Invisible Mass of the Back Row

I stand in the middle of the room, surrounded by anxious faces. It is my turn to recite the day's lesson. The Inspector's ruler points to me.

"Stand up. Recite the adventures of Columbus. What was the date of Columbus' landing in Jamaica? What were the names of his ships? Why was he in the Caribbean?"

My heart pounds. The heat of the morning sun, soaking through the galvanised roof, is magnified inside the schoolroom. The stench of fear is in everyone's nostrils. Something tells me that my days of being hidden, disposed of, dispatched to the invisibility of the back row, are numbered.

I stand up, my limbs shaking uncontrollably, sweat dripping from my armpits, my eyes inflamed. My belly aches. I am petrified. Words fail to come out. They are formed in my head, but my lips do not speak them. The Inspector's eyes pierce me through. They demand a response, demand to be respected and obeyed.

"What was Columbus doing here anyway?" The trapped words inside my head tumble out. The rebel inside me is alive. The schoolroom becomes even quieter, if that is possible.

"You in for it," Patricia, sitting next to where I stand shaking, mutters without moving her lips. I know she is speaking the truth.

The Inspector's face is frozen. Miss Henderson, form six teacher, pounces with the ruler. Her face says she is sure she could not have heard what she thought she heard.

"What did you say, Hortense?"

From I don't know where, a power surges through me. My fists clench. My teeth lock into each other. Miss Henderson reads challenge in my face. I stand still, not daring to say any more.

"What did you say?" she commands, challenging me to repeat my facetiness. And again it happens. Words gush out of my mouth. "Is what Columbus did want? Who invite him here?"

Before the last word has left my lips, the sharp sting of the ruler cracks my knuckles. Stupidly, I had left my clenched fist on the desk in front of me. The blow brings me back to the steam bath. Sweat now drips from my face, floods my armpits, drips from between my legs.

I could kill this woman with her sharp pointed nose, mean eyes and frightened face. We cross eyes, and for an instant I see the fear which has trapped us in this rank, smelly room. Miss Henderson is afraid. She is as much afraid of the Inspector as I am.

My brains, what brains I have left, are bouncing around in my skull, goading me on. I will get more of the ruler. It is written across Miss Henderson's wrinkled forehead. My life is at an end! At least in this school. If Miss Henderson does not kill me with this ruler, my aunt is sure to finish me off when she hears how I back-chat the Inspector and Teacher Henderson.

My parents are in England and living with my aunt is like walking a tight-rope. One little slip and I am in big trouble. Dis look and smell like big trouble to me.

The lunch bell echoes throughout the school. My salvation? For now, anyway.

Hungry bellies rumble in the steam bath, but we are still transfixed by the Inspector, paralysed by Miss Henderson's stare. Feet shuffle, fingers scratch prickly skin. From outside there is the freedom of released bodies bouncing against the partition and liberated voices rising. They magnify our imprisonment. But the walls have been breached. The jailers are quick to realise that this battle is lost. For now.

"Class dismissed," the Inspector grudgingly commands. Miss Henderson lowers her eyes.

"Good afternoon, Inspector. Good afternoon, Miss Henderson," we recite. Miss Henderson steps aside, stiffly. Fifty tense bodies scurry past, politely, straining to taste the fresh, if hot air of the noonday world and feed themselves from the lunch women under the cotton tree. But first there is Lorna Phillips to take care of. Somebody has to pay for this.

"Yo red pickney always sit a de front of de class. Unno t'ink is because yu pretty. Is only ‘cause teacher frighten fi yu pupa," I curse Lorna, as we bundle down the steps, out of earshot of Miss Henderson and the Inspector.

"Is 'cause yu black and stupid why teacher meek yu sit a de back all de time," Lorna chirps in.

"Is who you calling stupid? Yo want yu bloody nose right here?"

This is always the outcome of a tense morning in school. A fight often follows the Inspector's visits.

Lorna pushes past me and tries to make a break for the school gate. But I give chase, followed by Samuel, Tim, Patricia, Maud and Yvonne. Today she will pay for being teacher's favourite, for being "red", for being rich, for having everything I don't have.

"Look how fast she moving on dem marga foot," taunts Yvonne.

"Come, let we beat her up," I shout, and we surge forward, pursuing Lorna out of school.

I might not know the answers, but I can fight.

Just then, from behind the school gate, Teacher Edwards comes into view. He is big, sturdy and beautifully dark, with a baby moustache. He is handsomely dressed in his Dashiki suit. There is a kindness about this man that is not usually found among teachers. He would always listen to you, and not just take the teacher's side. He only beat you if he really feel you was out of order, rude, or you get catch with something you thief. We respected and even liked him.

The running stops, slows to a polite walk. The hot pursuit melts into fixed grins and prim steps.

