Serpentine, Volume 4, Number 3, Summer 2000

A Severed Tree

by Robert Burdette Sweet

Grenada, 1956.  I wandered toward the back of the thatched cabin looking for Junior. Rattled as I was from my confrontation with his mamman -- should that be who she was -- I felt the need for a familiar presence. I had been plunged into a lethal but splendrous world whose trappings and every word and gesture alarmed as much as it fascinated me. I was desperate for a connection to counterbalance my own trepidation, which increased my desire for Junior, intensified my love or need. I've never been certain which was which, or if indeed both words are not irrevocably linked.

       Night struck like a hammer blow. Tree frogs began their screeching and fireflies dazzled the heavy air. If there was a moon, no light from it penetrated the heavy canopy of drooping trees. Finally I came upon him where he hunched over a small fire about which were piled a semicircular ridge of stones centered by a collapsed chimney. Sparks from the fire so mimicked the whirls of fireflies that I almost passed it by.

       He was naked. Well, this was his own backyard. Besides, deep in the forest as we were where no breeze could work its way in, the temperature remained tepid. I aped him by shucking off my pants and adjusted myself on a stone beside him. Dark skins merge with everything. White skins shine like beacons, even in the dark. Though I felt awkward, I determined to enjoy every minute of it. Junior was simmering some sort of stew over a grill of twisted metal. I enjoyed watching him rise to bend over the pot which he stirred with sections of bamboo bound together to form a sort of ladle.

       "How you likes me mamman?" he wanted to know.

       "Is Mrs. Samuels really your mother?"

       "As much mine as anybody's." Junior reached for two once-white enamel bowls chipped and dark around the lips. Awkwardly he slopped the results of his cookery into them. "She fine woman and mamman to me."

       "But you don't look like her." I heard myself add with horror, "Or speak like her." Though his 'Ise' and 'youses' made it difficult to understand him, I swore never to correct his grammar or pronunciation, even though I made my living by doing just that in my own country. I didn't want to drown my lover in red ink.

       "I speak your language when I wants," he said handing me a bowl. "It's just that it slave-master language, which mamman knows and taught me when she taught me too the reading and writing, but is not a good or proper language to use on this island. Bad memories. Bad ... how you say? implications."

       There seemed to be no utensils, so I tried dribbling the stew into my mouth. The thick mass was too hot and tasted like boiled barley. But since my pronunciation of English had been declared oppressive by my companion whose need I needed, I resolved to brave up to the food. By my second sip the stew just seemed strange, possibly nourishing. I was hungry and the mixture of sweet potatoes and other vegetables, whose tastes I failed to identify, might last me until I could get my hands on some rum to wash it all down with.

       That the subtleties of grammar arose to separate the classes, I already knew. I just wasn't prepared to accept my speech patterns as officious and reminiscent of terror. So I mumbled into my bowl, "I'm sorry."

       Junior, who had swallowed his dinner in a gulp, poured himself some more. I couldn't take my eyes off the velvet of his body. Observing the dangles, bulges and ripples of his seemingly inexhaustible grace made me feel, through him, joined with the forest, to its warmth and darkness.

       "Have more," he entreated while watching me as I went to ease more stew into the bowl, my skin, I knew, luminous in the firelight, my body's hairs flaring chest and legs. I liked his staring at me, it made me feel alive. We seemed mutually connected. Junior's eyes permitted me to be.

       I slurped the stew while posing in front of him, my back to the fire. "You can read and write then?" I had been as surprised by Junior's offhanded mention of his literacy as I was surprised by almost everything about him.

       "I does both enough," he said stroking the hairs on my testicles. He was not very hairy compared to me. We were both becoming as wrapped up in our differences as we were in our similarities. But such can it be when races and cultures attempt intimacy of any kind.

       "Enough literacy for what?"

       "I can help sometimes others." Unbidden, his pronunciation, if not his sentence structure, was imitating mine. He accommodated himself to the language he despised, as did his Mrs. Samuels. For my benefit, obviously. But then, did that mean they both humored while despising me? I didn't know. I didn't want to know. "Like for my friend," Junior chatted on, "that the government charges for breaking his rib."

       "What?"

       "He breaks his rib, like Adam, and so he knows his girl Arabella will say her child is his. I writes letter for him to government telling he can't pay no matter what."

       I sat back down next to him, my eyebrows lifted. "I don't understand."

