Underhill Avenue Stories: Arni and Bibsi.

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

Arni and Bibsi are from Jamaica. Now they live together in a fifth floor rent controlled apartment in a stately brick apartment building around the corner from the store-front I rented on Underhill Avenue, Brooklyn.

Bibsi was a good daughter and though we all knew her as Bibsi, her given name is Miss Eunice Montgomery, Montgomery like the famous World War Two, British Field Marshal. Miss Montgomery is very proud of her name. Of course that was not her real name for like most Caribbean people, she is the descendants of slaves and her actual family name is now forgotten. I was the traveler who became a friend.

Bibsi had a little business on the side selling nickel and dime bags of street weed. I’d ring the downstairs bell and wait with my dog and soon a voice crackles on the intercom asking: “Who?” and she’d buzz me in and I walk up five flights to the apartment and knock discreetly and the door cracks open and I see the whites of her eyes and she’s holding the door like keeping the whole world out and then relents, I squeeze past and she darts her head out into the corridor, looks both ways before closing the door and double locking. I can smell something cooking.

I’m not the only one who visits for weed. Most don’t stay, they get a bag and scuttle off into the mean streets but I like to spend time with Bibsi and when I learned her mother was down the corridor I’d visit with her too. Bibsi and I do a little business and I roll a spliff with American Spirit tobacco and we smoke together and catch up on the news and soon I’ll venture down the corridor.

Arni sits in her small room on a straight back wooden chair beside the bed surrounded by mementos, many, many mementos, a cacophony of mementos, tchotchkes, porcelain dolls,  whole families of them, a treasure trove that one day might become a collector’s delight, and pictures cheaply framed, and photographs and artificial flowers, brightly colored chemical colors in an brass vase and medications and instructions 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 ersatz 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 held  high and regal. She told me, or anybody who entered her realm, that she was “on repentance” and then  recited a series of biblical aphorisms about the “long, hard road of life” and I knew it had been long and hard for her. 

They used to come from the church to visit but not so much anymore and she was lonely.  Arni loved church and I gave her a small gift for the collection plate so she had something to share just in case and she took it with gratitude and a kind of reverence and hid it from her daughter under a pillow or one of the small porcelain statuettes and then she’d laugh.  She loved it when we sat to talk and she stroked the head of my dog and the dog smiled and Arni came to call me husband. She beckons me to sit, reaching with an arm her hand extended in a gesture only seen in the elderly: “sit, sit”. 

Back up the corridor Bibsi’s ex, Pretty Ray is visiting. He’s standing in the doorway, his face barely visible in the shadows. His twisted dreads hang down under a black woolen cap pulled down over his ears and his coat collar turned up stylishly like a toff. I don’t think he ever worked in America but always dresses like he slipped off the pages of Vogue magazine.

A wind chime hanging from the frame of the kitchen entrance chimes when he brushes it as a he moves and sways like he’s dancing and he’s talking. His voice comes from his deeper parts, thick and black with a Jamaican brogue and he speaks from a place down in his chest, he’s a wizard, a shaman or a voodoo priest the way he looks and sounds, laughing to himself he addresses nobody in particular and he’s holding a plastic cup half-filled with 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 greased colonialism and capitalism. Rum, the original currency for slavery made vast fortunes for some and helped others forget their misery. It gave sailors and soldiers courage and respite, was at the centre of trade wars and rebellions. In Australia rum was a form of currency in the early colonial days used to pay convicts for their forced labor. And so its influence seeps its way into this small apartment in Brooklyn and Pretty Ray takes another sip. He’d been a bad boy in his time. 

As a teenager in Jamaica Pretty Ray 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. Pretty Ray was recruited by Michael Manley when Bob Marley was still making records in back alley studios in Kingston. Pretty Ray was henchman and enforcer  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 lottery numbers will be announced on television and Bibsi is scrambling through her tickets and flipping through the TV channels. There are more lottery tickets, scratch cards, coupons from the super market, envelopes and bills, plastic bags on the kitchen table.  I am squeezed into a space between the table and the stove and  the TV on the kitchen counter. 

Fish head soup is bubbling on the stove today but it could have been cow’s foot or chicken’s feet or goat’s head. The white man tends to eat the white meat if you now what I mean and certainly not the fish eyes which island people consider a delicacy. The head has lots of nutrition but it doesn’t look appealing looking at me, bubbling on the stove close to my elbow.

The dish rack is crowded. 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 are scattered on the linoleum floor. They are like big match boxes with adhesive tape inside and the roaches get stuck in the motel where they die. Like the ad says: “You can check in but you can’t check out of the roach motel”.

The kitchen clock strikes on the hour and  makes the sound of bird songs and here I sit night after night when I visit Bibsi and Arni in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn tonight listening to Pretty Ray’s stories. Pretty Ray 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 go. The police chief told him so too. Pretty Ray hears about work in America and he takes a plane to Miami and finds a bus that takes him to work on a Florida sugar plantation.

“Oh the work was hard Andrew”. He looks at me and his head knocks against the chimes and they 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, 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.  They 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 from the Caribbean islands, made blacker by the charred cane burned before it was cut to evacuate the snakes.

Pretty Ray 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 into the camp, whores they were and we lined up.

 “Oh God Andrew, there must have been fifty guys lined up waiting on a Saturday night. 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 off of her’ ”.

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 Pretty Ray 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 ‘em, heavy, heavy Andrew”,  and he bends and crouches in the frame of the kitchen door and heaves a hundredweight onto his shoulder and staggers and throws it onto the back of the truck.

Pretty Ray’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: “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 in my family.  My roots were European. On my father’s side my grandparents were Lithuanian and Jewish, merchants who escaped Russia before the Russian revolution. In fact they joined the Cossacks against the revolution.

My father married three times and I was the issue of his second union, his second wife, a tall, long-legged handsome woman of Swedish and Spanish parents. So I was a bit of bastard in more ways than one,  half Lithuanian and one-quarter Swedish and Spanish, born in Australia under the shadow of Hiroshima and the Holocaust as World War two ended. I had one full brother eighteen months younger and a half-brother eight years younger.

For myself, I was on my own journey and after leaving Australia would venture into some pretty dark corners myself more radical politics, 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 might be true.

I felt an empathy and a kindness towards black folks, I said it was their soul, what the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca called  duendé,  a kind of unconditional love I felt from black folks and I felt it and I heard it in their music and their lives. And the soup bubbled and the clock chimed in that kitchen full of pig foot soup and cow’s feet and chicken feet, love and memories.

_____

I visited last night and a few days earlier too and she seemed to be ailing. She was wan and weak laying crumpled on her bed in a threadbare nightdress with a scarf around her old gray head. She beckoned for me to cover her legs and 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 wasn’t  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 for a minute or two. I could hardly understand what she whispered in her thick Jamaican brogue but it was something about it being “time”, she  was tired and it was enough. A bowl of uneaten chicken covered with a cloth, lay beside her.

But I’m sad to say I’m on my way

Won’t be back for many a day

My heart is down

My head is turning around

I had to leave a little girl in Kingston town.