Squirrels or Monkeys

The squirrels are worse than the monkeys. I’ve been watching them wreak havoc in the neighborhood all morning, scurrying up and down the trees, tempting fate with those attempted street crossings, getting my dog all riled up, chipping at each other across the treetops.

Photo by Leslie Saunders on Unsplash

The monkeys would look us in our faces and steal the mangoes off the ground, take a bite and run so we’d get up early to collect them before they arrived. They were only wary when Didier was in the garden because it was clear to them that he was a man and that I was a mother. Unlike with squirrels and other animals (except, of course, for those in New York City parks who are cutthroat), the monkeys would not budge when I advanced towards them, trying to shoo them away, trying to exert my dominance.

Nah, they’d shrug, and look me straight in my eyes, deep into my knowing, into our knowing, grab a mango and run. Sometimes they’d come to the window when they heard the baby crying. Sometimes they’d walk the perimeter daring me to come outside and see what’s up.

The squirrels are everywhere all the time, and the monkeys would come in waves. I knew the morning had come when I heard their footsteps on the rooftop.

I think about them some mornings when I wonder what is coming next. Didier had begun his stage in Barbados, months before we’d arrived, and had chosen the house because of its close proximity to the hotel where he’d be cooking. As it was so close to the tourist areas of the west coast of the island, monkeys traveled in families searching for easy food and attention and often wandered through our garden on the way to richer opportunities.

It had seemed an adventure at the time, one for which we were certainly wildly unprepared, but one that felt our only option as the Plaza Hotel, where he’d been Executive Chef on its reopening, was restructuring and we found ourselves with nowhere to go. My endless worry there were the ‘what if’s.’ What if we needed to get off the island? What if there was a storm? What if we needed medical attention?

We’d considered staying in New York and trying our luck with a new restaurant group, but I think we were both burned out. We had two children under three and were hopeful that this might be a path to rediscovery. We would become someone else as a family of four living abroad in a place neither of us had previously been. That we were both ready for adventure was the promise. That we’d both find we were something else entirely at the end when we got back to the squirrels and left the monkeys.

I’d told everyone I was afraid. Of the monkeys, of being a mother of two, of being alone where I knew no one. I am afraid now. Back home in the suburbs, where everything looks as it always has in my memories. We are in the familiar unfamiliar. Like in many communities across this country, friends and neighbors have come out to protect those most vulnerable, the targeted, the racially profiled, the Black, brown, queer, undocumented, documented, anyone in the limitations of the eyes of these beholders deemed worth-less, uncontrollable, hopeful.

I remember the childhood walks on these sidewalks.

I cannot stop thinking about the people disappeared and killed on the street in the name of this lawless law and order. I cannot stop thinking of my grandmother driving unlicensed to pick up my father walking the backroads of Virginia. I can’t stop thinking about the familiar unfamiliar and the wild and daring to be more afraid in that space where I was seen and regarded in esteem, where the monkeys were unusual, but the people were kind and respectful.

I wrote a blog then called City Mom in the Jungle and a former classmate and Sunday school student adored my ‘fish out of water’ tales. I’d lived ten years in New York City before we moved to the island and reading about this city girl, dressed in black, sweating it out in the tropics, learning island etiquette, and dealing with the monkeys and mongoose and lizards and turtles was a hoot.

He’d failed to recognize that I’d always felt like an outsider, having lived my childhood in a white suburb, having had my identity denied or ignored or worse, written as some kind of ‘other Black’ because my community knew so little about Black people and I was hardly representative of all of us (as no one can be), as so many of my former classmates and friends had expected, that he thought I was one of his.

When I returned to the States and reentered suburban life, he’d send videos of monkeys in other countries pretending to provoke me cheekily, and I’d play along. In other posts, he’d begin to reprimand me on my own Facebook page about the experiences of Black Americans or worse, write racist, dog whistle posts and arguments on his own. Former classmates would chime in with their limited perspectives, none of them Black, brown, queer, or anyone else othered in the society, and their vitriol could be felt through the screen. It wasn’t that I didn’t know this deep in my bones, but to see it in print, argued in real time after a laugh (about monkeys), after my tears and my hurt and my rage and my fatigue, forced me to reassess the spaces I’d walked and navigated, the spaces in which I’d never felt truly welcomed or at ease.

It’s absolutely freezing where I am right now, making each walk with my dog Ivan a cuss-laced tiptoe over icy patches and still shudders from the wind. The squirrels seem to have multiplied, and they stress me out. I suppose I should not have assumed they’d be hibernating with everything else. I am often triggered by their sudden movements and the sound of their claws on the bark of the trees as they chase one another up and down the branches.

With the monkeys my fear was of being alone, feeling unprotected, of being judged, at their gaze. But they were also curious about me and their eyes asked questions. And we wanted to know each other somehow. Every day is harder than the next these days. If they are not like this for you, I wonder…

When the sun shone on my face each morning in Barbados, I’d listen for the rustling in the trees. The island was the closest to paradise I’d known and yet I was terrified of embracing it, of exhaling into the peace even the wandering monkeys tried to offer. I miss peace.