“You did that?” Son smiled at her.
Therese tapped her chest bone with pride.
“Miss Therese, love of my life, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.” Son took her hand and kissed the knuckles. Therese shrieked and cackled with happiness.
“I said you wouldn’t ask machete-hair for anything, so I left food for you in the washhouse. You never came for it.”
“Machete-hair? The cook?”
“That one. That devil. The one I almost drown myself for twice a week. No matter what the weather I got to drown myself to get there.”
“Don’t listen to her. She knows those waters just like the fishermen. She doesn’t like the Americans for meanness. Just because they a little snooty sometimes. I get along with them okay. When they say to let Therese go, I say okay. But I bring her right back and tell them it’s a brand-new woman.”
“They don’t know?”
“Not yet. They don’t pay her any attention.”
Stimulated by the hand kiss, Therese wanted to ask more questions about the women who clawed their wombs, but Gideon grew loud and stopped her. “She was a wet-nurse,” he told Son, “and made her living from white babies. Then formula came and she almost starve to death. Fishing kept her alive.”
“Enfamil!” said Therese, banging her fist on the table. “How can you feed a baby a thing calling itself Enfamil. Sounds like murder and a bad reputation. But my breasts go on giving,” she said. “I got milk to this day!”
“Go way, woman, who wants to hear about your wretched teats. Go on out of here.” Gideon shooed her and she left the table but not the room. When she was quiet, Gideon waved his arm about the house and told Son, “You welcome here any time you want.” His arm took in the cot where Therese slept at night, the floor where Alma Estee sometimes slept and the tiny bedroom where he did.
Son nodded. “Thanks.”
“I mean it. Any time. Not much life going on over there. Maybe you could find work here. Plenty work here and you young.”
Son sipped rum-laced coffee wondering why, if there was plenty work there, Gideon wasn’t doing any of it. “How long have you been working over there?”
“Three years steady now. Off and on before. They used to come seasonal.”
“Did you become a citizen in the States?”
“Sure. Why you think I marry that crazy nurse woman? Got a passport and everything. But, listen, I don’t let on over there that I can read. Too much work they give you. Instructions about how to install this and that. I make out that I can’t read at all.”
“You’ve been away so long, you must have lost your citizenship by now.”
Gideon shrugged. “The U.S. is a bad place to die in,” he said. He didn’t regret it. The only thing he regretted was his unemployment insurance. A marvelous, marvelous thing, that was. You had to hand it to the U.S. They knew how to make money and they knew how to give it away. The most generous people on the globe. Now the French were as tight as a virgin, but the Americans, ahhh.
After a while they were quiet. Therese was breathing heavily so Son thought she was asleep. He could not see her eyes, but Alma’s were bright and on him.
“You going back?” asked Gideon, “to the island?”
“I don’t know.”
“You want to get in there, don’t you, eh? That yalla?” Gideon stroked his chin.
“Man,” said Son. “Oh, man.” He said it with enthusiasm but he put a period in his voice too. He didn’t want her chewed over by Gideon’s stone-white teeth. Didn’t want her in Gideon’s mind, his eye. It unnerved him to think that Gideon had looked at her at all.
The old man heard the period in his voice and turned the conversation to serious advice.
“Your first yalla?” he asked. “Look out. It’s hard for them not to be white people. Hard, I’m telling you. Most never make it. Some try, but most don’t make it.”
“She’s not a yalla,” said Son. “Just a little light.” He didn’t want any discussion about shades of black folk.
“Don’t fool yourself. You should have seen her two months ago. What you see is tanning from the sun. Yallas don’t come to being black natural-like. They have to choose it and most don’t choose it. Be careful of the stuff they put down.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Come on,” said Gideon. “Let’s go see some of the boys. Let me show you this place. Paradise, boy. Paradise.”
They got up to leave and Alma Estee sprang into life. She stood near the door and stretched out her hand. Son stopped and smiled at her.
“You think,” she said whispering, “you think you can send to America for me and buy me a wig? I have the picture of it.” And she pulled from the pocket of her school blazer a folded picture which she tried her best to show him before Gideon pushed her away.
“TARZAN mind if I use his piano?”
It was incredible what Hickey Freeman and a little Paco Rabanne could do. He held the jacket by his forefinger over his shoulder. With the other hand he struck the keys. Jadine was startled. In a white shirt unbuttoned at the cuffs and throat, and with a gentle homemade haircut, he was gorgeous. He had preserved his mustache but the
