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Stephanie C. Horton
Ackee and Codfish, My Grandfather's Table
For Deday, Daniel Richard Horton
Jamaicans in Liberia always came to our yard during ackee season. My ears bubbled when they came. I soaked in the aural intricacies of pure Jamaican talk. My grandfather never lost his Jamaican accent.
The only ackee tree in Monrovia that I know of was planted by my grandfather (a cutting from his dead mother’s tree in Jamaica?), near the old frame house of three floors and steep stairways in the Horton family yard that we children called “the Big Yard”. We were a communal family then. The house, we called “the Old House”, was the first home my grandparents built before they moved to the other side of the wide, sloping yard stretching from the Mesurado River to the Capital By-Pass, to a modern two-story concrete house with marble floors, gleaming wood, black stone, and air conditioning.
The Old House was the first house I lived in, in Liberia, the home I had come to after being born in America while my parents were in college. I was just learning to walk, baby steps. I mapped its contours. I sucked and tasted its ancient essences. It was a large, airy, frame and stone house with hardwood floors; always cool, designed to catch the breeze; three wide porches; long wooden windows that pushed outward on wooden poles that fitted into slots. You could smell the rain if you stood by a window or were on a porch without getting soaked, the eaves were so deep.
The Old House was partially built on black rocks that had defied dynamite; between the rocks, long, black snakes held their age-old dens. Almost daily, one of our snake-killer cats dragged a dead snake to the bottom of the steep, narrow, white-washed stone kitchen steps in the back of the house overlooking the river, where the fishermen rowed out every early morning to fling nets in a shimmering arc that from a distance glistened silvery over the water. There I grew up, from baby to girl, on my grandfather’s dream land, inside his old house of many rooms and scents and hiding places; in intimate acquaintance with the river, the snakes; surrounded by my grandfather’s trees.
Ackee and breadfruit. Guava and cashew. Almond and mango. Monkey apple and pawpaw. Coconut and coffee. Plum and butter pear. None had the wild beauty, the sleek vermilion and black mystery of the ackee. But the ackee was one tree I wouldn’t climb.
Ackee was poisonous before maturity, we children were warned. That fruit (or vegetable) with shiny, wet black seeds that looked like otherworldly eyes that seemed to be looking at you; with blood red open petals curving inward against a moist cream center, somewhat resembling a lobster’s claws. So much strange enchantment, it took me outside of myself, and I imagined the “Jamaican tree”, the ackee tree, was watching us. I imagined because my grandfather seemed superhuman, the tree that came from the place he came from was more than tree. It was only later, much, much later that I learned that the ackee tree was medicinal, a West African transplant to Jamaica, taken over the Middle Passage waters during slavery and the beginning era of voracious hunger for African flesh, African wealth.
Only my grandfather knew when to pick the ackee fruit; how to cook it; when it was “fit” to be eaten. But then again, only my grandfather knew how to do almost everything. What else would taste so good with ackee but salted codfish? A food I found too strange to eat then became palatable to me cooked just his way. At the long dining table that seated the entire Horton clan, nothing was store bought but the codfish. We ate from what he raised; we ate from what he planted with his hands. His evangelical zeal took us from that table to far flung villages deep in the bush. After we left the car, walking forever on narrow paths that prevented driving, he admonished us to eat whatever was set before us, and not "behave like foolish people."
On the farm, he fixed the generator when it stalled. On the farm on moonless nights, without light bulbs powered by the generator, darkness took on the form of a living beast out to devour. Flashlight in hand, my grandfather would stride across the farmyard to the generator shed, and there was light. On the farm especially, there was always dirt caked under his dark fingernails.
On the farm, he insisted we drink goat milk, straight from the goat, to the glass, to my grimacing lips. “This is good for you, chile.” And then, "Deah," to my grandmother, "leave de chile ah'lone. She will drink it."
He kept bees for honey, and there were times when the bees were calm, lethargic. He knew those times in the same way he knew when to pen the animals when rain was coming, by the feel of the wind and the mood of the clouds; the same way he knew exactly what time of the day it was without a timepiece, by the position of the sun in the sky. He would leave his beekeeper’s suit, gloves and face mask behind, slowly reaching a large, dark hand inside the hive, handing us a warm, dripping honeycomb.
Yes, there were animals on the farm, bulls, cows, pigs, chickens, goats, who knew and respected his voice. There were groves of oranges, grapefruit, bananas, plantain. There were acres planted with pineapple, cassava, eddoes, yam. There were rubber trees; a deathlike cathedral of rubber trees, bleeding trees, hushed, wounded, reeking death; a rubber factory; tappers and farmworkers, loyal and respectful to my grandfather; and a whole other world of huts and smoking wood fires beyond a boundary line I a girl was not to cross, forbidden. But I transgressed those boundaries where black mambas held territory and would strike unprovoked.
I transgressed, disobeyed, and I knew that Deday knew I had. He never fussed or raised his voice at me.
I was nine years old when Deday died. There was codfish with onions at our house, for the wake . . . but no ackee.
Copyright © Stephanie C. Horton
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