The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson Page A

named Bertha, spoke the spells that ruined her masters and their progeny, that it was Bertha’s daughter who leaned over Mrs. Braithwaite’s ailing body and said plainly, “She deading.”
    In the aftermath of Mrs. Braithwaite’s death, there was some debate regarding the circumstances of her passing. But whether she’d died or been killed, there was a whooping that went up when her will was read, as it decreed that all the slaves, including the unborn (because just then Marguerite, Hyacinth’s great-great-grandmother’s cousin, was inside her mother’s belly), would be free. The land on which they lived was passed to them as well. And although it was said that Mrs. Braithwaite was forward thinking, generous, extraordinary even, in her gift of posthumous manumission, she was in fact a woman of her time, having witnessed and survived the terror of Bussa’s Rebellion, when the death of even one white slaveholder was enough to threaten the way of life to which she and the rest of the plantocracy had become accustomed. She knew that she couldn’t take with her to the grave what she had once owned in life. Like the courage of the women in Phaedra and Dionne’s family, the celebration every July had been passed down for generations on the hill. Eventually the festivities were co-opted by the church.
    Phaedra had inherited her fair share of fierceness from the women in her family. And so when it seemed like Father Loving was turning down yet another prayer avenue, Phaedraopened her mouth and spoke: “Lord God, Heavenly Father, please feed us with the food the cooks have prepared, especially the fish cakes. Amen.” And the hill women, who would normally have gathered themselves on a mission to correct a child speaking out of turn, simply chuckled and said “Amen,” because in truth hunger and heat were making close friends of their bellies and their backs.
    â€œFrom the mouths of babes,” Father Loving said. He looked at Phaedra and she saw something like anger flash across his face even as his lips stretched wide across his teeth in a grin. Phaedra turned to Chris and he shrugged his shoulders; she remembered their unspoken pact not to discuss their parents.
    In the requisite hour between feasting and going into the water, the adults’ heavy eyelids shuttered almost closed and the children who knew what was good for them sat in such a way as to preserve the neatness of their plaits and the pleats in their slacks and dresses. When they couldn’t stand it any longer, the children stripped down to the bathing suits they’d worn under their clothes because their mothers, suspicious as they were of germs, preferred the plain air to the public washrooms.
    Dionne went off with Saranne to the changing rooms farther up the beach; they switched out of the dresses they’d arrived in and put on polka-dot bikinis, a matching set of swimsuits Saranne’s boyfriend had sent from Trinidad when she whined that she didn’t have anything to wear to the boring church picnic. Their tops covered the mosquito bumps Saranne had for breasts and Dionne’s ample bubbies. Dionnewatched Saranne out of the corner of her eye, noting her flat stomach and firm arms. She was reminded of changing with her friend Taneisha for gym at Erasmus, the way she was comforted by her friend’s endless chatter that dulled the shame of having to undress in front of strangers. Dionne wondered for a moment what Taneisha was doing. It was Saturday and so it was likely that her mother, who made roti skins and cooked curry goat for women who called in orders from as close as Canarsie and as far away as Long Island, was already pouring oil into her pans and asking Taneisha to get the dough out of the industrial refrigerator that dwarfed their apartment’s small kitchen. Dionne shook her head then, because it hurt too much to think that she wouldn’t get a call from Taneisha that