I lay in the water face up, floating on my back, letting the viscous, salt water of the Caribbean Sea buoy me. I could hear the sounds of my children and others around me as I drifted between the present and some other time. The sea had never been this delicious, this wonderful. I let myself be on my own. Closed my eyes even though I feared the waves might crash over me and go up my nose. I resisted the urge to raise my head and closed my eyes. The sun was hot on my face. I could feel the heat in my lips and inhaled the sea's aura all around me. I started to time travel. My ancestors who passed through Barbados on their way to the Carolinas stood closer to shore. I sensed the bleed of their garments swirling around me. In my mind's eye I saw their head wraps and skirts, watched them wipe their hands on their clothes, peeped them sneaking bits of mango into the mouths of their own children. I recalled a time when visiting Jamaica as a young girl sucking the juice from a sugar cane stalk and wishing we could take this sweetness with us forever. I remembered that the cane was the cotton of the Caribbean. I remembered the gnarled hands of my great-grandfather, Jesse Ben, and his clean, well-shaped fingernails. He was old when I was a girl and lived long into my adulthood.
I closed my eyes as waves rocked me and saw stars when I opened them to the turquoise and azure hues of the sky and sea. I thought, as I often do when I find myself alone in nature, how did the people of long ago experience this? I thought of Africans coming ashore in what looks like paradise, only to become slaves to someone else's heaven. I thought of poor black people washing themselves in the sea, rubbing the fine sand on their faces and knees and elbows and feet as I'd seen many locals do when we lived here. I recalled the old man who passed me going down the aisle on the airplane to find his way to the bathroom who looked like an older version of my father and wondered if my family tree, were I able to trace it, would find some of our people in Barbados. I concluded that it was possible. Maybe that was why we'd relocated there to begin with. That I might find my way to myself somehow.
The sun was high and bright and the water's undulation hypnotic and the number of rum punches consumed had me outside of my control and into a space more nebulous and open. Breathing in the air, feeling the water lap against my ears, I opened my eyes to consider how this place suddenly felt like home after all of the promises broken and kept, after the punishing loneliness, after I'd called her my heart of darkness. But my heart of darkness still pumps life blood through me, shows me connection, and gives me direction. She has been patient with me and has allowed me to love and be loved, no matter my fear of it.
Part II.
I was as afraid of Barbados as I was of myself. She was dark and hot and humid and fecund and feral, shiny, damp, throbbing, and deep. She wore her colonialism like a necklace or a yoke depending on what circle you traveled and she was beautiful. She was in your face heavenly at times, then seedy and broken. I'd come to Barbados like a white American tourist. I don't say that with pride. But I'd prepared, as did my Euro-centered, patriarchy-card carrying, rigidly gendered French husband, for a life in paradise. A two year break from the grind. We'd dreamt of sun and sea and sand and tropical drinks and "maybe even someone to help you care for the children; it's really cheap there, you know?" I was still pregnant when we began the conversation about the move that would take us from New York City, my home, what I'd thought was my true north, to the Caribbean.
I'd only marginally considered how I'd relate or connect to the people of Barbados and was reassured that I'd meet the "wives of other employees" and would be part of an expatriate community which I presumed correctly would be mostly white. In Barbados I was black but a different black. I'd no Caribbean roots (that I knew of) and moved through space like a New Yorker. I was efficient, abrupt, focused. I acted with precision and purpose. I was frustrated by the slower gaits, imprecise schedules, and indirect responses. Expats marveled at the locals' disinterest in their companies' priorities, called them incapable, demonized their behavior and infantilized them in their minds. My husband regaled me and anyone who would listen about the unsophisticated ways in which they worked, how uncouth, how unprofessional, how inelegant, and I was struck by the overtones.
I'd spent my life, as instructed, proving these beliefs untrue. I knew that whites' impressions of me could determine my opportunities. That being likeable, malleable, complacent, unchallenging would allow me access to spaces forbidden to other black people. Before I could be called lazy, I worked harder and more efficiently than anyone else. Before I could be called messy or sloppy, I was well turned out and presented. Before I could be called unintelligent, uneducated, unprepared for the tasks at hand, I'd worked and considered every angle. There were rewards for this good behavior and the rewards quieted my restlessness for a time. I believed they were what I wanted, gifts, treats. I'd been a dear pet, a cultivated, curated, well-edited example of how to do it right, only revealed to be the sham that it was when the developing nation of Barbados showed me myself.
