Black Cake Buddhism

The package weighed about fifteen pounds. I staggered with it from the concierge’s desk to the elevator, noting the brownish liquid seeping through the brown craft paper and grey electrical tape. My mother had been sending such packages to me by mail twice a year since I’d moved out on my own. The first would arrive a few days before my birthday. The second delivery note from the post office would arrive a few days before Christmas. Since both occasions were in December, I would then have pounds of Trinidadian black cake in my possession. They were the envy of my friends who had either an acquired or inherited taste. A minority, like my child, hated the alcohol-infused, densely fruited mass. Others would bite into the blackened warmth and roll their eyes in ecstasy and communion with All Things Bright and Beautiful.

Then one year, it all stopped.

With an understanding that our time on earth is limited, and knowing that the deliveries would not continue forever, I’d asked my mother for the recipe many years earlier. She’d written it out for me on a sheet of lined paper with a blue ballpoint pen. I’d tucked the sheet into a cookbook and carried it with me through all my homes along Toronto’s Bloor subway line: the artist-filled, soon-to-be-condemned Victorian on Sherbourne Street with a secret worm farm in the basement; the second-storey apartment on Bloor at Christie; a shared house on Milverton Boulevard, a tree-lined street just north of Coxwell and Danforth; Bloor and Keele, a few blocks from the slaughterhouses, whose existence was revealed by the invisible stench of death that made its way south on the early morning breeze; a giant brick five-bedroom home on Colbeck Street in Bloor West Village; and a bit farther north, on Annette Street, an apartment above a dog-grooming salon. I moved every two years or so, a habit entrenched in my system by the multiple moves endured during my military base–brat childhood.

“A son is yours until he finds himself a wife. A daughter is yours forever,” my mum had once claimed when I was about fourteen years old. The words sounded like a trap. And I’d run from them and Caribbean girl-child prescribed roles ever since. I’d peek around the corner into the kitchen, where my mother slammed together brilliant meals while my father sat drinking with their guests. Her face was shut as she chopped, mixed, and stirred. She’d stop, wipe her hands on a red-and-white dishcloth, and exit the kitchen to sit with everyone, counting the minutes before heading back into the shadows to stir a pot or remove the dish from the oven. I’d quietly withdraw from my observation post, climb the stairs to my room, shut the door, and pick up my classical guitar, losing myself in the works of Mendelssohn and Bach. I later imagined my mother’s resentment, love, and frustration slammed into each dripping package of cake that arrived from that same kitchen.

In the formerly enslaved culture of Trinidad, it would have been Black/Creole women and girls forced to cook and bake for the Spanish, French, and, finally, English enslavers. Creating the delicacy of black cake required the extensive labour of women and girls, part of a social hierarchy based on gender and race. No ingredient in Trinidadian black cake is indigenous to the island. After emancipation, I imagine some might have revelled in benefitting from their own labour and, at Christmastime, created the delicious treat for their own families, at whatever cost.

“Wouldn’t it have been too expensive for people to make?” I once asked my mother. I knew that my grandmother had been a twenty-six-year-old widow with three small children in the 1940s whose husband, my grandfather, had died years earlier.

“Oh, everyone just made it happen,” she said. “They just did it.”

I felt the strings of patriarchy reach through the eons into my era and into my mother’s statement, seeking to pull me into appropriate obedience and service, expectations that were not hoisted onto my brothers. I watched carefully which household chores, if any, they were asked to do and compared them with my own.

“She feel we discriminating,” my dad laughed one day, as I scowled at yet another request to “make me a little bite,” something he never asked of my brothers. I made simple dishes, the occasional batch of cookies; however, as far as more complicated endeavours like black cake, souse, and callaloo, I’d managed to avoid taking up the spatula, or the steel bowl, or the wooden spoon. Until now.

It is August. I am in the living room of my parents’ Ottawa home. My mother holds a giant kitchen knife. Parang, traditional Trinidadian Christmas music, emanating from my father’s computer is making her crazy. Her hymns are playing on separate devices. A noisy battle of wills. I turn off the hymns and turn down the parang.

“I can’t do both,” I tell them.

My mother has decades of practice with knives, and unlike me, has not cut off the tip of her own finger. Mind you, I didn’t do that with a knife. I’d been using a pair of scissors to open a clear plastic one-litre bag of milk. I’d also managed to drop a weighted kitchen knife on my left foot, which required plastic surgery to rejoin the ends of a ligament that control the big toe. This was followed by months with my leg in a cast.

