Underhill Avenue Stories. Arni and Bibsi

Sometimes I see Arni as a kind of living shrine. She is 92, close to the age my mother died. My mother left when I was three and I only saw her once again much later. When I look at Jamaican Arni I know I am looking at a woman who has spent almost a century in this world and I replace her wrinkled black face with that of my mother’s. They traveled  the long road of life separately at the same time.

Arni is from Jamaica and Bibsi her daughter  brought her to Brooklyn thirty years ago and now they live together in this fifth floor rent controlled apartment around the corner from Underhill Avenue, in a stately brick apartment building in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.

Bibsi was a good daughter and though we all knew her as Bibsi, her real name was Mrs. Eunice Montgomery. Of course that was not her real name for like most Caribbean black people, she was the descendants of slaves and somewhere forgotten in the dim past was her African  family name. She had a little business on the side selling nickel and dime bags of street marijuana when smoking dope was illegal.

I’d ring the downstairs bell and wait and soon a voice crackles on the intercom asking who? And she’d buzz me up and me and my dog walk up five flights to her door and I knock discreetly. And the door cracks open and you see the whites of Bibsi’s eyes before she lets you in.

You’d squeeze through the cracked door, Bibsi held it like she was holding back the weight of the world and inside, I’d turn the corner into the brightly lit steaming kitchen, soup on the stove, sit, find my money and she’d hunt around for a bag and we’d talk and I’d roll a spliff, American Spirit organic tobacco and Mexican street marijuana.

Soon I’d venture down the narrow passageway to Arni’s room where she sits all day. She told me, or anybody who entered her realm, that she was “on repentance” and  recited a series of biblical aphorisms about the “long, hard road of life” and I knew it had been long and hard for her. 

Arni came to long for those visits because visitors were fewer and fewer and time was ticking. They used to come but not so much now and  Arni came to call me “husband”  because there were many visits to Bibsi’s for nickel and dime bags.

Like so many Island women before, Arni had been a custodian looking after white children; loved church and still went when she could, when somebody  came for her and the weather was warm enough. I gave her small tithes for the plate so she had something to share and she took my gifts with gratitude and a kind of reverence and hid them from her daughter under a pillow or a small statuette. Usually she beckoned me to sit, reaching with an arm,  her hand extended in a gesture only seen in the elderly, “sit, sit,  laugh a little, share chicken foot soup, cow foot, fish head soup with yams, and taro and collards and corn and okra.” And she’d stroke the head of my dog. 

Arni sits in her small room on a cushion on a chair surrounded by mementos, many many mementos, a cacophony of mementoes, tchotchkes, porcelain dolls, a whole family of them, a treasure trove that one day might become a collector’s delight, and pictures cheaply framed, and photographs on the walls and artificial flowers, brightly colored chemical colors in a vase and plastic pill bottles and packs of diapers in a corner and the television always on. But she seldom watches the TV, it just plays as background; Oprah and game shows and the news programs cycle through her day. She sits like Buddha in her chair, her head covered and wound in an exotically colored scarf like a voodoo princess, a shawl across her shoulders and her chin high and regal.

Each day the old lady sat “on repentance”, the television programs cycling past in the corner. Her daughter serves food and attends to most needs. Sometimes a relative visits, sometimes a city home-aid worker, sometimes somebody from the church; occasionally one of the crowd who come to buy a bag or two of weed or have a shot of rum, they’d  pop their  head in the door and say hello but it was the visits of her “husband” she looked forward to most. We talked of many things and sometimes I felt I was hearing the voice of a kindred spirit from long ago. 

She recognized that I too was growing older but still admired my strength and vitality and liked it when I held her hand or stroked her. The rambunctious laughter we shared was healing and united us in small moments. There was much talk of food and constipation and island remedies and  innuendos  I’d rather not share. And the chicken legs and ox tail soup kept coming.

She often asked about “the other woman -  the  black one”, and I knew who she meant. The old lady told me she was jealous and reminded me that women want a man only for his money and she rubbed her thumb and forefinger together and then thrust her index finger through the hole, in a universal gesture and we laughed uproariously. 

