Mummy dumps a bucket of water over my head. I heard only her footsteps, my back toward the open verandah door, my face toward the sea. My freshly pressed hair shrinks, coils. I can taste the oil sheen as the water rushes down my face. But I had done it, with Grandma’s help. Just for today, I looked like Mummy.
*
Water dripped from my shrunken curls. I stood in Grandma’s bathroom facing the medicine cabinet mirror as she raked her fingers through my hair, then stretched the ends and released. The curls shrank toward my scalp.
“Hair is so long.” She pulled at another section.
“Watch it, watch it, watch it,” she shouted, waiting for my attention, “hair jump!” And she released the curls. We laughed as the hair spiraled back into tight short curls.
I grabbed a weft of hair at the front, pulling it past my nose, lips, and chin. I pressed it hard against my chest.
“Grandma, look!”
She smiled. “I don’t have time for no tidy cornrows today.” I’d be accompanying Grandma to her friend’s brunch party. She pulled out a blow drier and a pressing comb.
Every summer, I spent a week or two with Grandma and Grandpa, sometimes helping in the convenience store they owned. I ate as much choc-ice as my stomach would allow, chased lizards in the dust-covered yard, and hassled my grandfather about the packets of Trojan that he kept hidden under the counter near the register.
“W’as dat for?”
“Too young for you to know.”
“Is it for sex?”
“What you know about that? Likkle girl, what you know about that? I go tell your Mummy what you said.”
“Grandad, I’m almost thirteen. Mummy and Daddy gave me a book.”
“O Lawd!”
*
“The ancestors are in the hair.” Grandma released a section of straightened hair from the hot comb. It swung heavy, black and sticky with grease at the side of my face.
“Such nice textured hair hidden in those cornrows. Your mother must be crazy not to press your hair now and then.”
Grandma kept her hair straight. Relaxed the roots every three weeks. She said in her younger days, she kept her hair curly—not like mine, but softer curls that bounced and turned the heads of women and men alike in the small village where she grew up.
I sat on a bar stool in the kitchen while she maneuvered between the stove that heated the comb and my blow-dried hair sectioned into four.
“Your mother thought she could erase him. But you got his cheekbones.”
I cringed slightly as the comb singed my scalp.
“Now that your hair straight, I can see him. Those cheeks are his.” She pushed my chin toward her while outlining my cheek with her thumb. She laughed short. “Oui Jesus!”
I knew who she was talking about. The Frenchman. My great-grandfather. His memory hung in a 24 x 17 frame on the dining room wall. I had heard the stories: over six feet tall, blond hair, blue eyes. He owned a banana and cocoa plantation, which he left to my grandmother.
But there were other stories too—stories hushed to whispers when I entered a room. Stories whispered in Kwéyòl, a language I barely understood.
I twirled a piece of thread I had pulled from the edge of my t-shirt. “Didn’t he hurt Granny?”
Granny was Grandma’s mom. People would touch the side of their heads when they spoke of her. Mal tête. Before she died, she’d lived in a locked room in the downstairs apartment of Grandma’s house. I was five when I first met her; she looked like a witch with uncombed gray tufts of hair haloing her head.
I heard the clank of the pressing comb against the metal stove burner. Grandma bounced her belly against my back. “Yes, he did.”
“Pull down your ear.” She grabbed at my hair and dragged the comb through. The metal teeth seared bits of my scalp and pulled at my fragile strands. I hissed at the pain.
Grandma rested her greasy hands on my shoulders and pushed down. “But that was how it was back then. That’s what men did. Me, I eh too sure that Granny self knew it was bad.”
“So why you love him so? Why you have his picture up?” I snapped the thread in two.
I had overheard Mummy say to my Uncle Roy, “Mama and dem idolize and uphold an oppressive past. That is psychologically disturbing.”
Grandma said, “Your mother always wanted that picture down.”
“What did he do?” I ventured, scrunching up my shoulders and looking at a loose thread at the hem of my skirt. If I pulled it, would it unravel the entire stitching?