       Junior glanced at me slyly. "When man breaks his rib, he knows then for sure that child will be claimed to be his. Which is troublesome. Because government passes rule making man pay for all children claimed on him."

       "But what's that got to do with breaking his rib?"

       To my amazement, Junior stood, propped one bare foot on a rock, and began rhythmically slapping his thighs with both hands in a mock imitation of drum beats. He tipped his head back like a baying wolf and burst out in a smooth baritone,

       "Adam in the garden, hidin', hidin'.

       Adam in the garden, hidin' from the Lord.

       Adam in the garden, he knows how Eve made from his rib.

       He knows the Lord knows all he does to Eve is his. So ..."

       A long pause, and then,

       "Adam in the garden, hidin' from his rib."

       Another but longer cessation of both hands and voice, broken finally by a running wobble and an extended embellishment of the vocal line:

       "Lordy mun, how Adam from his God he hides."

       Appreciatively I clapped and laughed. But Junior glared down at me. "Not funny," he said.

       "But the song is funny."

       He scowled. "Not to all them Adams out there hidin'."

       I arranged my features into what I hoped might be an acceptable frown. "I've been an Adam like that. Have you?"

       Now Junior did laugh. A deep, uproarious, hiccuping kind of spasm. "Not me, mun. Ha, ha," and he held his stomach while his privates flopped.

       We had a number of usual behaviors in common, I thought. "But I still don't understand why you wrote a letter to the governor because your friend broke his rib."

       "You don't get it?" He backed near the fire as though to warm himself. "Woman comes from Adam's rib, right?"

       I couldn't imagine how to respond.

       "Your Bible tells how that be true."

       "Yes, the Bible does, but ... "

       "So anything that happens to man's rib shows what his joy has brought about. I writes letter explaining that about my friend, but that he poor and can't pay. Except some day when his rib come back together. That will be a long, long time in happenin'. I signs the letter 'sincerely your own' and has mamman correct it all for me to make it just right."

       "But do you believe the condition of a man's ribs are proof of paternity, I mean fatherhood? What about sex?"

       He brushed a mosquito away that danced in front of his eyes. "Sex?" as though I'd dared a disgusting obscenity. "Sex?" he questioned again. "Don't know what you talk about." He managed to clap the mosquito between his hands. He showed its body to me, a dabble of blood and twisted legs, mangled against his palm. Behind him one log sunk into the other and smoke and flames spired into the darting fireflies.

       "Sex is this," I grabbed his crotch.

       "This be just fun." He reached for me. "Don't have to write no government a letter afterwards." And we sparred and parried and funned ourselves over the stones and on the ground struggling to avoid the fire.

       I gasped, "Nor have to worry about ribs."

       "But it's ribs that do it," he insisted while squeezing me in an illustrative hammerlock. He could be rough, in a playful sort of way.

       I was not certain then, but discovered in the following weeks, that Junior saw no particular connection between orgasm inside a woman and childbirth. His neighbors apparently didn't either. As it was eventually revealed to me, on the island spirits assured conception when the moon was full, especially under the yawning branches of a bo tree. A woman could be quite alone while accomplishing this feat. All she had to do was open her mouth and let some light from the Moon Spirit glide over her tongue. When I tried to correct Junior's version of reality by sketching in my notebook a penis and testes and a vagina and ovaries -- which I scribbled with charm and a degree of accuracy, or so I told myself -- he shook his head in disbelief. He was incredulous at the span of nine months to accomplish the miracle. It was like trying to explain to a butterfly how it was once a worm.

       Junior cupped his chin into his curved shoulder blade to protest, "Nine fucking months?"

       "You don't have to be fucking all that time," I calmly insisted. "Just once. Possibly."

       "Better with you," and he wrapped an arm around my leg.

       "Oh, I'm easier on ribs. I'll admit that. And, with me you'll never, like your friend, have to pay off the governor."

       "You just fun."

       "I hope so," I replied, not quite believing it. Nothing is just fun. All that we do has repercussions.

       Junior left me snoozing on the sandy soil. I dimly heard him saying, "Got to keep pot hot for mamman when she calls." I felt the heat intensify when he added more wood to the fire, but I was so groggy from whatever ichors flow after satisfying sex that I failed to aid him, even to lift my hand.

       I snapped awake, however, aware of my nakedness, when Mrs. Samuel's voice floated out of her window toward us: "Juney? Any food left?"

