Mahogany Birds

MAHOGANY BIRDS

by Carol B. Duncan

(Content warnings: insects, hurricane, Caribbean post-slavery era, colonialism, intergenerational trauma)

Four mahogany birds flew with desperate intensity across the wooden room, kerosene lamp light flickering on their dark brown, shiny wings beating the air at hummingbird speed. One maneuvered a short distance from the chiffarobe, which held the Beaulieu children’s church clothes and good shoes. It landed on Shirley’s left big toe. Tenting the white, cotton sheets over herself, her toe was probably not an intended target but merely an obstacle in its flight path. Shirley’s head was protectively covered, swaddled in the bedclothes, with a small opening left for her eyes to look out on the dimly lit room, as she lay on her back in her bed. Patchwork quilt wings peeked out from her white cotton sheet cocoon. This position was unusual for her as she typically slept on her stomach, her legs making a shape like a big number four, her head turned to the right towards the west door and the passageway leading to the modern part of the house constructed after the Second World War. She always looked because sometimes she felt like somebody was watching them. You ready for what you might see? Cousin Luke would tease her.

Shirley was a big girl now. The mosquito net covered cot, in which she had slept in her grandparents’ room, had been set aside. She had finished infant school and was in her first year at St. Mary’s. She was six years old and going to big school like her brother Georgie, her elder by two years, and their cousin Luke, who was twelve—and the Last Room’s self-appointed guardian.  

She put on a brave face as she peeked at the mahogany bird. Truth be told, she regarded the large, shiny dark brown antennae-waving insect with a mixture of fear, revulsion, and curiosity. 

Outside, the storm, forecast earlier that day by the local radio station, gathered strength. It swirled like a windy John Bull at carnival, wielding its whip, and butting and tossing anything not nailed down or removed for safety. Rain soaked the covered chicken coop and two small, one room structures in the yard. The one with a door and windows used to be a home. It was a small one room chattel house, perched high on its solid stone legs off the ground, as the rainwater rushed underneath. The windows were permanently battened down and the door locked and bolted. A rain barrel, which usually leaned against the back of the small house, had been put away. Only the cistern tank, a permanent structure, was left to collect precious rainwater, which would be used later for bathing, drinking, and cooking.

The open-air structure was used for cooking before Shirley’s grandparents added a modern kitchen with an electric fridge, gas stove, and a flush toilet and shower, inside the house. No night soil collector came by anymore.

Granpapa and Maman, their grandparents, valued thrift and self-sufficiency, yet the small house was rarely opened, and its contents mouldered. It was a reliquary of unknown family saints. Fragments of the generations after slavery days and before the world wars were stuffed into trunks and cases. Dry goods receipts nestled next to faded letters and bird’s eye cotton. These became the dwellings of creatures like bookworms, cockroaches, spiders, moths, and termites who could turn paper, cloth, and wood into food. On the rare occasions that the house was aired out, the scent of camphor balls permeated the air. The warmth, sunshine, and breeze from outside did little to refresh the atmosphere. 

A pre-electric sewing machine with a treadle sat next to a trunk. The children explored the trunk’s treasures including leg o’ mutton sleeve dresses, a drop-waisted silk gown with tiny holes where it had been eaten away and two straw boater hats with blue grosgrain ribbons. At the bottom of the trunk was a pair of white, high-heeled women’s shoes and an old time creole woman’s dwyiet outfit of faded plaid madras in muddied red, yellow, and blue with a faded eyelet hole and lace petticoat. Georgie wore the white high-heeled shoes whenever the house was opened. Now a tall eight-year-old, his feet neatly fit the shoes. Precariously balanced, he clip-clopped from the house to the yard, heels making croops-croops-croops sounds as he tottered. Luke busied himself with a ledger book trying to make out the faded names written in the columns, and the amounts owed and paid off for salt fish in 1896.

The outdoor kitchen was still used to scale pounds of fish before they were fried in hot oil with scallions, pepper, and thyme, the delicious odour wafting into the yard. Cassava was pounded in the mortar and pestle. Reminiscing about her sister Maisy, Maman roasted breadfruit and yams in the embers of her coal pot, bringing heat to the clay, which still bore the subtle prints of the potter’s hands.  

