Bernice couldn’t make up her mind whether to hate Dots or love her. Their recent physical, explosive love did not altogether wipe out the deep suggestion of distrust and envy that crept into her mind. She had only Lonnie now. But Lonnie was far away, and she could not tell how close he was in his heart towards her. He kept her always on her toes. She had recently proposed to him in her mind: a serious step, for she was a woman who worked out her actions in thought and followed them for some considerable distance of logic and practicality before she would put them into the sphere of reality. She felt she could keep herself secure without the great responsibility of having to be friendly to her “friends,” because as she knew “to have so many friends cost money.” Bernice was a very selfish woman. Although she didn’t know this about herself. What frightened her always was how her “friends” would come to her apartment, accept her hospitality, and her warnings about gossip with which she entertained them, and straightway, go back and spread it round in a hateful and compromising manner — to the very persons against whom she had appealed to them not to talk. This was her great fear, her terror of having “friends.”
She decided to call Lonnie in Barbados, by long-distance telephone. The operator told her the transatlantic call would cost at least nineteen dollars and fifty-somebody cents. She decided to put through the call, disregarding the expense. This was an act essential to her continued sanity. It had to be done. Money can’t stop me now; money can’t stand in my way; Lonnie is the purest person I know at this moment. If I hadda brought up Lonnie, instead o’ that whore, Estelle, all this wouldn’ have happen to me now. It ain’t natural for one person to have all this happening to her; and it got me asking myself if God vexed with me because one time I had to kill a child, before childbirth? But that was a mistake and a long time ago … and because Lonnie refused marriage and wouldn’t even acknowledge he was the child-father. Not until he learned I was to emigrade up here … but then it was too late, Lord, and I had already done what I didn’t have your permission to do. It done already, Lord, and you should forget it, and stop punishing me, and I should be able to stop remembering it, as I try to do. That is in the past; like the time when: it was the king’s birthday celebrations, under the clammy-cherry tree in the school yard of St. Matthias Girls’ School in 1937, and the custom was to pass old stale hot-cross-buns that were no longer hot (since they were leftovers from the Zephrins Bakery in Bridgetown) round from hungry hand to starving hand; pass them through a circle of two hundred hands, until each and every child had one bag full; and in the midst of this feast which came whenever a king or a queen of England ascended the throne in England, midst the happiness of those young black Barbadian school girls, some barefooted as they were born, some in uniforms, some in rags, some bareheaded with the grease from coconut oil mixing with the sweat from the sun, pouring little streams of shining thick water down their cheeks, some with bad teeth that they were born with, and which hurt for days and nights because there never was a school dentist in the district because there was no dentist on the school’s list of staff members, because nobody in that village who had to send her daughter to that school, to take buns from a king of England, free, could afford dentist’s fees, nobody in that village black-enough-rich-enough … the time when I told that lie, when: Isabelle, who lived beside Bernice, was a small emaciated black anemic girl, who never was full, who was always hungry; and Isabelle knew this, and Bernice knew this, and Miss Henderson knew this, although she was the headmistress and never was very close to her pupils; but the headmistress did nothing (did she do nothing because she could not?) to quench the thirst of Isabelle’s hunger. And when the buns came round, from hand to hand, and the bag reached Bernice’s hand, she dropped one bag behind her on the ground, and stood over it, hoping that no other girl or assistant mistress had seen. And when it was almost over — the passing of the buns — one bag of stale buns was short.
“One buns missing!” the headmistress screamed.
The white inspector of schools was standing close to her at this gala bun-giving ceremony of majestical rejoicing. “One bag o’ buns missing! Who thiefed a bag of buns?”
No one had stolen the buns. Universal silence said so. Not Bernice. Not the girl beside her; not Isabelle, whose mother Bernice had intended to give the buns to, later in the afternoon, to feed the four remaining children, who were too weak to go to school, who had no clothes (no rags mended sufficiently to enable the rags to go to school where children’s fingers of play and rough-housing would have made them rags again. After all, the school was not paying for the buns. They were given to the schoolchildren by the king. The teachers were given three bags each because they were teachers.) So Bernice decided to steal the bag of buns which would have been supper for Isabelle’s family. But the headmistress found out. She always found out everything with the help of a leather strap which the children said she soaked each night in “a topsy of pee-water.”
When Bernice
