Return Flights [1 ed.] 9781933227689, 9781933227672

Citation preview

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

RETURN FLIGHTS

Jarita Davis

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved. Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

RETURN FLIGHTS

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved. Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

PORTUGUESE IN THE AMERICAS SERIES

s e r ie s e d i tor s Christoper Larkosh and Maria da Glória de Sá

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

For a complete list of books available in this series, see www.portstudies.umassd.edu.pas. Return Flights • Jarita Davis Happy People in Tears • João de Melo Preface by Onésimo T. Almeida Translated by Elizabeth Lowe with Deolinda Adão Another City upon a Hill: A New England Memoir • Joseph A. Conforti Land, As Far As the Eye Can See: Portuguese in the Old West Donald Warrin and Geoffrey L. Gomes Almost Gone • Brian Sousa The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales • Darrell Kastin Land of Milk and Money • Anthony Barcellos Home Is an Island • Alfred Lewis The Marriage of the Portuguese (Expanded Edition) • Sam Pereira Move Over, Scopes and Other Writings • Julian Silva Azorean Identity in Brazil and the United States: Arguments about History, Culture, and Transnational Connections • João Leal Translated by Wendy Graça So Ends This Day: The Portuguese in American Whaling 1765–1927 Donald Warrin The Undiscovered Island • Darrell Kastin [Out of Print] Community, Culture and the Makings of Identity: Portuguese-Americans Along the Eastern Seaboard Edited by Kimberly DaCosta Holton and Andrea Klimt Tony: A New England Boyhood • Charles Reis Felix Two Portuguese-American Plays • Paulo A. Pereira and Patricia A. Thomas Edited by Patricia A. Thomas

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved. Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

RETURN FLIGHTS

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Jarita Davis

TAG U S P R E S S

UMass Dartmouth  •  Dartmouth, Massachusetts

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Tagus Press is the publishing arm of the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Center Director: João M. Paraskeva portuguese in the americas series 24

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth www.portstudies.umassd.edu © 2016 Jarita Davis • All rights reserved Series Editor: Christoper Larkosh • Managing Editor: Mario Pereira

For all inquiries, please contact: Tagus Press • Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture UMass Dartmouth • 285 Old Westport Road North Dartmouth MA 02747-2300 Tel. 508-999-8255 • Fax 508-999-9272 www.portstudies.umassd.edu Paperback isbn 978-1-933227-67-2 • Ebook isbn 978-1-933227-68-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Si ka badu, ka ta biradu. If you don’t leave, you can’t return. Tavares

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

• Eugénio

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved. Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

CONTENTS

Foreword by Christopher Larkosh  xi Preface xv 1

Dreaming in Crioulo, or Why I Romanticize the Old Country  3 Joseph Silva Barboza, a Portrait  5 Another Homecoming  7 Dress Whites  8 Ana Left the Old Country  9 The Children, Their Darkness  10 Defining the Morna  12 While Listening to Cesaria Evora  14 Atlantic Coasts  15 Corn 17 Return Flights  19

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

2

The Woman Who Cleans Fish  23 The Wedding Feast, Brava 1926  24 Harvesting a Return  25 Alone in Plymouth  28 Swimming Lessons  29 Nantucket Sleigh Ride  30 The Scrimshander  32 3

One Criolinha Speaks  36 You Cannot Prepare for This Trip  37 Impressions in Stone  38

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Arrival 40 At Midnight You Board the Boat to Brava  42 The Rainy Season  43 Meeting Mano and Mãe Vinda  45 This Is Someone Else’s Life  47 We Four Harvest Mangoes  48 Mangoes 50 I Am Twenty-eight Today  51 In the Field  53 Santa Maria das Dores, Sal  54 That Last Night  56 Departure 57 Cape Verde Has Been Slipping from Me  59

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

4

Vista from the Schoolhouse Steps  62 Djiny Describes the Festival of São João  63 Tonight 64 Seven Hesitations of Maria DeSilva  65 Sara Andrade Lobo, Age Seven  66 Each Evening  67 José Fishing in Fajã d’Água  68 Acknowledgments 69 Glossary 71

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

FOREWORD

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Returning to Cape Verdean American Culture with Jarita Davis

Is this the time for a new vision of Cape Verdean American culture? Large communities of Cape Verdeans have been part of the population of southeastern New England for more than a century and a half, with merchant and passenger ships connecting these islands off the West African coast to New England ports such as New Bedford and Providence since the time of whaling and throughout the age of heavy industry. The region soon became known for having the largest Cape Verdean community outside of the archipelago itself, and while this community continued to grow, especially in cities like Brockton, now one of the largest Cape Verdean cities in the world, it remained largely working-class and dedicated to family and everyday life. While traditional forms of music and cooking were an important part of cultural identity, literary activity and other cultural endeavors assumed a decidedly less significant role in the ordinary lives of most people. What has changed? Much of what appears to make the present a pivotal moment for Cape Verdean American writing can be found in this new book of poems by Jarita Davis, Return Flights. A Cape Verdean American whose family is rooted in New Bedford, she collects and develops so many of the themes and commonplaces of this community’s lived experience in a way that is both personal and connected to a shared narrative. Her attention to the details of memory and of the present moment has something of the photographic to it; whether in reproducing the sepia family portraits of a century ago or more recent ones of local everyday life, each connected in some way to the people from the Cape Verdean archipelago and its Creole culture born

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

xi

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

of a meeting of peoples and continents at the crossroads of the Atlantic Ocean. Images of young Cape Verdean children playing while being photographed on a beach in New Bedford, or of a group of workers in a Wareham cranberry bog, are collected and collated with earlier memories of whaling and migration to America, creating a sort of history of Cape Verdean American life through a set of poetic snapshots. Is there something about this multifaceted form of poetic narrative that can be considered Creole, one conditioned by and identifiable on the basis of its mixtures? The term Creole is one with countless definitions in any number of cultures that define themselves this way, but in this collection of poems, Jarita Davis points toward the challenges of defining it with any degree of certainty, whether through the incomprehension that arises through the mixture in or between different languages—such as Cape Verdean Creole, Portuguese, English, or even Italian— or the shifting or persistent constructions of racial identity of a mixed community in transit between countries such as the US or the Portuguese colonial system, and their consecutive attempts at fixing or unfixing Cape Verdean identity through their own particular forms of racialization. The effect leads to the perhaps inevitable conclusion that all culture is mixture, of the ancestral or the foreign that one makes one’s own through inheritance or personal selection, and that each of us is thus in greater contact with Creole models of culture than we may have realized at first. One of the most important steps taken in this book for the further development of literary expressions of Cape Verdean American cultural identity is that of cultural return, a theme common to other ethnic cultures in the United States. The author’s poetic journey to a present-day, independent República de Cabo Verde in the second section of the book raises the question, How does one return to a place that one has never been to

