Creative Writing from
Fairleigh Dickinson University
MFA Program

Dream of Brown-Skinned Men

Rosalie Morales Kearns

The North is learning . . . that there are vast differences in political capacity between the races, that it is the white man's mission, his duty, and his right to hold the reins of political power in his own hands for the civilization of the world.
          --John W. Burgess, 1923

For Elizabeth the arrival of the half-Chinese schoolteacher marked an interesting change from the usual island men. One of the maids announced his first visit, her voice muffled through the locked bedroom door.
     “Let him wait,” Elizabeth called out. She was in no mood for visitors in the afternoon heat. Justino, dozing beside her, hardly moved.
     Last night at the colonial governor's dinner party they'd warned her that someone would come to beg money for furniture and textbooks for the new school, and she had almost laughed out loud. Books for what, she wanted to say, to teach them what? How to cut more cane, be better housemaids?
     She returned to the article she was reading. “It says here they've invented an electric icebox,” she said to Justino. “Civilization's grandest achievement.” She fanned herself with the magazine but it did no good. She threw it off the bed. “You won't get them on this damned island for decades.”
     “Move to the mountains,” Justino murmured. He dreamed of living in the mountains.
     “What you have here are foothills,” she said. She considered evicting him from her bed before the warmth from his massive body stifled her. These people were impervious to heat. “You have no idea,” she said, “how invigorating it is to step outside the morning after a snowfall, or to look at the stars on a clear night in midwinter. The cold refreshes the spirit.”
     Justino smiled as he turned on his side and drifted to sleep. “It's cold in the mountains.”
     She studied his muscular back, admired her hand's luminous whiteness against his dark skin. Rosewood, she decided. He was the color of polished rosewood from the jungles of Honduras.
     She kicked at his feet. “Wake up and get out. I can't breathe.”
     After she bathed she felt revived. A breeze from the ocean swept through her bedroom.
     The maid appeared at the door.
     “The schoolteacher, señora. What should I do with him?”
     “Take him to the parlor. Tell Justino to bring us coffee.”

The señora's house was freshly painted in shades of rose the first time I saw it. I remember the tall doors with white shutters, the wrought-iron grillwork balcony overflowing with potted alegrías and trinitarias. I never did learn the English words for flowers. She lived in the oldest, most elegant part of the capital, where the streets are paved with the blue stones brought over as ballast in the Europeans' ships. Our island is too small to show up on maps, but tourists have discovered it now, so perhaps you know the part of the city I mean.
     The señora liked to say that she had come to the island in self-imposed exile, but in fact she inherited the house in the city, along with a sugar plantation on the coast. When guests stepped inside the señora's house they often felt a remarkable coolness, as if the night air had been captured there. Somber furniture, paintings of distinguished ancestors, breezes that came from nowhere--all created the impression that the señora had brought the North with her. Only in the verdant courtyard at the heart of the house did the guests know they were still on our island.

When Elizabeth saw the schoolteacher she remembered the rumors about his odd parentage. A Chinese man had come to the island and married a native woman; this boy was their son. An interesting hybrid he was, though disappointingly thin, and he didn't swagger like the other men. A little education could spoil a man here.
     “This is an honor, señora,” he said in perfect English.
     She half-squinted as she greeted him, pondering the color of his skin. Not coffee. A bit redder than café con leche. Bright like copper, but not dark enough.
     “I always enjoy an opportunity to practice my languages,” he said.
     She had to smile at his pitiable boast. “And I,” she said, “always enjoy talking to an . . . educated person.”
     One needed so few qualifications to be a schoolteacher in this place. Every year the government found some natives who were slightly more literate than the rest and sent them north to pick up a smattering of education.
     The schoolteacher cleared his throat and began his speech about the school's need for all manner of supplies, the indifference of the colonial government, his reliance on the well-known generosity of the leading citizens.
     Where was the Chinese in him? His eyes seemed normal enough. Some of the natives, in fact, looked more Chinese than he did in that respect--throwbacks to their Indian ancestors, she supposed. Perhaps his high forehead . . .
     His speech drew to a close. Elizabeth wanted time to study him more.
     “I have a sense of civic responsibility,” she said. “This island's natural resources would still lie fallow if not for families like mine, who invested our capital and hard work and talent here. But I confess I'm jaundiced about your project--” she paused. She would not call him señor, and she called no man by his given name unless she had made him her lover first. “I do what I can for this place, but I find my money is wasted by corrupt and ignorant native officials.”
     The schoolteacher's eyes narrowed over his smile. “'Jaundiced' is an interesting word,” he said. “Problems of the liver make you--Northerners--turn yellow, I believe. But a yellow view of the world should be a sunny view. How did we get from sunny to skeptical? Perhaps it is the color of the bile, rising up to choke off the vision.” He took a sip of coffee and admired the gold-rimmed porcelain teacup before he gently set it down. “But then, señora, you have no reason to be bilious.”
     “Why do you say that? My family has had its share of bitterness and misery, as much as any family has.”
     “No doubt,” the schoolteacher replied in a soft voice. He had not stopped smiling. “Still, bitterness and misery take on certain tragic dimensions, and allow more room for self-pity, when one's evening sherry is offered on a silver tray by a servant.”
     She laughed at his impudence. He seemed surprised, or pleased.

