Swimming in the Volcano (70 page)

If the government proved incapable of organizing the estates in any sensible way, then land for the landless had to be where the line was drawn, but Kingsley, refusing to attend a cabinet meeting scheduled on Tuesday, stayed up leeward in his home parish, manipulating his manipulators, he and Banks engaged in a round of musical chairs with the peasants, trucking them on and off the estates, stirring the nest, creating a pervasive mood of belligerence on the island. This then, was Kingsley's strategy unfolding—allow Banks to alienate the peasantry while he, Kingsley, vowed to restore to them a less oppressive version of the good old days. From Kingsley's point of view, sugar was economically achromatic, its power symbolic, a source of votes rather than a source of foreign exchange. Something to promise Joe Pittance:
we does give you wuk, mahn. Plenty!
Kingsley didn't have to explain it to them. For Mitchell the question became whether to repudiate the land reform program as it was being presently distorted and exploited or hold his peace and wait for the tide to go back out. The ministry rang with a dissonance that made him think, get out of here, go to Johnnie, and he did, hungering for the commerce between bodies and souls.

He crossed the cobbled street, paved with the ballast of a dead empire's ships, and passed along a high wooden fence, its old boards blackened with weather and exhaust but newly painted with graffiti, many PEPs and PIPs—the People's Independence Party, Kingsley's crowd—a dominant (its letters were four feet tall) but heretofore unheard of party, the PRP, easy enough to guess what the acronym stood for, and a solitary NJM—this would be the hand of an exile, someone from Grenada, a New Jewel Movement cadre member—plenty of references to Zion, Yah-weh, Jah, Babylon, The Lion,
Marcus Garvey, Michael Manley, Marley, five-spired marijuana leaves, and the latest slogans anthologized,
Banks is Bankrupt
and
Revo, Now
prominent among them;
U.S. out of ST
. C. Meaning, Mitchell reckoned, himself, though he could not make a visceral connection with the demand. Someone would have to come up and tap him on the shoulder and say
You
.

Where the fence abutted a bricked, windowless wall fronting the street, there was a door that he opened and went through, entering a narrow courtyard fenced on three sides and on the fourth side, Sally's school. A tin-covered walkway hugged the back of the fence, turning down the face of the onion warehouse to its center doors, thrown open, as were the shutters of its casement windows. Under the rain-proofed walk the school had fashioned a makeshift kitchen and storage area, there were hooks anchored into the wall for umbrellas and caps, vegetable seedlings sprouting in waxed cartons and a concrete planter crammed with traveler's palm. Behind the sheaf of fronds he found Adrian, presiding over the most marvelous sight, a bright row of dollish children, no more than three and four years old, dresses up or shorts down, each small pair of ankles cuffed in underpants, each cherubic bottom settled upon an enamel chamberpot, like upturned bowler hats, Adrian encouraging them to all make weewee. Their faces, however, so lovely, were universally raised in wonderment, as if in the newness of their minds they had seen Mitchell and said to themselves, Hey. There's God. Fathers, Sally had told him, steered clear of the school.

“Concentrate,” urged Adrian. “One two three: weewee.”

“This seems like a flawless crop,” said Mitchell. “What's wrong with them?”

Not a thing—Sally had felt driven to do something about the community's lack of structured care for preschoolers, so she'd devised a pilot program, and Adrian had volunteered to staff it for a week. Otherwise, the tots were mixed in with the regular students, Sally's theory being that despite the chronological differences between them, developmentally they were all more or less the same age, and the mix helped socialize the weirder kids.

“They are so cute I can't stand it,” confessed Adrian. “Weewee, ladies. Weewee, guys.” She dropped her voice so that two women making sandwiches in the kitchen wouldn't hear. “If my father were here he'd say, ‘Right, Adrian, cute as pups, too bad they grow up to be curs.' And you know what, Mitchell, every year that son of a bitch writes out a check to the NAACP. Here,” she said, slapping a roll of
toilet paper in his hands. “Make a contribution. Start at that end, check everybody to see what they did, and, you know, give them a wipe where necessary.”

“I'm untrained,” he said, not the least enthusiastic. “I'm not a member of the union.”

“Go on. It's easy.”