So many reasons to be afraid of the kitchen. Patriarchy, racism, slavery, sharp knives.

Sitting at a pullout table covered with a red plastic tablecloth, my mother and I chop the dried fruit into small bits on a wooden cutting board.

• 1 lb of currants
• 1 lb sultanas
• 1 lb Thompson raisins
• 1 lb prunes
• ¼ lb mixed peel
• 1 lb cherries (glazed)
• 2 bottles of rum (or any alcohol)

The boyfriend takes pictures of this historic event. He is encouraging. He likes eating food, any food, often cake, and figures this can’t be a bad development on my part. We’d searched for almond sherry, my mother’s alcohol of choice for her fruit cake, at every LCBO in the west suburban Ottawa borough of Nepean. It is in the database, said an employee, but we have not carried it here in years. We’d bought “just sherry.”

My mother and I stuff the fruit into two glass jars, pour half a bottle of regular sherry into each one, twist the lids airtight, and place them “to soak” in the back of the cupboard above the fridge of my parents’ kitchen. I learn that the soaking of the fruit would normally last for one year, beginning immediately after Christmas, just before attentions turned to preparations for Carnival. My mother assures me that this shortened four-month period of alcohol infusion, from August to the baking event in December, will be “just fine.”

Ghost

Even at nine years old I questioned the wisdom of parading that Trinidad Carnival. I thought we were trying to stay safe, and I was hardly low-key wearing a giant costume covered in gold sequins and beads. Long tufts of coki-yea, the woody midsection from the leaves of a coconut tree, extended my girth to about six feet in every direction. Dad said he’d done nothing wrong; he had the right to participate in the culture, he wasn’t hiding. He’d commissioned ornate individual costumes for my little brother and I and then, as he’d said, “taken the necessary precautions.” In my case this meant providing me with a bodyguard named Stuart. My father introduced us to each other and then disappeared into the crowds, shirtless with a flask of rum strung around his neck to jump up and play mas’. I looked up into the hundreds of faces of costumed and bejewelled revellers around me. I looked at Stuart.

He was tall and large with very dark skin. His job was to be with me the entire length of the parade. This worked well, except when I needed to cross the stage for the competition. That I did alone, pulling my heavily costumed self up the wooden ramp to wait for my name, costume, and band to be called. I then launched myself toward centre stage of the Red Cross Kiddies Carnival, chipping in time to the calypso road march, shaking the costume in front of the judges. I spun around, dancing back and forth across the full width of the stage, flashing gold in the sunlight and shaking my coki-yea fronds for the audience. Playing a big mas’ was an important rite of passage, my father had told us. “You have to know who you are and where you come from.” Maybe he already knew that this would be our last Carnival on the island.

By the time we did pack out, I knew why we were leaving. Three thousand night raids had been executed on family homes of the politically disobedient. To date, we had avoided an invasion and a ransacking; however, by this time, incidents had been adding up. The light aeroplane my dad flew on weekends was a red-and- white Cessna 150. One day, its engine stalled mid-flight, as the air uptake valve had mysteriously been covered with a cap. The result was that the plane’s gas tank collapsed in on itself. The plane started to fall out of the sky. My father crash-landed the small two-seater on a dirt road just outside the village of Moruga, placing the plane’s wheels six inches from the weed-filled ditches on either side. “Air force training,” he said. “Do it right the first time.”

Another day, he showed us numbers on a lab report confirming near-fatal levels of arsenic in his hair and fingernails. With his medical training, he’d determined that the white powder, a common weapon used in southern climes, must have been consistently added to his system on a regular basis. He had one person in mind who was often at their office.

After tampered brakes in our white Volkswagen buggy left my parents careening down a curving hill, slowing, coming to a stop only due to a flat section of road and an interaction with some bushes, they knew it was time to go.

Dad left first. My mother refused to leave right away. “It’s not me they are after,” she said. She insisted that we finish the academic year in our various schools. The prospect of showing up in Canada in mid-June with three disoriented kids made her brave enough to stay put for a couple extra weeks. She sold everything she could from the medical office and our home.

