We're Alone, page 4
“The first time I came to Grenada I came seeking ‘home,’” began Lorde’s essay about her 1978 visit. She had flown into the now-closed Pearl’s Airport in Grenville on the island’s northeastern coast. Back then, there was one paved road, she reported. Now, there are many smooth and winding ones through lively neighborhoods and tree-covered hills.
Among Lorde’s most vivid recollections was seeing Grand Anse Beach, not the hotel-lined miles of white sand that attract both locals and tourists but the busy thoroughfare that runs alongside it. She saw: “Children in proper school uniforms carrying shoes, trying to decide between the lure of a coco palm adventure to one side and the delicious morning sea on the other.”
I, too, saw children, dozens of them, on either side of the street one morning. Most wore traditional island school uniforms, white shirts or blouses, with plaid skirts or khakis. They huddled together, chatting and giggling, not paying attention to the dark blue sea on one side or the colorfully painted houses and buildings in the hills on the other. They reminded me of children you would see heading to school in Port-au-Prince, their range of black and brown skin glistening in the sun. The older ones kept their younger siblings at their side, even as they climbed into minivans and buses.
I went in search of more of those “vivid images” Lorde evokes in her essay, and, besides the students at Grand Anse Beach, there was the Fat-Woman-Who-Fries-Fish-in-the-Market. I did not see the Fat-Woman-Who-Fries-Fish-in-the-Market inside the turquoise-and-white square building downtown. She was not standing near the enormous fish on slabs waiting to be gutted. Nor was she by the smaller ones piled into buckets out front. The fish market smelled predictably like the sea. The buzz of the customer and buyer exchanges was much more subdued than I expected. Only some of the vendors had customers. The market’s calm on a Friday afternoon reminded me how small Grenada is. The island is 134.6 square miles, home to about a hundred thousand residents.
At dusk, in my ocean-facing hotel room at the Coyaba Beach Resort, I parted the curtains and waited for the sunset to momentarily turn the sand on the beach “flash green,” the same kind of faster-than-the-blink-of-an-eye green ray that Paule Marshall had tried to catch every afternoon while she was living in Grenada in 1962. Unfortunately, October is the wrong time of year for this. Audre Lorde had seen her green flash and a full moon in April.
In her memoir Triangular Road, Paule Marshall writes that Grenada “suggested the Eden the world had once been.”
I was in Grenada to receive an honorary degree from the University of the West Indies Open Campus. The students in the 2017 graduating class hailed from all over the English-speaking Caribbean and earned their degrees online. Many had lost homes and loved ones. I was told the story of one graduate from Trinidad who stayed home because she had donated her plane ticket money to relief efforts in Dominica, which has UWI’s most devastated campus. Hurricane Maria had struck Dominica, the southernmost of the Leeward Islands, as a Category 5 storm on September 18. Dominica’s prime minister, Roosevelt Skerrit, whose roof collapsed during the storm, later told CNN: “Our agriculture sector is 100 percent destroyed. Our tourism is, I would say, about 95 percent destroyed.”
In front of the supermarket across from the Coyaba Beach Resort were blue barrels lined up to collect food and other urgently needed supplies for Dominica. At the Beach House Restaurant, just north of the airport, where I attended a pregraduation cocktail party the night before the ceremony, the young female singer entertaining us with classic soul as well as Caribbean covers reminded everyone to drop something in the basket that would usually hold her tips; the funds would go to Dominica.
I have never been to Dominica, but now I wish I had. This is not born just from a desire to see a place “before.” Before the devastation, before the storm. I am from a place that constantly evokes nostalgia in the people who have seen, lived, and loved it “before.” This longing for before always saddens me because it makes the present seem even worse. But I still wish I had seen Dominica before, partly because it is the birthplace of the novelist Jean Rhys. I wish I had seen all that Antoinette, Rhys’s doomed narrator in Wide Sargasso Sea, had longed for from her captivity in Mr. Rochester’s England: flaming sunsets and rivers so clear that you can see the pebbles at the bottom, the moss-covered gardens filled with orchids, hibiscus, and flamboyants, which are illuminated at night by fireflies.
This is one of the ways I have imagined Dominica, along with what I have seen in travel guides: its high mountain peaks, forts, lush rainforests, reefs, gorges, lakes, and waterfalls. Dominica is also home to Xuela Claudette Richardson, the narrator of Jamaica Kincaid’s novel The Autobiography of My Mother. At fifteen, Xuela is taken by her father to Roseau, the capital of Dominica. Roseau, Xuela finds, has—like many places in the Caribbean—“a fragile foundation, and from time to time was destroyed by forces of nature, a hurricane or water coming from the sky as if suddenly the sea were above and the heavens below.”
“The second time I came to Grenada,” Audre Lorde wrote in “Grenada Revisited,” “I came in mourning and fear that this land which I was learning had been savaged, invaded, its people maneuvered into saying thank you to their invaders.”
Lorde’s second visit was in late 1983 after US president Ronald Reagan had deployed marines to the island. Reagan declared that he wanted to prevent a “Soviet-Cuban” colony from taking root in Grenada and protect American citizens on the island, many of whom were students at St. George’s University School of Medicine.
