The Star Side of Bird Hill (7 page)

THE
BIRD
HILL
CHURCH
of God in Christ 75th Anniversary picnic was a highly anticipated affair. For months before it happened, the head of the church picnic committee, Mrs. Gumbs, made announcements from her seat in the third pew, much to the annoyance of the elders who said they didn't want to strain their ears or crane their necks to hear what she was talking about. Mrs. Gumbs, mother to Clotel Gumbs and four other children with equally stingy portions of character and ambition, stood her ground, saying that she was neither usher nor deacon nor reverend and therefore did not belong in the sanctuary except on Saturdays when she cleaned it with the others from the Women's Guild. It was this kind of obsequiousness that got the gullets of Hyacinth and the other hill women. Phaedra could hear but did not listen to Mrs. Gumbs's long speeches because by then the service had usually gone on
for three hours and she could practically taste the cookies from the after-service repast; just the thought of sugar melting against her tongue and the maraschino cherry at the cookie's center, which she always saved for last, made Phaedra ache with longing.

Phaedra marveled at the elaborate headpieces Mrs. Gumbs wore, intricate concoctions with beads and plumes and straw that drew attention away from the massive chest and stomach that she wore with a kind of pride, having appointed herself the mother of the church. Some of the words floated through Phaedra's haze of hunger and boredom—“rousing success” and “pitch in” and “many hands make light work”—but mostly Phaedra was fascinated by Mrs. Gumbs's matronly swagger, which was so different from the kind her mother had. Phaedra looked at the peacock hat Mrs. Gumbs wore on the last Sunday before the picnic and whispered to Chris that he might have to go hold down the bird before it flew off her head. She realized that she was being uncharitable and straightened up a bit when her grandmother shot her a look that Phaedra knew wasn't nearly as deadly as the ones she normally gave her. She'd overheard Hyacinth talking to Ms. Zelma, saying that she was surprised Pauline Gumbs had not yet sat upon and crushed up the little piece of man she called a husband.

Phaedra's stomach grumbled with anticipation on the Sunday before the picnic when she heard all the items on the menu: stew chicken, rice and peas, cook-up rice, flying fish, pudding and souse, yam pie, macaroni pie, potato salad, fried chicken, and Phaedra's favorite, fish cakes. For the whole week that
followed, Phaedra imagined the food she'd eat at the picnic. It was easy to forgive Mrs. Gumbs's droning on about the powers of fellowship and the gift of Christian community when she called out the food in a way that made Phaedra see, taste, and touch it.

The day of the picnic came and everyone was at church at the appointed hour, just after eight o'clock when the sun hadn't yet got going. They lined up beside the school buses with beach towels and beach chairs, coolers brimming with ice and drinks, long aluminum pans filled with food, napkins, and paper towels and painkillers, diapers, and changes of clothes. They were wearing outfits they had waited for weeks to show off, only to shrug off compliments with words like “this old thing” and “just something I had in my closet.” Looking at the hill people assembled, you would have thought they were leaving on a long journey to see Jesus Christ himself, even though it took at most two hours to drive from Bird Hill in St. John to Folkestone Beach on the west coast.

Trevor offered Dionne a ride in his father's air-conditioned car, but she declined, citing plans to take the bus with her new friends. She was glad she could give them as the reason for saying no, because the truth was that Trevor's pouty, accusing looks annoyed her; and his mother, who insisted that she be driven because she couldn't tolerate noise, was just too much to be around. If she were being honest with herself, Dionne might have said that Mrs. Loving's sullenness reminded her too much of Avril, that she felt naked beneath the microscope of her intense gaze.

Dionne boarded the bus, muscling her grandmother's giant pan of potato salad to the back where the other girls were sitting. Accidentally on purpose, she knocked her sister in the head.

“Ow,” Phaedra squealed.

“You know I didn't hit you that hard,” Dionne said.

Then Dionne asked Chris, who was sitting next to Phaedra, “And you, how'd you manage to weasel your way out of the family caravan?” Dionne kept walking when Chris started to say that he was there to help Phaedra carry Hyacinth's pan of fish cakes.

