West Indian Day Parade in Harlem. Many slaves brought the tradition of African outdoor ceremonies to the Caribbean. However, once enslaved, they were prohibited from holding public celebrations despite their slaveholders’ engagement in street parades like Mardi Gras. Once freed, ex-slaves began their own street celebrations, combining elements of African and European culture. /caption]

Flora Fiction
Creative Space Literary Magazine
Summer 2023 Issue

West Indian Day Parade 1956 

 

I was 12 ½ and unhappy. My grandmother, whom we called Ma had not said a word from the moment we left Aunt Jessie’s apartment laden with shopping bags. Not a word as we clambered down to the summer-liquid streets of Harlem that led to the subway and the long ride back to our home in Bed- Stuy. Except for the sound of Ma hitting my head when I asked her what Aunt Jessie’s parting words had meant, there was just the thump thump of bad feeling in my heart.

Aunt Jessie wasn’t our real aunt. Unlike my family with its mix of Malaysian Dayak and West Indian, she was small and round, her skin the color of the whitish- brownish-pinkish powder my mother dabbed on her face when my father returned from months at sea.

Aunt Jessie and Ma grew up in Trinidad. While Ma preferred images of the pale Jesus, and Easter palms bent into crosses, Aunt Jessie’s apartment smelled like cinnamon and was crammed with island pictures , fancy tea sets, intricate figurines, lace borders, and sea shells filled with candy. The afternoon we visited, however, it was as if a tide had deposited a sunken treasure of fabrics and feathers, beads, pearls, bells, skins, straw hats and ribbons twisting with armfuls of glittery things. Ma tall and dark, a staunch member of the Ladies Auxiliary, and Aunt Jessie, short and round, spoke softly. Even sitting down, they looked like a number 10.
When Aunt Jessie turned and asked “Can you sit straight and tall?” I automatically looked at Ma for permission.

Aunt Jessie bounced over and gently grabbed my arm.
“Wave. No! Like this. Now nod your head at the same time. Good. To the right. Now to the left . Now how about a smile?”, she smiled.
In my whole life, I never smiled.

Ma gave me “the do as she says look.”

Meanwhile, Aunt Jessie was wrangling my brother and sister to stand beside me.

“I think it will work “, Aunt Jessie looked at Ma who smiled. “Good”, Aunt Jessie nodded to use, then to Ma, “Let’s go into the dining room. I’ve got some things collected that you can use.

Left alone without candy, me and my brother and sister fidgeted on the couch like addicts.

Later while Ma clutched two bongazooa shopping bags , Aunt Jessie distributed three little bags of candy, calling out as the door closed behind us,
“Thank you Gladys, she’ll be a wonderful Queen Elizabeth.”

And that is the reason I wanted to kill Ms. . Every day after school, I was at the mercy of her needles, endlessly measuring, complaining about my scrawny body, so unlike my younger sister who, plump and good-natured, was too dark to be Queen Elizabeth.

Ma was queen anyway. She demanded total obedience, faith in the lord, and lady-like behavior, especially in front of white people. I preferred my father’s stories of murdered missionaries and bloody jungle floors – perfect punishments for their bossy attitude.

As a result, I didn’t want to have anything to do with West Indian.

Despite prayers and weeping and the nightly whirr of Ma’s sewing machine, West Indian Day arrived. My parents were left to fend for themselves on the crowd-filling sidewalks, while up at Aunt Jessie’s, she and Ma inched me into a heavy white dress studded with pearls, its cloth filled bosom fitting delicately over my flat chest. Pearls around my neck, a glittering crown above my long black hair, I was the envy of my sister for whom Ma had dressed in striped fabric with a bandana around her head to portray a Trini village woman, and my little brother, the Queen’s footman, who had been squeezed into a tight beaded suit and saggy white stockings.

A car waited at the curb, its top down, soft white seats, a driver in front , and a man in the backseat I had seen on TV a million times.

Suddenly Ma stopped. She pulled from her wrist and slid onto mine one of her heavy silver bracelets. I was in total shock. She never ever removed them. Her lips were pressed together as if she would cry. We lived on a really bad block. All her West Indian friends at church lived on beautiful blocks with beautiful dishes of candy. But none of their children or grandchildren had ever been queen.

A whoop erupted from the crowd when Adam Clayton Powell Jr, the handsome Harlem Congressman, emerged from the car. He could tell I was nervous, helping me sit at the top of the back seat, arranging my red feathered cape, then sitting beside me followed by my sister and brother who sat on little jump seats.

“You look very pretty”, he said. He smelled like a flower.

The car moved forward, an island in an ocean of calypso, the beat and blare of saxophones and steel pans, and strange assemblies of mysterious objects and masks pulsing high in the air like waves in an ocean.

Everywhere lush patterns and colors, sharp straw hats, high heels, everyone dancing back-to-back, belly-to-belly, faces and limbs in every shade of day becoming beautiful night.

Women threw kisses at Mr. Powell, shook their bodies. He laughed, made jokes, made me giggle, made me forget the lessons of sitting nicely, until some blocks later, he left the car to stand at the viewing platform alongside Aunt Jessie and other important people.

“Your majesty”, he bowed.

I bowed back to him, like a queen, as the car took me away. To the cheers continuing from high atop windows and streets, hands clapping to the heartbeat of steel bands, a bacchanal of hips windmilling and long legs sashaying, the sweat glistening like pearls, the air grand with the aroma of patty cocos and spice while kids in beat-up shorts and grown-ups Sunday-sharp, wove through the strutting of feathered magical beings.

And I in their midst became one of them, the spirit in secret guise discarding the dry stiff heart of the old queen and, replacing it with my own, steel stringed in that afternoon filled with strength and beauty riding on a sea of joy carried along, in that car, setting sail for the new world.

– Christina Maile June 2023

READ the entire Flora Fiction Summer 2023 issue in Flora Fiction Magazine

MORE about Jessie Waddell, founder of West Indian Day Parade at Mapping the African American Past