Then there was Dawn, our simple-minded Alsatian with a sway back, a mild disposition, and a paucity of mothering skills. Most of her litter had died as she would rise suddenly and stumble over the nursing puppies who fell from her teats. We needed someone to take her. Gabriel, a distant cousin, needed a guard dog or at least the appearance of one. We dropped Dawn off with him the day before our departure. As we drove away, I turned for a last look at our furry simpleton. She stood tall, tail erect for the first time, watching us through the wrought iron gate.

On our final day, my mother handed us each a small suitcase to take to a waiting car. As I’d had a thoroughly colonial upbringing that included embroidery, netball, and English folk songs, I could not bring myself to fits and howls of protest. Instead, at some point during the drive to Piarco International Airport, on our way to Goose Bay, Labrador, Canada, I simply stopped speaking.

•

At some point during the previous year, my younger brother and I had been engaged in a favourite and covert activity — jumping on our parents’ bed. In the midst of our glee, a hard, shiny black object slid from beneath our father’s pillow, down the length of the polycotton sheet to nestle between us. We halted our exuberance and looked at each other. I picked up the gun. I put it back down.

This was the evidence that my then skeptical child-self needed. Maybe, we really were in some kind of trouble. The rantings about subterfuge were connected to the world outside of us and were not just in my father’s head. In the solipsistic stance of childhood, I’d figured he was just being weird and trying to make us all tense and unhappy. Now, I saw that the gun might be needed to point toward something. Maybe the revealed threat and whispered parental panic had a source. However, even with the weight of the gun in my small hands, I fought cognitively against this new understanding. This is stupid, I thought.

We called out to our mother. She came running. We protested its presence. Why? we demanded. Why is there a gun under Dad’s pillow? Mostly I protested that it was so close to her head, imagining that if it went off, it might leave us motherless.

Our mother shrugged, a helpless tilt of her head.

•

In 2009, Selwyn D. Ryan published a book called Eric Williams: The Myth and the Man, with the University of the West Indies Press. My father had handed it to me as I sat on the beige sofa bed, where I often perched on visits to my parents’ Ottawa home. As I skimmed through the 842-page tome, I came across a paragraph:

Between 1972 and 1974 there were numerous manhunts, as well as searches of homes, some belonging to prominent people including two doctors and a permanent secretary. The searches, which were often executed by the dreaded “Flying Squad” under the leadership of the assistant commissioner, Randolph Burroughs, were carried on amid great show of force, and invariably nothing was found to justify the brutality.

My father underlined and wrote in every book that he read. Written above the year 1974, he’d penciled in “1975.” “There has been much controversy as to how much of this Williams knew and condoned,” the book states. Burroughs, appointed by Williams to the position, was a name I heard often around our fraught family dinners as my father had expounded on his experiences of that time. For the first time, with book in hand, I felt that my childhood memories of the era had been externally organized. My father had not just been difficult or paranoid or crazy. The stories floating through the air around us kids, the unclear rationale for the breach in my early life, the phantasmic tales of subterfuge doubted by many had been named. I looked up at him and asked, “Does this paragraph refer to us?”

“No,” he said. “We were never raided. One soldier told his commanding officer, ‘I’m not raiding doc’s house.’ The plan was abandoned.” A raid did not happen that night — to us.

•

In 1962, the newly minted independent nation of Trinidad and Tobago had a new leader. Eric Williams was brilliant. He’d attended the most prestigious academies of Empire, was Oxford educated, had garnered a Ph.D. He had deep understanding of these worlds and had written on the intricate connections between capitalism and slavery. He understood this new nation was founded on the lands and lives of the Taino, the Kalinago (Caribs), and other nations; the theft of the lives of enslaved peoples from Africa; indentured labourers from India and China; and smatterings of others. The small Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago was now led by a Black man with vision and plans. The United States, by contrast, was a seething wreck of denial and obfuscation about its roots. It was hosing down and setting dogs on Black people who objected to living at the bottom of their caste system.

My parents, who’d settled in Canada, and other Trinidadians ensconced around the world, were quickly drawn into the excitement of new nationhood. The national anthem began, “Forged from the love of liberty, in the fires of hope and prayer … Let every creed and race find an equal place.” And so on. Those must have been heady times.

