White Teeth

Clara agreed but for reasons that were closer to home: a family memory; an unforgotten trace of bad blood in the Bowdens. Her own mother, when inside her mother (for if this story is to be told, we will have to put them all back inside each other like Russian dolls, Irie back in Clara, Clara back in Hortense, Hortense back in Ambrosia), was silent witness to what happens when all of a sudden an Englishman decides you need an education. For it had not been enough for Captain Charlie Durham – recently posted to Jamaica – to impregnate his landlady’s adolescent daughter one drunken evening in the Bowden larder, May 1906. He was not satisfied with simply taking her maidenhood. He had to teach her something as well.

‘Me? He wan’ teach me?’ Ambrosia Bowden had placed her hand over the tiny bump that was Hortense and tried to look as innocent as possible. ‘Why he wan’ teach me?’

‘Tree times a week,’ replied her mother. ‘An’ don’ arks me why. But Lord knows, you could do wid some improvin’. Be tankful for gen’russ-ity. Dere is not required whys and wherefores when a hansum, upright English gentleman like Mr Durham wan’ be gen’russ.’

Even Ambrosia Bowden, a capricious, long-legged, maga village-child who had not seen a schoolroom in all of her fourteen years, knew this advice was mistaken. When an Englishman wants to be generous, the first thing you ask is why, because there is always a reason.

‘You still here, pickney? ’Im wan’ see you. Don’ let me spit pon de floor and make you get up dere before it dry!’

So Ambrosia Bowden, with Hortense inside her, had dashed up to the Captain’s room and returned there three times a week thereafter for instruction. Letters, numbers, the bible, English history, trigonometry – and when that was finished, when Ambrosia’s mother was safely out of the house, anatomy, which was a longer lesson, given on top of the student as she lay on her back, giggling. Captain Durham told her not to worry about the baby, he would do no damage to it. Captain Durham told her that their secret child would be the cleverest Negro boy in Jamaica.

As the months flicked by, Ambrosia learnt a lot of wonderful things from the handsome captain. He taught her how to read the trials of Job and study the warnings of Revelation, to swing a cricket bat, to recite ‘Jerusalem’. How to add up a column of numbers. How to decline a Latin noun. How to kiss a man’s ear until he wept like a child. But mostly he taught her that she was no longer a maidservant, that her education had elevated her, that in her heart she was a lady, though her daily chores remained unchanged. In here, in here, he liked to say pointing to somewhere beneath her breastbone, the exact spot, in fact, where she routinely rested her broom. A maid no more, Ambrosia, a maid no more, he liked to say, enjoying the pun.

And then one afternoon, when Hortense was five months unborn, Ambrosia sprinted up the stairs in a very loose, disingenuous gingham dress, rapped on the door with one hand, and hid a bunch of English marigolds behind her back with the other. She wanted to surprise her lover with flowers she knew would remind him of home. She banged and banged and called and called. But he was gone.

‘Don’ arks me why,’ said Ambrosia’s mother, eyeing her daughter’s stomach with suspicion. ‘ ’Im jus’ get up and go, on de sudden. But ’im leave a message dat he wan’ you to be looked after still. He wan’ you to go over to de estate quick time and present yourself to Mr Glenard, a good Christian gentleman. Lord knows, you could do wid some improvin’. You still here, pickney? Don’ let me spit pon de floor and…’

But Ambrosia was out the door before the words hit the ground.

It seemed Durham had gone to control the situation in a printing company in Kingston, where a young man called Garvey was staging a printers’ strike for higher wages. And then he intended to be away for three further months to train His Majesty’s Trinidadian Soldiers, show them what’s what. The English are experts at relinquishing one responsibility and taking up another. But they also like to think of themselves as men of good conscience, so in the interim Durham entrusted the continued education of Ambrosia Bowden to his good friend Sir Edmund Flecker Glenard, who was, like Durham, of the opinion that the natives required instruction, Christian faith and moral guidance. Glenard was charmed to have her – who wouldn’t be? – a pretty, obedient girl, willing and able round the house. But two weeks into her stay, and the pregnancy became obvious. People began to talk. It simply wouldn’t do.

