The Village They Bought

Coins in the Wheelbarrows

Hester Bascom counted money the way other women shelled peas, without looking, talking the whole time, and she never lost one.

On the morning of the purchase she had been counting since four. The lamp in the cooper's house burned palm oil and smoked a little, and the smoke hung under the thatch with the smell of the mud floor, which she had swept and wet down the night before so the dust would not fly into the coins. Jonas had built her a counting board out of a barrel head, greenheart planed smooth, with a lip around the edge so nothing rolled away. On the board sat the silver of sixty-three people.

There were Spanish dollars with their pillars worn soft, and British shillings, and the little bits that the market women called "a bit" and spent four at a time. There were guilders from the old Dutch days, which some of the men swore were no good now and which Hester knew to be good silver whatever stamp was on them. Some coins were black from years in a calabash buried under a provision ground, scrubbed with lime and sand until her fingers stung. Each pile had a scrap of cloth under it, and each cloth had a knot tied in one corner, a different knot for each family, so that she would know without asking whose savings she was touching.

"You going to blind yourself," Jonas said from the doorway. He had been out to the trench to wash his face and his beard dripped.

"Then I will count blind," she said. "Hand me the lamp closer."

He brought it and stood behind her, near enough to be felt, far enough not to be in her light. Outside the kiskadees had started shouting their own name, and behind them was the noise that never stopped on this coast, the long breath of the sea coming in over the mud.

The total was twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars, and it was all here, and it had taken them six years.

Six years since the first of August in 1834, when the law in England said they were no longer property and then, in the same breath, said they must work four years more as apprentices on the same estates for the same masters, for wages so thin you could see through them. Two years since the first of August in 1838, when apprenticeship ended and the whole coast walked out into the road singing, with nowhere to walk to. Hester had been born on Plantation Concord in 1801. She knew every dam and trench of it. She had been owned on it for most of her life. She was now about to own it.

Not alone. Sixty-three of them. Thirty-one women and thirty-two men, and the women had put in more.

---

By seven the others had come to the cooper's yard, and the yard was full of people pretending to be calm.

Old Prudence had brought her grandchildren in their good shirts. Cudjoe the boatman had walked in from his house by the koker with his wife on his arm, and she had on a headtie of madras cloth, red and yellow checks, folded into a shape that stood up like a crown. Joseph Arno, who could read and write because a schoolmaster at the chapel in the next village had taught him by lamplight when he was a boy, carried the book. It was a ledger with a marbled cover bought in Georgetown for more than anybody wanted to think about, and the first pages were blank and stiff and smelled of glue.

"You write the date first," Hester told him. "Then everybody name. Not the number. The name."

"That is sixty-three names, Miss Hester."

"I know how many it is."

He grinned and licked the point of the pencil. Joseph was nineteen and wore spectacles with one lens cracked, and people teased him and then came to him at night to have letters read.

There were three wheelbarrows. Jonas had made the wheels himself, solid wallaba with iron rims. The coins went into canvas bags, the bags into the barrows, and over the bags went a layer of plantain leaves and then a sack, so that anybody on the road would see three barrows of green plantains going to market and nothing more. It was Prudence's idea. She had huckstered that road for thirty years and knew what thieves ignored.

"Plantains," Cudjoe said, looking at the barrows. "Twenty-two thousand dollar of plantains."

"Most expensive plantains in Demerara," said his wife.

They went out onto the public road in a line. It was the dry season, the short one, and the road was hard red clay with a crust of dust that the barrows' wheels broke through with a crunch. On the north side ran the trench, black water with lilies on it and small fish turning under the leaves. Beyond the trench lay the abandoned fields of Concord, which had been cotton once, white as surf in the old days, and had gone to razor grass and wild cane, with mangrove pushing in from the shore. The cotton had failed all along this coast when sugar took over and the owners went where the money was. That was why the estate was for sale. That was why sixty-three people who had been counted in its inventory, like the cattle and the coppers, could now count out its price.

On the south side the land ran back for miles, flat as a table, toward a line of dark trees that was the backdam, where the cultivated land ended and the swamp began. Everything on this coast was flat. Everything was lower than the sea. The sea was always up there, beyond the dam, higher than the floors of their houses at every spring tide, and the only reason they were not all drowned was a long hump of earth and a few wooden gates.

---

The attorney for the owners sat at a table on the gallery of the old manager's house. The house stood on tall greenheart posts, and the wind came under it from the sea, smelling of salt and mud and mangrove roots. A clerk sat beside him with a pen.

The barrows came up to the foot of the steps. Jonas lifted the plantain leaves off and the leaves fell on the ground, bright green and already curling, and there were the canvas bags.

"You will count it here," the attorney said. He was polite in the way that is worse than rudeness.

"We count it already," Hester said. "But you may count it again."

So they counted it again, on the gallery, for four hours.

Hester stood at the clerk's elbow, and every time his lips moved she moved hers, and twice she said "No, sir," and put her finger on a pile, and twice he found she was right. The heat climbed. The sun came round onto the gallery and the coins grew warm to the touch. Down in the yard the sixty-three sat in the shade under the floor, passing water in a gourd and a cake of cassava bread a woman from up the river had traded for salt fish, thin and crisp and tasting of smoke. Children slept with their heads in their mothers' laps.

Joseph Arno sat on the bottom step with the book on his knees and wrote the names. Each person came to him and said their name, some the name the estate had given them, some a name chosen since, one or two both, and he wrote both. When Hester's turn came she told him to write Hester Bascom, which was her mother's name and her own, and beside it to write her trade, Huckster and Laundress, and beside that Treasurer, which she had not been until a meeting under the tamarind tree the week before.

At two in the afternoon the clerk laid down the last coin and wrote a number and turned the paper round for the attorney, and the attorney looked at it a long time, and then he signed.

There was no cheering. Instead came a long low hum from many throats, the noise you make when you put down something heavy you have carried a long way. Then Prudence began to laugh, and that set off her grandchildren, and soon half the yard was laughing for no reason anybody could have said.

---

The first meeting of the proprietors of Concord was held that evening under the tamarind, and the first thing they did was argue.

They argued about the name. Some wanted to keep Concord, because it meant agreement and they would need plenty of that. Some wanted a new name entirely, one that did not belong to any owner. Cudjoe wanted Freedom, and his wife told him every second village on the coast would be called Freedom by Christmas. In the end they kept the old word and put Village after it, which was Hester's suggestion, and which pleased nobody completely and so was accepted.

They argued about the land. It would be held in common, the whole estate, front to back, the way they had bought it. Each family would have a house lot along the front, near the road, and a share of the cultivation behind. Nobody would sell a share to an outsider without the meeting's yes. Joseph wrote "held in common" twice because his pencil broke on the first.

They argued about the koker, and that was the argument that mattered.

The koker stood where the main drainage trench met the sea dam, a heavy gate of greenheart timber set in a frame between two walls of brick, with a door that slid up and down in grooves. When the tide went out the door was lifted, and all the fresh water that had collected on the land from the rain ran out through it onto the mud flats and into the brown sea. When the tide came in the door was let down, and the sea, pressing against it, held it shut. Without that gate, and the dam it sat in, Concord would be a swamp in a month and a lagoon in a year. The estate had let both go. The dam had low places where the waves came over at spring tides. The koker's door was swollen and stuck halfway, and two of the winch teeth were broken.

"Who pay the kokerman?" somebody asked.

"Who fix the dam?" asked somebody else.

"We," said Hester. "All of we. Every family a day on the dam every month, man or woman, and every family a shilling a quarter for the kokerman and the iron." She looked round the circle of faces in the dusk, lit by two lamps on an upturned barrel. "You think we bought a piece of land? We bought a piece of the sea's business. The sea don't care who own it. The sea want it back."

Joseph wrote that down word for word, which embarrassed her later.

Cudjoe said he would take the koker. He had worked boats all his life and he knew the tides better than anybody, and he lived near it already. They voted him a shilling a week, more than the village could afford. Hester would find it.

---

That night she could not sleep. She got up and went out without waking Jonas and walked up the middle walk, the dam that ran from the road back toward the cultivation, and then turned and walked the other way, north, toward the sea.

The sea dam rose in front of her, black against the stars. She climbed it, her feet finding the old cattle path, and stood on top in the wind. The tide was out. The mud flats stretched away below her, gray and shining under a thin moon, with little channels running across them like veins in the back of a hand. Far out she could hear the waves and smell them, salt and fish and the silt the great rivers poured into this sea, which made it brown as a cart road, never blue, not once in her life.

Below her, to the left, the koker stood in its brick walls, and she could see a figure there with a lantern. Cudjoe. He had not been able to wait. He was working the winch, and as she watched, the door groaned and rose a hand's width and stuck, and he cursed in a voice that carried to her on the wind, and then water began to pour through the gap, black water off their land, off her land, gurgling out over the mud and spreading in a dark fan toward the sea.

She went down to help him, bad knee and all. She put her hands beside his on the winch handle, which was slick with river damp and cold, and on the count of three they leaned, and the door came up another hand.

"It will need new teeth," Cudjoe said.

"I will find the money for the teeth," Hester said.

They stood together and watched the water go out. It made a sound like somebody pouring a bucket that never emptied. A heron lifted off the mud and went away low over the flats. On Good Hope, the sugar estate next door, which still had its owners and its steam engine, the night shift was firing the coppers, and on the wind came the smell of burning cane trash and hot syrup, the sweet scorched smell of every crop season of her life. She had hated that smell for thirty-nine years. Standing at the koker of her own village with the water running out, she found she could stand it.

In the morning Joseph Arno came to her house with the book and asked her to make her mark under the minutes of the first meeting. Instead of an X she wrote the H of her name, which he had shown her once on a slate. It was crooked. It was the first letter she had ever put on paper, and it was in a book that belonged to sixty-three people, and the land under the book was theirs to the low-water line.

The Ship Called Kestrel Bay

The sea changed color on the ninety-fourth day, and Ramdai thought at first that something had gone wrong with her eyes.

For three months it had been every blue there was. Dark blue off the Cape where the ship had rolled so hard the water jars broke loose and slid the length of the lower deck. Then one morning she climbed up for her turn in the air and the water alongside was green, and by afternoon it was brown, brown as the Ganges in flood at home, thick and opaque and churning, and she could not believe that a sea so far from any river could look like that.

"Mud," said Bhola beside her. He had his arms folded on the rail and his chin on his arms. "Somebody's land, washing out."

"Whose?"

He shrugged. He had been sick the first month, and his wrists looked like a boy's.

The ship was the Kestrel Bay, out of Calcutta in the cold season of 1845 with two hundred and forty people below decks. Ramdai had come down to the depot at Garden Reach with Bhola from a village near Arrah after the second bad harvest, because a man in a clean white wrap at the market had said there was work across the water, five years, a wage paid in silver, a free passage home at the end of it. He had said the name of the place, and nobody in the village had heard it, and he had said it was near Calcutta, which was a lie. She had understood that it was a lie by the third week at sea. By then it did not matter. There was no road back from the middle of the ocean.

Eleven people had died on the voyage. She had learned all their names and said them over at night, the way her grandmother said the names of the family's dead, so that somebody in this place would know.

---

They anchored off the bar at the mouth of the Demerara River because the ship was too deep to cross it until the tide was full. From the anchorage the land was a line. That was all. A long dark line on the brown water with a fringe of trees and, here and there, a tall chimney with smoke going sideways. No hills. No rise anywhere. A woman beside her called Jhuri who had become her friend on the ship, said that it looked like a country somebody had drawn with one stroke and then forgotten to finish.

When the tide came up they crossed and went up the river. The water here was even browner, and warm, and the banks were mud and roots and the big low trees that stood in the water on their own legs. A smell came off the land in waves: rot and flowers and smoke and, behind everything, something sweet and burnt that made her mouth water and her stomach turn at the same time. Bhola said it was sugar. He had cut cane at home for a landlord and he knew. Ramdai said that sugar did not smell like that. He said it did when you boiled a whole country of it.

At the town they were counted again and a doctor looked in their mouths. Then they were put into carts, open carts behind mules, and taken out along a red road that ran east along the coast with the sea on one side and the fields on the other. The light was enormous, with nothing to stop it, coming off the trenches and the whitewashed walls until she squinted for days.

They passed the gates of estates with names painted on boards. They passed a village where women in bright headwraps stood in the doorways of little houses with palm thatch and looked at the carts going by, and one of them lifted her hand, and Ramdai, not knowing what else to do, lifted hers back. They passed a long earthen bank on the left that hid the sea entirely, so that all she could see of it was the spray where the waves hit, flying up over the top like smoke. Then the carts turned in at a gate where the board said Good Hope, where she would live for five years, and as it turned out for the rest of her life.

---

The estate gave them a room in a long low building divided into rooms, twelve doors in a row under one roof of wallaba shingles, with a gallery along the front. The room had a mud floor and a wooden shelf and nothing else. The walls between rooms did not reach the roof, so that every cough and every argument and every baby crying went from one end of the range to the other. On the first night it rained.

She had never heard rain like it. At home the rain came in its season, heavy, yes, but the roofs were thatch and the rain on thatch was a soft thick sound, a hand patting a pillow. Here it hit the shingles like gravel thrown, and then it came harder, and the noise was so loud she could not hear Bhola speaking from the other side of the room. Water came through two places in the roof and she put their one brass water pot under one and her own cupped hands under the other until she gave up. The trench in front of the range rose until it was at the step. Frogs began, like a crowd of old men arguing. In the morning everything was steaming, the ground, the walls, the cloth she wore, and the sun came up red over the cane and the air smelled of wet earth and of the boiling house, which had never stopped through the whole night.

The women's gang weeded. She learned that on the second day. A driver walked them out along the middle walk to a field of young cane, and they bent and pulled grass from between the rows from first light until the sun was straight up, and then they rested an hour and bent again. The cane leaves cut fine lines on her forearms that stung with sweat. The mud in the furrows was the color of liver and sucked at her feet. The wage was less than the man in the clean white wrap had said, and from it the estate took money for the rice they were given, and for the doctor, and for a cooking pot she had not asked for.

Jhuri complained, and was fined, and complained about the fine, and was fined again. Ramdai kept quiet.

---

There was a market on Saturday afternoons where the public road met the dam between Good Hope and the village next door, and in her third week Ramdai went to it with Jhuri and four coins.

The village was called Concord. Jhuri had learned that from a man on the gang who had learned it from somebody else. The people there had been slaves on these estates, he said, owned like cattle by the same kind of men who now held the indentures of the people of Good Hope, and when they were freed they had refused to keep working for those men for nothing, and they had put their money together and bought a whole estate of their own. Jhuri thought this was a story.

The market was a row of trays and mats along the side of the road, under a big tree with feathery leaves and brown pods hanging in bunches. Plantains, green and yellow. Cassava roots like brown clubs. Eddoes, hairy and round. Little red and yellow peppers in heaps. Fish on banana leaves. Salt fish in stiff gray slabs. A woman sat on an upturned box with a tray of sugar cakes, coconut and dark sugar cooked together and set in rounds, and the smell of them, burnt and sweet, brought every child on the road.

The woman on the box was perhaps forty-five, with a face like polished wood and a cloth tied round her head in a high knot, and she was not selling but watching. Beside her a girl of about sixteen was doing the selling, quick and loud, making change from a calabash.

Ramdai stopped at the girl's mat, which had plantains and cassava and a little pile of something she did not know, flat and dry and white.

"Cassava bread," said the girl. She broke a corner off and held it out. "Taste."

It was thin as a leaf and dry and tasted of nothing much, and then of smoke, and then, as it softened on the tongue, of something faintly sour and good. Ramdai bought two plantains and a piece of the bread. The girl counted the change into her palm one coin at a time, and the old woman on the box watched the counting with an attention that was almost fierce, and when it was done she nodded.

"Where you from?" the girl asked.

Ramdai understood "where." She pointed east, out over the dam toward the sea, which was the only direction that seemed to lead anywhere.

The girl laughed. "That is the sea. Nothing there." She pointed at herself. "Patience." At the old woman. "My mother. Miss Hester." Then, pointing back toward the village, where the roofs stood up among coconut trees: "Concord."

"Ramdai." She pointed back the way she had come. "Good Hope."

"Good Hope," said Patience, and her face did something complicated. "Well."

---

In the weeks after that, Ramdai went to the Saturday market whenever she was not too tired, and on some Saturdays Patience was there and on some she was not, and the old woman on the box was always there.

She learned some things. That the people of Concord did not go into the cane fields of Good Hope anymore unless the wage was high, and that the estate had brought the people from India, and the Portuguese before them from some island in the sea, so that it would not have to pay the wage the villagers asked. She learned it from Patience in pieces, half in words and half in a hand turned palm up and empty.

"Not you fault," Patience said once, very clearly, as if it had been decided somewhere. "My mother say so. Not you fault. But is so."

Ramdai had no answer ready for that. She gave Patience the thing she had brought, which was two rotis wrapped in a cloth, made that morning on an iron plate over a fire of dry cane leaves at the end of the range. The flour was the estate's flour, which was not good, and there was no butter, only a little coconut oil she had bought, but they had puffed up on the plate the way her mother's did, and she had been proud of them.

Patience unwrapped one and tore it and looked at the layers. She ate a piece standing at her mat. Then she held the second one out to her mother, and the old woman on the box held it in her two palms, turned it, and smelled it. She ate it slowly, all of it, looking out over the road.

When she had finished she said something to Patience, and Patience translated, with her hands and with words Ramdai was beginning to understand.

"She say, how you make it?"

---

So on a Sunday in the dry season, when the estate did not work, Ramdai walked across the dam to Concord for the first time, with flour tied in a cloth and a little bundle of dry leaves for the fire.

The village was not like the estate. The houses stood on their own lots, each with a fence of split palm or of living hedge, and each with its own small garden of peppers and long beans and a breadfruit tree or a mango. Children ran along the front dam in a pack, all elbows. There was a big tamarind in an open space in the middle, with a wooden bench round its trunk, and under it two men were mending a net and arguing about the koker.