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

xii

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

before? How much of that return is based on family memory, how much on one’s own imagination or gifts of cultural invention, and how much does it depend on the desire to find something that might provide answers to recurrent questions of identity born of migration and mixture? While such a relationship to a culture of origin cannot be “the same” as that of people who have never left it (but when is the relationship to an element of culture ever really “the same” as any other?), this book speaks perhaps most forcefully to the lingering need for rediscovery and reconnection with elements of cultural origin today, especially those reestablished points of contact made on one’s own terms. The poems of Jarita Davis thus provide a sort of portal through which those connected to these Atlantic islands and their dispersed continental points of diaspora and migration might begin to reimagine that connectedness, their common narratives, their shared languages and forms of music. In this light, what may appear to be a random occurrence of any one person, whether from an obscure corner of New England or anywhere else, may actually become an emblematic image in a continually shifting vision, not only of Cape Verdean culture and its diaspora, but of US and global Portuguese-speaking cultures as well. The point is certainly not to attempt to represent the entirety of these cultures, but rather to move toward a more nuanced notion of what it means to represent a culture: that is, if that task of representation is even possible in the definitive ways it once was. However this transition might be conceptualized, this volume does much to move the discussion on the country of origin from a dreamed-of or imaginary space to one of tangible, lived, and written literary experience. This book thus marks a turning point for Cape Verdean American culture, one in which its common lived experiences are transported back and juxtaposed

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

xiii

against those of people still living in the country once left behind. In this way, a partially forgotten past becomes a starting point for possible futures, both of new transoceanic contacts and of new reinventions of culture. With all of this in mind, may each of us enjoy, benefit, and learn from our own return flights as we reimagine both ourselves and others, no matter what direction of time or space or limitless dimension of literary imagination they may be in.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Christopher Larkosh Boston, Massachusetts August 2015

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

xiv

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

PREFACE

When I was twelve years old, my grandfather, Papa, was disappointed to hear that I wasn’t studying Portuguese at school. “What are you going to do when you go to the old country?” he asked me. At the time, I thought his question was absurd. I had no intentions of going to the old country, where he himself had never returned after he left the island of Brava at age twelve. My grandfather wasn’t like the other Cape Verdeans in New Bedford who sent off huge bundles of clothing and nonperishable food on packet ships headed back to family in the old country. We had no known family still in Cape Verde, and it seemed like there was nothing to bring us back. Despite this separation, my family still showed me it was important to maintain our cultural ties and know that Cape Verde was a part of who we were. My mother, aunts, grandparents, and cousins would feed me and my brother Cape Verdean food and take us the Independence Day parades in New Bedford every year and say, “This is who you are; this is important.” Even though the place seemed impossibly far away, we were still tied to our roots in Cape Verde. I started writing these poems almost a decade after my grandfather died. I was haunted by thoughts and images of Cape Verde, especially the island of Brava. I tried to imagine the place he’d left as a boy, the place where he may have wanted to return to in his old age but sensed he would never see again. He didn’t ask me to go to the old country in his place but seemed to assume that I would go one day and ought to be ready. At age twelve, I had dismissed my grandfather’s words as those of an old man touched with the onset of dementia. Yet, when I started writing these poems and then made plans to finally see his birthplace for myself, I thought he may have been

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

xv

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

prophetic. Looking back now, it seems he set this whole project in motion with those words many years ago. If so, I’m glad that he did. In writing these poems, I embarked on a journey that included two trips to Portugal, two trips to Cape Verde, meeting long-lost family whom I doubt my grandfather knew existed, and meeting a family on Brava who took me in for no other reason than pure kindness. The more I explored Cape Verdean culture, the more I felt an affinity, despite my sense of separation. Because of the continual necessity of migration, Cape Verdean culture is shaped by separation and longing—longing for the home that has been left behind and for loved ones who have departed. Cape Verdean communities extend beyond national boundaries and are paradoxically independent of place, even when inspired by it. These poems reflect that sense of yearning for reunion and return that connects Cape Verdeans scattered across the globe. They conjure a nostalgic romance of the past, as well as embrace the vibrancy of the present. There is a vivid energy in this tension between regret for what might be lost and hope for connections that may be sustained despite physical separation. Sometimes I think it’s a shame that Papa never had the chance to read these poems or hear about my travels. But there’s a part of me that thinks somehow he always knew I would return, whether I realized it or not. That longing was born in me, even though I didn’t then have the words for it.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

xvi

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

1

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved. Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

D R E A M I N G I N C R I O U LO, OR WHY I ROMANTICIZE THE OLD COUNTRY

I dream of Cabo Verde every night now. A family owns a corner store there and remembers me from nights before. We smile, nod, point between stacked rice bags and ceramic statues of the Virgin.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Sometimes, I follow faint sounds guitars, violins, accordions through narrow brown and yellow streets. I step over uneven cobblestones beneath white sheets where a praça opens up. Above a crowd circling gray and brown with tambourines and finger cymbals a woman with a bright mouth and dress sings to Christmas lights strung from street lamps. I’ve only visited Papa’s broken fishing islands in visions, where a wheelbarrow jerks his father forward hopping and lurching behind. A black scarf covers his mother’s head. She leans over the milk canister and a boy brings his calf to its family waiting beneath a stone archway.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

3

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Brava held him in its worn nets. Too poor to keep him his memories became mine. Today I have learned to say Bom dia, and tonight I will not point but speak with my family in their cramped corner store.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