Because they were boys, the first two were, but the third was a girl, her face smooth as a chestnut, with pigtails like ganglia and no front teeth. She stared at him with the most cheerful expectation, and he made an absurd stab at etiquette by asking her name as he swiped a pad of tissue between her legs. He stood her on her feet and pulled up her drawers, and the next one was a girl too, pretty as Easter morning. She laughed heartily when he lifted her off the pot and saw she had left an unfeminine loaf-sized turd for Mitchell to praise. “Caca,” she chuckled. Jesus. He really wasn't ready for this and set her back down, leaving the roll of toilet paper in her lap as he went to tell Adrian that it looked as if Saturday was going to work out. Great, she said from where she stooped, wrenching her head up, and he could see the obsession foremost in her eyes.

“You know, he won't say nigger,” she went on, “he's too liberal for that so he says cur. That's the point. You see what I have to overcome?”

“Join the club. Sally's inside, isn't she?”

The school, by no means a sane and ordered world despite its effort to manufacture just such an illusion, was nevertheless not the madhouse he had at first anticipated either, but an asylum in the original sense of the word, dedicated to the habits the outside world took for granted but had denied these children, thereby denying their humanity, and it took less getting used to than Mitchell had imagined, once he began seeing the nation itself as an abused, misshapen child. On the back wall Sally had hung a banner, heralding the coalition's motto in big block letters:
We all is one
. There was a poster-board listing school rules, devised by a committee of her more competent students:

1. Keep hands and feet to yourself

2. 1 person talks at a time

3. Don't bite teachers

4. Good manners

5. Listen

6. Walk

A narrative pictureboard explained A Visit to the Zoo; maps illustrated a display showing Here's Where We Are. Any reader could learn that

The Day is
Wednesday, the sixth
.

The Month is
April
.

The Year is
1977
.

Today is
Mona's
Birthday.

Her Birth Sign is
Aries
.

Everything was labeled with red letters: chair, window, door, broom, table, cup, books, shelf, clock, light switch, light. The children were divided in three circles on the floor, a fourth group preparing for lunch at a long folding table—these the kids needing to be strapped in their seats in order to sit upright, otherwise they'd topple over, slide out. In one of the circles it was story time, the teacher reading from a book, letting everyone see the pictures. In the second, all girls, they were painting each other's nails—fingers and toes and anything in the way—and in Sally's group they were raucously dismantling a box of already mashed up toys, Sally refereeing disputes over property rights. Noticing Mitchell, a boy in her circle stood up with a cold, sparkling smile and shot him, silently and repeatedly, with his hand made into a gun, recoil and all, blowing the smoke from the tip of his index finger when he had finished. Jerome, sit your fanny back down, Sally said in a normal tone, and when he hesitated, testing her, she barked
Now!
and Sally's authority sent a shiver down Mitchell's spine; he had to ignore the impulse to sit himself. Sally got up and came over, happy to see him.

“They're so into violence,” she said cheerily, as if this were not as bad as it sounded. “Jerome always shoots you with his finger when he doesn't like something you do.”

“What'd I do?”

“Who knows.” Sally cut her eyes back at Jerome, checking on him, and made an amused grimace and snort. “Usually it's touch touch touch, hit hit hit. ‘Me goin stick this in you.' They grab their crotch, boys and girls both. We're into the great passions here. Violence and sex. Have you had your lunch? We're on first shift. You'd be crazy to pass up fried corn mush and Spam sandwiches. Come on, sit down with us for a minute, I don't see that much of you, and Hyacinth could use the help.”

