A Shift In the Light: Second Edition

By Patricia Glinton-Meicholas

Patricia Glinton-Meicholas began this semi-autobiographical novel in response to the long struggle and eventual death from cancer of a beloved cousin, who was her best friend in childhood. A focal point is a sojourn of some years with loving grandparents on a rural island of The Bahamas, the description of which reveals hilarious youthful escapades and a unique parade of characters. While this period was idyllic in one sense, the young girls were not shielded from the harder realities of family life or from the wider movements of history—local and international—and the sometimes painful impacts on their existence. One such focal point is the decolonialization of The Bahamas. These lines feed the central theme of the work—mutability and the courage to respond conscientiously and adapt to change, notions that are reflected in the title of the book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098317249

Book preview

Malcolm.

Chapter 1

It rained yesterday; rained from morning until night. I sat at my front window, looking at the young branches of the trees being borne downward by the force of the downpour. It was a day of darkness and wild lightning and thundering that shook my small house.

The wind rose, raged, screeched, howled and finally fell to sighing. All seduced me into wild imaginings. The rivulets of rain coursing down the hundreds of thousands of leaves and blades of grass in my yard would make me a river to run through my tiny backyard. Or God was in deep mourning, and weeping.

Today is different. Locked eternally in competition, the sky and sea vie daily to see which can paint the most memorable blue on the canvas of these islands. This October morning, only the dull of soul could fail to see that water and firmament have for once set aside their differences. Blue of sea and blue of sky have created a seamless backdrop in the hazy distance, erasing the horizon, the disputed border that normally divides them. A lone pleasure boat, probably an excursion from one of the dive operations in the south, seems suspended in air, caught up in the azure spell.

I concentrate on riding this wave of cool blueness, being inundated by it. It occurs to me that we must come up with words for the blues that appear in The Bahamas; the ones in the dictionary were made up before anyone who recorded things in writing had seen the waters and sky of this country.

It is a perfect day. The sun has crossed the line, and the heat has begun to lose its bite. It is a morning created for an indolent celebration of life—taking a day trip to one of the recreation islands that ring Nassau Harbour, or an excursion to Eleuthera or, better still, sailing slowly down Turtle Sound from Church Grove, Crooked Island, watching silver bonefish slicing through water, green-shadowed by lushly springing mangrove. It is a day for climbing up Cat Island’s Comer Hill to Monsignor Hawes’ tiny, Tuscan-style monastery, Mount Alvernia. It would be good to lean against its sun-warmed, rough stones, and look out over the island with its many ancient, smokeless chimneys poking through thick coppice. I am seeing so much detail today, as I have not seen in years of busyness. Perhaps, I may be able to see all the way to Port Howe, all the way to the teacher’s residence where my family once lived, all the way to yesterday.

But who would wish to escape a day so perfect? It is a doorway to anyplace other than where I may be at the moment, and do not wish to be. Perfect for weaving gentle dreams. I imagine characters from a Fitzgerald novel, dressed in carefree cotton whites and pastels, lounging on the crisp grass while lunching, sipping iced tea, launching floats of clever, brittle conversation… Illusion. The fragile bubble of lightness and peace breaks; the Little Match Girl’s last match has hissed into flame and gone out. There is no escaping the cold. There is no light, no laughter, no indolence. Spread across the wide lawn this day is a murder of crows, featured in black linen, cotton and moiré, heads drooping—a cloud of midnight at noon.

There is no escaping the shock of seeing her again, though. It’s the first time since her departure for Mexico a few weeks ago. She is blocking the direct route to the chairs under the tent. Strange—I know who she is supposed to be, but I do not truly recognize the woman before me, so cunningly positioned to forestall the treachery of eyes that would turn away without paying their respects to her. I can easily see why. She is so much changed. Her face is fleshless, the skin drawn tight over the prominent cheekbones that had formerly supplied much of her elfin beauty. Here is no naiad, whose life was designed to play out in sunlight. Here, instead, is aged parchment; upon it is sketched a character who belongs in a puritanical 19th century American novel, presiding over a narrow kingdom, pulling down shades, twitching lace curtains to cover the filth beyond her window, hiding away dry, dusty secrets of her own. As mouths do when their owners struggle with chronic pain, hers is tightly pinched, giving her the appearance of a disapproving dowager, whose long-held views on morality have been rudely breached. It is a mouth that seems never to have sung, told a joke or laughed. It disappears into a rose that has closed, faded, lost its juices and pleated itself into a tight knot. She is wearing a brown, ill-fitting wig and a black jersey dress, which her daughters must have bought. I know her—She would never have done so herself. Everything conspires to create the fantasy that is forming in my head. A giant spider has made a meal of her, sucked a vibrant body dry and left behind only the desiccated shell.

