 So this is part of a longer thing, and thank you for listening to it. I grew up near the river. In June 2005, a little boy went to the edge and stuck his legs in. The next morning, his body was found, pounced the ankles, a piece of spit bamboo, pushed up to his rectum to his lips. I don't know his name, I don't remember the date, and I can't find the article. I only remember the police and the ambulance blocking the view from my house. At this point in my life, I was listening to my friend Dee talk about how he liked to put the edge of the garden who was in his ass and I did fill up. Sometimes I would watch him do this, and I knew from watching him that the water would build to a pressure and then burst slowly, a trickle of white froth against brown skin. The woman who raised me was named Gloria. She was my second babysitter. My first babysitter died from a thunderstorm and said my mother pneumonia when I was two. Gloria came into my life after her retirement, sweeping one square foot of floor in front of the television for eight hours, watching the bold and beautiful while I waited for my mother to come home from work and later my father. Gloria had no eyebrows. A remainder, she said, from when she was in high school and shaved them off on a bed. Gloria and I read the same books. Sweet Valley High, Nancy Drew, Enid Blyton. Gloria was in and out of court when I was growing up. Her son, Shabin Red, a mud-colored boy with red hair, was being tried for gang rape for a long time, eventually going to prison. We would read next to each other in my father's study, a room which was supposed to be an office but eventually became the room where he slept without my mother for most of my life. He, Gloria's son and I read to each other. He was maybe 16. I was maybe six. I was very bright. I don't remember much of him either except that he had sad eyes and he was very good at mind sweeper. I grew up near the madhouse. In Trinidad there was a single mental hospital and people once dropped there would roam the streets and cloud the front gates. The church was up the street from my house, past the madhouse and next to the river. My mother told me and anyone who ever had any sense at all that those people were the ones who had a light on them. They would never go uphill, only downhill, in circles and I was safe as long as I didn't go towards them. Didn't go past the turn in the road, never went onto the main road. When I was 12, a woman was crushed by a passing truck in front of the madhouse. I creamed my neck and I saw her skull. I stuck my butt head back into the car and we went home. I think I must have thought that if I stayed away from life everything would be fine. I used to go to the river sometimes to walk when I was younger and tired of church. I got kicked out of first communion class for singing rudely. I wish I remember what I had sung. I would go for a walk up the hill and down near the river. The last time I went to the river, the very last time, I was sitting on the rocks writing and a man came over and sat next to me. He followed me home, but I ran. Later there was a security guard paid for by the neighborhood association and I walked next to the river talking to a friend, a male friend with skinny twisted hips that I didn't know I was in love with at the time. I screamed loudly on the phone at this place where this boy had just died when I saw men going into the river through bamboo with bags and bags. I screamed, I was joking, I was telling him that I was brave over the phone. Minutes later a truck came down the hill, a young man with a pointed beard and worried eyes. Are you okay? he said and I kept walking, nodded, said I was fine and giggled. Two weeks later that guard was robbed. I think now I couldn't possibly have been that lucky. I keep missing disaster. My best friend in the blue house across the street from mine lives with her family in the middle of the night. Her father is alone in the house in the morning. Hi uncle, I say as he passes down the road. There are whispers that he beat them. I'm not supposed to know. When I am 16, my friend Stampton, my only gay friend, one of my only friend who remains still my friend, asked me if I had ever been robbed, hurt, beaten, held at gunpoint. I said no and he said, well I guess that's what happened if you never go outside, if you're a white girl like you. My mother planted bay leaves at the entrance of our house, black sage, a tree for each child, a cycling wall of compost and prayers, a menstrual blood thrown into the leaves. Our house had flimsy locks. My father kept a machete next to his bed, showed us where the hammer was. The world was held at a fine balance. Every time I would misbehave, I would get a small warning but otherwise fine. Don't go to church, you might be that boy. Miss a class, you might get pregnant. Get a bee, you'll have to stay here. A few weeks ago, a young woman named Shannon Banfield was murdered in Trindad. In the picture that is being circulated, she wears a white dress and holds her hands clasped in front of her. She is light brown skinned, she has very well formed curls. She works at a jewelry store and she lived with her parents. She was in her late 20s. Her parents dropped her to work in the morning and picked her up in the evening. One day, I imagine, she said don't worry, I'll just take a taxi home. She didn't come home. The next day, her body was found in the jewelry warehouse in pieces. It is partly that her death