I visited St. George’s University, whose students and officials, Lorde pointed out, later denied that they were ever in danger. The school, which is no longer just a medical school but covers other disciplines, is an island unto itself, with its many salmon-colored buildings, large water tanks, security personnel, and buses. All over the campus are breathtaking views of True Blue Bay, where the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean meet.
If Reagan was so interested in seeing democracy flourish in the Caribbean, Lorde wondered, why did the US government support Haiti’s dictators François and Jean-Claude Duvalier and their repressive regimes? She also mentioned Puerto Rico.
In 1897, she wrote, “U.S. Marines landed in Puerto Rico to fight the Spanish-American War. They never left.” Like Dominica, Barbuda, and the US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricanes Irma and Maria.
At that time, I had not been to Puerto Rico either. I had only visited it in books, particularly through the eyes of young Esmeralda Santiago in her memoir, When I Was Puerto Rican. I imagined the guavas—which she taught other readers and me to eat at the beginning of her book—being no longer able to grow, the fields they came from deep in the countryside flattened, and the families that farmed them struggling to stay alive without food or clean water.
After the hurricanes, I watched an interview with the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto, and heard echoes of Audre Lorde in her voice.
“There is nothing that unites people more anywhere in the world than injustice,” the mayor said. “We have to get food; we have to get water, or else we are being condemned to a slow death. It may be easy to try to disregard us. It may be easy because we are a US territory and a colony of the United States. But we’re a people, damn it.”
“We are a people” is what we have been saying for generations to colonizers, invaders, and imperialists hell-bent on destroying us. And now more than ever, Mother Nature, too. The blessings of our islands are also our curse. Our geography gives us the year-round sun and beautiful beaches, but increasingly, in the age of extreme weather and climate change, we are on the front line of destruction. The Arawak and Taíno might have said we are a people, even as they died trying to prove it. We have even inherited the word for hurricane, huracán, from them.
“Much has been terribly lost in Grenada,” Lorde wrote at the end of her 1983 visit, “but not all—not the spirit of the people.”
The spirit of the people is also captured in a poem I have been carrying with me for years before coming to Grenada. It was written by the Grenadian poet, short story writer, and novelist Merle Collins.
“We speak,” she wrote in “Because the Dawn Breaks!,” “for the same reason that the thunder frightens the child … that the lightning startles the tree …”
The people of the Caribbean speak, she wrote, because we “were not born to be your vassals.”
Baldwin
In “Notes for a Hypothetical Novel,” an address delivered at San Francisco State College on October 22, 1960, and later published in the essay collection Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin pretended he was writing a novel in front of an audience.
“Let’s pretend,” he said, “that I want to write a novel concerning the people or some of the people with whom I grew up, and since we are only playing let us pretend it’s a very long novel. I want to follow a group of lives almost from the time they open their eyes on the world until some point of resolution, say, marriage, or childbirth, or death.”
Baldwin had already published Go Tell It on the Mountain seven years earlier, so it appeared that he was not referring to his best-known and first novel. In other talks and essays, he’d laid out some ideas about what made an unsuccessful novel, citing problems like too neat a frame, sentimentality, and facile lessons and solutions. The novel he was referring to in the speech, though, he claimed, was both “unwritten and probably unwritable.” Neither was it meant to be a “long, warm, toasty” novel. “This hypothetical book is aiming at something more implacable than that.… The social realities with which these people, the people I remember, whether they knew it or not, were really contending can’t be left out of the novel without falsifying their experience.”
As the speech continued, a boy emerged in Baldwin’s hypothetical novel. The boy had abandoned the church he’d grown up in to smoke cigarettes and have sex. He was rejected by the community and died of tuberculosis a year and a half later. This boy was not the only casualty of the church’s censure. A young woman lost her mind and ended up in a mental hospital. Still, Baldwin refused to limit his novel to a roster of disasters.
“The imagination of a novelist has everything to do with what happens to his material,” he said. As the speech neared its end, however, it became clear that the two novels Baldwin had already written (Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room) and the ones he had yet to write were part of a colossal, deliberate oeuvre. Go Tell It on the Mountain was only his first attempt.
Initially titled Crying Holy, Go Tell It on the Mountain was written after Baldwin gave up being a youth preacher and left the church to become a writer. He worked on the book for more than ten years, including while he was living in Greenwich Village and Paris, and he only managed to finish it in 1952, after he’d moved to Loèche-les-Bains, a village in the Swiss Alps.
In a 1961 interview with the American broadcaster and oral historian Studs Terkel, Baldwin remembered thinking he might never finish the novel. But then he realized that one of the reasons he couldn’t finish was that he was ashamed of where it came from.
“I was ashamed … of life in the church,” he told Terkel, “and ashamed of my father, and ashamed of the blues, and ashamed of jazz, and of course ashamed of watermelon.… all of these stereotypes that the country afflicts on Negroes: that we all eat watermelon; that we all do nothing but sing the blues.… Well, I was afraid of all that and I ran from it.”