Elizabeth had come to the island with one goal: through her management of the sugar plantation she would demonstrate her talent for business, prove that she deserved a larger role in the family's other enterprises. She had never expected to stay long. Her travels kept her away for months on end. But she always returned.
     Her brother was dismayed by her life in the tropics. “You should come home and get married,” he told her. “You detest the heat. There's scarcely anyone refined enough for you to talk to. Why stay there?”
     “It has its compensations.”
     Justino had been the first, years ago. The few times Elizabeth noticed him, he had been as unremarkable as a block of raw wood. But one day she saw him unloading sacks of rice from a cart at the side door. He took off his shirt in the heat, and she watched the play of his muscles as he easily handled the hundred-pound bags. None of the white men in her circle--magistrates, landowners, bankers--could match this specimen.
     And his skin.
     She had never touched a grown man with no hair on his chest or arms or back, never felt smooth skin on a hard body.
     He was promoted to an indoor servant. The housekeeper was not pleased. He's a brute, she said. He's a mule. What would he do inside a beautiful house like this? The housekeeper was fired.
     By then Elizabeth was a connoisseur of the many shades of brown. She knew the mulattos' tones of cacao, sesame candy, fine rum. The sullen negroes with their velvety skin were the color of cilantro seed and licorice. The mongrel natives called to mind maple syrup, cider. But the half-Chinese schoolteacher confounded her.
     She devised a way to observe him more: on his way out he had glimpsed the grand piano and his arrogance had disappeared. Might he play a few notes, he had asked. He learned as a child, it seemed, in the house of an hacendado who no doubt had taken pity on him.
     The Chinaman's playing was pedestrian, of course, but he had potential in other ways. You may come in the afternoons, she had told him, and play if you like. Nobody uses it here.

