The following is excerpted from the novel Broughtupsy by Christina Cooke, which is out in paperback today.
1996
Saturday
“You’re Jamaican?” the customs official says.
“Yes.”
“What part?” he says, rifling through my passport with my birth certificate tucked inside.
“What part am I Jamaican?” I respond.
He looks up, adjusting a strap on his vest. “What part of Jamaica are you from?”
“Here,” I answer. “Kingston.”
It says so on my birth certificate, but he keeps watching me. He’s grinning a little. We both know I don’t need to include my birth certificate. It says in my passport that I was born here, that it is my birthright to pack up and come home whenever I please. But still, I wasn’t sure—after all, it’s been so long. So I shoved my birth certificate in with my passport then put the whole thing in his hand. I needed to know that I would be believed.
“Where do you live now?” he says.
“Canada.” Vancouver, actually. Like it says in my passport.
“Why?” he says, still staring. He isn’t interested in reading it. He wants to hear me say it.
“Because that’s where my father took our family.”
“And your mother?”
I fidget with my backpack. “Dead.”
“How?”
“Sickle cell.” Like my brother.
“Where?”
“Here!” I exclaim. Exhaling hard, I smooth the front of my shirt to make myself calm. “Sorry. Here, in Kingston. Before we left ten years ago.”
He keeps watching me as my lips move in propa English, my accent all dried up. “Yuh sure is Jamaica yuh come from?” he says with a chuckle, stamping my passport then signaling to the next person in line.
Walking toward baggage claim, I stuff my passport and birth certificate into my backpack. It doesn’t matter how I sound. Behind me, I can hear the stamp-and-swoosh, stamp-and-swoosh of the customs official clearing the line. I know where I’m from. Taking three long strides to arrive at my carousel, I tap the box in my backpack to make myself calm. I lift my suitcase off the line and start toward the exit, YVR waving on the tag’s white tail.
Stepping into the muted daylight beyond the airport’s sliding doors, I cough then clutch my chest. The sudden change from air-conditioning to humid wind makes me wheeze. Coughing still, I walk to the curb, the crumbling concrete giving way to potholed road. Next to me is a woman in a teal church dress yelling at a man tying suitcases to a car roof with pieces of twine. Across the street is a patty stand with a long long line, and next to it are men in mesh shirts leaning against a wire fence, blowing smoke through their noses as they puff and puff, and there are children selling Pepsi and coconut water from beat-up coolers and porters pushing too-full trolleys behind white families, their skin garish against all the black, and next to me a child with black arms and black hair and down the sidewalk black and behind me black and I look and look as I pull my suitcase closer, sneezing against car exhaust billowing and patties baking and peanuts roasting in a pit hitched to a bike parked behind Corollas packed with eight, ten passengers and tour buses boasting AC destined for resorts behind policemen wielding batons in wide arcs of move along, move along as so many people, black, black, the sight of us filling me till drowning. My God, I’m home. And that’s it, I’m gone, drowning beneath memories of my childhood rippling high in hot crests.
Chirp of tree frogs floating sonorous, each piercing chirrup rising on the wane of the last. I’m in my childhood home. I am nine years old. Eyes shut, I pressed my hands against the slick pane of my bedroom window to feel the cool damp night. Right here—the banana trees, the orange trees, the pumpkin patch that just wouldn’t bear. Over there—the neighbor’s house, the football field, the hill leading to Spanish Town rising up in a smooth green curve. A dog barked; a door opened; a car engine sputtered, then stopped. Up here—the clothesline, the water pump, the pipe to the underground well that sometimes doubled as a slide. Behind there—the rosebushes, the old satellite dish, the gaping pit from that house that caught fire, the earth dark and red like a crusted wound.
Fingers spread, eyes open—a lizard crawled across the glass, its white belly swelling red, then nothing, nothing, thick black nothing. A car started and sirens wailed and the frogs kept chirping, chirping. Is Anancy mek it. That’s what Miss Lou said, the woman on TV with the big big smile and long brown dress and red plaid scarf tied around her head like a crown. It was my mother’s favorite show. We used to watch it together, just her and me, every Sunday after church. Anancy trick poor Bredda Toad to jump ina wah pot o’ bwilin’ wata and eva since, woi!—long high whine curving up, ending shrill, like a scream. And the trees and the earth and the pigs’ snouts and the reason why cows go “moo”—is Anancy mek it, so she seh.
“Where have you been?” my older sister Tamika says as I haul my suitcase onto the black gravel. “Didn’t your plane land a while ago?” She rests her hands on her hips, her head cocked to one side.