“Das grown folks talk.” Grandma pulled harder than usual on a section of hair.
I gritted my teeth, swallowing the “Ow” that threatened to escape.
She sucked her teeth as she pressed the comb through. “No one has a pretty, pretty history. He was my father. And sometimes people do things…they doh mean to. Ya know? And he loved your mother …lef’ her land…but she too ‘conscious’ for that…”
She handed me a mirror. I looked less primary school girl, always in cornrows and thick plaits. I peered hard in the mirror, unsure if I looked much more like Mummy or Great-Grandpa as Grandma said—my cheeks were hidden under all that hair. But my hair was straight like Mummy’s.
“Your mother is the lucky one.” Grandma sprayed my hair with sheen, using her left hand to shield my forehead and eyes from the residue. “She got the straight hair. Everybody used to think Grandpa wasn’t her father. White man live under your bed, they would tell me.”
*
I opened my eyes to an army of ants marching up the trunk of the mango tree toward the oozing sap. Black, biting ants. One, two, three, four, five, I counted, luring the sixth onto a sticky mango-stained finger.
I should have told Grandma no. But I wanted to feel my hair on my back instead of coiled up at the nape of my neck. In five months, I would be thirteen. And it wasn’t even permanent like what some of the girls had at school. My finger throbbed. I squashed the ant with my thumb.
Flinging the remains of the mango into a bush, I walked up the sloping ground to the open backdoor. I leaned against the wall there, listened to the voices coming from the front of the house.
“But you kah take care of the child properly, no grease in her hair and look at the shoes you give her to wear,” Grandma argued.
Mummy sucked her teeth. “Like you were such a good parent.”
“Wha? Wha…you say? Why you keep saying I did something to you? I never did anything to you. You need to get your head examined. Your Granny suffered mental illness.”
“You are the crazy one, with your selective amnesia.”
“Is rude you rude so, talking to your mother like dat. Das how you want to raise your child?”
“Don’t touch my child’s hair.”
Through the walls, I felt the boom of footsteps. I dashed toward the mango tree.
“Cherie! Cherie!” Mummy flew through the backdoor, her red skirt mushrooming in the breeze. “Let’s go.”
*
“What a madhouse,” Mummy muttered, as we sped away from Grandma’s. “I don’t know why I let your father talk me into letting you go over there.”
“Mummy, it’s not permanent.” I watched the curious faces of Grandma’s neighbors as we zoomed past the multicolored houses edging the gravel road.
“Cherie, next time, tell her no. Just say no.”
Our chests lurched forward as she slammed on the brakes. We had joined a long line of traffic crawling down the steep slopes of the Morne into the city of Castries.
“We’re not going to make it.” She flipped open her cellphone, calling one of her activist friends.
A rainbow of one-room houses dotted the hillsides that sloped toward the sparkling harbor water. On the roadside a deluge of fruit trees and bush scraped against the sides of the slow-moving vehicles. Ahead of us was a red minibus stuffed with passengers. The driver blasted “Murderer” by Buju Banton.
“Kill I today, you cannot kill I tomorrow,” I sang along as I settled into my seat, adjusting the air conditioner to the highest setting. I was happy we wouldn’t make it, happy that I didn’t have to feel the sun fisting the back of my neck as I held up a placard that read, “Save our Beaches.” Almost every week Mummy dragged me to a protest against the construction of a hotel on Pigeon Island, a beach in the village of Gros Islet.
“Why do we keep selling our birthright?” she would argue with beachgoers, “Englishmen and Americans get to enjoy what’s ours. The government already sell off prime property near the Pitons to foreigners who doh give two figs about this country. Are we going to give everything away?”
Beachgoers often stopped to talk with Mummy, mesmerized by her fair-fair skin, light brown eyes, and long straight hair, though she spoke like a local. “You’ll kah blame the white man this time for this economic and environmental colonialism.”
A horn blared from behind.