Patience pointed it out, up beyond the houses, at the foot of the great earth bank that held back the sea: a heavy timber gate between brick walls, with a winch on top and a man standing beside it in the sun, looking at the water.

"He waiting on low tide," Patience said. "Then he open it. Then all the water run out." She swept her hand from the land toward the sea. "Then he shut it again before the sea come in. Every day. Every night. If he sleep, we drown."

"Who pays him?"

Patience understood that one. She pointed at the houses, one after another, all of them. Then at herself.

In Miss Hester's yard, under a lean-to of palm leaves, Ramdai built the fire in a ring of three stones and set Hester's iron plate on it, and kneaded the dough in Hester's calabash, and showed the old woman and her daughter how to roll it thin with a bottle, and fold it, and roll it again, and lay it on the hot iron and turn it, and press its edges with a folded cloth until it filled with steam and rose. The first one Hester made tore. The second one stuck. The third puffed up so suddenly that she jumped and then laughed, a big laugh that brought a neighbor to the fence.

They ate them with a pot of something Hester had made, plantain and cassava and eddoes cooked down in coconut milk with a piece of salt fish and soft little dumplings, thick and yellow and sweet and salt at the same time. Patience said it was metemgee, and made Ramdai say it until Hester made her stop.

Walking home along the dam at dusk, with the cane on one side and the dark trench on the other and the frogs starting up, Ramdai found she was saying it under her breath, the new word, the way she said the names of the eleven at night. Metemgee. It was not a sad word. It sounded like something that bubbled.

Rails Along the Coast

Joaquim Gomes opened the shop at five because the Concord women came before the heat, and if the door was shut they went to the shop at Plaisance and he lost them for a week out of pride.

He took down the shutters one by one and stacked them under the counter. The shop was a single room on posts at the corner where the middle walk met the public road, with a gallery in front and a ladder of steps, and the room smelled of everything he sold at once. Salt fish in its wooden box, sharp enough to sting the eyes in the first minute of the morning. Brown sugar in a hogshead, dark and wet and smelling of burnt honey. Rice in sacks. Flour that had come from America and had a sour note under it. The salt pork barrel, which he did not open until somebody asked. Tallow candles hanging by their wicks in pairs. A cask of rum on a trestle with a brass tap, and beside it the little tin measures, the gill and the half gill, polished every Saturday by his wife.

Outside the light was coming up gray over the cane of Good Hope, and the frogs in the trench were tiring, and the first kiskadee was shouting on the post of the koker bridge. Far off to the east the sea dam lay along the horizon like a long animal asleep, and over the top of it, now and then, the spray of a bigger wave rose white and fell.

"You put the water on?" Maria called from the back room.

"I put the water on."

"You did not put the water on."

He had not put the water on. He went and did it.

---

They had been in the colony twelve years. They had come in 1841 from Funchal on a brig with a hundred and thirty others, most of them from the same few parishes on the north side of the island, where the hills went straight up from the sea and every scrap of earth was carried up in baskets and held in place with stone walls, and where there was not enough of anything. The planters in Demerara had paid their passage. They wanted white laborers for the cane, people said, and a man at the quay in Funchal had said there was land in Guiana and money and nobody starving.

There was land. It was all under water.

Joaquim had cut cane at Good Hope for two years. He had had the fever three times, the shaking kind that came every third day, and the third time he had lain on the floor of the range in the wet season and listened to the rain on the shingles and decided that if he lived he would never cut cane again. Half the people on his brig were dead within four years. Their bodies were not for the cane, people said, though Joaquim suspected nobody's body was, and the difference was only who could leave.

He lived. He saved. He bought a tray and a basket and walked the East Coast road selling needles, thread, candles and little bottles of oil, the way he had seen the village women do with plantains, and then he bought a donkey and a cart, and then, in 1849, he went to the people of Concord under their tamarind tree and asked to rent the corner lot.

He remembered that meeting the way he remembered the first sight of the brown sea. Fifty people in a circle in the dusk. An old woman in a high headtie on a bench, who said very little and to whom everybody looked before they spoke. A young man with cracked spectacles writing in a ledger by lamplight. They had talked among themselves for an hour in an English so fast and so full of its own words that he had caught perhaps one sentence in five. Then the old woman had said, "Rent. Not sell," and they had all agreed, and the young man had written it down, and Joaquim had made his mark.

He paid the rent every quarter day to the same old woman, Miss Hester, who counted it twice in front of him and then gave him a cup of something dark and bitter-sweet that she made from the bark of a tree, boiled with spices and sweetened with his own brown sugar. Mauby. It took him a year to like it. Now he could not get through a hot afternoon without it.

---

The train went by at a quarter past seven.

It had been running for five years now, from Georgetown out along the coast to Plaisance, the first railway in this whole part of the world, people said, and he believed it because who else would be mad enough to lay iron rails across a swamp. It did not come as far as Concord. But he could hear it from the shop, the whistle first, high and thin, and then a long iron breathing as it pulled out of the station a few miles west, and on still mornings he could see the smoke standing up over the coconut palms like the smoke of a cane fire, gray and then brown.

Twice a month he drove the donkey cart to Plaisance and put his empty sacks and his list on the train and went into town. Georgetown was all wooden houses on stilts, white and gray, with gardens and trenches and wide streets of crushed shell, and at the foot of it, on the river, the market at Stabroek, where the boats came in from up the Demerara and from the Essequibo and from the islands, and where you could buy anything that had ever been grown, caught or made in the colony and a few things that had not. He bought there from the wholesale merchants, many of them Portuguese now, men from his own island who had come ten years before him and had been luckier or harder. They spoke to him in his own language and gave him no credit at all.

"You are going to Stabroek Saturday?" Maria asked, coming in from the back with the kettle.

"Saturday."

"Bring onions. Real ones. Not those little ones like marbles."

"There are no real onions in this country."

"Then bring the little ones like marbles."

---

The first customer was Patience, Miss Hester's daughter, who was a woman now with a child on her hip and another, it seemed, on the way. She bought salt fish and rice and told him three pieces of news without stopping, and he caught two. The koker door had come off its runners in the night and Cudjoe's son, who had the koker now, had sat up till morning holding it with a rope. The meeting would vote on Saturday about the new trench to the backdam. And there were new people at Good Hope.

"New?"

"From China." She said it the way people on this coast said a place they had never seen and never would, the way they said England. "Two ship come in town this month, they say. Good Hope take a whole set of them. Men only. Nobody can talk to them."

"Nobody can talk to anybody," said Joaquim.

She laughed, and the child on her hip laughed at her laughing, and she went off up the middle walk with the salt fish on her head.

---

He saw them on the Thursday, on the road.

Twenty men walking in a line behind a driver toward the back fields of Good Hope, in blue cotton jackets and wide trousers, with cloths wound round their heads against the sun, and hoes over their shoulders. They walked looking straight ahead, like people who have decided not to look at anything until they understand it.

On the Saturday one of them came into the shop.

He came up the steps slowly and stood in the doorway with his hat in his hands, a man of perhaps twenty, thin as a rail, with a cut across one cheekbone that was healing, and a look on his face that Joaquim knew. He had worn it himself in 1841. It was the look of a man standing in a room where he has no word for anything.

"Good morning," Joaquim said in English, and then the same in Portuguese, because it made no difference either way.

The young man looked at the shelves. He looked at the rice. He touched his own chest, then pointed at the rice, then held up a coin, a silver coin, the estate's wage, and laid it on the counter.

Joaquim weighed out rice. He weighed out what the coin was worth, and then a handful more, because the young man's face had not changed and he remembered the floor of the range. The young man looked at the scale and at the extra handful. He looked at Joaquim. Then he pointed at the salt fish, and at the brown sugar, and at the little red peppers in a basket on the end of the counter, and asked, with his eyebrows, how much.

They did this for half an hour. It was the best half hour Joaquim had spent in the shop in a year.

By the end of it he knew that the young man's name was something like Lee, or that Lee was the part he could say, and that the rest was something like Ah Sing, and that he had come on a ship from a place he drew in the air with his hand as a long coast with many islands, and that he had been at sea longer than Joaquim had, and that he was very hungry and very careful with his money and wanted, more than rice or fish or sugar, a small iron pan with sloped sides that he described with both hands, curving them, and that Joaquim did not have.

"Next week," Joaquim said. He pointed at the floor, then made a turning motion with his hand for days passing, seven times. "I find."

Lee looked at the seven turnings and nodded, once.

---

That evening Joaquim told Maria about the pan.

"A pan like a bowl," he said. "Iron. With a round bottom. You put it right in the fire."

"For what?"

"How do I know for what? For cooking."

"You will not find it."

"I will find it at Stabroek."

She was cutting onions, the little ones like marbles, and her eyes were streaming. Behind her on the shelf stood the big earthenware jar from home, the only one that had survived the brig, and in it, under a layer of vinegar and garlic and thyme and the hot little peppers of this country, the last of the Christmas pork. She had put it down in the second week of December, the way her mother had in Madeira, and at Christmas they had eaten it fried in the morning with bread, the whole house full of the smell of garlic and vinegar, and people who smelled it on the road had come to the gallery, and now half of Concord asked for it by name every December, garlic pork, as if it had been born here.

"What does he eat, this Chinese?" she said.

"Rice, mostly. Fish. Sugar."

"Everybody eats rice and fish and sugar."

"Then he will fit in very well."

She laughed, which she did not do often, and wiped the onion tears off with her wrist.

Later, when she was asleep, he sat on the gallery with a candle and the letter from his brother that had come the week before. It said that the vines on the island had a sickness, a white dust on the leaves and the grapes, that every terrace in the parish had it, that the wine would be lost this year and maybe next, that half the young men in the village were talking of Demerara. It asked if there was room.

He looked out at the dark. He could hear the sea working at the wall, and the koker man's lantern was moving on the dam a quarter mile off, a little yellow point going back and forth, and then it stopped, and he heard faintly the groan of the winch and then the sound of the water starting to run. Low tide. The land breathing out.

He would write back that there was room. He would write that there was nothing but mud, and fever, and rain that came through the roof, and a village of people who had bought their own land with their own coins and would rent you a corner of it if you were honest. He would write that there was a new man from the other side of the world who wanted an iron pan with a round bottom. He would not know how to explain why this last thing was the reason to come.

---

At Stabroek on Saturday he walked the whole market twice. He asked the Portuguese wholesalers, who laughed at him. He asked the ironmonger near the stelling, who showed him every kind of pot made in Birmingham and none of them round. The tide was out, and the river at the foot of the market was a wide expanse of shining mud with boats lying on their sides on it and small crabs running across it in hundreds, and the smell of it rose up through the planks of the market floor, rotten and rich.

In the end he found it in a heap of scrap behind a ship chandler's, where a sailor off an East Indiaman had sold it for drink. It was black and rusted on the outside and had a crack near one handle that a blacksmith could close with a rivet. It was exactly the shape Lee had made in the air.

He carried it home on his knees on the train, the only passenger in the carriage with a frying pan, and people looked at him, and he looked out the window at the cane and the trenches and the brown line of the sea going past, and held on to it with both hands.

Pine Tarts on a Tin Tray

The first tray of pine tarts burned on the bottom, and Lee Chun ate three of them herself in the back room so that no one would see.

They were not bad. That was the trouble. The pastry was short and flaked when she bit it, the pineapple inside was cooked down dark and thick with brown sugar and a little clove, and the bottoms were black, and she knew that a black bottom would be the only thing anybody in Concord talked about for a month. She ate the third one standing at the oven with her eyes shut. The heat came off the oven door in a sheet and dried the sweat on her face before it could run.

The oven was Ah Sing's work. He had built it in the yard behind the shop out of bricks from the ruin of the old cotton house at the back of the village, two hundred of them, carried on his shoulder a dozen at a time, and a clay mortar he mixed from backdam mud and burnt shell. It was shaped like a beehive cut in half, with an iron door from the Gomes shop that had once been part of a safe. You built a fire inside it with dry coconut husks and wallaba splits, let it burn to ash, raked the ash out, and then baked in the heat the bricks held. It took her two weeks to learn that the left side ran hotter than the right. Today she had forgotten.

"Ma." Joseph stood in the door of the back room in a shirt that had been white that morning. He was three and spoke Hakka to her, English to everybody else, and something in between to the dog. "Ma, the people come."

"Which people?"

"All."

---

The cake shop opened on a Saturday in October of 1869, in the short dry season when the cane fields of Good Hope were being cut and the air over the whole coast smelled of the boiling house day and night.

It was a narrow room on posts next to the Gomes shop, built of planks Ah Sing had bought in Georgetown and brought out on the train to Plaisance and then by donkey cart, with a counter across the front behind a half door and shelves behind the counter. On the shelves were the things she had learned to make in the six years since she had married him, and some of the things she had brought in her hands from the other side of the world.

Pine tarts, folded into triangles. Sugar cake, coconut and brown sugar boiled and set. Cassava pone, which Patience Bascom had taught her, grated cassava and coconut and spice baked in a flat pan until it was dense and sticky and brown on top. Salt eggs in a crock, ducks' eggs cured in brine and clay the way her mother had done, which almost nobody bought yet. Little cakes of steamed rice flour, white and soft, which the children called cotton cakes and bought for a penny. A jar of mauby, a jar of plain sugar water with lime. In a covered bowl at the end, for the people who knew to ask, noodles she had made herself that morning, rolled and cut by hand, fried in the old iron pan with a little salt pork and onion and shredded cabbage and soy that Ah Sing bought from a merchant in town.

Half of Concord stood on the road in front of the half door. The other half was coming.

---

She had come to Demerara in 1862 on a ship with three hundred people, and more of them women than on any ship before, the women in a separate part of the hold, and she had been seventeen.

She did not think about the voyage. She had decided not to on the day she landed. Ships came; people were on them; some died. It had been the same for the Indians, and the Portuguese, and the Africans before them who had not come because they chose to at all, which Patience had told her one evening on the dam, plainly, the way you would tell somebody where the well was. Lee Chun had not known what to say. She had said, in her bad English, "Long time," and Patience had said, "Not so long. My mother was born on that estate there," and pointed.

At the depot in town a man from the estate office had come down the line of women with a paper. The paper said that Lee Ah Sing, free laborer, formerly of Plantation Good Hope, had paid a sum to the Immigration Agent toward the passage of a wife, and was there a woman willing. There were several. He was not the only man who had paid. She had looked at him across the yard of the depot, a thin man of thirty with a scar on his cheekbone, holding a paper bag of sugar cakes as a present, and he had looked at her, and she had thought: he has been here nine years and he is still alive. That was the whole of her reasoning. She had been right.

They had lived the first years on Good Hope, he in the factory as a boiler man, she in the weeding gang, then in a rented room in Concord at the back of the Gomes shop. Mr. Gomes had a way of standing in his door in the evening with a cup of mauby and talking to Ah Sing about nothing, with his hands, and Ah Sing talking back with his, the two of them laughing at jokes neither could have explained, and it was from those evenings that the idea of the shop had come.

The village meeting had rented them the lot. Ah Sing went to the tamarind tree on a Saturday evening with forty dollars in a cloth and stood in the circle while they talked. He told her afterward that it was the strangest meeting he had ever been to, worse than the estate office, because everyone talked at once and nobody was in charge and yet at the end there was an answer, and a young man wrote it in a book. Old Miss Hester, who must have been near seventy, had asked him only one question.

"You will do your day on the dam?"

He did not understand. Somebody showed him with a shovel.

He had nodded, and they had rented him the lot.

---

The trouble with the tarts was not the bottoms. Nobody noticed the bottoms. The trouble was that by noon everything was gone except the salt eggs, and she had made enough, she had thought, for three days.

Ah Sing came in at noon from the mill and stood looking at the empty shelves with his hands on his hips.

"Thieves?"

"Customers."

"All?"

"All." She showed him the money tin, a square tin with a ship painted on the lid. He picked it up and shook it, and the coins inside made a fat, heavy sound, and his face, which in six years she had seen do perhaps four different things, did a fifth.

"Make more," he said.

"I have no more flour."

"Gomes has flour."

"Gomes has bad flour."

"Make more with bad flour."

She made more with bad flour. She made it all afternoon, in the heat of the oven yard, with Joseph asleep in a box under the counter, and the boy Isaac Bascom, who was fourteen and was Miss Hester's grandson and had come to see what the fuss was, grating coconut for her for a penny an hour with a grater made of a tin sheet punched full of nail holes. He talked the whole time. He wanted to know what the salt eggs were for, and why her shoes were cloth, and whether in China the sea was brown, and when she said no, it was green, or blue, or gray, he did not believe her.

"Every sea is brown," he said. "Is the mud."

"Not there."

"Then where the mud go?"

She could not answer that, and he looked pleased.

---

The rain came at four, the first of the long wet season, and it came the way it always did on this coast, all at once, with no warning but a sudden cool wind that turned the cane leaves white side up.

Ah Sing had put zinc on the roof of the cake shop. It was the first zinc roof in Concord, corrugated sheets that came from England in crates, and people had stood in the road to look at it go up, and the old men under the tamarind had said it would cook them alive in the dry season and they would see. It did cook them. But in the rain it made a sound that Lee Chun had never heard and that she would hear every wet season for the next fifty years, and that her great-grandchildren in another country would try to describe to each other and fail: not drumming, not hammering, but a roar, a solid wall of sound like the whole sky being emptied onto a sheet of iron, so loud that you could not hear yourself think and did not need to. Isaac put his hands over his ears and laughed and shouted something she could not hear.

Then, under the rain, a bell. A hand bell, rung hard, coming along the front dam from the direction of the sea.

Isaac's face changed. He was gone before she could ask, out into the rain, barefoot, running.

