Island colors

About 2 percent of Port Charlotte’s population of nearly a thousand souls is of Caribbean origin. 

The area has four Caribbean restaurants serving up curry goat, oxtail, jubilee, callaloo, saltfish, and ackee. 

One needn’t even set foot in Jamaica to hear a variety of lilting voices and see splashes of color as riotous as its flag’s. And we don't have goats and stray dogs wandering into the road.

Within the space of 2 square miles, for instance, are three remarkable examples.

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Jamaican women younger than 60 walk like priestesses, their heads, sometimes turbaned, balanced high upon straight spines, as if carrying baskets of mangoes.  They seem to march to a dignified internal reggae parade.

There’s one such woman in the neighborhood, an unfailingly cheerful young lady. 

“It’s a beautiful day! Yes!” she’ll sing out as she passes.

Daily, she walks her dogs—one, a wayward, lunging pit bull, the other a lazy cur—as if marching in such a parade, dogs attached to one outflung arm, poop bag to the other.

Her brightly patterned skirts swirl around her ankles. Her dark hair is adorned with hanging dreadlocks the color of dried earth.  One morning, she appeared to be wearing a stuffed cat atop her head, its paws and tail bobbing merrily as she strode along.

On closer examination, it was a new patch of dreadlocks that she’d thought to weave overnight.

I wonder what she must do for a living.

Hairdressing?

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One island family has two middle-school children, whom I see walking to the bus stop.

They are even more polite and pleasant than other local children. Part of the reason might be a strict upbringing. Their father sometimes shadows them to the bus stop in a vast white Cadillac and sits there grimly until the bus arrives.

Christ. Middle school is hard enough.

One day, the girl was cradling a small shoebox in her arms. I figured it was goodies for her class.  But she opened the box and showed me what she explained was her egg.  It was, indeed, a hard-boiled egg, painted with a little face, swaddled in kerchiefs. She and all of her classmates had been protecting one all week, to learn what infant care was like.

She appeared ready to pitch it in the street at that point.

Her brother, even more pleasant than she is, once shocked a neighboring mom.

She was treating her sons to Dairy Queen and asked what he would like.

“I don't know. I’ve never had Dairy Queen!” he replied.

“The poor child!” she told me. “His father is so strict. Imagine! Never had Dairy Queen. I got him an Oreo Cookies Blizzard, and you’d think I gave him a million bucks.”

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Jamaican women older than 60 tend to shuffle about in small bands, usually heading to church, as one. Sometimes they travel door to door, carrying umbrellas against the sun and handing out religious tracts--which, if one reads them carefully, warn of intellectuals, Catholics, and other evils.

This tends to make a smart Catholic person a bit twitchy, but never mind. They seem like perfectly sweet old ladies.

Such a group--also unfailingly cheerful and dressed in clashing patterned skirts and blouses--lives together in what I call “the Pepto-Bismol House.” Not because of their need to dose themselves with it, though that might be a consideration in the islands. Rather, because of its appalling color, somewhere between Pepto and black raspberry ice cream.

I assume there are no men living there. None would stand for that paint job, and they would’ve been outlived anyway.

I wonder what their quiet next-door neighbor makes of this. His house is impeccably white, with crisp black shutters and a white Buddha out front.

On the other hand, giving directions to his place must be easy. Next to the Pepto-Bismol House. With a Buddha. You can’t miss it.