Brown Girl In the Ring Read Online Free PDF Page B

with him at last. Maybe a little apartment in one of the suburban cities outside the Metro core. Maybe North York or Scarborough, where she’d heard there were jobs and people could afford to drive cars and wear store-bought clothes. They would both find work, and Mami could come to live with them and leave Toronto people to their own hell.
    “You would like that, my bolom baby? Eh, no-name baby?” Baby’s eyes followed hers. He sucked fretfully at her knuckle. “Well,” she continued, “you almost old enough for your nine-week naming now. Next week, me and Mami go do that, and maybe in a little while, me and you and Tony going to live together, and I go buy a baby pram to push you in, and toys for you to play with. You would like that, Bolom?”
    Ti-Jeanne smiled at the child in her arms, hugged him closer to her, but he frowned and whimpered, clenching his hands into fists. She scowled at him. “Hush now.”
    He kept on whimpering. Ti-Jeanne sucked her teeth. She loved him, but when he got like this, it irritated her. Her mother and grandmother had raised her with the strap; it was what she knew of discipline. “Hush, I tell you. You best had learn fast to mind me when I speak, you know.”
    But by the time she’d tromped through the fallen leaves in the park to reach their farm, Baby was screeching with hunger. Ti-Jeanne hated the noise. She shook him a little, hoping to startle him into silence. Instead his screaming took on a desperate edge. Guilt burned at her.
    “Shut up, Baby,” she said. “You must learn to listen when I talk to you.” She rocked Baby in her arms and made soothing noises, trying to make up for shaking him. He got a bit quieter.
    Mami Gros-Jeanne was waiting at the door of their cottage, a hardened knot of a woman in her limp black dress.
    “Is where the ass you been all day? You don’t see the child hungry? Get inside and feed he! You just as bad as your blasted mother!”
    “Yes, Mami. I goin’, Mami.” Ti-Jeanne scuttled inside, unbuttoning her blouse as she went so that the child could suck.
    “Stupidness,” Mami muttered behind Ti-Jeanne’s fleeing back.
    Baby was soon full; he would sleep for a few hours. Ti-Jeanne spent the rest of the evening as she so often did, braiding Mami’s wiry salt-and-pepper hair while the old woman sat and chopped herbs at the “kitchen” table.
    Riverdale Farm had been a city-owned recreation space, a working farm constructed to resemble one that had been on those lands in the nineteenth century. Torontonians used to be able to come and watch the “farmers” milk the cows and collect eggs from the chickens. The Simpson House wasn’t a real house at all, just a facade that the Parks Department had built to resemble the original farmhouse. There was a front porch that led into a short hallway. To the left and right of the hallway were two small rooms in which the Riverdale staff had led workshops in spinning and weaving. Mami used the right-hand room with its fireplace as her parlour/dining room, the left-hand one as her examining room. Upstairs had been two offices. Those she had converted into bedrooms: one for herself and the other for Ti-Jeanne and Mi-Jeanne. Now that Mi-Jeanne was gone, Ti-Jeanne shared her bedroom with her baby son. The back of the house had consisted of male and female public washrooms, but they were no use now in a city without a sewage system. Mami’s followers had built her an outhouse just outside with a cesspit and had converted the two washrooms into a cold-storage room and a ventilated kitchen where she cooked on a wood stove that someone had found for her.
    “You minding me, Ti-Jeanne? For foot itch, you must pound garlic, and mix it with pot salt to put between the toes. That does kill it.” Mami Gros-Jeanne was always training Ti-Jeanne in the work she did as a healer.
    “Yes, Mami.”
    “This batch for Papa Butler. He coming Sunday for it. I done tell that man that he must wash he foot every day. He