‘Don’ arks me why,’ said Ambrosia’s mother, grabbing Glenard’s letter of regret from her weeping daughter, ‘maybe you kyan be improved! Maybe ’im don’ wan’ sin around de house. You back here now! Dere’s nuttin’ to be done now!’ But in the letter, so it turned out, there was a consolatory suggestion. ‘It say here ’im wan’ you to go and see a Christian lady call Mrs Brenton. ’Im say you kyan stay wid her.’

Now, Durham had left instructions that Ambrosia be introduced to the English Anglican Church, and Glenard had suggested the Jamaican Methodist Church, but Mrs Brenton, a fiery Scottish spinster who specialized in lost souls, had her own ideas. ‘We are going to the Truth,’ she said decisively when Sunday came, because she did not care for the word ‘church’. ‘You and I and the wee innocent,’ she said, tapping Ambrosia’s belly just inches from Hortense’s head, ‘are going to hear the words of Jehovah.’

(For it was Mrs Brenton who introduced the Bowdens to the Witnesses, the Russellites, the Watchtower, the Bible Tract Society – in those days they went under many names. Mrs Brenton had met Charles Taze Russell himself in Pittsburgh as the last century turned, and was struck by the knowledge of the man, his dedication, his mighty beard. It was his influence that made her a convert from Protestantism, and, like any convert, Mrs Brenton took great pleasure in the conversion of others. She found two easy, willing subjects in Ambrosia and the child in her belly, for they had nothing to convert from.)

The Truth entered the Bowdens that winter of 1906 and flowed through the blood stream directly from Ambrosia to Hortense. It was Hortense’s belief that at the moment her mother recognized Jehovah, Hortense herself became conscious, though still inside the womb. In later years she would swear on any bible you put in front of her that even in her mother’s stomach each word of Mr Russell’s Millennial Dawn, as it was read to Ambrosia night after night, passed as if by osmosis into Hortense’s soul. Only this would explain why it felt like a ‘remembrance’ to read the six volumes years later in adult life; why she could cover pages with her hand and quote them from memory, though she had never read them before. It is for this reason that any root canal of Hortense must go right to the very beginning, because she was there; she remembers; the events of 14 January 1907, the day of the terrible Jamaican earthquake, are not hidden from her, but bright and clear as a bell.

‘Early will I seek thee… My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.. .’

So sang Ambrosia as her pregnancy reached full term, and she bounced with her huge bulge down King Street, praying for the return of Christ or the return of Charlie Durham – the two men who could save her – so alike in her mind she had the habit of mixing them up. She was halfway through the third verse, or so Hortense told it, when that rambunctious old rumpot Sir Edmund Flecker Glenard, flushed from one snifter too many at the Jamaica Club, stepped into their path. Captain Durham’s maid! Hortense recalled him saying, by way of a greeting, and receiving nothing from Ambrosia but a glare, Fine day for it, eh? Ambrosia had tried to sidestep him, but he moved his bulk in front of her once more.

So are you a good girl these days, my dear? Gossip informs me Mrs Brenton has introduced you to her church. Very interesting, these Witness people. But are they prepared, I wonder, for this new mulatto member of their flock?

Hortense remembered well the feel of that fat hand landing hot against her mother; she remembered kicking out at it with all her might.

Oh, it’s all right, child. The Captain told me your little secret. But naturally secrets have a price, Ambrosia. Just as yams and pimento and my tobacco cost something. Now, have you seen the old Spanish church, Santa Antonia? Have you been inside? It’s just here. It’s quite a marvel inside, from the aesthetic rather than religious point of view. It will only take a moment, my dear. One should never pass up the opportunity of a little education, after all.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.