Tea by the Sea

A Novel

Donna Hemans

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781597098533
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Karibische Literatur

A woman searches for the daughter who was taken from her long ago in "a powder keg of a novel, where secrets and lies explode into truth and consequences" (Marlon James, National Book Award finalist and author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf ). To find the daughter taken from her, Plum Valentine must first locate the child's father, who walked out of a hospital with the day-old baby girl without explanation. Seventeen years later, weary of her unfruitful search, Plum sees an article in a community newspaper with a photo of the man for whom she has spent half her life searching. He has become an Episcopal priest. Her plan: confront him and walk away with the daughter he took from her. From Brooklyn to the island of Jamaica, Tea by the Sea traces Plum's circuitous route to find her daughter—and explores how Plum's and the priest's love came apart. "The forbidden love story of Plum and Lenworth comes alive in this heart-rending novel... heady twists and turns delivered in an urgent and beautiful prose." —Lauren Francis-Sharma, author of Book of the Little Axe "A moving portrait of identity, belonging, family, immigration, and the power of maternal love." — Washington Independent Review of Books

PART 1

Unforgettable, and Forgettable

1

Lenworth was back on the main road to Anchovy proper, past Long Hill’s deep ravines and its corners and its peak, and long past the canopy of trees that shaded the steep road snaking up from the coast. He was on foot this time, with the baby in the crook of one arm and an oversized bag that he pulled with the other hand. Having mistaken one house on a hill for the one he sought, he was lost and the driver who had taken him there had already left. On that stretch of road, without the towering trees the sun’s heat was like a glove on his body, too close and too heavy, and the sweat dribbling along his spine and in every crevice more of an annoyance than a cooling mechanism.

He worried about the baby and the heat, whether she was too young to be so exposed to the elements. Still, he kept her covered under a thin blanket; thin socks covered her toes. The car ride had lulled her to sleep, and she slept as if she had already grown accustomed to the sounds around her—a cow mooing in the distance, a dog’s disinterested bark followed by the growl of another, a couple of goat kids maa-ing nearby, and honks from a vehicle that navigated the hilly road’s deep corners. Since she was quiet, Lenworth suspected she was comfortable, and he willed her to remain that way—at least until he got to the house, which he imagined couldn’t be too far away.

The road had widened and flattened, and to his left were the abandoned railway tracks. That was his mistake; having sat for two hours already in the car, he had simply wanted to be at the house on the hill and had forgotten the written instructions to turn left at the junction where the tracks crossed the main road directly in front of the secondary school with the blue and white walls. Now he watched for the point where the tracks began curving toward the main road and an unpaved road to the left of the railroad crossing. He watched for the vehicles approaching from behind and passing on his right, turning to face the road each time a vehicle approached. He was careful not to brush up against the hip-high fever grass with its long, sharp blades or the patches of cowitch that would surely leave temporary welts on any exposed skin. Had it been another time, he would have pulled a handful of the stringy love bush and twirled the thin, yellow strands of the parasitic vine around his fingers. He loved the rubbery feel of it, how easily it snapped apart in his hands. Yet it was sturdy and resilient, able to regenerate itself from just a small piece.

The ground was hot—so heated the asphalt had softened and bubbled in places. The ordinariness of it all—the late summer afternoon’s heat softening the asphalt, the sounds of natural life itself persevering—comforted him. He needed the comfort, for there was nothing ordinary or comforting about what led him to that road that day. But he wouldn’t think about that—not then, not there.

At last, he saw the point at which the railroad tracks crossed the main road. He saw the school, children in uniform, the open field next to the school. Further up that unpaved road another fork, the Nurse’s house with the scrolled iron gate, and finally the overgrown yard behind a cut-stone wall. At the gate were two letters, an “M” and an “O,” the only remnants of the name someone had once given the property.

Up on the hill was the abandoned house, a small and compact building that looked like it grew out of the side of a cliff. There was nothing elegant about the house. Two concrete columns that were once painted white held up a small verandah and framed a door to a cellar. To the right of the columns, a set of concrete steps rose up to the red floor of the verandah and the aqua railing that hemmed it in. The back of the house jutted out of the hillside, or so it seemed. The kitchen and dining room backed up to a small cliff, with only a sliver of space between the walls and the cliff in which ferns and moss grew. The rooms—three, if he counted only the distinct ones, or four, if he counted the space in the middle with a curtain for a wall—were small, but the house would do. And despite the duck ants that formed black nests along the walls, the rotting floorboards he would have to replace, and the temperamental plumbing and electrical work, the house would be his refuge.