---

It was the sea dam. At spring tide with an east wind behind it the sea had come over the low place near the koker that the village had been arguing about for two years, the place they had voted to raise and had not raised because the rates were in arrears and there was no money for the labor. It had not broken through. It was coming over the top in sheets with each big wave and pouring down the landward side and cutting a channel, and the channel was getting deeper with every wave.

The whole village went. Lee Chun saw them from the shop, through the rain, going up the middle walk in a stream, men and women, with shovels and forks and baskets and bundles of brush, Mr. Gomes among them in his apron, Ah Sing running with a spade from the oven yard. Somebody's goat ran with them for no reason. She stood in the doorway with Joseph on her hip and watched them go.

Then she put Joseph in the box under the counter and gave him a sugar cake to keep him there, and asked the Gomes girl next door to watch him, and went to the oven.

The fire was still hot. She raked it up and built it high and put the old iron pan on top, the round one, the one Mr. Gomes had found at Stabroek before she ever came, and filled it with the rice she had been saving, and the last of the salt fish, and coconut milk from the coconuts Isaac had grated, and a handful of the hot peppers, and onion, and thyme, and let it cook down, stirring, the rain coming in under the zinc eaves and hissing on the bricks. It was not a dish from home. It was something she had watched the village women make in big pots on the dam at harvest, cooked all together, rice and peas and whatever there was, and they called it cook-up. She had never made it before. She made it now by smell.

When it was done she wrapped the pan in sacking and carried it up the middle walk on her head in the rain with a pile of enamel plates in her other hand, the way she had seen the market women carry trays, and it was heavier than anything she had carried since the hold of the ship.

On the dam they were working in a line, passing baskets of clay hand to hand from a borrow pit, packing it into the cut, laying brush on top and more clay on the brush, and the sea was still coming over, but less, and less. Old Miss Hester was there, sitting on an upturned basket at the foot of the dam under a piece of canvas, too old to shovel, counting baskets aloud as they went past. Every tenth one she called out the number and the line answered it.

Lee Chun put the pan down beside her.

The old woman looked at it, and lifted the sacking, and the steam came up into the rain with the smell of coconut and pepper and fish. She looked at Lee Chun. Then she called out, without getting up, in a voice that carried the length of the dam: "Eat in turns. Ten at a time. The rest keep passing."

They ate in turns. They ate with their hands and with the enamel plates and out of the sacking, standing in the rain, wet to the skin, clay to the knees, and went back to the line. Ah Sing ate with them and did not look at her, because he was embarrassed, and because he was proud.

By dark the sea had gone back down the mud and the cut was closed. In the morning the young man with spectacles, who was not young anymore, came to the cake shop with the book and asked her name, and how to spell it, which she did not know in English letters, so he wrote it as it sounded, and beside it he wrote what the meeting had decided the night before: that the day on the dam was done, by the cake shop, in full.

Low Water

Isaac Bascom had the tide in his body the way some men have a bad tooth, and on the night of the meeting it woke him at ten minutes to two.

He did not need the almanac. He kept it, a thin paper book from the government printer with the tides for Georgetown in columns, and he added forty minutes for Concord, because the tide reached the Demerara mouth first and came east along the coast after. But he had not looked at it in a year. He lay in the dark beside Clementina and felt the water going out the way you feel somebody leave a room behind you, and when it had gone far enough he got up.

He took the lantern and the long iron bar and went out into the night. The road was wet from the evening rain and the crabs were out on it, small ones, scuttling sideways from the light with their claws up. The trench beside the middle walk was full to the lip and black and smelled of rotting lilies and of the backdam, a deep vegetable smell, like a cupboard where cassava has been forgotten. The frogs were going so loud he could not hear his own feet. Every house was dark except the cake shop, where Mrs. Lee was already up and the oven fire threw a red square on the ground.

He climbed the sea dam. It was earth still, as it had been in his grandmother's time, but higher, and faced on the sea side with stone the village had paid for in the seventies and was still paying for. At the top the wind hit him, cool and steady from the northeast, full of salt.

The tide was a long way out. The mud lay in front of him for half a mile under a quarter moon, shining like the back of a wet animal, and far out he could see the white line where the waves were breaking, small and quiet at this hour. Nearer, a flock of birds stood on the mud in the moonlight, black shapes on long legs. In the morning, when the sun came up, they would be red, a red so bright it looked painted, and they would lift off together and go along the coast like a cloth being shaken out. Scarlet ibis. His grandmother had loved them. She had said they were the only things on the whole coast that had never belonged to anybody.

Hester Bascom had been dead five years. She had been buried in the ground behind the tamarind tree in 1875, and half the coast had come, and a boy from Good Hope had cried so hard that people asked his mother who he was. Isaac had been twenty. He still reached for her opinion sometimes the way you reach for a rail that has been taken down.

---

He went down to the koker.

It had been rebuilt since her day, with a new door of greenheart a foot thick and a winch with new iron teeth from a foundry in town, and the walls had been raised in brick. The water on the land side stood high against the door, pressing. On the sea side the outfall channel ran down over the mud, nearly empty, a trickle in the bottom. The difference between them was the height of a tall man.

Isaac hung the lantern on its hook and fitted the bar into the winch and leaned.

This was the part he loved, and would not have said so to anybody. The first resistance, the door stuck in its grooves with mud and weed and the weight of the water, and then the give. The groan of the wood. The teeth catching. Then the sound, starting low under the door and rising as the gap opened: water, a whole village's worth of rain, running out. It came through in a black rush with foam on it, and bits of grass, and once in a while a fish that had been unlucky, and it went down the channel and out over the mud and spread there, and the birds lifted and settled farther off. He wound the door up to a man's knee and pinned the winch and settled on the brick wall to wait.

He would sit here two hours. When the tide turned he would feel that too, and he would watch the sea coming in up the channel, brown and quiet, pushing the fresh water back, and when it reached the mark on the wall he would wind the door down and the sea would lean on it and hold it shut for him. Then he would go home and sleep two hours and go to the backdam with his father to cut cane for a Good Hope contractor, because the koker paid seven shillings a week and seven shillings a week did not feed a family of five.

---

At a quarter to three a lantern came along the dam from the west, from the Good Hope side, and a man climbed down and stood at the top of the koker steps.

"Kokerman."

"Persaud."

Jaikaran Persaud came down and sat on the wall a little way off. He was a short man of thirty, born on Good Hope in the indenture years, who had served his own five years in the field and then five more, and who had been coming to Concord on Saturdays since he was a boy, because his mother had a friend there. Everybody knew Ramdai Persaud. She had brought the first roti into the village, people said, and Miss Hester had learned to make it and then made it better, and the two of them had argued about whose was better until the day Miss Hester died. Ramdai still came to the burial ground behind the tamarind on that day every year. She brought two rotis and ate one of them herself.

"You come about tonight," Isaac said.

"I come about tonight."

They both looked at the water running out.

"They will vote it?" Jaikaran said.

"I don't know."

"You will vote it?"

Isaac did not answer. Jaikaran had a way of asking questions that made a man want to answer them truthfully, and he did not yet know what the truth was.

---

The trouble was money, as it always was, and it had come on slowly, like the sea at a low place.

When the sixty-three bought Concord, they had bought the whole estate, front to back, the house lots and the cultivation and the backdam and the sea dam and the koker and every trench and every bridge, and they had bought, as Miss Hester had said under the tamarind that first night, a piece of the sea's business. The sea's business cost money. The dam needed clay and stone. The koker needed iron and timber. The trenches silted up every wet season and had to be dug out. The estates around them had owners with capital and steam engines and could pay for it. A village of small farmers could pay for it in a good year, and in a bad year could not.

Then the colony had passed its ordinances. The villages were put under a central board in town, which set rates and collected them, and when a village fell into arrears, the board could seize land and sell it at auction to pay the debt. All along the coast it was happening. Lots sold at the courthouse door for a few dollars, bought by a speculator, or by the estate next door, which had wanted that land back since 1840. Concord was three years behind. The board had written. There would be an execution sale in October.

Unless the village paid. And the only way the village could pay was to sell something itself, first, to somebody it chose.

That was what the meeting was for. Jaikaran Persaud had offered to buy forty acres of the old cultivation at the back, near the backdam, low and wet and gone to bush, which nobody in Concord had worked in ten years because the men were cutting cane for wages or had gone up the rivers to the timber grants. He wanted to grow rice. He had saved the money for twenty years, from his wages and his wife's and from a cow and her calves, and his mother had given him the gold bangles she had worn on the ship. He would pay the arrears. The village would keep the rest of its land.

It sounded simple. It was not. The land was held in common. It had never been sold. The first thing written in the book under the names of the sixty-three was that it would not be sold to an outsider without the meeting's yes, and there were people in Concord who said that the meeting's yes was the same as a no, because Miss Hester and the others had not meant for any of it ever to go.

"They will say you are Good Hope," Isaac said.

"I am Good Hope." Jaikaran looked at the land behind them in the dark, the long flat miles of it, the trenches catching the moon. "I was born in the range. My mother was born in Bihar. My father is buried at the back of the estate under a tree the manager cut down the next year. I have nowhere else to be from." He shrugged. "Now I want to be from here."

---

The meeting was at seven, under the tamarind, with the lamps.

The book was there, open on its barrel, and old Joseph Arno beside it with his new spectacles, which a nephew in town had sent him and which had both lenses whole. He was sixty. His hand shook now when he wrote and the letters were bigger than they had been, but nobody else was allowed to write the minutes and nobody had asked. Patience Bascom sat on the bench where her mother had sat. She was treasurer now, and had been since the old woman's hands got too stiff to count, and she held the tin on her knees with the village's money in it, which was not enough.

Nearly everybody came. The old men who had been young in 1840. The young men who had never been owned and were impatient with old men. The women, who in Concord had always done the counting and most of the talking. Mr. Gomes's son Manuel from the shop on the corner, who was not a proprietor and stood at the back. Mrs. Lee from the cake shop with a tray of sugar cake that she put down on the bench without a word and that was gone in five minutes. A row of children on the fence. Jaikaran stood outside the circle, under the tree's shadow, with his hands clasped, and kept quiet.

They argued for three hours.

They argued that it was the first piece of Concord ever to be sold, and once you sold one piece you would sell another. They argued that if they did not sell it the board would, and then it would go to the estate, and the estate would never give it back. They argued about whether Jaikaran was an outsider or not. Cudjoe's grandson said that anybody who had done his day on the dam was not an outsider, and Jaikaran had done his day on the dam for three years now as a volunteer, without being asked, because he liked to be where the work was. Somebody else said that the Indians had come to take their wages. Patience said, very quietly, that the Indians had been brought to take their wages, which was a different thing, and her mother had said so the first year.

Then they turned and looked at Isaac, because he was the kokerman, and the kokerman knew the land.

He stood up. He had not planned to.

"That back piece," he said, "is the lowest land in the village. Every wet season it full. The water come off it last of all, because it farthest from my koker, and the trench to it silt up, and nobody dig it, because nobody use it." He found that his hands were moving, the way his grandmother's used to. "A man who want to grow rice there will dig that trench. He will dig it every year, because rice want water in, and water out, at the right time, and so do we. He will be on that land when nobody else is. He will see where the dam is weak at the back before I see it at the front." He stopped. "I want somebody back there," he said. "That is all I know."

They voted at ten, by hands, in the lamplight. Joseph Arno counted. He counted twice, because his eyes were bad, and then once more because he wanted to be sure, and then he wrote it down in his big shaking letters, the first sale of Concord land, forty acres at the back, to Jaikaran Persaud, late of Good Hope, now of this village, and he wrote the number of hands, and the number against.

Isaac did not stay for the sugar cake. He looked at the moon and felt the tide, and it was turning, an hour early by the almanac, which was wrong about once a month. He went up the middle walk to the dam at a trot with the lantern swinging. Behind him he could hear the meeting breaking up into a hundred conversations, and over it, clearly, Ramdai Persaud's voice, old and cracked and very pleased, telling somebody that she had always said so.

At the koker the sea was already in the channel, brown and quiet and full of moon. He wound the door down, slowly, until it sat in the mud at the bottom of its grooves, and he felt the sea lean on it, and hold.

Cassareep

Lucy Wakaba had brought four things down the Mahaicony River in her father's boat: a cassava press her mother had woven, a clay pot with a black inside that had never been washed with soap, a bundle of cuttings wrapped in wet leaves, and Samuel Bascom, who had been sick the whole way and was ashamed of it.

"River don't move like that," he kept saying, lying in the bottom of the dugout with his arm over his eyes. "River supposed to be flat."

"River is flat," said her father, steering from the stern. "You are not."

The dugout was her father's best, cut from one trunk and burned out and shaped over a month in the dry season, so long that six people could sit in it in a line, and its sides were spread with heat until they curved like the inside of a hand. It went down the brown river between walls of trees. The trees leaned out over the water and dropped flowers into it, purple and yellow, that turned slowly in the current. Monkeys complained in the high branches. In the afternoon a storm came across, and they pulled in under the overhang while the rain hammered the leaves and the river jumped all over its surface as if it were boiling.

Lucy did not cry. She had decided before they left. She would cry later, on her own, if she needed to, in a place where no Bascom could see.

---

She was nineteen. She had met Sammy two years before, when a timber gang came up the river to cut greenheart on a grant above her village, and he had been the one who could not swim and fell out of the punt on the first day. Her brother had pulled him out. He had come to the house afterward with a gift of tobacco for her father and had stayed on the step and talked for two hours, mostly to her mother, who did not understand half of it and liked him anyway.

He had been in the gold country before that, three years, up the Potaro, washing gravel in a long wooden trough in a creek where the water was black and the trees met overhead and the sun never came through. He had found enough gold to buy a cow and a gold ring and not enough for anything else. He said it was the worst work he had ever done and he would go back tomorrow if somebody asked him.

He had asked her father in the proper way. Her father had said he would think about it. He thought about it for a year, during which Sammy came up the river four times and helped plant cassava and nearly cut his foot off with a cutlass, and at the end of the year her father said yes, because, he told Lucy privately, a man who was so bad at everything and kept trying must be good for something.

Her people were Lokono. The coast people called them Arawaks, or worse, and had been calling them that since the Dutch. They had lived on these rivers before any of it, before the sugar and the dams and the ships, and they had traded down to the coast for as long as there had been anybody there to trade with: cassava bread, hammocks, baskets, fish, game, the black thick cassareep that every kitchen on the coast wanted at Christmas and few on the coast knew how to make.

Lucy knew how to make it. Her mother had taught her, and her grandmother had taught her mother, and that was the third of the four things in the boat.

---

They reached Concord a week before Christmas, in 1895, on a donkey cart from the river mouth, and the first thing Lucy saw of her new home was the sea.

She had never seen it. She had heard of it all her life, and her father had seen it, and she had imagined it blue, because in the one picture she had ever seen it was blue. It was brown. It lay beyond a great wall of stone and earth, brown and wide and restless, with lines of foam on it, and it was higher than the road. She stood on the cart and looked at it, and at the land on the other side of the road lying lower than the water, and understood for the first time what Sammy meant when he talked about the koker.

"It will come over," she said.

"Not while my father is alive," said Sammy, who was feeling better on dry land. "After that, me."

---

The Bascom house was on the front lot near the middle walk, on posts, with a zinc roof and a gallery and a kitchen at the back under its own roof, and a breadfruit tree whose leaves were bigger than her two hands. It was full of people. Sammy's father Isaac, the kokerman, a big slow quiet man who shook her hand and then, after a moment, her father's. His mother Clementina, who looked at Lucy for a long time and then took her by the elbow and showed her where everything was. His sister Hannah, nine, who followed her everywhere and wanted to touch her hair. An old woman called Patience who was not a grandmother but was treated like one by everyone in the village, and who sat on the gallery in a rocking chair, a cane laid over her lap, and asked Lucy's father how many people lived in his village and how they decided things.

"We talk," said her father.

"Until when?"

"Until everybody is tired."

Patience laughed until she coughed. "Same as here," she said.

Her father stayed two nights and went back up the river. Lucy walked with him to the cart on the road. He gave her his knife, a good one with a horn handle, and said nothing, and she said nothing, and he went.

---

The women of Concord came to look at her over the next days in the way women do, one at a time and then in twos, with a reason. A bowl of sorrel to borrow back. A question for Clementina about a hen. Mrs. Lee from the cake shop came with a paper of pine tarts and stood in the yard and looked at Lucy and said, "River?" and Lucy said, "River," and Mrs. Lee nodded as if this were a whole conversation, and in a way it was. Old Mrs. Persaud came from the back lands with her son's wife, and sat on the gallery with Patience, and the two of them talked about Lucy right in front of her, like a calf they were thinking of buying, and she found she did not mind.

What she minded was the cassareep.

There was cassareep in the Gomes shop. Clementina showed her. It was in bottles on the shelf behind the counter, brought from town, and before Christmas everybody in Concord bought a bottle to make pepperpot, the great dark stew that sat on the back of the fire through the holidays and was eaten with bread on Christmas morning. Lucy unstopped a bottle and smelled it, and it was thin, and sweet in the wrong way, and smelled of burnt sugar and not of cassava at all.

"Molasses," she said. "They put molasses."

"Everybody use that," said Clementina.

"I will make it."

Clementina looked at her. "It take days."

"Three."

---

So she made it.

She went to the back lands and bought bitter cassava from the Persauds, who grew a little on the high ridges between the rice beds, and carried it home in a sack on her head, and Hannah carried a smaller sack on hers. She peeled the roots on the back step with her father's knife, and grated them, sitting on the ground with the grater between her knees, the long board with the tiny chips of stone set in it that her grandmother had made. The grated cassava came off wet and white and smelling sharp and green. It was poison, raw. The juice in it would kill a dog. She told Hannah so, and Hannah's eyes went wide and she washed her hands three times.