The manservant showed me into the music room when I ventured back a few days after my first visit. I sat down at the piano and played scales and other exercises, to get reacquainted. I have always loved the piano. I've tried other instruments, the cuatro, the bamboo flute. But when I play the piano I feel I'm accompanied by a multitude. We bring forth the earth's deep sounds, a river coursing through the rainforest, a storm at sea.
     Half an hour passed before the señora entered.
     She had the bearing of a woman who is aware of her beauty and proud of it, as if it were a personal accomplishment. They say money won't guarantee happiness, but anyone can see that it enhances health: always enough food, enough sleep, no need for hard labor. She was sixteen years older than I, yet we looked the same age.
     I stood up to greet her. “Have I disturbed you?”
     “Not at all,” she said. “I know you're out of practice. One has to expect some sour notes.”
     I smiled. In retrospect, I think my smile is what kept her off guard. It may have been my only source of interest to her.
     “Do continue.” She chose a white rattan armchair to my right, just at the edge of my vision, and settled back as if to listen to me play. But after a few minutes she interrupted.
     “I hear you're a proponent of independence,” she said. “Surely you people don't think you're capable of self-government.”
     I could feel her watching me closely. When I turned to look at her she made no effort to hide her amusement. For a moment I was distracted by her gaze. Blue is a beautiful color, but so strange for eyes, so difficult to read.
     “And I saw your letter to the editor on Tuesday,” she said. “Don't you think you're rather exaggerating the destitution on the island?”
     “No.”
     “How miserable can you be when hibiscus and orchids shoot up everywhere, and you can hear the ocean out your window?”
     “Señora,” I said, “have you been to the huts in the hill district? Nobody can hear the ocean there.”
     She shrugged, but her constant scrutiny of me gave the lie to this show of indifference. “If they're so unhappy,” she said, “why don't they move somewhere else?”
     So our conversations went. She goaded me out of boredom, I believe; she had no genuine interest in our island. She allowed me to play uninterrupted only when she was busy with paperwork for the plantation, or studying foreign newspapers or poring over travelogues and maps.
     Gradually I realized she envied my playing--for I like to think I made up for my deficiencies with a certain amount of vigor and expression. It should have comforted her that what small talent I had would never be heard by more than a few.
     I treasured the sheet music and books I discovered in the conservatory. They were my only teachers. But I had my own music, too; I even began to hear it in my dreams, wilder and more passionate than I could produce in my waking hours. My old life, my old interests, seemed to give way to the music. Political discussions in the plaza no longer appealed to me. I had no time for books or endless meetings, no energy for letters to newspapers and government officials. My good fortune made me forget so much.
     In all the times Justino led me into the music room, he never looked back to see how I stared at my surroundings. His scorn for me would only have increased. I marveled at everything: the fine tiled floors, crystal vases, mirrors, the furniture inlaid with mother of pearl. Stained glass and carved wooden fretwork adorned the thresholds between each room. From everywhere you could hear the waves and feel the salt breeze.
     The señora's bedroom, I soon found, commanded a dazzling view of the ocean.
     I never got tired of being in that house. I believe our souls crave beauty.

Elizabeth was not surprised when she stopped seeing the Chinaman's letters in the newspaper. She had never seen him bristle in anger or seethe at the inequities he campaigned against. He could have no real understanding of justice. He couldn't know what it was to have untapped abilities, wasted talents.
     But she never could get him to express awe of her, or gratitude for what she provided. Or fear for all she could deprive him of. She wavered between grudging admiration and disdain. These people never seemed to feel anything deeply.
     Still, it amused her to speculate on his beliefs: a fashionable atheism, perhaps, but more likely an Asiatic fatalism.
     “Human beings are so serious,” she told him. “We think everything about ourselves is momentous. But it's a lazy habit, it's cowardly, to think that what we do matters. The moment we die we're extinguished.”
     The Chinaman seemed to nod to himself.
     “Do you agree?” she asked.
     “No.”
     “Then why did you nod? Are you trying to seem inscrutable?”
     “It's what I expected you to believe.”
     He was young and sinewy, but from certain angles he looked like an old man. Especially those bony hands. For a moment he seemed pathetic.
     She pushed that thought away. Nothing cooled her desire like pity.

The maid brought the letter out to Elizabeth in the courtyard, where she had gone to inspect the flowers. She never could remember the names of these audacious jungle blooms. They were so vibrant and primitive they bordered on the indecent.
     The letter was a notice that the island legislature had approved a higher tax assessment on private landowners. What ingratitude. These resentful, illiterate peasants presumed to interfere in matters they couldn't possibly understand. At this rate they would wreck their own economy, and it would serve them right.
     She tore the notice in half. It seemed the air became still, then heavy with throbbing heat that descended on the courtyard and surrounded her.
     She hurried inside, nagged by the feeling that as she did so the heat would cling to her and invade the house.

