Nicolette Bethel

(From Mama Lily and the Dead)

The Scotsman Gives Lily Her Name (1904)

He made a bed without regret
beside a girl who calmed her child
with breasts of well-rubbed teak, wet-sweet with milk.
When Annie filled her daughter’s mouth
on liquid nights, he suckled too,
and chased the shades of boats across the sea.
His child surprised him, springing wild
and undesired in her. Alive despite his fear,
she swam insistent for the light.

Malcolm smiled; she looked like him,
skin pale as teeth, hair still as water
hauled cool from limestone wells.
Her lips were pink against the breast
his lips had pulled; her hands
curled bright against the dark.
He dreamed of sails trimmed tight,
and fed his face to slapping air.

He named her Lily, for her whiteness,
but her eyes held secrets, dark as lakes
that swallowed sons beneath their waves.
He gathered winds about him. He wrapped
her fingers round a ring, and left.
Annie held her girls and wept.

The Obeah Woman Tells Lily’s Fortune (1909)

The obeah woman watched the small girl’s shadow
tip sideways, leak eastward, and trickle
under the lintel; it pooled on the floor.
No one wiped it. Lily flickered without it.
Mary Aurelius stepped from the hut
that sheltered her from spilling light.
She cupped her hands to catch the sun,
flung brightness over the child.

Mary Aurelius knew the terror of the hunt.
On long afternoons, the shadows on her walls
bloomed, became chainsores and scars.
Her neighbour’s dinner was sweat and rot.
Scramblings and bootsteps over her head
made way for blind sunshine. Shafts of light reclaimed her.
Ramatoulaye: Mary Aurelius —
fingers skinned lips from her teeth and named her.

Now, she cast light from her hands.
But Lily’s life, filed sharp by fate,
ripped that bright redemption.
Light scattered all around the yard.
The chickens pecked and clawed.

The Seamstress Teaches Lily to Sew (1910)

In her shop, Naomi tacked the seams of jackets,
flounced pinafores, turned fine lace and lawn
to bridal gowns. She laid slave-cotton
flat before her, slipped scissors through it,
snicked and ripped it, clipped soft riddles from it.
Lily watched her unscramble the code of tailoring.

When she finished Naomi called her granddaughter.
Come child. Come save these scrap for me.
Lily dropped the strays in tumbling heaps
on table corners and broken chairs, fiddled
them into piles. Naomi lit the lamp, picked a thimble,
sat Lily beside her, and patched scraps together.
By lamplight they stitched riddles of their own.

This where all the hole go.
Each got it own place. Follow the pattern.
Hole make sense all by theyself.

At night, Annie reclaimed her daughter,
fed her, bathed her, sang her to bed.
Lily mantled herself in re-membered cloth,
swallowed sleep in the embrace of her sister.
Behind her Naomi ravelled up riddles.
Each clean morning she fetched her granddaughter.
Come child. Come thread this for me.

Lily held the end of new-cut thread
attentive by its needle. She squinted through the metal eye
and aimed for the sense of the hole.

The Midwife Delivers Lily’s Son (1926)

Kahizah bids Atlantic swells
to throttle jetties, flood the groynes,
and suck the lime-white surface off the street.
She tells the sun: Unpeel the sky’s blue skin,
strip artery and sinew, spin
this air until it thickens.

Kahizah pulled tea-water from the well,
unwound greenbitter cerasee from walls,
piled fever grass to dry in cutlass light.
Then, after limeleaf tea and fish-and-grits
and shepherd needle smoked along the shore,
she bundled baygerina in hard wind
and told the headland: silt the ocean’s gut.

Kahizah molds the belly swell,
tells Lily: Lean across the sill
to catch that clapping shutter — tells
the spongy ripeness: Wring and spill
wet salt down Lily’s thighs.

When Lily raised her knees and cried
the ocean heaved its head.
When Lily clutched Kahizah’s side
salt water claimed the yard.
And when the new child cleared his eyes
to name the cyclone world, Kahizah
bathed him in sagewater, smoothed his limbs,
and cradled him for Lily’s arms to hold.

An earlier versionof “The Scotsman Gives Lily Her Name (1904)” was published in Calabash: A Volume of Caribbean Arts and Letters, Vol. 2, 2003.

An earlier version of “The Seamstress Teaches Lily to Sew (1910)” was published in The Caribbean Writer, Vol. 16, 2002.

