When I close my eyes now, I see Phibbah swiping her cloth at the cane settee in the receiving room, tilting it to sweep under. I see the campeachy chairs put right in the middle to catch a breeze, the carpets sent to Miss-bella by her sister in Bristol that curled up in our heat like they were trying to rest. The dining room where the porcelain cups and platters and the blue and white teapot rattled in the sideboard. I hear Phibbah hissing, ‘Ga-lang, pickney, just get out of my way. Why you can’t just leave me be?’

It was my job to polish the brass and put the flowers out on Miss-bella’s breakfast table, fan the flies off her food. But mostly I trailed the house, thinking of ways I could stick to Phibbah, like an apron. She grumbled while she worked, complaining that her old bones were rattling like stones in a calabash, that whoever dreamed up the colour white never had to be somebody’s laundress, that white people’s furniture never did nothing except breed more furniture. I liked the way her every word was birdsong, through the space in her teeth. Four of them missing right where my own new ones had just come in.

She’d been the one to pull mine out, so I asked her, ‘Phibbah, who pulled yours?’ Oh, I worried at her like waves on sand. Children are all blindfolds and hammers. Cruel because of what they don’t know.

She told me it was none of my business. ‘You don’ remember it,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘It happen before you born. Nobody remember a thing from then.’

Most days she did nothing but curse, but in the right mood she fed me scraps of hominy straight from the pot, or a slice of one of her corn cakes. When she sat outside the cook-room in the morning picking peas, and tapped her hand beside her in the dirt, it meant she’d set a few there for me, beside the washbasin. I’d creep over and scoop them into my palm, her arm tickling right beside mine. But she’d never turn, never look at me.

Peas snicking into pewter, Phibbah’s smell of coal, and the ley ash and aloe she mixed into soap. If I kept quiet, she might tell a story. But she had to work up to it, like a wave you can see coming from far out. First, she said, she had to find her story breath, which wasn’t the same as her living one.

My favourites were the ones about the house.

‘Only one reason white man ever build pretty-pretty house like this,’ Phibbah said. ‘You hooks worms to catch fish. After him come from England and finish him house, Massa send him letter to Bristol. We sabi sure as night going come, white woman going come. Sure enough Miss-bella come running ‒ bragadap! – same way guinea fowl come running when corn drop.’

Then Phibbah had a new mistress to learn. And she had to watch her the same way sailors watch the sky. Red sky at morning, sailor’s warning; red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Miss-bella came riding high on the driver’s bench in the mule-cart, as out of place as a white glove on a drying hedge, a teapot clinking on her lap, the blue and white pattern flocking the rim, like birds on a branch. She’d ripped up the cart cushions to make a little throne. Three nights Phibbah had stayed up sewing those cushions, finishing them off with a brocade leaf pattern good enough for the receiving room. Langton had said he wanted it to be like sitting on a god-damn cloud, the day he went down to get his wife. And here was Miss-bella, using them for her teapot instead of her backside! Oh, but she’d soon learn. This was Jamaica. Things were bound to crack.