Nothing's Mat

•••

•••

•••

Nothing’s

Mat

Erna

Brodber

•••

The University of the West Indies Press

7A Gibraltar Hall Road, Mona

Kingston 7, Jamaica

www.uwipress.com

© 2014 by Erna Brodber

All rights reserved. Published 2014

A catalogue record of this book is available from the National Library of Jamaica.

ISBN: 978-976-640-494-9 (print)

978-976-640-468-0 (Kindle)

978-976-640-476-5 (ePub)

Book and cover design by Robert Harris

Set in Dante 11/14.5 x 27

Printed in the United States of America

•••

contents

part 1.

1. Making the mat

2. Maud

3. Mass Eustace

4. Everard Turnbury

5. Euphemia

part 2.

6. Maud and Modibe: Morant Bay, 1865

7. Clarise

8. Turnbury

part 3.

10. The Home

11. Joy

12. The Joyless Village

13. Victor

14. Clarise the Second

15. Remaking the Mat

•••

•••

part 1.

•••

•••

1. making the mat

My people in the long-ago, according to my father, were very keen on manners and respect, usually from the young to the old, so a handle had to be put on the first name of the older ones. It got so ridiculous that you had people called Uncle Brother. This adult male might have been called Brother as a pet name by his younger sibs and gone into life as a man called Brother. The ordinary young could not call this adult male Brother. That was disrespect. You had to put a handle to his name, thus a nephew would call him Uncle Brother and his nephews’ age-mates would call him Mr Brother or Mass Brother.

In like manner I was introduced in absentia to an old lady whom I was instructed to call Conut. Co I knew to be the abbreviated form of cousin. She was my cousin, I assumed, many stages removed. It never struck me to ask what Nut represented. It was in the usual eavesdropping on adults, who when they are out of the sight of children feel they can relax and call things by their real name, that I discovered that Nut was the shortened form of Nothing. And the lady was really Cousin Nothing, contracted to Conut. My mother for some reason found her name and/or her being a great thing with which to tease my father; she could crack her sides with laughter by just saying Cousin Nothing. Conut was on his side of the family. Little bits from my grandfather and grandmother when Conut was in one of her deathbed episodes, and I was visiting, filled out the story of Cousin Nothing’s name.

Though I was wrapped in several names – all of us in my family, on both sides were – you could shake them out and find your formal name: Jean, John named after an ancestor, named because somebody liked the sound of the word; a major character in the book she was reading before your mother went into labour or your grandmother’s favourite character in the Bible. Then there were additional names. These were pet or home names. Your formal name was private. Any and anybody ought not to be bawling it out on the street. It was for official occasions.

Pet names came from how you looked when you were born. Tiny was a common one and it was really amusing to see a big buxom woman like my aunt, my mother’s sister, called that. This pet name often was not an English word; more likely than not, it was a set of syllables put together, like Bludum, which came to somebody’s mind when they first saw the baby, and those syllables stuck. How does someone come to be called Nothing and so totally that nobody can quickly find the formal name? I didn’t ask anyone. I just pondered. Nine from eight, you can’t. Go into the tens line and borrow one. Add that to the nine and it becomes eighteen. Nine from eighteen, you can. It leaves nine. That was arithmetic of my father’s time and which he had tried to teach me. Nine from nine leaves nothing. Did Conut’s name have something to do with her approach to arithmetic?

Conut and the origin of her name come back to me as at thirty, the age of the old maid, I sit on my daybed and contemplate the hills coming in through the glass windows and doors. I feel like nothing. The Conut I first met was ancient from the perspective of my seventeen-year-old sense of things, but her eyes danced and, though she was perfectly toothless, she could turn a tune, and apparently wanted to, for she did sing. There was something happening in Conut’s head. Nothing is happening in mine except for a slight pain which is linked to nothing, not to an exposed nerve in a tooth, not to an overworked optical nerve, not to clogged sinuses. I know this, for I have just had what they call in the medical field an executive profile and been declared healthy. All I have in my head is a slight pain, there by itself, for it is linked to no other part of my system. I therefore cannot diagnose and treat: I must leave my slight pain hanging there.

My stomach rumbles and I go to the toilet expectantly: something pleasant will happen. Nothing. Not even the goat-like substance which my doctor tells me is the hallmark of constipation. My parts are not speaking to each other, but thank God this situation sparks a memory. My frontal lobe is intact, so I am still human, but I remind myself that elephants too are said to be good at remembering. The evidence of the human condition, I once read, is the ability to work towards a long-term goal. This I know I cannot now do. Have I become inhuman? Am I getting to be Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, one of the few Bible-related persons with whom my father was familiar, who was condemned to eat grass like the cattle of the field and, as my father’s memory of the nonsense verses they intoned as children in Jamaica says, spread his bed in a sardine can? I pull forward my memory to console myself and to convince myself that even if I have had a stroke and my frontal lobe is gone and with it my claim to be above my Neanderthal forebears, I was once a thinker.

