Georgetown, December 1912
Our wedding was a quiet one, and small. On my side sat the family: sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, friends – and my disapproving parents. ‘You can’t trust them white people,’ Ma had said. ‘Especially the ladies. They got claws.’ Ma knew all about white ladies. She had worked as a maid for three of them when we were small. She said they were all high and mighty, and stabbed you in the back.
But it didn’t turn out that way. It was the other way round: me holding the knife. This is the story of how that happened. I’m telling it not to excuse myself. There is no excuse. It’s my confession. I must bare my soul, before Winnie, before God. Maybe that way I will find forgiveness. And redemption. Absolution. There’s an ugly stain on my soul, and I must wash it clean. Winnie, if you’re reading this: I hand this stain to you. I put it in your hands. Wash me clean. I will tell all, right from the beginning, even things you already know, because that is what a confession is about. You start at the beginning, when all was good, all was perfect.
Winnie was solid gold, I told Ma when she said those things about her. And we would marry and all would be good; I knew it from the bottom of my heart. She and I would conquer the world. We already had. That we were standing there at the altar was proof of it. That’s what I thought on my wedding day, the proudest man in the world.
We married at the small Roman Catholic Church in Albouystown, the same church where I had been baptised. Winnie wore white, and she was beautiful. Her father was in prison, so she walked up the aisle alone. She had few guests. Just her sister, Yoyo, and her mother. Yoyo hated me. I already knew that. She disappeared immediately after the wedding, and I was glad to see her go. That ridiculous hat! But her mother, whom I already called Mama, took us out to lunch at the Tower Hotel, Winnie still in her bridal gown, and tried to put me at ease. So that was a second good white woman.
And then I took Winnie home to Ma and Pa, home to Albouysoun. I was a bit ashamed, at first. How could I take my bride home to a tiny Albouystown cottage on rickety legs? She, who had grown up in a sugar palace, on her daddy’s plantation, in splendour, a princess? How could I pull her down so low? But she told me not to worry. She already knew about small cottages. She had lived with Aunty Dolly, whose cottage was even smaller. Aunty Dolly had taken her in as a silly sixteen-year-old runaway. Aunty Dolly had taught that sugar princess how to pluck a fowl, and brought her down to earth. I forgot to say: Aunty Dolly came to the wedding too. Aunty Dolly and her daughters, sitting on my side of the aisle. Aunty Dolly would put her hand in fire for my Winnie. She already had, but that’s another story. Aunty Dolly had made Winnie’s beautiful wedding dress, and her brother, a tailor, had made my suit. The smartest suit in Albouystown, with tails down to my knees. That suit made me stand tall. It made me almost feel worthy of my bride.
There was just the two of us and Ma and Pa, because my sisters had moved out, married and gone. They came to the wedding too. Grudgingly. They thought the same as Ma. That Winnie would stab me in the back, like all white women. And they too were wrong. We would be the happiest couple in the whole colony. It’s what I promised her. What she promised me.
But first, we had a honeymoon. I could never have afforded a honeymoon, but Uncle Jim gave us the honeymoon. Jim Booker, my mentor and the renegade white man from the powerful Booker clan; the black sheep of the Bookers, because he was on our side, the underdog side. Helping the revolution to come. When people say all white men are evil I point to Uncle Jim. There are good white men and Uncle Jim is one of them; as far as I know, the only one. But if there is one there can be many, because goodness is in the heart and it is a choice. Anyone can be good if they choose to be.
The honeymoon was his wedding present to us. Uncle Jim had a house down the coast, to the west, in the wild Essequibo district. It was an empty house because nobody lived there, but he sent people to clean it up for us and we went there for a week. I could not get more than a week’s holiday, and unpaid; as a lowly postman that’s what I got. But a week was enough. I had my Winnie all to myself, and it was a week spent in heaven. And then we came home to Albouystown. I keep mentioning Albouystown because I think that worried me more than the cottage. How could I bring my bride to Albouystown?
Albouystown, the poorest part of Georgetown. Albouystown is in the south, bounded by the Sussex Street trench on the north and the Punt Trench Dam on the south. The Le Repentir cemetery adjoins it, which only adds to its reputation – people are scared of ghosts and jumbies and bad spirits. I myself have experienced this. I once went to the wake of a neighbour in a yard down the road. In the middle of the Bible reading something stirred in the middle of the crowd, a commotion, and a man started talking and shouting some sort of gibberish. He then threw himself to the ground, stood on his head and danced around on his head. It was a quiet man, Mr Gibb, a coach driver, who had never behaved strangely before. Somebody threw a bucket of water over him, which made him fall on his back. A few minutes later he got up and couldn’t remember a thing. And everybody said afterwards he’d been possessed by an evil spirit from Le Repentir cemetery. That’s the kind of place I was taking my Winnie to.