“Damn idiot. Blasting a horn and only five inches we moving forward.” Mummy shook her head. Kept her foot on the brake. A river of hair whipped the sides of her face. Patches here and there were torched gold and red by the sun. “Natural highlights,” she would smile at anyone who asked about the color in her hair.
“This obsession with long straight hair was imposed on us by colonialism.” With Mummy everything went back to colonialism.
I nodded. Grandma would say that was Mummy’s education speaking. “Such smart words,” Grandma would mock, touching her straightened hair. Grandma was proud of her roots. “I eh saying what they did in the past was right. But I born how I born. I kah erase what I look like. And I won’t give what my father gave me to anyone.”
Mummy continued her lecture. “In Nigeria and Ethiopia, hair is just hair, not magic or good hair. We’ve been made so insecure by colonialism and racism we major on minor.”
What did Mummy call herself? I was nine when my classmates surrounded me after class, asking, “How come she so white, and you so black?” She’d come to my classroom to drop off the pink plastic lunch box I’d forgotten, the one with the Care Bears on the front.
“She your stepmother?” they had asked at first.
I shook my head. Before then I hadn’t noticed our different shades. Hadn’t thought it strange for such a fair woman to have a dark child. Her coloring was like Grandma’s, like the Frenchman’s. She had his cheeks, too.
She turned toward me. “Not everything Grandma tells you is true.” Her lips quivered—she wanted to say more but instead her mouth straightened into that hard line she always wore. Another secret.
I turned my face away from her, fogged the passenger window with my breath, then pressed my fingertips to the glass to make fingerprints. She lowered the air conditioner.
Sounds from outside floated in, mostly car engines and horns. And then the shac-shac of trees shaking in a strong breeze. Rubbish, neon-colored flyers flapped back and forth across the dusty streets. This was how it was between Mummy and Grandma—even when they refused to speak to each other, something like noise, a racket filled the room, the air.
“Nature doesn’t forget,” Mummy finally continued, “look at Granny… People think everyone carry on honky-dory because the years go by…not so…never so.”
If she hated Grandma so, why didn’t she just blow the horn and wait in the jeep? Why didn’t Daddy come to pick me up from Grandma’s house? To say hi to Daddy, Mummy would say, when she appeared, a tall shadow in the open front door, then plant a kiss on Grandad’s forehead. But it felt like pretend, like at school how we chirped around Elena, complimenting her gold bracelet, her fancy hair clip, then spent our lunch hour bad-talking her.
Maybe Mummy was like Granny—couldn’t help herself, couldn’t leave whoever hurt her. I had heard the whispers, how even when the Frenchman hurt Granny, she wouldn’t leave him, even when Granny’s sisters begged her not to, she returned. For gold bangles. Someone had said. She loved him, in spite of. Another had answered. Just chupid. Someone had sucked their teeth.
The traffic sped up as we crawled past the Castries Harbor. Two white cruise ships were docked. I watched a line of tourists in their sunglasses and colorful prints walk along the edge of the harbor toward the fish market. They were mostly blond. Some had dark hair like Mummy. She would fit in with them. They would never know she belonged to this place.
Not too far from the fish market, women who worked in the office buildings opposite the highway crowded a bus stop. Most wore their hair straight and slicked back in a bun or pinned up in a French roll. When I grew up, I would work in an office too. A lawyer. Isn’t that what Daddy said I could do? I would wear a suit like those women and wear my hair straight. And what could Mummy say then?
As the traffic broke apart like bits of bread in water and drifted in different directions, the jeep picked up speed, hurtling up another hill toward Gros Islet, where we lived. I twirled the ends of my straightened hair faster and faster.
*
“No.”
Mummy pointed a neon green wide-toothed comb at me. She had just demanded for the last time I get in the shower and wash out my hair. I stared right at her, watched how her expression oscillated from surprise to coldness at my defiance.
She shook the comb at my father who lay splayed out on the couch next to me. “One week in that madhouse and already she is stubborn like a mule.”
“Mummy, it’s not permanent,” I argued.
“Cherie, I want you to wash it out.”
