Tout Moun ka Pléwé (Everybody Bawling)

The headlines for our stories down here in the Caribbean always come in graphic type, written by the wind, and sung by the sea, with that murmuring in the water over Kick-Em-Ginny reminding us that Not all skin teeth is good grin.

I often think that a popular history of Grenada, or of Trinidad and Tobago, might have a title like Flight of the Sparrow: From Jean and Dinah to Capitalism Gone Mad. Now, since Hurricane Ivan swoop down and dékatché (destroy) Grenada in September 2004, I’m thinking that Grenada’s history for the half century from 1955 to 2005 might be titled, From Janet to Ivan: Tout Moun ka Pléwé, and this, of course, could also be the title of a calypso, the sung history of the land. This is not a history, not the history I’m thinking about, but some notes toward it.

When Hurricane Janet hit Grenada in 1955, I was four years old. In fact, it was seven days before my fifth birthday. I remember looking outside our house in Hermitage on the morning after Janet. I believe this is my memory, but I couldn’t write this piece as autobiography because memory sometimes tends to be fiction, even when we think otherwise, so let’s call this a true piece of fiction.

That morning, after Janet, I remember seeing a tall coconut tree in the yard near where my grandaunt’s house used to be, the same place where my cousin’s house, built after his return from England, now stands. It was the same coconut tree that, before Janet, used to be behind the house, on the hill separating us from another cousin on the piece of family-land up there. Today, when I tell my mother that the coconut tree had moved on the morning after Janet, and ask her if she remembers that, she laughs a little half don’t-quite-believe-but-can’t-be-sure laugh and says, Well, it couldn’t move, and then she adds, Perhaps, and then she shrugs and says, Meself, I don’t know. And then she comments, But plenty things happen with that Janet there, wi, leaving me to conclude that so much happened that the coconut tree moving from the back of the house and settling itself, fully planted, in the front yard, was not as impossible after Janet as it would have been before.

I remember the coconut tree, but I don’t remember anything about the kitchen, and my mother says that the night before Janet she was in the kitchen turning, in the way that woman always have to turn in kitchen, and her aunt (deceased now), the same grandaunt with the house next door, called out to ask her, What you doing there? Why you don’t go inside? You don’t hear they say storm coming? So you don’t fraid storm then? And although my mother wasn’t really one for obeying—and this is my mother saying, not me—and although she was thinking, Ki storm sa? (What storm is that?) Every time they only bawling storm, storm, and no storm coming, for some reason she decided to obey. So she went inside. And because she had a little piece of kitchen inside the wall house that Aruba money build, she continued what she was doing—and it must have been something she absolutely had to do, as most things are, when women have to do them in kitchen, and in those days she must have been cooking fig or potato or salt fish or something for supper, because it was about six o’clock or something like that, she said, and for supper it would have to be heavy food, not the little piece of wénté (light) bread she eating these days. Anyway, she went inside the wall house and next morning, when she looked outside, there wasn’t one piece of board where the kitchen had been standing the evening before. All the board that used to be the kitchen was down under the cocoa...