Free The Last Warner Woman by Kei Miller Page A

grave now, but I still doing work here because you is wutless. I still on my hands and knees. It is a crying shame. Monsignor Dennis look up at her and then he smile and ask, Nancy, is that you? He did start to do that, call people by whichever name did come to him. Mother Lazarus put her hands on her kimbo and is like she find a joke in this. She start to laugh and she say, Well there you have it. We is abandoned.
    Shhhhhhhhh
    What people in Spanish Town never want to see, they had to suffer and see. Lepers with all their sores sitting on whichever street corner they could capture, their hands stretch out for the whole day, hoping that somebody would drop a coin or two into them. More times people would just cross the road. I was lucky because I could walk up and down free and I never really have leprosy though I consider myself one of them. Sometimes if I see a woman who look to me like maybe she is a mother, I stop and ask her for money. Sometimes that woman turn round and ask why I not in school. I don’t tell her that I can read and write, thank you very much, probably better than her own dunce pickney. In the same way when I reach this country, the nurses in the hospital always asking if I want them to read to me. I don’t tell none of them how Miss Lily would sit me down every evening and learn me my lessons, and how I did read her favorite book plenty times and could recite chapter and verse from Jane Eyre without even look at the page. I don’t bother ask none of them the greater question—what good is writing and reading; what good is books when all the books in the world don’t change the fact that some of us is born under a stone, and every try that we try to rise we ongly buck our heads. The chaulmoogra oil did stop coming. The leprosy start to get worser and worser. Who never lose toes and fingers before, start to lose them now. Who did want to cry couldn’t cry, because their tear ducts mash up. The house start to really fall apart. The paint strip completely and you could no longer look on that house and think of anything soft; just plain hardness staring right back at you. The roof start to fall in and the garden get so overgrown it begin to look like wilderness. Sometimes when people pass, we hear them say, Look pon that abandoned house. I would think, but of course. It is an abandoned house for abandoned people. And I did know even then that that house was like my life. I know in my heart that I was destined for ruin. I know my life was going to be one big wilderness, full of chaff and stone, and this never cause no vexation in my spirit. I just accept it. That is what life was supposed to be. I was a leper. I consider all these things and I take them and call it as fact.
    Shhhhhhhhh
    One morning when it was coming on to my fifteenth birthday, I wake up and all around me was work. Like Sunday morning work when everything smell of polish and sugar, and every corner in the house shining like it new. Mother Lazarus was grating sweet potato, grating nutmeg, grating coconuts. I notice bowls of sugar and flour and cornmeal already measured out. I know this mean dukkunnu, and sweet potato pudding, and toto, and grater cake. But I was confuse. I ask her, what all of this for? She smile at me and say, Suppose I tell you that all of this is for you? Yes indeedy. Tomorrow is the day of your womanhood, and we has to celebrate it proper. Everybody else was doing their own bit of work, and each of them come over and hold my hand and shake it every time I pass them, and say, you is not a little girl no more. Tomorrow you will come into your womanhood. I start feel scared. I too shame to ask them what is this womanhood exactly? What it will look like? What it will do? I did think womanhood was when you start to bleed from your woman-parts, but it was four years since I was doing that. And I think womanhood was when your titty start to swell up, but my titties was already firm and did look like two big grapefruits in