4

J O S E P H S I LVA B A R B O Z A , A PORTRAIT

There was something Captain Ahab about him even before the amputated leg gnawed and bruised by diabetes that seemed to seep up from his toes. The sheets fell flat where his leg should have lain. A bar hung over his hospital bed for him to pull himself up. My grandfather was not well, but he was never weak.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Grandma kept the chain on the door latched above his reach so he wouldn’t wheel himself down the stairwell when he decided it was time to leave what was always considered my grandmother’s house. He was the only one who made cooking smells in the kitchen. A stew with a Portuguese name and fish heads staring from the steaming pot. He even did grandfather things sometimes. He tweaked our noses hard and pretended to hold them between his knuckles. He called me Sugarfoot and Little Chickadee and pulled nickels from my ear, but never let me keep them.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

5

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

I knew him by the things he brought back. Unlabeled spice jars left ten years after he died. A coffee table from Africa or India or Indonesia with two wooden elephants holding up the top their tusks made from real slivers of ivory. A pendant he gave me once, whale bone carved into an enormous, smooth tooth. The prosthetic leg he cursed while plunking across the living room and leaning on his walker more than he liked. At night, that leg stood behind my grandmother’s armchair where she dozed, resting her hands on her head and holding one knitting needle that pierced as straight and still into the night as her steady snoring.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

6

A N OT H E R H O M E C O M I N G

This picture was taken before the guests left before my grandfather loosened his tie buttoned his jacket back on the hanger and smoothed the lapels flat with his thick hands. In this moment, the house is filled with people and neither the sofa nor the photo can hold him, his smile, or the questions from his daughters on either side.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Although she is still a small girl there is barely room for my mother in this photo. There is her right knee, her dark, bent braid, and bright eyes. My aunt knows to fold her hands in her lap and that the party is not for her. She watches her father carefully, for hints of how long he’ll stay.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

7

DRESS WHITES

In this photograph my grandfather as I’d never seen him. His stout arrogance a small dark mustache on his full face the emblem embroidered on his seaman’s hat and one hand in his pocket.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

My mother knew him like this dark and squat and smirking. And at sea.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

8

ANA LEFT THE OLD COUNTRY

My aunt says Ana was shunned for keeping to herself that she was from a wealthy village where there’s no family left now. In her portrait she wears a hat of soft cloth roses, wire-rimmed glasses and a secret pressed into the thin smile

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

she allowed her children to call pride.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

9

THE CHILDREN, THEIR DARKNESS

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Write a poem for the little black girl. How shy and round her face is. How she is the youngest by far and reminds me of my mother in an old photograph taken one afternoon when she was too young and bashful to go anywhere without my grandmother. She gripped her mother’s first finger, watching the camera carefully. But this little girl, who is the youngest and teased, is happy. Even when her father calls her Preta! and shows the underside of his arm so she can see how light he is. He’d say, Black, the best thing to be, even though he resented the woman who wrote “dark” under “complexion” on his papers in America. My mother says people from the old country called Papa Pretin, and we will never agree on my grandfather’s color. She remembers him coming home after weeks on the ship. I only saw him pale, washed out by hospital lights. And I know how much she resents the advice her motherin-law gave the day my brother was born. Look behind the ears. Look at his cuticles, she said. Look at his testicles, and you can see what color he’ll be. My mother clipped the conversation with, He’s going to be dark, as dark as me. And later, this younger brother

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

10

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

would tease me, saying, Mom and Dad had me because they always wanted a little black child. And now it is this little black girl I want. I want her dark six-year-old fingers to squeeze around my own, dark like me.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

11

DEFINING THE MORNA

I want the violin strings that scrape along this voice’s tremor to make an image for you, a piney rosemary bush I can run my palms up the sides of, offer my cupped hands to your nose and mouth to breathe its swoon from my damp skin

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

full and heavy and pleading to be held these images should have more water like poems that come to me in the shower and shake my footing loose from the tub as I teeter and slip and hear my own voice calling please don’t— above the falling water the night we left the shutters open to the old rolling sea scraping back the sand and chasing itself into the ocean the salt waves’ voice sang the same but it was entirely new, you and I, lying together in bed, lying too close to touch I step from the shower, wipe the water from my shoulders—there should be more water—forgetting something, that poem given to me before I caught myself from falling, and stood upright again under the warm slippery spray

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

12

,

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

this is the morna, a hymn to longing, a lyric of faded illusions from a voice forgotten in the wet, begging without remembering why the scent of rosemary leaves us faint and how a moment that waits for dawn makes the old serenades our own

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

13

WHILE LISTENING TO CESARIA EVORA

I’m waiting to write the perfect poem about Cape Verde, a poem rolling up full and overripe as a Caravaggio still life in the heavy voice of the barefoot goddess, weighted with the sad, sandy hopes of rain.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

For now, I only have this poem, and the swollen expectancy of future poems that understand what Cesaria is saying as well as what she means when her voice spills its bruised body over the piano.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

14

AT L A N T I C CO A S T S

These boys could be in Praia, I think. Dried sea salt coarse across their shoulders. They dig their feet into the sand, chase glimmers of polished glass and trail tracks along the shore leaving smudges like their grandfathers left on Cabo Verde at this age.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Across the ocean and decades before, two boys called to each other in Crioulo. I picture the brown mountains watching from behind, and the sea washing up smooth rocks and jellyfish for them. But they’re not in Praia, they’re here, we’re all here, in New Bedford where they dig at the beach with sticks and face the Atlantic from the other side. “What are you taking pictures of?” the boys ask me. “The beach,” I say, and they scatter sand behind them to collect their stash. “Take a picture of this,” the younger one suggests, holding

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

15

a twisted clump of seaweed and goo. The older boy is serious. He carries stones with important colors for me to photograph. Our tie to each other and to the past is the water. They do not discover and uncover bits from shore, their home, to remember lost family in Cabo Verde. This is where they are. This is where we are. “Take a picture of this,”

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

the younger one offers, grinning at the snail peering from its shell.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

16

CORN for Tony

Tony is big. If he weren’t Cape Verdean he’d be from Nebraska. “You should write a poem about corn,” he tells me now. “A piece of corn, talking to a man in Cabo Verde who plants it.”

