Yesterday, at noon ... a roasting sun smote Coggins. Liquid ... fluid
... drought. Solder. Heat and juice of fruit ... juice of roasting
_cashews_.
It whelmed Coggins. The dry season was at its height. Praying to the
Lord to send rain, black peons gathered on the rumps of breadfruit or
cherry trees in abject supplication.
Crawling along the road to the gap, Coggins gasped at the consequences
of the sun's wretched fury. There, where canes spread over with their
dark rich foliage into the dust-laden road, the village dogs, hunting
for eggs to suck, fowls to kill, paused amidst the yellow stalks of
cork-dry canes to pant, or drop, exhausted, sun-smitten.
The sun had robbed the land of its juice, squeezed it dry. Star apples,
sugar apples, husks, transparent on the dry sleepy trees. Savagely
prowling through the orchards blackbirds stopped at nothing.... Turtle
doves rifled the pods of green peas and purple beans and even the
indigestible Brazilian _bonavis_. Potato vines, yellow as the leaves
of autumn, severed from their roots by the pressure of the sun, stood
on the ground, the wind's eager prey. Undug, stemless--peanuts,
carrots--seeking balm, relief, the caress of a passing wind, shot dead
unlustered eyes up through sun-etched cracks in the hard, brittle soil.
The sugar corn went to the birds. Ripening prematurely, breadfruits
fell swiftly on the hard naked earth, half ripe, good only for
fritters.... Fell in spatters ... and the hungry dogs, elbowing the
children, lapped up the yellow-mellow fruit.
His sight impaired by the livid sun, Coggins turned hungry eyes to the
soil. Empty corn stalks ... blackbirds at work....
Along the water course, bushy palms shading it, frogs gasped for air,
their white breasts like fowls, soft and palpitating. The water in the
drains sopped up, they sprang at flies, mosquitoes ... wrangled over a
mite.
It was a dizzy spectacle and the black peons were praying to God to
send rain. Coggins drew back....
Asking God to send rain ... why? Where was the rain? Barreled up there
in the clouds? Odd! Invariably, when the ponds and drains and rivers
dried up they sank on their knees asking God to pour the water out of
the sky.... Odd ... water in the sky....
The sun! It wrung toll of the earth. It had its effect on Coggins. It
made the black stone cutter's face blacker. Strong tropic suns make
black skins blacker....
At the quarry it became whiter and the color of dark things generally
grew darker. Similarly, with white ones--it gave them a whiter hue.
Coggins and the quarry. Coggins and the marl. Coggins and the marl road.
Beryl in the marl road. Six years old; possessing a one-piece frock, no
hat, no shoes.
Brown Beryl ... the only one of the Rum children who wasn't black as
sin. Strange.... Yellow Beryl. It happens that way sometimes. Both
Coggins and Sissie were unrelievably black. Still Beryl came a shade
lighter. "Dat am nuttin'," Sissie had replied to Coggins' intimately
naïve query, "is yo' drunk dat yo' can't fomembah me sistah-in-law
what had a white picknee fo' 'ar naygeh man? Yo' don't fomembah, no?"
Light-skinned Beryl....
It happens that way sometimes.
Victim of the sun--a bright spot under its singeing mask--Beryl
hesitated at Coggins' approach. Her little brown hands flew behind her
back.
"Eatin' marl again," Coggins admonished, "eatin' marl again, you little
vagabon'!"
Only the day before he had had to chastise her for sifting the stone
dust and eating it.
"You're too hard ears," Coggins shouted, slapping her hands, "you're
too hard ears."
Coggins turned into the gap for home, dragging her by the hand. He was
too angry to speak ... too agitated.
Avoiding the jagged rocks in the gap, Beryl, her little body lost in
the crocus bag frock jutting her skinny shoulders, began to cry. A
gulping sensation came to Coggins when he saw Beryl crying. When Beryl
cried, he felt like crying, too....
But he sternly heaped invective upon her. "Marl'll make yo' sick ...
tie up yo' guts, too. Tie up yo' guts like green guavas. Don't eat it,
yo' hear, don't eat no mo' marl...."
No sooner had they reached home than Sissie began. "Eatin' marl again,
like yo' is starved out," she landed a clout on Beryl's uncombed head.
"Go under de bed an' lay down befo' I crack yo' cocoanut...."
Running a house on a dry-rot herring bone, a pint of stale, yellowless
corn meal, a few spuds, yet proud, thumping the children around for
eating scraps, for eating food cooked by hands other than hers ...
Sissie....
"Don't talk to de child like dat, Sissie."
