Chapter 5

5

AS HER ELDEST CHILD LAY SICK IN THE BEDROOM AT THE BACK OF THE HOUSE AND her youngest was across the ocean on her own, Lucille Bunting sat at the kitchen table with a carved pencil in her hand and tried to write. The pencil had been a gift from Willoughby Dalton, a man who periodically walked the three miles from Carrington Village, where he lived, to her house on Aster Lane to give her gifts of his own making or things he had acquired somehow. The first time Willoughby had come to their house, a good year ago now, he had arrived carrying some cassia flowers in his arms. He had stood at the edge of their property and stared at the house like he was unsure, now that he was there, what to do next. Lucille had watched him through the window. She recognized him from church—he wore the same unfashionable gray felt hat, one that curled at the brim, and he had a bit of a limp—and he stood outside for so long without moving that finally she walked away from the window and went to do other things. A full hour later, when the sun went down, Lucille had circled back to the window and saw Willoughby walking away with the flowers still in his arms.

He returned the next day with different flowers—plumeria this time—and when he came to the edge of the property, again he paused, and at the window Lucille crossed her arms, prepared to watch the same strange show. But then Willoughby hobbled past the edge, all the way up the dirt walk to the house. She craned her neck to see the slow way he stooped in front of the door, the way he laid the flowers down, and the even slower way he stood back up. He walked off again.

Then one afternoon Willoughby knocked on the door. Lucille answered it and found him standing next to the heap of flowers, the ones at the bottom soggy and browned. She had not moved the flowers because she had wanted to see how long this could possibly go on.

Willoughby smiled and slid his felt hat off his head.

“Good afternoon,” he said. His voice was nice, buttery and soft.

Lucille did not speak.

“I bring you some flowers,” he said. He shifted his weight and tried again. “I’ve seen you. Been seeing you for some time. Can’t seem to stop, and my mind tell me that might mean something.”

He waited.

Lucille had never heard anyone talk that way, so open and pleading it was almost like he had come to show her a wound, an aching spot in himself that he was hoping she would tend. She could have if she wanted to—aside from the outmoded hat, he looked decent enough—but she did not know why she should. She said, “Seems people always look for meaning in things that don’t mean much at all.”

Willoughby, with all the flowers at his feet, slowly placed his hat back on his head. He nodded once before he turned, and then he stepped down into the dirt and walked back out to the road with nothing in his hands, nothing whatsoever to hold on to—neither flowers nor the person for whom he had come. For a minute Lucille felt sorry for him—he looked so sad—but Willoughby, and every other man for that matter, held little interest for her. Each time he came back after that, Lucille simply accepted the gifts and then sent him on his way, like tossing a fish back into a creek. The miracle was that that old fish just kept swimming up to the same spot.

Still, the things Willoughby brought were frequently useful, and the pencil, which he said he had whittled himself until it was smooth with a nice fine point, was an example of that. Lucille’s main use for it had been to mark bolts of fabric and to trace pattern pieces to make sewing a little easier than it had been in the past when she simply trusted her eye to measure lengths and envision shapes. Now, though, it had another use: writing letters, if she could remember how to write them. Lucille held the pencil over a smooth sheet of writing paper and considered just what it was she wanted to say.

***

LUCILLE HAD GROWN up on a medium-sized sugar plantation in Bridgetown, a plantation owned for 180 years by the Camby family and upon which her own family had worked for nearly half as long—first her great-grandparents, then her grandparents, then her parents, then her. That continuity of lineage among one family in one place was unusual, and it was among the reasons that her parents, who had been born full free, chose to stay on the property even when they might have made a life somewhere else. They had roots there. Generations of the Bunting family were buried on those grounds. They lived their life there because to them that was simply where life was lived.

In the story that had been passed down to Lucille, when the Queen of England decreed in 1834 that all slaves in British territories be freed, Lucille’s grandparents, knowing no other life, had rented a plot of land on the Camby estate and built a house on a patch of rocky land by a copse of mango trees. It was a small wooden house with one room at the front and one room at the back, raised up on lumps of limestone to keep it off the soggy ground and to keep the centipedes away. Her grandfather, her mother liked to recall with a chuckle, had an unnatural fear of centipedes, and Lucille, who knew hardly anything else about him, always imagined her grandfather yelping and jumping up on a chair at the sight of one, an image that made her chuckle, too.