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

When Tony was a boy, his father’s dim rustling in the kitchen shook him awake each morning, and from his bedroom window he watched a silhouette slipping from home, rushing to meet the sun in a field of corn that would not grow. Every year, you plant me in dirt and wait for rain. Maybe there’s enough rain. Or maybe it doesn’t rain for two years. Or three. But still you plant, why? His father left frustrations in farming for America, and Tony grew strong eating the dried corn his father used to press into dirt, while other boys’ fathers crouched in their plots of land, ignoring the quiet complaints from corn.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

17

Why are you so stupid to plant me in this hole? You could make cuscus or nice manchupa to eat. Tony’s father returned to Cabo Verde to hold the dry kernels in his palm and feel them stirring for growth. He bought more land with American money and hired men to put more corn in dirt and wait for rain.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

“Write something like that,” Tony tells me, resting an enormous hand on each knee. “A piece of corn talking. But the man plants it anyhow. That would be a good poem.” And maybe it would. But in all my revisions, the corn kernel wants to crack through its own hard yellow skin and stretch its green reach to meet the sun.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

18

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

RETURN FLIGHTS

The seventeen-year-old on the plane from Sal to New York knows Cape Verde is not a place you leave. It’s the shuttling across the Atlantic with his carry-on filled with letters written and saved long ago photographs his family forgot had been taken: his mother, standing by a cove, leaning against jagged rock in a bikini the same color as her warm brown skin. A black and white photo of his father that could have been the boy himself except for the yellowing crease at the corner. Video footage: fast music, quick hips. That’s my uncle’s house. The walls brown in the camcorder’s dim light. That’s my cousin. That’s my cousin too. He wears the necklace his girl gave him even though it pinches his neck. One tiny bead has an “F” for “Fatina.” That’s her name, Fatina. I’m coming back next summer.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

19

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved. Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

2

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved. Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

THE WOMAN WHO CLEANS FISH

splays the flesh flat spills open fish blood and fish bone and fish gut. The sand spread before her and the worn cabin behind are still as her body, but not the quick hands,

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

fragrant and soft with cod oil.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

23

T H E W E D D I N G F E A S T, B R AVA 1 9 2 6

Forever in this sepia photo a bride pauses by four young women each beautiful, each serious and there, a boy too small for stern eyes. The bride pauses by four young women at the long table, no men, but the boy too small for stern eyes and the cake, a spirit before the bride.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

At the long table, not men but five bottles of red wine, one bottle forgotten the cake a spirit before the bride. And pink roses with something like yellow daises. Five bottles of red wine, one bottle forgotten. No one sits, a palm tree stands above pink roses and something like yellow daises. Beside this, are the women who wait. No one sits, a palm tree stands along with the women who wait each beautiful, each serious forever in a sepia photo.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

24

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Jenks, anthropologist, 1924

I’ll bring back different stories, American clothes, and a handful of cranberries for each child. I’ll laugh when they spit the bitter flesh back into their hands.

Not about arthritis snapping my hips and ankles as I crouch in the dewy dawn, or the skin splitting my hand as I reach from the cold, dry air into the wet vines.

If you buy your own land, in three to five years you can harvest a full crop. In three years, I’ll be in Fogo again, telling my sobrinhos stories of the bog.

I can look at the cranberries, yes, but not eat them. It’s their color that’s sweet when the pink beads and candied crimson pebbles tumble into their wooden boxes.

• Albert

whether he picks by hand, scoop or snap, the very best harvester of cranberries on the Cape Cod bogs.

Over and over again, owners and overseers of cranberry bogs pronounce the Cape Verder,

HARVESTING A RETURN

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

25

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

of trees like narrow volcanoes exploding orange and yellow leaves. The evenings folded with the smell of burning wood, as colors collapsed into the sunset.

I’ll tell them about autumn tumbling behind boxes of cranberries set at the edge of the fields and how the end of each day would fall from the hills with a quiet fire

stumbling under the awkward empty wooden crates, gray and bigger than themselves, and brought them to their parents, bent in the bogs.

their children those old Criole songs: the one about the rooster who longs for his youth, wishing he could fly. And how the children helped,

How women picked too. Mothers in wide-brimmed hats stained their dresses while kneeling on crushed leaves and cranberries in the wet bogs, teaching

When their faces gather, scattered brown layers eclipsing each other, I’ll tell how here parents picked and scooped and told children stories of Nho Lobo, the lazy wolf.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

26

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

I’ll bring an aching armload of stories and berries back from the fiery fields of this other Cape to those brown faces in the beige mountains of Fogo.

My scoop snaps across the vines’ twigs. The money comes slowly, but it comes. Boxes stand stacked, bulging with berries. If the picking is good this year, and next,

Work on the bog is work that makes you feel old. Old enough to wonder how you are still bending your back over another man’s crops, not your own.

We danced, and the children took warm bread with cranberry jam from their mothers’ rough hands, hands torn by the berries’ vine and stained red beneath the nail.

How all through September and October and November, late into every Saturday night, we sang along with the accordions and mandolins in cabins by the bogs.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

27

A LO N E I N P LY M O U T H for the few Cape Verdeans who became owners in the cranberry industry in the 1930s

What kept you in the bogs, Domingo when the other Crioles left the shanties at the edge of the cranberry fields each brittle November to return to Fogo with gifts in pretty wrapped boxes for girls they’d loved in their youth? Didn’t you have sisters or grandparents or these dreams to go back to, or were they lost in the famine? Did word from Fogo say the girl you left had married another? Alone in Plymouth

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

you tended bogs as they iced, then thawed then reddened into summer on land you’d bought and Criole pickers came to you each fall, as if returning home.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

28

SWIMMING LESSONS Inhabitants of Brava generally do not know how to swim, but the young boys who wanted to get away on the whalers would learn this skill, just to be able to reach the waiting boats.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

