Priscilla

3. Nelson’s Mysterious Request-1

CHAPTER 3

Nelson’s Mysterious Request

June 5 – July 21, 1980

Trinidad-Tobago

Priscilla squinted into the lens of her camera, careful to keep the brilliant West Indian sun at her back. Beautiful shot, she told herself. Again and again she snapped the graceful boat, the turquoise sea and the frolicking people—wanting to save the images of this perfect morning on this perfect island for posterity.

Life, she reflected, was good. She could hardly believe that she had finished two years at FAMU. Two good years. She liked teaching, and she liked her school. But she asked herself: Do I love it?

Priscilla sighed. Maybe so, maybe not. She was not used to feeling ambivalent like this. She was an absolute kind of girl. Her father’s daughter. Nelson had always been most definite about everything.

But Priscilla had made the right decision when she had volunteered to accompany six graduate students from the Department of Political Science to the University of the West Indies in Trinidad-Tobago, where she was spending the greater part of her summer. During leisure time, like this morning, she often ventured off on her own. She and some avid amateur deep-sea divers had arrived at the docks off the Gulf of Parnia where they had waded in the water and were waiting for their signal to embark.

Priscilla clicked her camera again. Then, when one of the divers introduced himself and offered to take her picture, she smiled at this young man who said he was Roshan Patel.

He was good-looking: small, almost delicate of frame. He told her that he was a graduate student majoring in engineering in Toronto and was home in Trinidad-Tobago for the summer. She was surprised to learn that many East Indians resided in Trinidad-Tobago. There was time for her to note that she liked the affable way he had about him. But her mind was on the boat ride and diving.

Someone yelled out, “They’re calling us to come aboard.” The amateur divers, including Priscilla, all ran toward the boat in glee. They were jubilant during the short ride over to the reefs. As soon as the captain gave the order for his men to drop anchor, Priscilla leapt into the sea with Roshan and the others.

This was not her first dive. Shortly after she first arrived at Port of Spain, she had discovered she had more of a taste for the adventure on outings that require heavy diving gear than for the sedate little trips on the glass-bottom boats that so many tourists preferred. But what had lured her into her first dive had been the sight of lightly-clad locals cavorting onboard an old weathered vessel. She had also observed that none of the divers onboard that particular vessel wore the heavy diving gear. And so she had chosen that boat. When she went on board to have a closer look she had been delighted at how friendly the men were to her. So she had joined their tour and absolutely loved it. She supposed, looking back on that first dive, that she had been especially drawn to how free they seemed to be. She had liked that the men wore shorts and the women rolled up their shorts and pants and took off their tops, exposing their bras or bikini tops, and so she had done the same. She had long remembered the feel of the sun on her bare skin. She had not, she remembered assuring herself, come all the way to Trinidad-Tobago to behave as if she were in a nunnery of sorts.

Four weeks later, after she had returned to her home in Tallahassee, Priscilla sat at her desk at FAMU and looked at the letter she had drafted to Dean Newsome to “request a leave of absence to acquire some teaching experience at the University of the West Indies’ Trinidad campus.” Should she send this or not?

As she contemplated what to do with the letter, her mind drifted back to those happy times when she had not been on duty with her students. She particularly remembered the morning that she had met Roshan: how she had removed her T-shirt, rolled up her safari shorts and jumped aboard that diving boat.

Once the boat was out a distance, she, along with the other divers, had leaped into the magnificent, inviting water. Sitting motionless at her desk in Tucker Hall, chills ran across her body as she remembered how she had grabbed hold of the ankles of one of the experienced divers and glided through the depths of the Caribbean Sea. The locals had told her later that they had all learned to dive in exactly that way, by simply hanging onto the ankles of a veteran diver.

From that memory, Priscilla had gone on to another that was more personal, and dearer to her. She remembered the night she and Roshan had strolled along the beach, embraced and then fallen down on the wet sand and tumbled about …

“Well,” she had written in her journal the next morning: “we did it.”

But Priscilla sighed and put the draft of the letter away. That particular passionate trip down memory lane did not leave her any closer to a decision on whether to request the leave of absence from FAMU.

Still later in the summer, back from a quick trip home to Prendergast before the fall semester was to begin, Priscilla was enthusiastic as she told her father about the wonders of her time in the Caribbean. Her mother was visiting one of her older daughters, so on this particular evening it was just Priscilla and her father looking at her photographs of the beautiful coral reefs, the variety of marine life and some of the local divers.

Priscilla pointed to one of her favorites. “Just look at the multicolored and oddly shaped fishes and the creepy, crawling eels! They reminded me of snakes the way they slithered about.”

“My girl is still afraid of snakes, I see.” Nelson smiled. “But I never knew you were so adventurous. My goodness, Priscilla, where’d you get the nerve for such activity?”

Priscilla was too caught up in telling her story to answer his question. “I really liked seeing the octopuses. Or is that octopi? Whatever! They don’t mingle much with the other creatures. They just hang around the bottom of the ocean and come to the surface only when necessary.” Animated, she attempted to demonstrate their sucker-clad arms as they swirled about the depths of the ocean. “Unlike all the other creatures, only the octopuses have those long extensions, which they use to snare their prey.”