My sister and her husband join us as we look at her—all of us waiting for her to tell one of her sly jokes.

Chapter 2

That’s not her, my sister declares, unusually vehement, ungrammatical, and contradicting herself. That’s not her. Man, why do they have her looking like this? She looks so bad—like she doesn’t have anybody who cares about her. If she and God decided that this caricature of a housing was no longer good enough for her, why are we still parading it for the world to see? This is what we call ‘doing the right thing’? I just don’t understand this.

My sister usually composes her thoughts before she speaks. The uncontrolled outburst means that her feelings are deeply engaged as I expected them to be. As if responding to the report of a starter’s gun, she sprints to the tent with unwonted speed. She sits down, she sits up very straight,  her face and back go stiff, and her hands move in a washing motion, folding on themselves, in an out; it is her only movement for quite some time. I know her. The tears may not be visible, but she is weeping as if her heart is breaking.

No, dear sister, someone like you can’t possibly understand. But I’m so glad they’re holding this affair out here. If it were nearer town, the gawkers would have been hanging about begging the ushers for programmes. There is always the obscene desire to read them to see if they can ferret out past sins from the family list. Oh, and they want to see whose eyes are red behind the veils to assess the degree of discoloration, and count the salt runnels made by tears to see if expressed grief matches degree of bereavement. And they’re just not happy until someone falls down and starts screaming uncontrollably. Well, I won’t be the one hyperventilating to give anyone that satisfaction; I gave up my dream of providing spectacles for other people long ago.

Bernie is walking up looking even paler in her black suit than nature made her. She has done well in keeping her figure, and her salt and pepper hair makes her look distinguished. No, oh no! she cries. "This is not our sweet girl. Oh God, no! This thing is really too cruel. God, I can’t believe this. Oh, sweetie, what happened to you? She gets no answer, and knows that she will probably never have one, so she walks quickly to her seat with a stiffening of anger at no one in particular in her step. She sits, pursing her lips—a wealthy society matron whose high-toned ball has been crashed by a fisherman in his work clothes, smelling of a day’s conch sales. She, too, is weeping as if her heart is breaking. One of her troop has failed to muster for reveille.

Then Mommy, who has traveled with me in my van, kisses her, speaks to her; knowing my mother, she demands an answer, and is confident she’ll receive one. I leave the emotionalism to Mommy; I do not touch her or speak. I am still angry with her. I have shut up my heart, made it safe from any more than a surface perception of her and all the things that have happened to her, for her and around her over the past year. I have preserved a single thing. I have left intact and wrapped in mental silk a single, unearthly morning at the beginning of the month—a perfect rose of memory in a putrid bouquet of nightmare. I look at her briefly and pass on to the tent. The dappled shade is soothing. I decide then and there that matters of the heart are exothermic reactions. My own organ feels like it is in the grip of a well-muscled launderer, who is determined to wring it dry, but the terrible friction only succeeds in releasing a great burst of heat that threatens to stop the action of my lungs and suffocate me.

As we walk away, an usher hands us the expected programme. I hate him for it. Unsuspecting, he, like so many other service providers, is helping this thing along, making it move too fast, before we can absorb what is going on. They are giving a confirmation to the whole Arabian nights’ affair that I do not want. But programmes do have their uses at these times; they give us something to do with our hands and eyes, when these members threaten to betray us. This booklet is filled with photographs from the 1970s—that delightful time when hope was still in full force, and endless possibilities stretched out before us. She and her sister have always loved to be photographed, yet there seems to have been no recent portraits of her. A head shot of an entrancing twenty-something-year-old takes up the entire front cover. It must have been carried in someone’s wallet for years; the many cracks across the image fracture her face into tens of segments, and dominating the whole frame is a deep horizontal split, bisecting the high cheekbones she inherited from her mother. The graphic artist seems not to have had enough experience to remove the marks in the electronic process. I feel a wave of anger again, this time, at the lapse in artistry, but quickly realize that I am simply displacing it from myself.

A few others have problems with the booklet as well.

My God, her children look like they don’t know their own family names. Look how they spell Mummy’s name.

You jokin’. They even give Aunt Pet a different last name.

How come they only list some of the cousins’ names, eh? If they couldn’t put all, they shouldn’t have put any. That’s how I feel, so sue me.

I’ll bet it’s only the rich and famous—the rest of us just too common for notice.