• Marilyn

Halter

Today, they will learn to float. They hold each other aloft in the lagoon. Half stand hip deep one hand splays the shoulder blades the other props up the buttocks of a boy lying stiff across the still water. High rocks protect them from the tide. Those almost afloat focus and focus on breathing. They will their muscles slack before they come up sputtering and choking. The youngest boys collect sea urchins from between the black wet reefs while the rest raise each other like offerings from sea to sky until each can suspend himself letting water buoy his body weightless. Tomorrow, they will teach themselves to reach the length of the lagoon, holding their heads high above the water. Tonight they race home, salt clotting their hair and filming their dark shoulders and backs.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

29

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

NANTUCKET SLEIGH RIDE

The harpoon is thrown and pierces the whale when someone shouts Stern all! They row out from a tail launching a great wash of water, thrown like a heavy, wet wall against them, thrown hard like something they didn’t expect to catch and it throws João back, tumbling him onto his knees. Their boat is roped to the spear inside a whale thrashing its escape and when the vessel lurches forward João holds on, hears shouts of Jesus—his throat full of salt, then Good Christ breathing ocean brine he holds on, not knowing if the shouts are curses or prayers or both and when he chokes on gulps of sea, João knows he’s the one screaming and shuts up now, pressing his mouth together against the rush, clenching his eyes closed riding whichever way the boat thrashes and for a moment no matter how he grips or pushes his feet against what’s solid, he’s floating, all of him except his gut that sinks when the boat lifts the crew in air, then slams its weight against the surface again the smack of it through his seat, up the length of his spine into his shoulders and he holds on, the wet lashing his face while he tries to hold, still pulling air from water.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

30

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

It is still and it is dark and João wonders if he is dead. His wet clothes hang heavy on his limbs. He hears men talking, then remembers to open his eyes, surprised he can and surprised he’s still alive. The whole crew is alive and watching the whale at rest. A second harpoon is launched, someone shouts Stern all! and João holds his place in the boat.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

31

THE SCRIMSHANDER

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

In between their greasy luck and after the crew has sealed spermaceti in barrels below, the deck scrubbed down, harpoons and oars bent and broken from the hunt, now mended. Scraps of whale are still scattered about. Bits of bone with a graceful arch. A frightful tooth enormous even in the hand that brought the beast down. The scrimshander keeps this in his pocket or in his bunk, and sometimes runs his thumb over the enamel’s rough ridges. All the sails are resewn now and each day slips into the next while the scrimshander files the surface flat, and waits for the call from masthead. The sky spreads empty over empty sea shades upon shades of blue, deep and pale and delicate blue, polished like all variations of the tinged tooth’s one color, rubbed smooth.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

32

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

The sail needle pricks each point to its own depth, while each wave rises up differently from the last. Foam rolls off the crest of one, then bubbles under. Another wave is blown back by the wind. Each passes, then runs together into the same sea, as the scrimshander scrapes each point along the lines of one image. He darkens these grooves with soot, while the voyage cuts its mark across the finished, glassy surface of the sea.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

33

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved. Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

3

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

ONE CRIOLINHA SPEAKS

I am not the voice of Cabo Verde I am a voice calling for Cabo Verde a lonely voice naked on the edge of a stranger’s bed slipping each poem in turn onto a thin gold chain like painted beads from the necklace broken at my feet

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

36

Y O U C A N N OT P R E PA R E FOR THIS TRIP

you apply for a visa memorize a few phrases try not to stumble over accents buy insurance, film and make this list to take with you: go because your grandfather asked you though he was too old when he did and called you by your mother’s name.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

go to learn the value of water, to appreciate a bowlful from the supply brought up the side of a steep mountain upon the heads of women and girls whose husbands and fathers and brothers left to find work across the Atlantic. go so the next time someone asks, Are you Cape Verdean? you can say, Yes, instead of, My grandfather was. go with this picture of your grandfather in your pocket. the name of his father and village written on the back. go because someone you have not yet met is waiting for you there. go for a sense of direction. to feel the weight of south and east and to know your way by where the sun and ocean lie.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

37

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

IMPRESSIONS IN STONE

Imagine me, the American ghost of my grandfather, walking eighty years behind him through the same stone-clustered village I’d imaged into poems. These mountains, hard and heavy, this sky hazing around me. Here roosters crow, not to raise the sun into morning, but to untangle clouds from trees and scraps of shrubs. Through sleeping layers of mist, bright hibiscus flash red against the white-washed walls of this island. I dreamed too practically, and now with camera and notebook, I walk through a life cut from rock. An old woman nods Boa noite, her smile caves over toothless gums. Three boys chase a small pack of goats, kick them back onto the path and yank them from the rocky ledges with an old rope. A girl walks home barefoot with a cloth sack of bread. From the fog, a donkey brays and an old man with a cane picks his faded pace past bright laundry lain across dusty rocks. He wishes Jesu Christi companhi. My dreaming did not make it so.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

38

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

This teenage boy will still tease the village drunk when I’m gone. Children share stolen papayas behind the school house. A sturdy girl balances a wide bin of mangoes on her head and our eyes don’t meet along the narrow street. We pass. We both turn over our left shoulder to see if we have seen each other, really.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

39

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

A R R I VA L

After cold sweats and nausea after dizzy spells and buckled knees after being bumped the third time from flights to Praia and sobbing helplessly and publicly after we slept on the floor, resting our heads on our luggage while mothers combed and recombed their daughters’ hair and reapplied their own makeup twice we still waited for planes overbooked, cancelled, delayed from 5 a.m. to midnight sitting in the Sal airport when a woman named Julia with hair the color of eggplants shouted, “No apology not even ‘excuse me I’m sorry’ no ‘thank you for your patience.’” Julia turned to me, “Why come here?

