miss McBean gives me a gold star for getting all my sums right and reciting a perfect times table on my first day. During lunch the girls corner me against the school building and tease me for speaking “too proper.”

“Listen to how she talk speaky-spokey!” they taunt. “Listen to my China Royal voice. I should be on JBC TV! Look at my mongoose skin! Listen to my red mongoose voice!”

“Leave me alone!” I scream. “I don’t bother any of you. If I am a red mongoose, then all of you are black like john crows and dunce as bats.”

“All of you Black children are like Black john crows and dunce like bats! Not bright and pretty like me! Like me! Look at me! I am soooo white and soooo pretty!”

“Hey, Cheryl, you hear how she say her times tables to Miss McBean in class?
Fives times six makes a total of thirty! A total of thirty! A total of thirty! All white girls are dirty!
”

They form a circle around me, chanting, “Nasty girl! Talk-funny girl, Staceyann Chin! You red like mongoose! You red like sin!”

The bell rings and we make our way back inside. Donna, the girl who sits behind me, pulls my hair and whispers, “Dirty, stinking, smell-bad white girl from country.” I ask Miss McBean for permission to go to the bathroom.

I stand in a pool of yellow water on the bathroom floor and wonder if Grandma still wants me. When I get back to the classroom, someone has written in pen,
Chinese people eat dead cat and dog with mange,
on the front of my exercise book. I sit and try not to look at the hateful words.

On the walk home Elisha asks when my mother is coming back for
me. I don’t want her to think I have been abandoned, so I tell her she is supposed to be coming in a few weeks. Every day somebody in the house asks about Mummy. Eventually I stop lying. “So what if my mother left me here? Everybody knows that now! Find something else to talk about or shut up your stupid mouth!”

Diana does not tease me, but she says I shouldn’t be living in the house. “Stacey, I know it is not your fault that your mother leave you, but is not fair that my mother, who have all of we to feed, have to take up the burden of you.”

Glen is less understanding. “Mama, why you don’t send her to live with her father? Him have whole heap of money and him house just down on Leader Avenue. You should just pack up her and the dirty things she have under the bed and send her on her way. Or better yet, tie her up under the house with the dog.”

Andy likes to grab me and sniff my underarms. “White people smell like raw meat, eh! Come make me smell if you white, Stacey! Is that why you mother gone leave you? She couldn’t stand the smell! Is what happen to you? You allergic to water?”

“Auntie, Andy is outside teasing me about my mother!”

Auntie’s voice is tired as she tells them, “Lawd, oonu leave her alone, nuh! She is not responsible fi anything her mother do! Come, Stacey, come get some tea and nuh mind what them say.”

Andy shoves me when he passes me in the kitchen. Glen trips me when I walk by him. Shappy keeps asking me if I am ready to become a woman yet. Everything they do I complain to Auntie. Every five minutes I have to complain.

Finally, one morning Shappy steals my taxi fare and feeds my breakfast to the brown dogs hankering on the steps. I run inside to tell Auntie, who throws up her hands and tells me she has had enough. “Lawd, Stacey! How you so pestering? You must ignore them sometimes! Just give me ears a little break and leave me alone, man! One miss breakfast not going kill you and you children can walk to school.”

If we walk to school on the road it takes about an hour. But if we take the shortcut, the journey takes less than half that time. We carefully pick our way down the stony path, down past the other colorful wooden houses. The left at the road takes us to the Earl Drive Guesthouse. I still think of my mother taking graceful strokes and smiling before she saw
me standing there. Today we turn right and follow the path down past the Rastafarian family. Elisha calls out to them.

“Morning, Sister Love. Morning, Papa Love! Morning, Princess! Precious! Zion! Livity!”

I wave at the army of small children sitting on the tiny veranda. The track narrows and gets rockier. I use my hand to push the bushes out of my way. Elisha says to make sure I don’t touch the pepperbush and put my finger in my eyes. We duck out into a clearing with a big concrete structure. On the veranda the residents of the poorhouse sit and stare at the horizon. The old men and women are drooling and falling out of their chairs. One man is not wearing any clothes. He grabs his crotch and screams at us. A big woman in a pink uniform grabs him by the hand and drags him inside. He screams and begs us to please help him.