He could only complete the novel once he stopped running.
Given the title, one might expect the novel’s epigraph to be the refrain of the African American spiritual: “Go, tell it on the mountain / Over the hills and everywhere / Go, tell it on the mountain / That Jesus Christ is born.” After all, this song has been sung by preachers, Christmas carolers, civil rights marchers, and famous gospel singers since it was cataloged by the Fisk professor John Wesley Work Jr. in 1907. However, the epigraph is from the Book of Revelation (22:17), an invitation to sinners to redeem themselves through Christ’s symbolic bride, the Church.
And the Spirit and the bride say, Come.
And let him that hearest say, Come.
And let him that is athirst come.
And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.
Go Tell It on the Mountain is framed around the twenty-four hours that make up John Grimes’s fourteenth birthday. The day begins on a sour note when John mistakenly thinks no one remembers. But his mother does remember, and she gives him some money, which he uses to explore the city for the day.
John’s stops at different New York City landmarks outside Harlem allow Baldwin (who was, like John, a child of the Great Migration, the mass movement of more than six million African Americans from the rural South to urban centers in the northern United States) to paint a vivid picture of nineteen-thirties New York and the mixed feelings the city evokes in young John. For example, Baldwin writes of John seeing the city’s skyline from a hill in Central Park:
He did not know why, but there arose in him an exultation and a sense of power, and he ran up the hill like an engine, or a madman, willing to throw himself headlong into the city that glowed before him.
At the end of the day, though, John finds himself in familiar territory, in the fiery bosom of the Temple of the Fire Baptized church. Eventually, with the urging of the saints, he is entranced by the Holy Ghost and repents at the mourner’s bench, the threshing floor. The section of the novel devoted to John’s conversion, reckoning, and transformation electrifies the story’s final pages like the service must have rocked the Temple of the Fire Baptized that night. Baldwin, who both experienced and induced such ecstasy himself as a youth minister, does such a great job of capturing what it’s like to be enraptured that I always find myself trembling a little while I’m reading the scene. It also reminds me of many nights spent in the pews of my uncle’s church in Haiti, watching so many people become overcome with the Holy Ghost that they had to be picked up from the church aisle and carried to the altar while gyrating in the arms of a group of deacons who’d occasionally catch a kick in the stomach or face during this sanctified recovery mission.
On the threshing floor, John has visions, some like the ones he’d imagined earlier in the city, but they are even more fraught and glorious and even further out of reach.
“Lord, I ain’t / No stranger now!” the congregation sings as they rise to their feet.
In “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” published in his essay collection The Fire Next Time, Baldwin writes about undergoing a similar experience: “I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use the word ‘religious’ in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell.”
The blazing hell is one that neither Baldwin nor John could ignore, a place much like the city where John feels both invisible and reviled. The summer Baldwin turned fourteen was full of police violence, from which he was not spared. Even when he was younger, at ten years old, he was frisked and verbally assaulted by some police officers who left him on the ground, on his back, in the street. He was a child, but they could not see it. His young Black body was already considered menacing, a threat.
“It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it,” Baldwin wrote. Incidents like this were, in part, what led Baldwin to the church in the first place.
“Some went on wine or whiskey or the needle, and are still on it. And others, like me, fled into the church,” he wrote.
“Because I am an American writer,” Baldwin stated in his San Francisco State address, “my subject and my material inevitably has to be a handful of incoherent people in an incoherent country.” This incoherence, he says, is analogous to having a friend who’s keeping the mother he’s murdered in his closet, and though we know about it, we refuse to talk about it. This is what the best novels do, unbury the dead, or at least break down the doors and let the skeletons out.
As the hypothetical-novel speech wound down, it became apparent, too, that Baldwin was speaking about more than a novel. He was also talking about a country that was supposed to offer more opportunities to John Grimes and to Baldwin than it had to their ancestors.
“A country is only as strong as the people who make it up and the country turns into what the people want it to become,” he said. “Now, this country is going to be transformed. It will not be transformed by an act of God, but by all of us, by you and me.”
García Márquez
At the beginning of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Macondo’s patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, wants to move the idyllic yet isolated community he founded to another, more accessible location. And, since no one else wants to go with him, he decides that he and his wife, Úrsula, and their son should leave.
“We will not leave,” his wife says, reminding him that Macondo was their son’s birthplace.
“We have still not had a death,” he tells her. “A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.” His wife replies, “If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here, I will die.”
This was the first thing that came to mind when I heard, on April 17, 2014, that Gabriel García Márquez had died. For anyone who’s been forced, or has chosen, to start a new life in a new place, that scene provides at least two possible markers by which one can belong. By Úrsula’s definition, it is through life. By her husband’s, it is through death.
When my older daughter, Mira, was born in Miami in 2005, I remember thinking that, after nearly a quarter century of living in the United States, I finally had an unbreakable bond with the place. When my father, who had once imagined that he’d be buried in Haiti, was buried in Queens, New York, a few months after Mira’s birth, those ties became even stronger. After all, if we’re pushed out, we can always take the living with us. However, the dead can prove less mobile.