       I had just lifted my head when Junior arranged my fingers around a full, warm bowl. He efficiently pulled my short pants up as far as my thighs and told me to stand. I carefully balanced the bowl as he zipped me up and buckled my belt. "You take dinner into her. She will like that."

       Still groggy I padded around the house, once more managing my way through raised nails and gaps in the steps, to sway unsurely through the empty room. I was again startled by what I saw as I edged through the doorway into her room. Night had transformed it. Transformed Mrs. Samuels as well.

       Whatever her illness might be, it had not crippled her into total immobility. Her bed flickered from the wavering lights and subsequent shadows of numerous candles that only she could have arranged about. Over the call of a nightjar outside, the candle's sputtering obsessed the room. Candles were lodged in every cranny available in her Voodoo shrine. They were affixed into holes in the skulls, their flames making the feathers protruding from the eyes appear to move, to flutter along deep shadowed runnels of space. Spires of incense rose, the smell weighting the air as though St. Patrick and the Bible were lodged in their accustomed environs. The place reeked of Catholic mystery, with the added depth of the even more direct Voodoo confrontation with death. It's not that I don't respect the profundity behind religious nonsense, it's the worshippers and believers I fear for and just plain fear, who mistake metaphor for the real and err by misconstruing symbol for fact.

       Cautiously delivering Mrs. Samuel's supper into her waiting hands, I noticed that her head was neatly ensconced in a wound orange turban which she aimed at me while approximating a welcoming nod.

       "Your back is covered with sand," she observed. "Where have you been lying, Mr. Sweet?"

       I tried crawling my hand over my back. I heard sand spatter the floor. "Resting," I excused my condition. "By Junior's fire. I must have fallen asleep."

       Sipping the stew, she whimsically responded, "Quite natural. Good food and rest, irresistible companions. You like my offering to your gods, my gods, and all the gods?" She waved stubby fingers at her altar.

       "Oh yes," I politely assured her while settling back down on the wooden carton which Junior had earlier supplied me. "I'm sure your Damballah-wedo watches over you."

       "But sir," her tone challenged, "I explained this afternoon how Damballah-wedo is a cannibal of the heart and of the mind. Like love." She glanced at me warningly, her lashes closing contemplatively over narrowing eyes. "Would you find comfort by being watched over by a cannibal?"

       Frustration with her and my own desperation caused me to be blunt. "I too know God is a cannibal. Why else would we be created to be absorbed by him?"

       "That's why you prefer to deny what is?"

       "But I don't deny it. I - I merely play with it. If God made us from clay in his image, then I'll mold shadows of him as my fancy compels me."

       Mrs. Samuels, evidently in league with meanings that are indefinable, subversive and beyond the ken of rational knowledge, proceeded by insisting, "But you can only create as the gods command you to. You have nothing to say but what they insist upon saying through you. They whisper, you transcribe. At best, Mr. Sweet, you are a secretary. Did you ever think you had anything to say?"

       I was especially irritated by that remark, because when I had confessed to my mother that I wanted to become a writer she had triangled her plucked eyebrows to archly and rhetorically inquire, 'What makes you think you have anything to say.' I tried defending myself, 'It's showing, Ma, not saying.' She had only laughed, reducing me to devastation. 'Movies show every thought,' she pressed on, 'so what is there left for words? Scribblers are passe'. Imaginations are on hold. Only what we see can release us from ourselves. Which is the object, after all, of entertainment. Devote yourself, Bobby, to making money. Money is the only sign of success we have. And I want you to succeed. Money, money ...'

       This parental recollection bothered my head and caused me abruptly to change the subject. Since I was involuntarily administering to, and I supposed amusing my lover's mambo mother, I shifted gears to ask, pleasantly enough I thought, how Junior got his name. "Apparently from you," I probed. "How is it Junior came to think of you as his mamman? He doesn't resemble you much."

       Mrs. Samuels rolled and heaved her languid bulk in my direction. She was attired in a house dress that served as a nightgown. It was purple, speckled with flowers, hyacinth and roses mainly, ripped under the arms. Her breasts lay enormously wrapped in sheathes of these shimmering flowers. Heady speculations on the nature of life and the gods took second place to her adoration for Junior and his origin. I could tell, because at my question her vast body curled itself under the rotted sheet while she muttered, "You wants to know about my Junior? He appeared from nowhere. Nameless, hungry, forlorn as wandering children tend to be." She passed her now empty soup bowl over to me, sparkling clean as a licked dog plate. "And I took him in because ..." I stowed the bowl between my feet on the floor. "Because I had ...destroyed, somehow, my own real son. Destroyed him through belief. Not in the belief of Damballah-wedo so much as disbelief in what I knew to be true but couldn't obey."

