Uprooting by Marchelle Farrell

Author:Marchelle Farrell [Marchelle Farrell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd
Published: 2023-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

Crocosmia

A FEW CLUSTERS of strappy, accordion-folded leaves have appeared in the garden. They lengthened over the spring months, but now, as the hot July days stretch out, thicker structures appear from within them. At their tips rows of bumps form, looking like teeth. They stretch and grow into zipper rows of buds that colour from their starting pale yellow through orange to finally bright red as at last they reveal themselves fully. Arcs of flowers held up on the end of strap-like stems opening sequentially from tail to tip, a deep blood red. One of the first to open hovers over the steps down to the patio. The red flowers hang suspended over our heads like ruby-throated hummingbirds.

Having that thought makes my throat thicken and eyes begin to sting. I miss hummingbirds. The last time I saw them hovering overhead in numbers as thick as the crocosmia flowers floating over the patio was in Trinidad, and Trinidad has never felt so far away.

After my parents sold the house that I had thought of as our family home, they bought a place in the east of the island. It was in a neighbourhood unfamiliar to me, but on our first visit to their new home, in our search for places to go and things to do with the children that did not require making the long journey up the highway back towards Port-of-Spain, we discovered a magical garden nearby.

Cafe Mariposa is in the Lopinot hills, an area that had been renamed for the French count who built his plantation estate and settled in the area in 1805 while the island was under British rule. For a long while Lopinot was inhabited by the family and enslaved people who made up the count’s household, and other French creole migrants who joined them, attracted by the rich cocoa estates the land nurtured. The settlement, centred around the La Reconnaissance estate, remained largely untouched by change until the British government took ownership of the land in the early 1940s, and populated the village with people they displaced from the region of Caura.

Caura had been one of the island’s largest and most prosperous villages, despite its remote location in the northeastern hills. It was a community in a fertile valley of the Northern Range where the patois language and culture of the island’s mix of Indigenous, Spanish, French and African people and influences thrived away from British oversight. It had a school – rare for such a remote location – and one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the country until the 1940s, when the government under governor Sir Bede Clifford decided to dam the Caura River and build a reservoir over the site of the village to provide water to the entire north of the island. More than one thousand residents were evicted, and their homes dynamited and destroyed. Many of the old Caura villagers were relocated, travelling on foot with their children and what few possessions they could carry on their backs to the Lopinot valley.

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