Storm of Fortune

And having to live among all those children? Mrs. Macmillan’s ten children, who because they were born in thirteen years would still be very screaming, peeing, clawing children for such a long time! After so many months, since she had arrived by Air Canada, she still couldn’t wipe the memory of that jeering child’s face from her mind. She would lie in bed sometimes, long after the other patients were subdued by pain and sleep, and she would see that small boy’s face as clearly as that cold winter day when he looked up and called her Aunt Jerimima. It did not soften her hurt that the child meant “Jemima.” The name had been reinforced with a certain obvious perniciousness since she had been living in Canada, reiterated by the constant visual references to it on the television programmes which dealt with the racial disturbances in Harlem and Chicago and Watts during that summer. Estelle could not therefore allow herself to be exposed to a situation where she could conceivably come up against this incident without having the psychological buffet of the nearness of Bernice and Dots and Boysie and Henry, and the other hundreds of unknown West Indians she met on the street and at the West Indies Federated Club, which everybody called the WIF. They were complete strangers, but friends by the common origin of their colour. (“Any blasted nasty nigger on the street, is a friend o’ mine, just because I am black?” Perhaps yes: perhaps no.) And a simple thing like having Priscilla, the black nurse on this ward, so close to her made all the difference to Estelle. Priscilla’s presence gave her more strength than anybody on that ward, including Mrs. Macmillan, could imagine. For the fact was, this was the first time white hands had ever touched her black body in the function and the performance of cleaning it, or even giving it food. Priscilla herself never once attended to me; never once asked me if I want a bedpan; she make damn sure that there is always another nurse, a white nurse, to administer medicine and advice to me, blind her! that Priscilla touches only white patients … There were no white nurses in Barbados.

Estelle was ruminating on all these new things in her life here while Mrs. Macmillan was getting anxious, worried that she hadn’t heard her talking to her. “You promised, darling,” Mrs. Macmillan was saying, adhering to the shorthand of her way of speech. “Timmins, best place for you. Summer, there. Fish cheap. Fresh air. Lots o’ rest. That’s what your doctor want you to have.” For a moment, Estelle thought she was telling her about the West Indies, but Mrs. Macmillan had neglected to mention, or had never considered, the sun, and Estelle knew she was hearing about the north again. She could not make up her mind. She knew she couldn’t go back to live with Bernice, and in Mr. Burrmann’s home. Oh no, she couldn’t do that. Mr. Burrmann hadn’t even come to visit her, although he called every day at six o’clock, and he had sent the bouquet of red roses which Bernice had seen. Estelle knew it was all over between she and Sam Burrmann. It had happened so many times in her life in Barbados, and in the lives of her sisters, or aunts, or cousins, as many times in history. Once reading a book she found somewhere she came across the identical case. A Barbadian case. The book was talking about the early life of Sir Conrad Reeves, the “first black Chief Justice of Barbados.” And that was back in the days when Sir Conrad’s father was a white doctor, and his mother a black slave woman, back in the days when … it was the lot of most West Indian women in general who form part of matriarchal societies, that Peggy had to find some means of keeping the boy alive on her meagre resources. There was no poor and bastardy laws; and it was inconceivable and illegal to think of taking the doctor to court for maintainance of young Conrad. Both she and Conrad were simply expected to exist. Dr. Phillip Reeves was a bachelor, and he lived alone. Peggy would have welcomed going to bed with the master of the house inasmuch as it had meant the customary promotion from the cane fields. Catching the doctor’s eyes was easy for a young buxom slave like Peggy. Already she had possessed most of the characteristics which all white men had traditionally fancied in coloured women. Jesus Christ! she thought, what a terrible truth! The truth does really hurt. Remembering this passage now, after so many years, she shuddered with the terrible heavy knowledge of fact that Peggy’s case was identical to hers, except in one detail. Whereas Peggy worked for the master, Dr. Reeves, she, Estelle, was the sister of the master’s slave, Bernice. “Jesus Jesus Jesus!” she said, and Mrs. Macmillan heard.

“What did you say?”

“I was just thinking, just thinking. ’Bout life. Repeating itself. Like a circle, a small circle.”

“You right as hell, you hear me, darling?” The first light of morning was coming through the windows of the ward. Two nurses were already sponging the immovably sick with washrags and warm water; and some who could creep and shuffle to the washrooms were throwing their housecoats on their shoulders, and fumbling into their new slippers. Mrs. Macmillan felt she could talk louder now that there was more activity in the ward, and she began to repeat much of what she had said earlier when it was only dawn, because Estelle might have been listening only between the uncertain pauses between sleep and waking. Estelle was thinking: why did she tell Bernice she was not still pregnant? and why did she not tell Bernice she was really being discharged in two days on Wednesday instead of on Thursday? and why did she seriously tell Mrs. Macmillan she would consider going to Timmins to