Stories of Ourselves: "To Da-duh, in Memoriam" by Paule Marshall

Her face was drowned in the shadow of an ugly rolled-brim brown felt hat, but the details of her slight body and of the struggle taking place within it were clear enough – an intense, unrelenting struggle between her back which was beginning to bend ever so slightly under the weight of her eighty-odd years and the rest of her which sought to deny those years and hold that back straight, keep it in line.

It was as stark and fleshless as a death mask, that face.

Those eyes betrayed a child’s curiosity about the world, and I wondered vaguely seeing them, and seeing the way the bodice of her ancient dress had collapsed...

Perhaps she was both, both child and woman, darkness and light, past and present, life and death – all the opposites contained and reconciled in her.

My mother, who was such a formidable figure in my eyes, had suddenly with a word been reduced to my status.

‘This one takes after the father,’ my mother said and waited to be reproved.

But her frown soon gave way to a grudging smile, for my sister with her large mild eyes and little broad winged nose, with our father’s high-cheeked Barbadian cast to her face, was pretty.

It was almost as if she saw not only me, a thin truculent child who it was said took after no one but myself, but something in me which for some reason she found disturbing, even threatening.

‘But Adry,’ she said to my mother and her laugh was cracked, thin, apprehensive.

She led us, me at her side and my sister and mother behind, out of the shed into the sunlight that was like a bright driving summer rain and over to a group of people clustered beside a decrepit lorry.

Da-duh, ashamed at their wonder, embarrassed for them, admonished them the while.

We made our way slowly through Bridgetown’s clogged streets, part of a funereal procession of cars and open-sided buses, bicycles, and donkey carts.

I listened, and their voices, raw and loud and dissonant in the heat, seemed to be grappling with each other high overhead.

I suddenly feared that we were journeying, unaware that we were, toward some dangerous place where the canes, grown as high and thick as a forest, would close in on us and run us through with their stiletto blades.

It was a fairly large plot adjoining her weathered board and shingle house and consisting of a small orchard, a good-sized canepiece and behind the canes, where the land sloped abruptly down, a gully.

A fresh white cloth, elaborately arranged around her head, added to her height, and lent her a vain, almost roguish air.

She went on for some time, intoning the names of the trees as though they were those of her gods.

Following her apprehensively down the incline amid a stand of banana plants whose leaves flapped like elephants’ ears in the wind, I found myself in the middle of a small tropical wood – a place dense and damp and gloomy and tremulous with the fitful play of light and shadow as the leaves high above moved against the sun that was almost hidden from view.

Following her apprehensively down the incline amid a stand of banana plants whose leaves flapped like elephants’ ears in the wind, I found myself in the middle of a small tropical wood – a place dense and damp and gloomy and tremulous with the fitful play of light and shadow as the leaves high above moved against the sun that was almost hidden from view.

Looking up, I studied her closely, sensing my chance, and then I told her, describing at length and with as much drama as I could summon not only what snow in the city was like, but what it would be like here, in her perennial summer kingdom.

‘Oh no, you’d freeze to death. You’d have to wear a hat and gloves and galoshes and ear muffs so your ears wouldn’t freeze and drop off, and a heavy coat. I’ve got a Shirley Temple coat with fur on the collar. I can dance. You wanna see?’

After the Truck I did the Suzy-Q, my lean hips swishing, my sneakers sidling zigzag over the ground.

For long moments afterwards Da-duh stared at me as if I were a creature from Mars, an emissary from some world she did not know but which intrigued her and whose power she both felt and feared.

Her tone was incredulous.

It appeared to be touching the blue dome of sky, to be flaunting its dark crown of fronds right in the blinding white face of the late morning sun.

The hand poised to strike me fell limp to her side, and as she stared at me, seeing not me but the building that was taller than the highest hill she knew, the small stubborn light in her eyes (it was the same amber as the flame in the kerosene lamp she lit at dusk) began to fail.

Her voice was listless and the face she slowly turned my way was, now that I think back on it, like a Benin mask, the features drawn and almost distorted by an ancient abstract sorrow.

I sang for her until breakfast at eleven, all my brash irreverent Tin Pan Alley songs, and then just before noon we went out into the ground.

I sang for her until breakfast at eleven, all my brash irreverent Tin Pan Alley songs, and then just before noon we went out into the ground.

Some huge, monolithic shape had imposed itself, it seemed, between her and the land, obstructing her vision.

She remained like this until we left, languishing away the mornings on the chair at the window gazing out at the land as if it were already doomed; then, at noon, taking the brief stroll with me through the ground during which she seldom spoke, and afterwards returning home to sleep till almost dusk sometimes.

On the day of our departure she put on the austere, ankle length white dress, the black shoes and brown felt hat (her town clothes she called them), but she did not go with us to town.

She saw us off on the road outside her house and in the midst of my mother’s tearful protracted farewell, she leaned down and whispered in my ear, ‘Girl, you’re not to forget now to send me the picture of that building, you hear.’

For a brief period after I was grown I went to live alone, like one doing penance, in a loft above a noisy factory in downtown New York and there painted seas of sugar cane and huge swirling Van Gogh suns and palm trees striding like brightly plumed Tutsi warriors across a tropical landscape, while the thunderous tread of the machines downstairs jarred the floor beneath my easel, mocking my efforts.

For a brief period after I was grown I went to live alone, like one doing penance, in a loft above a noisy factory in downtown New York and there painted seas of sugar cane and huge swirling Van Gogh suns and palm trees striding like brightly plumed Tutsi warriors across a tropical landscape, while the thunderous tread of the machines downstairs jarred the floor beneath my easel, mocking my efforts.