Read The Last Warner Woman Online
Authors: Kei Miller
The Last Warner Woman
THE LAST WARNER WOMAN
A NOVEL
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
MINNEAPOLIS
2012
COPYRIGHT
© 2010 by Kei Miller
Originally published in 2010 by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, Great Britain.
First published in the United States in 2012 by Coffee House Press.
COVER & BOOK DESIGN
by Linda Koutsky
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH
© Thomas Langdon
Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution,
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. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to: Coffee House Press, 79 Thirteenth Avenue
NE
, Suite 110, Minneapolis, MN 55413.
Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Miller, Kei.
The last Warner woman / Kei Miller.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-56689-295-7 (alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-56689-305-3 (ebook)
1. Women prophets—Fiction.
2.
Jamaicans—England—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS9265.9.M553I37 2012
813′.6—DC22
2011030610
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
FIRST EDITION | FIRST PRINTING
THE LAST WARNER WOMAN
The blue sky broke. The warner-woman.
Bell-mouthed and biblical
she trumpeted out of the hills
prophet of doom, prophet of God,
breeze-blow and earthquake,
tidal wave and flood.
I crouched. I cowered. I remembered Port Royal.
I could see the waters of East Harbour rise.
I saw them heave Caneside bridge. Dear God,
don’t make me die, not now, not yet!
Well, the sky regained its blue composure.
Day wound slowly down to darkness.
Lunch-time came, then supper-time,
then dream-time and forgetting.
Haven’t heard a warner-woman
these thirty-odd years.
—The Warner Woman,
EDWARD BAUGH
Talk to me Huracan
Talk to me Oya
Talk to me Shango
And Hattie,
My sweeping, back-home cousin.
Tell me why you visit
An English coast?
What is the meaning
Of old tongues
Reaping havoc
In new places?
—Hurricane Hits England,
GRACE NICHOLS
in which the story begins
in which the story prepares to travel, and then begins again
in which others bear witness to the story
in which the story invents parables, and speaks a benediction, and then ends
PART ONE
in which the story begins
O
NCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A LEPER COLONY
in Jamaica. If you wanted to get there today, you would have to find a man by the name of Ernie McIntyre but who you would simply call Mr. Mac, at his own insistence and also the insistence of others, including his own mother, who knew him by no other name. Mr. Mac was famous for his great big belly, so surprisingly big that the buttons on the one side of his shirt were permanently estranged from the holes they were supposed to be married to on the other; he also had a great big head, and a sprawling set of buttocks, all of which he could somehow manage to squeeze into the front seat of a Lada taxi, you in the passenger seat, and then make the wild jerky ascent up the red dirt road lined on each side with the broad green leaves of banana trees. When the car reached the crest of the hill, Mr. Mac would stop—a welcome break, because if no one had warned you before about Mr. Mac’s driving, how he would press on the gas from the bottom of the hill and never ease off, not for any corner, not for any dip, not for any rock in the middle of the road, just gas gas gas all the way up, the whole time giving you his own tour guide speech in a strange language that, even if you could understand it, you would not hear because of the diesel engine; and if no one had warned you about all of this and you had made the great mistake of having a full breakfast, then all that food would have churned up and you would be feeling close to sick.
On the crest of the hill you would tumble out of the taxi, holding your stomach, while Mr. Mac excitedly pointed to something below.
“Look, mate.”
He would say this word,
mate,
because maybe you are from England and he is trying to impress you, but thereafter his speech would be lost to you.
“Dung deh suh it deh. Yu nuh see it? Dung deh suh! Look nuh! Den wha mek yu a hole on pon yu belly like seh birt pain a hit yu? Look. See de zinc roof dem pint up through de mist. Deh suh we a guh.”
You would not understand Mr. Mac completely, but you would look to where he was pointing and some of the words would then come together to make a kind of sense, for indeed, down there in the valley, there were zinc roofs pointing up through the mist. And that’s where you were going. Just as the Original Pearline Portious had back in 1941 while her mother stood frozen under a guava tree. Pearline had stood on this same crest of hilltop, except she had arrived by her own two feet. She had also looked down on the zinc roofs and made the decision to walk down to them. This despite her seventeen years of living in these mountains and never before having set foot on the trail. If she had continued to listen to the wise counsel of her family and friends and all those who lived in the mountains, she would not have made this journey, for they had said over and over that down there in the valley was a place of terrible sickness.
But it wasn’t curiosity that led Pearline Portious down the trail, unwittingly changing her life: that day she needed to sell a purple doily.