New to Jamaica’s slums and only twenty, I was one of those few chosen to do this piece of field research. I was bright then. We were to survey household heads in a depressed part of town. We not only had to be bright; we had to be wise. We were advised that as fieldworkers we should have no emotions. Having emotions and, worse, displaying them while in the field was a methodological sin. I was a bad scientist; I broke the law; I sinned. Approaching a clearing, I saw a little structure no more than five feet by five feet. It had a covering and was wattled up to about a quarter of its height. In it was this six-foot-tall man with his head leaning on one side of the structure and his feet stretched diagonally to the other side. Was this man building a house in which he couldn’t even fit? I saw this as funny and had to break the laws of science and laugh. I was in dangerous territory; I was a foreign student and had no large network of locals to protect me: he could be a gunman. How could I laugh at a gunman? I was breaking the laws not only of science but also of survival and wisdom. He empathized: Laugh, sister, laugh, he said, for the situation really ridiculous. Had to ask him my raft of questions: Was that where he lived? Yes. Was he the head of that household? Yes. He was. So the little house was a household. Items and their cost. I was not blind: I could see that he had nothing in it. No chair, no table, no bed, no sofa, no knife, no fork, nor spoon. He and I played the game of completing the questionnaire. It was his time to laugh as he showed me the only thing that he owned: a plastic bottle of tablets. He hadn’t even bought this, for he had no money. He had gone downtown to relatives who were well enough off, being proprietors of a drugstore, told them he was ill and had scrounged this bottle of tablets from these relatives who were ashamed of their connection to him and eager to get rid of him. What were the tablets for? Constipation. You see, sister, he offered, mi don’t even have that to put out. He delicately avoided the four-letter word. That is me now. I am and have nothing.

The phone rings and I rush to answer it. Might be someone telling me something that could stimulate. I reach it too late and there is only a dial tone to greet me. Nothing. A car passes by slowly. It is burdened down like a baby with poo in his diaper. It is burdened with sound. Some dancehall rendition which sounds like a tug-of-war between voice and instruments, between throat and nose, between lyrics and music. A dead heat. No one is winning. Stalemate. I am in a sea of nothingness. Is this like wandering lonely as a cloud? No. After that wandering came a host of golden daffodils and mental stimulation for the poet. What do I see before me as my mind wanders? I see the trumpet tree, that tree whose behaviour informs us about the journey of a hurricane. Its leaves are doing a little shake and wave, the action as taut and controlled as the dancehall rendition. It reminds me of the eye of the storm. No action. The flat phase of the hurricane. Stasis. I see a faded yellow leaf attached to a group of healthy green leaves by a string. The yellow leaf spins in the breeze but it won’t fall because it is tethered to a spider’s web and cushioned by the green leaves which are still secure on a stem. This ballerina is secure. I remember Conut. What I saw I still cannot and have not put into words. But me? I can put me into words, but wherever are they? Words describe something and I am no thing. They have abandoned me who was once a wordsmith. Lovely prose, they used to say. I feel like the Arizona of the Zane Grey novels: swaths of light brown sand; no cowboy on the horizon and not even one buffalo or Indian footprint. Nothing is happening. Nothing. Not attached. Not even a dream in my heart.

I have a wish, though. I wish I could see a boy with a kite. He would send the kite up and keep the stick of cord in his hand. He would be looking up anxiously to guide the kite past the electric wires and the tree limbs. I can see him jerk it, and in this gentle wind, I see it going higher and higher. It would be alone in the sky but it would be rooted in the boy’s hands. Do I need religion? Cousin Nothing had been singing or trying to sing some religious thing about anchor the first day I met her. I didn’t catch all the words: "I have an anchor" something something, then, "Will your anchor hold in the storms of life? We have an anchor." Do I need an anchor? I remember this line because my grandmother joined her. She had talked too about heaven and the rapture and joining her master in the sky.

I grew up in England and was on my last days of sixth form. I had one paper left to be done. I had opted to do a long paper rather than sit a formal exam and had the summer in which to complete it. We were given a choice of topics – Margaret Mead’s contribution to the study of the family, headless tribes in East Africa, or the West Indian family. With roots in the West Indies, I thought this last was tailor-made for me. All I had to do was get family trees from my parents. My father, always eager to help me with my work, was ready. We were going to use our own family as the base for my research and would look at its structure. His first. I assumed we would get to hers later. We set to work, drawing lines and arrows between them. Too often I would hear him say, Then where does X fit in?

My mother, more in jest than assistance, once called out, You first of all have to admit that yours is the ‘alternative family’; you are going to fit neatly into no mould. Where are you going to put Conut, your mother’s sister who isn’t your mother’s sister? We persevered. Then a nice thought hit my father.

Why don’t you go down and spend some time with your grandparents and check out these names. They are in their late eighties by now – how time flies! – but still very bright, I can see from their letters. Just the right time to be visiting old people.

My mother did not think that identifying these people would help my paper. They would have to be born again and in some order, she said, but added that it would be good for me to go down there.

Like my father, I had attacks of asthma and