Nelson seemed amused at his daughter’s carefree taste for adventure. “Girl, when did you learn to swim well enough to go into such deep waters?”

“Oh, Daddy, you don’t need to be a good swimmer to venture into salt water. You mostly float around anyway. And man alive, did I have fun!”

It was left to her mother, during a long-distance phone call, to ask the question Nelson had not raised. As she listened to Priscilla telling her about taking off her blouse and swimming in her b*a, her mother seemed shocked. “You went into the ocean and took pictures in your b*a? What were you thinking? And all those men hanging around you?”

“Oh, Momma!” Priscilla rolled her eyes. “That’s just the way life is there.”

Back home in Tallahassee, during the final week of that languorous Caribbean summer, Priscilla stepped onto the veranda off her bedroom. She basked in the glow of sunlight. For once, she hardly noticed the heavy heat and dense humidity.

Rapt, she considered how well she had adjusted to the drastic change in climate and her new lifestyle. Just last week, she had finally bowed to the inevitable and instructed her hair stylist to cut off her long curls and give her a short Afro. She ran her fingers through her hair and felt so free. Not for her—not anymore—the careful permanents to tame her hair into something it had never been intended to be. No more would her locks be tormented by the humidity. Her hair was au naturel, and she loved it!

Priscilla stepped to the railing of her veranda and shouted: “Who would’ve thought I’d make it this far, that I’d make it on my own? Surely the gods countenanced all this. Thank you, thank you and thank you.”

She did not care whether anyone within hearing range might call her mad. She was so happy, and that was all that mattered. But Priscilla was a realist, and she knew she was not risking so much with her theatrics. It was midday, so most of her neighbors were at work.

She laughed out loud in sheer joy.

And then she heard the telephone ring in her bedroom. Wrong number. She was not expecting any calls. Who could that be?

She walked back inside to the nightstand and picked up the receiver. Unprepared for the call, she hesitated for a few seconds, and then asked, “Hello?”

“Priscilla, this is your father.”

She grinned at the familiar, and so pleasant, carefully modulated tone. As if Arthur Ashe, her favorite tennis player, had scored a difficult point, Priscilla yelled out gleefully. “Wow, Daddy, is that you? What a heck of a surprise! Are you trying to give me a heart attack in the middle of the day, or what? Is everything all right? My goodness, I’m ranting. What’s going on? Why’re you calling at this odd time?”

For her whole adult life, Nelson had been unsuccessful in persuading her to address him as “Father” or “Reverend.” “‘You’re a young woman now,’” he had told her on her twenty-first birthday. “Calling me ‘Daddy’ is a little inappropriate, don’t you think? Call me ‘Father’ or ‘Reverend.’” But Priscilla never heeded her father’s advice. The Reverend James Nelson Austin was her “Daddy.” Eventually, even he came to accept her habit.

He cleared his throat. “Well, uh, you know, I thought I was better prepared than this. Give me a moment, will you, Priscilla?” Then, quickly, he seemed to revert to small talk. “How’re you doing? Things going okay for you at the university?”

As she listened to her father struggling to the point of his call, Priscilla had a picture-perfect image of exactly how he looked at this moment. Nelson stood slightly less than six feet in height, was of average weight and was light brown in complexion. His close-cut hair receded from his forehead. He cultivated an impressive moustache, which he trimmed and tweaked with pride each morning. Since he was always in the best of health and appearance, most people who saw him assumed he was in his mid-to-late fifties. But he was nearly seventy years old.

Still excited by the sound of her father’s voice, Priscilla said in rapid succession, “Yeah, yeah, my job’s going fine, just fine. I’ve been working on what I still have to do with that dissertation, and that’s coming along. And classes start next week.” She considered, and then instantly rejected, mentioning the possibility of sending in that application to teach this winter in the West Indies. Her “Daddy” might not approve. She laughed out loud. “Say, Daddy, you still wearing those Groucho Marx knockoffs? Or did you finally breakdown and buy some new ones?”

There was a pause. “What’s that? Oh, I see, you’re making fun of my glasses again. No, I still wear the same ones.” Another pause.

Priscilla frowned. It was not like her Daddy to have difficulty with words.

“Look,” he finally said. “Priscilla … I realize this call is a little out of the ordinary. But I need to discuss something very important with you.”

By then Priscilla had paced to the living room and plopped down on her sofa. She dropped her legs over one of its arms and hunched over the phone. “Okay, Daddy,” she said, “I’m listening.” She knew how proud her father was, and how rare that he was, in essence asking for her support. But it was not exactly in her nature to be cognizant of the feelings of her father, or anyone else, for that matter. But she was flattered that it seemed he had turned to her for something that was “very important” to him.

“Take your time, Daddy.”

Nelson continued. “I went to the doctor the other day and found out I have ‘a touch of sugar.’ Now, don’t go getting alarmed or anything. It’s only a ‘touch of sugar.’”