Chapter 55
He published his first piece of public writing when he was thirty-two: an essay in a Caribbean literary journal about teaching and identity, drawing on his experience as a teacher who had been formed between cultures and who had returned to teach in the place that had made him.
He had been writing the piece for six months, in the margins of everything else early mornings before the run, late evenings after Elise was asleep. He had shown drafts to Claudette, who was the most precise reader he knew, and to Nia, who could tell in ten seconds whether something was saying the true thing or performing the true thing.
Claudette had said: 'This is good. It has all of you in it.'
Nia had said: 'Stop qualifying your own experience. The qualifications are politeness. Lose them.'
He had lost them.
The journal accepted it on first submission. He was not sure what he had expected the same mild anxiety that accompanied all submissions but acceptance was what arrived, and with it the particular satisfaction of a thing completed and sent out.
The journal had a small but serious readership: Caribbean academics, writers, educators, diaspora communities. Responses came: a letter from a Barbadian educator who said the essay described her students precisely; an email from a Jamaican teacher in London who said she had read it to her class; a note from a professor in Toronto who wanted to include it in a reading list.
Dr. Whitfield, his university supervisor from Birmingham, wrote: 'I always knew you had a book in you. This is the opening chapter.'
He told Nia.
She looked at him over dinner.
'Is she right?' Nia said.
He thought about it.
'Maybe,' he said.
'Then start it,' she said. 'You know how you do things. You'll write it the same way you do everything else in the margins of the real life until the margins become the main text.'
He started it.
He wrote in his journal: 'If Mama Vie had met me at this age she would have said it was a sign. She might have been right. Or she might have just meant: everything arrives when it's supposed to. Which is also true.