“Them killing me in here! Help! Help! Them a murder me! Come, little girls, come save your grandfather.”

Elisha tells me to mind my own business and stop watching them. I follow her to the gate and we cross the road and enter Cornwall from the back gate. Their school grounds are much bigger than ours. The big field stretches from one side of the school compound to the next. We walk around the field. There is a group of boys standing by the water fountain. From far away they all look like Delano, with their fair skin and jet-black hair. As we get closer I begin to see small differences between them. One boy has little red spots all over his face. Another has a gap between his teeth. One of them has blue eyes.

Delano has his back to me, so I see him before he sees me. I don’t know why I cannot call out to him. One of the boys says something to him and he turns. I wave. He waves back. I continue walking and he turns back to his friends.

“Elisha, that one is my brother.”

“Which one?”

“The one with his hair part in the middle.”

“So why you don’t call to him?”

“Nothing. You don’t see that him busy? He is in high school. He has a lot of things on his mind. Him don’t have time to idle with primary school children.”

We walk through Mount Alvernia. All the girls are lined up for devotion. Everywhere you look is the white of uniforms. They stand straight up and sing the hymns so nicely. I wish I were going to Mount Alvernia.
When I take the Common Entrance I hope I pass for Mount Alvernia.

At Chetwood during lunch Delroy and Donna take my biscuits, my icy-mints, and my drops and distribute everything among their friends. Donna pulls my hair every time Miss McBean turns her back. One day she pulls it so hard, bits of it come out in her hand. The roots sting and I rub the scalp to make sure I am not bleeding. She is much bigger than me, so I cannot fight her. Tears well up in my eyes, but I do not let them fall. I bite my lips and take deep breaths. I am so tired of everybody doing what they want with me. Andy, Auntie, my mother, even Delano can just stop talking to me and I have to just take it. I wish I could turn around and stab Donna in the eyes with my pencil. My face gets hotter and hotter. But I know that I would just get into trouble if I hit her. Miss McBean would think it was my fault. I take more deep breaths until my face cools down. When I am able to speak, I turn around and face her.

“You know something, Donna? Everybody knows you are a slut because you have her period already. And you are only ten!”

Her face freezes and the tufts of hair in her hand fall to the floor.

“You know that when you have your period you can get pregnant? If you know what is good for you, you would stop looking at Delroy Johnson!”

She rushes at me and kicks me in the shin.

“Go on, kick me, Donna. That doesn’t change how you smell stink when you have it. You smell so stink that even the girls over Mount Alvernia can smell your dirty red-up, red-up panties. If I was you, I would stay home when it comes! I would stay home and wash myself with bleach! And by the way, everybody in the class can see the bunched-up pad in your pantie when you are skipping in the schoolyard!”

I look at her stricken face and drive the final words home. “Go on, ask anybody. Why you think nobody eat from your dirty period hands on
certain
days of the month?”

She bawls so pitifully that Miss McBean hugs her and begs her to say what is wrong.

I take my first beating from Miss McBean in absolute silence. “You think you are a big person, eh? You don’t believe I can make you cry?”

The flesh on her upper arm shakes as she delivers the blows. My skin contracts when the belt connects. I stand before her with dry eyes. After seventeen licks, she gives up.

“You are the dead stamp and seal of the living Devil.”

She wraps the leather belt around her hand and tells the other children that anyone caught speaking to me for the rest of the day would get even more licks than she just gave me.

B
roomie! Broomie! Who say the Broomie?” I trip over myself dashing to the front gate to see the smiling, bowing Rastafarian everyone calls the Dread. Every week he brings peppers. And when it is pumpkin season he brings the striped green produce in a basket. Auntie says that the Dread would sell his mother if he knew people would pay for her. Everybody talks bad about the Dread, but everybody buys from him because his wares are cheap. His goods are also fresher than the produce from the market. The market women have to travel all the way from the country in the hot sun with their callaloo. But the Dread just picks it from his front yard. If you buy more than one item from the Dread, you get a big discount. And plus, he delivers the goods right to your door. Occasionally, we buy brooms.