Phillip’s Mother Character Analysis

Then an army officer climbed out of a truck and told us all to leave the Queen Emma bridge. He was very stern. He growled, “Don’t you all know they could shoot a torpedo up here and kill you all?”

I looked out toward the sea again. It was blue and peaceful, and a good breeze churned it up, making lines of whitecaps. White clouds drifted slowly over it. But I couldn’t see the usual parade of ships coming toward the harbor; the stubby ones or the massive ones with the flags of many nations that steamed slowly up the bay to Schottegat to load gas and oil.

The sea was empty; there was not even a sail on it. We suddenly became frightened and ran home to the Scharloo section where I lived.

Finally she said, “You’ll be safe if you do what we tell you to do. Don’t leave the yard again today.”

She seemed very nervous. But then she was often nervous. My mother was always afraid I’d fall off the sea wall, or tumble out of a tree, or cut myself with a pocketknife. Henrik’s mother wasn’t that way. She laughed a lot and said, “Boys, boys, boys.”

It was very different in Virginia, where my father had been in charge of building a new refinery on the banks of the Elizabeth River. We’d lived in a small white house on an acre of land with many trees. My mother often talked about the house and the trees; about the change of season and the friends she had there. She said it was nice and safe in Virginia.

My father would answer quietly, “There’s no place nice and safe right now.”

I remembered the summers with lightning bugs and honeysuckle smells; the cold winters when the field would be all brown and would crackle under my feet. I didn’t remember too much else. I was only nine when we’d moved to the Caribbean.

I saw a huge, very old Negro sitting on a raft near me. He was ugly. His nose was flat and his face was broad; his head was a mass of wiry gray hair. For a moment, I could not figure out where I was or who he was. Then I remembered him working with the deck gang of the Hato.

[…]

The Negro said, “You ’ad a mos’ terrible crack on d’ead, bahss […] an’ I harl you board dis raff.”

[…] His face couldn’t have been blacker, or his teeth whiter. They made an alabaster trench in his mouth, and his pink-purple lips peeled back over them like the meat of a conch shell. He had a big welt, like a scar, on his left cheek. I knew he was West Indian. I had seen many of them in Willemstad, but he was the biggest one I’d ever seen.

I then watched as he used his powerful arms and hands to rip up boards from the outside edges of the raft. He pounded them back together on cleats, forming two triangles; then he hammed the bases into slots between the raft boards. He stripped off his shirt and his pants, then demanded mine. I didn’t know what had happened to my leather jacket or my sweater. But soon, we had a flimsy shelter from the burning sun.

Crawling under it to sprawl beside me, he said, “We ’ave rare good luck, young bahss. D’wattah kag did not bus’ when d’raff was launch, an’ we ’ave a few biscuit, some choclade, an’ d’matches in d’tin is dry. So we ’ave rare good luck.” He grinned at me then.

“Do the schooners usually come close by here?” I asked.

Again, very gravely, Timothy said, “D’mahn who feeshes follows d’feesh. Sartainly, d’feesh be ’ere. I be seen’ wid my own self eyes.”

I kept feeling that Timothy was holding something back from me. It was the tone of his voice. I’d heard my father talk that way a few times. Once, when he didn’t want to tell me that my grandfather was about to die; another time was when a car ran over my dog in Virginia.

Of course, both times had happened when I was younger. Now, my father was always honest with me, I thought, because he said that in the end that was better. I wished Timothy would be honest with me.

Again he did not answer directly. I was beginning to learn that he had a way of being honest while still being dishonest. He said, “D’place I am tinking of is call Debil’s Mout’. ’Tis a U-shaped ting, wit dese sharp coral banks on either side, runnin’ maybe forty, fifty mile….”

He let that sink in. It sounded bad. But then he said, “I do hope, young bahss, dat I am outrageous mistaken.”

“If we are in the Devil’s Mouth, how can we be rescued?” I asked angrily. It was his fault we were there.

“D’fire pile! When aircraft fly above, dey will see d’smoke an’ fire!”

“But they might just think it is a native fisherman. No one else would come here!”

I could picture him nodding, thinking about that. Finally, he said, “True, but we cannot fret ’bout it, can we? We’ll make camp an’ see what ’happens.”

“Now,” he said, “I mus’ go downg to d’reef an’ fetch langosta. We’ll ros’ it, to be true.”

I became frightened again the minute he said it. I didn’t want to be left alone, and I was afraid something might happen to him. “Take me with you, Timothy,” I pleaded.

“Not on d’reef,” he answered firmly. “I ’ave not been dere before. If ’tis safe, tomorrow I will take you.” With that, he went down the hill without saying another word. My mother was right, I thought. They had their place and we had ours. He did not really like me, or he would have taken me along. He was different.

Because it had been on my mind I told him that my mother didn’t like black people and asked him why.

He answered slowly, “I don’ like some white people my own self, but ’twould be outrageous if I didn’ like any o’ dem.”

Wanting to hear it from Timothy, I asked him why there were different colors of skin, white and black, brown and red, and he laughed back, “Why b’fees different color, or flower b’different color? I true don’ know, Phill-eep, but I true tink beneath d’skin is all d’same.”

Herr Jonckheer had said something like that in school but it did not mean quite as much as when Timothy said it.

[…] Suddenly, I wished my father and mother could see us here together on the little island.

I moved close to Timothy’s big body before I went to sleep. I remember smiling in the darkness. He felt neither black nor white.

Timothy, standing below to catch me if I fell, called up softly, “Phill-eep, ’Tis no shame to ease your own self back downg to d’san.”

Slowly I began to back down along the trunk. The bark was rough against my hands and feet, but what I felt most was Timothy’s disappointment. I couldn’t have been more than a few feet off the ground when I took a deep breath and said to myself, If you fall, you’ll fall in sand.

Then I started climbing again.

Timothy called up to be, “You ’ave forgot d’knife.”

I knew that if I stopped now, I’d never climb it. I didn’t answer him but kept my hands and feet moving steadily. Then I heard him shout, “You b’getting to d’top.” Palm fronds brushed my head. I grasped the base of one to pull myself up. Timothy let out a roar of joy.

In early April, I returned to Willemstad with my mother and we took up life where it had been left off the pervious April. After I’d been officially reported lost at sea, she’d gone back to Curaçao to be with my father. She had changed in many ways. She had no thoughts of leaving the islands now.

I saw Henrik van Boven occasionally, but it wasn’t the same as when we’d played the Dutch or the British. He seemed very young.