The Last Warner Woman (5 page)

“Yes, ma’am, but …”

“But you must not look away neither. That is worse.”

“Yes, ma’am, I won’t look away. But beg you please to tell me …”

“Mother Lazarus, you are to call me Mother Lazarus. People don’t like to call me Agatha cause I so old they think to call me Agatha would be too familiar. But I don’t mind it. Just don’t call me ma’am cause that make me sound like I is a schoolteacher or something, and I is not that.”

“Yes, Mother Lazarus.”

The old woman finished ladling out the bowls of porridge. She walked over to Pearline and took her soft young hands in her old wrinkly ones. “You must not worry your head one little bit, my child. You is in no danger of catching it. The people who live here is lepers.”

Mother Lazarus looked on the young woman for a moment, and then nodded as if she had made some decision.

Pearline swallowed.

“I already set up one of those rooms in the back for you, so I hope you will want to stay. You see, Pearline, I know they is going to like you, and I sure you is going to like them, and that is all that is important. Now come, take two of those bowls and let us go over. Remember now, my child, don’t stare.”

So Pearline followed Mother Lazarus back across the garden, up the steps of the middle bungalow, and then inside. And poor thing, she could not help it. She stared.

She had been prepared for the deformities. These did not surprise her. In fact, she thought they might have been worse. It was true, she saw hands without fingers, and coarsened skin that reminded her of alligators, and she saw a crevice in the middle of a face where there should have been a nose, and she saw stumps, and she saw charred limbs. But none of this—the scars, the missing digits, the hardened skin, affected Pearline seriously. It was not the bodies themselves that she was staring at, how they each had, in some way, failed the persons they belonged to. Instead she stared at what was on those bodies, wrapped around their feet and their hands. It was the “ongly-that’s” she had knitted.

For the first time Pearline realized she had been making bandages. And the display struck her, all at once, as more beautiful than her rainbow room. How strange, she thought; she had made the bandages in a kind of stupor, but now she was impressed by the nobility of the undertaking. She, a bandage maker. She placed the two porridge bowls on the floor and walked over to a bald-headed man she would later know as Maas Paul. She ran a finger along the length of the bandage around his foot. Her index finger trailed the circle until it could twist no farther.

“How it feel, sir?”

In truth, Maas Paul could hardly a thing. Feelings were especially dead in his feet. But he liked how the bandages covered them up, those two things that had embarrassed him for so many years. And he even thought, if only they could cover more, cover up his whole self, wrap him like an Egyptian mummy, then he would be ecstatic. So he knew how the bandages made him feel—less embarrassed about his body, and proud that a young woman whom he had never met before could have been drawn to his feet, and without the shadow of pity crossing her features, had looked at them as if they were beautiful.

“The bandages, miss? Oh, they feel very lovely. Very lovely indeed.”

“Young miss,” said another man sitting across from him, “come feel my own. I bet you find them even lovelier.”

“You all acting like a bunch of schoolboys already.” Mother Lazarus reprimanded them, but she was smiling.

“Stay out of this, old woman, and make the young miss come over and feel my bandages.”

It was then that a woman whose head had been diligently buried in a book looked up and spoke.

“So is it you who has made these bandages for us?”

Pearline understood instinctively that this was a woman who did not speak often, and she guessed correctly that this was the Miss Lily who had dragged her ass up and then down the mountain. She was the only female in the group of four. It was she who had the crevice in the middle of her face where there once had been a nose.

“Y-yes ma’am,” Pearline stammered. “Is me that make them.”

“Well, my dear, they are lovely. No, more than lovely. They are beautiful.”

The residents of the leper colony did not know about Pearline’s disastrous day at the market six months earlier; they did not know about the shoe vendor, Maizy, who had accused Pearline of making a doily that had hog-killing properties; they did not know about the doubts of Pearline’s mother; they did not know about everyone else in the world who had called everything she had ever knitted ugly. So they did not know what it meant to her when they said they thought her bandages were beautiful. They simply watched as tear after tear welled up and then rolled down her cheeks.