was so improbable that it is being remarked on. She did everything correct. She's a light skinned, middle class woman with no boyfriend, kidnapped and killed in broad daylight, wearing her work uniform to go and buy soap. I read this, scrolling through my Facebook feed in San Francisco, feeling resignation, horror, sadness, gratitude and guilt. Guilt. I was 16. Stanton never went outside. He said when he went outside, he'd spend $300 he didn't have and he'd burn in the sun and the fucking maxi taxis would be slow and he'd have to push to get in and someone would scream wham faggot and push him out the bus. We used to lie in his bed and talk about Ut. He would download whole books on BitTorrent. Ut. his criticism and history and index on post-colonial writing. He said that our friend D was a coolly who would never leave Trinidad. Ten years later, Stanton and I are away and Jamir comes to visit me at my grandmother's house over Christmas. She has lights around a poinsettia bush and he comes over and she looks through the window. Mind you, she's blind. And she says, who is this? You have a boyfriend and I say no and love. And she loves. And she says, there's rum and ice in the cupboard. D is now a teacher at Digomont in junior secondary school. We went to schools across from each other and childhood. The convent and the college separated by one street. There was a rumor that everyone believed that the two schools, the boys' school and the girls' school were connected by a tunnel underneath the chapels and that tunnel was closed when some girl got pregnant but you could still go find it by rummaging around the altar underneath the crypt. In 1836, St. Joseph's convent was founded as a school for white girls for an emerging merchant class post-emancipation. White girls, as they're called today, include Chinese immigrants, Syrians, maybe light-skinned blacks, half-scots, anyone who was trying to escape one thing for a small island but wasn't quite black. There are few truly white people, as they are known here. It wasn't to me any of those until I got to the U.S. In junior secondary school were places where we, the boys and girls of the convent and the monastery, never went near and never knew anyone from. These were the children who had performed the worst on the examinations, who we were told were stupid. They existed on a shift system. A group and B group. A group came for four hours in the morning, B group for four hours in the afternoon. The other four hours were for vocational development or work study, but that was purely up to the students and their families to coordinate. D was working at a school like this, a shift school, and he told me that it was the first time in his life that he was only himself. He wasn't the darkest one in the white boy's school or Muslim one. Yes, he was the son of a father with many other children growing up in a compound. He was a sibling of many people who hadn't seen a map of the Caribbean, not even the U.S. or England. Yes, all of these things, but not special or an anomaly because of it, just himself. Twelve years later, that is, this year, he has been denied a visa to Canada. He had been saving up to study music since we all first went away. And even with all of the money requirements met, the degree program, a Canadian sister, a steady job, he has denied three times. No link to the country, the immigration office says. I am still scared of immigration. I'm frightened all the time. I have to go to Trinidad in a week to get my passport renewed and I'm terrified. I have never crossed the border to Mexico, even though most of the year I live in San Diego. But the first time I went to get a student visa, I have to remember that the U.S. ambassador came out of the office himself to congratulate me because I was going to his alma mater. And he expedited my visas and he invited my family to apply for ten-year tourist visas, even my baby siblings, so they could visit me at graduation. My family didn't actually visit me, but I'll explain that too. I want to tell Dee that I'm sorry, but we both know it's passed that. It's passed me feeling any sort of guilt, it just is. When we were younger, he would say, all you girls only like white boys, no one likes me. And I was disgusted by his self-pity, but I would always say, I don't like them, and he would say, of course not you. And then I'd get huffy about that too. I felt guilty for most of my life about having things. Demir tells me his girlfriend has just broken up with him. Like me, like others, is a light-skinned mixed girl from a family of educators. And she broke up with him in order to attend a PhD program. I'm not a person who is breaking any odds. I'm not writing this because I'm special. I'm just representative. My mother is the lightest of her siblings. My father is the lightest of his. My father one day showed me proudly the drawn-out family tree and pencil. My grandfather bearing the title of Free Mulatto, a little boy with no name found on the steps of a church in Bridgetown, Barbados. The name, a God, the name of his master's family. After emancipation, he took his apprenticeship under a shoemaker, came to Trinidad from Barbados, had a son who was a civil servant, a postman, who had a son who was a professor, my father, who had me. And you, my father says, you're not a son at all. I know I cannot possibly live up to what is being asked of me. And still, most of the time, I'm glad I am even being asked. Thank you.