Galina

GALINA

by Carol B. Duncan

(Content warning: post-slavery Caribbean era, environmental crisis, xenophobia)

Each morning, we go down to the sea at sunrise, before di estate bell ring. We take a dip, as if to remind di sea, that she promise to carry us away. We are di second generation born free. Victoria was we age when she take di throne. Now, she is an ole woman, but times still hard.

Me—my name Shan, and my friends Boysie and Thomas, we joggle like small crabs, as we race across the beach to the rocky outcrop at the shore. Hands waving and eyes on the waves rolling in as we splash into the sea. I remember when rough water caressed our sleep-weary bodies. Boysie and Thomas swam far out, as usual. They scared me as their heads grew smaller, bobbing like buoys in the water. When the tide pulled back like damp bedclothes thrown off suddenly at night, I was left shivering, waist-deep with pebbly sand passing through my toes. That was the first time that I felt her brush up against me in the bay. She was beautiful. She was about the size of a large grouper fish. I moved sideways and she encircled me with her tail. I could hear her sing-song humming in my head. 

The sea is a mysterious mother. The sea does have plenty pickney. As chil’ren, we were taught to respect the sea, as we would any woman, whose jacket pickney were the result of unions with different, unrevealed lovers. There are stories of people with fins covered by long sleeves and gills hidden by high collars. This fish-gyal was no story, though. She pull away and laugh. Her finarm reach out from an opening in her side like a large navel. She encircle my waist and squeeze it gentle-like with a small sweet sting.

The fish-gyal dorsal fin rippled, barely breaking the surface of the water. Her head smooth-smooth and her eyes shining like mama’s ring, when she twist it, when daddy late comin’ home again. The whole-a she deep and dark like tamarind seed from her tail to her head. She turn over on her back under the water and look at me with her eyes green around the dark centre. Then she laugh. Her giggles sound squeaky like my own, as a child, when I used to put my hand over my mouth to stop myself from caw-cawing at big people joke. Somehow, I feel like she woulda laugh out loud at big people joke even when she young. She long-out her finarm again this time, showing the suckers on the underside.

 “You too nuff and full of yuh damn self,” she said that first time, the sound passing through my body like a bell’s clapper, ringing out loud, and shaking me. Then she laughed again, turned, and swam away fast-fast, her plump body effortlessly diving deep. 

Then Boysie splashed towards me with Thomas behind him. They had decided to end their quest to swim away from the island that morning. 

Spitting water in an arc, Boysie shouted, “Eh-eh Shan, you t’un pêcheur. You hugging up fish these days, boy? Is like you lookin’ for Guppy.  Ah tell you find somebody, otherwise somebody go’ find you.” 

Then he and Thomas laughed their mocking kya-kya-kya, as they dove into the surf one last time, the spray of water rising. With the pink of the dawn, we rushed away from the beach and into our backbreaking day working cane on the sugar estate.

•••

That night at our maisonmer, maman plaited my hair, her strong fingers dipping into the warm coconut oil in a calabash. I told maman about what had happened that morning at the bay—that I had seen a fish-gyal who could talk. 

She shook her head and said “Shan, you too lie. Di Grinnell, di merfolk doan exist. Not anymore. Dat is old-time story before my mother time. In esclavage days, di fish women would swim under di boats weeping for our people and taking those who ran away to freedom on out islands. We still bound to cane but we free since di Emancipation, and so they gone ‘bout their business.” 

When I took off my shirt and showed maman the puckered skin near my navel where the Grinnell gyal’s sweet sting had marked me, she nearly dropped the candle she was holding. 

“You betta watch yourself when you go down to the bay, because once they mark you, they will recognize you for life.”

Clothilde, my maman, and I live with granny Tansy in The Shallows, where the seashore had begun to wash away for years before di Emancipation. My father Charlot was away for work on the big island, Île Marie-Joséphine. He stayed for weeks at a time. Di sea brought plenty people en esclavage over here by boat. Maybe it will use a boat to take me, Thomas, and Boysie to other islands in di West Indies, or up to Scotia or Boston. 