       She arranged herself as comfortably as she could on her back, arms folded over the rise and fall of her tremendous stomach, short thick fingers interlaced. The yellowish cast of her face glowed from the flickering candles. "Have you noticed how outside that window," she squinted her eyes while adjusting her head into the pile of ragged cloths that served her for a pillow, "there is the large stump of a mango tree?"

       I had noticed it, before the night fell while I first spoke with her and because Junior had forbidden me to near it when we were out back. The trunk had been severed awkwardly with a twisted fringe of near-white bark along one side. Despite that, my intent had been to lay against it while he cooked. But Junior waved me off with the suggestion that I might be warmer by the fire, and I naturally obeyed him. So I assured Mrs. Samuels that I was aware of the severed tree whose roots undulated like molting pythons around the house. I had even tripped over them while attempting to reach Mrs. Samuels as I carried her dinner.

       "Trees are life," she said. "That tree, the mango, grew and grew, shading us, my little son and me, the two of us content. And the tree fed us. It fed us well throughout the year. Year after year. And butterflies came to suck the rotten fruit and birds took their fill from them also."

       I wondered what any of this had to do with Junior. But as Mrs. Samuels spoke, her lips mumbling over the richness of her reminiscence, I understood that I had been meant to hear this. For her enlightenment as well as for mine. It's not just that Mrs. Samuels was a natural storyteller, but that without the mechanical accouterments dependent on electricity -- radios, movies, records and the like -- people must imagine directly through each other the excitement of things. And for every storyteller whose confession is meant to exonerate their own souls, an audience of at least one has to be there to share it. I wondered if that isn't why she had predicted my visit. She needed my ears to hear what she must report. Junior knew this, of course, and remained outside so as not to interfere with her pleasure. As for me, I felt a tad abused and used, though at the same time privileged and awed. The crooning sound of her voice, the mesmerizing wafts of incense, the candle glow, and the occasional clear, hovering cry of the nightjar lulled my memory back to where it had never been yet I recognized as home.

       "What was your real son's name?" Mrs. Samuels had been so determined to know my surname and insisted I refer to her as Mrs. Samuels that I was curious as to why she had not yet revealed his name.

       She hunched and rolled her bulk across the large square bed toward me. She cupped one hand around her lips and whispered, "Junior."

       "Does Junior know he is Junior number two?"

       "No," she shook her head. "And I'll trust you not to tell him."

       I have always felt especially chosen when someone says 'I've never told anyone this before, but ...' Even though, of course, it's almost never true. When, days later, Junior told me he knew quite well he was, as he put it, Junior Two, I was not surprised. At Mrs. Samuel's initial admission, though, I experienced a voyeur's thrill. I leaned toward her. "What happened to your son, Mrs. Samuels?"

       "He gets sick. Real sick. Month upon month he begins fading away. Feverish and sweaty and then cold to freezing. And then just weak with watery eyes. He is six years old. His lips cracking. And when some blood smears off onto his tongue and teeth I know I'm going to not be able to stand it. So I run to a priest and plead, 'Come bless my child. Pray to your God to tell me what to do.'"

       She couched her head with one hand and thoughtfully stared at me. "I am, for this island, educated in white man's ways. I've been careful, always, to take on only so much of black man's ways. For generations now our mothers has reared us to do the reading and the writing of which I am now worse at than any mother before me. But no matter, from slave-masters we in my family all learned. And I now the only one to keep it going however I can." Slowly she blinked her great dark eyes. "Priest say I don't pray in church, so why should he pray for Junior who is not baptized? 'The fault is all yours, Mrs.Samuels,' he said. But then the priest pulls on the cross hanging down his black dress to explain how since his God cares for everyone, he'll do my son Junior one or two prayers. So I leave him relieved. And wait for my Junior to repair himself. After a week, and he not even eating anymore, I think the priest has no power to change anything. My son just lays there on his bed all day and night, this same bed sheet I spend my last days under once covered him." She fluffed the bedclothes. "We here in Grenada don't have much," she seemed to be apologizing to me. "That is why we live so deep in our minds."

       "Would a doctor have been any help? To heck with priests," I said.

