January 10, 2018 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
Kamil Ali
Forced into marriage due to pregnancy in her early teens, Daisy-Mae bided her time on the farm with a husband she had identified as the father of her child.
She’d picked him from a lineup of several neighborhood boys with whom she’d frolicked in the loft of her daddy’s barn. His docile personality suited her ambitions.
A burning desire to seek fame and fortune tore her away from her family a few months after her son celebrated his second
The vultures of Tinseltown descended upon the naïve country-girl and fed off her sac of dollars until they depleted it. She sold her expensive ‘dress-for-success’ clothes for less than 10% of their value to stave off hunger. Unable to pay her rent, Daisy-Mae filled her pillowcase with the few pieces of clothing she had left and picked an empty spot on the street to call home. She chose to join those whose dreams had died before hers and learn their skills for survival.
Polly Anders, a tough girl with street-smarts, took Daisy-Mae under her wings and protected her from the perils of street-living. Together the two girls developed a clientele of steady customers. They pooled their money and returned to apartment living.
Under the assumed name, Deria Main, Daisy-Mae and Polly Anders hung around hotels and became escorts for wealthy businessmen. She and Polly attended lavish parties together and separately, depending on clients’ wishes. They moved up to an apartment in a high-end neighborhood. The friends enjoyed travels in private jets and yachts to exotic destinations.
Ambition reared its ugly head once more, when Daisy-Mae wanted it all for herself. She kept her ears and eyes open, looking for opportunities to get rid of Polly, who treated her like a sister.
On a trip together to the Caribbean on a client's yacht, Daisy-Mae obtained and slipped pufferfish-poison into Polly's meal, causing her to fall into a coma. The client panicked. Daisy-Mae eased his worries when she convinced him that Polly had no other contacts but her. No one would miss her.
Numb from shock, he followed Daisy-Mae’s instructions to dump Polly into the middle of the ocean, brain-dead but still alive.
Polly’s reprimanding eyes haunted Daisy-Mae during her waking hours and plagued her sleep with horrible nightmares. She had to rid herself of Polly’s presence.
Upon her return home, Daisy-Mae sold her victims' belongings and informed Polly’s clients that she had retired from the escort service after getting married. She said that Polly had asked her to continue her service to them on her behalf. A few asked why Polly had not contacted them personally with the news. She said that Polly had made a clean break for the sake of her marriage.
When Daisy-Mae settled into her new life, she gathered her wits once more and blackmailed the owner of the yacht for their shared secret. She threatened that he had everything to lose if she reported the incident. He obliged with huge payouts to the tune of her demands.
The serial nightmares continued but took a bizarre turn. Instead of Polly’s staring eyes and sinking body, Daisy-Mae’s dreams showed Polly on the move.
In the first of the new set of nightmares, Polly’s body floated to the surface of her watery grave. Her pale and blue fish-eaten face bore a grimace of intent. Daisy-Mae jumped out of sleep in a cold sweat.
Disturbed by the image, she lay awake for the rest of the night, glancing at the clock every ten minutes and praying for the light of dawn to chase away the lurking shadows.
The nightmares brought Polly closer with every episode. Daisy-Mae forced herself to stay awake. She had to keep Polly from reaching her. After four days of sleep deprivation, her body collapsed into a sleep of the dead.
She sprang up and screamed out of the room when a terrifying nightmare allowed Polly to enter the apartment and lay on the bed beside her. Daisy-Mae had nowhere to hide. Polly had returned to seek revenge.
Polly’s spirit possessed Daisy-Mae’s body and took her on a murderous odyssey. She slew her clients with ruthlessness, leaving trademark initials, ‘DM’ on each victim’s forehead. Each one had a missing body-part.
Daisy-Mae witnessed Polly’s brutality through a dream-state haze. She awoke with blood-stained clothing after each slaughter.
Her heart stopped when the police knocked on her door at first light one morning. She glanced at her surroundings. Blood stained her clothing and bed sheet. Her bloody hand held the large butcher’s knife that she usually kept under the pillow for comfort.
The policy kicked down the door while she showered with steaming-hot water to scrub the murderous evidence away.
The police had obtained a search warrant based on eyewitness accounts and personal articles left behind at each crime scene. They had already found the victims’ body parts in her storage locker of her apartment building. Jars of vinegar preserved the human tissue like pickle. Labels on each jar gave the victims' names and dates of death.
The prosecution tried her under the name, Deria Main, using her false ID to identify her. She had thrown her original identification documents into the ocean when she switched from Daisy-Mae to Deria Main.
The media frenzy on the sensational case showed a woman named Deria Main who had deep lines of stress and looked ten years older than her age. Her family followed the news-updates but did not recognize her as their own Daisy-Mae.
After exhausting all appeals, prisoner Daisy-Mae moved around her last meal on its paper plate without eating it. The foul smell of rotting flesh made her gag.
Apart from emanating putridity, Polly Anders made her presence known by staying on the edge of Daisy-Mae’s vision.
The guards wore masks and used a fire-hose to wash her down from a distance.
Daisy-Mae prayed for the electric chair.
Caribbean renaissance
By Romeo Kaseram
Frank Appleton Collymore was born January 7, 1893 in Woodville, St Michael in Barbados to parents Joseph Appleton, a customs official, and mother Wilhemina Clarke. He was an only child who developed a love for the arts early in life; reading became his passion. He attended Combermere School between 1903 and 1907; following graduation, he was appointed as a teacher at this school, and later became its associate headmaster. He retired in 1958, but continued teaching until 1963. According to Notable Caribbeans and Caribbean Americans: A Biographical Dictionary, Collymore was “considered an extraordinary teacher who instilled a love for English literature in his students”. It adds: “He had a large library at his house and made it available to his students to read and amplify their literary knowledge.” Also, “He is considered an early source of inspiration to Caribbean writers such as Sam Selvon, George Lamming, Austin C. Clarke, and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott.”
