No one prepared me for the horrors of becoming eleven. There were no public service announcements about the mysteries of fitting in or standing out. Television, for all its offerings, neglected to teach me not to play too hard or act too childlike when what I still wanted was to sit and color or get carried away playing pretend. Where was I supposed to put these new, intrusive thoughts? And who gave everyone else the right things to say?
I waded through age eleven like a reluctant scuba diver navigating murky, unfamiliar waters—my periphery hazy, and the way ahead blurred from the intensity of my breath fogging up my mask. My mouth, at the tail-end of ten had begun to betray me. At eleven my lips were relegated to being pursed between my teeth—forbidding myself from speaking a word unchecked. I was restless with the stretching and yawning of my bones, with time, with the rigidity of my mother’s persistent march towards success, and with my inability to grasp the nature of my own reticence. In 1996 Jamaica, eleven was the unstable and unwelcomed interloper, disturbing the tapestry of my early life.
When eleven arrived, I stood outside the gates of ten rapt in a bubble of delusional euphoria about the exquisite details of the coming year. Not only would I get to stay up all night and eat whatever I wanted, but there would also be zero spankings and I could make my own rules and live as freely as I chose. These dreams were, of course, far from the reality I had known and could not maintain as my world crystallized and the fog of youth dissipated.
I dealt with the earlier years like most children—gradually aware of the efforts of the world around me, but content to maintain my oblivion to my nearest surroundings. My world was my mother and my older cousin Michael, my constant and reluctant confidant, whom she had taken in when I was seven and he was nine. We inhabited boarding houses with adopted aunts and their children with whom we played. Our play—wild and hard and mean, was redolent of the world in which we inhabited—a world of absent fathers, of just enough to eat, of mothers who worked and who governed our lives with bibles and belts, of latch-key children who spilled over into the streets and of endless heat-filled bare-foot days.
Before that year, my bones and skin were generally where I had left them and I knew what to expect each morning. Maybe I had grown a little taller, and my teeth had fallen or pushed through from the mysterious chambers that held them taut inside my head. Then came eleven and a growth spurt that extended my already gangly body to the status of an untamed and unrefined giraffe, knocking about our one-room home. My arms and legs splayed and flailed of their own volition. I tripped over everything, constantly apologizing for newly broken things. Apologizing, it seemed, became a regular aspect of my upward extension.
My growth spurt brought an ever-present growl in my stomach that often panged so hard it brought me to tears. We weren’t poor, not like my friends, for though food in our fridge was never found in abundance, it was not scarce. Fruit trees surrounded the modest and squat houses in our neighborhood and dotted most streets as far as the eyes could see. Our yard was lined with trees that ran the extent of Caribbean offerings. A short climb would fill the clamor in my belly with mangoes, guavas, plums, guinneps, oranges, coconuts, sweetsops, breadfruit, ackee, and tamarind. When not busy with chores, my days were spent hanging from a limb or climbing to the highest reaches for a feast and the solitude one can only find in the canopy of trees. Despite the abundance of fruit, my pangs grew aggressive and angry and became a constant companion in my early years.
When eleven came rushing in like a naked, febrile banshee, it hit me dead in the chest. Overnight, one mound sputtered from my planes while the other, resigned in duty did not take to the seeding of whatever hormones pulsed of late. It was a no-show. And what a show my mother made of me. From one corner of our fence to the next, my newfound feminine, mushrooming from my chest was lauded and laughed over. “Feed har more milk,” one neighbor woman suggested “Anno milk she need, yuh nuh si seh ah ackee she fi nyam,” regarded another. I hated eleven.
When my other breast finally checked in some months later, it was with zero fanfare—not even doting panegyrics from the woman who had suggested the right combination of concoctions that was heaped on my dinner plate nightly. One morning, while showering, it was there, a new offering for the sagging bra cup I could finally fill in. With its arrival came new rules for having breasts: no more fighting with Michael, no more climbing trees, and I had to absolutely, without question, wear a bra—especially to sleep. “You nuh want dem fi hang dung, right?” crooned my grandmother on a phone call from America. The same woman whose tits I knew for a fact hung so long and loose sent ripples through her dresses when she two-stepped in church when I was younger.
Eleven brought far too much flailing inside my body and mind to dive into the external nuances like the kids on American television who squandered their youth on tantrums and the dramas of first crushes with afforded frivolity. It wasn’t long into this warfare when we were plucked from Jamaica and transplanted to live with my grandmother in New York City. Until then, America had been a fictitious land where my grandmother was best friends with Santa Claus, and the two would pack barrels of American food and my American cousin’s hand-me-downs to send back to us on the island. My mother, an avid daydreamer, had often regaled us with stories of white Christmases and the lobster dinners that Americans feasted on daily. Despite never setting foot off the island—these were her fantastical offerings about the magical place that her mother and brothers inhabited—and where we were destined one day.
Being trapped inside of a body that was making its own rules was nothing compared to trying to fit into the body of a country unknown. A body whose moon hid behind the ever-present bedlam of buildings. Where were the stars in this country’s skies, and whose march was I to follow now that my mother’s drums were only beating for herself?