"Good afternoon, children."

"Good afternoon, Teacher Edwards," we still the vengeance in our voices long enough to chant in unison.

Lorna makes the most of Teacher Edwards' presence.

Walking as fast as she could, she says her polite good afternoon and makes a beeline for the hill which distances her from the rest of us. She is safe this time. We turn down the hill.

"Meek she gone. We'll get her tomorrow," we plot. My voice and limbs quiet down. For the first time that day, my heartbeat falls back into its normal silent rhythm. There is always tomorrow.

It is the pain of the Inspector that has fuelled my blood; the pain of the ruler was nothing. Chu, mi use to beatings. One little ruler slap a nothing. But dat renking, facety man. A way him come from? Dis warra warra man, jus' a bother people head. Him 'now de score. After all him is suppose to be black.

My uncle say all a dem collude to humiliate, not just me, but all a we, all de people who look like me. All de poor black people dem. Meek him no pick pan de red pickney dem, a meek him t'ink say is we alone no know nothing.

I walk silently down the hill with the others. Each of us is distracted by our own thoughts and anger at the morning. Food hunger is temporarily forgotten. Lorna Phillips and de Inspector dem all de same. Have plenty of money and hate we.

At the bottom of the hill, we are nourished by a wealth of warm, familiar sights and smells. The lunch women come into view. They are always there, big and strong, jutting out from the base of the towering cotton tree. Miss Ivy, as always, has on her red tie-head. In the afternoon sun, as she sits on her three-legged stool, it makes her face glow. Her food box is secured between her legs.

Aunt Dine always smells of cinnamon. You know her smell, because if you dare to make her laugh and expose her bare toothless black gums, in quiet moments she will give you a big smothering hug. Her missing teeth give her face a funny, quaint look. She is never scary to us because she lives in our district and we know her.

Miss Mavis always sits to the right of Aunt Dine, because, she says, she is practising to be on the right hand side of her Maker. Miss Mavis has the most beautifully oiled, ivory coloured skin in the whole world, and white, white eyes which twinkle and wink at you when she talks. She is never cross for long, but will cuss you out one minute and tell you scriptures the next. Her face is electric, whirling and changing as she speaks. Her eyes search your face for understanding.

And then there is one-foot Herby who is always late with his sky-juice and snowball. He can argue, always on about "de dam hot sun," which is "good for nothing, and only melting him ice, quick, quick, o'clock."

The boxes are unwrapped. Our senses are assaulted by saltfish fritters, fried dumplings, red herring, cornmeal pudding, sweet potato pudding, oranges, plums, mangoes or sugar-cane, snowball and skyjuice. Smells mingle and whirl, creating a comfortable oasis under the gigantic cotton tree. That same tree serves as a lover's nest and gambling spot at nights. If trees could talk, what stories this one would tell!

We go down the hill. The gloom of humiliation, the pain of the assault on all of us, lifts. We search for our lunch money and think of food. Like swarming bees we descend, shouting our orders to the lunch women.

"Unny stop de noise and wait. How many han' yu t'ink we have?" Miss Mavis quietly reprimands.

The shouts subside only for a moment as we change our orders and surge again.

''Two penny worth of dumpling and saltfish, please Miss Mavis."

"Mi only want one fritters."

"Mi jus' want a piece of cornmeal pudding today."

"But Aunt Dine dat red herring so little bit."

"Yu have no crackers again Miss Ivy?"

"How come Herby teck so long fi share de ice?"

The clutter and bustle carry on until the sweat is running down the women's faces. Wash-rags, carried on shoulders like a uniform, mop brows, as they try to keep track of orders and change.

"Lord unny pickney is somet'ing else. Unny gone like nobody no feed unny. Dem mus' a wok unny hard a school today."

The chatter waves and heaves. The banter and retort goes backwards and forwards until the lunch money secured in pockets and knotted in handkerchiefs has been spent for the day.

Boxes are empty. We mingle, swap and taste each other's purchases, eat, talk with mouths full. As we drift away, so do Aunt Mavis, Aunt Dine and Miss Ivy. Herby is the last to pack up and vacate the cotton tree. The forces have been spent for the day.

Will I one day move from the back row? Would I be let off from reciting the day's lesson, because I know it, just once? Would it ever be my turn to sit at the front, and not have to answer the Inspector’s questions?

The house is buzzing. A letter and a big, big parcel have arrived from England. "Me mother sending for we. Me and me two brothers going to England." I sang, "Me a go a Englan'. Me mumma and puppa send fi we." Oat will show Lorna Phillips. She have no people in a Englan'. Columbus can get lost. No more standing up in the middle of the class. No more hot, sweaty classroom. No more Teacher Henderson. No more Inspector. Me a go a EngIan'.

