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6 One day, a fateful day, sometime in the fourth year of my troubled infancy, as I was just recovering from the asthma that nearly took my life, something particularly terrible happened to My Aunt Joyce and me.1 The morning started out like any other. As usual, Harold’s dutiful wife arose at the crack of dawn, usually after the second cock-crow, went to the outside kitchen, and lit the coal pot to make the hearty breakfast and lunch of boiled bananas, sweet potatoes, salt fish, and callaloo. The night before, she would have remembered to put the dried salted codfish to soak in a bowl of water,ridding it of the excess salt that had enabled its journey from far-off Newfoundland. Then she would come to my room, rip the cover off me, and shake my shoulders to rouse me from my deep sleep.“Yvonne! Yvonne! Get up, up!” I would groan and say: “Me wa’ fe sleep, me tyad.” “You too young fe tyad.Put on yuh clothes and go outside to tek in de fresh morning air.” She repeated this ritual for as long as it took to get me fully awake and out of bed. I would dress and stumble through the door, frowning and grumbling, leaving her and Harold behind in the bedroom. The morning air was cold and damp. I would get goose bumps and shiver until my teeth clattered, whimpering like a puppy dog.When she determined that I had had enough morning air, she would order me to wash my face, clean my teeth with fine salt, and gargle my throat. A cup of hot bitter cerasee tea waited for me at the table.“Drink yuh cerasee tea. It good fe clean out yu blood.” I had to drink this bitter concoction —sweetened with “D sugar,” the poorest quality but most nutritious grade—before I got my breakfast of slimy oats porridge. “Oats porridge good fe you. It mek you bones strong.” All this was part of a health regime to help me shake the debilitating asthma that threatened to stunt my growth and take my life. But it was a breakfast of bitterness that made me vomit and slime that would make me salivate volumes, which I could not swallow to please her. It was a battle of wills to keep me alive. She tried beating me for not eating, but to no avail.“Yu going to sit Chapter 1 Early Childhood Memories, 1947–50 Chapter 1 Early Childhood Memories, 1947–50 7 dere til yu drink dat tea and dat porridge.”So I would sit there until I fell asleep with my face on the tabletop. Later when the sun was hot enough to take the chill out of the bath pan of water that she had set out, My Aunt Joyce gave me my daily bath and talked to me about learning to read and count. She had taught me to count to five using five fingers,two eyes,one nose,ten fingers,and ten toes. Later, she bought me an ABC book and marbles for counting.“One day I will have to send you to Sunday School. I going to make you a nice frilly frock.” I loved the baths because she talked lovingly to me about growing healthy and strong. There was a small tree growing close by, and she would coo about my growing out of the asthma just as the tree grew. Neighbours gave her many compliments on how well she was raising me. She loved it; I was a gift, the child she could not bear herself. ∗∗∗ I would come to understand that this ritual of waking early to cook and feed her husband and send him off to work was the pattern that I was expected to follow when I too became a good Christian wife. She would dish out hefty portions of cooked food in three stacking bowls of an enamel carrier in the following order: in the largest bottom bowl, she would place fingers of boiled bananas and cover them with the cooking water to keep them from hardening. In the second bowl, she would artistically arrange slices of boiled “modder edward” sweet potatoes and, in the third bowl, the cook-up of salt fish, coconut oil, onions, pepper, and callaloo. She would then slide each bowl carefully into the slender metal frame that strung the two-sided handles one on top of the other. Finally, she would...

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