Chapter 6
Previous chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
She is searching for herself in her father’s steps. Heavy, hard and premeditated–penetrating the wooden floor–the sound of his steps traveling through the corridors, making its way to the kitchen. In Comrade’s steps–the ones that walk over her mother, marching in time to the struggle–she tries to find herself. In her father’s words that rallied people together–one union, one struggle–she is lost in between. Words he never learned at any college, because his parents couldn’t afford the $35.00 entrance fee. “Wen Comrade Ironman speak, he talk the truth.” The people listened. They listened to Comrade Ironman’s cry to shut down the entire country, when management for the electric company, T&Tec, refused to increase worker’s wages.
“Let Trinidad stand still tonight. Let the lights from T&Tec go out tonight and management feel the might of the people.”
And for one day, just days before Carnival, the lights went out, and the streets of San Fernando and Port-of-Spain were dead. The next day the management’s negotiating team and the union returned to the table. The workers were given their wage increase.
Njeri cannot find what she is looking for in her mother’s sighs, because her mother is the jack-ass washing and ironing Comrade’s blue skirts for tomorrow’s battle. Cooks his food and carried his babies–four alive, three dead. She cannot find herself in her mother, who drags her feet everyday singing, “Oh what a friend we have in Jesus,” since she made a pact with God, and even God had failed.
“If you make dem stop fightin, den I’ll go to church every Sunday.” Njeri waited a whole year for God to perform what to her seemed like a miracle, but the miracle took too long to come. By the time she was seven, she was estranged from and unmoved by the word every Sunday. “Dere ain’t no fuckin God, and if he real, he could hold he ass.”
She can’t imagine herself as her mother, who had to ask someone to write, A C H A I A down. And Njeri’s own name–that unconquerable name weighing down her shoulders with too many expectations and requirements–she felt foreign when she heard it in its entirety: Njeri Ironside.
All of this–Comrade’s heavy footsteps, her mother dragging her feet, God’s betrayal and that unconquerable name–in a rush they glide around her head. Now, as Njeri struggles to remember what she was like when she was unconscious; before she started school, before anything. Like the time Joshua pushed her off the hammock, and she flew–hitting her head against a large stone. For awhile there was nothing. Njeri feels she has lost something–something is missing.
Her seven year old body sits on the toilet seat. Staring at the ceramic squares, she wonders how long it will take for her dangling legs to reach the floor and her beginnings to exist. She aims to go back, but all she sees is a blinding white vacancy–lightening, flashing, fleeting moments. She remembers her first day of primary school and how prepared she was not to cry.
I remember yuh first day of school and how yuh wouldn’t stop cryin. I remember. Ah was puttin on yuh school uniform, and yuh just wouldn’t stop cryin. Yuh fadder try to make yuh feel better by takin yuh picture. He even let yuh ride in front with him wen he was droppin yuh off to school.
But as soon as her father left and seeing all the other girls were in tears, she couldn’t help herself. The teacher came back and said, “You too, I thought you’re a big girl, and look at you, crying like de rest.”
She sees a hazy image of her mother throwing a grapefruit, hitting her hard in the stomach. Then there was the time she was lost in the supermarket–the fright she felt swimming in a sea of people walking past and through her. But these memories seem unreal. She tries to remember her birth, or when she couldn’t speak, because Joshua claims that he remembers being inside their mother’s womb. But all Njeri remembers is a feeling. A feeling of fear that comes with the shadows as they thrash around in the dark: loud sudden crashes, bodies slamming against walls, the sound of out-of-breath screams, and the silence after. An eerie silence, similar to the sound the beach made early in the morning and late in the evening, when all the people were heading home. The quiet between the waves coming in, crashing into the sand; the silence that was never without sound because the walls cried every night. Her heart racing with expectations of something breaking, someone suddenly screaming, “Oh God, look at de blood, so much blood!” This is what she remembers, but it is not enough. She cannot find herself amongst any of these memories, amongst a (any) feeling.
Njeri gets up and looks at her reflection in the medicine cabinet’s mirror, and for a quick second she cannot recognize her face. The image grins and jeers at her. She hears something whispering, “Yuh stupid girl.” And then, she feels someone or something moving behind her, but no one is there. She turns the lights off, and feels the person or thing’s eyes were nailing her to the wall. She doesn’t know what it is, but it makes her feel the sickening sense of nausea inside her stomach. She searches for its eyes and body but it ends when her mother comes knocking at the bathroom door.
“Wha you doin in de bathroom so long, girl? Is hide you hidin from house work so? No man want ah woman who can’t cook and clean, so yuh better come and help meh in de kitchen. Come cut dem carrots and sweet pepper for de fry rice,” Achaia demands.
“So yuh ask yuh fadder bout goin to de beach tomorrow.”
“No.”
“Wha yuh waitin for? Yuh doh want to go on de beach?”
“Yeah.”
“Well yuh know he will do anyting for you and Serena. You and your sister are his girls. He doh listen to me, so why yuh doh ask him. We can go and get out of dis house for one day? You should ask him wen he come home tonight. O.K baby, you know dat mommy loves you.”
She is Comrade’s girl. Njeri thinks about this as she cuts the vegetables. She believes that it is true. Whenever anyone wanted anything from Comrade, they came to Serena or Njeri. Her mind wanders to the time when her picture was on the front page of the Sunday Express, holding a placard–“One Union, One Struggle, Unite”–in her hand as she marched side by side with Comrade to (town of) Fyzbad on Labor Day. Even Comrade’s friends from the union said she was the spitting image of her father, and if Comrade ever went crazy and said Njeri was not his child, they’d have to jail him.
“I have his dimples, and red hair. I’m brave just like daddy, so brave dat I doh fraid lizards and frogs like Sreena.”
It’s not enough. She still feels like a stranger invisibly walking behind Comrade’s foot steps, stepping into his enormous black shoes that Joshua spit shined for him every Sunday evening. She can’t be a jackass as her mother called herself, cooking the food Comrade won’t touch, “This is stale food you giving me.”
Njeri wants to be as powerful as her father. The man who could shut down the entire country if he wanted to because the people believed in him.
LOVE, LUST, SCI-FI & MONSTERS
TSTAR EP
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