The excitement that day was infectious and even Dionne, with her practiced nonchalance, found herself giggling with her new friend Saranne and the hill girls who stuck to them like honey. The teenage girls, minus Clotel Gumbs, who sat next to her mother, huddled together so that they could gossip and squeal when the bus hit bumps and potholes. The girls listened as Saranne spun tales about her boyfriend, a big-time record producer in Port-of-Spain who she bragged not only called her every evening at her aunt Trixie's house, but also had written her love notes every week since she arrived. The girls sighed with envy at each turn in Saranne's romantic fable. And because Saranne—with her eyes spaced far apart in a way that would have been ugly on another girl, her skin the color of wet sand, hair that ran down her back, and slim thighs that never rubbed together like the Bird Hill girls with their legs grown thick by yard work and cornmeal—because Saranne was beautiful and had a Trini accent that made words tumble
from her mouth like song lyrics, no one poked holes in her story or mentioned the rumor that this very same boyfriend had gotten Saranne pregnant and that this was the reason her mother had sent her to live with her cousin Jean and her aunt Trixie in Barbados for the summer. Everyone was in a light mood that day, and listening to Saranne's stories, and Dionne's tales of her boyfriend Darren back in Brooklyn, whispered just loud enough so that the girls could hear but the adults could not, made the hill girls feel like they could borrow some of what boys saw in Dionne and Saranne.

The trip ended when the bus rumbled up to Folkestone and let its passengers out in a dense cloud of diesel exhaust. The church people unloaded their things and stood staring at the grove of manchineel trees, two new public washrooms and tennis courts, and beyond them, the sea. Then they seized upon the picnic tables, acting as if someone else were fighting them for space at ten on a Saturday morning. Dionne and her crew stood back, trying to distinguish themselves from the country ways of their mothers and grandmothers and brothers and sisters, until their armor of teenage cool was cut through by threats to break their you-know-whats right then and there if they didn't bring themselves over where they were supposed to be, and promptly.

Once everyone's food and belongings were laid out on the tables, it was time for a prayer. Phaedra hated how holy the hill women and some of the men became when they came together under the auspices of church functions. And this time was no different, as the hill women fell over themselves in an effort
to prove their godliness, taking the baseline level of Bajan gentility to a fever pitch. Phaedra thought that Father Loving's prayers to bless the food and the cooks and the church family and the sea and the fishermen and our nation's leaders would never end. Ever since she'd seen Hyacinth and Dionne making fish cakes earlier in the day, her heart had leapt with single-minded focus toward devouring them. And so as she endured Father Loving's endless entreaties to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Phaedra soothed herself by imagining how the oil, batter, codfish, onions, and pepper would explode in her mouth.

Father Loving wound through his prayers, and Phaedra felt Chris fidgeting next to her. Phaedra and Chris were still friends, though sometimes the tension between Dionne and Trevor was thick enough to slice with a cutlass, and that meant that they couldn't all hang out together anymore. Chris had been waging a campaign for closeness during the bus ride, holding Phaedra a moment longer than necessary when the Bird Hill caravan veered too close to reckless drivers on the south coast road. Now Chris slid in when Phaedra was defenseless, her head bowed respectfully. Phaedra felt Chris's leathery fingers creep toward hers, but she swatted him away before he could take her hand in his. When Chris's hands were a safe distance away, she heard Father Loving starting up again with more fervor, this time with a plea that the children of Bird Hill would not forget where they came from, that the blood of Jesus and of their people that was shed for them would not have been shed in vain.

