Down Behind God's Back
An unfinished blessing for Barbados... my country, my home
There is a saying in Barbados that for every church, there are two rum shops.
The island, which spans 166 square miles, is known for its rich spirituality. Faith is the manure which bares the fruit of civilization. There is really no other way to explain the magic of Barbados than of it being God’s grace. To be surrounded by such beauty, and to know it deeply, is cause for prayer.
My grandmother’s house shares a plot of land with a small Methodist church. Because of this, my childhood is molded not by sight, but by sound. The sound of worship, to be exact. As a little girl, I made a home for myself in the guest room at the back of my grandmother’s house. The room had been added as an extension to the home sometime in the early 2000s, but you would not realize it unless you paid attention to the way that room holds the weight of one’s foot, as opposed to the rest of the house. Despite being the newest part, it feels the least secure. The rest of the house is cement and heavy and secured. The structural integrity of the room is in tact, but it lacks the reliability that other rooms have been granted for centuries of existence.
Between the floral sheets, handmade chestnut bed, and shaded bathroom — a bathroom with one small window that, despite not providing much of a view, allows you to hear the doves sing sweetly — I made space for myself. I know Barbados dearly. If you ask me about midnight on the island I will tell you about the rhythmic dance of the wings of crickets, the churning of an oscillating fan, a broken down Mitsubishi slowly passing down an unpaved road, its radio crooning calypso. I will tell you about the particularities of tropical silence. How its weightlessness is vastly different from congested New York skylines. If you ask me about Barbados at 4:00pm, I will talk about the screams of chickens begging for salt bread, stale from being left out despite my insistence that I would come back and eat it. You will hear about the jingle of a BICO ice cream truck, promising a treat so sweet your teeth will ache, but it would be okay because this pain only cost one dollar.
If you ask me about Barbados at 8:00am on Sunday, I will tell you about prayer. Behind my grandmother’s house, and away from the scent of frying fish and damp laundry, I listened to service. In Barbados, the doors are always open. Churches have pews crafted from rich chestnut, which do nothing to insulate the calls of God’s worshippers. If anything, their voices are amplified, becoming one booming call that carries the word of the Lord far beyond the walls of my grandmother’s house. As a child, I could not imagine sitting in church for longer than two hours. Until I was 13, my mom would send my brother and I to stay with my grandparents from June to August. Under their rule, I attended bible study five days per week and early morning Sunday school. I remember begging not to go, knowing that I would be hot and hungry and did not want to stand in front of the congregation and sing about how awesome my God is. I was young and unappreciative and I was under the impression that everything in my life happened because my mother said it was so. My grandmother had no tolerance for petulance, and what she wanted to happen was what would happen.
At 13, I no longer had to sit in a makeshift classroom with the other kids, reciting passages from the Old and New Testament. I got a promotion and sat alongside my aunts and grandmother, feeling the wooden pews beneath my legs.
Church is where I learned to pay attention. What I took in first was not the tall stained glass windows or the vaulted ceiling, but the people. In New York, you can spot a West Indian from a mile away. This association extends beyond the accent or the silver bangles or a last name like “Hall” or “Knight.” It is something in the blood and the body. It is an idea that we have a uniquely shared history. In a baptist church in Barbados, this feeling is magnified. Never in my life have I been around people with such an intimate familiarity of one another.
Then, there are the clothes. Despite gaining its independence from 300 years of British rule in 1966, Barbados is a country led by English respectability — my mother still knows all the words to “God Save the Queen,” and has genuine respect for the song.
On the island, church is the opportunity to not just pray, but to look good. You see men and women in their eighties and nineties, adorned in lace and silk and sequined fascinators. Little girls, whose faces are shined from thick petroleum jelly, boast freshly parted hair and socks with matching gloves and lace trim. Their dresses are starched and divinely white. The little boys are the picture of gentlemanly benevolence. Dapper in their slacks and shined loafers, they have sparkling teeth and idle hands. Disobedience is rare for fear of being scolded, not by God, but by a grandmother who rules her home with an iron leash.
There is an air of regality that swallows the older women who sit prim and silent, beside taking a moment to mumble a “praise Jesus” every couple of minutes. Their backs are ramrod straight and I have always felt inclined to hold their hands, for no other reason than wanting to know if, through touch, they can impart some wisdom or guidance that will teach me how to be so still.
_______
It took me five years to go back to church after my grandmother passed away. I remember wearing a black silk dress — the same dress I wore to senior formal and thought was the first real sign of maturity because the bust did not accommodate me wearing a bra — and obnoxiously tall platform heels to the funeral. I cried so hard and inhaled so fast that I swallowed my tissue and had to silently gag it up behind thinly veiled attempts at clearing my throat. At the time, this death felt like something that had only happened to me. I was the one who had to move in to her freshman year dorm three days after the funeral and I was the one who moved over 3,000 miles away from home and I was the one to whom my grandmother’s last words were “I’ll see you soon.” Six years later and my brain can only process snapshots of that day. What I remember the most is my attempt at gauging everybody else’s reactions to laying my grandmother to eternal rest.
My mother wore sunglasses throughout the entire funeral, something I nagged her about at the time. It is only with time, and thinking about my mother as an independent entity — separate from the moniker “mom” — that I realize these sunglasses were her attempt at respecting my grief. My grandmother’s passing signaled a disruption in our lineal tree. There was both a generational and cultural hierarchy that provided a line that could never be crossed. My grandparents were not apathetic people, but their characters were not defined by an overzealous sensitivity or need for affirmations. While I knew my grandmother for 19 years — and I only really “knew” her for one, since the idea of death was not something resting comfortably in my mind and I did not feel the need to probe her about her childhood and her aspirations — it was from a distance. I knew she loved me more than anything in the world, and I her, but there was so much of her that I did not know.
My mother, on the other hand, was her daughter for 60 years. When I call her “mommy” and think about wanting to live inside her skin, I have become acutely aware of how excruciatingly painful it would be to not be able say those things and hear a response. To call “mommy” into the air and only have the memory of a voice, as opposed to the real thing. I have been slowly trying to get my mom to talk about her childhood and to let my grandmother live on through me, as well. I have my mother’s cackle and OCD and perfectionism and addiction to chocolate, but I wonder what of my grandmother she has. The things that are not personality traits, but physical indications of shared genealogy. ___________________________________________________________________________
I had to dig out my old journal because I knew I wrote this on paper, but hadn’t typed it up into Substack - I also never really finished it, hence the cut short ending hahah. Since I’m OOO this week I finally had time to dig into my old work. woo! vulnerability!
lots of love,
Jasmine <3
“The wood is mahogany, not chestnut”…ok miss girl
My mom already found a spelling mistake whatever mane nobody’s perfect