Then the press. It was a long tube of woven strips, as long as Lucy was tall, closed at the bottom, with a loop at each end. You packed the wet cassava into it and hung the top loop from a beam and put a pole through the bottom loop and sat on the pole, and as you sat, the tube grew long and thin and squeezed itself, and the juice ran out through the weave into a pot below. Lucy hung it from the beam of the kitchen and sat on the pole and swung her feet. Isaac came and stood with his arms folded and watched for a quarter of an hour without a word, and then said, "Is like a koker," and went away again, looking pleased with himself.

The juice ran out yellow and cloudy. She let it stand overnight, and in the morning a white starch had settled at the bottom, which she saved for Clementina to starch the shirts. The clear juice on top went into her mother's black pot, and the black pot went onto the fire.

She boiled it all day. She stirred it with a paddle of wood and skimmed it and fed the fire with dry coconut shells and watched it thicken and darken, from yellow to brown to the color of mahogany and then to black, until it ran off the paddle in a thick slow ribbon and the smell that came off it filled the whole yard and then the whole street. Bitter and sweet. Smoke and something like old honey. The poison was gone; the fire took it. People came out onto their galleries to smell it. Frank Gomes from the rum shop came to the fence, a young man with a big mustache he was clearly proud of, and asked if she was making gold.

"Better," Lucy said.

She poured it into four bottles that had held his rum, and sealed them with corncobs and wax, and gave one to Patience, and one to Mrs. Lee, and one to Mrs. Persaud, and kept one.

---

On Christmas Eve she made the pepperpot. Clementina had always made it with a bottle from the shop, and Lucy did not want to take that from her, so they made it together, and argued about it the whole time, quietly at first and then not quietly, and by the end Clementina was laughing so helplessly that the step had to hold her up.

Beef and pork and a cow heel for the thickness, cut in pieces. The cassareep, poured in until the whole pot was black and shining. Sugar, a little. Cinnamon stick and clove. Hot peppers, whole, three of them, not broken, because broken they would burn the tongue off. Thyme from the garden. Then the fire, low, for hours, until the meat was soft enough to fall from the bone and the gravy was thick and dark and glossy and sweet and sour and hot all at once.

Her mother's pot would sit on the back of the fire now through the whole of the holiday, as it did at home. Every day you heated it to boiling, and every day you added a little more meat and a little more cassareep, and because of the cassareep it would not spoil. Up the river her grandmother had kept one pot going, people said, for a year. That was the thing about it. It kept. You could leave it and come back to it.

On Christmas morning the Bascoms ate pepperpot with bread from the cake shop, and Patience came and ate it in the rocking chair, and Isaac came back from the koker at seven in the morning and ate three plates of it standing up in the kitchen. Frank Gomes came with a bottle of his own rum and garlic pork from his mother's jar and stayed the whole morning. In the afternoon the Persauds came, the old woman and her son's family, carrying dhal in a pot and roti in a cloth, and the Lees came with pine tarts and a bowl of cold noodles, and the little gallery of the Bascom house was so full that the children sat on the steps and the dogs sat under the steps and the posts creaked.

---

In the evening, when it was over, Lucy went up onto the sea dam alone.

It was the first time she had climbed it. The wind was strong and cool and smelled of salt. The tide was in, the brown water right up against the stone below her, slapping, and out on it the last light was going, a long stripe of red low on the water to the west where the sun had gone down behind the line of the coast, and the sea under it was the color of her own cassareep. She watched it until the red was nearly gone.

She thought of the river, the black water and the trees meeting overhead and her mother at the fire. She thought she would cry, and waited, and did not.

Behind her, below the dam, she could hear the koker. Isaac was going down to it with his lantern, and she watched the yellow light go down the steps and stop. In a while she heard the winch, and the long groan of the door, and the sea pushing at it, and then nothing, the door shut and holding. The water off the village land would have to wait for morning now. It would sit in the trenches and the low lots all night, pressing against the gate, and in the morning, when the tide went out, Isaac or Sammy or one day somebody not yet born would open it, and it would all run out.

She went back down to the house. Clementina had kept the pot on the fire. Lucy took the paddle and stirred it, the way her mother would, and added a little cassareep from her own bottle.

The Night Before the Wedding

The fruit for the black cake had been drowning in Frank Gomes's rum for eleven months, and on the morning of the queh-queh Clementina Bascom came into the rum shop to take it home.

"You have it?" she said from the door.

"I have it."

"You didn't drink it."

"Mrs. Bascom." Frank put his hand on his chest. "I am a businessman."

"That is why I asking."

He brought it out from under the counter: a stone crock as big as a child, sealed with a plate and a cloth and a ring of candle wax, that she had carried into his shop the previous January and put under there with her own hands, and that he had not been allowed to touch except to add rum once a month, measured, in front of a witness. Inside were raisins and currants and prunes and the candied peel that came in tins from England, chopped fine, soaked in his best dark rum and a bottle of the sweet red wine his grandfather's people made on the island, which he brought in from town for the purpose at great expense and at no charge. By now it had turned to a black jam that smelled, when he broke the wax, so strong and so rich that a man drinking at the end of the counter turned round on his stool.

Clementina leaned over the crock and breathed in with her eyes shut, a good while. Then she put the cloth back.

"All right," she said. "You could come tonight."

He had been invited already. Everyone had been invited. But he understood that he had now been invited properly, and he bowed.

---

The rum shop stood where his grandfather's shop had stood, at the corner where the middle walk met the public road, and it was a different building on the same posts. In 1853 Joaquim Gomes had sold everything in one room. Now there were two shops side by side, the provision shop that his uncle kept, with its sacks and barrels and the smell of salt fish, and the rum shop, which was Frank's, with a long counter of greenheart planks, four stools, a window onto the road with a shutter that propped up on a stick, and shelves behind the counter of rum in bottles and rum in kegs,.

It was a shop that men sat in. In the mornings, cane cutters from Good Hope and rice men from the back lands came for a shot of white rum before work and a piece of bread. In the evenings they came back and sat on the four stools and the bench outside under the window and argued about the price of rice and the new mill at the estate and whose son was going to the gold country and whose was coming back with nothing. On Saturday nights somebody brought a guitar or a fiddle. Frank sold rum by the gill and the half gill, and plates of fried fish and bakes that his wife made in the back, and on credit to men he trusted, and he knew the business of every house in Concord because sooner or later every house's business came through his door.

What he did not know, and wanted to, was why Hannah Bascom was marrying Walter Lee.

Not that he objected. He liked Walter. Everybody liked Walter, who was twenty-three and worked at the rice mill on the estate, keeping the engine, and who came into the rum shop on Saturdays and drank one gill and talked about engines until people left. He was the grandson of the old Lees at the cake shop, Mr. Lee who was nearly eighty and still sat on his gallery every evening, and Mrs. Lee, who still made the pine tarts. His mother was an Arno, old Joseph Arno's granddaughter, so he was Concord on that side already, and nobody could keep the families straight anymore, which was the point. He had a good laugh. He had asked Isaac Bascom for Hannah in the proper way, in front of the koker, at low tide.

And Hannah. Hannah had stood behind the rum shop's window when she was nine years old, hiding from her mother, and Frank had given her a sugar cake to keep quiet. She was twenty-one now, tall like her father, whose laugh carried to the koker bridge. She ran the girls' class at the schoolhouse on Tuesdays. Frank had thought, privately, for years, that she would marry somebody from town, somebody with a collar.

He had said this to his wife. His wife had said that he thought about other people's marriages too much because he did not have to make his own work. His wife was seven months gone with their first child and said things like this regularly now.

---

The queh-queh began at eight, in the Bascom yard, and Frank went with his wife on his arm and a demijohn of rum on his shoulder.

The yard had been swept and wet down and swept again. The lamps hung from the breadfruit tree and from poles along the fence, kerosene lamps with glass chimneys, so many of them that the yard was brighter than the shop at noon, and around the lamps the moths and the beetles turned in clouds. Benches had been carried from the schoolhouse and set in a ring. On the gallery, out of the way of the dancing, the old people sat: Mr. and Mrs. Lee in two chairs side by side, very upright, she in a dark blue jacket with frogged buttons; Isaac Bascom, gray now, with the koker key on a string round his neck where it always was; Lucy Bascom, his son's wife, with her two children asleep across her lap; old Mrs. Persaud's son Jaikaran and his wife, who had come from the back lands with a basket of food the size of a cow.

The drums were at the side of the yard, two of them, played by two men from the next village who came to every queh-queh on this part of the coast and were paid in rum and food and the right to complain. One was a big drum played with the hands. One was smaller and higher and played with a stick, and a third man shook a pair of gourd rattles so fast his arms blurred.

And the women. The women of Concord stood in the ring, twenty of them, thirty, more coming in through the gate, in white and in bright cotton, with their heads tied, and Hannah was in the middle.

---

Frank had been to queh-queh before. Every man in Concord had. But he had never been to one that he was so close to, and he stood at the fence with his wife and found that he did not know where to look.

The songs began slowly. One woman led, an older woman with a deep voice, Miss Cora from the end of the front dam, and the ring answered her. The words came in the old way, half in the English of the coast and half in words that were older, that had come across the sea in the holds of the first ships, and that nobody could translate anymore but everybody knew. The leader sang a line and the ring sang it back, a little changed, and the drums came in under it, and the women began to move, not dancing yet, swaying, their feet shuffling in the swept dirt, their hips moving.

The songs were for the bride. That was what queh-queh was. The night before a wedding the women of a village sang to the girl who was marrying, and danced with her, and the songs were advice, and teasing, and warning, and some of them were so frank about what a bride ought to know about husbands and beds and how to keep a man in his place that the men at the fence laughed and looked at their shoes. There was a song about a man who said he would bring home money and brought home a fish. There was a song about the sweetness of sugar cane and what happens when you chew it too long. There was one about a cook pot that Frank's wife told him, laughing behind her hand, she would explain to him later. Each one had a line that came round again and again, and the ring came down hard on it with their feet, and every time Hannah threw back her head and laughed.

Then the men came in. That was the custom. One at a time, from the fence, a man would step into the ring and dance, and the women would sing at him, and what they sang was not kind. They sang about his laziness, his rum, his wife's patience. They sang about the time he fell off the koker bridge. The man was supposed to dance through it and not be shamed, and to give a coin to the bride before he left the ring.

Walter Lee was not supposed to be there. The groom stayed away from the queh-queh by custom, and he was at home, at the cake shop, with his brothers. But his brother Albert came in, a boy of twelve with ears like jug handles, and the women sang at him about his ears until he was almost crying with laughter, and he gave Hannah a penny. Sammy Bascom came in, the bride's brother, and they sang about him falling into the river on the timber grant, and Lucy, on the gallery, laughed so hard she woke the children.

Then somebody pushed Frank.

He never found out who. He thought his wife. He stumbled into the lamplight with his hat in his hand, and the drums did something quick and pleased, and Miss Cora looked at him and opened her mouth.

They sang about his mustache. They sang about his grandfather, who had come over the sea with an iron frying pan on his lap. They sang about the rum shop, and the credit book, and the shot glasses that were smaller than they looked. They sang that a Portuguese could sell salt to the sea and the sea would pay him on Friday. Frank danced. He was not a good dancer, but he had grown up in this village and he knew the steps, the shuffle and the dip and the turn, and he did them with his hat over his heart, and the yard roared. At the end he stood in front of Hannah, in the middle of the ring, and put a silver dollar in her hand.

"Too much," she said under the noise.

"For eleven months of fruit," he said.

She laughed and kissed his cheek, and he went back to the fence with his face hot and his wife's arm through his.

---

At midnight they ate.

The tables were boards on trestles under the breadfruit tree. Cook-up rice in a pot so big two men carried it, black-eyed peas and rice and salt beef and coconut milk, dark and rich. Curry from the Persauds, chicken and potato, with roti folded in a cloth, and a pot of dhal yellow and thin and smelling of cumin and garlic burned in a ladle of hot oil and poured in at the last minute so that it hissed. Metemgee. Fried fish. A great platter of chow mein from the cake shop, noodles and cabbage and strips of pork glistening. Garlic pork from Frank's mother's jar. Pepperpot, because Lucy Bascom would not let any feast in that yard go by without it. And on a side table, under a cloth, not to be touched till tomorrow, the black cake: nine of them, round and heavy as stones and dark as the inside of a koker, baked that afternoon in the Lees' brick oven, with Frank's eleven months of fruit inside them and, poured over the top while they were still hot, another bottle of his rum.

He ate standing, the way everyone did, with a plate in one hand. He watched Mr. Lee, who was nearly eighty, eat roti with his fingers and dhal with a spoon and say something to old Jaikaran Persaud that made him laugh. He watched his wife sit down on the step next to Lucy Bascom and put her hand on her own belly and Lucy put hers there too, the two women's hands on the cotton, and say something to each other that he would never know. He watched Isaac Bascom get up from the gallery at half past one and take his lantern and go up the middle walk toward the sea dam, because the tide did not care about weddings, and come back at three and sit down and eat a second plate as if he had never left.

The drums started again after midnight and went on until the sky turned gray over the cane. Frank walked home with his wife along the front dam as the kiskadees started. The sea was going out. They could hear it pulling back over the mud. Behind them, the last of the singing was still coming from the Bascom yard, thinner now, a few women's voices and one drum.

"You know why she marrying him," his wife said.

"Why?"

"Because he come to the koker. In front of her father, at low tide. Not in a parlor." She yawned. "Because he know where things matter in this village."

Frank thought about that. He thought about the iron pan, and the cake shop's brick oven, and his grandfather walking all through Stabroek market looking for it.

"I will give them the rum for the first baby," he said.

"There is no baby yet."

"There will be."

His wife laughed, and leaned her head against his shoulder, and they went up the steps of the rum shop together in the first gray light.

The Last Ship

The cane fire started at Good Hope just after dark, and Sumintra Persaud climbed onto the roof of the rice barn to watch it, which she had been told forty times not to do.

The barn roof was zinc and still warm from the day. She lay flat on it with her chin on her hands. Across the back trench and the dam and the first fields of Good Hope, a mile off, a line of fire was running through the standing cane from left to right as if somebody were drawing it with a stick. It was not like a cooking fire. It roared. Even at this distance she could hear it, a sound like wind in a big tree with crackling under it, and every so often a pop as loud as a gun when the fire got into a hollow stalk. The flames went up three times the height of the cane, orange at the bottom and yellow and then a dirty red at the top where they turned into smoke, and the smoke went up into the night and spread out flat under the clouds and glowed.

They burned the cane now before they cut it. The fire took off the dry leaves and the trash and the snakes and left the stalks standing black, full of juice, and the next morning the cutters went in with their cutlasses and came out black to the eyes. Her father said it was quicker. Her grandfather said it ruined the sugar. Nobody at Good Hope asked either of them.

The ash came down. It always did, an hour after a fire, if the wind was from the south. Black flakes, light as moth wings, drifting down out of the dark onto the roof and the rice and the water in the trench and her own hair, and with them came the smell, burnt sugar and burnt grass, a smell so sweet and thick you could have eaten it. On the estate they called the falling ash black snow, and none of them had ever seen snow.

"Sumintra!"

Her mother, in the yard below with a lamp.

"Sumintra, get down off that roof before I tell your nani!"

Her nani had been dead for eleven years. Her mother still said it.

---

She was thirteen and the eldest of six, and she lived with her parents and her brothers and sisters and her grandfather Jaikaran and her grandmother Sukhia in a house on posts at the back of Concord, on the forty acres her grandfather had bought from the village in 1880. The house was a long one, built in pieces as the family grew. From the gallery you looked out over the rice.

There was nothing else to look at. Rice on every side, flat as water, which it mostly was, the beds divided by low earth dams no wider than your foot, the trenches between them straight and full and catching the sky. In the planting months it was mud and seedlings in rows, and white egrets picking along the edges. In the growing months it was green, a green so bright it hurt, moving under the wind in long waves like the sea. Now, in the dry season, it was gold and heavy and bending, and in a week they would cut it with sickles and thresh it on the barn floor and winnow it in the wind, and her grandfather would drive the cart to the mill, where a Concord man named Walter Lee kept the engine and always gave him an honest weight.

Behind the rice was the backdam, where the land ended and the bush began, and behind that, people said, there was more water than land for twenty miles: the conservancy, a great shallow lake held in by dams, that fed all the trenches of the coast in the dry season and had to be kept from drowning them in the wet. Everything in this country, her grandfather said, was about water. Keeping it out, letting it in, letting it go. A man who did not understand water should go back to Bihar, where at least the river was where you left it.

---

In the morning she went to school.

It was three miles to the Concord schoolhouse by the middle walk, and she walked it every day with her two younger brothers, and her mother said every day that it was a waste. A girl needed to read a price and sign her name, and Sumintra had done both since she was eight. It was her grandfather who said she should go. He had never been to any school and could not read, and he signed his name in Hindi letters and nobody at the government office knew whether it was a signature or a drawing. He wanted somebody in the family who could read a paper from the board before he put his mark on it.

So she went, barefoot on the dam in the cool of the morning with her shoes tied round her neck to put on at the door, past the backlands and the canefields of the Concord farmers and the house lots and the cake shop, where old Mrs. Lee, who must have been seventy, sat on her gallery shelling peas and always called out the same thing, which was the word for "school" in her language, and laughed when Sumintra called it back.

The schoolhouse was a long wooden building on posts with louvered windows and a zinc roof. On Tuesdays, after the regular lessons, the girls stayed for an extra hour with Mrs. Hannah Lee, who had been Hannah Bascom before she married, and who taught needlework and what she called household arithmetic, which was really just arithmetic, and which she said was the only kind that mattered because women had always been the ones counting the money in Concord and always would be.

Mrs. Lee was the one who had the book.

---

It lived in a cedar box in the schoolhouse cupboard, wrapped in oilcloth, and she brought it out on the Tuesday after the cane fire because one of the bigger girls, Ivy Gomes, had asked whether it was true that Concord had been bought with money carried in wheelbarrows.

