Dinners

When I remember family dinners before you and Mom divorced, I remember this:

I'm ten, or nine, or any age before sixth grade, the year Mom resected your whole self from our family unit. When you cook, it's on Sunday evening, the day you ease Mom's burden, and you prepare a traditional Jamaican dish, always. You arch over the stove, scraping slivers of onion and scallion off an oak cutting board into a reservoir of rice and peas.

I sit at the peninsula of counter that carves the kitchen from the rest of our South Miami town-house. I watch as you extract an orange, pumpkin-shaped pepper from a jar's murky liquid. Earth-toned scotch bonnets bob in the jar like tiny brains preserved in formaldehyde.

You make incisions in the pepper, carefully measuring slices against the pot's contents. The muscles in your taut, tawny arms flex then relax, flex then relax, as you sift the rice with a wooden spoon. They're reedy yet powerful, your arms. You dash in piece after piece, stirring and adding until the upsurge of steam produces tears, which you catch in your T-shirt's sleeve.

I smell the pepper from where I sit. I taste it. Scotch bonnet clouds stifle my nostrils, and I squirm atop my stool, sniffling.

When dinner is ready, you announce it by yelling, "Come, nuh," and Mom sits herself beside me at the L-shaped counter.

You drop my plate in front of me. I cull onions and bright bits of pepper, and you suck your teeth as two separate piles mount.

"Boy, eat your food," you say from across the counter.

I tell you I don't like onions.

"That what make the t'ing nice," you say.

Mom adds, "You don' mind the little ones on your cheeseburgers."

"Those aren't real onions," I argue.

You say, "And the burgers. Them hardly real meat."

I shrug. "Can I at least have some water?"

"Wad-er, wad-er," you mock. "It's wahtah." You take a glass from the dish rack and fill it from the faucet. "You don' like Jamaican food?" You say it humorlessly, handing me the glass. "You don' like your heritage?"

"His palate just hasn't matured, yet," Mom says. She takes her fork and starts scooping into the pile I've constructed, but you, with your taut arm and knuckley hand knock her fork away. It's your hand I lock sight on now, so roped with veins it favors a ball of rubber bands. I can hear Mom, beside me, stop chewing.

I hook a luminous scotch bonnet in a tine and drag it to my plate's edge.

"Boy, eat the t'ing." You pierce me with a look that says, This is the last time I'll tell you.

I fork a cluster of rice into my mouth; the heat inspires an upheaval of my stomach. In time, I'll grow to love this heat. When school lets out, I'll frequent the nearby Jamaican restaurant, with its white plastic chairs and tables, matted with flyers for dancehall parties or announcements for carnival. When a fine dining version finally opens in Coral Gables, I'll defame it for Americanizing our dishes, for watering down our culture. And when I leave Miami for college, I'll have to bus for hours to a neighboring city, where a generically Caribbean restaurant promises "Jamaican style" jerk chicken. I'll stand out in the cold when the restaurant doesn't open at the time promised and when they do, I'll order a second to-go plate of their jerk, even when the first tastes something closer to barbecue wings. I'll start calling Mom for recipes and she'll mail care packages with ingredients I can't get in my college town. I'll start cooking oxtail and curry goat for friends and lovers, and I'll begin saying what amounts to "This is the food of my people." In the fridge, I'll keep my own bottle of pickled scotch bonnets. And after I graduate, I'll...