Wisdom - Hardcover

Neff, Heather

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345447433 ISBN 13: 9780345447432

Publisher: One World/Ballantine, 2002

Synopsis

“You must promise me to go back to Wisdom one day. You see, little girl, Wisdom is your Source. It’s where your blood was born. . . .”

The words of her grandfather echo in her ears as Maia Ransom, a nurse from Michigan, arrives on the island of St. Croix for the first time. She has always been curious about the great estate her grandfather lovingly described, but the importance of this place has suddenly become vital. A private woman with no lover and no children, Maia is slowly succumbing to the same disease that killed her mother. She has three weeks to find Wisdom. Once there, Maia hopes to uncover the rich history of her people—and the will to fight for her own life.

But once on the intoxicating Caribbean island, Maia finds that the inhabitants resent her presence and are determined to lead her astray. Maia finally locates the estate, but the once-grand manor now sits crumbling in disrepair, home to the dissolute, alcoholic, and severely ill Severin Johanssen, the only living son of its former owner. After an initial frosty dismissal, Maia finds herself living at Wisdom as Severin’s temporary nurse.

Seeking refuge, Maia befriends Noah Langston, a striking Crucian lawyer who is doing all he can to help his people rise up to self-sufficiency. Noah soon opens up in Maia tender emotions she never imagined were hers to feel. But what he discovers about her family will shock Maia to the core. For Wisdom is not just her legacy, it might be her future. And there are people who will do everything in their power to keep Maia from fulfilling her destiny.

With a clear eye and a poet’s heart, Heather Neff has written an absorbing, redemptive novel of struggle, family secrets, and making the profound choice between hiding safely from the truth or leaping through uncertainty towards true love. Wisdom is ultimately about finding one’s true soul.

About this title

About the Author

An associate professor of English at Eastern Michigan University, Heather Neff attended the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and received her Ph.D. at the University of Zurich. Fluent in German and French, she also worked as a translator and as a language coach for film productions. Before returning to the U.S., she spent two years teaching at the University of the Virgin Islands. She is also the author of Blackgammon.

Reviews

A family legend draws an African-American nurse from Michigan to the sultry Caribbean island of St. Croix in Neff's gutsy first novel. Maia Ransom, the descendant of slaves who worked the St. Croix plantation of Wisdom a century and a half ago, visits the island for three weeks to investigate the stories told to her by her grandfather. Braving native scorn and lecherous pursuers, Maia insinuates herself into the life of the last Wisdom heir, Severin Johanssen, a nasty layabout and drunk who is dying of liver cancer. Maia is dying, too, of ovarian cancer, and finds herself strangely sympathetic to the plight of the objectionable Severin, who possesses the deed to the once grand, now dilapidated estate. Maia elicits help from local black lawyer Noah Langston, who unearths evidence proving that Maia's grandfather was really the legitimate son of a love marriage between the freed slave Zara Ransom and the white owner of Wisdom, Jakob Johanssen. Suspense builds in the form of a burgeoning romance between Noah and Maia, jealous jockeying for Wisdom's ownership on the part of greedy white descendants and the ultimate race for time before death claims the main characters. Neff has fashioned a contrived plot in which random threads are destined to be spun together too neatly, but her characters convince, especially the island natives hostile to outsiders. The author knows the violent beauty of the island and wisely avoids romanticizing its racial tensions and brutal history. Choosing a main character who is doomed from the outset is tricky, but Neff pulls it off with somber, brave conviction.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The last line--"True wisdom is the love of those who came before. And the love of those who are yet to come"--aptly sums up the drama of this enchanting tale. Maia Ransom decides to die on her own terms when she is diagnosed with ovarian cancer. As far back as she can remember, her grandfather told her stories of the estate, Wisdom, that he grew up on in St. Croix. Working as a nurse in Detroit and seeing so many people die, Maia feels compelled to learn of her true ancestry before she can die peacefully. She travels to the beautiful Caribbean island for 21 days to find answers to her family's legacy. She finally finds the estate, only to be mystified by the secrets and myths that surround the old dilapidated manor. Maia discovers that Wisdom is not just her history and a part of who she is but also her future and who she will become. Lillian Lewis
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

TWENTY-ONE DAYS

Severin roared up out of the sea, his hair a thatched mass of bleached ringlets, his skin broiling as salt met parched flesh. Seagulls screamed overhead, drowning out the voice ripped raw from decades of nicotine and rum. Stretching, reaching desperately toward some lost pocket of lung, he found himself bending double to retch out the last vestiges of meaning in his life, knowing now with absolute certainty that the only thing left to face was his death.