•••

Shirley, Georgie, and Luke Beaulieu lived with their grandparents on St. Augustine Street in Paradise. People say that the neighbourhood was so called because in the tek-bad-sinting-and-mek-laugh way of Caribbean style joking, it had been the entry point of a living hell for many. Indeed, Paradise people had found a way to make an entire culture out of bad things. The Beaulieu property deed told a related story. The neighbourhood was on the back end of a parcel of land, owned by the same planter family who had also owned Paradise Estate, once a sprawling sugar plantation, on the northern side of the island. The Beaulieus shared the same name with that family, evidence of complicated relationships of blood and commerce. Île Marie-Joséphine maps from the mid-1600s included Anse Paradis and Rue Clémence. Now renamed Mercy Lane, the short, broken-up street was the beginning of the stone path from the harbour, which led to the countryside and the sugar estates. We live in Paradise every day, neighbourhood people would joke, especially at carnival time when the popular steelband Les Anges took to the streets. 

Paradise Harbour, the island’s major port was a natural harbour where the ships had arrived carrying humans, most destined for the market, and then the sugar estates, while others arrived under contract, to control those who worked sugar cane. Products for everyday life were aboard the ships as well, including burlap wrapped St. Lawrence River ice, and Canadian Prairies’ flour, tea, and fabric for those who could afford to wear more than the crocus and cotton sacks encasing the flour and rice that they ate daily. The harbour was a short walk from the old slave market and St. Augustine Street. Slavery days were 135 years ago, but Maman always talked about them with hurt in her voice, as if the island’s human bondage history had happened just the other day and to her personally. 

The grandchildren had no idea of Maman’s actual birthdate. She always told them that her birth paper burn. 

“How I not to take that personal?” she would ask when politicians and young people used slogans like “All a’ we is one!” to forge a new identity other than colonial.

She would counter speaking back to the radio, “We is one, yes, but we, di working people, suffer a lot! Santimanitay! When they goin’ talk ‘bout dat, eh?” 

“All right, Maman, don’t worry up yuhself,” Aunty Giselle would soothe as they made the day’s lunch, the one local radio station playing in the background, perched on the dining table. 

•••

In the real paradise, I will have a mother and a father who know me, Shirley thought, picking out the tiny wriggling black insects in the flour. She and Georgie were doing their part to get ready for the storm by sifting weevils, which seemed to thrive no matter how tightly sealed the flour bag. Luke helped Granpapa with cleaning the yard. Their parents lived in England and Luke’s mother, Aunty Pearl, who was their mother’s sister, lived in America. England, Canada, and America. They were all paradise as far as Shirley was concerned. Just different parishes of paradise, like how she lived in St. Joseph Parish and other people lived in St. Matthew Parish. 

All Last Room denizens only knew their parents through letters and yearly barrels sent home with clothes. Their only visual image of their Beaulieu parents was a family portrait taken by Bodley, at his photography studio in town. Aunty Pearl and Shirley’s mother Daphne were children in the picture, sitting next to their four siblings and Maman, Granpapa, and Gros Maman, her great grandmother who was still alive at that time. 

Shirley was called Ti-Daphne, because people said she favoured Daphne when she was a child, and a glance at the family photo proved it, but she had no idea what her mother looked like now. Each year, it was a ritual for the cousins to dress up in clothing made by Maman, for a picture taken in town at Bodley’s photography studio, tucked away in what was little more than a storeroom at the back of his dry goods shop.

One day, I goin’ find my navel string and my mother, thought Shirley. She had heard that people buried umbilical cords and so she, Georgie, and Luke had set out to find theirs digging in the yard near the small house. Granpapa, whom they helped every day in the garden, put a stop to their work. He explained that even if it was true, that the buried navel strings would have long disappeared and become a part of the soil. 