"Oh, go 'long you, always tryin' to prevent me from beatin' them. When
she get sick who gwine tend she? Me or you? Man, go 'bout yo' business."
Beryl crawled meekly under the bed. Ada, a bigger girl--fourteen and
"ownwayish"--shot a look of composed neutrality at Rufus--a sulky,
cry-cry, suck-finger boy nearing twenty--Big Head Rufus.
"Serve she right," Rufus murmured.
"Nobody ain't gwine beat me with a hair-brush. I know dat." One leg on
top of the other, Ada, down on the floor, grew impatient at Sissie's
languor in preparing the food....
Coggins came in at eleven to dinner. Ada and Rufus did likewise.
The rest of the day they spent killing birds with stones fired from
slingshots; climbing neighbors' trees in search of birds' nests; going
to the old French ruins to dig out, with the puny aid of Rattah Grinah,
a stray mongoose or to rob of its prize some canary-catching cat;
digging holes in the rocky gap or on the brink of drains and stuffing
them with paper and gunpowder stolen from the Rum canister and lighting
it with a match. Dynamiting! Picking up hollow pieces of iron pipe,
scratching a hole on top of them, towards one end, and ramming them
with more gunpowder and stones and brown paper, and with a pyramid of
gunpowder moistened with spit for a squib, leveling them at snipes or
sparrows. Touch bams.
"Well, Sissie, what yo' got fo' eat to-day?"
"Cookoo, what yo' think Ah are have?"
"Lawd, mo' o' dat corn mash. Mo' o' dat prison gruel. People would
t'ink a man is a horse!" ... a restless crossing of scaly, marl-white
legs in the corner.
"Any salt fish?"
"Wha' Ah is to get it from?"
"Herrin'?"
"You t'ink I muss be pick up money. Wha' you expect mah to get it from,
wit' butter an' lard so dear, an' sugar four cents a pound. Yo' must be
expect me to steal."
"Well, I ain't mean no harm...."
"Hey, this man muss be crazy. You forget I ain't workin' ni, yo' forget
dat I can't even get water to drink, much mo' grow onions or green
peas. Look outside. Look in the yard. Look at the parsley vines."
Formerly things grew under the window or near the tamarind trees, fed
by the used water or the swill, yams, potatoes, lettuce....
Going to the door, Coggins paused. A "forty-leg" was working its way
into the craw of the last of the Rum hens. "Lahd 'a' massie...."
Leaping to the rescue, Coggins slit the hen's craw--undigested corn
spilled out--and ground the surfeited centipede underfoot.
"Now we got to eat this," and he strung the bleeding hen up on a nail
by the side of the door, out of poor Rattah Grinah's blinking reach....
Unrestrained rejoicing on the floor.
Coggins ate. It was hot--hot food. It fused life into his body. It
rammed the dust which had gathered in his throat at the quarry so far
down into his stomach that he was unaware of its presence. And to eat
food that had butter on it was a luxury. Coggins sucked up every grain
of it.
"Hey, Ada."
"Rufus, tek this."
"Where is dat Miss Beryl?"
"Under de bed, m'm."
"Beryl...."
"Yassum...."
Unweeping, Beryl, barely saving her skull, shot up from underneath the
bed. Over Ada's obstreperous toes, over Rufus' by the side of Coggins,
she had to pass to get the proffered dish.
"Take it quick!"
Saying not a word, Beryl took it and, sliding down beside it, deposited
it upon the floor beside Coggins.
"You mustn't eat any more marl, yo' hear?" he turned to her. "It will
make yo' belly hard."
"Yes ... pappy."
Throwing eyes up at him--white, shiny, appealing--Beryl guided the food
into her mouth. The hand that did the act was still white with the dust
of the marl. All up along the elbow. Even around her little mouth the
white, telltale marks remained.
Drying the bowl of the last bit of grease, Coggins was completely
absorbed in his task. He could hear Sissie scraping the iron pot and
trying to fling from the spoon the stiff, overcooked corn meal which
had stuck to it. Scraping the pan of its very bottom, Ada and Rufus
fought like two mad dogs.
"You, Miss Ada, yo' better don't bore a hole in dat pan, gimme heah!"
"But, Mahmie, I ain't finish."
Picking at her food, Beryl, the dainty one, ate sparingly....
Once a day the Rums ate. At dusk, curve of crimson gold in the sensuous
tropic sky, they had tea. English to a degree, it was a rite absurdly
regal. Pauperized native blacks clung to the utmost vestiges of the
Crown. Too, it was more than a notion for a black cane hole digger
to face the turmoil of a hoe or fork or "bill"--zigaboo word for
cutlass--on a bare cup of molasses coffee.