But di sea is coming to us instead of taking us away. It deepened just a few inches at first, and then again by a few feet. After three centuries it is yards deeper. Di planters and overseers seemed not to notice that the jetty didn’t extend far enough into the sea. The jetty was half-buried and the big ships could get closer to the island than ever before to collect the sugar and rum. As the shoreline got deeper, the mangroves couldn’t seem to keep the water from flooding di land during the hurricane season.

•••

Thomas and Boysie used to fish off those stony hills that reached all the way to the shoreline. I mostly watched them cast their catgut lines right into the sea, their long arms, with bunched muscles pushing back the air currents like dey swimming. The stones are a backbone pretending to be hills which begin in the interior of the island. The formation unfolds, skirting the mangrove and the pebbly beach, to the shoreline where they come to a halt and stand up tall. In those days, the jagged outcrops, with slippery greenish moss, stood still. Their rocky toes burrowed a long way down into the bedrock just before The Shallows dropped off into the depths of the sea. We always thought that they would be there forever, steady, and permanent guardians of the shore. 

Now the sea’s Near Deep is closer than ever with its white-capped, huge waves. It is just beyond The Shallows. And The Shallows are now just outside what used to be a scrubby path lined with sea grape bushes leading from my granny Tansy and grandfather Charles’ cabin. That cabin was where fishnets and lobster pots used to be stored. The fishnets and lobster pots were long gone now, washed away when the first big waves crashed ashore. The Landfolk Council tell us Shallows dwellers to Let Go the Land and Embrace the Sea. It is hard for those of us who still prefer to landwalk when we get a chance on the sandbars of The Shallows, rather than swim, stilt-walk, row our scullies, or hitch a ride wid di Grinnell people-dem. 

My granny Tansy have a lobster pot and a piece of net in her special place, a smooth rock, in a sea cave where she keep fragments, bits and pieces of the old life for remem’ry sake of the good and the bad. 

“Doan lissen to dem. Dey have no respeck for di time-before-this-time,” granny Tansy would say. “My grandmother told me that when the sea stand up taller than the tallest people, and decide to walk to shore, that that is when you go see change for true.  But it not goin’ be easy.”

She would conclude her sermon, triumphantly, remarking that “Preacher used to say it will be the fire next time. But look, we hear in the next time now, and it wasn’t fire at all, it was water again.” 

Water and wind tossed plenty man, woman and chile, animal and bird into the sea. Di water cover di trees and it flood di cane fields. It wash ‘way di plantation big house and di cabins near the shoreline. Is like our prayers here on Lespérance came true. Yes, we did want sugar cane days and hot sun to be over, but lawd jeezas, not like dis! Cane still on land and now a new variety grow in di sea.

Those rocks where me, Thomas, and Boysie used to fish when we were chil’ren are new islands. Their rough-hewn grater-cake surfaces poke out of the surrounding sea. 

“We middling for so,” we used to say as we struggled through the water in the early days, arms splashing, feet kicking for life, our heads bobbing just above the briny surface. You’re supposed to drink water and suck salt. Well, we drank salt and suck water. We clung to the rockface. We nyam raw cockles and barnacles, spidery feet poking out an all. When di storm done, we alive, oui, and some other people, too. But we could see di human bodies floating out to sea. At the same time, we see movement in the water coming towards us, moving like big fish, but there is something human about them, too, with arm and fin and tail. And is so di Grinnell, the merfolk, find we on dis side of the island where the shore wash ‘way from the storms. The sea had lived into its promise to change us; but it didn’t take all of us away, it brought something from its depths to us.

•••

I see him sipping bush tea and watching me each morning as I swim around The Shallows, eating the green algae, and cleaning the bay. But I pretend that I ain’ paying him no mind at all. He could be just another human, looking to hitch a ride to the west side of the island. There, the washout is less, and the land still straggles down to the sea. We Grinnell does help humans if they can do li’l something for us too. We like to eat seacane, the long hardy stalks of sweet grass which started to grow in The Shallows and the Near Deep after the first big storm. We only take what we need. And the landfolk like to harvest seacane sugar for fuel. So, you see, he could do for me and I could do for he. 