"It's true," said Mrs. Lee. "Look."

She laid it on the master's table, and the girls crowded round. It was not one book anymore but three, the old ledger with the marbled cover and two plainer ones after it, and the old one was coming apart. The spine had cracked. The pages had gone brown and soft at the edges like the skin of an old banana, and a corner of one fell off when Mrs. Lee turned it.

She showed them the first page. The names, in a round careful hand, sixty-three of them. Some had a mark beside them and some a letter. One had a crooked H.

"My great-grandmother," Mrs. Lee said. "Hester Bascom. She was the treasurer. She learned that one letter so she could put it there."

Sumintra stared at it. Then at the ones after: Jonas Bascom, cooper. Prudence. Cudjoe Ferreira, boatman, which was strange, because she thought Ferreira was a Portuguese name, and Mrs. Lee said a lot of people had been given the names of owners and kept them or not. She looked at the pages of minutes that came after, the shaking writing getting bigger and bigger, the first sale of land: forty acres at the back to Jaikaran Persaud, late of Good Hope, now of this village.

"That's my grandfather," she said, and the other girls looked at her, and she felt her face get hot.

"It's falling apart," Mrs. Lee said. She said it in the flat voice she used for arithmetic. "The old one. Another ten years and nobody will read it." She looked round at them. "Who has a good hand?"

Ivy Gomes had a good hand. So did a Bascom cousin named Ruby, and a girl from the front lots. And Sumintra, whose hand was small and neat and leaned a little to the right.

Mrs. Lee gave each of them a copybook from the cupboard, the school's own, and a pencil, and a section of the old ledger to copy, word for word, every name and every line, on Tuesday afternoons. Sumintra got the years from 1876 to 1884.

---

She did it all through the dry season and into the rains.

On Tuesdays she sat at the end of the long table under the window with the old book on a cloth in front of her and the copybook beside it and copied. The writing was hard to read. Old Mr. Arno had written so large by the end that a single line of minutes took half a page, and some of the words were spelled the way people said them and not the way the master taught. She copied them as they were. That was the rule. When she was not sure of a word she wrote it with a little cross over it so that somebody later would know.

She copied the arguments about the sea dam, and a fine for a man who let his pigs into the trench. She copied the night they voted her grandfather the land, and the number of hands, which was forty-one for and twenty-two against, and she was furious about the twenty-two for a week before she realized that most of them were dead. She copied a line in Mr. Arno's big shaking hand that said only: "Kokerman I. Bascom says he want somebody back there." She did not understand it, and asked her grandfather, and he laughed for a long time and then wiped his eyes and did not explain.

At home in the evenings she started her own copybook, which nobody had asked her to do.

She did not know what to call it. It was not the minutes. It was what her grandfather said on the gallery after supper, when he was in a talking mood, which was not often. About the range at Good Hope when he was a boy, the long room with walls that did not reach the roof. About the weeding gang and the driver and the fines. About his mother, Ramdai, who had come on a ship called Kestrel Bay in 1846 and had learned the names of the eleven people who died on the voyage and said them at night all her life. Sumintra asked him if he knew the names. He did not, not all. He knew four. She wrote down the four.

She wrote down how her grandmother made roti, which was different from how her mother made it, and how old Mrs. Lee at the cake shop made pine tarts, which she had watched one Saturday through the oven yard fence, and how Lucy Bascom made cassareep, which she had not seen but had heard about from Ruby, who said it took three days and you could die from it. She did not know why she was doing it. It seemed to her that if Mrs. Lee was right about the old book falling apart, then other things were falling apart too, things that had never been written down at all, and somebody ought to.

---

The news came on a Saturday in the rains, read out in the rum shop.

Mr. Frank Gomes read the town paper aloud on Saturday mornings, because half his customers could not read it and the other half wanted to argue with it. Sumintra was there because her father had sent her to buy kerosene at the provision shop next door, and she stood in the doorway of the rum shop with the can in her hand because she was not allowed in.

The government in India, the paper said, had stopped the emigration. No more ships. The war, and the talk in India against the indenture, and the men in Calcutta and in London who had been arguing about it for years. There would be no more people coming from India to the estates under contract. The ones already here would finish their terms. The system would end.

Nobody in the rum shop said much. Mr. Gomes folded the paper. One of the old men from Good Hope, a man named Ramkissoon who had come as a boy on one of the last ships, got up from his stool and went out past her and stood on the gallery and looked toward the estate for a long time. Then he came back in and asked for a half gill and drank it and went home.

Her grandfather was on the gallery of the long house when she got back with the kerosene. It was raining. It was the steady rain of the middle of the wet season, not the roaring kind but the kind that went on all afternoon, and it was falling on the zinc of the roof and the zinc of the rice barn and on the flat water of the rice beds, where it made a sound like frying. She told him. He listened. Then he sat for a while.

"So I am the last," he said.

"You were born here, Gran."

"So I am the last who was born on the estate under a contract." He shook his head. "It doesn't matter. It is only a thing. Ships stop." He looked out at the rice in the rain. "Your nani would have said a thing."

"What thing?"

"I don't know. Something. She always had a thing." He laughed. "Write that down. In your book."

So she wrote it down: that her grandfather had said nani would have said a thing, and he did not know what. She put a little cross over it, the way she did with words she was not sure of, so that somebody later would know.

That night there was another fire at Good Hope, and from far off across the fields, on the wind under the rain, came the sound of tassa drums from the estate ranges, where somebody's wedding had begun. She lay in bed and listened to the drums and the rain and did not get on the roof.

The Book on the Oven Rack

On the ninth day of rain Teresa Gomes took off her shoes at the schoolhouse door, out of habit, and then stood looking at the water on the classroom floor and put them back on, because it was absurd.

The water was ankle-deep and brown and perfectly still. It had come in under the door in the night and across the floorboards and found its own level, and now the whole long room was a shallow lake with the benches standing in it on their legs like wading birds. The light through the louvers was gray and green, and the rain on the zinc roof was not the roaring kind, not anymore, but the steady patient kind that sounded like it intended to go on until the end of the world. It had been going on for nine days.

"Miss Gomes," said Winnie Lee behind her. Winnie was twelve and had followed her from the cake shop, as she did most mornings, with an umbrella the size of a cartwheel. "Miss Gomes, the cupboard."

Teresa looked at the cupboard. It stood against the back wall, where it had always stood, and the water was at its lowest shelf, and on the lowest shelf, because the cupboard's upper shelves had been full of slates and copybooks when she moved it there, was the cedar box with the books.

She said a word her father used in the rum shop, and waded.

---

The water at Concord in that wet season came from both ends at once, which was the worst way.

At the back, the conservancy was full. The great shallow lake behind the backdam held the water off the savannahs for the whole of the coast, and in the dry season it saved them, and in a wet season like this it lay there brimming against its own dams, and the engineers from town let it out where they could and the rest had to go somewhere. It came forward through the back trenches into the rice of the Persauds and the canes of the Concord farmers, and then into the house lots, and then onto the road.

At the front, the sea. There had been spring tides on top of the rain, high water twice a day so high that it stood against the koker door for hours, and in the short hours of low water the koker could let out only so much before the sea came back. Sammy Bascom, who was sixty and had kept the koker since his father retired, had not slept a full night in a week. His son Daniel took the day tides. Between them they opened the door at every low water to the very last inch the sea would allow, and still the water on the land rose.

Teresa had grown up hearing that Concord was lower than the sea. She had never really believed it. Now she stood in the schoolhouse with her skirt wet to the knee and believed it entirely.

---

The books were wet.

Not ruined. Not yet. The cedar box had kept out most of it, and the oilcloth Mrs. Hannah Lee had wrapped round them years ago had kept out more. But water had come in at one corner of the box and soaked up through the bottom of the stack, and the two newer books, at the top, were damp only at the edges, and the old one, the marbled ledger from 1840, at the bottom, was soaked through.

Teresa lifted it out with both hands. It was heavy as a brick and cold. Water ran out of it at one end. The marbled cover, which had been faded brown and blue, was darker now, and when she opened it, very carefully, standing in the water by the cupboard with Winnie holding the umbrella over her as if they were outdoors, the pages stuck together in a solid block and then came apart with a soft wet tearing sound that she felt in her teeth.

"Miss Gomes," Winnie said.

"I know."

"Is the names book."

"I know."

She was twenty-six. She had been the schoolmistress of the girls' side for three years, since Mrs. Hannah Lee's eyes got tired of small print and she went to live with her son in town. She had not been raised to this. Her father kept a rum shop; her grandfather had kept a rum shop; her great-great-grandfather had come over the sea with nothing and rented a corner from these people. She was not a Bascom or an Arno or a descendant of any of the sixty-three. She had been given the cedar box because she was the schoolmistress, and the box lived in the school, and nobody else had wanted the bother of it.

She stood in the water holding it and found that she wanted to cry, which annoyed her very much.

"Winnie," she said. "Your father's oven. Is it lit?"

---

The cake shop was dry because Ah Sing Lee had built it on posts a foot higher than anything else on the road, sixty-five years before, and everyone had laughed at him.

Albert Lee was in the oven yard under a lean-to of zinc, feeding the brick oven with coconut husks. He was a broad, slow, cheerful man of forty with a burn on one hand from the iron door and flour in the hair of his forearms. The cake shop was his now. His grandmother had died in her eighties, still making pine tarts, and he made them the way she had, with the left side of the oven running hotter than the right, and he had not been able to stop baking just because the whole country was under water. People still had to eat. He had made bread every day of the flood and sent it along the road in a flat-bottomed boat Daniel Bascom had built in an afternoon.

He looked at the book in Teresa's arms.

"No," he said. "Too hot. It will burn."

"Not in the oven. On top. On a rack. Over the bricks."

He thought about it, wiping his hands on his apron. "The bricks hold heat all day, after I rake out. Gentle heat." He thought some more. "My wife have racks. For drying the coconut."

His wife, Mabel, came out from the back with three of them, shallow trays of woven wire on wooden frames that she used for drying grated coconut and orange peel and, in the season, the little salted fish that Winnie hated. She looked at the book, and at Teresa's face, and did not ask any questions. She returned with a clean flour sack, and spread it, and a turkey feather from the hat she wore to town, which she held up as if it were a surgical instrument.

"For turning," she said.

---

They worked on it for four days.

It was slow. You could not force the pages apart. You laid the book open on the flour sack on the rack over the warm bricks, and let the heat come up through it, and after half an hour the outermost pages would begin to dry and loosen at the edges, and then you slid the feather under one and lifted it, so slowly that you could barely see it move, and laid it over. Then you waited again. If a page tore, you stopped and laid a strip of the flour sack under it and let it dry in place. If two pages would not come apart, you left them for the next hour.

The smell was extraordinary. Wet paper and old ink and the cedar of the box, and over that, from the oven below, bread and pine tarts and burnt coconut husk and the faint ghost of eighty years of cake. Teresa sat on an upturned crate beside the rack with the feather in her hand and breathed it all day. The rain went on. The zinc lean-to over their heads roared and then muttered and then roared again. In the road the water stood a foot deep and people went by in Daniel's boat and in washtubs and on doors, laughing, cursing, carrying children and chickens and once a goat standing very upright in the middle of a washtub as if it had paid for the ride.

On the second day Grace Bascom came, Sammy's daughter, who was thirty-two and kept house for her father and brother now that her mother Lucy had grown too stiff to manage the steps. She brought a pot of pepperpot because there was always a pot of pepperpot at the Bascoms', and a bottle of her mother's cassareep, which was black as the ink on the oldest pages. She sat with Teresa through the afternoon.

"My great-great-grandmother is in there," Grace said.

"On the first page. With the H."

"I never seen it. Never once. All my life." "Daniel seen it. He went to the school when Tanty Hannah had it. I was always in the backdam."

"You will see it," Teresa said. "When it's dry."

"If."

"When."

They sat. Winnie brought them sugar water with lime. Mabel Lee came out every hour to look at the pages and say nothing. Old Frank Gomes came down the road in the boat, paddled by a grandson, and called out to Teresa from the water that she was making a fool of herself over a book of old minutes when the whole country was drowning, and she called back that he should go home before he fell in, and he laughed so hard the boat rocked.

---

On the third day, at about three in the afternoon, the rain stopped dead.

There was no warning. The roar on the zinc stopped as if somebody had shut a door, and in the silence they could hear dripping everywhere, from every roof and every leaf and every eave, and then the frogs, and then the kiskadees, and then, very far off, the sea. The sun came out. It came out hot and white on the floodwater, and the whole coast steamed. Teresa stood up from her crate, stiff, and went out to the road and looked east toward the sea dam, and on top of it, against the sky, she could see small figures moving.

"The koker," said Albert Lee beside her. "Something wrong."

It was a tree. A whole tree, a big swamp tree uprooted somewhere in the backdam and carried forward by the flood down the main trench, that had come to rest across the mouth of the koker on the land side in the night and jammed there, branches and roots and all, and the water could not get past it. Sammy had found it at the morning low tide. They had been working on it all day.

Teresa went. Everyone went. The men went into the trench up to their chests with ropes and cutlasses, and the women stood on the dam and hauled. Daniel Bascom went under the water three times with a saw and came up blowing. Albert Lee, who could not swim, held a rope with Mabel and Winnie and Grace behind him, all of them leaning back, their feet slipping in the mud. Teresa held a rope. The rope burned her hands and she did not let go.

It came free at sunset, all at once. The tree rolled and swung and the roots went past the koker walls and the water came after it with a rush and a roar that drowned every voice on the dam. Sammy, who had been standing at the winch for eight hours, wound the door up to the top, as high as it would go. The water went out through it in a brown torrent, foaming, carrying grass and lilies and drowned crabs and somebody's washtub, and out across the mud flats, where the tide was just turning, and into the sea.

---

On the fourth day the book was dry.

It was not what it had been. The pages were wavy, and stiff, and brown in tide lines where the water had soaked up and stopped, and in places the ink had run and blurred so badly that whole lines were gone. Teresa turned them with the turkey feather, one by one, at the cake shop's counter, with Grace and Winnie and Albert and Mabel and old Frank Gomes, who had come to complain and stayed, all leaning over her.

The first page had held. The names were there. The crooked H was there, a little fainter, a little blurred at one leg.

But in the middle of the book, in the years of the seventies and eighties, whole pages had run. You could see that there had been writing on them. You could not read it.

Teresa sat back on the stool. Grace put a hand on her shoulder. Old Frank cleared his throat to say something and, for once, thought better of it. Then Winnie Lee, who was twelve, said: "Miss Gomes. The copybooks."

Teresa did not understand.

"The ones the big girls did. When Mrs. Hannah Lee had the school. Ivy and Ruby and the Persaud girl. My mother said. They copied the whole thing out. Every page."

Teresa sat very still.

The copybooks had been in the top of the cupboard. The top of the cupboard had been dry.

She put on her shoes and went up the road to the schoolhouse at a run, through the mud, and found them, a stack of school copybooks tied with string, with the years written on the covers in four different girls' hands. She untied the string. She opened the one marked 1876 to 1884, and there, in a small neat hand that leaned a little to the right, was every word of the pages that had run, copied exactly, with a tiny cross over each word the copier had not been sure of.

At the bottom of one page was a line in that neat hand: Kokerman I. Bascom says he want somebody back there.

She sat on the dry bench and laughed, and then she did cry, a little, which annoyed her very much.

Blackout on Water Street

The seven-ten train from Plaisance was so full that Winnie Lee rode the last four miles into Georgetown standing on the step of the third carriage, gripping the rail, holding her hat on with her free hand.

It was not allowed. Nothing was allowed anymore. There were notices about it on every station wall, along with the notices about the blackout and the notices about rationing and the notices telling people to grow more food and not to talk about ships. But the guard on the seven-ten was a Concord man, a nephew of somebody, and he only shook his head at her as he went past along the outside of the carriage like a crab on a wall.

The coast went by below her. The trenches full and shining in the early light. The canefields of the estates, and here and there a black field where they had burned the night before, still smoking a little, the smell of it coming in waves through the smell of the engine. Rice beds, green. Villages: the house lots on their posts, the zinc roofs catching the sun, women already in the yards, a man in a white vest cycling along a dam with a basket of fish on the handlebars. And on her left the whole way, the sea wall, concrete now along most of this stretch, gray and long and straight, and over it, now and then, the brown sea showing in a gap, the same color it had always been.

She was twenty-one. She had a job in town, which half of Concord thought was wonderful and the other half thought would end in disaster, and she was late.

---

The Food Control office was on the upper floor of a wooden building on Water Street, near the market, over a hardware merchant who had nothing in his windows anymore but nails. Winnie typed ration cards. She had learned to type at a commercial school in town, two evenings a week for a year, going in on the train and coming back on the last one at night, and she typed faster than anyone else in the office, which the two men who also typed did not like.

There were cards for flour and cards for kerosene and cards for rice, which the colony grew, and for salt fish, which came from Canada and had almost stopped coming. Ships had been sunk. Everybody knew it and nobody said it in the office, because it was on the notices not to. But you could not hide it. Last year a ship had gone down so close to the mouth of the river that people on the sea wall in town said they had seen the smoke. The flour that came now came irregularly and in small amounts, and every family on the coast had a card that said how much of it they could buy each week, and Winnie had typed half of them.

At noon she went down to the market.

Stabroek market was the one thing in town the war had not made smaller. It stood at the foot of Water Street on the river, a great hall of iron and glass with a clock tower on the corner, built sixty years before, people said, from pieces shipped out from England and bolted together like a toy. The clock's four faces looked out over the whole town. Under it, inside, under the high iron roof with the light falling through in long dusty beams, was everything. Plantains in green and yellow banks. Cassava, eddoes, sweet potatoes in heaps. Pyramids of limes. Peppers. Fish from the river and the sea laid out on wet sacks, still moving. Cassava bread in tall stacks from up the rivers. Crabs tied in bundles with string, their claws waving. Coconut oil in bottles, gold. Brooms, baskets, cutlasses, enamel plates. Cloth. Tobacco. Herbs for every kind of complaint. Live chickens in coops that complained louder than anything. And the noise: a thousand people talking at once in the English of the coast and the English of the town and in Portuguese and Hindi and Chinese and the languages of the river people, and all of it bouncing off the iron roof and coming back down.

