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In a Garden
“Girl,” she say. “Dah man he suck his teeth at you.” Yes he did. After that I started seeing the red-haired garbage man all over town. Walking into Booker Brothers department store one day to buy patterns and cloth with my mother, I saw him down the sidewalk. At Stabroek Market, where the stink of a hundred years of animal blood mixed with rotting fruit and fly-blown roti to create a foggy miasma, I saw him loading a flatbed trailer. Another man nudged him and he turned. I saw him see me just before I looked away and that was when I dropped the matchbox I’d been carrying in my pocket for days, waiting. And I knew he saw me drop it and I knew he’d pick it up and inside that match box was a note all tight and schoolgirl secret with my street address on it and the rest was up to him. Oh my Lord! What was I thinking? Good white girl like me, top girl, St. Rose’s girl, bad girl, looking for trouble, heading straight for it. We were all headed for trouble. It was 1974. Guyana was less than 10 years old and Forbes Burnham, a dictator, declared that within two years Guyana would feed, clothe and house its people without help from other countries. He seized and nationalized the sugar plantations and bauxite mines, stopped the importation of food. J.P. Santos’ motto was “one good tin deserves another,” but the shelves held nothing that wasn’t bulging, dented or rusty. The Guyanese produced almost 400,000 tonnes of sugar yearly yet ration cards were issued and lineups formed. Between 1970 and 1974 the national debt rose by 250 percent. Race riots were a weekly event with entire communities burned to the ground. Hatred was fuelled by the government’s attitude. Burnham was black but more than 50 percent of Guyanese were descendants of indentured labourers shipped over from India after Britain abolished the slave trade. Burnham rivalled Cheddi Jagan, a South Asian Guyanese with majority support but a Communist who scared the CIA into backing his opponent. Guyana, the Land of Six Nations – where were the other four? They kept quiet: the Amerindians because they’d been almost wiped out, the Europeans because most had left when the country gained independence in 1966, the Chinese because they were too busy and the Portuguese because their numbers were too small. Everyone wanted out. So a man in the sugar line at J.P. Santos asked me if I was old enough to sponsor him to Canada and two others wondered if I could sell them foreign cash. On Kaieteur Road our house was surrounded by a thick 10-foot-high hedge, a chain-link fence embedded in its thorny centre while on the ground inside a German shepherd prowled night and day. And Mazie plucked passion fruit right off the vine that grew over our gate and fed us with it for breakfast. “Come, nah,” she say, “but the girl be so, so young.” Yes I was. |