Plenty Grinnell and landpeople get together nowadays to help one another. Is not like before when it is a shipwreck that bring we together. Or when the sailors used to throw the captives overboard and we would catch them and bring them back to where we live in Grinnell. Grinnell is the mountain under the sea. That is where we breathe life into them. Seamountain people. We have always been here. Allyuh live in the topside, and we live underside, in di sea’s bottom house. Di Near Deep and The Shallows are closer than ever. 

As I swim my second navigation of The Shallows, I call out to him. I send di sound through di water on his note. He struggling to see who sending him a message from his perch in his targaneck maisonmer. The targaneck dig down in di sand allowing di landpeople dem to settle on their back. Targaneck is like conch father and mother. They live for thousands of lifetimes. They could be as small as a pebble or as big as a whole island. Landpeople build their wood house on stilts or stone maisonmer on di back of the large targaneck shell. Di tagarneck eat all the landpeople leavings. Everything left over drains down the hollowed stalks of the long seacane grass holding up di maisonmer into di targaneck.

“Hey boy, yuh dotish or what? Is you I callin’! Come talk to me, nuh?” 

Just then, I resurface, blinking my second eyelids at him. I show off meself and flip in midair, my long tail curling and splashing the water sending it in an arc, and wetting him up as he sat on his perch. Then he dive in and he swimming. He swim good for landfolk. I head to a small sandbar and he follow me. 

“So,” he say to me, smiling, “is true that Grinnell will follow you if they tek set on you. I watching you for a while now. You swim far out in the Near Deep, further than I dare to go. Ah glad to meet you.”

I open di valve and extend my finarm to him. We have human ancestors several generations back from the time of the slave trade and over time some of us have this finarm. 

“Doan frighten, dahling,” I say to him, “My name is Galina. I already know you is Shan. You and yuh boys come here every morning. Lemme link you and then I can breathe for both of us in di underwater.”  I extend my finarm and use the sucker to touch his skin in di same spot as when I first saw him. 

“Come, leh we go, nuh.”

And I tellin yuh, that that is how we got together. Every morning we meet, and we go for a swim. I link him and take him a little deeper under di surface each time. Landpeople know about us, and Grinnell, too. They see a small brownskin landman with long plaits trailing behind him with a big, darkskin Grinnell woman swimming in The Shallows in the morning. Then we disappear into the scrubby grass of the sandbar or beneath the sea in the Near Deep.

•••

We liming one day, drinking seagrape wine, when Boysie bus’ out “Why you must pick up a Guppywoman eh, Shan? Why you doan choose a landperson?”

“Boysie—doan call she dat. Guppywoman is disrespectful. My Galina is Grinnell. Besides, she have a half-human great-grandmother on she faada side. So, she could be yuh cousin!”

“I not prejudice eh, but you causing commotion in di landpeople community. People talkin’ and ah seein’ she getting bigger. Is wha’ really goin’ on?”

Thomas and Boysie doan mind Grinnell on di side, but as a main person, they have second thoughts. Galina and me together and dat is all. You should hear how they carry on ‘bout how I go manage to feed all dem Guppy chil’ren, and that Grinnell woman never make one chile at a time. 

•••

When my time came, I released the babies. There were twenty chil’ren in all. They swam from my womb into the bay, The Shallows. No muddy, freshwater stream, or barrel birth without enough food and salt. They live with me, because they are more fish than human at this early time, but too young for the Near Deep or maisonmer. Their gills are fully formed at birth and their lungs will develop and grow slower like their other human features. Shan and I swim with our silvery pod in The Shallows.

CAROL B. DUNCAN is an academic and creative writer of Caribbean heritage. Carol was born in England of Guyanese and Antiguan parentage. She spent childhood in Antigua with maternal grandparents from Dominica and Antigua before emigrating to Toronto. Caribbean folklore, storytelling and patois/creole language are important sources of inspiration. Carol’s writing has been recognized with the Waterloo Region Arts Award for literature. Her short stories appear in Augur Magazine, Heartlines Spec, PREE Caribbean Writing, FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction and the anthology African Ghost Short Stories.

Galina was edited by Azure Arther. It can be found in Tales & Feathers Volume 3.