Jamaica Dreams: A Memoir
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About this ebook
Rosemarie Robotham
Rosemarie Robotham was an editor for Shebooks and the former deputy editor of Essence magazine. She started her journalism career traveling the globe as a footloose reporter for the monthly Life and was also a senior editor at Simon & Schuster. A coauthor of the award-winning Spirits of the Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Seventeenth Century, she is the author of Zachary's Wings, a novel, and the editor of two collections of fiction and memoir. A writer-in-residence at Yaddo Artists’ Community in Sarasota Springs, New York, one charmed November, Robotham lives with her husband and two children in New York City in the shadow of Barnard College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, her alma maters. She currently writes and edits for print and digital media and works as a book coach. Follow her on Twitter @rarobotham.
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Jamaica Dreams - Rosemarie Robotham
Mad Martha
On the first day of high school, we numbered 30 in our class and sat in five rows, six girls deep. Our gray linen uniforms, brand new, rustled with too much starch, tickled our legs, and made long pyramids in our seated laps. Soon, the stiffness would give, the cloth would grow limp and familiar, no longer ironed in the careful manner of the first few days, when our mothers, admonishing us that we were young ladies now, scrutinized us on our way through the doors to our grown-up world of first form.
Only Jesse in our class had no mother. Her uniform was crushed and dingy with wear. The top button of her blouse was missing, and Jesse kept tugging the break of her collar together. The sleeves barely curved over her thin shoulders, and the edges trailed tiny threads that had come undone from the fine weave.
Jesse lived at the orphanage up the street. She had inherited her uniform—she owned only one—from another girl who lived there, who was now several classes ahead of her and too filled out for the tunic. Most of us in our class had arrived from junior school together. Jesse had come from another school. She was small for 12 years and would collapse into uncontrollable spasms of nervous laughter whenever the teacher asked her a question. In later weeks, this annoyed Miss Andrade, who thought Jesse was trying to avoid studying. But Jesse literally could not find her voice when the eyes of the class were upon her.
Of all my schoolmates the first day, Jesse most fascinated me. The other girls swirled about, ignoring her, exchanging stories of their summer just over. Jesse sat alone at her desk, shoulders hunched and head bent. Huddled like that in her secondhand clothes, she looked poor and motherless, which intrigued and stirred me completely. How foolish Jesse thought me when, months into our friendship, I confessed I found real romance in her living in a long, wooden barrack with other children—constant playmates and no parents whose hearts she might break at every turn.
I was from a large and established family in Jamaica; our relatives turned up everywhere on the island. Most were handsome, coffee-skinned, jade-eyed, erect, and they had clothed themselves in the mantle of being special with no thought whatsoever that they could be otherwise. Oh, we had our drunks, our problem children, the cousin who stole his father’s Pontiac and was that night roughly arrested, the tender adolescents who wandered into the bush to smoke weed. But our family took these characters as necessary elements in an invigorating mix, colorful souls to be scolded and protected by the more firmly rooted among us.
I felt the turbulence of my family’s loyalty and the weight of their pride. I always felt like an imposter in their midst, the lonely, hidden child who had learned to smile as needed and speak the appropriate words. Now, a silent, inwardly precocious 11-year-old, my truest self remained locked within, and I let her languish, fearful, always fearful of being found to be unworthy after all.
By comparison, Jesse’s life at the Convent Home seemed free of such shackles, storybook-like. All those orphans to share her days, vegetable patches to tend, sheets to be laundered, nuns and sisters to confound. I had no comprehension then of the orphan’s sense of having no place, no corner of one’s own. It would be years before the knowledge dawned that what I really shared with Jesse on that very first day was the awareness of not belonging. And I envied, not her imagined exemption from the strictures of love, but her freedom to admit and embrace her rootlessness, to freely explore that emptiness and loss.
Jesse’s desk was on the other side of the classroom, next to the window. She was always studying her hands, which she kept crossed on her lap. She never sprawled across the pencil-carved desk like the other girls, never rested on the delicate points of her elbows, nor placed an inquisitive chin in her palms. Instead, she seemed to curl closer into her silent self, waiting to disappear.
I stared at Jesse for days across the classroom. Sometimes, she raised her eyes and caught me watching her. She’d look away immediately, back down at her hands.