Turning his back to the noon, his craggy face, furrowed with drink and sun and salty wind, looked like that of a long-forgotten hermit. Purple bags of swollen flesh made it impossible to guess the color of his eyes, and his crud-thickened hair, bleached by repeated bathings in the salty sea, had lost any semblance of its natural texture and color.

“Ah, shit,” he muttered. “Shit, shit shit shit.”

His puckered, lardy brown flesh exuded the ripe undertone of caramel-sweetened alcohol, and when he tried to wade through the surf a knifing pain tore more deeply than ever before into his aching bowels. It would have been difficult for anyone to believe that he was barely thirty-five. That he had once been young, and handsome, and considered intelligent. Even brilliant. Now it seemed clear that his doctor was right. He was going to die.

Far up on a powdery dune lay Tina, watching lazily from beneath a wind-bowed palm tree. Her onyx eyes reflected nothing of the equatorial sun; her left hand brought an overripe star fruit to her unsmiling lips. Shifting heavily, she pressed her hips more deeply into the sand and exhaled in slow impatience. Her gaze fell to her feet, once fine and rosy despite a childhood spent in barefoot abandon, but now swollen white with her own alcoholic dissipation.

“Come, Seven!” she called out, her voice slicing through the battering surf.

Severin turned at her bidding, even as his thoughts swept seaward with the undertow. His eyes searched the horizon, momentarily blinded by the searing meridian light, then finally settled on the figure swathed in a billowing robe.

“Seven,” she shrilled, “come now!”

He took a step forward and felt the wet sand suck eagerly at his soles as the waves again claimed his thighs.

Tina began chanting in a soft voice; the atonal notes wafted toward Severin between the swells of the surf.

Sweet John him cook the one-legged turkey, John him eat the one-legged turkey, Massa ask why the one-legged turkey, John say so it be . . .

“Hey, you!” he rasped. “You, Tina — you hear me?”

Her chanting voice swelled louder:

John him say the one-legged turkey He born that way the one-legged turkey Massa say no one-legged turkey, but —

“Tina, Tina! You! Singing up there! Come help me, woman!”

She ignored him, her voice lilting defiantly above the sting of the surf.

“I calling you, Theresa!” he shouted, using the baptism name that few on the island knew and no one had called her since her father, witnessing a fist-fight she’d had with her brother Carlson, had affectionately begun calling her his “Tiny Tiger.” Instantly she had become “Tina,” and no one had since dared to use her Christian name.

The song stopped abruptly. He heard a long, sullen whistle as she sucked her teeth. Then her voice began again.

Slowly, painfully, Severin waded out of the water. His torn jeans wedded to his hips, he pulled his hands up along the ballooning flesh of his belly and sloughed the water from his matted chest. Tina looked away in disgust.

“Woman — come help me get me up that hill!”

Severin waited, panting heavily while Tina hoisted herself elegantly to her feet. The two stood facing one another while the woman’s robe blew lazily around her ample body. Her buttery brown skin fell loose over the high cheeks that bore witness to the mix of French and African blood she bore from her native St. Lucia. She was still remarkably beautiful.

“You coming to help me?” His rasp had an undercurrent of real desperation.

Tina’s hand came up to her hip and she snorted out a laugh. “Get your pasty white self out the water, Seven! I’m gone, meson!” Slowly she turned, making her way to the top of the dune. Severin watched her with dismay, feeling the keen struggle for power that had always brought them back together, even when other lovers lured them away. Gathering up his breath, he staggered forward, his body little more than driftwood in the undertow.

Minutes later he found Tina lounging on the front seat of his rusting pickup truck, her leopard-print caftan pulled back to reveal a perfect leg propped up in the frame of the open window. He leaned against the blazing hood, his head moving like an aging dog as he drew in slow and shallow breaths. Slowly and involuntarily his gaze rose up to Wisdom.

