The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir Read Online Free Page B

“Grandma, how come you can’t read? Them never have any school when you was small?”
    “Ah, me child…” Grandma wipes the sweat from her glistening forehead. “Go and get the comb and make me comb your hair while me talking.” I want to hear the story, so I get the comb without murmuring.
    Grandma undoes each braid and runs the comb through it. When she is done she gathers all the hair and runs the comb through the entire mass. The sharp teeth of the comb rake across my scalp. I try hard not to cry. But soon I am shrinking into the floor and wiping the cascading tears.
    Grandma sucks her teeth. “Stacey, is cry you really crying? Me think you did want to hear the story. You don’t want me fi tell you?”
    I wipe my face and nod.
    “All right, then, stop the crying and make me tell you.”
    She lifts the comb and rakes it across my scalp. I burst into a fresh round of tears. Grandma drops the comb and raises her right hand to God. “Jesus, if you not busy, come take a look at this sorrowful child!”
    She adjusts my head for leverage. “Stacey, I don’t know why you is so ’fraid of this nice head of hair. Is not soft like Delano own, but it not tough like them little naygar children own either.”
    She parts the hair in two equal sections, and oils the part. “Your hair is just like butter, soft and nice.” Pull. Drag. Plait. Part again. Wail.
    “Only Jesus know why you bawling like that! You just want to look like you don’t have a good-God soul who own you! You want to go just go ’bout the place with a fowl nest ’pon yuh head? You don’t have no mother, but I want people fi know that you have somebody who taking care of you.”
    I try to picture my mother combing my hair, but I don’t know what she looks like. We have no pictures of her. Grandma smears the sticky grease from her hands onto my face. I smell onions and scallions on her fingers as she wipes the snot from my nose.
    “All right, all right, Stacey, don’t bother cry no more. Make me tell you the story that will show you how much you have to give the Lord God thanks for. Let me tell you how, from the very first day, the God up in heaven was looking after you.”
    “Grandma, me know the story of how me born already. Me want to know why you don’t know how to read.”
    She sighs and pulls me into the folds of her floral skirt. The fabric reeks of wood smoke, fried chicken, and washing soap. “Stacey, me gal, if I ever tell you ’bout my life—Lawd Jesus, if—” She pulls her handkerchief from her bosom and wipes her eyes. I look up into her eyes brimming with tears. I stop breathing.
    “I wasn’t even eight years old when me mother, Mama Lou, stop me from going to school. She was a midwife—but she was sickly—so she did need me fi work. She couldn’t read either, so she never think that book-learning so important. Me never want to leave school, but me have to do what she say.”
    I can’t think of Grandma as a little girl. And it is stranger still to see her crying. She wipes her eyes and continues. “She send me to Kingston to work with a woman name Mrs. Levy. In all me life I don’t think I work as hard as I work for that woman. Eight years old and me was peeling green bananas, soaking salt-fish, cutting up the onion and scallion to cook food. And you have to believe me when me tell you that I don’t stop working from then. It was one domestic job after the other.”
    “But Miss Sis say that them have schools for big people. Why you never go when you was bigger?”
    She smiles and touches my face. “Well, things not always so easy, you know. By the time me was fifteen me start to have the children. Me had to work fi feed them.”
    I don’t know what to say to that.
    “But because me couldn’t read me couldn’t get no permanent job. One woman tell me she can’t hire me fi cook fi her family because she don’t want me mistake bleach fi water and poison the whole of them. Is only God make me find this job at the