XIV.EXOTIC FAUNA, A COMPOSITION.
CABO SAN LUCAS. 1996.
WEDNESDAY. NIGHT.
It was much later in the evening—when dinner was cleared, the Europeans were smoking cigarettes and sipping espressos, and there was some shifting around of chairs—that Bas squeezed himself in beside Cecilia, forcing out Santiago’s assistant, Hugh.
“So, Cecilia, Procurer of Butcher Knives, whatareyou?” he asked, leaning into her.
“Umm. No idea. A flute?”
Bas laughed then. “No. I meant your ethnicity.”
“Oh.” It was a question she’d been asked often. For as far back as she could remember. When she first arrived in America at the age of seven and her parents enrolled her and her brother, Andrew, then four, in a Head Start day-care and after-school program, in a predominantly Black neighborhood. From the beginning she stood out, despite her complexion. The way she spoke, her prim handmade clothes, her leather T-bar shoes, her grosgrain ribbons, the texture of her hair. She was an anomaly. And over the years, although she worked hard to fit in, there were those who managed to make her feel slightly other. An outsider. An imposter. Not Black enough. Not American enough. Not… enough. Ultimately, she had learned to stop defining herself by what she wasn’t, as opposed to what she was.
“Jamaican, Chinese, English, Scottish, and Indian,” Cecilia recited by rote.
“So you’re the full orchestra.” He smiled. That dimple. And then much to Cecilia’s surprise he clinked his wineglass for attention, and then shared his findings with the table.
“I love that.” Beatriz clasped her hands together, adoringly. “The whole world within. So inspiring.”
“Yes. Very exotic.” Rafaella smiled in Cecilia’s direction. Cecilia smiled back politely.
She realized that Rafaella probably was not aware thatexoticmight be taken as offensive. She herself had only discovered that when Lorry had explained it to her the year prior. Howexoticconnoted being viewed through a white or Eurocentric lens. How it wasdevaluing.
“I’d rather be called that than the N-word,” she’d said to him. They were lying in the woods behind his parents’ house in Greenwich, postcoital. The November earth cool and hard beneath her back.
“Well, yes.” He smiled. “That would be considerably worse. But you shouldn’t be thinking of it as a compliment either, Boo. ‘Exotic’ is white people thinking they’re giving you a compliment when they’re not. It’s like saying, ‘You’re beautiful, for someone who’s not white.’” With that, he zipped his pants and sat upright, maple leaves clinging to his golden hair. “Come. Let’s go back in before they start looking for us.”
“Dot or feather?” Bas was asking her now.
“Excuse me?”
“The Indian part. Dot or feather?”
Cecilia was equal parts aghast and amused.
“Um, dot, I guess.”
“That’s incredibly offensive, Bas. You should know better,” Jaya spoke up from where she was nursing a cup of mint tea. “I didn’t know you were Indian.” This she directed at Cecilia, although she didn’t address her by name.
“My mom’s dad’s family. They migrated to Jamaica at the turn of the century.”
“Fascinating,” Bas said. “My family has been in the same village for five hundred years.”
“Anch’io. A Treviso,” Rafaella added. “But me, I had to leave. Too small.”
“Mine were Vikings,” Katrine announced proudly.
Jaya leaned back in her chair then, teacup still in hand, pinky extended. “My mum’s parents migrated from Mumbai to England in the thirties. My grandfather came to study at the London School of Economics, and never really went home.”
As Cecilia understood it, her great-grandfather, as part of a wave of Indians seeking employment, had arrived in Jamaica as an indentured laborer and worked on a sugar plantation after slavery had been abolished. And so the island had a new pecking order. For generations, even the newly freed Black Jamaicans looked down on the Indians who toiled in the cane fields. Cecilia’s migration story was, it seemed, vastly different than Jaya Clark’s. She imagined her caste—or what was left of it—was, too.
It struck her then, the varied histories represented at one table. And how heartbreaking that she could only trace her ancestry back so far. She noticed that Hugh, who was born in Saigon but whose family had fled to the States in the ’70s, hadn’t spoken either.
“I think Rafaella and I hold the record here then.” Bas smiled, holding his wineglass aloft.
“Congrats, mate,” Elliot said, drolly.
