“Yuh see people come in yah from mawnin?” she asks John-John in defense. “Sun too hot.” She doesn’t tell him that she hasn’t been in the mood to do the regular routine — linking hands with tourists, courting them the way men court women, complimenting them, sweet-talking them, showing them all the goods, waiting with bated breath for them to fall in love, hoping they take a leap of faith and fish into their wallets.
John-John shakes his head, his eyes looking straight ahead. “We cyan mek di heat do we like dis, Delores. No customers mean nuh money,” John-John says. His jaundiced eyes swim all over Delores’s face. “Wah we aggo do, Mama Delores?”
“What yuh mean, what we g’wan do? Ah look like ah know?” Delores fans herself harder, almost ripping the newspaper filled with the smiling faces of politicians and well-to-do socialites. She wants John-John to leave her alone to her own thoughts and feelings. But the boy can talk off your ears. He would sit there on the stool and talk all day if she lets him. Sometimes this interrupts Delores’s work, because tourists see him in the stall and politely walk away, thinking they were interrupting something between mother and son. “Well, Jah know weh him ah do. Hopefully him will sen’ rain soon,” John-John says.
“Believe you me,” she says to John-John, who squats to diligently paint one of his wooden birds. “Tomorrow g’wan be a new day. Yuh watch an’ see. Ah g’wan sell every damn t’ing me have.”
“Yes, Mama Delores. Just trus’ an’ Jah will provide fah all ah we,” John-John says. The pink of his tongue shows as he works on perfecting the bird’s feathers. He has been working on that one bird since last week. Usually it takes him only a few hours. When he finishes the bird, he separates it from the rest, which he wraps one by one in old newspaper to place inside the box. Delores picks up the bird he’s just finished. It’s more extravagant than all the others, with blue and green wings skillfully outlined with black paint, a red and yellow underbelly, and a red beak. The eyes are sharp, the whites in them defined with the small black pupils. It looks like it will be a popular item, expensive. Delores already prices it in her head. She guesses fifty U.S. dollars.
As Delores examines this new bird she thinks of the parrot she once saw at Devon House in Kingston — a colonial mansion with a beautiful garden that had just opened up to the public. The year was 1968. It was her first trip to Kingston and she was eighteen years old. She left four-year-old Margot with Mama Merle and rode on the country bus to town all by herself. Initially she went to look for temporary work as a helper; but on a whim, she decided to visit the new attraction. Delores wanted to see it so that she could brag. So she wandered from Half Way Tree, where the country bus dropped her off, all the way up the busy Constant Spring Road. With a few wrong turns and stops to ask for directions (“Beg yuh please tell weh me can fine Dev-an House?”), she made it. It took a while for the nice Kingstonians she asked to understand her heavy patois and point her in the right direction. The mansion was just as beautiful in real life as it was in the papers — white paint glowing in the sun, big columns and winding staircases, a water fountain. But more amazing than the house were the parrots. They seemed suited for their habitat — flying from tree to tree with colored wings through a lush garden with so many different trees and flowers, Delores saw many she hadn’t known existed. She followed the birds until she got to the courtyard, where genteel Kingstonians sat enjoying the outdoors under the shade of fancy umbrellas and broad-brimmed hats. As if caught in a limelight onstage, Delores fidgeted with her Sunday dress — bright yellow with lace and puffed-up sleeves. She felt like Queen Elizabeth in that dress, especially because she had a pair of frilly green socks to match and a shiny pair of flats with buckles on the sides that never showed any specks of red dirt. The only things missing were a pair of gloves.
And the Kingstonians must have thought so too, for a hundred pairs of eyes followed her when she walked by, frowning pale faces transforming into amusement. They covered their mouths as though to suppress a laugh or a sneeze. Slowly, Delores backed away. She didn’t notice the pile of dog mess. She stepped right in it, and in her shock, stumbled into the path of a group of Catholic school girls on a school trip, who were gliding in a straight line across the courtyard like swans being led by their mother — a nun who walked with her head tilted confidently to the sky. The girls gasped when Delores stumbled in their path, immediately corking their small noses with delicate pale hands. The way they snickered as their eyes scanned Delores’s dress made it seem as if the dog mess were smeared across it. Right then Delores hated her dress. But it was her shoes and socks that caused the most laughter. And then the nun, as polite as she thought she was, smiled at Delores, her pinkish face glowing like a heart. “You must be lost. Are you here with the group from the country? They’re by the picnic tables.” How did she know Delores was from the country? That morning Delores thought she did a good job putting her outfit together in preparation for a day in the big city. But the girls were all snickering, shoulders hunched and pretty ponytails in white ribbons jerking back and forth. Delores should have listened to her mother. “If me was suh big an’ black, me woulda neva mek scarecrow come catch me inna dat color. Yuh bettah hope di people inna Kingston nuh laugh yuh backside back ah country.” Mama Merle was right. Maybe bright colors weren’t for her. The girls’ laughter followed Delores all the way back through the gate like the smell of dog mess she never stopped to get rid of. The humiliation was worse than the swarm of flies.
It was as though a veil had lifted from her eyes. When she looked down, all she saw was her black skin and how it clashed with the dress. With her surroundings. With everything. It had collided with the order and propriety of the colonial mansion that day, and the uniform line of those high-color Catholic schoolgirls. Something about that trip changed her, and on the bus ride back her home looked different: the sea-green of the nauseating sea, the sneering sun in the wide expanse of a pale sky, the indecisive Y-shaped river that once swallowed her childhood, and even the red dirt from the bauxite mines caked under her worn heels, seemed like a wide-open wound that bled and bled between the rural parishes.
Delores looks at this bird John-John has created — a creature of the wild that he too had probably seen and fallen in love with. Delores frowns. John-John looks up and sees her staring at the bird. He gives her one of his clownish grins, his front teeth lapping over each other like the badly aligned picket fences around Miss Gracie’s pigpen. “Ah see yuh admiring me work, Mama Delores.” He’s only a boy, Delores decides. In time he will begin to see the ugly.
He raises the bird to Delores and she takes it. “Yuh didn’t have to,” she says, her heart pressed against her rib cage. She always wondered if she’d ever see anything like those parrots again.
“Is fah Margot,” he says. “Tell har is a gift from me. Ah made it ’specially fah her. It’s the prettiest one in di lot.”
Delores’s hand shakes and the bird slips from her fingers and drops with an impact that breaks its beak. She’s not sure if it slipped or if she heard Margot’s name and flung it. The grin fades from John-John’s face. He says nothing. He only sits there, his shirt open, his hands on his knees, with his legs wide. He looks down at the de-beaked bird on the ground.
“Me nevah mean fi bruk it,” Delores says. She bends to pick it up, but John-John stops her.
“Is okay, Mama Delores. Nuh worry ’bout it. I an’ I can mek anothah one.” But the shadow hasn’t left his face, and his eyes barely meet hers. She knows he has been working on this one for a while. She knows it probably took him a long time to choose the colors.