Lead Me Home

Mammy called me at work on Long Island on a summer morning in 1994.  “Your Nana died yesterday, Tanti Basdai just called,” she sounded sad and lost.  Even though she was in her mid-fifties she still felt the pain of losing her daddy.  “Your father and I are going to fly down to Trinidad tomorrow morning.”  It was then that I decided to take a bereavement leave and go with her.  Losing a grandfather in the land of your birth is yet another strand lost in the ties to your culture.  I could already feel the fabric unraveling.  I left Port of Spain twenty-two years earlier and the memories of the eight years I lived there were faint and surreal.  In New York everything is well sanitized and prettied before it reaches the consumer, even death.  The few wakes and funerals I attended in my adopted country had been a very civilized affair.  People dressed in somber black and view a washed, preserved, well dressed and perfumed corpse laid out in a Cadillac coffin posed as if sleeping.  The family receives their condolences and after a few hours everyone gets to go home.  Nana’s sendoff would be different I knew.  Death is more of a pragmatic affair in the Caribbean.  True to the meaning, our family would hold an all-night wake staying up with the body in the parlor all night.  The coffin would be a simple wooden affair meant to decompose as quickly as the body.  Friends, family and the curious would come see look see that the old man is dead, drink black coffee prepared in a big iron pot in the yard and play cards to keep the family company in their all-night vigil. 

I flew down the next day and met my parents at the airport.  I walked off the airplane steps to the tarmac, greeted by the aromas of the island.  There was the usual humidity that slams into you as you step out of the air-conditioning.  The smell that greets you is lush, leafy and tropical mixed with the smell of the fires of burnt garbage.  It’s a not unpleasant scent but burns your nostrils with memories; memories of a childhood spent running barefoot on dirt traces past animals tethered to the backs of houses surrounded by cane fields.  The smell takes me back to harvest time where they would set the cane ablaze to rid it of the knife like leaves and any pests sheltered in the neat rows of cane.  The sky would light up a bright orange as the flames swelled over the cane.  The smoke and flames visible for miles and gave the yard an eerie reddish hue that cast long shadows.  After the fire the cane cutters would arrive, well before dawn, to slash at the cane with their cutlass and bundle them into waiting oxcarts before the heady heat of the day. 

The day of the funeral dawned hot and sticky.  I was one of the few relatives who slept as I had abandoned my mother and her sisters around 3am to find a bed.  A few minutes after putting on my dress and makeup I was dripping with sweat.  I was one of the few people dressed in black.  I stood out like the expatriate I was.  Most mourners came in their Sunday church clothes or dressed in white.  Nana was placed outside in the shade of the house for visitors.  He wore a stylish sorrel colored tuxedo.  In life he had never dressed in anything but dirty pants held up by a piece of string and an old sweat stained shirt.  In death he was dressed for the first time like the wealthy man that he was.  He was given a haircut and a shave.  He looked groomed and unfamiliar.  My uncle was furious because the funeral home had shaved off the enormous, gray handle bar moustache that he wore proudly for many, many years.  The funeral parlor said that the shaving was unavoidable because they had spilled something on his face and couldn’t get the moustache clean.  In the states they would face litigation, here we just shrugged our shoulders and carried on.  The mourners stood for prayers officiated by a Presbyterian minister, Nana’s adopted religion.  We sang Amazing Grace in unison in the shadow of the house.  The entire sendoff was held outside and had the air of a somber tent meeting.  Across the yard I am startled by Nana’s ghost – a man, the twin to my grandfather from the Fedora to the handle bar moustache.  I called my mother over curious to find out who the familiar stranger was.  She vaguely recalled that he was a cousin.

The body is loaded into an old station wagon provided by the funeral home to make its final, bumpy journey from The Garden, down Santa Clara Road to Couva.  The speakers on the top of the wagon blasts Jim Reeves singing, “I am tired, I am weak, I am worn, …Take my hand, precious Lord lead me home.”  The tune, which I normally laughed off as ridiculous, sentimental and old-fashioned, brings tears to my eyes.  At the cemetery I take pictures of everything.  The gravediggers even smile and pose with their shovels.  It’s a simple and quick affair.  There are some graves with wrought iron metalwork others with headstones and several with melted candles.  Many of the graves remain unmarked and you count steps or funeral mounds from the fence to find your long buried relatives.  We count to find Nani’s spot to see if the old man will rest next to her.  Is it six from the fence or five? No one is certain anymore.  In the 40 or so years that she’s been gone a headstone or an ornamental gate was never placed; there won’t be one placed on Nana’s grave either.  His body will be reclaimed by the earth and eventually no one will remember where he too is buried.