We lived on Butcher Street, which was one of the richer streets, with separate cottages in big yards full of fruit trees. It was probably named after Mr Khan, who had his butcher shop up near the north. Other streets in Albouystown were full of long buildings called ranges, tenements where several families lived together sharing the space. So we were actually lucky. But when I took Winnie there I didn’t feel lucky. I felt ashamed.
Everyone here was struggling, and everyone here was coloured, either African or Indian. Except my bride. She would be the only white lady in the whole of Albouystown. People would stare. They would shun her. They would be afraid of her, just like they were afraid of all white people. I don’t want to say it, because saying things sometimes makes them happen, but there were people in Albouystown who might wish her ill. Who might do her wrong. But when I told that to Winnie, she only stroked my cheek and smiled and said, ‘George, George, don’t worry about a thing. I can take care of myself.’ And she did.
Winnie, if you are reading this – do you remember those first days, weeks? After the wedding, when I brought you home? I carried you over the threshold into that cottage. I felt bad about that, because I did not have a house of my own to offer you, but only a bedroom in my parents’ home. But you said you did not mind, and maybe you really didn’t. You laughed when I swept you up into my arms and carried you over the threshold; your veil caught on a nail in the door and because the veil was attached to your hairdo, all your hair was pulled away and it hung loose and when I set you down it was all over your shoulders, and you were laughing, laughing; and then you changed out of your wedding gown and we went off on our honeymoon, and then I brought you back home to Albouystown and our married life began in earnest.
Ma and Pa were in awe of her; all they saw was her skin, and in spite of what Ma had said, about white women stabbing you in the back, the truth was her upbringing reneged on all that and awe overcame suspicion. And now she was their daughter-in-law. White people had to be catered to, but you don’t cater to a daughter-in-law, do you? You’re supposed to be in authority, as her elder; they didn’t know what to do.
I put Winnie down, careful that she should land on her own two feet. She was still laughing, grabbing her loose hair and pulling it back, and she stumbled, knocking over the little hall table. Ma heard the commotion and came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron. She saw Winnie, and curtsied. I couldn’t believe it. Ma curtsied! It was terrible, but Winnie handled it with grace; she opened her arms to Ma and gathered her into an embrace that was as genuine as it was touching, so that it looked as if there had been no curtsy at all; it looked as if Winnie had not noticed, even though she had.
‘Where’s Pa?’ I asked. I was still dying of embarrassment because of that curtsy and I had to do something to distract from it, though of course Winnie already had, and in fact, Ma was still in Winnie’s arms and Winnie was smiling at her and Ma was smiling back. But I still asked, ‘Where’s Pa?’
‘Where you think? At Bernie’s.’
And again I almost died of embarrassment.
‘On my wedding day?’ How could Pa go off to Bernie’s, today of all days? Just an hour ago he was at the reception in the church hall. Just a small reception, the same people who had been at the wedding. But of course Albouystown folk were curious. They had gathered on the road outside trying to get a glimpse of the bride. Winnie must have been the only white lady who had ever stepped into Albouystown, and word had spread and people wanted to get a glimpse of her. You can’t blame them. Everyone loves a wedding, a bride, and especially such an unusual one. I didn’t blame them at all, for standing outside the church and then the church hall to ogle my Winnie.
But I was embarrassed, for her. But what did she do? She waved! You waved at them, Winnie, and you smiled, that innocent smile of yours. But they did not wave back. They simply stood and stared, and that’s when I knew there was going to be trouble. And yet I knew: it would be good. In the end it would be good. Winnie would win them over, just as she had won Ma over, in the end. Winnie was like that. She would make everything good. And she was still only nineteen years old. Not yet twenty, not yet of age, and already she knew the wisdom of the heart: that everyone deep inside wants only to be loved, but that to love is greater than to be loved. And without even knowing these strangers, she was loving them with just a wave and a smile. They might not love her back, as yet, but they would.
