The Last Warner Woman (17 page)

The second thing that intrigues me about this form is the casual manner in which the mental health worker has written down a theory of “supposed cause.” On most forms this space would have been left blank, or else it would have been a guess hazarded by a close family member—stress at work, spouse committed suicide, and so on. I did not know that being of West Indian Origin was sufficient cause for madness. And yet I have always known the statistics: the highest percentage of schizophrenic patients in British asylums was always West Indian migrants, as if only the very crazy had bothered to climb aboard ships and sail to the Mother Country.

I used to think that this had everything to do with Columbus’s blindness, or something like it—that unable to recognize what was so deeply religious in the Caribbean people flooding her shores, Britain had misread them as mad or deranged. Their tambourines and their hats and their habit of speaking in tongues seemed like lunancy to Britain.

There was a time when I was confident in this analysis. Some days I was even angry. I would think words such as
injustice, arrogance, institutionalized racism.
But then one day, having the time, and the money, and the inclination, I went to Jamaica. There I met several people who on hearing my accent, would say, “Oh! You is from England? Well, let me tell you something, I have a auntie who did go there and she and the whole lot of them that did go to the Mother Country, every raas one of them, mad as shad! You hear me, son? Mad as bloodclawt shad!”

From these three forms I began to reconstruct events; a whole narrative was unfolding before me. People emerged from the ink of their own hands, and I even thought how ethical this was, the way people were writing their own way into the story. Sergeant V. C. Mitchells’s handwriting, for instance, is dark and heavy, as if he were a man who pressed down a little too hard on his pen. I could just imagine him, paused between each letter, the pen still resting on the paper, as he mouthed and practiced the words he was about to write down. A man of deliberation. I conjured him then to be a middle-aged man with a round belly on which he could rest his hands. I could see him, from the distance of thirty years, sitting in a red armchair in Council House in Birmingham.

Large teak doors that seem as if they should belong to a church are closed. A meeting is underway and it is Sergeant Mitchells’s duty to “guard the perimeters.” It is easy work, more ceremony than function, and it involves only sitting down for three hours, nodding with deference to the councilors as they walk in and out, self-important in their gowns and their heavy chains of office. There would have been a time when Mitchells would have resented this kind of work, but now, only two years away from retirement, he doesn’t mind it. For three hours he is required only to play with his buttons, to rub his hand across his bald pate, to observe for the hundredth time the different plates on the wall. He is so intent on passing the time in this manner that when the commotion outside begins, a sound as loud as an air-raid siren that shakes the whole of Council House and rattles two of the decorative plates off the wall. Mitchells’s first instinct is to press himself deeper into his chair. He remembers then that it wasn’t retirement that slowed him down. He has always been slow. He has never had that instinct common to all good police officers, a natural urge to run toward a scene, toward gunfire and screaming, while everyone else is running away.

The sound outside is escalating. Mitchells thinks, what the devil is wrong with that woman? He can tell that much—that it is a woman. And also that she is black. He can tell from the sound and shape of her words, the way she is pronouncing “flood,” something deep and resonant in the vowels; he imagines this is how a large copper bell would pronounce the word if it could. And also the way she says eart’ quake, losing the
h,
and how this word in particular seems to practice its meaning, causing everything to shake. Mitchells begins to think what a different place Birmingham has become—first hit by bombs, and then by immigrants. I imagine he would have fancied himself a congenial, liberal kind of man. Perhaps one of his best mates, Ezekiel, was as colored as they came, chocolate for skin, and he and Ezekiel would have shared many pints together. Mitchells was not one of those who thought the coloreds should have bloody well stayed where they came from. Fair is fair, he might tell you, they fought for the Mother Country when others just sat in their offices the whole bloody time. And after the war there was all that rubble to be picked up, and train tracks to be relaid, and the houses to be rebuilt. There were jobs aplenty. Mitchells would tell you there were more jobs than people. But even Mitchells would concede that although there were places for them to work, there were no places for them to live. So the new immigrants ended up living, sometimes, twenty to a house. Mitchells would have been a bit green in those days, and the influx of people, many of them with tempers as hot as fire, would have made his work difficult. He wouldn’t have liked having to go to their houses, sorting out their squabbles, decoding their language and writing down statements that, for him, were largely guesswork.

“Hawficer, a dead de bwoy deserve fi dead.”

“Pardon me, ma’ am?”

“Hawficer! Oh Jesus Christ have mercy pon a sinner like me! Look pon mi good good son, fallen!”

“Pardon me, ma’ am?”

“Hawficer, mi never do a ting more dan stan up like dis wid de pickaxe in mi hand. Is him come run up into it.” “Pardon me, sir?”

So Mitchells knows that this woman shouting “flood” and “eart’ quake” and breaking plates with just her voice is one of these immigrants, and is glad to be inside, glad that he doesn’t have to face her, glad that he doesn’t have to try breaking through the storm of her words, saying “Ma’am, ma’am, please can you calm down.”

But then the teak doors groan open. Sergeant Mitchells jumps to his feet. The Lord Mayor flounces toward him. “What the blazing hell is going on out there?”

