She knew.
And now I know, too.
It was because I was nine and wanted some me time. Because in that rectangular house on the hill – bisected down the middle, creating three railroad-style rooms on each side, designed like a game of moral my girl cousins and I played from morning till evening time, which my construction-worker father blue-printed and built with his own hands when he was twenty-five – I was reading.
Because I was fleeing the stench of tension being brewed in that cornflower living room where my six-foot-two father’s bulging muscles poised, waiting for their food. The veined sinews of his broad back, arms and legs flexed at attention across the entire four-cushion couch and commandeered an armchair, too. His large, sandpaper hands braced, giving my alternating sewing and strolling mother a chance tuh make haste an organise something fuh meh tuh eat. While he watched Jet-Li round-house opponents in exemplary hi-ya Kung-Fu. Sidekicks and knife-hands my father practiced after viewing how to do. And the Sunday martial arts shows were ending at the strike of two.
Because I was making my own use of the intermittent leisure hours before the seven o’ clock news. That period for entertainment before TTT broadcast another protested policy from Prime Minister A.N.R. Robinson making Trinis feel more and more abused. That seven o’ clock witching hour finding households perched with wringing hands in case the landslide-elected man execute more salary cuts when they income done slash in half over the last seven years. And rates of unemployment down in the dumps and the poor crying unsupplemented tears.
The now dreaded nightly news before which parents sit holding they head, wondering how much more they could afford to lose. Those parents’ fears making instructed children across the nation have to bruise they agile fingers to turn up the TV volume so adults could hear people in Port of Spain streets getting interviewed. Their fellow angry citizens with mic in they face cussing out parliament ministers who didn’t adjust they spending to decreasing revenues after our oil prices drop and we island fall from third richest country in the West during the good ole days of the oil boom.
It’s because I decided on my own to take advantage of the interlude during which daddy was in a better mood before that sun setting news viewers only too happy to put off till evening. Feteing people in Trinidad not wanting to hear no more about how the country grieving this salt in the wound 15% Value Added Tax. News about which mummy and daddy, in 1989, thought they could be lax.
Liming people not guessing that in a year Yasin Abu-Bakr and his group of Muslim militants would attack Prime Minister Robbie. That they radical militia would open gunfire in the Red House while inside parliament was convened. They didn’t guess, a year before, that these same families would be wishing for any news of the coup they could hear. That we would be begging for any broadcast at all over black, silent TV screens. Any update to penetrate our emergency curfew’s silence and days of a country’s collective fear.
But it is not yet 1990. And daddy is without worry, free to leave his smouldering ash tray on the jagged centre table to cloud the air we breathe. While he watches his warring Kungfu movie. It is because I coughed, waved my hands frantically in front my watering eyes. Because I wrinkle up my nose, heave a sigh, stand up and leave the living room to get a reprieve. Because I didn’t stay in the tar stink fog with muted mummy who didn’t speak up against release of the second-hand smoke. Didn’t speak up to chide an environment children shouldn’t have to abide.
Next on TV would be Bonanza’s cowboys grappling then flat-out dragging ‘wild rebels’ through the dust. And my father’s baked breast, leg and thigh, warm-from-the-oven macaroni pie, rice and pigeon peas, callaloo, cole slaw, green salad, and tall cup of orange juice brought to him on a tray was a must by that time. My parents’ power struggle games, their anxiety-inducing stalemate that saran-wrapped the whole house, through which my humming mother secret-smiled, would end at the strike of 2 o’clock.
Because I ducked into the second bedroom. I would not voluntarily watch oncoming karate chops. And my two younger sisters who still widely shut their eyes, uphold those people’s lies and deny deny deny were then outside under the cashew tree making red mud pies plated on mango leaves.
I was in that second bedroom that I couldn’t term my bedroom. That my sisters and I couldn’t refer to as our bedroom. That we couldn’t name, claim, possess because my mother got vex any time it was so called.
I was in our bedroom that I rearranged to put the cedar chest of drawers in front the door connecting my parents’ room to ours.
I was in the second bedroom that was in line with my parents’ in that abhorred style of rooms succeeding and leading from one to the other with a connecting door smack dab in middle of the floor between theirs and mine. The door that my mother opened at all hours of the deep, dark night to climb into my bed to rest her head on my pillow.