Pearline stood there, in this great tide of sentiment, and made another decision then and there. She had already taken the trail down to the leper colony. Now she decided she would stay. And what was more, she was going to turn it into a beautiful place. She was going to make a colony of many colors.

an installment of a testimony spoken to the wind

Shhhhhhhhh

What this man taking his own sweet time to tell you is that Pearline Portious is dead. She is dead and buried as many years and as many days as I have had breath. I never know her and never before I read so much bout her as I is reading now. They say she died quiet, but she must have been in plenty pain. Bless her. When I was a little girl I used to sit on the veranda at number 35, when the sun was low and the sky was like a blood-red scarf wrap round the mountains, and I try to learn myself to knit. They tell me this was the gift my mama had. They tell me she could turn string into sweaters and blankets and doilies and bandages. I wanted this gift to pass on to me, so asked her spirit, if it was out there, to guide my fingers. But the two needles did always slip from my hands, or the string would slip off the needles, or I would never make the knots right. I was no good at it. And sometimes I wonder if that did break her heart, that I couldn’t be her daughter in such a way as that.

Shhhhhhhhh

Let me tell you all I really know of Miss Pearline. She was a woman like the wind, for just as no one knoweth where the wind come from so too I cannot tell you who was Pearline’s people, or in which part she did grow, or anything of that sort. She find her way to Queen Margaret Drive on an ordinary morning asking for work. People would do that in those days—walk on street, a small stone in their hands, and knock on gates. When the boss lady or the boss man come out to answer the
ping ping ping,
the person at the gate would have to talk out their résumé right then and there.
Ma’am, sir, I is fit and able to do any kind of work you may have—washing, cleaning, cooking, whatever it is.
So it happen that when Pearline came knocking on Queen Margaret Drive she got lucky. Mother Lazarus really did need help for true. So Pearline move in and she work at that house for little over a year. Maybe she would have continued but as I tell you, on the day that I made my way into this world, birth pain hit Pearline hard, and she made her own way out. No newspaper did carry that story. It was not written down in any book. Not a thing has been written bout Pearline Portious. She never important to the world, and so the world ongly write down her name three times: the first, on her birth paper; the second, on mine; and the third, on her death paper.

Shhhhhhhhh

I was never short of mothers though. First, there was Mother Lazarus and I probably did look more like she than I could ever look like Pearline. You see, they tell me that this Pearline Portious used to be a pretty young woman, but I have never been what anyone could call pretty. And they tell me her skin was the color of nutmeg and that her fingers was long and slender, and it was her fingers that you would always notice, because they was always busy doing this or that. My fingers is short and stumpy, like Mother Lazarus’s; and me and Mother Lazarus have skin like the deepest part of night. Schoolboys used to say you can’t see Adamine until she smile. But this Mr. Writer Man who is writing my story, I must give him his due, for what he say bout Mother Lazarus is correct. She was a short old woman with big hair, and always wearing two shirts. It is only one place where his description fall short, for I forget to tell him bout the freckles on her face. It was like God did sprinkle black pepper over it. And also, it is true, she did smell of oranges and lemongrass and powder, but that is the only way to describe the perfume she did always make for herself. Old as she was, Mother Lazarus had her vanities.

Shhhhhhhhh

The one lesson that woman tried hard to learn me was this—to believe in miracles. And in angels. And in demons. And in the devil. And I still believe in all of those things. But she said I shouldn’t bother believing in no God. She said it made not a lick of sense to believe in someone who did not believe in you. She said his eye was ongly on the sparrow, it was not turned toward poor people. Mother Lazarus said there was evil and good and all kinds of magic in the world, but is best we learn how to use those things for our own selves than wait around on any God to do things for we. I did wonder why her heart was so hard against God, and then one night she tell me. It was a night when the room was so hot that I couldn’t fall asleep. Her voice reach me from the darkness.
Ada, you sleeping?
I tell her I was awake, and just so she start to tell me the story. I had not too long turned twelve and maybe in her own way Mother Lazarus decide it was time to give me a warning:

Ada, when I was just a girl, bout the time when I had achieved the same age you have just achieved yourself, I went to the river to catch janga-shrimp. When I catch enough janga to fill my skirt, I begin to walk back home. I had to make my way through the cane, and the sun was like a fire above me. Nowhere on earth does the sun shine hotter or more evilous than it does when it shine over cane. Yes indeedy. Well, I was walking through that sunhot when I hear like clipclopclipclop behind me and I feel the dust rising up everywhere like when a flour bag drop and bust open. I never have to look behind me to know it was the devil. I don’t mean to say this man who was riding up behind me had horns or that him did have a tail or goat feet, but there was just something evil in this man. I should tell you now, it was my own brother. Yes child. He did born from the same woman as me, but this boy was also a creole, for his papa was a white man. So he did live in the big house with his big important family. But is like him never satisfy with that. Is like him did want to be full white, and he think that to be white mean you have to step on black people. Whenever he ride out on his horse, he would call out to them that was his own cousins and brothers and sisters. Even his mother. My mother. Him would say, look on all you, you ugly set o nayga! It come a time when he even start riding with a whip. The time of cane and whip was done. Massa Day did done, but is like this man wish in his heart that such things did not done. And so it was this man who did ride up behind me with his whip. He jump down from his horse and I start to bawl right then and there, Jesus save me! Jesus save me! Because I was a fool. Neither Jesus nor nobody else did save me, and right there under the hot sun, mongst the hard cane and the stinking dead janga, that man make a woman out of me long long before I was ready to be a woman. And after he done that thing that man will do unto a woman, and him ride off with him whip, I know that he had put a baby inside me. I feel it. So I stay right where I was. I never stir a muscle. I never call unto Jesus neither, cause I learn that lesson fast. But I speak unto my own belly with my own girl voice—I say I not having no pickney! I not having no pickney! And I keep on keep on keep on saying it until it become true, until I feel my insides get hard, and I start to bleed. I almost pass out right there and it was the next morning before anybody find me. I never been able to have a pickney since that time, even when I was a young woman and was ready for a child. And I tell you what, my dear Ada—I used to be vex with God for not answering me that day. Yes indeedy. But I was even more vex with myself for speaking unto my belly like that, blocking it up so strong that even me could not unblock it later.

That is another way in which I have become like Mother Lazarus, for I don’t have no children of my own and it is too late now. My womb been closed a long long time, like a shop that never had enough custom. But I learn something about Mother Lazarus that night. Her words did really have all the power of Creation in them; for I tell you something else: when I was born and my mother did lay dead on that bed, it was Mother Lazarus who spake unto herself saying,
this child need me. I cannot die for fifteen more years.
And so said, so done. She lived fifteen years to the day, till she was 105. On my very birthday she decide at last it was time to dead. It was the eighteenth of March.

Shhhhhhhhh

Everything that is important to me happen on that day. On the eighteenth of March I was born. On the eighteenth of March my mother dead. On the eighteenth of March, Mother Lazarus lie down on her cot, pleased as Miss Thomas puss, and dead. On the eighteenth of March I get the calling. I did run from the calling at first. I know it was God, and I did scared. I did want to hide in cave like Elijah, or inside a fishbelly like Jonah. Deep down I always believe in the Savior—no matter what Mother Lazarus did try to learn me—but I did believe her when she say he was not interested in people such as we. So I never know what business God, all on a sudden, want to have with me. I put my fingers in my ears, but this calling was like an earthquake inside my head that no bush tea could cure. I finally pick myself up one night and run straight to the Revival church. I step into the room and the Captain spin down from his pulpit and ask me “what is thy name young lady?” I tell him, and is like the sound of my name was an alabaster jar broken. The whole room gasp, and the place was full of a sweet and holy fragrance. The women start to dance wild and they sing and cry and spin and dip, and they shout Glory Glory Glory. Poor me don’t understand none of this commotion. The Captain man pull me aside and he give me directions to the Bishopess’s yard. He say go quick, girl child, for she has been calling unto you for days and nights.