“Grandma says my hair will stay straight for two weeks. It’s just as good as putting cornrows in.”
Her voice inched upward. “I didn’t give you permission. Both you and Grandma know that I don’t want your hair straight.”
I looked out toward the sunlight streaming in through the open door of the verandah. I felt my hair strands grazing against my neck. Prickly. Hot. I imagined how my hair looked whenever I scooped it over my shoulder: the blackness, the shine, the length.
“Troy!”
“Cherie, listen to your…” My father nudged my leg. He gave me a look that said he didn’t want to be in the middle of this.
“I have Great-Grandpoppy’s cheeks,” I blurted out.
“What madness you saying?”
“I have the Frenchman’s cheeks. Your cheeks.” I pushed the skin of my cheeks upward and using my fingers I traced its sharpness, height, and mold.
“He is in my hair, too.” I continued catching her gaze as my hair swung back and forth.
“That is the nonsense Mama filling your head with? That man was a monster. That’s who you proud of looking like. Like her?”
“Diana, Diana,” my father called, after she marched to the bedroom.
I walked outside onto the verandah, looked out over the sea. The wind blew my hair in strands across my face. I closed my eyes, imagined what my friends would say. They would praise the length. Tomorrow, I would wear my hair in a long ponytail tied up high on my head with a ribbon, ride my bike to the mall where we sometimes hung out at Fernandes’s ice-cream parlor. I twirled the end of a section of hair, coating my fingers with sheen. I didn’t understand Mummy. Was everything we got from him bad? Was Grandma bad? Didn’t Mummy want me to look like her?
*
Daddy runs out onto the verandah when he hears my scream. The bucket clatters to the ground.
“Diana,” he yells, before running back inside.
The water shocks. Cools. Today is hot. But my hair…my hair is turning—some strands shrinking and coiling, the ends dripping water.
Daddy returns with a towel, wiping my face and wrapping another one around my shoulders. He steers me into the house, attempts to dry my hair.
“No, no, no,” I try to stop him. The cotton towel will frizz my hair.
“It’s too late.”
I taste salt, oil sheen, mucus. “Why, why, why. She hates me.”
“Is not you, is not you.” Daddy hugs me. “She and your Grandma…”
I cry too loud for my own ears. Stop, stop, stop. I am almost thirteen and I sound like a baby. But the crying comes from my belly, like the bursting of a water-filled balloon, a sneeze I can’t silence with clenched teeth. But a thought, steady and slow-moving, fills my mind even as my body shakes with my sobbing: I’ll leave at seventeen. After graduation. I won’t be anything like her, always fighting.
Later, with my frizzing hair pulled into a tight damp bun and a change of clothes, I find her splayed out on the patio chair, sunbathing in the last light of the day. She has left the red bucket in the middle of the verandah;. I pick it up, hear the swill of water, put the bucket down, tiptoe toward her. She does not move.
She’s rolled her pants up to her knees. And tucked her shirt into the cups of her bra, exposing her belly. It isn’t as flat as I thought. It puffs out, white and glaring in the sunlight. Her hair lies like a fan on the flower-patterned cushion of the chair. Her eyes are closed. Her hand moves above her head like a hummingbird darting from left to right, twirling the ends of her hair.
I know then that she is a liar. Even when she hates Grandma, she wants to belong to her. Belongs to her. Belongs to him too. He is in her hair. Even when she tries to burn the Frenchman off her skin, he is in the strands burnt gold and red by the sun.
Catherine-Esther Cowie is from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia and has lived in Canada and the US. She is a poet, fiction writer and visual artist. Her writing has appeared in The Common, SWWIM, Southern Humanities Review, West Branch Journal, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and PN Review. Catherine-Esther Cowie’s work has been nominated for AWP Intro Journal, a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets 2018 and 2019. Her visual art has been featured in The Indianapolis Review, ctrl +v journal, The Florida Review, and CALYX. Her visual art was nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology 2023. This story was longlisted for the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writer’s Prize.