Cracked blacktop for play and streets so packed and loud that the windows needed windows became my new normal. Eleven had nothing on New York City. Nothing on the stench of garbage trucks from days gone by, whose reeky remnants lingered around every corner. Nothing on the immigrant kids hurling immigrant slurs at other immigrant kids who hadn’t yet found their way around a curse. Nothing on high rises and brick boxes that left Tetris-like fragments of the sky. Nothing on wrong colors, gang colors, and clothes—not uniforms, but clothes. Wrong clothes, wrong shoes— High-top sneakers from a discount shoe store which were not cool. “Grandma! THESE ARE NOT COOL!!” Nothing on food that chewed like plaster, on chicken that smelled and tasted of metal, on bread that hung limp when buttered, on fruit with no fragrance and NOTHING on ANXIETY! BRUH!
New York was a penitentiary of brick blocks, tree pits, and barren parking lots whose grayness pounded their way into my dreams. My sneaker-clad feet beat hard surfaces from the moment I set out till the seconds before I went to bed. Most days I only saw my toes or my mother at the very end of the day, for she was now locked away inside a building, working twice as long, and making twice the pay as a customer service rep than she ever did as a trained secretary in Jamaica.
T.V., a childhood luxury, became a constant friend. In this new life, the prelude and closure to my days were the plinks and bonks of cartoons that had no end. After school, my evenings were spent in marathon sessions as I dared myself to outlast their programming. Cartoons in Jamaica were relegated to four hours of scheduling that began at six am on the weekends. If we were lucky and my mother went off to the Saturday markets before 8 am, Michael and I would ignore our chores and spend our morning absorbed in whatever we could of the fleeting entertainment. We, like most Jamaican families, had one television with the same two channels. Occasionally, a channel featured American programming, including my mother’s favorite soap operas, which also aired at six in the morning during the week—episodes she never missed and whose music pulled me out of bed each day.
In America, American television was a gift from the gods who favored the entertainment of children and who dedicated entire networks to 24 hours of programming. If I chose, I could spend my time clicking through channel after unending channel with no one to stop me, no one keeping time the way my mother did when the daily allowance of half an hour was done. My grandmother had long since left her penchant for punishment behind and I was allowed more than my share of time to unwind in front of a movie or ten. The general household advisory was that I stayed inside, and though Michael was free to roam and eventually float away, the city blocks were deemed unsafe and I had no permission to wander.
In the evenings, when I grew accustomed to the notion that the cartoons would indeed be there when I returned, I would stray away from my sitter. After promising my grandmother that I would stay within the vicinity of her call from our fourth floor window, I was allowed to play in the courtyard surrounding our apartment complex. Play was what my grandmother termed my endeavors at entertaining myself—waiting more closely resembled the truth. Our building’s courtyard had fencing on every side. Emblazoned across a large red and white sign beneath the words NO SMOKING were the far more aggressive rules: NO PLAYING, NO RUNNING, NO PLAYING BALL, so…I would wait. I waited for someone who looked like me— a young immigrant kid or someone in the general vicinity—to come down and perhaps laugh with or and stand around and talk.
My grandmother’s buxom bosom was my only sense of normalcy. Although I had grown astronomically since she left when I was five, on nights when my mother’s shift ran into the wee hours of 3 a.m., and the pangs of anxiety had long replaced the grumblings of my stomach, my grandmother would curl me into her small, firm bed and talk in that sweet sing-song that had christened my childhood memories. Her voice would break through the gnarled fists in my abdomen and lull me back to the sun-splashed monotony that we once called home.
Though no one had asked me about leaving the island or staying in this cold, hard, and lonely place, I had resolved that somehow I would go back home. Back to the barefoot way we kids played on those heat-delayed days when the sun was so hot that we stuck to the shade of the soursop trees, sometimes climbing to the highest treetops for a touch of a cooler, stronger breeze. Back to the regularity of my mother and her ridiculous but now forgivable rules. Back to the hours spent steadied on the fattest limb of the guava tree in silence watching the sky for the flicker of birds passing overhead. Back to the routine of preparing for the school week with hours of handwashing and ironing my uniforms in factory-like precision and polishing my school shoes until the glinted when struck by the sun. Back to where all my neighbors sounded the same and there was no shame to my blackness.
In New York, my heart clanged when I wore the wrong clothes because someone always call me out for being too green. No one cared to look past my immigrant sheen to see me rowing upstream just trying to get through the day. In my chaotic classes, my once-proud voice had begun to falter. The words I uttered were met with sniggers because my patois hadn’t flattened out to sound like the twang Michael and my mother now effortlessly mastered. Somehow, in their wanderings, they had picked up American slang and vernacular while my tongue stumbled and stuttered.
That year, I felt smaller than the ants that I watched for hours when I had a childhood in Jamaica. Like I had walked, unushered, through the ivory towers of the eleventh-year portal and had been dropped into a world that ached and bled at random. Who was I supposed to be when it ended?
I’m not sure when it happened. Not sure when my skin fit right enough to not feel like I was hula-hooping inside my own body. Not sure when I stopped dreaming of returning home or when I fit New York around me like a well-worn belt, holding myself in enough to stretch, to breathe, to settle. Not sure when I got the right shoes, when my voice passed through my classes, unchecked. Not sure when the food, to my tongue, was just food, when my mother’s white Christmas was just a Thursday, and the lobster we only afforded with her bonus pay, was too chewy and smelled too much of chlorine to enjoy. Not sure when my teens became a breeze and the nightmare of my threshold years was well behind me. Not sure when my thoughts became my own, when I learned to breathe through my anxiety, or when I learned to claim all the space around me as mine. Not sure when I lost my mother to work, when Michael finally left, or when my grandmother’s arms grew too frail to keep me home. I just knew that somewhere in the mess and tangles of my youth, I had found my own drum, molded to my own skin, and had arrived safely inside my own country.