Many on the block knew of my long affair with the married dread from Barbados who often stood around the blue post box on Underhill  Avenue. Even her husband knew though would never dare speak of it. This “Island Girl” lived her own life on her own terms as I did. We had all become part of each other’s lives. And now the old lady would die here in this small crowded room in Brooklyn.

I have lived in tropic islands and know the fresh smell of the briny sea, copra and coconuts and children playing and shining in the sun and the old folks living out their days with a dog nearby still close to the earth. We pass through in different ways.

Up the corridor Bibsi’s ex husband Tony is standing in the doorway, his black face barely visible in the shadows, his twisted dreads hang down under a black woolen cap and his coat collar turned up stylishly like a toff. I don’t think he has ever worked in America but he always dresses like he slipped off the pages of Vogue magazine.

A wind chime hanging from the frame of the kitchen entrance chimes when Tony brushes it as a he moves and sways like he’s dancing as he talks. His voice is thick and black and deep with a Jamaican brogue and he speaks from a place deep down in his chest. He’s a wizard, a Sharman or a voodoo priest the way he looks and sounds, laughing to himself as he addresses a phantom, a plastic cup half-filled with white rum, Wray & Nephew White Over proof Jamaican Rum. 

Wray & Nephew White Over proof Rum is the top-selling rum in the world. In its native Jamaica, this crystal-clear rum is legendary. Rum, the catalyst for the birth of nations helped create capitalism and colonialism and slavery. Rum, the original currency for slavery; made vast fortunes for some and helped others forget their misery. It gave sailors and soldier’s courage in battle, was prohibited and at the centre of trade wars. Colonial Australia, under the English, used rum as currency in the early colonial days, to pay convicts for their labor. And so its influence finds its way into this small crowded apartment and Tony takes another sip.

Tony has been a bad boy in his time. As a teenager in Jamaica he drank his rum and carried a gun for the politicians. This was the sixties when the U.S. supported Tony Siega against the socialist Michael Manley. Tony was recruited by Michael Manley’s campaign when Bobby Marley was still making records in back alley studios in Kingston. Tony was a henchman and enforcer for Manley who supported Fidel Castro when the streets of Kingston rang with gunshots and good reggae as the two political parties fought it out.

He sways back and forth in the doorway brushing the wind chimes and his face moves in and out of the shadows and I can see a smile curling on his lips and his eyes looking at me from across the kitchen.

Soon the winning numbers will be announced on the television and Bibsi is scrambling flipping the tv channels, and sorting her lottery tickets and papers. There are more lottery tickets, scratch cards, coupons, super market sales pamphlets, envelopes and bills, plastic bags on the kitchen table and I’m squeezed into a space between the table and the stove, the TV within arm’s reach on the kitchen counter and my elbow’s on the edge of the stove.

Cow foot soup is bubbling but it could have been chicken’s feet or goat’s head or fish head soup, some kind of offal soup. I sometimes buy her fish – she loves that – crabs especially - but snapper and porgies are good too. The white man tends to eat the white meat if you now what I mean. certainly not fish eyes. Island people consider them a delicacy.

The dish rack is crowded with dishes. The shelves are stacked with more papers, plates and saucepans. A roach is running past the salt and pepper shakers. Then another. A couple of roach motels, like big match boxes with sticky stuff inside that anchors the roach to the bottom of the motel where they die. They are scattered on the linoleum floor. Like the ad says: “You can check in but you can’t check out!”.

The kitchen clock strikes on the hour in amongst the squalor and it makes the sound of bird songs. And here I sit night after night when I visit Bibsi and Arni around the corner from Underhill Avenue in Brooklyn listening to Tony. Remember Tony?  Tony’s Bibsi’s ex husband. Well actually Bibsi is really Eunice Montgomery. Montgomery like the famous World War Two British Field Marshal. Miss Montgomery is very, very proud of that name.

Tony was thrown out of Jamaica before he was twenty years old. He was a thug and a criminal and his father knew he was going to die on the streets of Kingston if he didn’t get out. The police chief told him so too. Tony takes a plane to Miami and finds a bus that takes him to work on this Florida sugar plantation.

“Oh the work was hard Andrew”. He looks at me and his head knocks against the chime and it rings so nice and strange in the dowdy kitchen – “you don’t know how hard it was”. 

