I’m nervous like a chicken that is purged and waiting to be slaughtered as I wait for the Third Year exam results. They are due today. I had asked my brother, Clarence, to buy a Gleaner so that I can check it for myself.
My best friend, Norma, returned after spending her summer holidays in Westmoreland, and after a powerful hurricane blasted the island. I’ve only seen her once and only for a brief moment in which she assured me that she and her relatives had remained safe during the hurricane. They had not suffered any major damage. I figure she does not have time to think about the exam results since she is must be busy with her new secret boyfriend.
I’m sitting on the verandah, eyes glued to our winding driveway when I see Clarence walking home. I rush to meet him and grab the newspaper from his hand. Dashing ahead of him to the verandah, I spread the Gleaner out on the table. The names of the students who have passed the exam fill more than a page because the results are for the entire island. The names are listed by surnames and in alphabetical order. As I scan down to the Ms, my heart begins to summersault uncontrollably. Suddenly, I can’t breathe. I close my eyes.
Oh God, what if my name isn’t there? I do not want to be anybody’s maid or washerwoman. I do not want to scrub white people’s floors. Mother has always warned me and Vera that we should never do such demeaning jobs. I must pass this exam. It is my passport out of this stifling village, my ticket to freedom where I can breathe air without being watched, my ticket to a prosperous future. Oh please, please, let my name be there!
Shaking my head, I dismiss the dreadful doubt and fear that overcame me. I take a deep breath, then open my eyes and resume scanning and thumbing my way down the page. It’s such a large page. There are columns and columns of names. Oh, my goodness! There are so many Ms…Montclair, Monteque, Montgomery, Morehouse, finally, I see it. Moreland, Winsome Ermilinda is printed among the Ms. I squeal so loudly, I almost burst my eardrum. Mother is sitting at her sewing machine. She drops the dress she is working on and rushes out to the verandah to stand beside me.
“Let me see, let me see,” she demands but shows no emotion.
I put my finger on the spot.
“See, Mother, I pass!” I jump up and hug her.
She pushes my hand away and checks the newspaper for herself. Satisfied that I have truly passed the Third Year Exam, she hugs me back. I do not recall Mother ever hugging me since I was about nine. It means almost as much as passing the exam, but she’s not aware of this.
“You did good, child, praise the Lord.”
Mother returns to her machine without saying anything more.
Before I take the newspaper to Clarence’s room to share the good news, I check the names further down under the Ps. Powell, Norma May is printed there. I am happy like our pig in a mud-pen, for me and my best friend.
My mind gallops into the future. Life is going to be fantastic! I can see it now. Norma and I will go looking for jobs together. We will check out each other’s outfits, we will inspect each other’s makeup, we will even exchange some things, we will travel together to and from Mandeville. Oh, brother! It is going to be absolutely wonderful. Of course, after I have saved enough money, I will go to college to train to become a teacher, the career that I truly want.
***
The day after the exam results are published, Norma appears at my house in the evening. I rush to hug and congratulate her. She is stiff like the trunk of the trumpet tree at our gate. She does not even congratulate me in return. I am flabbergasted, hurt and angry.
“I have something to tell you, Winsome,” she says. She is serious like Teacher Davis when he administers a whipping. Her thick lips are poutier and look fuller than ever. She does not seem like her usual self at all.
I’m taken aback by her coldness, but more by her appearance.
“You know I’m your best friend,” I say. “You can tell me anything. You’ve already told me―I should say wrote to me―that you have a secret boyfriend. I hope you don’t think I spilled the beans?” I am assuming this is what she thinks and why she behaves so coldly. She does not say anything else, so I try to reassure her. “I haven’t breathed a word to anyone.”
“I believe you. It’s not that. Let’s walk down to the gate.”
We walk down the long driveway. She remains silent all the way. There are two large boulders shaded by a sprawling trumpet tree at the gate. We sit close together on one of the boulders. Norma is a tall, sturdy girl. She looks awkward sitting on the rock. The blackbirds that have taken up permanent residence in the trumpet tree begin to squawk the moment we sit down. They flit from branch to branch as if they are annoyed and want us to leave. The gate is a good distance from my house, therefore, neither my mother nor my brothers will be able to hear our conversation.