“The Midwife Delivers Lily’s Son (1926)” is due to be published in Yinna: Journal of the Bahamas Association of Cultural Studies, Vol. II.

Companion Piece — Oh, My Life and Days

“Mama Lily and the Dead” is a series of poems about the life of one woman, my paternal grandmother, who was universally admired, pitied, and loved by all who came into contact with her, mainly because she lived to bury every member of her immediate family. Her husband and all her children predeceased her — some by half a century, the last by a mere three weeks. What people admired about her was her apparently unshakeable faith in the God who took from her everything that mattered most — except us, her grandchildren, for whom she had a bright and shining love, and a house which was a work of art, a crucible for creativity, a home, and a document of history all in one.

She was a fundamentalist of the Puritan persuasion. She was converted by a Pentecostal preacher from the Anglicanism of her birth, and became a lifelong member of the branch of the Plymouth Brethren that settled in The Bahamas round about the turn of the twentieth century. Hers was the kind of world where plainness and modesty were watchwords for behaviour. In an African culture where even the poor strove to adorn their daughters with earrings and bracelets, she stripped herself of those ancestral gifts, taking out her earrings when she was saved, and never wearing jewellery (other than her wedding ring) or make-up for her entire life, not to mention never uttering a swear word she didn’t make up herself (at least not that we heard), never marrying after her husband died (when she, and he, were both only 39), never wearing trousers or cutting her hair or touching alcohol (the last was a bit more flexible than the other prohibitions; when she cooked she sometimes used rum, and her wicked progeny were not above handing her a spiked glass of eggnog at Christmas gatherings, just for the hell of it). “Oh, my life and days!” was what she exclaimed when she was amazed by something, what she said when another person might have said “by damn” or “great shit” or “Jesus Christ”. We thought she was perfect, and were cowed by the idea. I was afraid of her, annoyed by her, embarrassed by her, fiercely loved by her, and, ultimately, inspired by her. She kept us all together; we all shared in her bereavements, though we could never attain her special status — that of a woman who had buried a husband, two mothers, endless cousins, six children, and a daughter-in-law.

The genesis of these poems came during one dark winter I spent studying in Canada. When given the task of producing a long piece of some sort, I composed a poem in five movements called “Stranger Anger”, written during the dull ache that was February, an ode to homesickness. A little to my surprise, the central piece was a poem in blank verse about my grandmother and her house.

Subsequently the longer poem fell away. When my father died, I stopped writing poetry — which I had started as an exercise to help me develop my prose style — but “My Grandmother’s House” continued to live. When Momma herself died, seven years after my father and three weeks after my aunt, I pulled out “My Grandmother’s House” and reworked it so it could be read at her funeral. Later, when I found the ability to write poetry again, around the turn of the millennium, I posted the poem to The Gazebo, the Alsop Review’s online workshop.

It was kindly received, I’ll say that. It wasn’t trashed, but was roundly criticized on several levels. I chose not to revise it after all, because I found I couldn’t — it was already too mature, and had been written by a very different person for a very different purpose. Instead, I took to heart the most useful of the suggestions that emerged in the discussion — that I write a series of poems about this woman, Lily, my grandmother.

And so was born the idea of a biography in verse. Her story is, after all, a riveting one. She was born half white and illegitimate in a community settled by ex-slaves and Liberated Africans, looking too much like her white father ever to be accepted. She escaped her community by marrying a man whose outcast status was similar to hers, the child of a mixed-race woman from the tiny middle class who’d been banished from her family home to the edge of town for having had the temerity to become pregnant by a man who was simply too damn black. The two women were far closer in many ways than my grandmother was with her own mother, whom she judged for having had three children by three different men and marrying none of them. In the end, though, she took her own mother in to her home, and looked after her till she died. My father and his siblings grew up in a house of widows and single mothers.

I chose to tell my grandmother’s story through the eyes of other people. I never, after all, knew what she thought and felt inside; if she struggled with her lot, if she questioned her faith, if she ever got angry with the hand she’d been dealt, we never knew it. We saw her only from the outside, and so that’s how I’m writing her life. She was a lonely, wounded, coping, difficult, loving character, someone who never talked about her grief, who, despite her bereavements could still laugh with her children and grandchildren when they were outrageous (and they were all outrageous) and who, despite her commitment for eighty of her ninety years to a Christ she called upon many times a day, fought her own passing in tears and perplexity. She was our grandmother, and was at her strongest alone. This series is my tribute to her.