I was in the second bedroom that I blamed an artistic impulse I just had to follow for my sudden need to reposition the dressing table to bar the connecting door from allowing entry.
The children’s bedroom that didn’t grant security from my mother leaving my father’s queen-sized bed right after her moans, giggles, gusty sighs to climb into my twin instead.
The bedroom where she’d lay her head and weep and tell me of my father’s unwanted hands grasping, forcing at his command. The bedroom where my mother would share how yuh fadda doh take no fuh a answer after he come home stink uh he whores.
The bedroom where I had to say I love you more, mummy, to get her to turn away from me onto her side. To draw up into a 4ft 10 foetus as she said iz you does keep me from jess sticking my head in the oven again. Threatening her daughter with ending her life.
The second bedroom where my teddy and I were hemmed up against the cold brick wall to keep my mother’s protruding butt from resting on us all night.
I was in the second bedroom that I reorganised so the entry door would be the one off the kitchen and I could listen for the jangle of bead strips announcing one of her trips into my bed and pretend to be asleep instead.
In therapy, when I work to cleanse my somatised body of its trauma memories, I am removing her hands from my waist. Her sour breath from my neck. My right shoulder rotates to shrug that mother off me. Throw the monkey from my back. To push off the big spoon pulling my spine to her pillowy breasts. Strangling my space. Launching her covert emotional incest attack.
That Sunday, in the second bedroom, dust motes danced in sunrays lancing the row of fancy blocks topping the wall. Pink, Cabbage Patch curtains undulated in a whispering breeze visiting me through dirt-speckled louvres. The thick smell of soaked earth sunk me into its clumps, captive like it held the entrenched house. Its outer bedroom walls stood just three feet from the steep, moss-carpeted rise of Baptist Hill that sent mudslides to reclaim its stake, rendering our windows portals for toads, vines, spiders and snakes. Those bedimmed windows also an archway through which, in daydreams and night visions, I escaped. And, that day, The Children’s Illustrated Classic ~ Oliver Twist was granting me a magic-carpet-page taking me to a new and dank, cobble-stoned place.
I was lain upon the top twin bed of the bunker mahogany set my father bought from Standards furniture store instead of getting out hammer, nails and saw from his workbag once more to make another squat, unpolished bed my mother called an eyesore with its un-sanded pine slabs for slats under the mattress that bore jagged splinters, which tore our bed-making hands. This sturdy, early iteration my father crafted for the first of his inside and outside children was mine. And, three decades later, it has stood the test of time. My younger sisters shared the bumper beds – four-year-old Sherrie on the bottom bunk, seven-year-old Ericka on the top of a set that quivered as if made of ply.
That Sunday, I braved a daytime climb up the flimsy ladder instead of sitting with my mother in their bedroom at her Singer sewing machine or going in the kitchen to put some water on the stove to boil so my father could see at least something doing and my mother, approving, would be encouraged by the 24/7 company she needed and would get moving to make his lunch. Taking care of my mother was not my responsibility. Just for that one day.
And that’s why she made me pay.
It was not my duty to protect my mother from my father’s brutality she was baiting not only by waiting to cook, but in those snaring his attention from the tv side-eye looks. Those swaying hips, and twisting back the curtains in the living room while blocking the television screen from his view, and the finding ways to get a rise chooks that I couldn’t understand. She rinsed out my ears daily with the vinegar of her hate for this man. Why she wasn’t getting his food ready? And her children’s meals, too?
Everybody else in Trinidad was going and be sitting down at their dining table to their week-awaited Sunday food. All my friends would be bragging tomorrow in school about the big piece of fry chicken they get instead of the regular small piece that was stewed. Why this fussing, hair brushing, cyah leave the man to his tv watching mood?
I wasn’t understanding the contrast between what my mother told me every single day. The unending complaints she made that Ah never shoulda marrid yuh fadda when daddy was at work at his construction sites and she had me sit next to her on the couch instead of going and play outside, or with my cousins down the hill, or reading my books in the gallery in the calm sunlight and what she was now taking it upon herself to do. Teasing? She not fraid uh him? The whole thing was puzzling. I couldn’t wrap my head around the lack of logic. My mother was purposely courting Ulric. She wasn’t making sense. That was when I didn’t know the purpose of distorting reality for your child, so she will always be on your side.
