Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [9]
I opened my eyes, everybody was looking up and pointing at Coco on the glacis railings with his feathers alight. He made an effort to fly down but his clipped wings failed him and he fell screeching. He was all on fire.
I began to cry. ‘Don’t look,’ said Aunt Cora. ‘Don’t look.’ She stooped and put her arms round me and I hid my face, but I could feel that they were not so near. I heard someone say something about bad luck and remembered that it was very unlucky to kill a parrot, or even to see a parrot die. They began to go then, quickly, silently, and those that were left drew aside and watched us as we trailed across the grass. They were not laughing any more.
‘Get to the carriage, get to the carriage,’ said Mr Mason. ‘Hurry!’ He went first, holding my mothers arm, then Christophine carrying Pierre, and Aunt Cora was last, still with my hand in hers. None of us looked back.
Mannie had stopped the horses at the bend of the cobblestone road and as we got closer we heard him shout, ‘What all you are, eh? Brute beasts?’ He was speaking to a group of men and a few women who were standing round the carriage. A coloured man with a machete in his hand was holding the bridle. I did not see Sass or the other two horses. ‘Get in,’ said Mr Mason. ‘Take no notice of him, get in.’ The man with the machete said no. We would go to police and tell a lot of damn lies. A woman said to let us go. All this an accident and they had plenty witness. ‘Myra she witness for us.’
‘Shut your mouth,’ the man said. ‘You mash centipede, mash it, leave one little piece and it grow again … What you think police believe, eh? You, or the white nigger?’
Mr Mason stared at him. He seemed not frightened, but too astounded to speak. Mannie took u the carriage whip but one of the blacker men wrenched it out of his hand, snapped it over his knee and threw it away. ‘Run away, black Englishman, like the boy run. Hide in the bushes. It’s better for you.’ It was Aunt Cora who stepped forward and said, ‘The little boy is very badly hurt. He will die if we cannot get help for him.’
The man said, ‘So black and white, they burned the same, eh?’
‘They do,’ she said. ‘Here and hereafter, as you will find out. Very shortly.’
He let the bridle go and thrust his face close to hers. He’d throw her on the fire, he said, if she put bad luck on him. Old white jumby, he called her. But she did not move an inch, she looked straight into his eyes and threatened him with eternal fire in a calm voice. ‘And never a drop of sangoree to cool your burning tongue,’ she said. He cursed her again but he backed away. ‘Now get in,’ said Mr Mason. ‘You, Christophine, get in with the child.’ Christophine got in. ‘Now you,’ he said to my mother. But she had turned and was looking back at the house and when he put his hand on her arm, she screamed.
One woman said she only come to see what happen. Another woman began to cry. The man with the cutlass said, ‘You cry for her – when she ever cry for you? Tell me that.’
But now I turned too. The house was burning, the yellow-red sky was like sunset and I knew that I would never see Coulibri again. Nothing would be left, the golden ferns and the silver ferns, the orchids, the ginger lilies and the roses, the rocking-chairs and the blue sofa, the jasmine and the honeysuckle, and the picture of the Miller