The line of children and grandchildren, who would have claim to the house and most of whom had migrated abroad, had no use for it—too small, too remote, too old, too generous with old-world charm (if it could even be called charming at all). Lenworth’s own father, who had migrated to England and never returned, had no use for it either. Even if his father wanted it, he would have been further down the line of relatives with competing interests in the house. The house was now temporarily Lenworth’s, so long as he paid the annual taxes and for any necessary upkeep.

Lenworth put the baby on one of the beds and stepped back outside for a long look down the hill, out across an old fowl coop, over the fruit trees that crowded one half of the hill, and down on two houses visible in the distance. He imagined his older relatives standing on the verandah as he was, as far back as the 1930s and 1940s, and looking out at what they had managed to acquire despite the myriad obstacles set up to ensure their failure. He shook his head. “It will do,” he told himself. Then he stepped back inside in the semi-dark to set about boiling water on a makeshift stove and mixing the baby’s formula.

Anchovy welcomed Lenworth. Some folks remembered his family name, Ramsey; his granduncle, Baba Orville; his great-grandmother, Adina; and that Adina had eight sons and one daughter—Lenworth’s grandmother who married and left Anchovy for some other town. And there was Miss V—102 years old with the memory of an elephant—who knew his family tree and could recite almost perfectly who begat whom. Around Anchovy and in nearby Montpelier and Mount Carey, people introduced him as Sister Adina’s great-grandson, cousin to the Ramseys, and relation of Baba Orville who used to own a rum shop in Anchovy and lived over on the road that ran behind the train tracks.

“Them dead long time now, and who lef’ gone abroad. Him come to take over the house that lock up all these years.”

“He come from good people.”

Such was his welcome into Anchovy. He was subsumed, welcomed without question, and pitied for having so young a baby to raise on his own.

Anchovy in those days was quiet, a little slip of a town seven miles from Montego Bay on the main road from Reading on the north coast to Savanna-la-Mar on the south coast. Except for a bird sanctuary off the main road that led to Anchovy, rafting on the Lethe River, and an abandoned railway station, Anchovy and the small towns immediately surrounding it weren’t known for much. Anchovy wasn’t a market town—not like Brown’s Town, which Lenworth had just left and which swelled on market day (Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays) with vendors from nearby and faraway towns, who spread out beyond the covered market in makeshift stalls along the road or simply pushed their bunched or packaged goods at potential customers with a plea or a price. Even a Thursday afternoon in Brown’s Town, when stores shut early to prepare for the Friday and Saturday afternoon swell of customers, felt more alive than Anchovy did. But the relative quiet of the town wasn’t what mattered. What did? Plum wouldn’t find him there. Really, no one would look in that particular location for Lenworth, since he had only an indirect connection to Anchovy through distant relatives. More important, it was not a connection his immediate family members or acquaintances would know.

Indeed, Plum looked for Lenworth. She returned to their small cottage on property that at one time had been a large pimento and cattle estate. The pimento and the cattle were long gone, the surrounding land subdivided and developed as residential plots. All that was left of the estate were the cottage and the larger house, which from the outside looked like it would crumble without much prompting from a single puff of wind, then decay. But it was only an illusion. Inside was an artist’s dream. Every inch of wood on the floor and the ceiling had been replaced with hand-sanded and hand-carved mahogany. The plaster walls had been rebuilt with new concrete walls, which were painted a light cocoa, orange, and green, the paint brushed on to make the walls look as distressed as the outer perimeter of the house. Necessary, modern conveniences were interspersed with remnants from another time—enamel bowls, yabbas, and shutters that banged in the breeze.

On her return, Plum passed the main house with its front walkway flanked by two large monkey jars, flowering bougainvillea and hibiscus, and dwarfed by the flame of the forest trees behind it, both in full bloom. The flowering plants, with their red and pink and yellow blooms celebrating life, taunted and teased, made tears flood Plum’s eyes again. She walked past the house to the cottage in the back and found the rooms had been stripped of Lenworth’s things—his CDs and books and papers and clothes. He didn’t have much, but everything belonging to him was gone. Plum’s clothes hanging in the wardrobe were meager, forlorn, and childish, a reminder that she had only just begun her adult life.