July that year brought infernal heat. Even the breezes in the señora's house died away.
     I entered the conservatory to find her irritable and immobile in the rattan chair. She took the heat--and my calmness--as personal affronts.
     “Only a brute, a dumb beast in the field,” she announced, “could survive this weather. This island isn't fit for human habitation.”
     I took my place at the piano. Soon I had to start tilting my head upward so the sweat would drip into my shirt rather than onto the keys.
     She continued her diatribe. “If the Anglo-Saxon race abandoned the island, it would revert to a steamy jungle peopled by savages.”
     It was clear she was trying to irritate me. I played cooling music.
     “Stop smiling,” she said. “Disagree with me. Argue.”
     “What is the measure of a civilization?” I said quietly. “Paved roads? Monuments to great men? Before the Europeans came, people lived simply, it's true, but they didn't know starvation or misery. There were no extremes of wealth, and thus none of poverty.”
     She was intrigued now, her sour mood fading. “The people who lived on this island were superstitious savages,” she said. “They had no learning, no culture.”
     “Does philosophy exist only if it is written down?”
     “Philosophy! Dare you dress up your primitive myths in such a term?”
     “Some would say it's primitive to carry out a 'civilizing mission' with brute force.”
     Her eyes sparkled. My challenges were better than any soothing music I could have played.
     “It's no accident that we have the mastery,” she said. “It's the design of nature itself that light triumphs over dark.” She stood up, energized despite the heat, and paced from window to window. “So many beautiful things are white. Sea foam, swans, clouds. Of course snow. And the moon.”
     “The night sky,” I countered. “The sleek fur of the panther. And have you never seen a black swan?”
     “White is pure,” she said, “and clean.”
     “Life springs from the clean brown soil.”
     She sat down next to me at the piano, for the first time.
     “Think of flowers,” she said. “The loveliest ones are white. How many brown flowers are there?”
     “Flowers grow from brown trees, or under their protecting shade. Besides, a flower lives only a few days, the tree endures.”
     She gripped my arm and laughed, delighted. “Will you be so foolish as to declare that darkness is better than light, night better than day?”
     “If you didn't have night to sleep, to dream, your soul would sicken and die.”
     “In the dark you can't see anything.”
     “The sun blinds,” I said, “if you look directly at it.”
     “But blindness--”
     She stopped.
     She still held my arm, but now she stared down at it in shock and fury. I glanced at it myself, but saw nothing unusual. Before I could ask her what was wrong she rushed out of the room.

Damn the Chinaman! She had rested her hand on his arm, felt the lean, hard muscle, the smoothness of that damnable skin, then looked at her own hand against that goldenredbrown background. And it was not white.
     Not the white of her linen sheets, her stationery, the floor tiles, not the white of milk and coconut and sugar, nor of alabaster or face powder. She had rushed through the house, compared her hand to all of these.
     She stared at her skin. She could find no word to describe it, no real-world thing to which it compared. Not the blushing tea rose, the conch shell, the ash-blond poplar sideboard in the drawing room; not the bone china or the damask tapestry in the dining room.
     She was white, she knew she was. She had seen the contrast of her face with a native's in the mirror. She had caught glimpses of herself floating past the bedroom window at night like a ghost.
     The heat was afflicting her mind. No doubt she had fever. She would invoke the cold, think of icicles from tree branches, frozen rivers, snow drifts. Better never to have seen the shadow men, never touched them.

I went again the next afternoon and was admitted to the conservatory as usual. By now I knew that my music could be heard all through the house, but the señora stayed out of sight as I played.
     I returned a few days after that. No one answered my knock.
     Months later I learned she had left for good.

We should never judge anyone on appearance, I've found. Look at Justino, a slow-moving old man now, a dour peasant in a hut in the mountains. Who would think he'd been beautiful at one time, muscular and smooth-skinned, with a slow, lazy smile? He must have smiled like that for her, lying in a white woman's bed and hearing her disquisitions on winter as he drifted into sleep.
     I laugh when I think of how I looked the day I met her, a nervous young man in my best clothing, ill-fitting and cheap as it was, as it still is. But I am clothed in dignity now, I tell myself, though my guayabera hangs slack over my stooped shoulders. I have made it to old age in spite of everything.
     What would she think of me now? I begin to suspect that I must have been beautiful to some small extent, now that that beauty is gone.
     It has been decades since I touched a piano. I don't often allow myself to think of that. Until I got too old to work I concentrated on the daily routine of lessons: grammar, arithmetic, history. And I attended my political meetings, wrote my letters of protest. We are still a colony. Wealth is still in the hands of a few foreigners. Now I sit outside the café with the other old men and talk. Nobody remembers why I'm called el chino.
     Sometimes I can't help longing to play again. When I venture to the cliffs by the sea I remember the breeze coursing through her enormous house. I think of myself as a young man. I watch the waves and think of her malice and desire as she listened, invisible, to my music.

        [Published in Grain, volume 27, number 1, Summer 1999]