And since the base, Americans.

They had come two years ago, in 1941, to build an airfield on the river south of town, out in the sand hills, and they came into Georgetown on Saturdays and on any other day they could get away, young men in khaki with very short hair and very loud voices who had more money than anybody in the colony had ever seen in a young man's hand. They bought things in the market as if they had never seen food. They took pictures of the clock. They were polite, mostly, and enormous, and they ate everything.

One of them was at the stall of a Concord woman Winnie knew, Miss Ivy from the front lots, who sold sugar cake and pine tarts from Winnie's father's oven on market days. He was holding a pine tart up to the light and turning it over.

"What is this?" he said to Winnie, because she was there, and because she looked as if she might know. "Pineapple pie?"

"Pine tart."

"Pine?"

"Pineapple."

"Then why isn't it called a pineapple tart?"

Winnie looked at him. He had a sunburned nose and was perhaps nineteen.

"Because," she said, "it isn't."

He bought six.

---

The flour got worse in the middle of the year, and by August there was almost none.

Her father had been making bread and pine tarts in the brick oven behind the cake shop for twenty years, as his father had before him and his grandmother before that, and he had never in his life run out of flour. He stood in the oven yard on a morning in August with an empty sack in his hands, turning it inside out as if there might be some in a seam.

"Rice flour," said her mother.

"Rice flour make a bread like a brick."

"Then make bricks."

He made rice bread. It was heavy and gray and sweet and it fell apart when you cut it, and people bought it because there was nothing else, and complained about it to his face, and came back. The government had notices up now telling people to eat local, eat rice, eat cassava, eat plantain, eat what you grow. Winnie had typed one. She brought a copy home and pinned it up in the shop as a joke, and her father took it down.

It was Grace Bascom who said it, on a Sunday, on the Bascom gallery, where the Lees had come to eat because the Bascoms still had a pot of pepperpot and the Lees had nothing to put with it.

"You want bread," Grace said, "ask my mother."

Lucy Bascom was sixty-seven. She sat in the rocking chair that had been Patience's, with a basket on her knees that she was weaving, the way she always was, out of split strips of a reed that her nephew sent down from the river. Her hands did not stop while she talked. Her hair was entirely gray and she wore it in a long plait down her back. She had lived in Concord for forty-eight years, and in all that time Winnie had never heard her raise her voice.

"Cassava bread," Lucy said, "is not bread. It is better."

---

So in September they made cassava bread in the cake shop oven yard, and half the village came to help, because everybody wanted bread and nobody knew how.

It was the cassava first, the bitter kind, which the Persauds still grew on the high ridges in the back. Sumintra Persaud brought it, in a cart, two sacks of it, with her son Dev, who was thirteen and sulked because he had wanted to go and look at the American trucks on the public road. Then the peeling and the grating. Lucy's old grater, the long board with the chips of stone in it, which her grandmother had made, and three new ones of tin with nail holes punched through that Albert Lee made in an afternoon. Then the press. Lucy had a new one, woven by the same nephew, and they hung it from the lean-to beam over the oven yard and sat on the pole in turns, Winnie and Dev and two Gomes boys and Grace, and the poison juice ran out yellow into a pot that Lucy guarded with a stick, because a dog had tried to drink from it.

Then the part Winnie had never seen. Lucy took the pressed cassava out of the press, a long white tube of it, damp and packed hard, and broke it up with her hands and rubbed it through a sieve, a flat woven tray, until it was a coarse damp flour. Then she took the iron plate, the big flat iron plate that had come from the Bascom yard two generations ago and still had roti in its history, and set it on three stones over a low fire of coconut husks.

"Hot," she said. "Not too hot."

She spread a ring of cassava flour on the iron, a circle as wide as a man's arm is long, and pressed it flat with the edge of a calabash, round and round, until it was a thin even sheet. She did not hurry. The sheet began to hold together. The edges went from white to cream. She took a flat wooden paddle and slid it under and turned the whole thing over in one motion, so fast Winnie barely saw it. The underside was speckled brown. She let it cook a little more and slid it off onto the zinc of the lean-to roof, which Albert had climbed up and swept, and laid it flat in the sun.

"Dry," she said. "One day. Then it keep a year."

Winnie tried. Her first one broke into pieces when she turned it. Her second one burned. Her third one was not round but it held, and she slid it up onto the roof next to Lucy's and stood back to look at it, sweating, with cassava flour to her elbows and the smell of the hot iron and the coconut husk smoke in her hair.

By evening the whole roof of the oven lean-to was covered in pale disks drying in the sun, overlapping like the scales of a fish, and the next day the village had bread for a month.

---

Sumintra Persaud wrote it down.

She did it that evening, on the gallery of the cake shop, by the last of the light, because the blackout meant no lamp could show from any window after dark. She had a copybook in her lap, an old school one, thick with use, and she wrote in it in her small neat hand that leaned to the right. She had been writing in it for twenty-six years. It was full of things. How her grandmother made roti. How Mrs. Lee had made pine tarts. How Lucy made cassareep, which she had finally watched in 1921. How Mrs. Gomes put down garlic pork. Metemgee. Cook-up. Black cake, with eleven months of fruit. Now cassava bread.

"Why you write all that?" Winnie asked.

Sumintra did not look up. "Somebody should."

"Everybody know how to make cook-up."

"Now they know." She finished a line. "Your children's children will be somewhere with no cassava and no oven and they will want to know." She looked up then and smiled. "Or they won't, and it doesn't matter."

Winnie thought about that on the train the next morning, standing on the step, with the sea wall going by.

---

The blackout was strictest at the coast, because of the ships.

On a night in October Winnie walked up the middle walk to the sea dam after dark, which her mother did not know about, and climbed the concrete steps to the top of the wall.

There was no light anywhere. That was what she could never get used to. All her life the coast at night had been dotted with lamps, every house, every gallery, the koker lantern, the rum shop, the lights of town to the west in a low glow on the clouds. Now there was nothing. The whole coast lay under the sky in the dark as it must have lain before anybody came, and the stars were enormous, more stars than she knew existed, and the sea in front of her was black, and loud, and the wind off it was cold and wet.

Somewhere out there were the ships. The supply ships, carrying flour and salt fish. And the others, under the water, waiting for them.

Below her, to the left, she could hear the koker. Daniel Bascom was working it without a lantern now, by feel, because the rules said no light on the shore. She heard the winch and the groan of the door and then, steady and unhurried, the sound of the water running out. It was the oldest sound in Concord. Hester Bascom had heard it on her first night as an owner. Her father said that Mr. Ah Sing Lee, the first of them, had built the cake shop on high posts because of it.

She thought of the American with the sunburned nose, who had come back to Miss Ivy's stall three Saturdays running and bought six pine tarts each time and asked Winnie each time where she was from and did not believe there was a place called Concord. She thought of the typing, and the commercial school, and the notice she had seen last week in the office about women wanted for clerical posts in Trinidad, and in Jamaica, and maybe, after the war, in London. She thought of Sumintra's copybook. Your children's children will be somewhere.

The water ran out of the koker in the dark. Out at sea, very far off, so far she was not sure, a light showed for a second on the water and was gone.

Everybody's Name

By half past five in the morning there were forty people outside the schoolhouse, and Ruth Bascom had not yet found the key.

"It's in your hand, Miss," said the policeman.

It was in her hand. She had been holding it so tightly since she left the house that she had stopped feeling it, an iron key on a loop of string that the headmaster had given her the night before with a face as if he were handing her a baby. She unlocked the door. The hinges, which she had oiled herself yesterday, did not squeak. Behind her, on the road, the line shifted and murmured and somebody laughed, and the sky over the cane to the east was going from black to a deep clear green, and the kiskadees were starting.

"Six o'clock," the presiding officer said, coming up the steps behind her with the box. "Not a minute before. You hear me, Miss Bascom? Not one minute."

"Yes, Mr. Thom."

"If one person vote at a minute before six, they will throw out this whole station and I will be in the newspaper."

"Yes, Mr. Thom."

He was a small anxious man from the civil service in town, sent out with a ballot box and a policeman and a bag of papers and the belief that the East Coast would be the death of him. Ruth had liked him at once.

---

She was twenty-eight and had taught the infants at Concord school for nine years, and for the last four, since her aunt Grace's eyes got too tired for it, she had kept the cedar box. She had been appointed poll clerk because she could read fast and write a clear hand and because the headmaster, who had been asked first, had said that he would sooner put his hand in a fire. Her job was to sit at the table by the door with the register and find each person's name, and read it aloud, and tick it, and send them on to Mr. Thom, who would give them a paper, and they would go behind the screen, which was a flour sack curtain hung on a cord across the corner where the blackboard was, and make their mark, and fold the paper, and put it in the box.

That was all. It was the simplest thing in the world. People had been doing it in England for a hundred years. They had been doing it in this colony for a hundred years too, some of them. But up to now you had needed to own property, or earn a certain income, or read and write to a certain standard, to have your name on the register at all. Ruth's father had voted, once, because of his land. Her grandmother had never voted. Her aunt Grace had never voted. Most of the people in the line had never voted.

This year everyone over twenty-one could. Everyone. That was the new law. Men and women, owners and tenants, cane cutters and rice farmers and fishermen and shopkeepers, people who could read and people who could not. The government had put up notices about it all over the coast for a year. Ruth had taught her infants to read the notice. She had gone round the back lands in the evenings with Mrs. Sumintra Persaud and helped people find their names on the preliminary list and get them put on when they were missing, and they had been missing a lot, because the clerks who had made the list had not known how to spell half the names in Concord and had not much cared to learn.

---

At six exactly, by Mr. Thom's watch, which he held up for the policeman to see, Ruth opened the door.

The first person in line was her grandmother.

Lucy Bascom was seventy-seven. She had walked from the house on the front lot with Grace on one side of her and a stick in her other hand, and she had been standing outside the schoolhouse since five. She had on a dress Ruth had never seen, dark blue with a white collar, and she had her gray plait coiled up and pinned, and she carried a small basket on her arm, one of her own, very fine, the strips of reed so thin and so close that it looked like cloth.

She came up the three steps slowly. She stood at Ruth's table.

"Name," said Ruth, because she had to, because that was the procedure, and because Mr. Thom was watching.

"Lucy Bascom," said her grandmother. Then, after a moment: "Wakaba."

Ruth looked at the register. It was in alphabetical order, a long typed list on foolscap sheets, every adult in the Concord district, and she ran her finger down the B's. Bascom, Clarice. Bascom, Daniel. Bascom, Grace. Bascom, Henry. Bascom, Lucy.

"Lucy Bascom," Ruth read aloud, clearly, for the record and for the room, and ticked it.

Her grandmother nodded once, the way she did when a cassava bread came off the iron whole. She went to Mr. Thom and took her paper and went behind the flour sack curtain with it and her stick. Ruth heard the stick knock against a bench. Then a long pause. Then the paper rustling as it was folded, very carefully, in exact halves, and her grandmother came out from behind the curtain and put it into the slot in the box and stood regarding the box as though it had surprised her.

Then she turned and went out, and on the steps, where the whole line could see her, she stopped and took something from her basket and handed it to Grace. It was a cassava bread, round and pale and perfect. Grace broke it and gave half to the person behind her in line, who was old Frank Gomes, eighty-one, who had voted four times in his life because of his rum shop and wanted everybody to know it.

"What this for?" Frank said, holding the cassava bread.

"For you to eat," said Lucy, and went home.

---

They came all morning.

The sun came up hot over the cane and the schoolhouse heated like an oven with the shutters open, and the zinc roof ticked as it expanded, and the line outside did not get shorter. People came in their best clothes. Men in white shirts that had been starched until they could stand up on their own. Women in their good dresses, some in long bright wraps from their grandmothers' trunks, some in headties, some in hats from town with flowers on them. Rice farmers from the back lands came straight from the fields, mud to the knees, because they had been up at four and would go back at noon. Cane cutters from Good Hope came, because Good Hope was in the Concord district now. They waited in the sun and talked, and the talk was loud and cheerful and full of teasing, and every so often somebody came out of the schoolhouse and the people near the door asked how it was, and they said it was easy, nothing to it, and walked off very straight, as if they had grown.

Ruth read names.

That was all she did for eleven hours. She read them aloud as each person came to the table, and found them on the register, and ticked them. Persaud, Dev. Persaud, Sumintra. Persaud, Ramesh. Lee, Albert. Lee, Mabel. Lee, Edwin. Lee, Winifred, who had come home from town for the day and dressed as if for a wedding. Gomes, Francisco. Gomes, Teresa. Gomes, Leo. Arno, Cecil. Ferreira, Hilda. Ramkissoon, Lall. Bascom, Daniel, her own father, who winked at her. Names from the front lots and the back lands and Good Hope, African names and Indian names and Portuguese and Chinese and names that had come from owners and been kept or changed, names that had been in the cedar box since 1840 and names that had arrived on ships in 1846 and 1853 and 1917, and names nobody in Concord could pronounce until they had heard them said by the person who owned them.

She had thought it would be boring. It was not. Somewhere in the middle of the morning, she found that she had stopped looking at the people and was only hearing the names, one after another, in her own voice, out loud in the schoolhouse where she had learned her letters, and that her eyes were stinging and she did not know why.

There were mistakes. There were always mistakes. An old man from the back lands whose name was on the register as Ramnarine when it was Ramnarain, and who refused to vote under the wrong name until Mr. Thom, sweating, wrote a note in the margin. A woman who came in with her baby and could not find anywhere to put it down, so Ruth held it on her knee while she voted, and it was sick on the register. A man who went behind the curtain and did not come out for so long that the policeman went to look, and found him sitting on the bench reading the ballot paper over and over, because he had never been asked his opinion of anything in sixty years and wanted to be sure.

At noon her nephew Carl came in, who was five, with his mother, and stood by Ruth's table while his mother voted, staring at the box.

"What she putting in it?"

"Her name," said Ruth. "Sort of."

"Why?"

She thought about it. "So they can count her."

---

At two the rain came, a short hard shower, the first of the season. It came across the cane in a gray wall and hit the zinc roof so loud that for five minutes nobody in the schoolhouse could hear anybody else, and Ruth stopped reading names and just sat, and Mr. Thom put both hands flat on his table and gazed up at the ceiling in despair. The people in the line outside did not leave. They came up onto the gallery and squeezed in under the eaves, laughing, and the ones who could not fit stood in the rain and got wet and did not care. When it stopped, the road steamed, and the air smelled of wet dust and cut grass and, from somewhere, somebody's lunch, curry and fried plantain, and the frogs started up in the trench as if it were evening.

At four Mrs. Sumintra Persaud came back with a pot of food for the officers, because she knew nobody would have thought to feed them. Rice and dhal and a curry of pumpkin and roti folded in a cloth, still warm. Mr. Thom said he was not permitted to accept gifts at a polling station. Mrs. Persaud said it was not a gift, it was lunch, and set it on the end of his table. He ate it with his fingers, with great concentration, between voters, and said nothing about it in any report.

---

At six in the evening, by Mr. Thom's watch, the policeman shut the door.

Mr. Thom sealed the box with wax and string and a brass seal, and wrote things on forms, and counted the unused papers twice, and signed, and had Ruth sign, and the policeman sign. A car came for him from the district office, the only car Ruth had seen on the Concord road in a month, with a driver who complained about the mud. Mr. Thom shook her hand.

"Very good, Miss Bascom," he said. "No mistakes. Well. Some mistakes. Not your mistakes." He hesitated in the door with the box in his arms. "Seven hundred and nine," he said. "That is the number who voted here. Out of seven hundred and forty on the register." He looked almost frightened. "I have never seen anything like it."

The car went off down the road in the dusk with the box, toward town, where it would be counted with all the others. Ruth did not know what the count would be. It did not matter to her tonight. She stood in the door of the empty schoolhouse with the register in her hands and watched the taillights go.

Then she went to the cupboard and took out the cedar box and opened it and took out the old book, the one with the marbled cover, wavy and stained from the flood when she was nine, and opened it to the first page. Sixty-three names. Some with marks. One with a crooked H.

She laid the register beside it on the table. Seven hundred and forty names, typed.

She sat for a while looking at the two of them side by side, in the last of the light. Then she put the old book back in its oilcloth, and the register in its envelope, and locked the schoolhouse with the iron key, and walked home along the front dam. The tide was going out. Up ahead, on the sea wall, her father's lantern was moving toward the koker, and as she walked she heard, coming down the middle walk from the back lands, somebody singing, an old man's voice, a song in Hindi that climbed at each line's close, and then, from a yard on the front lots, somebody answering it with a different song entirely, and both of them laughing.

Ravi's Trunk

The trunk would not shut, and Dev Persaud sat on the lid while his brother did the hasps, and their mother stood in the doorway saying that if it would not shut it was because Ravi had packed it like a fool.

"I packed it like a man going to England," said Ravi.

"You packed it like a man going to England with no sense."

It was a tin trunk, painted green, bought new at a shop on Regent Street in town for more money than Dev made from an acre of rice in a good season. It had brass corners and Ravi's name painted on the lid in white letters by the man in the shop, who had spelled it right the second time. Inside was everything Ravi owned and several things he did not. Three shirts. Two pairs of trousers. The good suit, gray, made by a tailor in Plaisance, who had never seen a London winter and had made it of a cloth suited to a wedding in Guiana in August. A coat bought secondhand from a man who had come back. Shoes. Socks, which Ravi had never worn in his life except to the wedding, and which he held up and looked at with suspicion. A bottle of pepper sauce, wrapped in a shirt. A jar of mango pickle, wrapped in another. A stack of roti, wrapped in a cloth and then in wax paper and then in another cloth, that their mother had made at four in the morning and that Ravi had been told to eat on the first day at sea and not before.