That Sunday, my itching back stopped sending electric shocks jolting my nerves awake while I lay on my belly, lazily swinging my feet in the stagnant air. It would be five years before I would sneak a visit to a dermatologist who would diagnose this unseen, no-reason-for-being itch as overwhelming stress. I could have told him it was fear. Perpetually on guard for the next slap or tense word indicating their always-bubbling trouble erupting, my adrenaline levels never reset. But that Sunday, I was giving myself the peace those people, those parents would not let me get.
I could not, I would not hear my mother’s smirk-lipped humming above the turning of raspy, illustrated pages and the floor fan whirring. I could not, would not hear my father’s readying limbs stirring against the velour cushion covers my mother sewed every Christmas.
I made myself swallow back the acid taste of the regurgitating Crix and cheese breakfast. I made my ears relax their constant vigil and, now inside the book, drew level with Fagin’s hooked nose. I circled the tall man, studied his jutting chin, curved shoulders, thin arms, vulturous pose. My eyes traced his question mark back and returned to his front where his lecherous leer stopped me cold. Oliver, yuh doh see the slyness lighting up his eyes, how his fingers stretching past his raggedy shirt look like scythes? Oliver though, height on par with Fagin’s knee, looked up at Fagin trustingly. Oliver Twist was orphaned. He was hungry.
It was because I chose me.
Because I chose to read. Because I chose to flee her and my father steupsing, their under-breath cussing, their issuing threats, their flirtatious fussing. Flee my father groping my mother’s thick thighs and jiggling backside as she walked past from their bedroom, through the living room, to the kitchen with her preening smile.
Because I went into the second bedroom and dared to decide I would not be audience to their mercurial theatre of sexual strokes and knock-out strikes. But my mother does not like me quiet. She cannot abide me being remote, removed from the endless chatter she makes her child obliged to provide. She cannot tolerate lack of perpetual company and deems my independence an enemy that requires her extinguishment. So, she contrived. And arrived in the second bedroom to vanquish self-reliance.
The door slams inside the second bedroom. Yuh eh hear meh calling yuh? The black door my father made a choonky too wide swings behind her, shutting out steam smelling of rice, horse hooves drumming on tv, my sisters’ distant giggling feeding their dollies out in front. No, I din hear yuh, mummy, I mumble through mahogany bars. Steupssss, dise cuz yuh pack up in here like yuh en have nuttin tuh do.
From the top bunk, she is a dome-headed dinosaur. High hair bump at the jut of her head. Short arms leading the charge to my empty bed against the opposite wall. Long, straight, “white woman” nose about which she boasts spears the air. Her slim lips sneer. Everybody outside spenin time tuhgedda and you like yuh doh cyare if yuh sisters need you or if I want help doin sometin. She sits facing me. Her sharp chin grows hard corners when she speaks while sucking her teeth. The front one is not yet chipped from a morning my father will beat and beat with open, five-fingered hands from which dangling sixth appendages he could never stand were twisted off, leaving nubs he doesn’t like touched.
I reading the book we buy when we went in town lass week, mummy. I cajolingly speak into the pulsing atmosphere. She turns the rotating fan to blow her straightened hair. Yeah, buh nuh doin anyting. Big big Sunday an your foot cock up like everyting done do. Youse a lady in dis house? Look, come dong an go in de shop fuh meh now. I peer the length of my body. I am dressed in a wash-out, home jersey. Buh, mummy, we make groceries yesterday. And today is Sunday. Spikes and them mussbe done lock up and gone home.
The day before, I got her up from watching her soaps to make sure we reach Kelly’s Supermarket before they close. When she said she depressed and don’t have energy to go, I reminded her Sam would be there. After I kept up the cheer through the narrow aisles and we ticked off all the food, toiletries, cleaning supplies to last for two weeks from the list I carried, we got in line. The one with Sam at the register, bagging on the side.
While I unloaded the red pack of Breeze, the tall bottle of Squeezy, the bags of dried peas, Sam smiled. He sweet-talk my mother, holding her small hands with the gold bands and had her ducking her head like a child. Sam was tall, young, face in a perpetual grin. He knew he was handsome with that smooth, black skin and all Covigne Road girls tracking him. Though discomforted by my mother’s flirting in front me, at least Sam’s congeniality kept her from blurting unending digs to criticise dah saga boy one who tink he better dan me or dah pisintail gyul who picky hair much thinner dan mine or yuh grandmodda watch meh funny las week so bess allyuh stay up home fuh de time being.