A wind springs up suddenly from the east. It rattles the trumpet tree and sends branches swaying back and forth, side to side. The blackbirds hang on for their lives. Looking over at the meadow, across from my house, I see the tall grass bend forward from the force of the wind, straighten up, then bend forward again. Little gusts of wind like this occur all the time, especially just before the rains come—rain-breeze, we call it.
Norma, you’d better talk fast. It looks like it’s going to pour soon. She’s sitting on the boulder absorbed in her thoughts, oblivious to the weather’s signal.
“This is one of the hardest things I’m going to say,” Norma says and looks down on her shoes.
“I don’t get it. Since when do you have a problem telling me things?” She is beginning to annoy me, and I feel compelled to tell her off, especially because she has caused me much anxiety. “First, you take off for the summer and do not bother to write. We always write to each other. You promised. Then you write at the end of the holidays when you know I wouldn’t have time to reply. You write about a phantom beau, but you cannot tell me his name. I do not have a clue what this is all about. Is this how you treat your best friend? What’s going on, Norma?” I look long and hard into my friend’s eyes. I realize now that she has been crying.
“I’m going away,” she says in almost a whisper.
Shocked, I stutter, “Wh…at? Where…where are you going?”
“I’m going to live in Westmoreland―”
“What the heck are you saying? Are you and your parents leaving Fairhaven? This place has been your home for a long time.” The Powells came to live in Fairhaven when Novelette was a baby. We’d grown up together.
She looks back at me with swollen, raw eyes. “No, my parents are staying right here. I’m the one who’s leaving.”
“But why? I know you prefer it here to Westmoreland; you told me so.”
“I have to go.”
“What do you mean have to go? Without your parents?”
“I’m going…I’m going to have a baby…that’s why my parents are sending me away. They say I’ve brought disgrace on the family, and they don’t want the people of Fairhaven to find out about it. Do you know they’ll read my parents out of the church if the elders find out?”
I’m in total shock. The thought of such a thing happening to Norma has never crossed my mind.
“Oh, brother! And your mother is so active in the church.” I am slowly beginning to grasp the seriousness of her situation. “I can imagine how she feels, considering that she’s been the president of the Women’s Fellowship for a couple of years now.”
I visualize the gossip-mongers in the district conversing in their brawling patois, ridiculing Mrs. Powell—behind her back, of course.
“Imagine the woman has only one pickney and she couldn’t even control her. She has the gal running around like a leggo beast. But dem is white, dem will manage.”
Norma makes a giant effort to fight back tears, but she loses the battle. All of her defences collapse and tears flow down her cheeks like a rushing stream.
“Oh, Norma, I’m so sorry. How did this happen to you?” I move closer and hug her. “I thought when you wrote to say a boy touched you, it was just a touch. I didn’t think you’d let him go all the way. This is bad.”
“I know. I’ve ruined my future.”
“And you just passed your Third Year. Your parents must be livid.”
“Livid is saying it mildly. My father won’t even look at me since he found out. It’s as if I don’t exist. I’m a piece of garbage. Oh, Winnie, I just want to curl up like a snail and die.”
The tears are not just flowing now; she’s bawling her heart out. The silent treatment must hurt more than anything else; she was always close to Mr. Powell.
I try my best to console her. “Norma, please don’t cry. Having a baby is not the end of the world.”
She pulls away from me and looks through her tears into my eyes. “Which seventeen-year-old girl do you know who isn’t married and has a baby who turned out to be anybody?”
I think hard. There must be someone we know. Maybe there is, but I cannot recall any girl like that. I try to change the direction of the conversation.
“But who is the father of the baby? Surely you are going to make him accept his responsibility? What about his parents? Don’t they want you both to get married?”
“That’s the part I can’t tell anyone. And no, getting married is totally out of the question.”
“Norma, I am your best friend. What do you mean you cannot tell anyone? I’m not anyone. You have taken the trouble to tell me your secret, so why are you holding out on this part? If you do not trust me, why did you bother to tell me anything?” I’m throwing questions at her as I get angrier and angrier.
“My parents say if I tell anyone, they’ll disown me. They say if the story gets out, it will cause too much heartache in Fairhaven. Please, Winnie, don’t ask me again. I must go away before I start to show which is any moment now. I must have the baby somewhere else. My mother says I can come back in a couple of years, but I have to take this secret with me.”
