Prose

Leaving

WRITTEN BY MARIA CROOKS

It was a May night and people were gathered in the living room of our house. Funny I can still remember our street address: Calle Cisnero 129. My grandmother was there, my favourite aunt, Tia Felina who always allowed my sister and me to play in her hair; her daughter Zenaida, whom everyone called Clarita (fair‑skin in Spanish) which was ironic because she was very dark; Juanita, my mother's Haitian friend who always had plates of food laid out on an altar in her home for orishas and saints; Boli, our next door neighbour whose withered right arm dangled uselessly by her side; and her two daughters China and Yolanda with whom my sister and I played and fought constantly. Our mother told us a story that Boli in her youth would go dancing and when her partner spun her around the room, the withered arm would swing out wildly and then wrap itself around the man's body in a weird involuntary embrace. We used to laugh at the odd image this conjured in our minds.

Despite her handicap, she kept her house spotlessly clean – when sweeping for example, she would wrap her good arm around the broom handle and managed handily, pun intended, to accomplish the task. These, and many others were the friends, family and neighbours who had come to bid us farewell.

I could not see their faces distinctly because the room was dark. There were some oil lamps, but they cast more shadow than light. In their wavering flame people's faces appeared distorted, their silhouettes blotted along the bare walls like shapeless, magnified characters out of a child's fantasy book. The remaining rooms in the house were in total darkness – a sort of no man's land – my parents had sold the house and the electricity had been suspended for the new owners to reinstall.

I observed these people with a longing in my soul, the shadowiness of the room reflecting my feelings accurately. My grandmother was the first to leave; she was an old woman, probably the age I am now. As she said goodbye, I sensed that I would never see her again. I was not close to her and yet …

At some point that night Tia Felina, said what no doubt many in the room believed, that we were leaving just when things were finally going to start getting better in the country. People had so much hope then and they pinned them all on the brash young leader who so enchanted them that huge audiences would remain standing in stadiums to listen to his long, frenzied speeches that lasted up to eight hours at times.

It's been decades since, but that shadowy sepia‑tinted tableau persists in my memory because it was the night my childhood as I knew it was severed. The decision to leave was the right one for my family and I am forever grateful to my parents for making it, and yet …