One year and three months ago, a little while after my mom left, my dad shook me awake and looked at me with such a smile that I thought Jesus Christ himself must’ve been standing on our doorstep—or that my mom had come back home.
“Caroline,” my dad said. “Wake up, Caroline. There’s something you need to see.”
He picked me up even though by then I was already eleven and could walk just fine. He took me outside. From his arms I could see the glowing lights. I was scared at first, because by then I’d learned in school about how slaves were sometimes dumped off slave ships before they could even make it to the island. I thought the lights were the ghosts of those slaves coming for me because they were jealous that I’d been born free.
My dad wasn’t scared, though. He said they weren’t slaves at all but were lost jellyfish—lost, because jellyfish never came to Water Island to glow like that. He put me in his small boat and we drifted out onto the water, waves making us go up and down, and all around us those lights glowed, and it was like the world got confused and turned upside down, and we were floating on the stars, and above our heads were the jellyfish and the sea.
“Almost as pretty as heaven,” my dad said. I agreed until I put my hand in the water and got stung so bad I had a rash for days.
My dad leaves home three hours before I wake up so he can get to work—that’s what he tells me, anyway—so instead of him rowing me across the strip of sea, he takes the ferry by himself, and every morning, I take Mister Lochana’s speedboat to the Saint Thomas waterfront.
Sun shines hot and yellow and makes my shirt uniform sticky with sweat. I see the things no one else sees. A woman is standing behind a tree in the shade, watching me, but when I turn my head to say good morning, she’s gone again—nothing but the sunshine and baby green leaves swaying in the breeze.
Safari taxis don’t like to stop for locals, and the ones that stop for locals don’t like to stop for children, so I have to run to catch up with a taxi and jump on just as it slows down for a red traffic light swinging over the street. A woman with big breasts sucks her teeth when I climb over her to squeeze into a little spot without saying excuse me.
It’s hot in the safari taxi. The seats are sweaty, and there’s no space to breathe, so people stick their heads out the windows. I’m afraid that those heads will get knocked off by trucks in the opposite lanes. The taxi passes by the marketplace, which smells like cooking fish and meat pies, past the baseball fields where children skipping school in their uniforms chase each other and dig through the dirt for soldier crabs. There’re the restaurants that smell like the salted stew beef and boiled plantain my mom liked so much. We’d get a plate every Sunday after church, and I always looked forward to the passion fruit juice, so sweet that bees would fly all around me. After she left, I asked my dad if he’d take me to church, and I pretended it was because he’d raised me to be a good Christian girl, but it was really so I could get that juice. He told me we would go the following week, but we haven’t gone once since.
Stalls under blue tarp sell fruit and summer dresses and ice-cold rum, and trucks and buses and chickens busily stream by in the granite streets. Across the street, tourists wander off the ferry, snapping photos at the tables of wooden jewelry and fake purses and a donkey named Oprah with her big yellow sunglasses. The taxi slows down in front of a Catholic church, and behind that church is my school.
I leap out of the taxi without paying, since my dad forgot to leave out money again, and I already paid Mister Lochana with all the quarters I could find hidden around the house like in an Easter egg hunt. The taxi driver sees and honks his horn and yells at me in French through his open window. People on the sidewalk look at me as I run right into the middle of the road, cars blaring their horns, chickens squawking at my feet, and up the church steps, my bag smacking my back. I turn around to grin at the taxi driver, who looks like he wants to get out of his safari right then and there to slap me good, and, since I’m not looking, I run right into my teacher, Missus Wilhelmina.
Missus Wilhelmina had a white great-great-great-grandpa from Saint Martin that she likes to talk about all the time because he made her clear-skinned. Missus Wilhelmina says that Saint Thomas and Saint John and Saint Croix (but not Water Island, because she always forgets about Water Island) and all the other islands in all the Caribbean are no good, seeing that they’re filled with so many black people. In class, she says that the Caribbean is almost as bad as Africa itself.
My skin is darker than even the paintings of African queens hanging in tourist shops, same paintings my mom would buy so she could hang them on her living room walls. Their skin is painted with black and purple and blue, and reminds me of the night sky, or of black stones on the side of the beach, rubbed smooth by the waves. I secretly think the women in those paintings