He sways like sugar cane in the breeze and makes the gesture of a cane cutter showing me how he clutched the charred sugar stalks to his chest to throw them on the back of the truck. The sun was burning hot and snakes crawled through the long grass.  The men rose at four in the morning and ate a kind of porridge and were in the field as the sun rose. All the men were black, from the Caribbean, made blacker by the charred cane burned before it was cut to evacuate the snakes.

Tony draws deeply on his Newport cigarette and takes another sip of rum. 

“We were all young island men Andrew – oh God. Once a month the boss used to let these women in to the camp, whores they were and we lined up. Oh God Andrew, there must have been fifty guys lined up waiting. It was crazy. The guys all shouting instructions and drinking and urging ‘come on man, hurry up and get off her – you had enough already – get of off her man.’

One Sunday a white boss drives into the compound and clambers up into the back of his truck and announces work for those who want to earn extra cash on their day off. He’s a potato farmer and Tony says he’ll do it.

“Andrew, the potatoes grew in lines as far as the eye could see – miles of potatoes Andrew, so many potatoes and we had to pick ‘em off the ground and bag them, heavy, heavy”,  and he bends and crouches in the frame of the kitchen door and heaves a hundredweight of potatoes onto his shoulder and staggers and heaves it onto the back of the truck.

“Where you from Andrew?” Tony asks. He’s peering at me from the shadows and Bibsi swings around and looking down into my face:

“look at me Andrew, let me see your eyes – you got some – you know – I don’t mean no insult Andrew but you got some black in you.” 

It was not the first time Bibsi had asked me this question. She often asked me. “Why you like us Andrew? Why you help us?

I was Australian through and through and assured her that as far as I knew there had never been black blood in my family.  My roots were European. On my father’s side my grandparents were Lithuanian and Jewish, merchants who escaped Russia after the Bolshevik revolution. In fact they were on the wrong side of history and some joined the White Russians and the  Cossacks against the revolution.

My father married three times and I was the issue of his second. My mother was a tall, long-legged handsome woman of Swedish and Spanish desent. No black there at all. So I was a bit of bastard in more ways than one – half Lithuanian and one-quarter Swedish and Spanish, born in Australia as World War Two ended. 

I had one full brother eighteen months younger. He died when he was thirty-eight, shot in the head by his girlfriend as he slept in his bed early in the morning. The beautiful young woman then turned the Lugar pistol on her herself. it was a murder-suicide. I remember the three AM phone call in New York from Australia. Then the shock and then shadows of memory, flying for hours, arriving and sinking into confusion and grief. 

My brother had always lived close to the edge. The margins he occupied were more risky than mine. He wanted money.  Me? I tended to follow my bliss hoping the money would follow. But my brother sometimes crossed the line. He ran clubs and bars but he was no criminal. He just loved the nightlife and the back rooms. I wanted him to come to America and join me. I knew he would have loved it. But I was afraid he’d gravitate to the edges in America too – the dark attraction was something that intrigued us both so I knew it was likely. But he never made it.

For myself, I was on my own journey and after leaving Australia would venture into some pretty dark corners myself more whores and strangers than criminal behavior. And here in Brooklyn so many years later, so far from my roots, I told Bibsi and Tony I was pure white though perhaps in another lifetime I may have been black and in fact believed this to be true.

I felt an empathy and a kindness towards black people. I said it was their soul. The Spanish poet Frederico García Lorca called  it duendé, a kind of unconditional love I felt from black folks and I heard it in their music and their lives. 

I visited last night and a few days earlier too and she seemed to be ailing, wan and weak, lying crumpled on her bed in a threadbare nightdress with a scarf around her old gray head. She beckoned for me to cover her legs. At first I thought out of modesty but then realized she was cold. It was probably the only time I’d been in that room when the television was not playing.

I found some money for church and she took it gratefully and slipped it carefully beneath her pillow in a gesture of a secret shared. She was weaker than I ‘d ever seen her and suddenly I contemplated her impending death.  She lay still, her life force weak. I stroked her skinny shoulders.  I could hardly understand what she whispered in her thick Jamaican brogue but it was something about being “time”. She  was tired. It was enough. A bowl of uneaten chicken covered with a cloth, lay beside her.