The Bird Hill Church of God in Christ picnic was held every third Saturday in July. If you asked some of the old people, like Hyacinth, they would tell you the real story, that the church had only taken what the original seven men who founded the hill did to celebrate their emancipation, and made it their own. They would also tell you that Bird Hill was once a community of freedmen, born when the local slaveholding family was wiped out by a series of unfortunate events. Pneumonia whipped through the white Braithwaite children like fire in a cane field. A boating accident took the overseer. A mysterious illness rotted the patriarch from the inside, bloating him until one day his belly ballooned to three times its normal size and his lips cracked and eventually stopped letting air pass through. Mrs. Braithwaite found herself without a child, husband, or another white person of her class to talk to. She looked out upon the fields and saw herself outnumbered by big strapping women and men grown strong on provisions and pork fat. Mr. Braithwaite was a firm believer in keeping his property in tip-top shape, and it was not unusual for the Braithwaite boys, as his male slaves were called, to take first prize in running and boxing competitions with the other plantations. Soon after her husband's death, Mrs. Braithwaite was consumed by a rot similar to the one that took her husband, although in her case she got smaller and smaller, well past the slim-waisted figure she cut when she was first married. The disease progressed quickly, and in a matter of days, she emitted such noxious gas that her servants took her commands from well across the room where she lay wasting away. The
old-time hill women would tell you that Phaedra and Dionne's great-great-grandmother, a heavy-footed woman with sour sops for breasts named Bertha, spoke the spells that ruined her masters and their progeny, that it was Bertha's daughter who leaned over Mrs. Braithwaite's ailing body and said plainly, “She deading.”

In the aftermath of Mrs. Braithwaite's death, there was some debate regarding the circumstances of her passing. But whether she'd died or been killed, there was a whooping that went up when her will was read, as it decreed that all the slaves, including the unborn (because just then Marguerite, Hyacinth's great-great-grandmother's cousin, was inside her mother's belly), would be free. The land on which they lived was passed to them as well. And although it was said that Mrs. Braithwaite was forward thinking, generous, extraordinary even, in her gift of posthumous manumission, she was in fact a woman of her time, having witnessed and survived the terror of Bussa's Rebellion, when the death of even one white slaveholder was enough to threaten the way of life to which she and the rest of the plantocracy had become accustomed. She knew that she couldn't take with her to the grave what she had once owned in life. Like the courage of the women in Phaedra and Dionne's family, the celebration every July had been passed down for generations on the hill. Eventually the festivities were co-opted by the church.

Phaedra had inherited her fair share of fierceness from the women in her family. And so when it seemed like Father Loving was turning down yet another prayer avenue, Phaedra
opened her mouth and spoke: “Lord God, Heavenly Father, please feed us with the food the cooks have prepared, especially the fish cakes. Amen.” And the hill women, who would normally have gathered themselves on a mission to correct a child speaking out of turn, simply chuckled and said “Amen,” because in truth hunger and heat were making close friends of their bellies and their backs.

“From the mouths of babes,” Father Loving said. He looked at Phaedra and she saw something like anger flash across his face even as his lips stretched wide across his teeth in a grin. Phaedra turned to Chris and he shrugged his shoulders; she remembered their unspoken pact not to discuss their parents.

In the requisite hour between feasting and going into the water, the adults' heavy eyelids shuttered almost closed and the children who knew what was good for them sat in such a way as to preserve the neatness of their plaits and the pleats in their slacks and dresses. When they couldn't stand it any longer, the children stripped down to the bathing suits they'd worn under their clothes because their mothers, suspicious as they were of germs, preferred the plain air to the public washrooms.

Dionne went off with Saranne to the changing rooms farther up the beach; they switched out of the dresses they'd arrived in and put on polka-dot bikinis, a matching set of swimsuits Saranne's boyfriend had sent from Trinidad when she whined that she didn't have anything to wear to the boring church picnic. Their tops covered the mosquito bumps Saranne had for breasts and Dionne's ample bubbies. Dionne
watched Saranne out of the corner of her eye, noting her flat stomach and firm arms. She was reminded of changing with her friend Taneisha for gym at Erasmus, the way she was comforted by her friend's endless chatter that dulled the shame of having to undress in front of strangers. Dionne wondered for a moment what Taneisha was doing. It was Saturday and so it was likely that her mother, who made roti skins and cooked curry goat for women who called in orders from as close as Canarsie and as far away as Long Island, was already pouring oil into her pans and asking Taneisha to get the dough out of the industrial refrigerator that dwarfed their apartment's small kitchen. Dionne shook her head then, because it hurt too much to think that she wouldn't get a call from Taneisha that morning, which always began with the same question, “So, whatchu doing?” She wanted to forget Taneisha's kindness in believing that she might actually be doing something interesting, rather than “nothing” or “watching TV,” like she usually said. That, and the fact that Taneisha always waited for Dionne to say something about her mother, instead of asking, was just part of what had made them such good friends.