Two weeks ago I wrote about the pleasure of savoring Naomi Jackson’s language in Star Side of Bird Hill. But I only wrote about the beginning of the novel.
Based on Jackson’s voice, her characters and their situation, I saw sad times ahead for teenager Dionne and pre-teen Phaedra, sent to their grandmother in Barbados by their mother. As she was withdrawing from the world, her daughters were dealing with everyday life on Bird Hill.
Children Carnival dancers
At their grandmother’s home, both girls have had time to be themselves without having to live lives of little lies, as was required by two girls practically raising themselves and not wanting social services or their long-gone father to know.
Although they are settling into the routine of life at their grandmother’s, Dionne feels her spirit is being stifled. She goes off with a fast girl also sent back to the island by her family and is rude to her grandmother in front of the other teens. Phaedra has made fast friends with a boy her age and, while also missing home, is taking each day as it comes.
The sadness Jackson was foreshadowing earlier in the novel does come to pass and the girls realize their stay will be extended. They react differently from each other, and true to themselves.
Dionne is angry and lashes out. All she wants is to belong, to have a normal life. Her grandmother reflects:
… how much she believed that she was not only right, but also justified. And she knew that this was the thing that would harm Dionne in the end, not her foolishness but the foolhardy way in which she clung to her own terrible ideas.
Phaedra instead spends time with her grandmother, learning her ways, and with the people who grew up with her mother. Like her midwife grandmother, she is learning about other people’s secrets without trying, because she is paying attention. She is part of her world in a way Dionne is not during this time of her teenage anxiety and stress and yearning.
As their grandmother tells Dionne on another occasion:
Your sister, now, she can watch and wait, and see how things go. But you, you’re not taking anything to be the truth unless you have the living proof for yourself.
Out of nowhere, their father suddenly appears. Again, the girls react differently but as themselves. Dionne wants to belong, she wants to go back to the states, even if her father is in Miami and not Brooklyn. Phaedra wants to understand.
During the annual Crop Over carnival with its myriad celebrations, both girls have the opportunity to show their true spirit.
Phaedra gets to take part in the grand play mas dance in full costume with her new friends:
Phaedra started to dance to the music that she’d been committing to memory for this very moment. A solid month of memorizing lyrics from the radio finally paid off as she sang “Leggo My Hand” along with all the other children. She looked back at Chris, noting the way he loomed over everyone with the beanstalk height he’d grown to over the summer, carrying the weight of his royal palm tree costume with a majesty she’d never see on him before. Phaedra and Donna chipped across the stage in their desert rose costumes, and soon their faces were covered in sweat, sequins, and glitter. They danced proudly, slowing down and then making their movements bigger when they neared the judges’ bandstand. Phaedra and Donna both looked to it as if it were the promised land because their feet were aching in the old tennis shoes they’d dyed to match their costumes. All the kids put on their best smiles and flew across the stage, and then it was over, a rumble of chat and an echo of applause filling the stadium, and offstage the sound of somebody’s child crying.
Dionne’s experience in the Grand Koodament parade is also colorful and chaotic, but with a far darker undertone and violence:
Every once in a while Dionne looked out of the corner of her eye at her father, and saw him dancing, waving a rag in the air that was steadily turning from white to gray as they progressed. Errol was enjoying himself, dancing with Evangeline with abandon. Dionne realized she hadn’t seen him that happy in a long time. Something had shifted between Dionne and Errol, and he seemed less like a father to her that day, more like a friend. …
Dionne’s drink turned over with the commotion. The coconut cocktail slicked her wrist, and she looked up. Just a moment before, her right hand had clasped a length of rope that distinguished their band from the crowd of onlookers. … Her father, who just a moment before had been sweating next to her … was beating on someone whom she took at first for a woman, until the crowd joined in.
Crop Over refers to the end of the sugar harvest every year when slaves were allowed to celebrate. Grandmother Hyacinth refers back to those times and what their ancestor experienced when yet another child of hers was taken away, sold as just another slave, when talking over with Dionne what the teen has been through:
Every day the children that you call your own, the husband that you call your own, the wife that you call your own, everything that you call your own, you knew wasn’t yours in truth. You knew that any tie to what you thought was yours could be broken just so. And so this thing people call grief, this thing that people call sadness, this thing that people call darkness, that was what we were living in all the time.
The beauty of what Jackson’s character says to me is that several pieces of knowledge are embedded there. Slavery was an all-encompassing fact of life, that is something people just don’t get over in a year or so, or a generation or so. It is that deep a part of living and breathing, to not fully be free.
And so while there are deep sorrows and grief now, they are still sorrows and grief of the kind that happen to all people, even those who are free. And without that underpinning grief and sadness and darkness, there is perhaps a better chance to heal and carry on. After all, the people who did not have freedom still carried on. So we can as well.
But there is also the knowledge that anyone, no matter their status in life, will suffer loss, will suffer grief and sadness and darkness. And that knowing this might provide some measure of strength in knowing it is coming and that it may be endured.
And that there is also the possibility in knowing we can be united in this knowledge and in this sorrow, and because of that, perhaps be stronger because we are together.
Jackson’s novel is not perfect; there is at least one action late in the story that may be a little too neat in tying up a plot point. But that is not as important as the knowledge and togetherness that is shown. This was especially satisfying to see because the story of the sisters was truly a story of both of them.
Because even if, as Hyacinth says, :You can't wait for someone else to save you from the life you made for yourself,” Jackson also makes it clear that there is nothing they cannot abide if they are together.
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