Perhaps their anger comes from the same sources as mine. Our great grandmother and great great grandmother had lived to 91 and 101. We had prided ourselves on being a line of long-lived women. The timing went wrong, and it happened so quickly. Couldn’t I have tried harder to see her more often? If only I had been given the slightest premonition. If only, if only… I begin to search among the minutiae of our contacts over the years to see if I have shown her clearly enough, by word or deed, that I loved her deeply.

Often I have tried to recall the days we all spent together, but that time is like an eventful, but forgotten dream. It is a torment to know of the existence of a fabulous landscape just beyond my grasp. I am a fish whose pond has receded, leaving me beached and gasping. I would spend days wrestling with vignettes of memory, much like picking up the shards of a piece of my best china that had slipped from my hands and shattered. I would turn them this way and that to make them fit together, treasuring the fractured mess, knowing I should throw it away, but hoping the miracle will happen to make it whole again. And I had been the one commissioned to remember.

She never gets in touch with me, Cally said to me once. I always call her at least once a year. Sometimes I send a few dollars, and say its for her youngest daughter. It’s just trying in some little way to make sure that she’s okay… to let her know that I love her, but she gets all formal with me, distant, like she has a pot on the stove or errands to run, and she’s impatient to go deal with whatever it is. I’m always so disappointed, expecting her to remember but, for some reason, she doesn’t want to remember. She paused for a moment, and then added with a touch of wonder in her voice, Maybe it’s like that Barbra Streisand song.

My family has an old-money kind of dignity, without the money. Up to this point, it has kept a slippery to hold among us. But as the morning wears on, it flees our congregation, leaving behind a black hole that sucks up all light and restraint from its vicinity. Everywhere among us are the auguries of grief. Handkerchiefs—grey burgundy, white, striped, plain, smoothly ironed and folded, lace-edged, rosetted, embarrassing with wrinkles, lipstick, powder and less salubrious signs—sidling shamefaced out of hiding; men discovering grains of sand beneath their eyelids, surreptitious throat-clearing, women patting gingerly to preserve neat lines of mascara, then the slow, inexorable slide into sniffling, open weeping and, finally, an unbidden hoarse wail escapes through the cracks of a broken heart, surprising the well-brought-up and normally sedate voice that produced it.

I remember that it is my sister’s birthday, and turn to look at her, having carefully avoided doing so before. With her husband beside her, she sits, as is her habit, tightly wrapped in her dignity. I know that there will be no birthday celebration. She would not wish it. Her reasons for this are probably the same ones that cause her to refuse to be photographed. It is the rare family album in which she appears as more than a shadow. When she gave birth to her only child, she never uttered a sound even though the birth was a difficult and painful one. She merely squeezed my hand, and apologized to the attending nurse and doctor for soiling the bed. Having known her all her life, I doubt very much that any form of arrogance is at the root of this reticence. It seems that if this ripple-less façade that she presents to the world gave even slightly at its seams, her emotions would explode and cover the whole world. But this will not be the day of the great outpouring. Consumed by what must be a terrible grief, she maintains a grave calm, even when she is called upon to read the poems she has written just for this day.

Except for my son and two daughters, we are all there. I thought it best to leave my children in the world of Nickelodeon, where resurrection is simply a matter of pressing rewind. We have always been a family that gathers in full force at these times, much like what the Americans call a hazmat team, as if to contain and smother the problem with superior numbers, counting on genetic continuity and solidarity as our protective suits. Here we go again—my mother, my younger sisters and my brother. My mother’s family—Aunty Irene, Uncle Alexander, and their many handsome children; Aunt Yvette, her son and daughter, and Aunt Bernadette, whom her nieces and nephews have never accepted to call ‘aunt’, as many are much older than she and the younger ones too close to her own age. Here, too, are Uncle Earl and his wife, and two of Uncle Freddie’s sons have come. Aunt Belle, now in her eighties, seldom bothers to attend anything these days, but has sent her daughter Rianne to represent her. Miss Roselda and her daughter Monisha have long been family to us, and have never failed to join us for all our special events, happy or sad. Members of my father’s clan complete the ensemble: assorted cousins and the aunts Mariel, Miriam and, of course, Marion, three of the four sisters whose names begin with ‘M’. Mariah died long ago in the States, where she had lived the greater part of her life.