They dragged over two more chairs to the lunch table, Sally positioning hers to keep watch on her circle. Mitchell found himself next to a godling, this folded-in elfin boy of East Indian descent, his bobbing head transformed by a dreamy smile, a miniature Krishna. Mitchell looked down the table at the other children, cow-faced, water-headed, roamy-eyed, their expressions emblazoned with awe, which he could not help but return, confronted by the staggering inscrutability of biology and birth. At Sally's prodding, Mitchell picked up a spoon and began feeding the boy, who hummed the melody from a toothpaste commercial as he chewed. Sally asked how were things at the ministry, and when he told her, she said the whole fiasco reminded her of this big crisis that took place while she was working toward her teaching certificate in Kansas, a conflict between the university's lab school and the College of Education, both squabbling about who was responsible for what, with the staff at the lab school vying for a greater measure of autonomy. The dean of arts and science stepped in to arbitrate the imbroglio, ordering the College of Education to back off and sanctioning the two people most intimately involved in the daily operation of the school to co-author new job definitions, top to bottom, for everybody who had a role to play, and whatever the co-authors came up with would be law, the last word, end of crisis. The two women dispatched their assignment with the utmost commitment, fair-mindedness, common sense, sensitivity, and fellowship. By mutual agreement, they clarified the lines of authorities, meticulously defined each staff member's obligations, reconceptualized the college's oversight function, and developed a power-sharing arrangement in which they were co-equals. Only, for administrative purposes, co-author A was first among equals, in charge of managing personnel and budget, while responsibility for curriculum, methodology, and vision fell upon the able shoulders of co-author B. They submitted their hard work to the dean, who congratulated them for a superb effort and sent them back to the lab school where, to everyone's dismay, co-author A's first official act was ... can you guess?

“She fired co-author B?”

“Exactly.”

Mitchell ventured a moral to the tale: Power corrupts. But Sally made a thoughtful frown and said, No, she didn't think so, this wasn't a story about corruption. Spooning fried mush between the boy's lips he had the sense he was feeding a sacred bird. What's the story about then? he asked.

“I don't know. I think it's just about relationships.”

“I wonder if that's strictly a female's perspective. What's wrong with this kid, by the way?”

“Shiva? I don't know that either. He has a freakish muscular dysfunction that nobody on this island is qualified to diagnose.”

“What's going to happen to him?”

“I don't know. Also he's blind. Eat your sandwich too, Shiva. Mitchell, give him his sandwich.”

“Fuck all. Is he really?”

“Don't bring pity into here. This isn't Calcutta. We're doing just fine here, although, Mitchell, look, I want milk for these kids.”

The ministry ran a small dairy farm, its purpose to provide milk exclusively to Queenstown schools, though that in fact
was
a story about corruption. Sally said there hadn't been a delivery in weeks and he promised to look into it. Then she told him about Jolene, who had gone up north to her home village for a weekend visit and hadn't returned to her uncle's in Scuffletown, where she was employed in his upholstery shop. Into the story came an ill child and the child's angry, ashamed father—both, Sally suspected, belonging to Jolene. The uncle had described the child's symptoms and Sally figured it was cerebral palsy. Four years old and had never been outside his paternal grandmother's shanty. There's a real person trapped inside the disease, she told Mitchell. Someone has to reach in there and pull him out. He asked did she want to be dropped off or would she come up the mountain with them, he had to know because of timing, and she said it depends, let's wait and see, if it was no trouble.

“Juice,” said Shiva, and Sally was all over him with praise, because he never talked.

Adrian began herding her pygmies in for lunch, and Mitchell asked what was with her anyway, what was this Mother Teresa act, and he wished he hadn't asked it quite that way because Sally became prickly, defending her, saying Adrian was one of those people waiting all their lives to help, but need to be asked, and no one ever asked before, she'd only been asked to make money, look out for herself, be a success. So now she was spending mornings at the school and afternoons scouring Queenstown and environs for local Michelangelos, the latest being a guy who was into a ceremonial sacrifice motif, obeah, working with house paint on pieces of Masonite. She was wild about him, Sally said.

Children monkeyed up to climb into his lap, touch his face, his mustache, poking their greasy fingers into his mouth. Hey, open this, said a kid with a groggy voice, and threw a juice box at him. The surface of the table was pooled with spillage and scrap; the teacher's
assistant, Hyacinth, was untying children from their chairs and setting them along the wall like statues of Buddha, brushing mush from laps, out of Brillo pads of hair. I knew it was too good to be true, Sally muttered, when a fight broke out in her untended circle. A girl battered the skull of a bigger but seemingly helpless boy with a plastic car.
Jerusha, stop that right now
, Sally thundered. The girl named Jerusha obeyed by redirecting her violence back upon herself, slamming the toy into her own face, something religious in the image she made, the mechanical dimension of the act, holding the toy in both hands, something frighteningly holy in her masochism, how she bowed her forehead into the blows. When Sally grabbed her she went berserk. Sally had to fight back and Mitchell had to help.