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

40

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

You have no family here. Why come here when they’re so many places you can go?” This was my first night in Cape Verde. At 2 a.m., Julia took me to her cousin’s house in Praia. We slept by the patio where the family cleans fish. Too hot to close the door to the smell. Her daughter and I shared a mat on the floor and hid under a sheet from mosquitoes. Julia wrapped a curl of eggplant hair around an empty toilet paper roll. She stepped over our mat. A pad bulked her underpants. “I guess we’re all family tonight,” she said and set an alarm for the next stretch of our trip.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

41

AT M I D N I G H T YO U B O A R D T H E B O AT TO B R AVA

Sometimes it’s good to travel the hard way. In a cabin cramped with four bunks, a mother and son stare from their shared bed and you climb to the top bunk. In this cabin cramped with four bunks an old woman with the smell of many days enters as you climb to the top bunk. Still, all the passengers watch you.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

An old woman with the smell of many days pulls a blanket to her eyes while all the passengers watch you. Take your Dramamine, take your birth control pill, instead of pulling a blanket to your eyes, wrap your denim jacket around you. You’ve taken your Dramamine, your birth control pill and you turn your back to their eyes. Wrap the denim jacket tighter around you, curl against your knapsack with your back turned to their eyes and spoon it like a lover.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

42

THE RAINY SEASON

Every day the sky’s weight holds low, heavier than it can hold but still it holds, every day.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Today’s opaque clouds settle over yesterday’s. One gray promise layers another. The sky lingers at the ledge of wetness like untouched sand at the ocean’s breaking edge. It’ll rain today, the women say and hang damp laundry outside. Any day now, it will rain. They send their boys to water the yard. It rained once while I was on Brava The dust in the praça speckled to mud spots. People spread their palms catching the wet they’d imagined and asked, Do you feel the rain?

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

43

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

The next morning the ashen shrubs tipped their edges green and open to the muted sky and waited again for rain.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

44

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

MEETING MANO AND MÃE VINDA

I came for the place, not for Mano, the grandchild of my great-grandmother’s father. I didn’t come for him and his milky brown eyes, or for his wife, Mãe Vinda, who keeps repeating I love you too because it is almost all she knows in English and because she thinks I need to hear it. Why isn’t she happy? she asks Steve who’s come to translate. Mãe Vinda brings bananas and Fig Newtons, glasses of Tang balanced on saucers made for tea cups. I love you too, she says again in English because I am not saying anything. I cannot speak because I don’t know Criole. I cannot speak because I do not have any questions for them. I cannot speak because there was no talk of family left in the old country. Not of Mano or Mãe Vinda, or the old, old woman who wants so much to get up from her wheelchair to greet me. This woman with a face of folded skin who asks after my great-grandmother and when I say, No, when I say, She died forty years ago, the woman rocks in her wheelchair, saying, Nu ca sabé, nu ca sabé, rocking to the rhythm of another woman behind us, scrubbing wet laundry against a washboard.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

45

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

I did not come for them. Since they are here, I take photos. Mano is already a photograph of Cape Verde or a painting, rather, a portrait against the velvet green backdrop of his armchair where he pushes himself up, holding the arm and the back of the chair to sit lopsided, the only way he can make himself comfortable. Mãe Vinda gives me three round doilies she crocheted herself. We exchange addresses without knowing why. I promise to send copies of the photos, and Mãe Vinda promises to send more crocheted doilies. I love you too, and Mano nods, still searching for a comfortable position in his chair.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

46

THIS IS SOMEONE ELSE’S LIFE

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

This stone kitchen blackened by the open fire’s wooden smoke. The bright blue dining room walls. Pictures framed in painted glass— flowers and fruit bordering the faces. Outside, a tired dog. A chicken tied to something heavy. A woman smooths her turquoise apron across her lap.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

47

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

WE FOUR HARVEST MANGOES

There are no paths in that deep green place. John guides our way clearing an opening between trees with a large, bent stick. Until we make it to this side, it is all dust and rocks and dry land. Here, the ground opens up, turning itself inside out, pushing its bright green pulp high from the hard, broken rind. “Why don’t you chik-chik?” Djiny takes a picture with an imaginary camera. “Is beautiful. Chei di mangi.” We walk down the steep side of the ledge. The slope was cut into shelves supported by rocky walls so all the water rests here in the broad leaf before running back to the ocean. John looks biblical, the way he points his walking stick to clusters of mangoes marked yellow with sun. He sends Nelson up to shake them down. The boy, all lean muscle and innocence, youth still in his back and arms, climbs into the mangoes. He spreads his legs and arms in suspension and shakes the supporting branches, daring them to break, daring himself to shake harder.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

48

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

The ripe mangoes tumble to the ground their big, heavy weight thudding around us. Djiny and I scatter across the rocks and broken sticks to collect them, and it feels like Easter, the warm, heavy eggs filling the span of our palms. Each egg tinted green, yellow, and red. Each with one tiny spot sticky from where it held the tree. When our bags are full and our limbs as weighted as the trees’ and while it is still cooler than it will be, we duck under branches heavy with fruit and make our way back into the dust. Behind us, dried mango peels from illicit mango eaters feed the soil full. Everything, even the goat tied to a dried shrub and gnawing an old pit, is full of mangoes.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

49

MANGOES

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Djiny and I each ate three or four mangoes still warm from the sun in Ferrero. We stood over her kitchen sink slicing mango peels onto the counter and bit deep, the stringy flesh catching between our teeth the juicy pits slipping from our hands.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

50

I A M T W E N T Y- E I G H T TO D AY

I am twenty-eight today and rattling up the rocks of my grandfather’s jagged island home. The woman next to me on the narrow bench of the aluguer has a plastic bin of garoupa fish with scales bright as boiled lobster in the center of the flatbed.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

It’s my birthday today and a girl not yet a teenager smiles from the other side of the truck. Wind brushes her four thick braids. I am twenty-eight today and going to Nossa Senhora do Monte for lunch in a crisp, white dress. The aluguer rambles across the narrow road cut through a tunnel of rough rock. We speed along a steep overdrop, honking and spinning around a sharp bend. I hold onto the bars overhead, the strength in my arms flexing to keep me from sliding across the flatbed with the blue basin of garoupa. I am twenty-eight today and old enough to know not to wear white in this dusty place, but many birthdays ago I wanted to believe in a woman who traveled the world in a breezy white dress and with a long

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

51

thick braid down her back. The truck clatters loud past a quick flash of water deep below the quiet clustered villages. Tumbling between trees sculpted into enormous bonsai cowering from the wind, blown from this banging ride toward the shelter of the road’s cliff walls.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

