The Wake

“No! It’s cloves and celery!” G’Gee sat quietly in the corner of the kitchen, listening to her out-of-town cousins. They were arguing over a recipe. Cousin Terry and Cousin Ruby lived in Chicago and some city in Wisconsin, respectively. They had spent more time in the States than they actually did on the islands. This would always lead to them feeling the need to prove just how Bahamian they were, as evidenced by the current argument. For the past twenty minutes, they stood in front of the old-fashioned gas stove, arguing over whether or not cloves or season-all went into a traditional chicken souse.

They were both wrong.

Bay leaves, allspice, onions, potatoes, meat, lime, goat pepper, salt. These were the building blocks of the dish they were trying to achieve. At 12 years old, though, G’Gee wasn’t actually up to the challenge of butting into the culturally misguided culinary debate between her cousins, so she sat silently as the two threw their American accents around the otherwise empty kitchen, glimmers of Bahamian Creole peeking out when either of them got angry enough.

This wasn’t G’Gee’s first wake. It was, however, the first one she’d been to for someone so close to her. The first where she could fully process that the person they were remembering wasn’t actually going to come back. She could hear car doors slamming as family members pulled into the yard, beer bottles clanging in the boxes being lifted out of trucks. Her past experience let her know that children should be seen and not heard. She’d be there all night nodding politely at distant cousins she’d never remember the names of. The kitchen was her safe space until Ruby and Terry had taken it over with their dreadful cooking. With her stomach growling slightly, G’Gee realized eating would have to wait until Aunt Beverly arrived with her pot of mutton souse, a staple at every family gathering.

She could imagine Aunt Beverly now, a towel thrown across her wide-set shoulders as she commanded her kitchen with the sternness of an iron chef. An industrial-sized steel pot on the stove collectively boiling the potatoes, onions, spices, and meat. Spanking the hands of anyone with her wooden spoon should they reach too close to the pot that was considered sacred. It was this no-nonsense attitude in the kitchen that dubbed Aunt Beverly “the auntie that could cook.” G’Gee’s mouth began to water as she thought about the Johnnycake her one good auntie¹ would more than likely be bringing. Sugar, flour, butter, milk, and grated coconut would come together like the brass section of a Junkanoo group to provide the only thing worth partnering with a good bowl of the piping, clear broth. Cooking any Bahamian dish called for some amount of reverence. Aunt Beverly always showed it. G’Gee would hungrily yet happily wait until Aunt Beverly decided to grace everyone with her presence. Even if G’Gee wasn’t able to grab a taste of Aunt Beverly’s, at a wake of this size, there would be more than enough pots to choose from, donated by family and friends. G’Gee didn’t have to settle for the monstrous concoction currently being strewn together by her culinary deficient cousins; she also didn’t have to continue to bear witness to its creation.

With that in mind, G’Gee quietly closed her book at the kitchen table and crept to the only other safe space she could think of: Grammy’s room.

The air in the room was still. Grammy’s peppermint oil lingered, not as strong as it normally was but enough to let you know that Beryl was once there. The bed was made neatly but her Bible was missing from its normal spot just below the pillow. A detail that would be missed by any other, but one that let G’Gee know her grandmother wouldn’t be coming back. G’Gee picked up Grammy’s pillow and burying her face into its memory foam, she let out a wail from deep within her. Wakes were her grandmother’s thing. As a matriarch of her parish, Beryl thought it her job to donate as much as she could during a community member’s loss. G’Gee was never actually a fan of her grammy’s cooking, but she also knew that the mystery stew currently being brewed in the small kitchen was something not even her grandmother would present to the world. So there she sat, in the middle of her grandmother’s bed fondly remembering food she didn’t actually like, and for some reason, this made her chuckle. The laughter bubbled in the pit of her stomach until it found a way to escape. The sound was as loud as it was sudden, which made her laugh even harder, until tears began to pool in her eyes. This genuine laughter turned into mania, and finally, transformed into sobs. She couldn’t describe what she was feeling, but she did know that the lump in her throat was a symptom of her grandmother’s now permanent absence.

Beryl was a woman of rigid routine, and it would be difficult for G’Gee to erase that from her memory. Every morning at 4 AM, the television at number 12B Plantol Street blared songs from the old Zion Baptist hymnal, their crackling notes spilling into the quiet neighborhood. The hymns, a mix of nostalgia and reverence, played from an aging TV set that rarely left the community news station before 8 AM. At 5 AM, this music transitioned to the early morning prayer line. Elderly Christians from across the nation would call the station’s hotline in anticipation of saying their own special prayers for The Bahamas. Grandmothers, Grandfathers, Great Aunts & Uncles from the family islands would have their radio stations tuned into this broadcast, hoping to hear the familiar voices of their loved ones lifting them up in prayer. Beryl Marshall of Plantol Street used this as the soundtrack to her morning. By the time these prayers were done, she would have donned her finest linen shirt adorned with a broach that would be impossible to purchase in the modern age. With her wooden cane in one hand and her utilitarian purse in the other, the 6 o’clock hour would meet her ready to walk to the first Mass at Our Lady’s Catholic Church.

By 7 AM, she could be seen having a leisurely stroll along Bay Street, quietly contemplating which restaurant she would sit at for breakfast. By 1 PM, she would have caught the bus to the local grocery store to find items for lunch and dinner on that specific day. If one sat quietly enough in their living room, they could hear the rattling of the grocer’s trolley making its way through the intersection of Windsor Lane and Plantol Street back into the busy yard of Number 12B.