In the January/February 2004 edition of BWIA Caribbean Beat, Philip Nanton recognises what he describes as “a sense of stability and timelessness” still present in the Chelsea Road, Woodville neighbourhood on the edge of Bridgetown where Collymore was born, and spent most of his life. Nanton tells us it was in this “conservative, urbanised Barbados” where Collymore “lived both inside and outside the almost tangible social structure”.
Says Nanton: “In his youth, Barbadian society was made up of a white minority, who held the political and economic power, and the majority black population over whom, for the most part, they ruled. But the day job of successful school-teaching was combined with celebrated evenings on the amateur stage and the creativity of artist, poet, and editor. John Wickham, the Barbadian writer, noted what an unlikely, almost unique product Collymore was. He came, Wickham wrote, ‘from a Barbadian class noted for its careful husbandry, its narrow vision… It is a class notorious for its loyalty to Barbados, generally uncomfortable in any environment which calls for the use of imagination.’ And so, ‘by all reason of his background in time and place, Colly is the last man one would expect to have identified himself with a literary magazine and made it the foremost contributor to the surgent spirit of West Indian writers.’ Collymore was, above all, a sort of ‘gatekeeper’ – a cultural mentor and artistic arbitrator. In December 1942, at the launch of Bim – the magazine with which he will always be associated – Collymore was one of a number of editors. By the third issue, he had in effect taken over as sole editor. In the 32 years that followed, he produced 56 issues, before handing on the editorship to John Wickham in 1974. Bim, which started as a production of the Young Men’s Progressive Club of Barbados, quickly became one of the few regularly sustained literary magazines in the region.”
That Collymore lived in and beyond “social structures”, as Nanton notes, is also evident in his reach past teaching and publishing. According to Nanton, Collymore “also used his personal interest in writers and his gentle style to promote Barbadian artists and West Indian writing abroad”. Nanton adds: “[Collymore] brought the early poetry of Derek Walcott to the attention of his friend Henry Swanzy, producer of the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices in the 1940s and 1950s. George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Shake Keane, and Kamau Brathwaite were all provided with introductions to Swanzy as they made their way to London. This involved more than simply passing on the names of those who came to the door of his home, claiming to be able to write, or the transitory encouragement of a secondary school teacher. It involved a talent for identifying ‘the real thing’. In an edition of Bim in 1992, its jubilee year, a letter from Swanzy reviewing the magazine’s considerable achievements paid tribute to Collymore’s gatekeeper role. ‘I do not know which I admire the more, his tastes… or his magnanimity. Unlike so many literary people, he was perfectly ready to pass on the names of unknown writers, for their sake, and not his. One recalls a Jesuit saying: it is surprising what good can be done, if no credit is claimed. So there was a two-way traffic between us: cash and publicity from the BBC… and credit and permanency from Bim.’”
That Collymore came to be at the centre of Caribbean literary renaissance of the 1940s and 1950s was also through his short stories and a collection of poetry: Thirty Poems (1944), Beneath the Casuarinas (1945), Flotsam: Poems 1942-8 (1948), Collected Poems (1959), Rhymed Ruminations on the Fauna of Barbados (1968), and Selected Poems (1971). He was also a painter, an accomplished actor, and a man of letters. Notable Caribbeans and Caribbean Americans: A Biographical Dictionary insists Collymore's poems, ‘Hymn to the Sea’ (1971) and ‘Triptych’ (1948), published in Collected Poems, “deserve more attention”. In ‘Triptych’ it notes “the heterogeneity of Caribbean ancestry, together with its concomitant violence and suffering, is treated as an important source of Caribbean identity”. It adds: “In ‘Hymn to the Sea’ the encircling sea has symbolic and metaphorical resonances; Collymore’s sea is a chthonic, embracing womb to which man is drawn by the pull of his evolutionary memory.”
Additionally, “In his short stories Collymore achieves an admirable intensity through effective use of language and narrative sparseness. Although his characters and settings are Caribbean, his themes are universal. Some stories explore the dark underside of humanity, while others examine such issues as alienation and loneliness. ‘Shadows’ (1942) and ‘Rewards and Chrysanthemums’ (1961) show Collymore’s fascination with the mind’s dark side. The latter is a symbolically resonant story of two middle-aged, incompatible Barbadian sisters of fragile sensibilities living together after years of separation. ‘Shadows’ creates compelling tension out of the narrator's terrifying realisation that he is going insane. Other stories, such as ‘R.S.V.P. to Mrs. Bush-Hall’ (1962), show Collymore's sharply honed satirical skills. Although he is a transparent con-man, Lucas, the mediocre English expatriate poet, thrives in the colonial society of sham respectability depicted in the story.”
Collymore passed away on July 17, 1980. On September 18, 1986, a complex was opened by the Central Bank of Barbados, the Frank Collymore Hall, housing a 491-seat recital space; this state-of-the-art venue serves in accommodating a variety of plays, special events, concerts, film screenings, conferences and cultural activities. The Central Bank of Barbados also funds an annual series of awards for creative writing in his name, the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Awards. During his lifetime, Collymore received the Order of the British Empire in 1958, and the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977.
Sources for this exploration: Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English; Notable Caribbeans and Caribbean Americans: A Biographical Dictionary; and BWIA Caribbean Beat, January/February 2004.