My sister. Her hair falls in fat twists to shoulder-length, silver hoops dangling from her earlobes scarred with keloided skin. She’s wearing a pink dress bunched up to one side—but her face, though, that same face: bushy brows angled high over my same cheeks, nose broad and royal above thick lips. She smiles, her lower lids bunching beneath brown eyes like our brother Bryson’s, like mine. She’s lost weight.
“You’ve lost weight,” I tell her.
“No,” she says. “I’ve just grown up and stretched out.”
It’s been ten years since I last saw her. Squaring up to her, I realize we’re the same height now. My neck tingles with memories of a childhood spent always looking up. “Is this the part where we do the tearful reunion?”
She chuckles, pulling me in for a hug. “Still trying to be the funny one.”
“Hi,” I murmur, smiling into her neck.
“Hi,” she says, squeezing me tight. Giving me a proud pat, she pulls up the handle of my bag. She starts the car as I climb in, laying my backpack across my lap. Click click our seatbelts go, filling the tense silence. She asks me about my flight. It was fine. I ask her about her day. It was fine. She taps her nails against the steering wheel, driving us out of the parking lot as I rub my palms over the gray suede of my bag.
I lift my left knee, then my right, feeling my sweaty skin slide all over the pleather seat. The air-conditioning rattles louder, struggling to keep up as afternoon heat settles on us, heavy and oppressive like a bad dream. I remember this feeling. I used to hate going downtown because of this feeling.
“Tamika,” I murmur, unzipping my bag.
She doesn’t hear me. She’s too busy honking at a delivery truck that cut her off. Winding down her window, she yells something at the driver, her patois deep as the sea. I focus on her voice, trying to translate her tongue rolling over vowels and slicing through consonants—but I don’t get it, can’t hear it, feeling like I’m listening through water. Am I Jamaican? I wrap my hand around my neck.
“Tamika, look.” Opening my bag, I glance down at the dark wood. “Here he is.” I put the box on her knee. “Here’s Bryson. I brought our brother home.”
She looks down at the lacquered grain of our brother’s urn then screams. Her body convulses as she jams on the gas, foot leadened like she’s losing all her blood through her feet. All of it, all her color—gone. You ever seen that? You ever seen a black woman turn white as a ghost?
“Stop it,” Tamika hisses, panting with her forehead on the steering wheel.
I laugh harder. We’re facing a concrete barricade. Tamika managed to stop before plowing right through.
“Mi seh stop!” she says.
Cars behind us start honking, a few people leaning out their windows to yell something nasty as they pass. Leaning over, I wind Tamika’s window up.
“You look like a ghost, you know that?” I settle back into my seat. “A black-white ghost.”
She lifts her head off the steering wheel.
“Why didn’t you come?” I ask her.
She kisses the lacquered grain of Bryson’s urn in a gentle hello.
“His funeral,” I say a little louder. “The hospital, all of it. Why didn’t you come?”
Tamika throws the car into reverse, backing away from the barricade and back into traffic. Pursing her lips, she’s as quiet now as she was when we first left, when Daddy made all his plans for our first departure. He said we needed a new start, that it was what our mother wanted. Tamika asked him if he’d crawled into her grave and asked her himself. When Daddy came home with our U.S. visas, Tamika barricaded herself in her bedroom. She was going to start sixth form right there, at home, like her and Mummy had planned.
“Why?” Daddy yelled, threatening to break down the door.
She wouldn’t answer. All she did was slide her scholarship letter under her door, day after day, the seal on the top waxy and bright. Hampton School for Girls. Our mother went to Hampton, so she was going too and that was that. After a while, my father gave up banging and emptied the house around her, trying to smoke her out with silence. Tamika sucked the smoke in and turned it back on us all. For ten years, all I knew of my sister was her voice through the phone. I thought our brother dying would be enough to bridge this distance I didn’t understand.
“Why didn’t you come?” I ask again. Still silence—so I ask again, and again, till she turns on the radio and switches to the news.
“Why didn’t you come?” she murmurs. “All dis time since yuh leave yuh fadda house an’ yuh neva come look fo’ me?” She grips the steering wheel tighter then grimaces.
I stare at her, head spinning as I open and shut my mouth with the press and pause of traffic.
We are sisters, not friends. Our shared blood means there is nothing here to earn, to covet, to lose. We will remain sisters no matter what happens, no matter what we do or don’t say or how many years we’re apart. I want to scream in her face but instead I clamp my lips against all my angry questions. You wanted me to come to you? But you left us. And for what? I chew the inside of my cheek. Tamika keeps driving, sighing with the relief of knowing I’m due no answers.
My sister did not come to my brother’s funeral. That’s that.