I am twenty-eight, and the girl who might be eleven giggles without opening her mouth. She giggles at me clasping my knees together as we jolt and bounce up the mountain. She knows better than to wear white in this faded place, but we both smile at the daring of it.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

52

IN THE FIELD

broad bending cane sweeps its green pulse beneath late September’s sun

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

lush pride before its even fall

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

53

S A N TA M A R I A D A S D O R E S , S A L

At the pale beach’s warm edge the bluing water foams white around your ankles, then runs clear back to the ocean’s brilliant shallows back into the dark deep where it meets the sky in a panorama like every postcard you’ve wanted to send.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Someone is building hotels as fast as the pink tourists can bring their Euros. Locals paid to dress like cartoon sailors arrange lounge chairs on the private beaches. This is not the old country. Italians in tiny trunks, hair graying on their backs. The honeymoon couples. The package tour of it all. An entire vacation in one hotel with a restaurant overlooking the ocean your room overlooking the ocean every goddamned thing overlooking the ocean except the shanties four blocks behind the souvenir shops, past the nightclub, “Disco Banana.” Though you came here looking for a kind of home, the shopkeeper asks,

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

54

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Posso aiutarla in the tourists’ language. You answer, No, grazie, and look away because the tourists’ language is the language you know.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

55

T H AT L A S T N I G H T

That last night on Brava we sat on cold stone benches by the old boat statue and cut the quiet night deep with the sad sweet songs that brought me to the old country.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

On guitar and on mandolin we plucked out mornas the old Criole way. I keep that last night pressed between the pages of this book a fragile, faded evening when we sang into the open stars and to lights across the water on Fogo lacing the damp hours with longing.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

56

D E PA RT U R E

Beyond chickens and goats and furniture tied at the stern this fading vista of Brava is the same last look taken by my grandfather when he left this island. The port of Furna dims its rocky façade, then thins into the graying horizon.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

A young boy is the first to get sick. He sits on the deck above, and his vomit splatters from overhead, blown against the hull below. Then others. Passengers bend over the sides, spitting into the sea. A woman on deck sits helpless, holds her head between her bent knees and throws up between her feet. Our cabin is full. A woman lying on my bunk and the man at the table take turns vomiting into a bucket. The carpet stickies with what misses.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

57

In the hallway, a barefoot boy slips by the bathroom door, slips into a pool of vomit beside an old man asleep in the aisle and wearing a shiny suit.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

While passengers pour buckets overboard I stand for hours at the bow of the boat. Had my grandfather been sick or did he stand up front like this, leaving the stench of it downwind and letting the brusque cold air whip through his jacket as he faced ahead, his back to the sound of retching and his home, behind him.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

58

CAPE VERDE HAS BEEN SLIPPING FROM ME

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

The crisp moonscape of Espargos with one lonely tree, its bark blown smooth by windswept sand. The way on Sundays, Vila Nova Sintra is filled with girls in baby-doll dresses from America—blue chiffon, red velvet, and too much lace. Their hair wet back smooth and tied with ribbons. Patent-leather shoes shined for Mass after a week’s rest. Each morning, I slip further from Cape Verde. From the children’s makeshift parade. The leader with a dusty Fanta bottle crushed onto a broomstick. Behind her, a boy gallops on a piece of plywood, and his brother beats the bottom of a plastic bucket to march everyone into tempo. A donkey climbing uphill, a propane tank strapped to its back. The pensão with pillowcases stuffed with old rags. The twin boys in Fajã d’Água each with two thumbs growing on their left hands.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

59

Two thumbs growing from one split knuckle.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

There’s a place where right now stout-legged women balance plastic bins of goatfish on their heads and walk through the village shouting, “Come buy fish.” The customers bring money from their houses the way children meet ice cream trucks here. And in the streets of Praia another woman carries an enormous tuna on a cutting board on her head and offers to slice a piece for passersby. All this now far from me, the German anthropologist who’s had to learn that waiting is doing something. The boy whose head is growing too large for his neck to support it. Even the woman who cracked open a coconut in front of me while I held a glass beneath it to catch the milk. Now I wake each morning, the same as if I’d never gone.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

60

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

4

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

V I S TA F R O M T H E SCHOOLHOUSE STEPS Heaven is an idea. It is attainable daily. • Darrell

Bourque

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

If heaven is achievable today, it is in these two girls at the schoolhouse steps braiding and unbraiding hair. The gray cobblestone path and brown wall of rough rock before them are forgotten along with this white-washed house of emigrantes, its bright green shutters closed to a tilled stretch of dirt dotted with the even red scrawling through the branches of hibiscus trees. The two girls bend away from this, fold their bare feet beneath them. One curves her shoulders and neck over the younger girl, her small fingers smoothing and folding softness into the head in her lap.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

62

DJ I N Y D E S C R I B E S T H E F E S T I VA L OF SÃO JOÃO

The emigrantes, they come for the São João fest. Praia d’Aguada, the good boat, goes to Sal and bring the emigrantes right to Brava. When Praia d’Aguada arrive to Brava and the people, they come out the boat everyone waiting for them, the people of Brava all there and they play guitar they play mandolins, everything. All the old mornas. Everything. And the people, they cry.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

And the fest, oh! a big, big fest. All kind of food, pork, catchupa. They kill two cow and take the beef. Every kind of food—sweets, everything. And the people, they eat. A procissão—lot of people in the procissão yeah, lot of people walking and drums bap bap bap and walking through the praça very beautiful—all balloons, different color and we call fita, hanging all through the praça, yeah. And with the camera they chik-chik the emigrantes always chik with the camera. Then firecracker Boom! from Sant’Ana Boom! Nossa Senhora do Monte Boom! all the firecracker. Yes, you miss a good fest.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

63

TONIGHT

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Theirs is a red dance Quiet, hot and damp. He knows to hold each girl The way her shape holds her. His hand plays along her side Thumb against the ribcage His smallest finger on her hipbone. He lets her take the first step To see how she wants to be led. His thighs lean into the dance He steps back and guides her To the right, to the right She closes her eyes And trusts she will be moved To the right place.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

64

S E V E N H E S I TAT I O N S O F M A R I A D E S I LVA

With her earrings, lipstick and good shoes, they’ll say she’s put on airs. Without them they’ll say she’s let herself go. She hasn’t let herself go beyond the yard in months hasn’t left Sant’Ana in years. She will have to take the child with her. They will whisper

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

when she passes. Even if she leaves the child they will talk about the child. They will talk about the father. Then too, it might rain. If it doesn’t rain the road will be dusty and ruin her good shoes. If she doesn’t go, they will say she hasn’t left the yard in months or the village in years for fear of what might be said.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

65

S A R A A N D R A D E LO B O, AGE SEVEN

Sara sits next to me and tries on my sunglasses. She takes my pen and makes a pah, pah, pah sound, sucking the cap through the space where she lost her front tooth. She writes her nome completo, “Sara Andrade Lobo,” in my notebook along with her sisters’ and her brother’s and her parents’ names. She has an aunt in America, but she doesn’t know where. She can count to ten in English.