Upon emancipation many other people on the plantation, friends who had worked alongside Lucille’s parents and her grandparents for years and years, left the grounds of the estate and went out into the world. Some only went elsewhere on Barbados, which at 166 square miles was hardly enough world to contain everyone now that people were free to go where they wanted and to live where they pleased. Lucille’s mother had told her the story of a woman named Becky and her husband, Abraham, who had packed their few belongings and kissed everyone on the plantation farewell before setting off down the long gravel road that led out to the wider world, only to walk back up that road nine days later telling everyone that they might as well stay where they were because there was nowhere to go. All the land was used up. What they meant, Lucille’s mother explained, was that almost all of the arable land on the island was already owned by the white planters who had once owned them. After their return, Becky and Abraham arranged to rent a small plot on the Camby estate, enough space to build a small house and grow a few crops for themselves. During the day, they worked the same land they had worked before they were free, only now they earned a wage. It was the best they could do. And it was what many other people did, too. “Officially unchained,” her mother said at the end of the story, “but tethered just the same.”

By the time Lucille was five, she worked weeding the fields in the morning under the early sun. By the time she was ten, she was feeding the livestock, and though she had been instructed in the art of efficiency, she lingered sometimes with a cow she had named Helena, listening to it as it lowed, and she took extra care to comb an ox that she called James. When Lucille was twelve, her mother, who did not want her only daughter to have a life in the fields, saw to it that Lucille went to the school that the Cambys ran on their grounds. There were free schools in Bridgetown by then, but the closest one was at least a forty-five-minute walk there and back, time when tenants could have been working instead, and rather than lose that time the Cambys operated a school of their own. On Monday through Friday, Madam Camby, who had no qualification other than that she herself had been educated, sat at the front of a shed outfitted with benches that several of the tenants had built and taught children their letters and numbers as well as some of her personal observations about the natural world and matters of history. She brought books over from the great house sometimes, and she held them up for all to see, though if any student leaned forward to look at the pages up close, she always jerked the book back lest it be touched. So much held up as a promise was kept just out of reach.

In the evenings, after school and supper, Lucille’s mother would sit with her daughter and teach Lucille how to sew, a skill that would serve her the rest of her days. Every year each tenant on the plantation was given a single long piece of linen from which they made clothes. But that linen was precious, so Lucille’s mother used a piece of scrap fabric to demonstrate how to sew a whip stitch and a ladder stitch and a basting stitch and the difference between them. By the light of the hearth, she showed Lucille how to finger fold a pleat and how to tack down a dart and how to properly fell a seam so that even from the inside, a garment would not appear undone. When that piece of fabric was filled up with thread, they would pull out the stitches and reflatten it with a warmed block of wood, then they would use it again. Lucille had a gift, and before long, when that piece of fabric was falling apart, her mother gave her the linen, and she made all her family’s clothes. She loved to sew, the feel of working the fabric with her own two hands, the satisfaction of the thread slipping through. After the linen was gone, she used a bedsheet to sew. The worst whipping she ever got in her life was delivered by her father after she took the front facing of her bedquilt apart from the back and used it to make herself a new dress. That dress, though, was so striking, with its colorful squares all down the bodice and the skirt, that Madam Camby, upon seeing young Lucille wearing it into the school shed one day, asked her where she had gotten it from. When Lucille replied, with some trepidation, that she had made it herself, Madam Camby had frowned and told her to run home and change. “And leave the one you are wearing up at the house. Put it on the back steps.” Lucille did as she was told. She thought it was only a matter of time before her parents would hear about it and that once they did, she was in for an even worse whipping than the one her father had recently delivered. But instead of punishment, what came to Lucille the next day was the dress, folded and delivered by one of the house servants out to the Buntings’ small home, and on top of the dress was a note in Madam Camby’s good writing-hand: an order for two more dresses, “not made of quilts, but made with the same fine workmanship” to be worn by the housemaids. That was how Lucille became responsible for making all the house servants’ garments thereafter, an effort for which she was not paid beyond the bolts of fine woven poplin that Madam Camby supplied and from which Lucille was permitted to keep any yardage that she did not use.