After she and Georgie sifted the weevils, they shelled the pigeon peas sitting on the hot pavement of the kitchen steps. Excusing herself to get a drink of water, she ran to the rain barrel at the back of the small house. Maman had forbidden her, but she had an overpowering desire to look in the barrel, so that she could glimpse her mother as a child. Then she would imagine what Daphne looked like, living in England-paradise, and having tea with the queen, while eating fancy biscuits from a pretty tin. After all, she, Shirley Elizabeth, had been named after the queen. 

Most times when she looked, all she saw was rainwater and her wavering reflection, but sometimes, like today, a little girl looked back at her. Like Maman and Daphne, they had the same thick, plaited hair, the colour of sugar when it came to a high boil. Daphne and Shirley had large puss eyes and high foreheads. So did this little girl. When she looked to the left, the girl turn her head same way. When she was feeling jokey, the girl would turn her head the other direction. 

As they played, the girl’s hand rise up out of the water, fast-fast, and pull Shirley by the shoulder of her merino under wid she.

Shirley didn’t fight. The dank, stagnant water hugged her up like new-moon-night as the little girl’s grip slid down her arm to hold Shirley’s hand tight. Shirley could see small points of light like the stars as they sank down, her barrel friend leading the way. Shirley went down in the rain barrel thinking she would get to England faster than the boats in the sea. Their thin, brown legs entangled; they both sank to the bottom. When their feet hit the wooden slats, they gave way easy-easy like when Shirley’s two front teeth fell out at Easter. As the little girl swam fast towards one of the light points, it grew from a tiny dot like the centre of Maman’s eye to the size of a large, round breadfruit and then it became warm and golden. Shirley’s one breath was running out, and her lungs felt like they would burst open like a pig balloon. She gasped and the golden breadfruit grew as big as a house as they flew into it, darkness falling away like the broken-up roasted skin of the fruit. They were wading in the warm, pulpy centre. Then Shirley was breathing air on the other side, the yellow sun behind her in its usual place in the sky, her shoulders heaving. She and the little girl were swimming in clear, salty, turquoise sea water in a small lagoon with a tall white house on a bluff in the distance. There were cane fields, rolling hills with big-big trees, and prickly cassie poking the horizon. The little girl looked at her, smiled, and dove under the surface of the water.

Just as she was about to swim deeper with the little girl, she felt large hands on her back pulling her up and Maman’s voice stern in warning, “I ain’t making joke with you Shirley Elizabeth Beaulieu. I tired tellin’ you, never to touch or look in that barrel or any other rainwater barrel for that matter! Is how you even see or find it? Doan bother answer me. Come inside now. I going to bathe you and give you a bush bath.” 

“Is why I have to have two baths, Maman, especially after I already bathe this morning?”

The old woman only shook her head. After all, Shirley was born en veil, her tiny body completely covered in a watery shroud.  Such children were said to be connected to the spirit world. 

Crushed by the thought of disappointing her grandmother, Shirley looked up expecting to find a disapproving look, but Maman’s eyes remained kind. A look of worry also sat there now though, like burnt rice at the bottom of a pot, firm, grainy, and hard to get out.

Later that afternoon, after Shirley’s second bath and the bush bath, and the season rice lunch, the blaze of the tropical sun died down as the wind quickened and the first heavy drops of rain fell. The children ran inside the house heading down the corridor to the Last Room. Shirley, Georgie, and Luke noticed the mahogany birds were more plentiful than ever inside the house. So much cockroach in daytime is not usual. The Beaulieu house was Dettol-clean and bleach sanctified, its wooden floors—including the Last Room, the old part of the house—scrubbed with a brush and soapy water by Granpapa regularly. All foodstuffs were packaged and put away and dishes were washed throughout the day. Nothing was ever wasted, and the soapy dishwater was thrown in a high arc from the kitchen steps, landing on hardy plants which soaked it up. 

•••

The Last Room, with its high rafters, was always where the youngest members of the household slept. Shirley, Georgie, and Luke were the room’s latest occupants. Connected to the main house by a long umbilical corridor from the doorway that used to frame a front door, it was the original, wooden, chattel house. The whole Beaulieu family with parents, children, cousins, and various family members including grandparents had lived there. Over the years, friends and relations from the countryside dropped by with little, if any notice, when in town. 