November sixteenth. It is dark outside. Night creatures are going to sleep. Day animals still don't know it is time to wake up. Inside, the lamp is lit, casting its honey glow on our faces still dazed with sleep.

"Unno go wash, and put on unno clothes," Salna orders. Sleepily, we obey.

The sun is creeping over Easington hills, reflecting the honey glow inside. Its full power is still waiting to wake up. I cannot drink any tea, cannot eat what is to be my last piece of hard-dough bread and butter. My stomach is tight. My jaws are refusing to chew on this familiar taste.

"If yu don't want de tea, lef' it an go put on yu clothes. Dem all dey pon de chair, and don't mess up de hair," I am ordered again. I do as I am told. No time for backchatting.

Now there is much coming and going. In the dim light of morning, not yet fully awake, neighbours come to say farewell. They bring parting gifts of mangoes, and presents for relatives in England, not seen or heard from in many years.

Like a stranger, I greet my new clothes, gingerly feeling, inhaling the new cloth smells. I try to work out which piece to put on first without disturbing my newly crafted hairstyle.

I dress in silence, only now beginning to fully realize. Today, my every action, in this dim morning light, is to be registered in the cosmos as my last in this familiar, tiny, two-roomed house.

We pile into the van just as the morning sun claims its place in the sky. It releases its passions and bums away the last stillness of the night. The silence of parting quiets the most active tongue. The drive to the airport is long and hot. Still, the pain of parting traps us in our silent world.

Who will look after Cousy's grave? Who will make sure that the weeds do not choke her roses?

Cousy had not moved, as she always did, when the sun peeped over the hill top. Had not roused me to do my morning chores when night kiss morning awake. I thought Cousy's coldness was just the passing of night. So I slept on, not noticing that her "old bones", as she often referred to herself, had not stirred, that her limbs were stiff, that she got colder as the morning got warmer.

Lloyd banging on the door, ordering me to get up and feed de chickens, alerted the yard. I woke to find Cousy's gentle face tight and still, a trickle of tears running from her opened eyes.

"Why are you crying Cousy?" I asked as I crept sleepily out of bed. There was no reply. And I found myself crying too. Her stillness, her unfocused stare, signalled a change.

I opened the door to find the whole yard gathered outside, waiting. They understood the signals. Death had crept under the door and taken Cousy away in her sleep.

"I want Cousy," I hollered, as I fell into Miss Olive's arms.

Does this mean I won't ever again share Cousy's bed and snuggle into her warm bosom? Won't smell her old mysterious smells, and watch her crinkled face?

Now, this thought forces out the hot salty tears which well up inside. I am leaving her behind. The tears flow freely, soiling my newly polished face. Bringing me back to the speeding van taking me away from Heartease, from Cousy, from my goats, from Lorna Phillips. Towards ... the gigantic, shimmering aeroplanes.

The sun releases all its enormous strength. The sea retaliates. It shimmers its bluest blue, a blue that envelops the airport and the parked aeroplanes.

The following hours are filled with a numbness. The only parallels I can think of are visits to the dentist with anaesthetic injected to deaden the pain or when you freshly buck your toe on a big rock stone. My inside is dead. I am cold in the blazing sunshine.

Now, everybody is crying, some pretending that they aren't. Handkerchiefs flap goodbye and wipe streaming eyes. My brothers and I are ceremoniously handed over to a pretty, chocolate-coloured woman dressed in a blue uniform. We follow her, reluctantly, into places of strangeness, places with strange lights and strange demands. People smile knowingly and gather up our belongings.

Then we are sitting in the belly of the gigantic metal bird, which we have only seen before from the ground, looking upwards. This is it. We are going to England.

England brings my mother and father back to me. It drags them forward from the fragile recesses of my young memory. I remember snippets of incidents which had told me of their existence. How long have we been separated? Well, it is hard to know. It was hard, those days long ago, to understand what was going on. I cannot count how many days I was without my father's company, nor am I positive of the many years without my mother's embrace. But memory surges suggest seven years, perhaps, without father and five without mother.

I was not to know then, that although I would return many times, that first departure was the beginning of my exile from Heartease.

Paraffin heaters

smell

always just coming

into cold dark places

afraid and

excited at the same

time

cold

smell

wanting to be elsewhere

in fact Jamaica

"Yes, Salna," I replied for the tenth time, to my mother's call from the kitchen. A pokey, steamy place at the back of a cold, cold house.

All the houses I see are stuck together, with no place to play outside, no yard. Do children not play outside in this England? Is it always so cold? Does it ever get warm? Does the sun shine here?

"Now, listen to me child," my mother's dark, youthful face smiles down at me, brings me back to the steamy place. I sit huddled in strange clothes, close to the paraffin heater. "You had better decide what you are going to call me. You can choose from Mother, Mummy, Mum. The same goes for your father. You've got Dad, Daddy or Father to choose from."

