A Tall History of Sugar. Curdella Forbes

      Chapter III

      i

      Rachel took her son to the big school when he was six years old. Until then, he had hardly appeared to the eyes of the world. She could have sent him to basic school, kindergarten, which was an option, when he was three or even two years old, but she did not. Quite a few children went; his friend Arrienne had gone; it was there she learned to read, and write her ABCs. In those days basic school was not compulsory the way the big school, elementary, was, and Rachel was not the only parent who chose not to send her child. Most preferred to save limited resources for when the children were old enough for the big school. (Almost every child was taught his or her ABCs and all were taught to spell their names at home, even by parents who could not read. Fear of disgrace was the fear of being unable to recognize one's own name on a bulla cake before swallowing it whole.)

      Rachel was not among those who chose not to send their child early to school. She simply had a different vision from everybody else. Though the big school did not admit children until they reached the age of seven, she had gone and begged the head man-teacher to take Moshe the year before, and the year before that, until, a year before the officially required age, the co–head teacher, who was the head man-teacher's wife, saw that the child could read far above his years and could write his ABCs, so she relented. Rachel had taught him during the years at home, using the Reader's Digests she got in the post and the Nola books she bought at the drugstore in Ora. And Moshe was a natural. He took to books like ducks to river water.

      Rachel avoided the basic school for fear her son would be killed before he was old enough to defend himself. It was not that she feared the children at the big school less, but that she knew the children at that school feared the man-teacher and his wife more. The two, without any sense of irony, were known to beat without mercy for fighting and bullying in any shape or form. Moshe was delicate as stringing roses in April, and his transparent skin bruised at a touch, so that but for her obsessive care, he would have been a mass of scabs and wounds.

      As it was, he was often bruised and wounded, since there were things from which she could not shield him—falling down when he ran; cutting his knees when he kneeled on the ground to watch snails or sow seedlings on his side of the kitchen garden; dreaming (this she did not know) of terrible flight and kidnapping by mattress when she and Noah fought in the front room (after such dreams he woke up black and blue); burning and peeling when he forgot to wear his sun hat (the wounds wept for days when the sun cut him like this, and she had to wrap him in white cloths loaded with cucumber and slices of aloe vera, and keep him confined to the back room, where he slept, in the dark).

      For the first five years of his life he did not know any other children. His world was circumscribed by his mother's life, and his mother's friends, which were two. Rachel was a woman who kept to herself and seldom left her yard or the one-acre farm adjoining her yard. This was where she planted most of the provisions the family needed for their meals. She accompanied her husband to the hospital to tend the sore that never healed, and it was in the same place, Ora-on-Sea, that she shopped for necessities she could not plant—brown soap, mixed meal, kerosene oil, replacement lamp wicks, salt beef or salted cod—though she could as easily have shopped at Miss Caro's or Miss Lill's establishments in the district. But she shopped in Ora-on-Sea because she was a woman who liked to keep to herself and didn't like people knowing her business.

      Miss Caro and Miss Lill sold groceries in extremely flexible amounts and combinations depending on what people could afford; the two shopkeepers also gave credit (trus), writing up what people owed on wrinkled strips of brown paper that they stuck on a wire spike attached to the wall behind the till. Giving trus was an act of kindness much valued by villagers who received their wages once a fortnight and had many mouths to feed, but trus was also in Rachel's view an invitation to open yourself to gossip. Rachel was a proud woman. She would rather do without than take trus, and she would rather avoid the local shops than be exposed to the knowledge of her neighbors' dependency.

      She used to sew a little, earning a bit extra from the skill her father had forced her to acquire. But she gave it up at about the time Moshe was found, to shield him from inquisitive eyes and questions. People had no reason to come to her house if she wasn't sewing their clothes.

      She had no relatives living nearby. Her two brothers and six sisters, who had not been as academically gifted as she was, had made opportunity for themselves and migrated to England. Her sisters moved to Canada when Canada opened up through the Domestic Workers Scheme. Her brothers, left lonely behind, went across to America. It was Rachel, the oldest, who stayed, because somebody had to look after her father after her mother died giving birth to Charlie, the youngest boy. Then, when she might have gone after her father died, there was Noah, and it was too late.

      Every now and then she visited her one female friend, Miss Hildreth Porter, who lived two miles away. Otherwise Miss Hildreth visited her, and they spread themselves on mahoe-stump stools in each other's yards (that is to say, Miss Hildreth, a thick-girthed woman of great size, spread herself, while Rachel, more slender and dainty, placed her feet side by side and covered her knees with her spread skirt), and sitting in this way for an hour when Rachel visited Miss Hildreth, and three hours when Miss Hildreth visited Rachel, they discussed the foolishness of neighbors; the cruelty of some people to their children; the nastiness of people who gave their children bush-rat soup to cure whooping cough; the pedigrees of careless young men who sought to put themselves with the daughters of respectable families even though they well knew their own families were infected with yaws, consumption, madness, thievery, marley-gripe, fluxy-complaint, sugar, and other diseases; the indecency of girls who frequented the wharves in Ora when the ships came in from far countries, turning themselves into sailor-bait in exchange for English guineas and American greenbacks; the growing wildness of the young; the ungratefulness of those who had gone overseas and forsaken their relatives; the epidemic of divorce cases in the Gleaner, shameless men gleanering their wives—be it advised my wife Leonora has left the matrimonial home and I am no longer responsible for any debts she may incur—what a wukliss man, exposing his dirty linen in public like that; the coming of independence in 1962 ( Moshe was four years old) and the memory of the first time they voted, dipping their hands in red ink; the goodness of Yahweh Elohim Most High.

      Theirs was a strange kind of gossip because they almost never mentioned anybody's name (except Yahweh's ), but spoke in generalities. If a name was mentioned, it was always a name from the past, someone they had heard of or who was long dead. They wove a history of districts without calling anyone's name who was living or who was not remotely dead, retailing stories without implicating anyone's reputation, as if history could be cut off from memory or kin that remained. But their gossip took this form because the two of them prided themselves on abhorring slander and backbiting, and this was why they were friends, and did not keep other women friends. (This was why Moshe so often drew people with vivid skeletons, and abstractions where their faces should be.)

      Rachel had another reason for her friendship: Miss Hildreth lived alone, and Rachel's heart, despite her great pride, was compassionate.

      Her other friend was Samuel. He came on Sunday afternoons, arriving in time for two o'clock dinner and leaving before sunset. He was Rachel's distant cousin from the remote district of Manyenni, fifteen miles south of Tumela. Their conversations were of a different kind from the ones Rachel had with Miss Hildreth.

      Rachel and Samuel discussed the state of the world, the condition of apartheid in Rhodesia, the language of dreams, the lost codes in the distorted scriptures, the existence of satanic verses, and the efficacies of oils for healing the soul. Such oils were often stashed on the back shelves of drugstores in Jamaica's capital towns. The trade in these was brisk, a parallel economy on which the drugstores thrived because there was always a large clientele of the rural folk and sometimes the upper social echelons who believed in these remedies. Oil of Hold Him Tight. Oil of Do Wha Mi Seh Yu Fi Do. Oil of Tun Him Back (Turn Back Evil). Oil of Win di Case (for winning court cases). Oil of Tun Him Mouth Backa Him (for retributing insults).

      One night, Samuel told her,