“The plan was always to go home,” my mother says. By 1966, my father had accepted a job with the Trinidad and Tobago Regiment, caring for soldiers. My mother returned to the island ahead of him with us three children. She wanted to get back by a certain time, so that my older brother could sit his common entrance exam, a nationwide test for eleven-year-olds that could determine your future. In preparation, each morning before school, my father had woken him up and trained him in mathematics. He knew that what my brother had learned so far in the Canadian system would be no match for the rigorous British model of education on the island. And as the son of Steve Blizzard, who’d competed for and won an island scholarship to study abroad, my brother had to pass for a good school. We arrived, he killed it — the exam, I mean. My brother. He pulled it off. He was brilliant then. Still is.

My mother also executed another of their ideas. My father would later claim that he left Canada one day and opened up an office in Belmont the next morning. What he always neglected to mention was that his wife had been in Trinidad for months, working at Community Hospital, finding and setting up a home for their three children, putting us into schools, arranging transportation to and from, and managing the household. She also commuted daily to the nascent medical office on Erthig Road, to ensure that it was constructed properly.

The job with the Regiment never materialized. My father was disappointed and outraged. And without the promised job that had initiated our return to the island, the medical office became the one source of family income. The family struggled financially, partly because my parents treated everyone who came into the office, even those who could not pay. My mother recalls ducking out to the pharmacy around the corner, to buy medication for patients she knew would never be able to buy it themselves. Several times, patients showed up injured at their office. It might have been the head wound that bled like a demon or the ectopic pregnancy that my mother, a trained midwife, spotted in an instant. If they could not treat them on site, my parents packed them into their white Volkswagen buggy and drove them to the hospital. Invariably, upon return, the remaining patients had cleaned up the blood from the office floor and were sitting there calmly waiting for their turn to be seen.

By the late ’60s and early ’70s, my parents had garnered some goodwill and influence. However, they’d also attracted some bad mindedness. At five foot six, my father seemed much larger than this. And with a tinkling rum and Coke and the requisite off-white shirt-jac, he could hold the attention of a room. He’d tell jokes or sing an ole-time calypso. Contrastingly, he also railed loudly against those who had upset him. Was it true he was asked to join the political game? Was it true that he’d refused contemptuously with, “No. Y’all too corrupt”?

“He brought it on himself,” I heard years later. “He kept talking. Loudly.”

•

A haunting can be a repeated story. Each time you run a tale in your head, the body experiences it in real time and creates the hormones of flight. Neurons form dedicated pathways and even seek to relive familiar discomforts. By 1976, we were back in Canada, the land of my birth. And over the next ten years, my father debriefed at home, his trauma landing in the ears and bodies of his interlocutors, the children still at home, and his wife who’d quietly slept with a gun pointed at her head.

“They t’ief!” my dad would exclaim, answering his own query at the dinner table. We all sat and watched him. He’d set up his own answer with the following questions: “How so-and-so could say, ‘I could buy Trinidad’?” “How so-and-so could own skyscrapers in Canada?” We occasionally egged him on with a familiar question. His voice would get louder at this opportunity to explain to us, again, what we well knew.

A haunting can be a feeling of no real recourse, a memory of strange goings-on, a suspicion that the ground upon which we stand is warped. Who can one trust? What is real? Who would believe you if it were? I grew up with this in my mind at all times. I became haunted, carrying a generalized fear around in my bones. Regardless of fact, fiction, history, imagination, or story, in my child-mind, it was because of Eric Williams that our lives had been disrupted. I was resentful of that name. For years, I remained mad at my father as well, as I resented the need to return to Canada. I’d arrived on the island with my Canadian accent, not quite Trini enough. Upon return to Canada, I slid halfway back into the accent with which I’d first learned to speak. I hated leaving my familiar being on the island, to once again become foreign. I learned to live in a generalized non-belonging, a kind of imagined invisibility. It took me decades to land.

I felt a familiar jolt in my system when I read in the Guardian that the seminal work of Dr. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, was to be reissued by a major press. My child-self was still discombobulated by that name. I knew that I would write to clear this breach of spirit. Old harms train us. They can keep us circling like dogs on a spot of ground or they can lead us to new terrain. We choose. They can whisper toxins from the depths of memory or they can inhabit us with wisdom.

I am still reading the tome on the contested legacy of the former prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. I will reread the great treatise, Capitalism and Slavery. I will read it again even though I can just barely separate art from spectre.