Until I forced open my eyes, I had been carried though life dazed by the inherited well-established expectations of me, a son. As if these expectations were rays of light hitting the ocean, they broke into myriad colours, hypnotic and in a straight line from wave-ground seashells to horizon.
Untaught to Imagine
Leaving the path before me was something my brain was no longer set up to imagine. I pulled up my socks and put on epaulettes; went to school; attended classes; stood and said “Good morning, sir” or “ma’am” when teachers entered the room; tried to prove that sin squared theta plus some other thing I hadn’t heard about prior, nor since, was equal to one; sat silent in detention a few times for my smart mouth; did exams, failed many of the Mathematics ones, but excelled at Biology and Literature; graduated from epaulettes to a noose called a necktie, and completed A-level education, finally emerging with no useful talent, but a knowledge of how to “look professional” and project confidence in an interview so I could be chosen over others for a job you’re usually then trained to do.
My first Job at a Dairy
I remember the experience in slides:
Slide one: I push the door and am before a panel of five people. In retrospect, I think they’d done this out of boredom, with the purpose of intimidating applicants.
Slide two: I am a Laboratory Technician, which sounds fancy, and I get to wear a white lab coat and hard hat. You would think they are angel wings and a halo, respectively, the way the factory staff doing the packaging outside the glass-box-laboratory treats us. However, my only responsibility for the first month is sticking a pH meter in individual cartons of fruit juice and taste testing them to okay a new tank used in their pasteurisation. Cast as the miller’s daughter, my work life is a modern interpretation of Rumplestiltskin.
Soon I’d be calculating, several times a day, the amount of water that fruit juice concentrates required to ready them for packaging, but, oddly, I have no memory of attempting to drop myself into one of the tanks while its blades chopped at, in order to agitate the juice inside. It was my first job, though, lasted only one year (a tendency you’ll notice) and immediately preceded my leaving to do a first degree in Brazil, which I call ‘The Debaucherous Years’.
It doesn’t take a year to experience work environment toxicity, however. Perhaps, receiving a cheque, so, able to buy rum at nightclubs from Thursday to Sunday, made me think I could do as I pleased with my own body. Who tell me to start to grow dreadlocks?
Slide 3: I’m no longer considered “presentable” by black people who cut off all their hair or use chemicals you should not use if you’re pregnant to straighten it. I am scheduled to work solely nights, but prefer it because I won’t have to interact with disgruntled customers returning milk or heavy cream that has gone bad before its expiration date promised it wouldn’t.
Slide 4: One night, an unusually large number of gallons of water I’d calculated to be added to a juice concentrate didn’t set off red flags with the experienced (pressed for time) foreman. The sample upon which the calculation was based—a sample brought to me by the foreman—hadn’t been allowed to agitate enough and I should have taken another sample. I was told this by one of these men descended from the slave owners who still seem to own everything in Barbados. A warning letter was placed on my file because that would go back in time and prevent the shipment arriving late to an airline.
Slide 5: On a different occasion, it was when I asked someone for clarification about something that their reaction was explosive. I then began to comfort myself with thoughts of quitting this place because I had applied for a scholarship that would take me overseas. The person asked if I thought that because my father was so-and-so I could speak to him however he thought I’d spoken to him. My father was a public figure at this time and so people made all kinds of assumptions about who I was, not knowing that my relationship with him had long been one of civilities, of “Good night” and “Good morning” or of him returning home after I’d gone to bed and leaving before I got up.
This workmate had overreacted and made it personal, but the department head was also his good friend, so he talked to me as if he intended to do something about it, although I had no interest in pursuing the matter.
Slide 6: I couldn’t wait to leave foolish people like them behind and ran to the plane on the day I left the island for São Paulo.
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