A Tall History of Sugar by Curdella Forbes

Author:Curdella Forbes [Forbes, Curdella]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, ebook
ISBN: 9781617757815
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2019-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter XII

Despite Joseph's threat, the new job was also in Brixton. So he didn't have to travel far. It was a most unlikely job, looking after an old white man who needed someone to cook and shop for him in the daytime. At night his daughter came home from her job as a nurse's assistant at King's College Hospital on Denmark Hill. A nurse, not his daughter, came in twice a week to check his blood pressure and vital signs.

Moshe's job also included small intimate things like helping the old man get to the toilet, changing his diapers when he pissed in them, and helping him count his money, which he did incessantly, obsessively, pouring the bills and coins onto the table from the metal strongbox he kept under the bed, refusing his daughter's attempts to get him to open a bank account.

He really irascible, Moshe wrote to Arrienne that September. Miserable as johncrow batty. Take up this. Put down that. Sit down up. Walk up straight. The food too hot. The food too cold. Mi hot, take off my sweater. Mi cold, put on back my sweater. Yu rass, I tell him in my mind. First I ever cuss so. Maybe I miss you. Please write.

Sometimes irascibility shaded into downright spite. This happened when the pain in the old man's extremities became too much to bear. He would spit out the food, all over his front, so that Moshe would have to clean and change him. At other times he threw the food against the wall, aiming with surprising strength for someone so scrawny. Moshe was sure he couldn't weigh more than a hundred pounds.

You never know ill will could make a man so strong, he wrote in his journal to Arrienne. And he almost hurt my feelings. You know cooking is the one thing I can do when it come to housework. Mama really teach me that before we went to Kingston, so I wouldn't starve on campus or have to eat badfood. So when this little maaga Englishman finding fault with my cooking I am not amused.

But funny enough, he wrote, I don't mind the work. I so used to tuning people out, you know, that easy. He cuss all day but I just go somewhere in my head. I think I find him a bit of a relief. He's the only one I've met who has decided what he thinks I am and stuck to his guns on that. Don't ask me no question, make up him mind all by himself. It bring a certain amount of equilibrium.

"Dirty little Chink!" the old man would crow in his most devastated moments. "You think I don't know you, but I know you! Chinky! Why don't you go back to Hong Kong?" And then, as if he had lost something incredibly precious among the piles of trashed newspapers and magazines that he tore up when he had nothing better to do, he would skitter his hands through the piles and ask, weeping, "What is my name? Do you know my name, Chinky?"

"Your name is Mr.

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