Ladee Hubbard
Mafolie Hill
My mother set me down for seven years in the Virgin Islands where the water and everything was blue. To man the cool breeze with other dark skinned people in the vast sunlight of our colonized dreams of fluidity. In the morning, light would run against the palms while the yardman leaned against his broom, head tilted towards the wind. His smile faced the shoreline and filled the air with theoretical discussions of navy/cruise ship philosophy: to rape the shade with clean guns or perfect diction. He looked down at me, bowed and called me Miss Ladee.
I saw a lot of money put into condominiums for red-faced women on the streets in bikinis and gold chains and tacked on tans. Until some emasculated man, still unaccustomed to the way only tourists could walk around bare-assed on the waterfront, would reach out and pull their hair. Their husbands in the park, popping flashbulbs at all the little girls going to catholic school, offering them dollars if they would only smile. Or when the navy was in town and men stammered through the back streets in shiny boots, grinning and dropping garbage like everyone was a maid in the world class resort called St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. For seven years and I wanted to wake up and go home. Just like all my friends and everybody who wasn’t rich or white and didn't imagine they'd ever be.
They called me a Yank until I learned to modify my grammar, but everybody had something to say about the States. In the sunlight of my scars where the days extend forever; we went there on vacation I thought and then I thought we'd never leave.
But no time or place is ever as stark as it sounds in a letter someone sends you from some place now far away. Let me try to explain.
Me and my friends walked up Mafolie Hill on hot days, our conversations like a see-saw until eventually I got sick and had to ask to leave. When we talked we talked like this:
Jo-Jo:
Wha ya da wan wid dat shuppidy gal? She a bat fo' true.
Allison:
Must be tinking we all runnin' out fo' de navy man wood.
Ladee:
It’s cuz she mommy ain't der wid her. She an' Darryl carry on like so but she—
Allison:
Who say dat?
Ladee:
She tell me so she self. For he gone off for de States.
Allison (laughing):
Eh-eh, dat gal could lie! She ain’t been no place with Darryl. I da know he in de States right now.
Jo-jo:
Wha' for?
Allison:
He done join de Army or something shuppid.
Jo-Jo:
Eh-eh, she shuppid, no? Mus be tinkin' we all crazy like her worthless muddah—
My three best friends on the surface like triplets, with brown hair and big eyes that sometimes made them look like they wished they were crying. Green plaid skirts that hung over their knees. Striking down sentences about life on The Island where they had really cool hairstyles and were cooler than me. Twenty years later I can still hear them saying, hey girl, why can't you smile? You know it’s not quite the same with you wearing all your dreams in Burger King and sucking on a straw and not even looking. You see that guy? He wants your number and he hangs out with Darryl so you should see what he has to say about this whole big mess. Why are you so fourteen and acting like forgiveness when that girl left her door open, must have been looking out for something. But I don't like to talk too much; I'm not saying a thing. Only he seems to think he's something too well, lets find out, you gotta remember what your doing, you gotta learn to pay more attention than that. You gotta learn to braid it. Or get it cut or something cuz it just hangs there, girl, and its a mess. You just don't know how to act and don't even know why we love you like time and time again I guess you know we do. But I don't want you embarrassing me with all that grinning you did last night. Why can't you just walk like we do, in a plaid skirt and hairstyle and twistee straw on Sundays?
We all agreed it was better to go stateside but why do you come back talking like we a bunch of fools? When this is where you come from now, in the park or on Mafolie Hill, with the sky. What were you doing with your auntie out in California? While I was burning up in no air-conditioned rooms and your hair fell out again and I miss you like that. Your mother didn't burn you that way, you been sweating from the sun—
I have no answer save I miss you and so a part of me reads without breathing because it sighs and forgets how old we all are now with our smiles and our babies who have fathers in the Navy who have shiny boots on, who are hanging out in a park somewhere, who are on their way to war.
Ladee Hubbard is a writer from New Orleans. She received a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her first novel, The Talented Ribkins, was published in 2017 and received the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award.