Free Triangular Road: A Memoir by Paule Marshall Page B

that felt larger than its minuscule 160-odd square miles. Creating the illusion of greater size were the narrow, winding country roads, the villages of little tin-roofed chattel houses endlessly repeated along the roads and sugarcane fields as far and wide as the eye could see. Above all, there was the seeming overflow of humanity everywhere. “Bajans like peas,” Adriana would have said. Indeed, Barbados remains the eighth most densely populated piece of real estate on earth.
    The Scotland District finally, so named probably by some “poor johnny” Scotsman long ago nostalgic for his native Highlands. But “Scotland” was a misnomer when applied to the few low, nondescript limestone hills crowded into the northeast corner of the otherwise flat island. Chalk-white some of them, the hills surrounded the valley floor where my eighty-five-year-old aunt, Branford Catherine, lived in a two-room
board-and-shingle house, weathered dun-gray by the sun. The house stood on the Clement family’s last remaining “canepiece,” the one that would have been sold to finance Branford Catherine’s passage north had she not defied her mother, the imperious M’ Da-duh, and refused to emigrate.
    I had no recollection of my aunt from the childhood visit years before. Nor did the old woman remember me, given that she was almost completely senile. Long-legged, large-boned, her body apparently still fit, her black face still miraculously unlined, but her mind eclipsed. Branford Catherine spent her days on an old-fashioned wooden recliner called a planter’s chair in the tiny sitting room of her house. There she was devotedly cared for by a niece of her late husband.
    The niece, called simply Mis’ Edith, was a sprightly middle-aged spinster who delighted in repeating the saga of my aunt’s life whenever I came to visit. Not only had the young Branford Catherine refused to be sent north, she had also chosen to become a common hawker, to M’ Da-duh’s shame and disgust. According to Mis’ Edith, dawn would find Branford Catherine, a full basket
of mangoes, yams, cassava and the like on her head, briskly setting out on the fourteen-mile walk to the main market in Bridgetown. Hawking—buying and selling, commerce—had been her life and her love. Even now, on those rare occasions when, as Mis’ Edith put it, “she comes back to she-self for a minute, her mind clear-clear as a bell”—when that happened Branford Catherine was known to slip out of the house and set off down the road to the main market in Bridgetown.
    “I has to watch she like a hawk.”
    I once witnessed one of those fleeting resurrections. My aunt, moribund on her planter’s chair, suddenly turned one day to where I was sitting nearby and, peering at me, said “Adrie?” (Adrie had been Adriana’s pet name as a child.) “Is you, Adrie . . . ?” The old woman’s eyes, the whites stained tobacco-brown with age, carefully parsed my face. Again: “Adrie . . . ?” Then, before I could react, her mind abruptly shut down again.
    Adriana, who had recently died, would not have been pleased to learn that she and I looked so much alike.

    The ironies and absurdities of my family history! A rumhead of a grandfather—a brilliant craftsman, yes, but a rumhead nonetheless—who had been named after Queen Victoria’s consort. Then, a little dictator of a grandmother who had so impressed me at age seven that I would forever memorialize her in my work. An aunt who had rejected Big America to remain on the little two-by-four island as a common hawker. An uncle in Brooklyn who, having converted the several brownstones he had accumulated into rooming houses, now lived rich as Croesus on Long Island—he and the other West Indians like himself responsible, in part, for creating the near-ruin of an inner city now called “Bed-Stuy.” Then there were all the other Clement family members, known and unknown, dispersed widely across England, Canada and elsewhere.
    At the same time,