This little talk put an end to days of nervous tension about deciding what to call my England parents. Having arrived, what do you call these newly acquired people? I dreaded answering to my mother’s call. What do you answer when strangers call to you, but they are not strangers really, they are your mother and father? I fell back on old responses, familiar language.

No one told me I would need a new language in dis England.

"My mother who dey a England; my mother who a send fa me in a England." Here I was without a language to reply to her calls. Lorna Phillips, I still hate you, but oh I wish you were here. At least I know your name.

Mum came with me for my interview at Devon Spencer School. She sat right next to me as I read for the Headmistress. I read but did not know the words of this new language, could not read the words of this strange book. I did my best. I read until I was told to stop, being corrected by the Headmistress. The Headmistress was impressed. I was impressed. My Mum was impressed. My impressive reading enrolled me in one five, the hottest, baddest stream in the first year, only second to one six, the remedial stream.

My strategic location in one five has a familiar feel about it. There is no Lorna Phillips. In this group we have all recently arrived, from one island or another but mostly from Jamaica and all poor, clearly black and one rung from the back row, the bottom stream. This is home away from home. I simply settle down to school life and cultivate the culture of the back row. We graduate in hair plaiting, make up and cussing. Our section of the common-room is dominated by the smell of hair pomander, face powder and Woolworth's latest perfume fragrances.

"You know say Columbus enslave de Indian dem fine in the islands. De same one dem who save him life, and help him restock him ships and tell him say him no reach India yet." Joycelin is feeding us information as she leafs through her latest book, discovered at the local library.

”You lie!" The challenge comes from Fay Green. "Because is Africans dem enslave and ship to de islands, to slave on sugar plantations, fi make sugar fi white people tea in a England."

The hair on the back of my neck stands up. The room is suddenly very hot. This man, Columbus keeps coming back to haunt me.

"With all de tea dem drink in dis place, is we still a fi meek sugar fi dem fi sweeten it," says Joycelin as she continues to leaf through the book, stopping every so often to throw out morsels about the exploits of slavers, life on plantations and the fights slaves and the indigenous Indians waged for their freedom. Conversations weave and heave. We move back and forth between anger, total disbelief and downright outrage.

"Is who write dat book you reading? 'Cause is foolishness you telling me. I don't believe a word of it,” Fay Green finally bursts out.

Each new piece of information is challenged and questioned. We discover heroes, rebels, guerrilla fighters. They help us assert our right to be. Toussaint L'Ouverture, Sojourner Truth, Nanny, Cudjoe, Paul Bogle. The books tell us they all come from our own back yard. Thoughts of them mingle with the hair oils, face powder, and self-affirmation lessons which claim space in our section of the common-room.

Group humiliation replaces individual humiliation here in England schools. This bottom from remedial class gets the meanest, most feared teachers in the school. Their sole intention seem to be to ensure that we know and keep our place. And Columbus keeps coming up. Today's lesson is to make sure we have learnt the lesson of conquest.

Things mingle and whirl in my mind. Easington heat. Easington sweat. English cold. English ice. Frozen faces, frozen information, frozen places.

"Why did Columbus sail to the Indies in 1493, Hortense?" The frozen face cracks momentarily. “And while you are thinking of the answer, Fay Green you can be thinking of the commodities which Hawkins traded with the Portuguese of the Gold Coast of Africa."

Indignantly, the back row comes into its own. "Columbus was looking for a new route to India, so that when he landed in the Caribbean he was good and lost; he thought he was in India. The people who befriended him were massacred and the rest enslaved to mine gold and cultivate sugar. When they died from diseases Europeans brought to the islands, they were replaced by Africans stolen from the Gold Coast of Africa, Miss."

I said all of this slowly, so that I would say it well. Some of it came out just as I had read it in a book that one of the others had taken from the local library. Slowly, but quickly, because my head was hot and heavy. I can feel the others in the back row feeling proud. We watch the frozen face thaw out. We watch her eyes travel right along the two rows at the back. We watch a stream of red blood rush from the neck to the top of her head.

Fay Green cannot hold her voice back. "Hawkins traded trinkets for black African people, who were enslaved and shipped to the Caribbean to slave on sugar plantations, to make sugar for English people's tea, Miss."

All eyes are on the teacher. The back row is tense, wanting an explosion.

The school pips signal the end of the lesson and class five, unusually dignified, stands up and leaves the room. Miss remains fixed to her chair.

Whoops and slaps are heard down the corridor. The back row claims a victory. "She won't be asking us those stupid questions again, will she?"

Voices are raised, claiming, proclaiming, learning the new language in dis here England.