That was also how, a few years later when Lucille was nineteen, she met the eldest Camby son, the one who had gone to university in England and returned with his wife, Gertrude, to run his family’s estate. Lucille had walked up to the great house one morning with a stack of newly finished dresses in her arms. She went around to the back door, prepared to hand the dresses to the housemaid Jennet as she always did, but instead she saw a handsome, well-dressed white man whom she did not recognize jiggling the knob. Lucille stopped about ten feet off and watched. The man mumbled under his breath. And then, as though he sensed someone was looking at him, he glanced over his shoulder and met her eye. Lucille saw him blush. He let go of the doorknob and took several steps back. “This always used to stick when I was a boy, too. It’s a wonder no one has ever managed to repair it,” he said. Lucille said nothing, and the man stared at her until Jennet flew through the door and took the dresses from Lucille and then, noticing the man, froze and said, “Sir.” He smiled amiably—he had an endearing smile—and said, “Evidently it can only be opened from the inside.” Jennet, confused, said, “Sir?” and the man looked past Jennet to once again meet Lucille’s eye, this time as though they shared a private joke between them.

That was Henry Camby, Lucille was to learn, and that moment would be the beginning of many more private moments between them to come.

A little more than two years after that day, Lucille would leave the Camby estate. When she did, her first child, Millicent, was one year old, and her second, Ada, was only a few weeks in the world. Just as her mother had not wanted her to know a life confined to the fields, Lucille did not want her daughters to know a life confined to the estate. That time had come to an end. She wanted to give them more. She would take the house, the one that had served the Bunting family for so many decades, with her when she went. Henry Camby would declare that the house belonged to Lucille by virtue of heritage, a rationale that no one on the Camby estate had ever heard invoked—and one that would never be invoked again. For a time, it had been the talk among all the tenants, Henry Camby giving Lucille Bunting the house like he had. That gesture, combined with the Bunting girls’ appearance, confirmed what most people already knew. It was an occurrence so common that beyond the estate grounds, on the island at large, no one remarked on it at all.

On a Sunday morning in 1891, Lucille and a few other tenants she had known for a long time took apart the house piece by piece. They pried back boards and removed the door from its hinges. They loosened the windows and popped them out of their frames, like eyes from sockets. They unstacked the stones from the hearth. Then they piled everything into carts and wagons and paraded down the gravel path that led to and from the estate, the white pebbles in the path blowing up a chalky dust as the wheels crunched overtop. It was the first time in her twenty-one years on the earth that Lucille had ever walked all the way down that path. With Ada tied to her front and Millicent tied to her back, she walked. She kept her eyes straight ahead. Because she did not know what was out there, she had no destination in mind, and the procession carried on in a general northeastern direction until the sun went down and Lucille told them to stop. “Here,” she said. She believed the darkening sun was a sign from God, an indication that she was where she should be. They had come to a dusty road that Lucille would later learn was called Aster Lane. It had only a few other houses on it. By lantern light her friends, tenants who needed to be back at the Camby grounds by morning to work, started to build. First a foundation with uprights in each of the four corners. A floor that was eighteen feet long by ten feet wide. Then walls up from there. Windows inset. They knew how to do it. Their houses were so often taken from them, by man or by God, that they had to know how to rebuild. It took the greater part of the dark hours, but by the time the sun rose, it was done. The same small house in a brand-new place. The same small house in a brand-new life. Lucille, more exhausted than she had ever been in her life, had stood back in the glorious morning sun and, bursting with pride, looked at the house and thought how far she had come. It was no more than three miles from where she had been born and had spent all her life, three short miles, but to her it was a whole world away.

***

THERE WAS NO turning back. Lucille had been the first of the Buntings to go somewhere new, and once she was gone, with two babies to care for all on her own, she had to figure her way. She had brought with her all the bolts of fabric she had accumulated over the years, all the leftovers and scraps she had kept sorted by color and print, and she used them to sew clothes while the children slept, sewing even though her eyes were heavy and she pricked herself with the needle many a time. It was in a new place, but she sat by the light of the same hearth where her mother had taught her and listened for her mother’s voice guiding her through how to ease a sleeve or gather a skirt. For eight years since her mother had passed, Lucille could count on hearing that voice from time to time when she was sewing, as though her mother were with her. But now, as hard as she listened, Lucille could not hear it. She would never hear it again. She would have no help, no one to depend on besides herself. To be independent was what circumstance required of her. It would be up to her to make sure that her girls never went to bed hungry, not for food or for love or for any of the necessary things of this life.