The Last Room was a survivor of an older time, before the First World War, when Victoria herself was queen and slavery days had just ended. It was built entirely of wood with no electricity. The iron bedsteads, resistant to insects, were shipped to the island from England, and slept in by several generations of Beaulieu children, and relations of blood, kin, and friendship. The bed was nearly a century old by the time Shirley laid on it for the first time as a two-year-old in 1965. It was the same year as the island’s first general election for its own government other than an appointed colonial governor. 

Harbingers of storms, mahogany birds sought shelter in warm, dry places, coming out of the garden and rich soil and the space under the house large enough for Shirley and Georgie to go under and hide. The children ran from them squealing observations like “You see that one there, that is the biggest one I have ever seen! It’s the same size as my little finger,” and repeating Maman’s warning, “You betta scrub your teet’ and wash your face good, otherwise cockroach goin’ kiss you!” 

Sunlight dappled the back garden with its lime, sibble-sweet, soursop, and guava trees. Big ground lizards scurried through the undergrowth. Hard to believe that a storm was coming, and so soon in these last few days of summer holiday. As they played, the children’s grandfather PawPaw and Uncle Russell battened down the windows and louvres, plywood stretching like protective bandages to prevent them from breaking open and bleeding glass and wood. Maman had her supply of candles and matches prepared and had already set out hurricane lamps on the dining table. Aunty Giselle baked bread, johnny cake, and buns, and fried escovitch fish. If the power went with the storm, the food could last for days without any electricity or refrigeration. The smell of onions, pepper, and lime mixed with the buttery, sugary cakes baking suffused the room. The chickens had been boarded in their coop, while the cat hid in any number of places near the kitchen. The children went to bed, said their prayers, but did not go to sleep. They were too excited by the storm, the thrumming sound of the rain on the roof and the roar of the winds.

•••

So, mahogany bird, you can fly, too, Shirley thought as she laid in her bed eyeing the insect on her toe. Mahogany bird sounds so much nicer than cockroach. The collective smells, conversations, and songs were recorded in wood. Sit on a mahogany chair in the front room, and you could almost taste Maman’s original mauby and ginger beer, and feel the decades old, cane-woven seat hugging you up and curving around your legs. In a modern, flat chair, with its hard seat, you were not held as you sipped drinks watered down by ice cubes, from the nearby fridge. 

I cannot fly, thought Shirley, at least not if I am awake. And then out loud, even though she had not meant to say so, “Sometimes when I go to sleep, I can fly, swim, walk, and run, too.”

“Gyal, you too story! All-yuh go to sleep, nuh,” Luke whispered. “Di power already gone. No electric light. If we sleep now, we won’t hear or see anything.” 

Maman had left a glowing kerosene lamp on the single chest of drawers near the second door leading to the garden with the big soursop, sibble-sweet orange trees and the guava on the east side of the house. 

“Luke, how I supposed to sleep wid these mahogany birds flying around the place?” asked Shirley.

“They goin’ settle down, Shirley. They frighten and seekin’ shelter. ‘Member I told you from early, that we gonna get a lot of rain, because they were comin’ in the house. So, we get early warning, and now they get shelter. What I really worry about is other things that movin’ around, when it stormy and di power gone.”

Luke always playin’ like he is one of the big people. Soon he goin’ try to tell one of Maman’s night time stories to frighten us, thought Shirley. I know how the story goes too.

Just then, they heard sounds at the second of the two doors that led to outside, the west door that was steps from the small house in the yard, with the permanently battened down windows and locked door save for a few times a year. It was an insistent thud-thud-thud. 

“You hear that?” asked Georgie.

“You frighten? Is just lightning striking and hitting di trees and ground. Nutten more than that,” replied Luke.

“Is how you know that for sure, Luke?” asked Shirley, her voice querulous.

“I doan think that was a branch,” said Georgie backing up his little sister.