Summer would often find G’Gee in her grandmother’s house with all of her other cousins, on school holiday. With only so many rooms and beds to choose from, fights would often break out. Everyone loved Beryl, but no one wanted to be privy to their Grandmother’s early morning ritual during a school holiday. G’Gee often lost. She was the most quiet and timid of them all, and many summer nights found her sharing a bed with the elderly matriarch. If G’Gee knew that those summer nights and early mornings would come to an end at some point, she would have never thought to fight against her cousins. She would have taken her time to remember every small detail of the routine, and she would have joined her beloved grandmother at morning mass. She would have hugged her more often and thanked her for the food that she made. If G’Gee thought for one second that the bedroom at the front of the house would now lay empty, never to have the same occupant again, she would have found a way to freeze time and never remove herself from the moments she should have been cherishing the most with Beryl.

“What are you doing in here?” The sharp voice carried across the room and hit G’Gee smack in the face, pulling her back to the present. Her mummy stood in the doorway observing her with a mixture of both sadness and confusion—tears weren’t a language that the family spoke. If you’re crying, how can you aptly solve the problem that created the tears? G’Gee quickly wiped her eyes and decided to throw her cousins under the bus. “Ruby and Terry ga burn the kitchen down tryin’ to make one pot a souse.” Her mother opened her mouth, surely ready to berate her for speaking anything but the Queen’s English, but G’Gee’s words settled in her mother’s mind a nanosecond before the row could begin, her mother’s hand pausing mid-air indicating an action passed down by mothers, dating all the way back to the Paleolithic age—this would have been an argument for the books. It was with that awkwardly-timed truth, though, that her mom hurried out of the doorway and in the direction of the kitchen, almost certainly prepared to protect the family homestead from the grease fire of an oilless dish.

G’Gee knew she would have to answer for her poor grammar at some point and figured she would lose herself in the crowd of mourners outside in an attempt to delay the inevitable tongue-lashing. She quickly set to fix her Grammy’s vacant bed the way she found it and moved to put the pillow back in its place but was immediately taken aback by an object that she hadn’t noticed there before. Her grandmother’s glasses. The tortoise-framed eyewear was perched perfectly in the place the pillow should have been, and they called to her, luring her in with the saddest of songs. The closer she got, the louder the singing became, the acapella of “Beulah Land” echoing around the room as if being sung on Mount Zion by a league of angels. She reached out and touched the glasses only to feel warmth radiate from the tips of her fingers all the way up her shoulder and into the rest of her body. It was the glass breaking in the distance that severed her from this strange yet comforting moment. Remembering why she needed to leave Grammy’s room in the first place, G’Gee stuffed the newfound glasses in her pocket and rushed out of the room to the front door of the house and sought to make herself disappear in the throng of family, friends, and neighbors who had all gathered to eat and drink in Beryl’s name.

Mourning isn’t a state. It’s an event. It’s a series of events rather, and G’Gee had just stepped into the heart of the main one — the wake. Her Grandmother’s house was one of the oldest in the neighborhood, sitting on a lot she shared with G’Gee’s Aunt Beverly, her sister; the homes of the two siblings separated only by a septic tank and family drama. Today though, the lot housed a large white tent with several tables of food and many strange faces. They all had come to pay their respects to the family. To share their memories of Beryl. Many had just come for the food and companionship. Some faces G’Gee recognized from the days prior to the official wake. Friends of the family that had passed by to sit with Beryl’s children and check in on them, bringing cases of soda and plates of food, doing their part to show they cared for Beryl while she was alive and would continue to show that devotion in death.

G’Gee once found wakes to be strange. She wasn’t sure why people weren’t a little more upset. The reason you were gathered was to help usher your loved ones spirit into the next life — a life that wouldn’t include you. Yet there they were eating and drinking and singing and playing dominoes. To the untrained eye, a wake would look just like another party in the backyard. Just another cookout. To G’Gee though, it was a sad cookout. This would be the first wake she would be forced to stay until midnight, the first wake where she would help sing the hymns that took her grandmother’s spirit from the world of the living to a world with no pain and sorrow.

As the hours passed she watched her older cousins sneak alcohol from the coolers at the side of the house. She watched her uncles break a table because of their aggressive domino-playing. The out-of-town cousins had taken a table at the farther end of the tent, unwilling to fraternize but not bold enough to leave before midnight, when the spirit is supposed to pass on to the next life.

G’Gee found a perfect spot underneath the fig tree to watch the sunset in the busy yard. It was her grandmother’s favourite spot to watch the activities of the over the hill community. This served as a perfect spot for G’Gee to survey the night’s activities. The hours moved quickly. In fact, G’Gee was surprised at how quickly the time had passed when she heard the rumblings of the first hymn.

“I’m standing on the mountain, underneath a cloudless sky.”

G’Gee looked down at her phone, 11:55 PM. It was almost time.

Her Uncle Ubby had started the hymn that would comfort Beryl in the next life. As more people joined in on his rendition, G’Gee reached in her pocket and touched the glasses she took earlier. In doing this though, G’Gee began to feel the same sensation she felt in her grandmother’s bedroom. It began to radiate throughout her whole body.

“I’m drinking from the fountain that never shall run dry.”

G’Gee felt like walls were closing in on her. She was finding it difficult to breathe and her vision was clouded with white. The once balmy air of the island began to feel near freezing. G’Gee could no longer just see the tent filled with family and friends; she saw other faces, faces that were never there before.

“I’m feasting on the manna of a bountiful supply.”

In that crowd of faces though, as clear as day, she saw her grandmother walk toward a white door that hadn’t been there before. Before crossing the threshold she took a look at the singing mourners, smiled and passed through. That was the last thing G’Gee saw before her world went black.

“For I am dwelling in Beulah land.”

“One good” A colloquial Bahamian unit of measurement.