I know how I looked and I know what I sounded like and it fills me with shame. In trying to right myself when postpartum depression and anxiety turned me upside down, I lashed out. Self-loathing and internalized racism made me angry that Barbados hadn't easily opened herself to me. Wasn't I her kin? I had no friends. Locals looked at me suspiciously, tried to suss me out, make heads or tails of this black American girl and her French husband and multicultural babies. I was indignant for my husband, wished the cooks in his kitchen could make his life easier for him so that he could, in turn, make my life easier. I willed them to be better, to act better, to give a damn about the shitty hotel company that couldn't have given a damn about them, to show up for their low wage in the hot kitchen to work tirelessly and thanklessly for spoiled tourists so my husband could be praised and exalted. I hated what I believed they were doing to my family. The cultural divide between my husband and I broadened and I saw for the first time the weight of his self-importance and privilege and my deference to it.
I said silent prayers to Barbados to get her shit together. (Wasn't I trying to muffle my cries each night as I found my thoughts turn more and more psychotic? Why couldn't she? Why did she always have to show her contempt? Her wounds? Her pain?) I asked her not to be as she was. (I'd been stuffing myself down my throat my entire life! My parents had hung up on my while I wailed in fear at the monkeys coming to the screen-less windows and I tried to act casual about it.) I asked her to make it easier for the tourists visiting our landscape. (Let them feel special and important. Let them focus on your blue waters and have their hair braided and tell you that now they looked just like you. Let them tell you how much they love you and your food and your dress and your style and then return to the air-conditioned luxury hotels and villas whilst you tell them they are pretty and return to your modest dwelling.) I asked her to keep her skeletons in her closet. (It can't be colonialism, racism, class structure, and history preventing your rise and your success. Barbados is not ready for prime time, can't get it right.)
In a class about the Barbadian character, my husband and other white expats were taught to expect a passive-aggressive position from the Bajans/Barbadians. It was explained that because, unlike slave masters and traders on other islands of the Caribbean and in the United States, the slavers of Barbados had allowed families to stay together, had not separated them through sale, and had therefore made its black population more complacent, docile. The terrain, unlike other islands, did not provide much place to escape. There were no mountain ranges or protected landmasses in which to hide. That this modified history was meant to explain to expat workers the resistance they might meet when dealing with locals making pennies to their dollars infuriated me. That they believed it made it worse. When my parents came to visit the island, my father said that Barbados "wasn't ready for prime time" and I knew that she still had more to prove. We both did.
In New York City, I could disappear into the melting pot. I could ride the subway, walk down the sidewalks, go to work, restaurants, parks with people from all walks of life. Sure, there were pockets of complete WASPy whiteness and areas where black and brown communities set up "Little" versions of their homeland, but for the most part I was amongst the world's population every day. The blackness of Barbados hit me like the wall of humidity that sweated my hair, all coiffed and presented for my reunion with my husband, when I walked down the stairs at the back of the plane the evening of our arrival to the island. It curled my hair, glossed my cheekbones, and parted my lips. She gave my swinging hips and the jiggle my ass made when I walked permission. She showed me all the black ladies and men doing all the things. She gave me eye contact and I was at first afraid to meet her gaze.
I got lost in Barbados. Walking through the mansion's ruins deep in the forest of mahogany trees at Farley Hill overlooking the island's Atlantic Coast, I discovered her lush, soft heart, and mine for her. I fell in love with this place and then the east coast. My first foray into the island, going deeper to her core, no longer flitting on her edges where tourists and expats teased her and hedonistically played with her, I discovered another type of paradise. It was morose and melancholy. There was a Victorian sadness to this place. Ghosts, secrets, and whispers. It was here that I made my first friends on a class trip with my oldest girl. They resuscitated me. They shared their secrets and let me tell mine. This included my shame and my pride and my confusion. I was able to admit that the paradise promised had not been what I'd expected. That the sun was too bright and too hot for this exhausted mother, that our house was uncomfortable, that I'd been so lonely, that my husband didn't and couldn't meet my needs, that being a black, African-American expatriate in a country of black Caribbean people was more challenging than I'd expected.
