Take coffee, now, Auntie Mavis said, early, early morning coffee, or something like ginger root or Spanish onion or honey-leaf tobacco or stand-pipe jasmine! Directly , you see, that is the intentional smell of things.
True as well for Seville orange, June plum, sweet sop, custard-apple, ripe mango, wild thyme, mint, sage, rosemary, pimento...
Come to think of it, true, too, for fresh-cut sandalwood, yucca, lignum vitae, balsa, pitch-pine...
And we mustn’t forget seashore tang, vegetable mould, grassland after rain...
I know they call me Aunt Mavis, but fancy eh, I don’t have a sister or a brother for anybody to call me auntie, and besides, I like standing up alone in this suffocating island world, but I suppose it’s out of some sort of good, old-time respect for grey hair and straight ace plain talk that mostly everybody calling me Auntie Mavis. You could ever reckon a nice thing like that?
And as for bauxite red dirt and luscious white sea sand and banana walk and sugar-cane field, which foreign grab from us, long ages: now, that is the intentional smell of once-own-it-and-then-lose-it, in the merry-go-round-and-drop-off-it-like-breadfruit island, the same intentional and detrimental deep hole, gone like wood smoke after breeze blow and rain fall sideways.
So, this miscall auntie, you see here, in the long run, can say to herself. ‘There’s the real intentional smell of things: smoke, breeze and slanting rain, mostly things you can’t hold on to and build a world with.’
Review by: Astrid, Images: Africanlife
From Island Sketchbook Narratives
The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories
Edited by: E.A Markham
