The Measure of a Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

As much as you wanted, as little as you wanted. I had heard that sworn to as a fact. Yet how could that be? And more wild than that, “cars,” they said, were a sight to behold. They said some people somewhere in that world beyond the horizon had made something called a car that would run faster than a horse—which was the fastest thing I knew of. Having never seen a car, I wondered how on earth they managed to make such a thing. And shoes. How about people who had shoes and wore them all the time? Not just on Sundays. Even toilets, they said, were found inside some rich people’s houses. Couldn’t imagine how that would work.
    As those on shore waved and shouted their goodbyes, the anchor was hoisted, the sail was set, and our vessel eased out to sea.
    First the waterfront of Arthur’s Town grew smaller and smaller; then Cat Island itself became a dot on which I focused intently until it disappeared from sight. Looking back now, in my mind’s eye, I remember it as a place where a simple people, three hundred families strong, managed their survival through an improvised, communal existence. Until the embargo, tomato farming was the closest thing to an industry that we had. On an island that consisted mostly of coral rock, each familycould still find a plot of ground big enough to call a family farm, and fertile enough to meet a family’s needs. Some who didn’t work a farm built boats. Some built houses. Others were fishermen or well-diggers or shopkeepers.
    At some time in the distant past a marriage had taken place between a barter system and a cash economy, and that marriage had endured into a benign tradition. Competition was kept as close to neighborly levels as was possible. The person who built houses would probably have to take some goat or fish meat in addition to some money for his services. For those who didn’t have cash, an exchange of their labor served as a viable currency just as well. That way everything leveled out. Thatched-roof houses without plumbing were built largely from materials found around the island. Taxes? There were none. Therefore, a family could function from year to year having only the slightest amount of cash. No money was needed to build a rock oven for baking; the rocks were there in abundance. A family would build a lime kiln from freshly cut trees that were still green and burn them over many weeks until the green wood became an ash with a consistency resembling cement. It wasn’t actually cement, but it had a texture that ultimately hardened like cement, allowing them to build the walls of a house. They could build a door out of wood and nails if they had those things. If not, they used twine to secure pieces of wood together to form a door. Protein came in the form of pigs, goats, chickens, and fish.
    I was just a child when we left, and none of us were particularly given to introspection back then. But nearly sixty yearslater, a dear friend asked a very telling question. “On Cat Island,” he asked me, “when you looked in the mirror, what did you think about the color of your skin?”
    The question opened doors that helped me to understand that special place. I told him, first of all, that I had no recollection of having seen myself in a mirror at that time. I couldn’t remember having ever seen a looking glass in our house, or any other kind of glass anywhere on the island (except maybe rum bottles on the shelf of Damite Farrah’s shop). No glass windows, no glass doors, no stores with glass fronts. Our family didn’t drink from glassware; we drank from enamel cups. Reflections, of course, from pond water, baking pans, various other kinds of metals. That’s what I had. That’s all I had. Occasional glimpses from reflections. Never was I able to recall having seen myself in a mirror. So I never got a fix on my color. No reason to. With no frame of reference to evidence its necessity, the issue never arose. There was one guy in Arthur’s Town, a doctor, who was