by Ros Martin
Making sense of difficult histories, making sense of slavery and its’ significance here, now in Bristol is hard, so hard. You want to run, hide, re-invent your past, lie. Stay shtum. Shhhh!
Black, white, privileged, underprivileged, all held captive. Bewildered by this subject matter, so close to home, close to the bone..., This city, built from blood, sweat, terror; stone by stone. Hostages we are in captivity....;
Suffering. Who suffers most when this subject is broached?
Memories.
.... Fragments.
Incidental thoughts; come, go....
that clay tobacco pipe.....
I smile. As I recall my first visit to my mother’s beautiful homeland, St Lucia, aged 7 with my siblings, my mother grandmother, aunts & uncles, arriving in St Lucia from Canada, Trinidad, Florida meeting us, for the first time.
Dispersed seeds, my family
Reconnecting.
With a brother in Lagos... for the first time...... this year. (beat)
I shut my eyes. I’m there. I’m back in St Lucia... a child. I can see her: an old, old family help. Servant, my mother calls her, I flinch: Mammy Jane, everyone calls her. She’s dark, very; wiry. She smokes....... a tobacco pipe!
She loves ice-cream, mammy Jane does! We all do, homemade in a churn, packed with ice. Mammy Jane turns the handle on the churn for a long time. Mammy Jane’s likes her ice-cream in her tin cup & left out to melt, it has to melt before she’d drink it!
‘How old are you Mammy Jane? ‘
‘As old as the teeth in my head!’ She laughs.
Teeth. She has none....
....Dental carries...
...I remember her because unusually, she, a rare adult, speaks to us small children. She raised my mother, aunties & uncles and she smoked a tobacco pipe.