the enemy. She was sure to misunderstand anything I did, and the time came when I thought she not only misunderstood me, but quite definitely disapproved of me. I was an only child, but for her I was one too many.
She hated my father, and even after he died she continued to hate him.
She would say, ‘Go ahead and do what you doing. You is your father child, you hear, not mine.’
The real split between my mother and me happened not in Miguel Street, but in the country.
My mother had decided to leave my father, and she wanted to take me to her mother.
I refused to go.
My father was ill, and in bed. Besides, he had promised that if I stayed with him I was to have a whole box of crayons.
I chose the crayons and my father.
We were living at the time in Cunupia, where my father was a driver on the sugar estates. He wasn’t a slave-driver, but a driver of free people, but my father used to behave as though the people were slaves. He rode about the estates on a big clumsy brown horse, cracking his whip at the labourers and people said—I really don’t believe this—that he used to kick the labourers.
I don’t believe it because my father had lived all his life in Cunupia and he knew that you really couldn’t push the Cunupia people around. They are not tough people, but they think nothing of killing, and they are prepared to wait years for the chance to kill someone they don’t like. In fact, Cunupia and Tableland are the two parts of Trinidad where murders occur often enough to ensure quick promotion for the policemen stationed there.
At first we lived in the barracks, but then my father wanted to move to a little wooden house not far away.
My mother said, ‘You playing hero. Go and live in your house by yourself, you hear.’
She was afraid, of course, but my father insisted. So we moved to the house, and then trouble really started.
A man came to the house one day about midday and said to my mother, ‘Where your husband?’
My mother said, ‘I don’t know.’
The man was cleaning his teeth with a twig from a hibiscus plant. He spat and said, ‘It don’t matter. I have time. I could wait.’
My mother said, ‘You ain’t doing nothing like that. I know what you thinking, but I have my sister coming here right now.’
The man laughed and said, ‘I not doing anything. I just want to know when he coming home.’
I began to cry in terror.
The man laughed.
My mother said, ‘Shut up this minute or I give you something really to cry about.’
I went to another room and walked about saying, ‘Rama! Rama! Sita Rama!’ This was what my father had told me to say when I was in danger of any sort.
I looked out of the window. It was bright daylight, and hot, and there was nobody else in all the wide world of bush and trees.
And then I saw my aunt walking up the road.
She came and she said, ‘Anything wrong with you here? I was at home just sitting quite quiet, and I suddenly feel that something was going wrong. I feel I had to come to see.’
The man said, ‘Yes, I know the feeling.’
My mother, who was being very brave all the time, began to cry.
But all this was only to frighten us, and we were certainly frightened. My father always afterwards took his gun with him, and my mother kept a sharpened cutlass by her hand.
Then, at night, there used to be voices, sometimes from the road, sometimes from the bushes behind the house. The voices came from people who had lost their way and wanted lights, people who had come to tell my father that his sister had died suddenly in Debe, people who had come just to tell my father that there was a big fire at the sugar-mill. Sometimes there would be two or three of these voices, speaking from different directions, and we would sit awake in the dark house, just waiting, waiting for the voices to fall silent. And when they did fall silent it was even more terrible.
My father used to say, ‘They still outside. They want you to go out and look.’
And at four or five o’clock when the morning light was coming up we would hear the tramp of feet in the bush, feet going away.
As soon as darkness fell we would lock