When Amarelle left for work in the morning she stepped off the stoop and turned
left. Turning right was the shortest route to the main roadway but it meant walking
past the vacant lot and the adjacent empty building Blackwelder was working on.
Fellows were always hanging out there, red-eyed, unshaven and unwashed; they
looked dangerously idle. Besides, at some point in that direction the sidewalk
disapeared.
She had to pick her way through tufts of grass, broken glass, dog droppings, oil
stains, plastic garbage bags torn open by the dogs; and her eye always fell on the stuff
people dumped in the vacant lot. Like a refrigerator, "a whole new refrigerator", she
told Radix, who reminded her it was cheaper sometimes to buy a new refrigerator than
to repair the old one.
Turning right, then, she passed the stoop of the corner house owned by ex-police
officer McGuigan; there were idlers there, too, but they made room for her to pass,
and the sidewalk held smooth until she got to the main roadway.
Once at the bus stop she kept her gaze fixed on a point down the road where the
bus, coming up a slope, pulled to the kerb at the stop before hers. This fixed look, the
lift of head, the tightly clamped lips, was intended to put off taxi drivers prowling for
fares to the subway station. They honked invitingly at anyone waiting at bus stops,
shaking your composure and forcing you to signal No!
This brazen street hustling – acceptable on her island with its narrow roadways, and
people who didn't mind being squashed thigh to thigh – struck her as out of order in
this city. These Jamaicans! With their transports along the route! Those minivans with
sliding doors and pounding music and a silent operator with one eye on his sideview
mirror and one hand reaching over his shoulder for the fare!
Amarelle liked riding the buses. They were solid and safe with ample window glass
for looking out, and designated stops along the route. They trundled along with the
wheezing careful movement of pregnant women. They had single seats so you didn't
have to sit beside someone. She could take out a book and read. The bus took her
straight to the hospital on Third Avenue where she worked.
Returning home would have pleased her if there were neighbours to wave to,
people washing their cars, mowing lawns. She needed the friendliness of the people
she knew next door to feel part of any place.
But the moment she stepped off the bus and saw those plump young women in tight
shorts hanging over babies in strollers on the sidewalk, she groaned. This is a tenement
area. Laundry hung out on the fire escape, loud music, children with bad teeth, bright
paper litter on the streets. This is tenement living!
She could have survived; she could have held her nose and stepped past the human
clutter; clamber over the fellows on the stoop without a murmur of protest; if only she
could open her door and walk into a living room she had furnished, a bathroom she had
fixed up; a home with hanging plants, nice curtains, simple smooth things from Ikea.
But Radix was indifferent to all that, to what he considered bourgeois tendencies.
(from Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel! a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 