Guadeloupe: An Uneasy Relationship With Paradise
By Aina Hunter

When my mother takes me to a restaurant, I hesitate at the table before sitting; and after sitting, I hesitate before opening the menu. I know something the maitre d’ does not: no matter where we are seated, the seating will be unacceptable. If by the window, my mother will ask if I don’t feel the “terrible draft.”  I don’t, but it doesn’t matter. The host or hostess is summoned, and we move. If seated along the wall, she will wonder aloud why we are “cramped up in the dark like this.” If there is some suggestion that we dine within fifteen feet of the kitchen or bathroom, I stop between tables, watching her back stiffen from a safe distance.

At times like these, the heat radiating from her brown skin is a byproduct of blood churning into molten lava, or cottonmouth venom, or black widow spit—you get the idea. The point is she often suspects that the undesirable table or slow service is due not to her own unusually high standards, or a server having a bad day, but the R word. She’d never say it; she doesn’t have to.

One afternoon in a trendy San Francisco oyster bar, a skinny young waiter slurred his words and shrugged when mom asked him a question about the lunch menu.

“Well I’m not really the Answer Man, but I can find out if you want.” His glazed eyes could barely focus.

“You do that.” Her sharpness startled him, temporarily, into full consciousness. “Not the Answer Man,” she muttered as he scurried off. “Who does he think he is?”

“He was born in the eighties. He was raised on Cosby Show reruns. He’s a hipster; they talk like that!”  I was beating back a dark cloud I could barely see.

When my mother was thirteen, Lillian, her witty and gregarious grandmother, decided to take her eldest granddaughter on a train ride from Washington D.C. to South Carolina. They shared a car with chatty people, and the conversation was lively.

They soon crossed the Mason-Dixon line, and the train stopped at a restaurant. Lillian took her granddaughter by the hand and disembarked with the others, my mother eager to continue the adventure over dinner on the restaurant patio. They lingered over the menu, but no server appeared.

Lillian was unsuccessful in her attempts to flag down a waitress, and mom’s stomach growled as plates of food sailed by. After what must have seemed an interminable period, it dawned on my mother why they weren’t being served. (“Dawned” isn’t quite the best word to use in this case because mom once described it as the feeling you get when, after coming in from the sunshine, your eyes become accustomed to the dark.) A waitress finally leaned over and said, “Now you know we can’t serve you people here. Now go around to the side window and get what you want to go.” 

My mother, humiliated, wanted to disappear, but Lillian, stone-faced, said they weren’t going anywhere. They sat at the empty restaurant table until it was time to board the train again. Now everyone on the train, the people they’d had so much fun with, seemed different to my mother. Distant and foreign—as though they were now separated by an invisible pane of glass.

She might deny that the waitresses’ snub left an indeligible impression on her psyche, but I know it’s true, at least in the cumulative sense. Segregation was cruel—even to bright, pretty girls, protected by accomplished middle-class families and the hefty sense of privilege that came with.

Until very recently mom’s restaurant quirk annoyed me, in part because of the leakage, the spillover. I have enough anger (some earned and rational, some arbitrary and free-floating) of my own, so I tell myself that her past is not mine when I feel myself thinking the worst of a remark, a look, a bad table.

I’ve just returned from a much-needed summer escape to Guadeloupe. For two months I had a tiny cottage on a paradise called Sainte-Anne. About three minutes from a white-sand beach filled with middle and working class, mostly black “Gwada” locals (all citizens of the French West Indies are legally French nationals, however). Teens, families, and kids recently freed from school were eating coconut ice cream and baguette sandwiches while splashing in the surf. About twenty minutes by foot squatted a popular European resort chain we’ll call Club Sea, located on a much quieter, more pristine piece of real estate.

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