And on top, flat, in a brown paper envelope, a copybook.

"What's this?" Dev said, lifting the corner of it as Ravi tried to close the lid.

"Ma's."

"Ma's book?"

"Ma's copy. She made me copy out all of it. Every recipe. Three weeks of evenings." Ravi held up his right hand and flexed it. "I have a callus."

Their mother, in the doorway, said nothing at all, which was how they knew it mattered.

---

The ship sailed from the wharf at Georgetown on a Thursday in July, in the middle of the long wet season, and half of Concord went to see it go.

Not half. It only seemed like half. There were three trucks, borrowed from the rice mill and from a Gomes cousin who carried timber, and they went along the coast road in a line at six in the morning with people standing in the backs holding onto the sides and each other, singing, and the rain came and went and came again and nobody got down. Dev rode in the first truck with the trunk. Ravi rode in the cab with their mother, who had never been in a truck before and did not like it.

The coast went by in the gray light. The trenches brimming, the rice fields under water, flat and silver to the horizon, with the young plants standing up in rows and the white egrets standing among them like pegs. The villages, each one a string of houses on posts along the road, zinc roofs running with water, people on the galleries waving as the trucks went past because they could see what kind of trip it was. Everybody knew. Every village on the coast that year had somebody going. England wanted workers for its buses and its hospitals and its factories, and the papers said there were jobs, and the ships went every few weeks, and the price of rice was what it was. Two boys from the front lots had gone in the spring. A Lee cousin had gone last year and written back that it was cold and gray and that he had a job on the trains and a room with a gas fire you fed with coins. A Gomes girl had gone to be a nurse.

And on the left, all the way into town, the sea wall.

It was concrete here, high and gray, built in long sections with joints between them, and on the other side of it the sea at high tide stood nearly to the top, brown and heaving, with the rain on it. Waves hit it and went up. Spray came over in sheets and fell on the road and on the trucks and on the people singing in the backs, and they shrieked and laughed and went on singing.

"High tide," said the old man beside Dev in the truck. Lall Ramkissoon, who had come on one of the last ships as a boy and had never left the coast since. He looked at the wall with a professional eye. "Spring tide and wind. Bad combination."

"It's a good wall."

"Every wall is a good wall," said Lall, "till it isn't."

---

The wharf was a confusion of people and trunks and umbrellas and noise. The ship lay alongside, white and enormous and rusty at the waterline, with smoke coming from its funnel, and the gangways went up its side like ladders into a house. On the wharf were families from every village on the coast, from Berbice and the Essequibo and the islands in the river, standing around their trunks in the rain, holding on to the ones who were going. Women wept openly. Men stood with their hands in their pockets and wept less openly. Children ran between the trunks. A man was selling coconut water from a cart, hacking the green nuts open with a cutlass and handing them out with a straw, and doing a very good business.

Beyond the wharf sheds Dev could see the clock tower of Stabroek market over the roofs, and the iron of the market roof shining wet, and the river, brown and wide and fast with the flood, carrying whole islands of water hyacinth down toward the sea.

Ravi stood by the trunk in his gray suit, sweating.

"You can still come," he said to Dev. He had said it every day for a month.

"I have the rice."

"You have the rice. You have the mud. You have the koker that breaks every year and the price that falls every year and the board in town that takes your money for the drainage and doesn't drain." Ravi's face was wet, and not all of it was rain. "In England a man works and they pay him. Every Friday. You don't have to look at the sky."

"In England a man looks at the sky and it's gray."

"Then he stops looking."

Dev did not answer. He looked at his mother, who stood a little way off under an umbrella with Kamla, his wife, and his daughter, Asha, who was three and asleep on Kamla's shoulder. His mother was fifty-four. She was talking to Winnie Lee, who had come out from her office in town to see Ravi off, and who had a letter of her own in her handbag, Dev knew, from a hospital in Toronto, that she had not answered yet. The two women were laughing about something. His mother looked very small under the umbrella.

"I'll come later," Dev said. "Maybe."

Ravi knew what maybe meant. He hugged him, hard, in the gray suit, and the suit smelled of the tailor's shop in Plaisance and of sweat and of their mother's roti in the trunk, and then he went to their mother and she held his face in her two hands for a long time and said something to him that Dev could not hear, and he went up the gangway with the trunk on the shoulder of a porter behind him.

The ship's horn went. It was so loud the gulls went up off the river in a cloud.

---

They were back in Concord by four, wet and quiet. The rain had stopped. The trucks dropped people along the front dam at their own gates, and the people went into their houses without much talking, and the frogs started up in the trench.

Dev was walking his mother up the steps of the long house at the back when he heard the bell.

He knew it the way everyone in Concord knew it. It was the old hand bell from the koker house, rung hard and fast, the one that had been rung for the sea dam since before his great-grandmother came off the ship. Nobody rang it unless they had to. He had heard it three times in his life.

He ran.

---

It was the wall. Not the koker. A section of the concrete sea wall a hundred yards east of the koker, where the joint between two sections had been leaking for a year and the board in town had been written to about it twice. With the spring tide and the wind, the sea had worked its way into the joint and under the toe of the wall and scoured out the earth behind it, and the section had settled and cracked from top to bottom, and the sea was coming through the crack.

Not over. Through. A jet of brown water as thick as a man's arm, driving out of the landward face of the wall at the height of Dev's chest and falling into the trench behind with a noise like a pump. Around it the concrete was weeping in a dozen places. Every time a wave hit the other side, the jet doubled and the whole slab seemed to shiver.

Henry Bascom, the kokerman, was there, soaked to the skin, his lantern on the ground. So were twenty others. More were coming along the dam from both directions, running, with shovels and forks and sacks.

"The tide's still rising," Henry said. "Another hour and a half. If it goes, it goes all at once."

"Sandbags," said Dev.

"We have forty."

"Then we fill more."

---

They filled them all night.

They filled them from the borrow pit behind the dam, where the clay was heavy and blue-gray and stuck to the shovel, and from the sand of the foreshore when the tide went down far enough, and from the road itself. The rice mill sent its whole store of empty sacks on a cart. The cake shop sent theirs, the flour sacks with the miller's name on them in blue. The Gomes provision shop sent sacks of rice that had not been emptied yet, and old Leo Gomes said they could have the rice too if it would keep the sea out, it had weevils anyway. Women held the sacks open and men shoveled and children tied them with string, and they carried them up the face of the dam and passed them hand to hand along a line to the crack and packed them against it on the landward side, layer on layer, until the jet was a spout and then a trickle and then a dark weeping stain on the sacking.

It was what Hester Bascom had done with baskets of clay in 1869. Dev knew that, because his mother had read it to him from the copy she had made at thirteen. He did not think about it at the time. He thought about it later.

At midnight the tide turned. They felt it in the wall. The pressure went out of it, and the weeping slowed, and the sea pulled back down the mud with a long sucking sound, and the cracked slab stood, leaning a little, propped on four hundred sacks of clay and sand and weevily rice.

Henry Bascom went to the koker and opened it, because the land behind the wall was full of water from the breach and from the rain, and it had to go. Dev went with him. He had never worked the koker. Henry showed him: the bar, the winch, the lean, the give. The water went out under the door in a black rush with foam on it, as it had since 1840. Henry's son Carl, who was ten and should have been in bed, sat on the koker wall with his knees under his chin and watched.

"In England," Dev said, "they don't have this."

"They have the Thames," said Henry. "I read about it. Walls all along. Sluices."

"Who opens the sluices?"

Henry shrugged. "Somebody paid."

They stood and watched the water run out. Dev's hands were raw from the sacks. He was so tired his legs shook. He thought about Ravi on the ship, somewhere out on the dark sea past the mouth of the river, eating none of the roti because he had been told not to till morning, and the green trunk in the hold with the copybook in it, every recipe in Ravi's hand with his callus.

In the morning he went home and slept for four hours, and then got up and went out to the rice, because the water had come back into the beds from the breach and had to be let out again at the right time, by somebody who knew.

Smoke From Town

Marcus Gomes saw the smoke from the window of the four o'clock train, and at first he thought it was a cane fire in the wrong place.

It was too big. It stood up over Georgetown behind them in a column so wide and so black that it looked solid, like a second town built on top of the first, and at the top it spread out under the clouds and went brown and orange where the sun came through it. The train was pulling away east along the coast and every person in the carriage had turned round in their seats to look back at it through the windows. Nobody spoke much. An old woman with a basket of fish on her knees said "Oh, no," very quietly, and then nothing more.

He had been in it an hour before. He worked as a clerk in a hardware store on Water Street, behind a long counter with brass rails, measuring out nails by the pound and rope by the yard and writing invoices in triplicate on paper so thin you could read through it. At two o'clock the manager had come out from the office and told them all to go home. There was trouble in the streets. The shops were closing. Marcus had walked to the station along the edge of the market, past the iron hall with its clock, through a crowd that was moving in too many directions at once, and he had smelled smoke already, and heard glass, and seen a policeman on a horse at the corner looking as if he did not know where to go, and then he had got on the train and the train had left, and now he could see the whole thing from the outside.

The center of town was burning. By the time he got to Plaisance, the radio in the station master's office said so. The wooden stores along the commercial streets, one after another, the fire jumping from roof to roof in the wind. By night the glow of it was on the clouds all along the coast, and people in Concord stood on the sea wall and watched it, a red light low in the west where the town lights usually were, and talked in low voices, and went home and did not sleep.

---

His aunt Teresa had the rum shop now, and she shut it that night for the first time since the war.

"Nobody needs rum tonight," she said.

"Everybody needs rum tonight," said his father, Leo, from the provision shop next door.

"That's why."

She was fifty-four and had been the schoolmistress for twenty years before she took over the rum shop from her father, and she ran it like a classroom. There were rules on a board behind the counter in chalk. There was no credit after the fifteenth of the month. There was no talk of certain things after nine o'clock at night, and everybody knew what the certain things were, and so for the last two years, since the talk on the coast had begun to get sharp, the rum shop had been one of the only places in Concord where people of every family still sat on the same bench.

Marcus played there on Saturdays. He had a guitar he had bought from a sailor and taught himself on, and he played calypsos, the old ones and the new ones from Trinidad that came on records, and he made up his own about people in the village, about the price of rice and the koker that broke every wet season and old Mr. Lall Ramkissoon's opinion of the sea wall. They were not very good. People laughed anyway, at the right places, and sometimes at the wrong ones, and banged the counter with their glasses on the last line of every verse, which was the custom, and his aunt pretended to disapprove.

He did not play that Saturday. The rum shop was open again, but quiet.

---

It went on all year.

Not in Concord. That was the strange thing, and the thing Marcus did not know how to explain to anybody who did not live on the coast. In town, and in other villages, there was trouble. There were strikes, and marches, and nights when people stayed indoors. There were villages along the coast where neighbors who had lived side by side for three generations had stopped speaking. There were stories, and the stories got worse each time they were told, and nobody knew which were true. Families left. A rice farmer moved his family from a village to the east to his brother's place in Berbice, overnight, with everything on a cart. An African family from the back of a village near Mahaica came to Concord, to cousins, and stayed. In the rum shop men looked at the door every time it opened.

In Concord, they called a meeting.

It was the village council now, not the old meeting under the tamarind, and it met in the schoolhouse, not under a tree. But it was still the same thing, really. Still the same families. Still the cedar box in the cupboard at the back of the room with the book in it from 1840, and Miss Ruth Bascom still keeping it, and the minutes still written by hand in a ledger by whoever had the clearest writing, which this year was Miss Ruth.

Marcus went because his father made him. He sat at the back on a bench with his knees up against the bench in front. It was hot. The shutters were open and the moths came in and circled the lamps. Every family was there. The Bascoms and the Arnos and the Ferreiras from the front lots, the Persauds and the Ramkissoons and the Singhs from the back lands, the Lees from the cake shop, his own family from the corner. The new family from Mahaica, sitting very still by the door.

Dev Persaud stood up. Marcus knew him a little: a rice farmer from the back, ten years older, quiet, with hands like roots. His brother was in London. He did not stand up at meetings often.

"I want to say something about the sea dam," Dev said.

People looked at each other. It was not what they had expected.

"Every night," said Dev, "Henry Bascom go to the koker alone. Every night since his father, and his father before that. Two o'clock, three o'clock, he walk the whole front dam alone with a lantern." He looked round the room. "This year, the way things are, nobody should walk anywhere alone. Not Henry. Not anybody."

"So?" somebody said.

"So I want to walk with him." Dev looked at his hands. "And I want somebody from the front lots to walk the back dam with the Ramkissoons when they check the rice trench. And somebody from the back to sit with Miss Teresa when she close the shop. Two by two. Every night. Different people. Everybody take turns." He sat down. "That is all."

The room stayed so still that Marcus thought it had failed. Then old Daniel Bascom, sixty-three, who had kept the koker for twenty years before his son, laughed from his bench by the wall.

"My grandmother," he said, "used to say the sea don't care who own the land." He shook his head, still laughing. "She would have liked you, Persaud."

They voted it by hands. Miss Ruth wrote it down.

---

Marcus was put with Dev, on the koker, on Tuesday nights.

He did not want to be. He was twenty-two and had a letter in his pocket from Winnie Lee of the cake shop, who was a nurse in a hospital in Toronto now, and who had written that there were jobs there for young men who could keep accounts and that the cold was terrible but you got used to it and the money was real. He had been carrying the letter for a month. He took it out and read it on the train every morning. On Tuesday nights at two in the morning he did not want to be walking the front dam with a rice farmer who said nothing.

But he went. The first Tuesday, they walked the whole length of the front dam from the Good Hope boundary to the east end without a word, and Henry Bascom met them at the koker and they watched him open it, and they walked back.

The second Tuesday it rained, and they sat under the koker house roof, which was zinc, and the noise made talk impossible anyway.

The third Tuesday, Dev brought food.

He had it in a pot wrapped in a cloth, and he opened it on the koker wall while Henry was working the winch, and it was cook-up rice, black-eyed peas and rice and coconut milk and salt beef and thyme, dark and heavy and still warm. He had a spoon for each of them. Marcus had not eaten since six. He ate standing on the koker wall in the dark with the water running out below him and the frogs going and the smell of the mud flats coming up on the wind.

"Who made this?"

"My mother."

"Your mother makes cook-up?"

Dev looked at him. "Why not?"

Marcus did not know why not. He had thought, without thinking, that cook-up belonged to the front lots, to the Bascom kitchens, the way roti belonged to the back lands and garlic pork to his own family at Christmas. He said so, more or less.

Dev laughed. It was the first time Marcus had heard him laugh.

"My mother has a book," he said. "You never saw it? Everybody in Concord who ever made anything, she wrote down. Since 1917. My brother copied it out to take to London." He scraped the pot. "Cook-up is page forty. Under your great-grandmother's garlic pork and above Mrs. Lee's pine tarts." He shrugged. "My mother says nothing in this village belongs to only one family. She says it's all just written in different hands."

---

In the months after that, Marcus found he did not mind Tuesdays.

They talked, a little, on the dam. About rice and the price of rice. About Dev's brother in London, who drove a bus now and had married a girl from Barbados and sent home photographs of himself in a coat so thick he looked like a bear. About Winnie Lee's letter and Toronto, which Dev had never thought about and said sounded cold. About the sea wall and the joint near the koker that the board had finally repaired after the breach four years ago, with Dev and half the village on sandbags all night.

They walked. Henry worked the koker. Some nights other pairs passed them on the dam, two lanterns coming the other way, a Bascom and a Singh, a Ferreira and a Ramkissoon, a Lee and an Arno, and they called out to each other and kept walking.

And on Saturdays Marcus played again, at the rum shop. He made a new calypso, about the night watch, about the pairs on the dam and the lanterns and Dev Persaud's mother's cook-up and old Daniel Bascom laughing at the meeting. It was the best one he had ever made. It was still not very good. But when he played it, on a Saturday in October, with the rain on the zinc and the shutters propped open and the moths at the lamps, the whole shop banged the counter on the last line of every verse so hard that his aunt's glasses jumped, and at the end Dev Persaud, sitting at the back with a mauby, raised his glass to him and did not drink, just held it there.

Marcus did not go to Toronto that year. He told himself it was because of the trouble, that it was not the time to leave his parents. He told Winnie the same thing in a letter. It was partly true.

On the last Tuesday of the year, on the dam at three in the morning, he asked Dev if he could see the book.

"My mother's?"

"I want to see page forty."

Dev looked at him for a while in the light of the lantern. Then he nodded.

The water ran out of the koker below them, black and steady, toward the sea, which was quiet that night, and far to the west the lights of town were on again, a low orange glow on the clouds where the fire had been.

Every Dish on One Table

"Pepperpot," said Grace Bascom, "is not negotiable."

"Nobody is negotiating," said Sumintra Persaud. "I am only saying it is May. It is not Christmas. Who eats pepperpot in May?"

"Everybody who comes to my table in May."

They were on the gallery of the Bascom house on the front lot, in the two rocking chairs, with a copybook open between them on a stool and a plate of sugar cake that neither of them was supposed to be eating. It was a Sunday afternoon in June of 1965, the short gap between the rains, and the heat lay on the coast like a hand. The breadfruit tree in the yard dropped a leaf, very slowly, the size of a tray. Below the gallery, in the dust under the house, three of Henry's grandchildren and a dog were all asleep in a heap.

The council had given them the feast. It had happened at the meeting in May, after the announcement on the radio that independence would come at midnight on the twenty-fifth of May next year, a year from now, and the whole village had been in the schoolhouse arguing about what to do. Fireworks, said the young men. A dance, said the young women. A cricket match against Good Hope, said everybody over fifty. Then somebody said food, and the whole room had turned and looked at Grace and Sumintra in the second row, and that had been that.