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Sara wants to know what I am writing. I tell her, “Something in English,” and she wants me to read. I will not read from my notebook but I have poetry, and I read that. She watches the words change my face hears my voice smooth around the sounds. Sara asks if I can sing, and I say, “Yes, but I am shy.” She points to another poem. She leans against me, knobby little twists of her hair against my arm, and she can feel how important the words are from my body’s rising breath, the vibration of my chest. When she feels the poem finishing and my voice settling into stillness, Sara closes the book, touches my hand and says, Basta.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

66

EACH EVENING

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Each evening she gathers the tablecloth upon itself with the grace of swimming unrolls a crocheted runner across the table and remembers her mother folding sheets upon themselves with the grace of swimming. The billows swooped between them as she and her mother folded the sheets matching the corners, bending for the new fold. Billows swooped between them the width pulled taut, they stepped together matching corners and bending for the new fold. They dipped down for the last length pulled the width taut, stepped together and drew in the last length with a final breath.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

67

JOSÉ FISHING IN FA JÃ D ÁGUA

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Five rowboats wait along the coast for morning. The bay breaks blue against the black volcanic rock. José straddles two boulders and unwinds the spooled line. He swings the bait above his head like an American cowboy launching it past the foaming tide. His forefinger rests beneath the line his thumb guides it while three curled fingers meet the heel of his hand. The sun touches the waves warm as vanilla, and José leans against the pull of the line dropping slack on the rock beside him. Now the sun lowers with the clouds like a shade closing the sea for the evening.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

68

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Many thanks to the editors of the following journals in which some of these poems previously appeared: Cape Cod Poetry Review, “The Scrimshander” Cave Canem Anthology, “The Corn Poem” Crab Orchard Review, “Return Flights” and “Atlantic Coasts” Historic Nantucket, “Harvesting a Return” and “Dreaming in Criolu” Plainsongs, “Vista from the Schoolhouse Steps” The Southwestern Review, “For Cesaria Evora Tuesday; An Art Project, “Defining the Morna” Verdad Magazine, “Gathering Mangoes” I am grateful to both Darrell Bourque and A. Van Jordan for being thoughtful and attentive first readers. I extend thanks to Ron Barboza and Traudi Coli for allowing me to peruse their person archives of photographs, books, clippings, and other artifacts of Cape Verdean culture and history. Marlene Lopes offered valuable insight as head of the Cape Verdean special collections at the James P. Adams Library at Rhode Island College. I am grateful to Cave Canem and Disquiet for generously offering fellowships to their workshops; the feedback, discussions, and wonderful communities of writers found there are incredibly illuminating. I appreciate the time and space to write at residencies granted to me by Hedgebrook and the Nantucket Historical Association. A Woodrow Wilson mmuf Travel Research Grant allowed me to go to Cape Verde. Finally, but most emphatically, I am forever grateful to John and Djiny Fernandes of Brava, who out of sheer generosity and goodness offered me a home in the village that my grandfather once called home.

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

69

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved. Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

G LO S S A RY aluguer • truck with seating in the flatbed, used as public transportation basta • “enough” boa noite • “good night” bom dia • “good morning” Brava • the smallest and most westerly island of Cape Verde where nineteenth-century American whaling ships picked up crew members catchupa • corn and bean stew chei di mangi • “full of mangoes” cuscus • cornmeal, ground and then baked Criolinha • little Criole girl Crioulo • a creole language of Portuguese basis, spoken on the islands of Cape Verde. It is the native language of virtually all Cape Verdeans Espargos • a town on Sal Fajã d’Água • a bay on Brava where American whaling boats used to anchor, with a small village at the foot of the mountains Ferrero • a town on Brava fita • ribbons or streamers Fogo • a Cape Verdean island that is an active volcano and where residents live along the volcano’s slopes; also the Portuguese word for “fire” Furna • the port of Brava garoupa •  grouper fish Jesu Christi companhi • “May Jesus Christ accompany you.” morna • traditional Cape Verdean song featuring languid minor-key melodies and lyrics that reflect desire, longing, and separation Nho Lobo • “the Lazy Wolf” or “the Clever Wolf” — a character in Cape Verdean folktales told to teach morals to children no, grazie • “no, thank you” (Italian) nome completo • full name

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

71

Copyright © 2016. Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth. All rights reserved.

Nossa Senhora do Monte • town on Brava Nu ca sabé • “I didn’t know.” pensão • boarding house Posso aiutarla • “May I help you? (Italian) praça • town square or plaza Praia • capital city of Santiago, the largest and first discovered of Cape Verde’s Islands; also the Portuguese word for “beach” Praia d’Aguada • the faster boat that makes round trips to Brava from Fogo and Praia, the nation’s capital on Santiago preta • black pretin • “little black one” procissão • procession, parade Sal • the island with the international airport and a flat, sandy terrain; also the Portuguese word for “salt” Santa Maria das Dores • seaside town on Sal that is popular with international tourists Sant’Ana • town on Brava São João • St. John the Baptist, patron saint of Brava scrimshander • one who works at scrimshaw, a handicraft practiced by sailors as a pastime during long whaling voyages; scrimshaw were artistic carvings on bone, ivory, or shells sobrinhos • nieces and nephews Vila Nova Sintra • town on Brava

Davis, Jarita. Return Flights, Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,

72