“S-sir, your w-w-worship …” Mitchells begins and feels like a novice again rather than a sergeant just two years shy of retirement.

“W-w-w-well do something!” the mayor shouts, mocking the sergeant’s sudden stammer. “That ruckus out there is an utter disgrace!”

So Mitchells would have had to do what he had never liked doing. He had to run toward a commotion instead of running away from it.

Outside, Victoria Square has come to a standstill, and Mitchells can see her now, the woman causing this great disturbance. She is wearing what can only be described as a crown—a red and white crown that rises from her head like a mountain. In a few minutes he will manage to pull this elaborate headpiece from her, and he will see then that it is only strips of cloth braided together. Everyone in the square is frozen by the woman’s performance. Her hands are spread wide and she is spinning, her head dipping and coming back up. He feels dizzy just watching her. But for all her turning and dipping, the woman’s voice remains steady. Mitchells even wonders whether it really is her own voice because at times it seems not to come from her, but from above. It is as if Heaven is shouting with her, or that she is shouting with Heaven.

The sergeant thinks in all his years he has never seen madness like this before—for this is a madness that is beautiful and terrible and powerful all at once. He begins to walk toward the woman and feels as if he is stepping into the center of a hurricane. As big a man as he is, he feels he has to hold himself together so he won’t blow away. He approaches slowly, squinting.

And then suddenly he believes he is going to drown. He believes the earth is going to swallow him. He believes blood is going to rain from the sky and the moon will turn into red. The closer he gets, the more he accepts everything she is shouting. He wants to turn back and warn everyone else too, that right here and right now, in the cold of Birmingham, there will be a natural disaster the like of which has never been seen. But Mitchells has worked in the force for too long and is only two years away from retirement, so he pushes the thoughts from his head. He knows these are her thoughts, and he doesn’t stop to consider how they have been planted so firmly in his own mind. He is finally in front of her. She keeps on spinning. Her cries are still getting louder. He cannot hear himself when he begins to speak, “Ma’ am. Please, ma’am. Can you calm down for me? Calm down I say!
MA’AM!”

But, dear reader—if I may address you so directly—there is something that happens when the writer begins to reveal himself. When he suddenly declares himself as “I.” It compels him, quite frankly, toward honesty. So what if I were to tell you that I am not actually sure where this book begins. It may have been the three pink slips of paper I have just described. But then, it may have been before.

What if I confess that maybe, just maybe, the beginning of this story is the day of my own beginning, March 18, 1976?

I was born in Warwickshire, England.

I was born, perhaps as you were, in a hospital.

But I’m afraid that mine was no ordinary hospital. It was a mental asylum. I was born to a patient there—a woman registered under the name Pearline Portious-Dehaney. I have searched for this woman a long time. They tell me she was of unsound mind.

They tell me that during labor she had been tranquilized so heavily that she did not push or grunt or do anything at all. She just lay there.

They tell me it was the midwife who reached in and pulled me out of the womb, almost as if she were rescuing me.

When I was born, I was beautiful. My skin was the exact color of a clear sky. I was beautiful, and blue, but I was, of course, dead.

And then something strange happened. My crazy, crazy mother, my mother who had seemed so useless, even to herself, suddenly raised her head and the glaze lifted from her eyes. She spoke up. But she was speaking a language that no one knew, such odd syllables which she brought together like an incantation. And whatever it was that she said, it caused a shiver to travel up everyone’s arms, up their necks, and a sharp coldness slapped them in the center of their brains, freezing them.

My mother’s words froze everyone in the room except me. For me, her words were a melting. I opened up my lifeless mouth and gulped a first portion of air. The color of the sky poured away from my skin.

They tell me I was born dead, but when my mother said this thing, this strange unpronounceable thing, it was like a miracle, like a Revival; I suddenly became alive.

You see, every story stretches in two directions—creeping into a past, galloping toward a future. And every writer is searching for something—himself, his mother, the truth.

an installment of a testimony spoken to the wind

Shhhhhhhhh

Every day have its order, and every hour its own arrangement. That is how to keep yourself in a right and proper mind, by knowing what is what, and what things belong to which time, otherwise your life is a giant darkness, a great madness. It is like an apocalypse. Listen, Apocalypse is the day when you wake to find that straight after six o’clock comes nine o’clock—no seven or eight in between. Apocalypse is the day when the sun rise from the west and set in the east. Or Apocalypse is a day like today—like an extra day of the week, a day that don’t normally come but when it does it is like bat wings and darkness rushing toward you. You can’t do a thing. You just stay there, simple and fool, and your mind stop working. I feel like I slipping. I feel like the ground underneath me is oil and I can’t stand up. I feel the madness rising in me again, but I praying hard. I sending these words to you as always, but I sending some up to Heaven as well. Lord, deliver me. Lord, deliver me, because everything has lost its order. Hear and believe what I saying to you—if you don’t mind sharp, on your own day of Apocalypse, you will go stark raving mad. You who never think you could end up walking the road naked, begging money from car window, you frighten to know you will do that and worse.