But now that was over and here we were in that cramped little front hall and Winnie picking up the table she had knocked over. I should have done that but my awkwardness had lamed me and all I could think of was Pa’s rudeness in not being at home to welcome my bride. Ma and Pa had not stayed long at the reception and they knew I would be bringing her home and the least Pa could do was be there when she came. But Pa didn’t think that far. Pa had only one love, one obsession, and that was at Bernie’s. I knew what Pa would be doing. He would be sitting at Bernie’s desk poring over a stamp album. Because that was what Pa loved most in the world: stamps. Postage stamps. And Bernie, who lived in Kingston and had a big house, had the best stamp collection in the whole of Georgetown and Bernie’s was where Pa could be found whenever you were looking for him. So even on my wedding day, that was where Pa was to be found and I burned with shame. But I couldn’t say anything, not in front of Winnie. So I just frowned at Ma to let her know I disapproved, and I turned to my bride and said, ‘I’ll show you our room. Would you like to rest? Or take a bath?’
She laughed. ‘Rest? On my wedding day? Gracious me, no, of course not! I just want to get this dress off and put on some comfortable clothes. And I want to be off on our honeymoon!’
‘You got to eat first!’ said Ma. All Ma ever thought of was cooking and baking and feeding people, and wonderful smells were wafting their way out of the kitchen, and Ma came to her senses in that moment because she exclaimed, ‘Oh Laus! Me pine tarts!’ and she ran back into the kitchen.
I wasn’t hungry, not in the least, so I said to Winnie again, ‘Come.’
And I took her hand and led her into that bedroom.
Winnie and I occupied a double room. It was just a little bit bigger than the bed, which was jammed into a corner. On the other side of the bed there was a wardrobe. The doors in the wardrobe could not open properly, because the space between the wardrobe and the bed was too narrow. I was ashamed of these cramped quarters, but Winnie never complained. She pretended not to mind; she turned her back to me and asked me to unbutton her dress, which I did, and then I turned away to give her some privacy while she changed her clothes. Her little suitcase lay on the bed. We had had it sent there in advance. It was all she had brought into our marriage, though she had much more, of course. But Winnie knew she couldn’t bring all her clothes. She knew that all there was room for was what fitted into this one suitcase. And I left her to change and went out to talk to Ma.
‘Ma,’ I said when I got to the kitchen, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t curtsy to your daughter-in-law!’
‘Don’t give me no eye-pass!’ she retorted. ‘Who is the child and who is the parent? Just because you got a white-skin wife you think you could order me around, tell me what I can do and can’t do?’
And she was of course right – a son shouldn’t be reprimanding his mother – but the truth was, I was completely mortified by this situation, bringing Winnie home to such a place, and that was why I was rude to my own mother, giving her eye-pass.
Ma was bent over the oven, removing a tray of pine tarts. Ma’s pine tarts were the best in all of Albouystown. The best in Georgetown. The best in the world! And even though I was still full from all the food we’d had at the reception – food that Ma had cooked – I couldn’t resist; I stretched out my hand, forgetting that they were straight out of the oven and scalding hot. I soon found out; I cried out and Ma laughed, and all was forgiven.
So now I was Winnie’s husband, the happiest man in the world, and the luckiest. I must put away this shame and this awe and just be myself, be the man Winnie knew, the man she had married, because she loved him. She did not want my awe.
‘I don’t have much to give you,’ I said as I put her down.
‘All I want is your heart.’
Winnie: the romantic. The trouble is, when she said these things she meant them, and she lived them. She did give me her heart. But I did not take good care of it.
I wanted so much to be strong for her. A man; manly. Her hero. To protect her and provide for her and our children, all while adoring her with every fibre of my being. Instead, I stabbed her in the back.
Winnie: what can I do to earn your forgiveness?
I wore a hat to Winnie’s wedding – and such a hat! That hat was the talk of the town, afterwards, as I knew it would be. It was the most beautiful, and widest-rimmed, hat ever worn in British Guiana. I had it made especially for the wedding. Winnie’s wedding dress was rather plain, just as she is, so I knew that my hat would be what the ladies admired, more than her dress. The brim was almost a foot wide. It was trimmed with frothy lace and real red roses – my hat was a work of art, and that’s the way it should be. Everyone I spoke to commented on my hat. It was a complete success.
Now, why would I be talking about a hat, a mere hat, so soon after my sister’s wedding? You’d have to know what went before to fully understand. This wedding should never have taken place. It was an abomination. I could not believe that my sister, my shy, soft-spoken big sister, she who had always deferred to me, would actually go through with it, but she did. I had given her my opinion on this farce of a wedding but she did not heed me, and rather than create a scandal, with my opposition to it out in the open, and make my family the laughing stock of British Guiana society, I played along, pretending to have been swayed by her never-ending love for her so charming darkie groom.