I look into my friend’s eyes, eyes that were once blue like the sea at Bluefields Beach, eyes that were once full of laughter, eyes now haunted and murky-grey. My anger subsides, and pity takes its place. I hug her again and swear to keep her secret—the part she has told me. She kisses me on the cheek and gets up off the boulder. She leaves me sitting there with my elbows on my knees and my hands on my cheeks.
Norma is the only true friend that I have, the only person that I share things with, the only friend that Mother allows come and go freely at my house. Who can I talk to now? Vera is a good sister, but being ten years older, she is not into the things I’m into. Clarence is closest to my age, but he is a boy. I cannot talk to him about girly things. My mother does not have time to talk to any of us. The more I think about my new situation, the angrier I become at Norma. How could my friend be so stupid?
Sitting on the boulder under the trumpet tree at the gate of my house, I am confused and lost. Yet I cannot help it; it’s only human I suppose―I begin to speculate on who the father of Norma’s baby could be. Going over the last year of our friendship, I recall the secrets we shared, how Norma laughed when I told her that I liked Clement Hall. “That scrawny boy? You can do better,” she’d said. She never confided in me at any time that she liked any of the boys in Fairhaven. I wondered sometimes if it is because she is white. More than likely, her parents wanted her to marry a white boy. That’s the way it is; whites marry whites and fair-skinned marry fair-skinned. There are only a few of them in our district, and they are much older than Norma. But even if she had become friendly with one of them, why wouldn’t she have told me? I thought we shared everything.
There is another side to this puzzle. Norma and I live almost identical lives. We go to church on Sundays, we go to school during the week, and we go to the manse two evenings each week for extra lessons to prepare us for The Third Year exam. We were not allowed to go to the fair in September, therefore, except for the youth concert, and the Christmas play, we stayed at home with our families. When I think about the strict life we have lived, it baffles me that Norma could find any opportunity to be intimate with a boy in Fairhaven. This boy has to come from here because she said if people find out who is the father of her baby, it will cause too much heartache in Fairhaven.”
A few raindrops splatter on my arms. I see them, but I’m too absorbed in my thoughts for my brain to process what they imply. I rehash Norma’s letter. In it, she wrote, “It was like electricity the first time he touched me.” Cripes! This is not one of the boys in our village. It sounds like an experienced person. It must be one of the men in the district! No wonder her parents said if the information came out, it would cause a scandal. My heartbeat picks up speed, beating faster and faster. Which of the men of Fairhaven could be so disgusting? He probably has a family too.
I could spend months of my life wondering and analyzing every man in the village. Now that I have passed the Third Year, I have more important things to think about, and since Norma did not want to share that information, I persuaded myself to put the problem out of my mind. I do not want to think about it anymore. But I do know one thing for certain―everything that happens in Fairhaven under the cover of darkness always shines through in the light—eventually. One day, the entire sickening truth will come out. I wonder who will feel the worst at that time. Will it be Norma? Will it be Mr. and Mrs. Powell? Will it be the perpetrator?
I have my future to think about. What will I become? Will I achieve my goal of becoming a teacher? For the first time, I appreciate and silently thank Mother for being the strict parent she is. A young unmarried girl having a baby in this village is not only seen as a sin but a curse that ruins all her dreams and aspirations. No one respects you after that. I will never allow such a thing to happen to me.
The blackbirds in the trumpet tree suddenly become eerily quiet. A shadow passes over the clouds, and the sky darkens. A heavy shower rains down on me like a giant bucket of water hurled down from heaven. I arise from the boulder and sprint to the house. By the time I step onto the verandah, I am soaked to the skin. Norma has a longer walk to get home; she would still be walking. If I’m soaked to the skin, she must be drowning in rainwater.
***
A week later, Norma quietly left Fairhaven. The Powells conveyed the story to people in the district that she went to Westmoreland to take care of an elderly aunt who had become gravely ill. The aunt had no children and needed someone in the home at all times. Being caring relatives, the Powells had sacrificed their daughter to undertake the task. We did not correspond after that.
Photography Credit: Jason Rice
Yvonne Blackwood is an African-Canadian author of three adult non-fiction books and three children’s picture books. As an award-winning short-story writer, she has contributed to several anthologies including Human Kindness, Canadian Voices, and Wordscape. She has also published articles in More Our Canada, InTouch magazine, and Green Prints and have written numerous articles for several newspapers including the Toronto Star. Another excerpt from the novel has been published by Adelaide Magazine.