Just yesterday she was feeling up Sam biceps. She was laughing open-mouthed. She was sticking out her tot-tots that reach Sam waist thereabouts. She doh remember slipping him a few dollars on a palm caress when he bring all the heavy grocery bags up the road. The cupboard full. Why I hadda go?
Oh gosh, Uricka, doh be so. Ah din remember to put de peas tuh soak las night. She switches mode to coax. Yuh cyah cook something else? Ent lentils doh take long tuh burst? This is not my first rodeo. Yuh know how yuh fadda is. Ah could make a quick lentils buh we go never hear de end uh it. We. Making us a team. My mother drops her round shoulders in the sleeveless, floral top she sewed in the seamstress class she was taking before she just suddenly stopped.
Sharp battle angles are gone. My mother looks forlorn. The long nose points down to the thin, brown carpet. In the lines of her forehead’s frown, I read the remembrance. The dejected script plays across her face and pitches me, without encumbrance, without time to seek balance, without the armour of resistance or allowed distance, into the memory she is conjuring. That episode to which she is obliquely referring. The buttercream walls above the stove and yellow plywood ceilings bear the evidence of that morning.
It was a weekday that time. The sun had just finish rise. There was no warmup before Ulric wade in with his opening line. Cyatrin, whey de work shirt dat yuh was suppose tuh hang up here fuh me tuh wear dis morning? My father holds a scrunched up, black and white chequered ball in his fist he lets fall to the plastic vinyl of the kitchen floor. I know dis not de good good shirt you was suppose tuh press fuh me since lass night? His black sweat rings the collar. The shirt releases his pungent odour.
My throat gags in the way it does when he comes home from work and pulls me too close, too long under his arms for a hug. He had was to dig the shirt out the basket before coming to ask if mummy didn’t know iz this one he want. He drawls the bait on a singsong jibe. My father tilts his head to the side. Laser focusses on my mother’s backside. Compresses dark lips into his spit-gathering-at-the-corners smile. It does not reach his hard, reddening eyes. I slide into the cobwebbed corner to hide.
Outside the tension of the kitchen, birds trill sweet melodies. Uncle Errol cock crows from the rose mango tree shading the living room and gallery. Our resident stray cats down in the yard complain how they hungry. Within the confines of these sunshine walls to which I am pressed, I do not speak. My father’s growl drowns my heartbeat.
Eh, eh Cyatrin. Like yuh nuh hearing me awah? Mummy stirs the contents of the pressure cooker on the back-right burner with a wooden spoon. She does not turn around. She does not look up from the steaming pot as my father comes further into the kitchen beyond the beaded strips dividing it from the living room. Yes, Ulric. That’s all my mother replies quietly. She keeps stirring the viscous peas. And I freeze.
My father does not like to be ignored. She does not turn to face him. Her spine communicates she is bored. She does not see my father adopt a waiting stance. She does not see him loosen his thick, outstretched forearms. I see it in a glance, the bubbling volcano. On the opposite end of the kitchen, the half doors bear witness also. They stand in wait. I am out of sight behind the fridge, hanging wet school socks on the hot iron grate to dry. My sisters in the bedroom at my rear, behind closed doors. Making themselves not able to hear. Lucky not to see. Not made into my mother’s security, her ears, her eyes.
Ulric, you mean tuh tell me yuh cyah wear something else dis morning? She stops her stirring and spoons some of the brown liquid to her blowing mouth. Slurps, smacks. Shakes in more salt. Some annoyance seeped out in her last word. My belly makes a 360 machine-cycle turn.
At her tone, my father spurs his bare heels to slam the concrete. He steps closer. It is not yet seven o’clock. I checked the analogue face on our bedroom wall before I crawled out to brave getting ready for school. It was meant to only be ten minutes of interaction between these two. The blue VCR digits confirmed five minutes to go before my father walk out the door, trek down the hill, and get in his tan, third car that park in granny yard. But then came the snarl.
He growls again and hits the counter. Hard. Lightning bolts bloom in the thin, white formica. A jagged shard snaps off under my father’s first attack. Wares in the dishrack on the metal draining board adjoining the counter jump and crack. I swallow my gasp, turtle-pull my head back. His voice is rising, growing unbalanced, sharp.