I’ve never believed in romance. I’m as romantic as an old potato. Romance is a silly notion that infects most women, the silliest kind of women. I’m a married woman myself, and I know what men want, and it’s not romance. I know what makes them fall to their knees before a woman, what can sway even the strongest man. That is the weakness of men, and all Winnie did was find a man who was easy to conquer. It was unbelievable. You don’t marry a man for that!
Of course, there’s no dearth of single English males hungry for wives in the colony, but hardly any of them are marriageable. Either they are Booker men – whom a Cox girl may not marry, for political reasons; or else they are ageing, or else they are, well, simply horrid. Yet does a lady need to stoop that low? As the elder of us, Winnie could have had the cream of the cake: my Clarence. Yet she rejected Clarence in favour of this George, this darkie postboy, and so Clarence is mine.
I married him soon after my father’s trial; a small, inconspicuous wedding. I married him for two reasons:
One: So that I could take over management of the estate. Even as a sixteen-year-old I correctly assessed him as weak of character, and easy for a woman to control.
Two: to produce sons.
Promised Land must remain stable and strong far into the future, and the only way is to raise young men whose hearts and blood are wedded to the plantation – young men with sugar in the blood, young men whose hearts would race at the pungent smell of the burning of the trash, young men who can walk through the towering canes and know: this is my home. I will protect it with my last breath.
I don’t care much for babies and young children but I suppose you can’t have young men without them. Anyway, there are servants to deal with that problem.
And so, after my wedding all my energies went towards, firstly, training Clarence to know that I was the power behind the throne and, secondly, him impregnating me as soon as possible.
The first of those goals came easily enough; with my striking looks and even more striking character I soon held him in the palm of my hand. He is a foppish fellow, completely unsuited to plantation life; that he is here at all was the result of negotiations between Papa, or rather, Papa’s solicitor in London, and Clarence’s father Lord Smedley, who was anxious to see him removed from the dissolute life he was leading in London. So Clarence was imported to the colony by Papa, a surrogate son. He was supposed to invest in our struggling plantation, inherit it and marry one of the daughters, and as the elder sister remaining (our eldest, Kathleen, had left us for England years before), Winnie was the allotted one. But she rejected his advances, and so he turned to me. I was still only sixteen at the time, and needed Papa’s permission, which he readily gave. After all, Clarence was now to manage the plantation, and we needed him firmly attached to the family by way of marriage.
Clarence, of course, was rejected by his own father, who got rid of him by sending him to us with a small fortune. He was a spoilt lounge lizard with a penchant for loose women, drink and gambling. Easy enough to braid into my hair; I needed him only for the position and the sons to come. And so Clarence was installed as heir to Plantation Promised Land, and in return invested the much-needed money for a sugar processing factory. Thrown into the deal, a Cox daughter as his wife – me. In this way Lord Smedley was able to wash his hands of this troublesome stain on the family name, and we got – well, we got Clarence.
He had – and still has – no knowledge of plantation business and no inclination to learn, whereas I have been absorbing the spirit of sugar and the rhythm of its seasons all my life. Learning the business side of it was easy for anyone with a quick brain, even a female. We didn’t really need a Clarence, since I was there – but Papa had never heard of a woman running an estate, and we needed the money, so I suppose it was a good bargain, and we were the winners.
Ha! That, you see, is how a woman wins. Clarence is my marionette. And with my hat I showed them all who holds the reins in this disgraced family. What with Mama’s abandonment of us, followed by Papa’s prison sentence, followed by this farce of a wedding, with Winnie cut off without a penny to her name – well, the Cox family was mired in scandal. Now, I’ve never cared what people think, never cared about my reputation – I’ll do as I please. But I plan to show them all, those who point fingers at us. I have a plan, a long-term plan. My wedding to Clarence – even before Winnie’s wedding to George came about – is a part of that plan, and the hat was a symbol of it.
Georgetown, August 1912
I took George with me to the harbour to meet Mama. He was reluctant to go.
‘It’s your mother,’ he objected. ‘Why would you drag me along on such a momentous occasion? She will want to see you alone, or you and Yoyo!’
