Seasoning

By Fiona Raye Clarke

The wooden shed behind our house was my father’s study, bar, and church.  He used to speak his literature to me there and say his prayers with a rum in his hand. When my mother went to mass one Sunday, Pa took me to the back of the yard, which was flanked with silk cotton trees, and up the path his father led him and his father before that. I followed, proud he had taken me on as a son when I was his only daughter. He led me to a spot so worn the grass was missing, kicked away from struggling heels and yanked by desperate toes. 

He introduced the ritual with: “Who don’t hear does feel.” But I didn’t know what I was supposed to be listening out for. I thought I heard every word Pa said perfectly— I stood straight when I wanted to bend, and I studied hard because I wanted to be everything to him.

“Turn around,” he said. I obeyed. Pa said his father’s father’s father had been called “buck,” an animal for breeding. I wondered what he felt telling me that, studying his wide jaw and stubborn chin for signs of jealousy. I wanted to tell him not to worry.

I turned away from him, and he told me to strip. My stomach lurched but I obeyed, because I didn’t want to seem to have something to hide. Mama told me girls weren’t supposed to have secrets. Only women did. And I would be a mongrel, a crapaud, or a boy before I ever became a woman. 

Before then, I had only been naked in the bathtub, splashing around. The air was cool despite the sun. 

“This how seasoning supposed to happen,” Pa said. He explained seasoning once as breaking apart a person and stitching them back together in whatever image you have for them. In the past, masters did it, and my father’s family took it over to control the visions they had for themselves. But I didn’t understand why we would willingly bite into something we had been forced to eat.

“It made us people who could fly,” he said. We were the ones who walked into the sea in shackles. They thought we had drowned, but we made it back through a whole ocean to our home. Amphibians, because those they tossed overboard on the Middle Passage became mermaids who could live on the surface but chose not to.

“Black children have to be tougher,” Pa continued, “because the world has always asked more of them just for living.”

Just for living? I thought I was doing more than that. I know trees and the way night air smells before I sleep. I know stories and not to go into the forest or say my name in front of the silk cotton trees because they listen. Know the cross Mama gave me is my only protection because Pa refused my christening. When its gold bothered my neck, I was misbehaving, and the cross knew it. 

So I didn’t know what the “just” was about. By opening my eyes in the morning, I could see rainbows and streams and green. Aren’t we all part of the stars? And what is black?

But I knew from the first impact. As Pa hit me, he made me shiver in the sunshine. I wanted to give all the understanding back. 

He closed the ritual with: “There, Eleanor.” And he walked back to the house slower than I had ever seen him move. 

As I rebuked any sign of tears, body reeling from echoes of Pa’s force, I realized he’d said my name—in front of the trees. I wanted to be in the grass, to be cradled in its crowns like pothung dogs with upset stomachs eating the blades for relief. 

But I couldn’t move, couldn’t make my bare legs twitch to carry myself. I couldn’t compel my toes to uncurl, to stop gripping rocks, sticks, and dirt mixed with the blood I assumed had rolled down my stinging back. 

So, I stood there, behind this shed that I had glorified, but now would trade anything to get away from. I remained alone, until I wasn’t. I felt the weight of the sun shift behind me and turned around. 

It was a child with no clothes on, too. I tried to meet their eyes, but they were covered under a large straw hat. With only my hands to cover myself, I tried to use them, but they were powerless. I couldn’t recognize my skin by the touch, no longer wanting to play with the little hairs on my arms or trace the dots of moles. With his seasoning, Pa had transformed me with the sky, the earthworms, and myself. I was a black child now, who instead of being of the stars, was alien to them. 

I gave my back to the child who, from his voice, was a boy. 

“The lashes didn’t break the skin,” he said. 

I didn’t believe him. My whole posterior felt it had been wedged open by Pa’s switch.

“There’s blood,” I winced.

“Not from your back.” 

I looked down. I hadn’t cried throughout the seasoning, but now I blubbered, swallowing air through my cries. 

Pa had brought the final division down between us and had beat me into becoming a woman. “I need a rag,” I said, lost in shame.

“You don’t if you come with me, Eleanor.”

I gazed at him then. His eyes were still veiled, but his smile broadened.  He said my name just like Pa did. As though Pa had crawled down his tiny throat and was throwing his voice.

The boy’s feet were backwards on the end of his legs. Nausea gripped me. 

“How it is you know my name?” 

The smile widened under the hat. 

“Who are you?” I stamped.

“Ellison.”

I traced the familiar name with my tongue. “You could really stop me from bleeding? How?” My arms spread at my sides as though all of me was shedding.

“The trees. Go stop it.” He gestured to the forest.

I followed his little finger, clutching my cross. My name had been spoken, and now I was being called to the woods themselves. 

“Pa said I wasn’t to go there.”

“Your Pa does talk a lot. He ever say he have a brother, who didn’t want to be seasoned and get old and wrinkled as the trees over there?” He waved at the trees and the forest came closer. 

I looked back and the shed was gone. I thought about running, sure the boy’s backward feet would slow him and before my body could remember Pa’s beating, my legs took off. 

Ellison was fast, his feet pushing him forward like propellers. His hat didn’t move, like it was part of him. 

My cross necklace patted quickly against my chest, until I got tired—feet and bones fed up of holding up misery. I stopped, panting. I would never outrun him. 

“What I have to do to give back the knowledge, to stop the bleeding?”

He was neither breathing hard nor sweating. “Give it to the trees. They’ve held much worse than anything you can hand them.” 

I straightened. I was already naked, like him, already against the sour knowledge seasoning gave. Why not join him in everything else? 

The hair on my head started to fall away, but I wasn’t afraid. As quickly as the sun was beating on my bare head, it was covered again, replaced by a straw hat that I would cherish like I had done Mama’s cross. One foot turned clockwise then the other foot counterclockwise—it didn’t hurt.

Ellison chuckled, “Wherever you go now, your feet will be the last part of you to leave.”

I laughed too, testing my new way of walking. The ground and roots below welcomed me. The tree’s song was joy in the soil. I looked back towards the shed. 

“Will he remember me?” 

“It’s only since you came that he stopped looking for me in the forest.” 

I had never thought of my father as someone searching for anything. He had always seemed like he grabbed all he had, forcing it into a chokehold.

I raised my hands above my head not caring that my Sunday dress was on the ground behind the shed. That it would be all they would find besides my cross. I took that off too, laying it at the root of a tree that looked particularly kind. 

“What are we?”

“Douens,” Ellison answered with the same broad smile. 

I hoped my smile was as wide too. 

“Ready?” he asked.

I nodded, still getting used to the hat, claiming most of my sightline when I moved my head.

We took off running. I ran faster than I ever had, deep into the forest to make the silk cotton trees my home, waiting to call the next child. 

Fiona Raye Clarke is an award-winning Trinidadian-Canadian writer and community-engaged artist. Her writing has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts and has appeared in various publications online and in print, including The Puritan Town Crier, the Room Magazine blog, and alt.theatre, among others. She is an alumnus of the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Diaspora Dialogues Long-Form Mentorship Program. She sits on the editorial board of Canthius and holds a Certificate in Creative Writing from Humber College.