Wah odda blasted shirt yuh wah meh wear, Cyatrin? I tell yuh de big borse an dem coming een dis mornin. How de ass I suppose tuh wear a jersey tuh de office fuh Cummerbatch meetin? The how it go look gene has been activated. Steupsss, wah yuh want me do fuh dat now, Ulric? My mother jeers, does not placate him.
Bang. His hard, bare heels hammer on the concrete under his feet. His heavy tread is water to the cement in my belly. Cramps. Uneasiness hardens to dread. My ears go deaf. Lungs cease intake of breath. My body spools a cocoon of vacuumed silence. Shocked suspension. Temporary hoisting from this existence. A child’s short-lived resistance.
My ears pop when my father knocks the pressure cooker cover off the top of the pot. The metallic clang to the draining board, its bang on the floor, its discordant tinny spin is like the bell rung for wrestling. His arms swings back from the rotator cuff to launch an open-palmed slap at the boiling pot of lentil peas. Brown explodes upwards as the pot careens off the burner. Fissures of steam hiss and blanket the kitchen in mist.
Flushing skin up his calves, biceps, neck, forehead signal my father’s blood rushing. The advance of his erupting rage. Let my mother gage whether to be fresh now. Her shoulders hunch. Her neck contracts. She cows under his looming height right above her, hemming her in at the hot stove. Ejected peas coat the walls and ceiling. The detonation draws me out from merely peeking. The food that was for him to eat when he come home this evening is the second target for attack. There will be no more on-your-marks-get-set objects for intimidation. I know that.
Splat. In a second my father’s hand is a squeezing blood pressure cuff around my mother’s soft arm. He heaves her shoulder to the brink of its socket. Tears cloud my vision. My feet emerge beyond my volition. My long fingers circle a third of his russet forearm. Stop it!
He scoffs at my hold in amused derision. Gulping sobs and rapid breath from my mother who only now seems to detect the threat. Her bulging eyes swivelling from her peripheral to plead into mine are wet.
Uricka, go an geh ready fuh school fuh meh please. Dis doh concern you. Yuh modda and I jess goin an talk in de backroom. He pushes the top and bottom double doors of the kitchen to go through. My mother is being borne against his body like a police officer apprehending a criminal. He drags her into custody. He relatches the double doors close behind them after they step down into the washroom. He leaves me to watch a father haul a mother away. Her face suffused with impending doom.
There is a fault line in the washroom’s concrete floor my father built. There is a fracture in the middle between the washing machine and the stone jukking sink on the opposite side. Hearing two pairs of feet drop into this crevice whereupon floor plates slide as my father takes my mother in the backroom to talk not in front my eyes. Hearing my father’s furious whispers rise. Hearing dull thuds of impact carry on for minutes at a time. Hearing high-pitched, muffled cries is buried inside. Of me.
I didn’t understand those early, discreet talks in the backroom. But my terrorised body knew. Even then as a child. Flesh-pocketed memories do not lie.
This she wields. It is this my mother dilates doe eyes with to effect the squeeze. As she asks me, in that second bedroom, to go down in the parlour, please. When I know there is no need to reach in the shop. Groceries done make and the shelves stacked to the top. But, mummy, everybody going to be dress up fuh church. Iz Sundaaaay. I don’t want to go out de road looking like dis.
I don’t want to be recruited as an accomplice preventing her getting licks from her husband’s vicious hands. Sitting on my bed, she asking me to done read cuz, Uricka, yuh big enough tuh understan. Getting daddy something to eat, keeping the peace with a man she chose to marry and with whom she chooses to stay a family is not her responsibility. It is mine.
I am nine.
Contributor Notes
Camille U. Adams is a memoirist and poet from Trinidad and Tobago. She earned her MFA from CUNY and is a current Ph.D. Candidate in Creative Nonfiction at FSU where she has been awarded a McKnight Doctoral Fellowship. Her writing has been long-listed in the Graywolf Creative Nonfiction Prize 2022 and selected as a finalist for The 2021 Orison Anthology Award in Nonfiction. Camille’s memoir work is featured/forthcoming in Passages North, Citron Review, XRAY Literary Magazine, Wasafiri, and elsewhere. Camille can be found on Twitter at @Camille_U_Adams and on Instagram at Camille_ua.