Our lives had worked before. When I was a child, we were fixed in sunlight; we overcame sickness and all the other ups and downs of life. My mother was strong and vital; her knees not arthritic, her step not halting. It was she who caught me when I stumbled, took me to see the doctor when I was ill, kept watch over my indifferent appetite—not the other way round. Our people never grew feeble or senile, and never died. Clear in mind and full of the joy of life, we completed our tour of duty, and were called above to be decommissioned and awarded our stars.

There are a few children here today; procreation was one of the first formulae of abundant living my family lost. Now, the family is dying faster than it is growing, and we are forgetting more than we recall. Given this distressing, unwanted attrition, how is it that we cannot forget that my favourite aunt is doing so more and more daily without any special effort, her key for delete permanently stuck and erasing all her yesterdays? She used to love to play Pacman when the Atari games first came out; she drove the miles between her workplace and home to play on her lunch hour. It looks like Pacman got into her brain during that close contact, and is ensuring that no ghosts haunt her house.

We are trying to forget that my favourite uncle, while worrying whether his pacemaker would allow him to enjoy more time with his grandchildren, was consumed by a mordant liver cancer, like wax in a very hot fire, three weeks after his diagnosis just a few months ago. And now this obscenity, that no one understands. Moving from grave illness to eternity on a runaway train is a flaw in the life cycle of other families. We have always recovered. We have always lived above-average clean and reverent lives. Our going away has been a slow drawing of blinds; it is our legacy to be called home with plenty of time to say our goodbyes. Here we are now locked in a cycle of anger, disbelief, fear and an emptiness that will not be filled, no matter our attempts at distracting ourselves. We have no blueprint for this, no mental package that says ‘Open in the event of recurring twilight’; ‘Use in case of a sudden, unexpected descent of the sun’. If there was one, I have lost my key to it in the hustle and bustle, the to-ing and fro-ing of life. What was it that kept us in touch with joy and certainty?

We discovered that there has been no wake for her, and there will never be. Jehovah, we learn quickly, does not approve. You would think he would set aside theological fine points when he sees people grieving. He should know that wakes are essential to the Bahamian psyche. The bittersweet stories and tearful laughter wakes produce are the only bridge that can span the fearful maw that now yawns between us and our beloved, threatening to swallow up any connection we have shared with her. Wakes are the philosopher’s stone that can convert lost flesh into familiar spirit, withered touch into precious memories. How can we part from her without a chance to ‘bid goodnight’ and lay her head ‘upon the Saviour’s breast’? This is the way of our people and without this intermediary, grief becomes too hard to bear, the mourning deeper and longer.

This is to be forestalled at all costs; so, today, we raise desultory conversation to a new standard, playing hide and seek with pain. This has now become standard procedure in times of difficulty. Skirt the field of battle and outflank the enemy. We puzzle over the reason so many of the smart and good-looking women of our family have not yet found husbands. Irene offers one: the men are either in Freeport or in jail, as the old song suggests, or looking for someone to share aftershave with. I remember how, when Cally was still unmarried, Sister decided that she was frightening off the men with her intensity. Man, they scared o’ you, Cally, she would say. She might not have been far wrong; I am sometimes afraid of Cally myself. Breaching my sister’s barriers is like driving along unfamiliar mountain roads in pitch black in a car with brakes that do not always hold—a perilous enterprise.

We talk of Bernadette’s new grandson, of why my cousin Max and her family have not been able to come from Freeport, of how it had been too short a notice and too expensive for her sisters to travel from Germany and North Carolina, where they have settled with their husbands, of how my children have grown so tall and so smart. We talk of everything but the reason for our gathering. Marion, the youngest ‘M’ of Daddy’s sisters, speaks not at all. She sits with her husband Ivor, both of them transfixed. They are two knights who, though they saw Camelot dissolve many years before, still sit tightly gripping the Round Table, their fingers now calcified, unable to accept that the fellowship of the table is no more, the magic is gone and Camelot will never rise again.

Where is Gerrie? You see her anywhere? Mommy asks, and her whisper is picked up and passed on in a rhythmic wave over the congregation.

She said she wasn’t coming here, I answer.

A Greek chorus rises.

She said she wasn’t coming here.

She said she wasn’t coming

She said…

And the answering echo resonates.

Why?

Why?

Why?

Yes. Why? Why has been the unspoken question since the unleashing of the chain of events that brought us here.

I can certainly answer the question about Gerrie’s absence if I care to do so. She told me emphatically at the beginning of the week that she did not approve of the plans for the day that the son-in-law had concocted with the complicity of her own brother. In between the bitter riffs of intense anger, I could fathom that she, as a good Anglican, was offended by the idea that her sister would not have the honour of naves, lady chapels, votive candles, incense and organ music.