       "I tried the doctor before even the priest. I believe doctors to be of no account. But I wheeled Junior there, to Concord clinic, in a wheelbarrow, him moaning all the way. The doctor just wanted to know if there was water standing around where we lived. And I said how it's almost a swamp our shack sits in. And the doctor pulled on that black tube thing around his neck and said, 'Drain that swamp!' He gave Junior some round, hard, tiny food to chew which the child spat up and since I could not drain a swamp and Junior only sickened more, I never went back. I only guessed that to save my child the white man's way I had to go to church and drain my swamp and neither seemed much help or possible to me."

       She swallowed hard before proceeding: "My white blood doing me no good," she sighed, "and Indian blood dead in my veins before I was born. So I rallied my black blood and called upon the African magic man whose powers had to be beyond those of the priest and doctor." Her voice had a catch in it which she struggled to control. "He came at my bidding, the magic man did, and stooped low over my panting child. 'Very, very sick,' he said touching Junior's forehead. 'I don't know if much can be done. You should have called on me sooner. Why did you wait?' I wanted to explain to him that there were many knowledges in this world and on this island and that I didn't know whose might be strongest. Was his the strongest? I asked him. 'I'll tell you what to do,' the magic man said. He peeked out my window. 'That mango tree smothers your house. Too big. Too much fruit. Too long roots. That mango tree means death. Cut it down,' and he jerks on a chain around his neck that has a picture-circle of the sun hanging from it. He pulls on it hard. He looks into my sick Junior's eyes and waves his hands over the child's face. 'Cut that tree,' he repeats, kissing his sun as did the priest his cross as did the doctor stick the tube into his ear.

       "I couldn't know, Mr. Sweet, what power there was to alter things. So I told the magic man, 'We are poor. That great tree feeds us. That great tree shades us. That great tree shields us from the rain. How can all that goodness be the cause of sadness?' The magic man demands upon his leaving, 'That tree takes away the strength from all who live here in this place. Cut it down!'

       "At first I was relieved the magic man had gone But sad. My black blood did me no more good than did my white. Or Indian, for that matter. I am by blood a combination of all the knowing of this earth. There seems no strength to change things for the better. How could it be that cutting the goodness of the tree would save my son? So in my mind I told myself accept, accept ... that has to be what power is.

       "But my son, now thin and fading more, with dry eyes and fingers pulling through his hair cried, 'Mamman, do as magic man say. Cut down tree.'

       "'But, child, there is no purpose to starve us of food, shade and beauty."

       "'Mamman,' his voice came thin as his narrow shoulders, 'please, please for me. I sick. I dead sick. Kill your tree.'

       "'For some crazy whim of those who think they know what no one can ever know?' I snuggled this blanket close under his pointy chin." Again, she held up a flap of the blanket.

       "For two more days I took care of my Junior both all the day and all the night long. I blew food into his mouth through bamboo I hollowed out. And water too. And love. All the love my wanting self could harvest for him. And I thought and thought about where real power to change things could come from. On the third day he died. He choked and sighed and closed his eyes."

       I watched Mrs. Samuel's lips shake and waited for her tears which to my wonder never came. Instead she propped her entire mass up with both elbows sunk into the straw mattress and smiled. A broad, beaming, at first endearing smile. While I stared, it stretched itself and quivered into a bitter, trembling stricture of breath, finally exploding into a horselaugh so intense the candle flames wavered from the force of it.

       "With a machete I went out to hit the tree. I smacked it hard, then harder. For all day and half the nights I bit my fury into the tree. Finally it fell, on the day of my son's burial. It fell into the swamp with a wail of snapping branches. The rot of it still stinks the air where it sinks each year deeper into muck."

       I stood and reached toward her in order to help Mrs. Samuels recline with as much comfort as would be possible back onto her bed. "You thought the mango tree was evil?" I thought aloud.

       "No, no," she stifled a moan. "I have never been certain which advice could be strong enough to save what there is to save. Do you know, Mr. Sweet, what power there is that is the most strong?"

       I watched as she gestured helplessly toward her burning altar of skulls and feathers. Chills shook my body. I stared at the picture of St. Patrick and the Bible open to Revelations resting upon the stone that was the precise color of Junior Two's skin.

Robert Burdette Sweet is Professor Emeritus at California State University and author of novels and short stories, including Blood Warm, a soon to be published novel about his travels around the island of Grenada in the 1950s.  The story "The Severed Tree" is an excerpt from the novel. 

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