Guest post written by The House of Plain Truth author Donna Hemans
Donna Hemans is the author of two previous novels, River Woman and Tea By the Sea, which won the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. She is also the owner of DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers based in Washington, DC. Born in Jamaica, she lives in Maryland, and received her undergraduate degree in English and Media Studies from Fordham University and an MFA from American University.
About The House of Plain Truth: A novel of fractured family and the search to protect–or discard–what unites them, this story traces one older woman’s decision to uphold the wishes of those who have departed over her sisters’ objections.
The morning of my mother’s funeral a black bat flies through the door that opens to the front veranda, flutters in the light, then swoops left, its body blending with the deep mahogany color of the closed half of the double doors. It hovers near the piano, which sits in a nook immediately behind the door, alights for a moment, then lifts up and flutters its wings again.
I’m dressed already, pacing, awaiting the arrival of the handful of relatives who’ve flown to Jamaica for the pandemic-era service, as well as the driver who is coming to take us to the service. The house is quiet. Pandemic restrictions limit the number of mourners at the service to 20 so the family and friends who would have been with us are not here. Instead, I watch the bat as it weaves in the light and dips toward the piano and the wobbly stool.
When the bat—really a large moth—hovered and settled on the piano, I thought it fitting. The duppy bat—as we call it in Jamaica—is thought to embody a departed soul that isn’t yet at rest. And duppies—both the good and the bad, the ones who come when called and the ones who linger to haunt the living—are thought to roam about their familiar environment. The piano and the stool were mostly my mother’s. She played at random times, often after dark when the house was settling into a late-evening stasis, sometimes in the midafternoon when she took a break from whatever chore she’d started. When she played, the tones circled the house, drifting down the driveway to the street and to the nearest neighbors’ yards. Sometimes she sang along to the tune, practicing hymns she’d sing on the church choir.
There may be nothing to the bat’s presence, and my upbringing would have me dismiss it’s presence as mere coincidence. My family doesn’t subscribe to the superstitions about duppy bats or practice the burial traditions that Jamaican mourners sometimes use to ward off spirits. We didn’t turn my parent’s bed, didn’t mark the front door with chalk, didn’t put out pebbles for a duppy to count. And when the bat arrived, I didn’t raise an alarm, in part because I wasn’t raised to fear its presence. My mother would probably have said, “Let the bat stay. It not troubling you.”
Just in case, on the morning of my mother’s funeral, I didn’t guide the moth back toward the door and the light. I let it settle as it desired on the edge of the piano, away from the light, in the corner with the piano that provided a balm for my mother.
***
When my father tells the story of how he and my mother met, a piano is a part of it. They’d met when he, a young man from Anchovy in the western parish of St. James was working in Clarendon parish on the southern end of the island, some 90 miles from home. At the time, my mother was a newly minted teacher who had returned to Woodhall from teachers college in Kingston to teach at a primary school she’d previously attended. Weekdays she stayed with her two aunts on the family compound and weekends she returned to Kingston where her father lived.
The afternoon they met, my father sat near the side of the road reading. My mother was walking with a mutual acquaintance, who called my father to come meet her friend. But my father didn’t go immediately. First, he trudged back up to the house to swap his shorts for long pants. Only then was he ready to meet the woman he would later marry. After that first meeting, my father visited my mother at the Woodhall school, stopping in the morning on his way to work at one of the nearby forest properties or trying to catch her in the afternoons at the end of the school day. My mother, who learned to play the piano as a child growing up in Woodhall, often arrived to work early or stayed late to play the piano or the organ. When my father caught up to her, he’d find her by the piano with the sound of music floating up around her.
***
Music was a gift my mother tried to give her children. I rejected it. She wanted the same love of music to ooze from us, the piano to spark the same joy. For me, it didn’t.
The melodica was among one of my mother’s first musical gifts to us. There were two of the handheld keyboards, both a light olive color, and I think of them as gifts for my older sister and me. My younger sister was still too young to play music when my mother brought the melodicas home. My lasting memory is cleaning the mouthpiece and tube, not the music we played, not my mother guiding our fingers over the keys.
Sometime after we moved to our house in Brown’s Town, we got the piano. It feels like it has always been with us, another sibling whom I was forced to tolerate and play with, the thing that haunted me the way a spirit would. My mother taught us the basics, guiding us through the beginner piano books and later buying us each our own copy of Smallwood’s Piano Tutor. Despite the lessons, the only song I managed to play, neither passionately nor rhythmically, was “Home,” and even now it lives in my head, and so does my mother’s voice asking, “Did you practice the piano today?”
“No, Mom.”
“Go and practice.”
I trudged to the piano, my slippers making soft swooshes on the tile, pulled the little stool, and opened the music book to pick out the notes to “Home.” I played just long enough to satisfy my mother’s wish that I practice and improve. It seems as if I played that song for years, until my mother said, “All right, it’s time to play something else.” I flipped the pages and landed on another song that appeared easy to play. Neither of these were songs I knew or would sing elsewhere, and whether I played them well or not, didn’t matter much to me.
A lifelong lover of music, my mother didn’t understand my lack of interest in the piano or music generally. I couldn’t articulate it either. Perhaps trying to get a handle on it, once, my mother asked, “If you don’t want to play the piano, what do you want to play?”
Boldly, confidently, I said, “the violin.” I was about eight years old and certain picking an instrument like the violin would have been the end. Surely, who would teach me to play the violin?
“Okay,” she said. She went upstairs to her dressing room and took the violin case and a book from a shelf. “There,” she said. “Play.”
I had miscalculated. So eager was I to do as my mother was fond of saying and “work my brain on her,” that I’d forgotten she had a violin and guitar stashed away. I don’t imagine my mother truly expected me to play an instrument I had never touched. But I think she wanted to remind me that she could not be easily fooled, that she saw through my ploy to get away from playing the piano. The violin sat for weeks on the daybed, reminding me of my failure, making a mockery of my attempt to outsmart my mother and shed her gift.
Still determined that I learn to play, my mother registered me for my first tutored piano lessons in seventh grade—the first year of high school for Jamaican students. Friday afternoons, I sat on a veranda of a little cottage tucked away behind a dormitory and the larger of the two dining rooms. To make the lessons, I missed Spanish class. That turned out to be my last stand against piano lessons. When I complained about missing Spanish classes, my mother dropped the piano lessons and I dropped piano for good.
***
Days after the bat appears, I return to the piano to look for where it settled, whether its dried wings remained in that corner, perhaps on the floor or on the hymnals and music books atop the piano. But it isn’t there and there are no severed wings. Perhaps it had flown again out of the house immediately after it flew in.
Despite what I had been taught had long been taught to believe was mere coincidence, in that moment I chose to see a spiritual connection in the bat’s presence. Except, I didn’t fear the bat. If it was indeed my mother’s spirit, she didn’t come to harm me. There was no reason not to let her be. She had simply returned to her familiar place. Had I welcomed her gift of music all those decades earlier, I could have returned the gift to her on that October morning, one note at a time.