It cost one shilling a week taken out from what little she earned, but when they were old enough Lucille insisted on sending the girls to school. They had both come out light, and Lucille understood that the lightness meant that they had the chance to become things that Lucille never could. In the evenings, between stitches, Lucille watched her daughters drawing letters on their slate tablets with chalk. She recognized the letters, recalled them from her afternoons in the shed, and as the girls drew them out, the letters appeared like old friends. She smiled at them sometimes as though they might smile in return. But mostly she watched and tried to fill in the gaps for the things that she did not know, the things she could not remember, the things she had not been taught. Millicent was careful—the chalk would screech as she deliberately dragged it over the slate—and Ada wrote faster, more interested in getting the work done than in doing it right. No matter how many times Lucille scolded her, Ada always finished first and set the tablet aside to go back out on the porch and listen to the crickets or hunt for them in the long grass. Both things were a privilege—the schooling as well as putting it aside.

Beyond schooling, just like her mother before her, Lucille aimed to teach Millicent and Ada certain practical things: how to sew a hem or mend a tear, how to cook barley in the pot, how to hammer a nail and file a board, how to reckon money, how to chop wood. At home, Lucille put the girls to work in the small garden she had planted out back, teaching them how to harvest cassava, pumpkin, arrowroot, eddo, and yam. She taught them about herbs and plants, what they could do with things like milkweed and pigeon pea and crab’s-eye vine. And all the while she sewed clothes that earned them enough to get by. In an average week, she could make one fine garment. She was forever pulling bits of thread off herself. She rolled them between her fingers sometimes until they formed little balls, and she lined them up across the hearth until there were so many that she cleared them away. She was talented enough that she could have made clothing to order for white women in Bridgetown who had their wardrobes imported from England or from ateliers in France, but she did not have access to the fabrics that white women preferred—velvets and chiffons and silk lace. Everything she made was of either cotton or muslin, common fabrics that she worked to elevate by how brightly she dyed them with things like beetroot and yarrow or how she mixed prints. The garments she made were distinctive that way, sought out in the market by Black women and colored women who wanted to look their best. She did not, as a rule, make clothing for men.

***

THAT MORNING THERE had been a storm setting up to the south, and the smell of rain had roused her. Not rain falling, but rain coming. The air was fuzzy with that particular smell. Lucille had lain still in bed for a few minutes upon waking, breathing it in and listening for thunder, but all she heard was the sound of the birds, who seemed so blithely unconcerned by any change in the weather that it made her wonder whether she was wrong. Maybe there was no gathering storm. Maybe she only wanted there to be. She was not the only one who would have welcomed rain. The drought had been going on for so long that hardly anyone on the island could get any crops to grow. Work was scarce. People were hungry. A good rain might help ease the struggle, she thought.

She lay for a full five minutes before she rolled over and saw that Ada was not in her bed. Millicent was there, sleeping soundly, thank God, but Ada was not. Quickly, Lucille sat up and looked around. The room was sparse. Three beds crowded in did not leave space for much else. Ada’s bedsheet was turned back. Her quilt was gone. Lucille got out of bed and hurried to the front room, but all she found there, on the table by the hearth, was Ada’s school tablet, propped up against a canister as though it wanted to be seen. Lucille walked closer and read.

I am going to Panama to earn money for us. I will send word when I arrive.

Lucille spun around, surveying the room. She had the thought that Ada, even at her age, was playing a hiding game and would step out from behind the cupboard or the door, grinning brightly, the longer Lucille looked. But when some ten seconds passed and Ada did not appear, Lucille, with a sinking feeling, walked to the front door, opened it, and stepped out onto the porch in her nightgown. She looked down, but the parched earth was too dry to register footprints. Across the street, the view was the same as it ever was: the Penningtons’ house with the same three-legged pot on the porch, the Callenders’ house with its row of cherry trees. Everything the same. The sinking feeling slipped down into dread. It was not until Lucille stepped back into the house, her mind racing, the dread whipping up into panic, that she noticed that the pair of black boots in the corner was missing. Months earlier, Willoughby had brought those boots as yet another one of his gifts and Lucille had set them on the floor and not touched them since. But as soon as she saw that the boots were not there, Lucille knew it was true. Ada, her impetuous, strong-willed daughter, really had gone off to Panama all on her own.

***

NOW LUCILLE HELD the pencil poised over the paper. What was she to say? That she was cross? That she was full of terrible worry? That in a way, an odd way, she did understand? Lucille held the pencil in midair. As soon as Ada sent word, if she did, Lucille wanted to have something ready to send in reply. When she had left the Camby grounds, her mother’s voice had not come to her anymore. No matter how cross or worried Lucille might have been, she wanted Ada to know she was with her somehow.

There was so much to say and nowhere to start. Lucille sat by the lamplight and tried, but she had never been good at forming letters, and so far nothing was coming out right.