They stood at the edge of the carpet. No one moved. Then she laughed in a way that was loose and unbridled, almost flirtatious, and let her gaze fall first on Gertrude and then on him. He watched to see her smile fade, but it didn’t. “And you must be the new people.”
He heard himself say, “Yes, ma’am,” but he wasn’t fully present, or not yet, anyway. He was trying to gauge her, mental arithmetic, trying to add the sum of her parts and reach some sort of accounting because she was a young woman, younger by a good measure than the architect with his big head of gray hair who’d expended a whole three minutes of his precious time questioning them about the island before he hired them on. . but she was old too, a kind of chameleon, he saw that now in the light that leached in through the window and trembled along her cheekbone — old as his mother but with the face and figure of a girl yet to bear children. And that was another conundrum, because she had borne children, that’s what he’d heard — two of them, by another man altogether — and she was standing here in her pretty dress and her silky pinned-up hair as if she were something high when she was nothing more than common, common and worn-out and old.
And what sort of comment was that, or question or whatever it was: You must be the new people? Who else would they be, standing there on the edge of her carpet, their black faces shining with sweat above the servants’ costumes she’d hung on a hook in the bathroom?
“Well,” she said, “good,” and she took a step forward as if to see them better. “You must be Julius, then—”
“Julian,” he corrected her.
“Julian, yes. And you are—?” She’d turned to Gertrude and she was young again, graceful, sweet.
Gertrude was bunching her lips. For a minute he thought she was going to curtsey. “Gertrude, ma’am.”
“Oh, yes, yes, of course, Gertrude.” The way she said it, the way she pronounced his wife’s name as if she’d taken it up like a pewter pin she’d found in the dirt and then polished it on her sleeve so it glowed like silver, made something seize in him. “And you’ll be cooking for us, then. You’ve seen the kitchen?”
Gertrude nodded, then dropped her eyes.
“You do understand that you’ll be expected to serve as many as ten to twelve people at meals, three times a day — Mr. Wright told you as much, I take it?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “And that you’ll have to handle the meats and the produce and make use of what we’re growing here on the farm, as well as take on all the housekeeping, you and your husband, that is. Do you think you’re capable of all that?”
“Oh, she’s capable, ma’am.” He was standing there at the edge of the rug as if it were a precipice — and for a second it was, waves crashing on the rocks below, gulls screaming in the void. He held himself absolutely rigid. “She may be young, but she’s the best cook in all of Bridgetown, a real paragon.”
The mistress — and what should he call her, certainly not Mrs. Wright, because she wasn’t married, was she? — ignored him. Her eyes were the color of week-old cider with the green flecks of mold still floating on the top of it. They never left his wife’s face. “What sort of things do you like to cook, Gertrude — what do you specialize in?”
He tried to answer for her but he barely got the first word out of his mouth before the woman cut him off. And still she wouldn’t look at him. “I want to hear from you, Gertrude. What do you cook?” A dip of the shoulders, a laugh. “Practically anything’d be better than what I’m capable of. .”
Monkey lips, monkey lips. Gertrude gave him a look, squared her shoulders and lifted her eyes. “Jug-jug, pepper pot, fish any way you like it. And conkies. I make conkies they famous all up down Baxter Road.”168
He couldn’t help himself. “And white people’s food,” he blurted, “—she makes white people’s food too. Of course.”
“Mash potato,” Gertrude sang out. “Ham hock and black-eye pea, pig he feet, bee’steak in de pan, frittah, dat sort t’ing.”
And here he was, not five minutes into that house and that job of work, and he was hotter than any iron in any smithy’s shop in the whole godforsaken country — peasant talk, low ignorance and the smart of humiliation like a stingaree lashed across his face — and he couldn’t contain himself to save his life. “Hush,” he hissed, jerking his face to hers, every line knitted, “you just shut that, woman! You don’t talk like that. You don’t ever.” He was going to add, Is that the way I taught you? his right hand, his slapping hand, trembling so hard he had to shove it in his pocket, but he caught himself. This wasn’t the place. But what place was it? Where was he?
The dishwater man rotated his toe. Gertrude stared at the carpet. In his head, sailing high in quick blooming bursts, were the rockets people sent up arcing over the night-black void of the sea on Empire Day, pop-pop, pop-pop. And the mistress — Borthwick, Mrs. Borthwick, was that what the dishwater man had called her? — puffed herself up like a crapaud frog and let her voice rise two levels. “And, you,” she said, pinning him with her eyes while the words rattled like steel blades in her throat, “you will not talk to her in that tone of voice, not in my presence, not in this house.” There was a silence. The earth stopped dead, transfixed on its axis. “Is that understood?”
He could have said anything, could have lost all he’d wanted and dreamed of right then and there and found himself back on that yellow-hairedtrain again, disgraced and disrespected, his poor black peasant Bajan wife crying on his shoulder, but all he said was, “Yes, ma’am.”
Out beyond her, beyond the carpet and the bookcase and the lobster-trap chair and all the rest, the sun suddenly exploded through the clouds in a fiery pillar that silhouetted her like some unearthly being, and he saw that sun and that room and the look on her face and fought himself down. He could never be sure afterward but he might even have bowed his head in the way those people in the bushes bowed and ducked away into the shadows when Mr. Brighton or one of the gentlemen or ladies sitting there under their parasols looked out across the lawn. He might have bowed his head. And for what? For what?
He watched her face, saw her arm rise and fall in a dismissive sweep as she ordered the dishwater man to take them off to the kitchen, and then they were moving, he and his wife, following the twitch of the dishwater man’s shoulders across the floor and out of the room. And what did she say, Mrs. Borthwick-Wright, Mrs. High-and-Mighty, in her voice of scorn? “Woman,” she spat, two syllables flung at his back as he retreated and all the while the rockets going off in his head, pop-pop, pop-pop.
She took a dislike to him the minute she laid eyes on him, and she hated to admit it to herself, hated to admit any kind of prejudice, but there it was. It wasn’t his looks. He was a good-looking Negro, light-skinned, with proportional lips and deep chocolate eyes, of medium height, slim and self-contained. No, it was something in his demeanor, the way he held himself, rigid as a pole, as if he’d just been shocked with an electric wire and was waiting for his torturer to throw the switch and shock him again. And the way he looked at her with a kind of cool insolence, as if she were the one applying for the job, as if she had to meet his expectations. She’d never seen anything quite like it, though admittedly her experience of Negroes was limited — she’d seen them in people’s homes serving at table and the like, and she’d encountered a handful of them when she was a librarian in Port Huron in the days before Edwin, but those Negroes were the ones she approved of, hard-working people educating themselves on their own time. Or at least trying.