Childhood by Andre Alexis

Author:Andre Alexis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2020-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

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Now, once Henry dismissed the sirens, he led us downstairs to the dining room.

– Mrs Williams, he called.

The old woman with red hair, whose slippers and rolled-down stockings I now noticed, shuffled amiably in.

– Yes, Mr Wing?

– Mrs Williams, I’d like you to meet Miss MacMillan and her son, Tom.

– Is a lovely boy you have there, miss.

– And I believe he’s hungry, Henry said. What have we got that isn’t frozen?

– Mr Wing, you know I does never freeze anything. It have some okra and rice in the fridge.

– Would you like okra and rice? Henry asked.

I said

– Yes, please.

I could only have said “Yes, please” to okra once in my life, and I remember it still. The texture was repulsive. The rice, though, was a thing with pigeon peas and pieces of something salty that turned out to be pigtail. I ate every grain, rescuing some from under the okra.

– Thank you, Henry, my mother said when we’d finished.

– Did you like it, Tom?

– I didn’t like the green, sir.

– Neither did your mother.

So, we never had okra again, though Mrs Williams sometimes served callaloo, which is okra by other means. (Callaloo inevitably came with crab, however, and crab was the most exotic food I could imagine, and it was good.)

It’s strange, now that I think of it, how easily I accepted as much of Mrs Williams’ cooking as I did. It was mostly Caribbean and, until I discovered Henry’s Trinidadian descent, inexplicably foreign. Yet, I took to plantain and roti, dasheen and doubles as if I were born to them.

The food was appropriate to my new surroundings. Not that Henry’s home was Caribbean. It wasn’t, but it was more so than anything I’d known. My grandmother, after all, had swept Trinidad from her own life and surroundings. Here, in this household, buljol and sugar cake belonged.

At least, I felt that way. My mother almost certainly felt otherwise. Perhaps, when she was younger, my grandmother hadn’t been quite so diligent in hiding her origins. In that case, the Caribbean aspect of Henry’s home, Mrs Williams in particular, would have been an unpleasant reminder of the place she’d fled.

I write all that without conviction, though. My mother was unkind to Mrs Williams, but she may have had other reasons to dislike her. The thing is, I can’t think of her behaviour without remembering how little I understood it.

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