‘But you are part of me now,’ I said. ‘And Mama must know that from the start. I can’t wait for her to meet you!’ And as usual with George, I got my way. I was beginning to feel guilty about that, actually. I wasn’t naturally the bossy type; quite the contrary. So why was I so bossy towards George? Was there a residue of racial superiority in me, an unconscious sense of mastery? One that overcame even my sense of feminine deference to the male; and in him, vice versa? I would have to be careful in future. George was so very sensitive. I did not want to ride roughshod over him. But on this I did insist: he must come with me to greet Mama off the ship. It will be the last time, I swore to myself. Soon we will be married and after that I will be soft and yielding, and he will be the man, strong and in charge. That’s the way it should be.
‘There she is,’ I cried, pointing. I grabbed George’s hand and pushed my way through the crowd, dragging him behind me. Yes, there was Mama, crossing the gangplank! She had hardly changed a bit! So lovely! She wore a travelling suit of tweed – rather unsuitable for our climate – and a hat and was just unfurling a parasol as I saw her, and she looked so smart. I pushed myself to the front of the waiting crowd, George in tow, and the moment Mama touched firm ground I flung myself at her.
‘Mama, Mama! How I’ve missed you! Welcome home!’
Mama’s arms opened wide and closed round me, and we stood there in silence for a long moment. I was sobbing with relief and gladness. How I had worried these last few weeks! I have a tremendous fear of the Atlantic crossing. The ocean is so wide, so deep! I had nightmares of Mama in a little boat tossed on the waves and sinking down into the ocean depths. Papa always used to scoff at these fears, and Miss Wright, our governess, too: ocean travel is safe, they would tell me; few ships sink. Yet still, the terror of the ocean and its power never left me. And only recently the greatest ship that was ever built, the Titanic, supposed to be unsinkable, had sunk! Proving that I was right to fear the ocean. One thing is sure: I shall never make that voyage. You will never find me boarding a ship bound for Europe.
Eventually Mama and I drew apart and looked into each other’s faces. I knew my cheeks were wet with tears, and so were Mama’s; but now she laughed and kissed me on both cheeks and then on the tip of my nose, exactly the way she always used to when I was a child. She had not changed.
‘Winnie! My darling Winnie!’ she said, and then she looked around, behind me.
‘Where’s Yoyo?’ she said.
‘At Promised Land,’ I said. ‘She’s waiting for you there. But Mama, this is George – my fiancé!’
And I grabbed his hand again and pulled him forward. He was holding his hat clasped to his stomach with his left hand, and I let go of his right so that he could greet Mama.
Mama frowned, and hesitated ever so slightly before taking his hand.
‘This is – George?’
‘Yes, Mama. We have been waiting for your arrival – we shall be married next week!’
Mama looked George up and down, still frowning, not taking his hand. The moment hung in space. I could tell by George’s expression that he was wilting inside – he still harboured this unfounded fear that all white people looked down at him. But I knew Mama wasn’t like that. I had not told her George was black because I knew she would not care. And in the next moment she proved me right. Her lips spread in a wonderful smile and she extended her hand and said, ‘I’m delighted to meet you, George!’
Poole, our chauffeur, dropped George off outside his home in Albouystown. This was the house which was to be my home when we married. Seeing it, I understood at once why he had been so reluctant to bring me home. He was ashamed. It was just a one-storey cottage, and it would be small for the four of us. But I was used to one-storey cottages; it was no smaller than Aunty Dolly’s. When I was a silly girl of sixteen I had run away from home to be with George, but fortunately Aunty Dolly had plucked me from my fluffy dreams, taken me into her home, talked sense into me and forced me to grow up. I adored her.
Now, I squeezed George’s hand and smiled at him before he got out of the car, to show him I wasn’t shocked. But his eyes told me he was ashamed all the same.
Just as he had been ashamed to introduce me to his parents. But I had insisted, and at last I had met them, just last Sunday. His mother was a thin, ramrod-backed lady, and she greeted me unsmilingly, with a mixture of shyness and hauteur. His father was just as thin; tall and loose-limbed, just like George, and elegant in his black suit and bow tie. We met on the promenade, and walked up and down conversing while the brass band played in the roundhouse. A stilted, disjointed conversation, led by me; I asked questions, the answers to which I already knew:
‘Where do you work, Mr Quint?’
‘At the post office, ma’am.’
‘Oh! So, just like George!’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘How many children do you have, Mrs Quint?’
‘Just the three, ma’am.’
‘George, and…?’
‘Two daughters, ma’am.’
‘Do they live at home?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘I do like your hat, Mrs Quint. It’s very pretty.’
‘Thank you. ma’am.’
And s. . .
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