The open grave of the ruined house leaped out at him from behind the untended hedges and wild forests of grape trees. The elegant, French-styled double windows that opened to cool, deep rooms were now shuttered with warped, broken jalousies. The patched slate roof sank between skeletal beams that barely held the house together, and even the great stone drive that had once welcomed the governor of the Virgin Islands and the vice president of the United States was now overgrown with stiff weeds. Gaping holes at the window frames welcomed lizards, spiders, and centipedes. The hand-carved woodwork that gracefully latticed the gables was now honeycombed with worms.

He sighed, pulling his trembling gaze away.

“So what game you playing?” Tina asked impatiently as he pulled himself behind the wheel. His stained shirt was encrusted with salt from his skin and hair.

“No game, baby.”

“What the doctor tell you, Seven? You acting like he say something new.”

“He did,” Severin managed as he wrestled with the truck in the deep sand.

“You lying!” she laughed. “Doctor say no more rum and Coke?”

Severin grunted, his face empty as the wheels spun helplessly.

“And he tell you no more pussy!”

“No need for that,” he said under his breath, his feet working the useless pedals.

“Don’t believe it!” she snorted, digging deep into her caftan for the thin cigars she had smoked since her childhood. “I know you, Seven. You never been long without pussy!”

He grimaced and reached across the seat for the cigar, taking it from Tina’s ripe lips and shoving it into his thin mouth. He knew that she was willfully refusing to understand his miserable, aching impotence, and he loved her deeply for it.

“Where you want to go?” he asked her and she rolled her eyes toward the house.

“No food up there?”

He shook his head, lowering his throbbing temple to the scalloped edge of the wheel. She looked away. “Thirsty?”

He barely nodded, finding himself awash in dizziness.

“Well,” she announced, “then drive to Christiansted. Don’t want nobody from Fredriksted to see you right now.”

Gratefully he propelled the truck down the rocky path to Centerline Road, forcing his mind to be one with the vehicle. Tina moved her hips back and forth, as if making the seat conform to her hard buttocks. She found another cigar and lit it with expert ease as the hot wind whirled through the soiled cabin.

Severin had dealt with pain before; dealt with it for many years of his life. This pain was not new — what was new were the words of his doctor, the Canadian doctor who had sent his tests to Miami rather than Puerto Rico for conclusive results. Severin, I have some very serious news. It was those words that sent him headlong into the noontime surf, cutting the strength from his softening flesh. The tests confirm that the cancer has metastasized to other parts of your body. The words made him seek to drown the remnants of himself in the uncaring waves. You’ll have to refrain from alcohol and cigarettes and other chemical substances. And now he was glad to force his legs and arms and neck and head into the rusting pickup truck. I’ll give you something to help with the pain, but Severin, I strongly recommend surgery, as soon as possible. . . .

Liver cancer.

He was glad to have someplace — anyplace — to go. He was glad to comply with Tina’s whims. Yes, he would drive her all the way to Christiansted. He would drive her all the way to Point Udall — the easternmost point of the island — if she so desired. At that moment he would have driven this woman to the other end of the world if she had so much as lifted the tip of her smallest finger. Anything to vanquish the doctor’s as soon as possible . . .

Tina’s favorite bar on the East End of the island was located on the poolside patio of a tiny hotel tucked between the main street of the town and the sea. Patrons could sit at one of the wrought-iron tables on the deck facing the water, or choose a barstool at the long counter shaded by an aluminum awning. Most of the hotel rooms were rented by the hour to local residents; few real tourists found their way there. The bar survived, therefore, on the goodwill and regular patronage of Christiansted’s permanent inhabitants. No one ever used the pool, but each and every drinker on the deck watched the sun trace its evening path across the sky and drop into the cobalt Caribbean. This was the famous ritual of Brandy’s Bar: waiting for the mythic green flash at the moment when the day became night.

“Bôzu, sésé — Hello, sister!” Brandy called out affectionately in St. Lucian patois as Tina made her way through the labyrinth of wrought-iron t...

Edition details

• Publisher: One World/Ballantine
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0345447433
• ISBN 13: 9780345447432
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336