Undeterred, Geraldine staged her service at St Mary’s yesterday. Our old neighbours from all the places in which we had ever lived came out in astonishing numbers, and so did our great family. It was a wonderful memorial service and could only be a memorial service because of Gerrie’s little problem with habeas corpus. The son-in-law, his wife, the sister next in age to her and my cousin’s brother were firmly of the same persuasion and in possession, a hold they were determined to relinquish only to the bosom of the earth. Neither did they attend, as they lived under a doctrinal proscription that forbade them to worship in rites and sanctuaries other than their own.

Yesterday, we spent an hour breathing in the seduction of incense, the towering music of 18th century German composers, so dependent upon crashing organ chords. The priest had known my cousin, my grandparents and other members of the family, so he reminisced as if giving a toast at her wedding. We finished the event with a feast of ham, chicken, macaroni and green salad for which no one seemed to be able to raise the enthusiasm it deserved. No one, that is, except my Aunt Miriam, who was adjusting to new teeth and a life without a steady man in it, her long-time companion having died a short time before. She was in fine fettle, whispering to me, as if my life depended on the malicious tidbit, that our cousin’s wife was a few cold cuts short of a sandwich. When I pretended not to understand, she poked me in the ribs, eyes gleaming. You know, she said, the elevator don’t go all the way to the top floor, the pepperoni keeps sliding off the pizza! I smiled a watery smile and walked away, unable to rid myself of the vision of impossibly white teeth, sixty-five years younger than their owner, and wobbling in wicked laugher and comic misalignment.

As if from a long way off, I can hear the whispers. There are always answers to every human ill at these affairs, but why are they always in the possession of those whose hearts are not broken?

Why she wait so long to get help?

’Man, I know it must have had something to do with that church she belongs to.

Child, they tell me it was some kinda African herbalist who was treatin’ her for the longest; more like obeahman if you ask me.

Boy, I don’t know why they didn’t take her to the Mayo Clinic or Cuba—I hear those Russian-trained doctors doing some good work down there. With all the money her in-laws have, they coulda ‘most pay for a new body for her.

Well, you know, things weren’t too copasetic on that side. Everybody’s saying that they’re surprised they gave their permission for this to be here.

This, I thought. This what? And why did she wait? Because nobody wants to put a name or face to the furtive noise beneath one’s window past midnight. No one wants to face down an enemy who has no ability to reason, does not recognize you as a person with family and dreams for the future, but only sees you as a means to a necessary end.

Another voice with more than a hint of malice.

See that woman over there?

Yeah, I know her. Things must be good, too; she used to drive one beat-up Chevy—only the Bondo and the loan payments was holdin’ that on the road. Now, I see my girl drivin’ a big Ford Explorer these days, and you know, they ain’t cheap.

I don’t know who managing their money for them, but my guess is it gat to be King Midas. I sure would be willin’ to let whoever it is handle my paycheck.

No, my boy, you don’t want that. Is probably somebody with MP" behind their name or somebody named Pablo or Pedro from Cali, which is worse, ‘cause when them fellas come to collect for service rendered, you ain’t ga like what you have to pay.

Chapter 3

When he started, the son-in-law promised that the programme would be brief. Strangely, I can never remember his name. To me, he will probably forever be the white son-in-law from Rhode Island and remembered for breaking his promise regarding the brevity so greatly desired by all present. By the pained, put-upon look on his face, I would say that his attendance at the ceremony probably has cost him his weekend pioneering. Given a captive and very polite audience, he sees his chance to make up for lost time and does. With the patience of a schoolmarm pointing out the need for decorum to a fractious child, he encourages us to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we are going to heaven.

I look out to sea again, just as the son-in-law begins to speak. The boat has passed from sight.

When you die, you’re gone; you return to the earth. You become a part of the earth—no consciousness, not spirits wondering around trying to communicate with loved ones. You’ll be nothing but a memory in the mind of God, he says. He tells us that heaven is reserved for the elect; but, he says, if we do the will of God, we will get a chance to inhabit the New Earth, not heaven, when God recreates us.

Oh, my, I say to myself. The weatherman says we’re in for a long dry spell.

Eh, Lord, we must be orange juice to get reconstituted, comes a theatrical whisper from one of our number.

Knowing the personalities well, I attribute this comment to Irene. The songs chosen by the son-in-law are foreign to us and most of us are forced to either pretend to sing or remain mute and shift our weight from one side to the next, as he raises one unknown song after the other to an equally unfamiliar God or, like Irene, keep up a running commentary