The pounding continued. Its regularity was impossible to explain as a fallen branch, or a small tricycle, forgotten in the yard and battering around. 

There were other things that fly at night other than mahogany birds seeking shelter. Like most Paradise children, they had heard the stories about the soucouyant sucking people at night, her woman skin buried in a barrel of water. She put it on in the daytime and look like an ole woman. She could fly and even turn into a fireball.

“Well,” said Luke with his ‘fraidy-chuckle, “Wha’ go happen to a soucouyant on a stormy night, when morning come, and she woman skin bury in a barrel, or mortar, lock up inside somewhere for safety? All-yuh think she would seek shelter on a night like this when there is so much rainwater that it might put out she fire? They say soucouyant does suck di blood of people, especially naughty children who are disobedient and don’t say their prayers at night.”

It was then that they heard a crash outside at the west door and a woman’s voice pleading, “All-yuh open dis door quick gimme nah! It have plenty rain out here.”

•••

People call these chil’ren grandmother—who is my sister Charlotte—and me soucouna or soucouyant, and they ‘fraid we bad. Family call me Maisy. Some women in our line does come into di powers at change-of-life. Instead of we limbs stiffen up, we ligaments, bones, and sinew stretch. At the same time that you come to understand life a little more, you thirst for it.

I does see ti-fille Shirley looking down in the water, and I always wonder is what Charlotte twenty-fifth grandchild, with she eighth husband, seeking in the water world? Whey she tryin’ to go? You see, when I was a girl, I used to bathe in the early morning at the little lagoon down near the big estate house. I visit the memory and Shirley follow me when I ride di sasa time to di past-not-past. 

Charlotte and I lived there with my mother, the cook. My daddy was a cooper who mek barrel for shipment and he was hired out in town. We helped our mother in the kitchen and looked after the hens and the milk cow. Our blood father was the master of the house. We were not allowed to speak or even look at him as a family. Daddy was my mother’s husband, well, as much as you could have a husband en esclavage. Beaulieu, the planter, was not always there, as he visited his other Leeward Island sugar estates. He used to go to England, too, where he had houses in the country and in town.

I born in 1807, when the English outlawed the trade, and my sister born in 1808. Slavery days wasn’t over yet, though, and between you and me, saltwater people still end up here and work wid we creole Africans and gens de couleurs libre. Beaulieu was here on the island for two years with his English wife. It was a big trouble and suffering for our parents, but they got through in a fashion. We were young when the Emancipation Day came on August 1st. If you want to see fête! We stayed young looking right through Victoria time on the throne. We can still look young if we want to, but it catches people attention. So, you could look young for a short time. Like when I playin’ mas’, or I go out on di road sometimes, I young down meself. We are 162 and 161 years old now but we look like we are old women of 80 or 90 years.

People say we fly at night in a ball of fire and accuse us of sucking people blood. But lemme tell you, we not flying every night and turning into fire. Dat tek too much energy. Besides, Paradise getting bright with electric light. Some people house light up like daytime all di time. The true dark is gone except for hurricane time.

And is not the blood of innocents we seek. We need energy like everybody. We sometimes take a little bit from ne’er do wells, scoundrels and scallywags who out there doing mischief about di place late at night. 

Is when Charlotte goin’ tell this generation of chil’ren who me and she really is? Streupps! I tired lock up in di ole house, sleeping for years at a time, and growing dotish wid me skin in a barrel, and only these ole clothes to put on. You shoulda see me in my day! I only come out at J’Ouvert now because I blend in, in mi tear up old-time clothes. People see di petticoat and think I playin’ mas’! 

But hurricane coming tonight. I know ‘cause di mahogany birds dem stirring underneath and inside mi house and coming through boards and I know they lookin’ shelter in Charlotte nice, dry, family house. Well, I is family and I comin’ out, too, oui, to take a lil stroll. I can’t look in di windows to see people cuz they batten down. Maybe I will go inside through the wall-cracks late-late. Nobody go see me. If dem go to di inside latrine and I can’t hide fast enough, they might think they seein’ something. I go walk ‘bout tonight, oui.

•••

“Open di door!”