Plum ran back out—tottered, really—and found her landlady, Mrs. Murray, the artist who had given new life to the decrepit and rundown historic house.

“Look at you,” Mrs. Murray said. She held out her hands, palms upward and fingers splayed, surprise and joy in her voice.

“Have you seen him?” Plum asked.

“Lenworth? No.”

“He’s gone.”

“What you mean, gone?” The levity in Mrs. Murray’s voice was absent now. She looked over Plum with one sweeping glance, capturing Plum’s heavy breasts and swollen belly and the distraught look on her face. She caught Plum before she fell, held her up, linked their arms, and walked her back to the cottage.

Inside the cottage, Plum lay on the floor and bawled, rocking and heaving on the ground like a Pentecostal possessed by the Holy Spirit, throwing off the landlady attempting to hold and calm her. When she had no tears or sobs left to pour out and no strength to stand up, she knelt and looked around at the borrowed furniture that came with the cottage, then stood and looked around again for something of Lenworth’s, a handwritten explanation, a clue to where he had gone and why. But she found nothing, no sign that he had lived there at all.

Had it not been for her breasts, achingly full, it would have all felt like a miserable dream, a nightmare that Plum wasn’t actually living, and from which she would wake at any minute.

Neither had words for what had happened. Lenworth was gone and so was her child, the daughter she had planned to name Marissa. They let the silence steep. For Plum, the quiet was less painful than the sounds of life—the twitter and buzz of birds and bees, the swish of leaves, the wind in the trees, a donkey braying in the distance. Mrs. Murray’s lone parrot, which had escaped its cage again, cawed incessantly, taunting them from a guava tree.

“I hate that bird.” Plum did the only thing she could in that moment. She stepped outside, picked up a small stone, and threw it at the parrot, forgetting that its wings had been clipped to prevent it from flying away.

The parrot flitted from one limb to another, cocked its head, and repeated what Lenworth had taught it. “One plus one equals two.” It paused, then said, “Lenworth, leave the bird alone,” repeating the two phrases exactly how it had heard them. Day after day, Lenworth had stood by the parrot’s cage feeding it dried corn and repeating “one plus one equals two” with the expectation that the bird would fool an unsuspecting stranger into thinking it could count. And Plum, if she was nearby, always told Lenworth to leave the bird alone. But the joke was now an unwanted reminder of what had been. Plum reached for another, larger stone.

“Come, come.” Mrs. Murray pulled Plum’s hand back. “Don’t mix my bird up in this business with you and him. Come lay down and rest. I going to make you some soup, and when you wake up we’ll figure this out.”

2

At another time, Lenworth would have been in a school helping students with chemistry experiments or tutoring a student in math, teaching Pythagoras’s theorem and square root and cube root. Now, he was on the verandah of the abandoned house in Anchovy, again looking down the hill, across the overgrown plot of fruit trees on the land he had claimed as his refuge, and at a house with a rusting zinc roof. Algebra seemed abstract, and the symbols and rules to solve the equations like something that belonged to another era. Even the elements of the periodic table seemed like a useless thing to teach. Nothing he had taught had any use for him here on the hill, and he imagined that his former students who didn’t go on to a university would eventually say the same about advanced math or chemistry.

This—the detour from teaching high school math while saving toward an engineering degree—was temporary. He didn’t know yet how he would get back on track to his ultimate goal—the engineering degree—but he knew one thing: Picking up and starting over was far easier for him as a man than it would have been for Plum. Single fathers got pity; single or unwed mothers generally didn’t, and more often than not, they suffered setback after setback that hardened their hears and blunted their future.

The sun dusted everything with a pale yellow. Dew glistened on the grass and to the left of the verandah, water dripped from a broken gutter onto the house’s exposed concrete footing. Away from his property and in the flat land below, a woman hung clothes on a line. Lenworth stood for a long while looking on, trying to decipher the woman’s age. He saw no children, no other person walking around the yard, and from that distance he thought the woman was older, a retiree perhaps.

Looking out like that on the acre of land, the houses in the valley, Lenworth imagined the pride a rich planter must have felt when he looked out from his verandah at the...