"One table," Grace had said, standing up, before she knew she was going to. "All the way along the front dam. Every family bring their dish. Everybody eat from everybody."

Miss Ruth, her niece, had written it down. Then the council voted them a sum for it that would not have fed a birthday party, and went on to argue about the fireworks.

---

Grace was sixty-three. She had never married, had never wanted to, and had kept house for her father until he died and for her brother Daniel until his wife came and for half of Concord's children in between. She had spent most of her life in the backdam, cutting cane for wages when she was young and then growing her own provisions on a family strip at the back, cassava and eddoes and plantain and peppers, and she had hands like the bark of a tree and a laugh that the whole front dam could hear. She could not read well. She had never been to school past the age of nine, because her mother needed her, and she had never minded, except once, in 1934, sitting by the cake shop oven with Teresa Gomes, looking at a drowned book with her great-great-grandmother's mark in it and not being able to read the names on either side.

Sumintra was sixty-one and could read anything. She had been reading the minutes since she was thirteen and writing her own book since then too, and it was in her lap now, the cook-book, as people called it, though it had never had a name: a stack of school copybooks sewn together along one edge with fishing line, swollen and soft with fifty years of use, stained with turmeric and coconut oil and cassareep, and in it, in her small neat hand that leaned to the right, was every dish anybody in Concord had ever told her how to make.

"Page forty," Sumintra said, turning. "Cook-up. Your grandmother Clementina's way, and then Hannah's way, which has pumpkin. Page forty-one, metemgee. Page twelve, garlic pork, old Mrs. Gomes, the jar, December. Page fifty-five, chow mein, Mabel Lee. Page sixty, pine tarts, Mrs. Lee Chun." She turned more. "Roti, my grandmother, page one. Dhal, page two. Curry, three to nine, I have too many curries. Black cake, page thirty, with a note." She read it out. "Fruit must be put down eleven months. Witnessed. Frank Gomes."

Grace laughed until she had to put her sugar cake down.

"Eleven months from now is May," Sumintra said.

"I know what eleven months from now is."

"Then we should go and see Teresa."

---

Teresa Gomes was behind the counter of the rum shop with her glasses on her forehead and a ledger open, adding columns. She was fifty-seven. She looked at the two of them in her doorway and took her glasses down.

"No," she said.

"You don't know what we want."

"You want the crock."

"We want the crock," Grace said.

The crock was under the counter, where it had always been, where her father had kept it, a big stone thing with a plate for a lid, used for nothing else for sixty years but black cake fruit for Concord weddings. Teresa brought it out. It was clean and dry and smelled faintly, deep inside, of rum and raisins, like a memory.

"How many cakes?"

Grace and Sumintra looked at each other. They had not discussed this.

"How many people in Concord?" Grace said.

"Nine hundred," said Teresa. "About."

"Then a lot of cakes."

Teresa thought about this. Then she reached under the counter again and brought out a second crock, smaller, and then went into the back room and came out after a while with a third, which was not a crock at all but an enamel bucket with a lid.

"Raisins," she said. "Currants. Prunes. Peel. You will buy them in town at Stabroek, from Mr. Fernandes on the north side, because he is the only one who does not sell the peel with sawdust in it. You will chop them yourselves. You will bring them here. I will provide the rum." She paused. "And the wine."

"Teresa."

"My grandfather provided the wine," said Teresa. "For your Tanty Hannah's wedding. I am not going to be the Gomes who did not."

---

So they went to town on the train, the two of them, on a Thursday, and bought fruit.

Sumintra had been to Stabroek a hundred times. Grace had been perhaps ten in her life, and every time she came under the iron roof she stopped just inside the door and looked up at it, the girders and the glass and the light coming down through the dust, and the noise coming up at her from the whole market at once, and the smell: fish and limes and wet sacking and cassava bread and coconut oil and pepper and the river at low tide under the floor. The big clock on the tower said eleven. It always seemed to say eleven when she came.

Mr. Fernandes on the north side was ninety if he was a day, and he knew Teresa Gomes's father, and he knew why they were there before they told him. He sold them twenty pounds of raisins and fifteen of currants and ten of prunes and the peel, and threw in a pound of cherries, red and sticky in a paper, for the top of the cakes, and would not take money for the cherries.

"For the first one," he said. "Independence." He said it the way people were saying it all over town that year, trying it out, like a word in a new language. "My father came from Madeira on a sailing ship, eighteen-eighty-something. He would not believe it."

They carried it home in four flour sacks on the train, with the fruit smelling through the cloth so strongly that the people in the carriage kept looking round for it.

---

The chopping took a week. They did it on the Bascom gallery, every afternoon, on the two rocking chairs, with two boards and two knives and the fruit in enamel basins at their feet, and anybody who came up the steps was given a knife.

Henry's boy Carl came, who was seventeen and wanted to be an engineer and was supposed to be studying for his examinations. He chopped prunes for two hours and talked about drainage. Asha Persaud came, Dev's girl, who was ten, and chopped peel very slowly and very precisely and ate every fourth piece. Peter Lee came from the cake shop, fifteen and enormous and shy, and chopped raisins in silence until Grace asked him about his great-great-grandmother's oven, and then he talked for an hour about how the left side still ran hotter than the right and nobody had ever fixed it because nobody wanted to.

And Grace's mother came out. Lucy Bascom, who was eighty-nine, who still lived in the back room of the house where she had lived since 1895 and still wove a basket a week, though slower now, sat in the doorway on a straight chair with a basket on her knees and watched them, and once in a while told one of the children that they were cutting too big.

On the third day Ruth came up the steps with a box.

It was a tape recorder. The school had been given it by a teacher training college in town, a heavy gray machine with two reels on top and a microphone on a cord, and Ruth had borrowed it for the weekend. She set it on the stool. She had been wanting to ask for months, she said, and had not known how.

"Ask what?" said Lucy.

"To record you, Gran. Talking. About the river. About when you came. If you want." She looked at the machine and then at her grandmother. "Only if you want. It would be yours. Your name on it. Nobody would play it without asking."

Lucy considered the machine. Her hands went on with the basket.

"What would I say?"

"Anything."

"Nobody wants to hear an old woman say anything."

"I do," said Peter Lee, unexpectedly, and went red to the ears.

Lucy looked at him. Then she laughed, a small dry laugh that Grace had not heard in a while.

"Put it on, then," she said.

So Ruth put it on, and the reels turned, and Lucy Bascom talked. She talked about her father's dugout, and the trees leaning over the black water and dropping flowers into it, and the timber gang, and the young man from the coast who fell out of the punt on the first day and could not swim. She talked about her first sight of the sea, and how it was brown, and how she had thought all her life it would be blue. She talked about the cassava press and the poison juice and the black pot that her mother had given her, which was in the kitchen now, behind them, and had never been washed with soap. She talked about the first Christmas, and Clementina laughing on the step, and the gallery so full the posts creaked.

The children stopped chopping. Grace found she had stopped too. They sat on the gallery in the heat with the knives in their hands and the fruit at their feet and listened to the reels turning and the old voice going on, steady and dry and full of small jokes, and down in the yard the dog woke up and came up the steps and lay down at Lucy's feet.

When she stopped, after nearly an hour, Ruth did not touch the machine for a moment. Then she switched it off, and wrote on a card in her clear hand, Lucy Bascom, born Wakaba, Mahaicony River, in her own words, 1965, and put the card in the box with the reel.

"There," said Lucy. "Now somebody else can talk." She looked at the basins. "You are behind with that fruit."

---

On the first Saturday in July, Grace and Sumintra carried the fruit down the front dam to the rum shop in four enamel basins, with Carl and Peter and Asha behind them carrying more, and half the children of the front lots following to see.

Teresa had the crocks ready on the counter. They poured the fruit in, all of it, the dark sticky heaps of raisins and prunes and the little black currants and the bright peel, and Teresa took down a bottle of her best dark rum, and another, and then a bottle of the sweet red wine, and poured. The fruit drank it. The smell came up out of the crocks and filled the rum shop and went out of the door onto the road, and people stopped walking.

Teresa put the plates on, and the cloths over the plates, and a ring of candle wax round the edge of each, the way her father had.

"Eleven months," she said. "Once a month I add rum. Not without a witness."

"Who is the witness?"

Teresa looked at the three young people in the doorway. "Them," she said. "Turns."

Peter Lee put his hand up, as if he were in school.

Sumintra opened the cook-book on the counter, to page thirty, and under her own note from long ago, under Frank Gomes's name, she wrote in her small neat hand that leaned to the right: Fruit put down July 1965 for May 1966. Witnessed. And she handed the pencil to Peter, who wrote his name under it, and then to Asha, and then to Carl, and then held it out to Grace.

Grace looked at it. She took the pencil.

She wrote a G. It was crooked. Then she kept going, slowly, one letter at a time, while everybody in the rum shop watched, until it said Grace, and after it, with a long pause between each letter, Bascom.

Midnight on the Sea Wall

The table ran the length of the front dam, a quarter of a mile, and Carl Bascom had helped carry every board of it.

It was not one table. It was every table in Concord: schoolhouse benches on trestles, doors off their hinges, the long greenheart counter from the rum shop, the cake shop's baking boards, planks from the rice mill, laid end to end along the top of the dam from the Good Hope boundary to the koker, and covered in every tablecloth and bedsheet and flour sack the village owned, so that from the sea wall it looked like a long ragged white road running through the dusk. Lamps hung over it on poles. Children ran under it. Dogs patrolled it with the seriousness of policemen.

And on it, by eight in the evening on the twenty-fifth of May, 1966, was everything.

Carl walked the length of it once before the eating started, because his aunt Grace had told him to, to see that nothing was missing. Pepperpot in Lucy Bascom's black pot, which had never been washed with soap. Cook-up rice in a pot so big it sat on the ground at the end of the table and was served with a shovel, nearly. Metemgee, yellow and thick. Roti in stacks wrapped in cloths, dhal in a bucket, curries in a row of enamel basins, pumpkin and chicken and potato and chickpea, and Mrs. Sumintra Persaud standing guard over them with a ladle. Garlic pork from the Gomes jar, out of season and nobody cared. Chow mein from the cake shop on a platter the size of a cartwheel, and pine tarts by the hundred, and cassava bread, and sugar cake, and fried fish, and salt fish cakes, and plantain chips. Mauby and sorrel in buckets with blocks of ice from town floating in them, sweating. And at the koker end, under a cloth, guarded by Peter Lee and Asha Persaud with a seriousness that frightened small children, thirty black cakes, round and heavy and dark, eleven months of fruit inside them, and a red cherry on top of each from an old man at Stabroek.

Carl was eighteen. He had passed his examinations in December. He had a letter from a college in Toronto, through Winnie Lee, who knew somebody, saying there might be a place for him in civil engineering in the autumn. He had not told his father yet. He had told his aunt Grace, who had said, "Drainage?" and when he said yes, had laughed until she cried.

---

They ate at nine.

Nobody gave a signal. It just began, the way the rain began, all at once, nine hundred people reaching. Carl ate standing, the way everyone did, with a plate that was refilled by people he did not know he was related to. He ate pepperpot with roti. He ate curry with cassava bread. He ate chow mein with a spoon and black cake with his fingers, and the black cake was so dark and so soaked in rum that it stuck to his teeth and made his eyes water, and Mrs. Teresa Gomes, standing beside him, watched him eat it and nodded, satisfied.

The drums came at ten. The old men from the next village who had played at every queh-queh on this coast for forty years, and their sons, who played faster. Then Marcus Gomes with his guitar, playing calypsos on a chair on the dam, the old ones and his own, and the young people danced in the road below in the lamplight, and the old people sat along the table and watched and argued about whose dancing was worse. Somebody from the back lands brought a drum of a different kind, a big flat one played with sticks, loud and sharp and fast, and it fought the other drums for a while and then fell in with them, and for half an hour the whole front dam rang.

Lucy Bascom sat at the head of the table, at the koker end, in the rocking chair that had been carried out of the house and up the dam by four men. She was ninety. She had on the dark blue dress with the white collar she had worn to vote, and she ate a small plate of her own pepperpot, slowly, and watched everything, and every so often somebody came and knelt by the chair and said something to her, and she said something back, and they laughed.

---

At a quarter to midnight they went up on the sea wall.

All of them, or all who could climb. The tide was out. The mud lay below them under a half moon, shining, and beyond it the sea, quiet, the waves small and far off, and the wind steady and cool from the northeast, the same wind that had always come. To the west, over the line of the coast, the glow of town, and over the glow, every few seconds, a flash.

Carl stood near the koker with his father Henry and his aunt Ruth and Grace, and below them Henry's lantern hung on its hook at the winch, because the tide did not care what night it was.

The radio had been carried up too. Somebody's radio, on a long cord from the rum shop, sitting on the wall on a folded flour sack with the volume all the way up. It was crackling. Through the crackle came a voice, and a band, and a crowd, very far away in the park in town, and then the voice stopped and the crowd went quiet, and in the quiet, over the radio and on the wind at the same time, they heard it: a great roar, from twelve miles away, from the whole town at once, and the fireworks went up over Georgetown in a wall of light, red and green and gold.

The old flag was coming down there. The new one was going up. Green, with a long gold arrowhead. Carl had seen it in the papers.

At the schoolhouse below them on the front lots, Mr. Dev Persaud and Mr. Edwin Lee pulled a rope, and a flag went up the school pole too, the same flag, made by the women of Concord out of cotton bought at the Gomes shop, and the lamps on the table below lit it from underneath as it went up, green and gold, and the wind off the sea took it and opened it out flat.

The whole wall shouted. Carl shouted. He did not know he was going to. Next to him his aunt Grace was laughing and holding on to his arm, and his father was shaking hands with everybody within reach, and somebody started singing, an old song that everybody on the coast knew, and then a new one that only some of them knew yet, and the drums started up again below on the dam.

At five past midnight Henry Bascom went down the koker steps with his lantern. Carl went with him. The tide had turned while they were shouting. He felt it.

His father showed him nothing. He had shown him a hundred times. Carl fitted the bar and leaned, and felt the give, and the door came up, and the water from the land, a whole village's worth of it, went out under the door in a black rush with the new flag's colors in it from the lamps above, and out over the mud, toward the sea.

---

**2026**

Naomi Persaud's kitchen in Richmond Hill was too small for this, and she had said so, and nobody had listened.

It was a Saturday in November, gray and cold, and through the window over the sink she could see the elevated train going by at the end of the street above Liberty Avenue, and the rain on the roofs of the row houses, which were not zinc and made no sound at all. On her stove was a pot of metemgee from page forty-one, which she had made twice before and got wrong both times. On her laptop on the counter, leaning against the bread box, were her cousins.

Not cousins, exactly. Imani Bascom in Toronto, twenty-five, an engineer for the city's water department, at her own counter in Scarborough with a pot of cook-up. Luke Gomes, also in Toronto, thirty-six, who had flown home in the summer to see the village and come back with a crate of photographs from a Gomes great-aunt's wardrobe. June Lee, forty-one, ten blocks away in Queens, who was supposed to be bringing the pine tarts and was late. And on a fourth square, in a chair by a window in a care home in Mississauga, with a blanket over her knees and Winnie Lee's granddaughter on shift as a nurse somewhere in the building, Asha Persaud, seventy-one, who had stood guard over thirty black cakes on independence night and had been talking for an hour.

They had been building it for a year, the five families. A private space that only the people invited could see, where each of them added names. Five trees, and then not five, because the branches ran into one another so many times that Imani had given up drawing lines and started drawing knots. Luke had scanned the photographs from the wardrobe, and they had gone through them on Sunday nights with the old people, face by face, until every face had a name typed under it by somebody who knew. Imani's grandfather Carl, who was seventy-eight and had built drainage in three countries and still could not make pepperpot, had given them the cedar box, which had come out of Concord with him in 1979, and Imani had scanned the old marbled ledger page by page, under glass, at the city archive where she had a friend.

There was a map, too: every place every family had gone. Concord to Georgetown to London to Toronto to Queens to Brooklyn to Orlando to Birmingham and, for one Lee cousin, Perth. And one dot still in Concord, where a Persaud nephew still grew rice on the forty acres at the back and sent them pictures of the koker at low tide.

And there was Lucy's reel, turned into a file by a man in Brampton who did it for archives, labeled in the words Ruth Bascom had written on the card: Lucy Bascom, born Wakaba, Mahaicony River, in her own words, 1965. They had played it for the first time together in June, all of them, after asking every living Bascom first. Naomi had listened in her kitchen with her hands in a bowl of flour and had heard an eighty-nine-year-old woman from a river she had never seen describe the first time she saw the sea, and how it was brown.

Asha had recorded too, now, three Sundays running, with her say-so and her name on every file, because she said that if Lucy could, she could.

"Naomi," Asha said from her square. "Your metemgee is burning."

It was. Naomi turned it down and stirred and swore, and Imani laughed, and June Lee came in the door at last, stamping rain off her boots, with a tray of pine tarts that she had made from page sixty and whose bottoms, she announced to everyone, were black.

Later, when the others had gone and the pot was soaking, Naomi sat at the counter with the scanned first page of the ledger on the screen. Sixty-three names in a round careful hand. She had been adding them to the tree one at a time for months, each with what the book said beside it, because there was a box for it and she wanted every box filled. She had left one for last.

She typed it now. Hester Bascom. Born on Plantation Concord, 1801. Beside occupation she wrote what Joseph Arno had written in 1840: Huckster and Laundress. Treasurer.

Under the name, in the image, was the H. She zoomed in until it filled the screen, crooked, the left leg longer than the right, the pencil pressed so hard it had dented the paper a hundred and eighty-six years ago. She sat with it a while. Then she picked up a pencil from the counter and, on the back of an envelope, tried to make it exactly the same.