turning wheels

Today went to La Plaine, on the Atlantic side. (as opposed to the Caribbean side) Sandra did her Baha’i thing with Veronica, and I played with the two kids, Kayvon and JJ. La Plaine is a village like any other, but Veronica is Carib and her house is Carib style, a two-room hut with crepe paper party streamers on the door, and a separate kitchen hut. I was playing catch with the boys outside, and then Kayvon looks up and so did I, and there is this hugely muscled rasta man in sleeveless grey coveralls walking over. He barely gave me the time of day…maybe he don’t like white girls, or maybe he just felt my intimidation. Anyway, turns out that he is JJ’s father, but not Kayvon’s. Veronica, further turns out, is like the Samaritan woman at the well—any number of husbands and at least six kids, starting at age 18 and going down to JJ. She is the sister of Francilia, the Carib lady whose kid, Dylan, I played with last week.

They had all kinds of trees in their yard, as Kayvon showed me when I asked him—cacao and mango and what I think was guava. The cacao pods are big and gnarly and purpley-brown. The mangos, alas, were not ripe. We played catch for about a hundred years, then Kayvon found a stick and switched to cricket. The rasta father worked on his car and smelled up the yard.

Sandra told me all sorts of interesting stories on the way. Apparently in the sixties there was an uprising of the rastas against the very few whites that were around. Ted Honeychurch tried to befriend them and defend their cause, and they kidnapped him and I think she said they killed him eventually. They killed some other people, too, so all the whites fled. She told me about a friend of hers who left her husband and two kids to go and live in a tree with a rasta who called himself “Mango.” But after a couple of years she visited Sandra and warned her to get out of Dominica, saying that she was fleeing, as well. Then there was the story about the Geneva plantation, which was huge and fruitful but got burned up and some of the family killed and now it’s a cricket field and “bits of this, that and the other.” Then there was a story of a friend of hers who was white but pretty native in his style of dressing and hygiene; he was working up on a telephone pole and a bunch of black rasta types started yelling at him to get off their island, and he yelled back, “Your island? Who do you think brought you here?”

She also told me about my Chinese astrology sign—I’m a water dog, it turns out.

Tay wrote to me today…how nice. I’m horribly tired and my neck hurts and I’m all bloated, probably all from dehydration. Funny that I don’t feel it, and drinking water only makes it feel worse. I don’t want to go back to the old mill anymore—I’m too tired and it doesn’t feel worth it. Still, what else am I going to do?

There’s this inner level that native people here don’t seem to have, or work with. I can only call it “examination”—they don’t seem to realize the sub-par level of, for example, their dance workshops, or their written publications, any of that. Or the possibility of a person’s skill having levels—if I say I’ve worked on magazines before, they hand over the job of editing and designing fully to me. If I say I’m interested in dance, I’m a dancer and qualified to teach a class. If I say I have experience in a choir, I’m qualified to critique a performance. The idea of amateur doesn’t seem to exist. If you can, you’re an expert. For some people I guess it would be nice—for me, who came here to learn more, being called upon to teach is not nice.