“Who is it? Is why you doan go to di front door?” asked Luke. 

“Whey you manners, boy? I is you Aunty Maisy, your grandmother Charlotte sister. Rain coming down out here for so! I beg you let me in! This is where I drop because these hurricane winds too high.”

“Maman said you live in America,” said Luke. 

He ran from his bed to the door and unbolted it. A primary rule of the Last Room, once it was time to go to sleep, was all feet off the ground, all parts covered down.

He barely covered up before the door flew open. Aunty Maisy entered the room wearing the silk dress from the trunk. A plaid dwyiet rested on her round hips and a matching faded plaid madras head scarf and foulard covered her hair and shoulders. She had beautiful, clean hands, with smooth oval nails like Maman’s, and large, hazel, puss eyes in her full cheeked light-brown old-young face. She wore the white shoes, their heels clacking on the floorboards as she walked. 

“So, you is di boy who like to put on me shoes,” she said looking at Georgie.

“Yes, Ma’am” he answered shivering.

“Georgie, I just dropping in,” she said, answering the unspoken questions. “Stormy weather is a good time. Good people off di road, animals put away and I could go about di place and hitch a wind ride. I ain’ troublin’ anybody.”

Aunty Maisy stepped further into the room, her clothes dripping wet, one long side plait escaped from her head tie. She stretched her arms and stretched and stretched until she reached the rafters. 

“Ah, yes, this is where I did leave it,” she exclaimed, pulling down a British soldier’s WWI sweetheart brooch and fixing it to her foulard. “I left this here in 1946. Di world was in a set of confusion.”

Aunty Maisy laughed, her voice softer, “I know all of you. Shirley, you visit me at the barrel. Georgie, you wear my shoes, and Luke you read my shop ledger.”

Just then, the children heard their grandmother’s voice from the hallway exclaiming, “I am hearing too much noise in here.” 

Maman faltered as she entered the room, witnessing Aunty Maisy shrinking to her normal size.

“Maisy!” she exclaimed, “What di blazes you doing in here scaring me grandchildren? You stay in your place and I in mine!”

The children watched open mouthed. All their lives they had heard that Aunty Maisy was away in America. Plenty people had family who were overseas for decades and many never came back. What was unusual was seeing their grandmother greet another family member without the usual manners and offering of something to eat or drink.

“Charlotte, I was out on di winds, looking a lil something, and when I come back mi barrel gone. Eh-eh, not even a mortar for me to rest lil’ bit. Your barrel gone too.”

Maman sighed, the secret revealed, and then pleaded, “Say no more. They too young, Maisy!”

“I doan know ‘bout that. Mi great-niece already have a touch of what we have,” she said nodding at Shirley peeking out from her sheet cocoon.

“She find di barrels hidden in plain sight, when other people just pass them. She does come and look for me. She riding di sasa waves good-good. I see when you bring she back. I wasn’t going to try to keep her, Charlotte. In any case, she is strong and attached here.”

Maisy could have lived a topside life with few, if any ventures into the other world, and she did for over a century. Grief at the death of her husband in the great war when she was 108 years old, drove her into seclusion in their small one room chattel house. When the war was over, and the family bought the property in town, her chattel house was moved from its location in the village, near the estate to the yard. Maisy hardly ventured out. In time, talk of her existence went from gossip about her assumed death, to legend. Her sister and select family members kept their secrets. 

“Well now you know,” said Maman to the children, tucking them in. “This is why I does tell all you to pray and sleep when night come. We go talk more. Say goodnight to Aunty Maisy.”

“Good night, aunty,” they chorused.

The sisters headed to the kitchen to chat ole talk and drink bush tea. 

“We living wid soucouyant!” Shirley burst out.

“Imagine that!” exclaimed Luke.

“I told you it wasn’t a branch!” said Georgie.

The children whispered quietly, falling asleep as the lamp extinguished. 

By dawn, the storm had passed over. Maman was preparing breakfast. The mahogany birds had disappeared, and Aunty Maisy was gone. Only her brooch remained on the top of the chiffarobe.