By the time Mother took me to her birthplace—Bequia—
I was a fifth-grade wordsmith in a first-grader’s body.
H-o-m-e—too easy—was off my spelling list although
I didn’t know what home meant. I did not recognize my
Mother’s mother: she was the color of pitch and whether
she was pleased to see her daughter and me, she kept it to
herself, a mystery. “Tonight”, Mother said, “we’ll sleep
under cotton netting to keep the mosquitoes from eating
us up” and like the man who delivered his catch from
early sea light, her voice echoed. Later, as grannie’s house
went dark, a bauble of moon glistening off the fretwork,
Mother found me atop a chest of drawers—(I had known
how to save myself, opened each drawer, more, then more,
scaled every one stuffed with the scent of lies and Hazell
history)—shivering in the nocturnal damp. When she asked,
I said I was hiding from the mosquitoes. Then I saw my first
on a screen. “How do they `eat you up’”? I probed. Nothing’s
as you imagine it, Mother said, and she wasn’t speaking to me.