I didn't recognize the New Yorker who'd just begun making a career for herself, who'd finally found a real place to call home, who'd confronted assaults and deep old wounds only to see the post traumatic stress pull any sense of safety out from under her. I couldn't believe how bad I was at living abroad. I'd dreamed since I was a girl of being a "woman of the world" and then couldn't hack it. I thought, I can't even hang on this little island with black people and I thought I was going to be a world traveler? I'd been fed and made complacent on the spoils of the first world. I wanted my rules, my food, temperature control, my media, fast internet, VOGUE magazine, sidewalks and clean streets. I wanted businesses and companies that thought I was always right. I wanted antiseptic correctness. I feared real connection and contact and Barbados wanted to touch me. Touch me with her warm fingers, take me into her beating heart, get mango juice and soursop, sugarcane, coconut, lime, breadfruit and flying fish fry in my hands and my hair. I thought I could move there, live there, raise my children there and remain untouched, unchanged but she revealed herself to me and me to myself.
Part III.
Though I was angry with Barbados and my time spent there, I kept coming back. I kept up with dear friends and the weekly news. I followed different organizations on the island and got excited about the island's successes. I met people living in the United States from Barbados with pride and told them of my time spent there. I tattooed a flying fish, the nation's symbol, on my right forearm underneath the Eye of Horus. I still regaled people with my tales of monkeys and cultural confusion, long days spent at the immigration office, and word for word play by play of conversations I'd had with customer service at varying businesses, but I kept going back. When I told white people I'd met about my years in Barbados they'd say, "See! I knew you were from the islands!" To which I'd always reply, "I'm actually an American born black person. My parents and their parents are from here too. We've no Caribbean roots that I know of." They'd always meet my response with suspicious eyes. They understood why they visit the Caribbean, for the sun and the sea, but couldn't imagine that I'd somehow have been there for the same reasons, suspected that I was keeping my roots a secret. There is no secret.
My father and mother both went in search of their roots using ancestry.com and found what they'd pretty much suspected. Many US narratives begin in West Africa, and theirs was no exception. There are various European attributes that can more than likely be traced to the rape of my slave ancestors. That's no secret. They've also worked diligently with their siblings on their family trees to see how far back they can trace our family. We are at the mercy of the slave masters' records. What I know is that Barbados and the Carolinas have a very deep connection for both white slavers/forefathers and the slaves they transported with them for trade. My people are from the Carolinas and the surrounding areas.
As the daughter of black Southerners, I have made the connection to my slave ancestors, seen the soil where they toiled, been inside the modest homes where they lived. I have been inside the churches and listened at my grandparents' and my great-grandparents' knees of stories that brought dimension and depth and value to the lives of the people who came before me. I loved their character, their strength, and their dignity. I despised that they were made to bend to the whims of white people, that their lives were not fully realized because of what racism and poverty inflicted upon them, and that the crosses they were made to bear were never acknowledged by the good, white people who'd unloaded them onto their backs. These warm brown, beautiful people never believed how glorious they were. That their lush, dark, soft hearts, sweated brows, and sinewed arms, strong hands, and wooly hair deserved to be loved.
It is with that love that I return to Barbados. To tell her that I love her, and myself, in her imperfection. That is she a baby, a young one, and that I am sorry for having been unforgiving. I have been that way for myself. Because I didn't learn that my blackness, my heat, my desire, my need, my gifts, my treasures, my heart, my humanity was enough. That I could allow myself a moment to float aimlessly or rest. That I didn't have to prove that I was other than I was. Than I am. When I next visit Barbados, I am going to spend Foreday Morning with my friends native and adopted. I am going to follow the steps of the man who looks like my father and let myself be painted in mud and colors. I am going to wash myself off in the sea and trace the color stained sweat down my face. I am going to rise and fall with other black people into the night and let Barbados finally, actually fill up the cracks in my story. I may jump at the Grand Kadooment or find other Cropover events in which to participate and I will come to the sea and float on my back, careful not to let the water go up my nose. I will let the water come to my ears and listen for my heartbeat. I will catch the heartbeat of those who came before me and I will let the sun brown my body to a deep mahogany.
Barbados nearly broke me. She did crack me open. And is now filling those cracks with moon dust. What I'd wanted was a picture, a two dimensional postcard of my life. Instead I found that I must put my hands in, dig in deep, pull from myself the lies and deceits embedded in me to make me easier, less than I am. I have learned to love being this black woman. I have loved having a deep, wounded, melancholy heart because she has shown me how to be compassionate. I know the chemtrails of slavery weave themselves across my soul's starry sky and that I have carried that dark secret as it were my own. It isn't only mine to bear. What is my own is the light. What is mine is my heartbeat in my ears as I float in the water. What is mine is the undulating rhythm of the waves. What is mine are the things revealed to me living in Barbados.
(c) Copyright 2017. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
