Skin Folk (26 page)

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?”

I
n 1971, the late Jamaican 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.

L
ilies. 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 her 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.

Once her shaking hands had managed to pick up the shards of plastic casing, Samantha headed for the garbage can in the kitchen.

She froze in the living room. The lilies were bare stalks, dried petals scattered all over the room as if they had been windblown.
Like dead men’s hair, withered wisps clung to the cotton-plant stick. The odour of water-rotted vegetation seeped into Samantha’s
nostrils.

“Your daddy sorry he didn’t get to see you before he leave. He fly to Ottawa this morning, some conference or something. How
things at work, sweetheart?” Samantha’s mother fed layered squares of cloth and quilt batting under the sewing machine needle.
Her sewing room took up half the basement, ceiling-high shelves of patterned cloth towering over a high-tech sewing machine
encrusted with knobs, flashing lights, and diagrams. Samantha could remember any number of Sunday afternoons like this, herself
and her mother cutting squares and triangles of fabric for quilts, chatting in the rhythms of her parents’ birthplace that
felt so easy in her mouth.

“Work okay. Not too nice sometimes. Come weekend, I don’t feel to do nothing but sleep. But at least I have a job, right?
Mummy, you know that song? The one that go, ‘Sammy dead, Sammy dead’?”

“I used to sing it to you when you was small.” Her mother snapped the pressure foot of the sewing machine down to hold the
quilt in place, stood up, and arched her back to relieve the soreness. “You want some pimiento liqueur? Your grandfather just
bring me some of his latest batch.” Samantha nodded. Her mother walked over to the wet bar on the other side of the room and
lifted out the cut-glass decanter. Ruby liquid sloshed inside it. When she removed the stopper, a warm, spicy scent floated
up from the bottle.