No Telephone to Heaven

The fourth chapter of No Telephone to Heaven opens with a flashback to Paul’s Christmas party. This flashback details the burgeoning friendship between Clare—who has a drunken, unsatisfactory sexual encounter with Paul—and Harry/Harriet, who thereafter comforts Clare when she becomes sick in the swimming pool.

The narrative then switches to Clare in the “NO TELEPHONE TO HEAVEN” truck as it makes its way through the countryside. On the truck, Clare briefly recalls an experience wherein she attempted and failed to adopt a child from an orphanage—an “institution for light-skinned foundlings”—because she had wanted to “save” a child from this “colonial contrivance” (92). She then reflects back on the early days spent with her father in America after her own mother’s departure.

Clare recalls watching a great deal of television in those days, feeling a sense of unfillable “loss” (93). She compares the “magic of television […], her ability to conjure images by switch, to change the images as she wished” (93), to her experience of media in Jamaica. In Jamaica, they did not have television and were not privy to films or programs outside of those shown in public cinemas. Clare reflects on the lack of control viewers had over what they saw in Jamaica, and how, in a sense, this condition was not so different from “the little black box catching waves in the Brooklyn apartment” (93).

This reflection triggers a memory of Miss Peterkin, Clare’s white American history teacher in Jamaica who fallaciously believed that the film Gone with the Wind was a documentary about the Civil War. Clare recalls how—when taking the class of girls to view the film in the cinema—Miss Peterkin screamed with absurd emotion at the images on the screen. Clare notes that Miss Peterkin—whom the students jokingly called “Miss America” (96)—was the first American she ever met.

Clare recognizes that her mother’s move back to Jamaica privately devastated her father, though he refused to acknowledge their separation. He believed that Kitty would “be back” (96) once she appreciated what America had to offer their family. However, when Boy took Clare to enroll her in a city high school, he had to confront his misconception of America.  When the principal inquired about his marital status, Boy admitted aloud for the first time that he and his wife separated. When the principal asked about his race, she refused to accept his answer, “White […] of course” (99). The principal claimed to be “familiar with you island people,” maintaining that the school system had “no room for lies [or] in-betweens” (99).

That year, Clare’s teacher read a news story about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, including the names and ages of the four young girls who were killed: “Addie Mae Collins, 14; Denise McNair, 11; Carole Robertson, 14; Cynthia Wesley, 14” (101). Moved by this tragedy, Clare trimmed a picture of one of the girls—lying in an open coffin—from the paper. She kept this picture with her in her wallet, constantly peeking at it through its celluloid screen. One weekend—while Clare and her father watched TV coverage of the president’s funeral—he caught her looking at the photo. He seized it from her, telling her, “We are not to judge this country … they gave us a home. Your mother could never understand that … she blamed the whole place for a few ignorant people” (102). Clare reflects that the picture, nevertheless, was sealed in her mind, “[c]onnecting her with her absent mother” (102).

When Clare was a sophomore in college, Kitty passed away from a sudden brain hemorrhage. Anguished and frustrated, Boy claimed that she died because, with “the soul of stubbornness” (103), she refused to return to the US to see a doctor for her headaches. Clare recalled a letter wherein her mother addressed her, writing: “There is a space between who you are and who you will become. Fill it” (103).

The morning after they received news of Kitty’s death, Boy confronted Clare, demanding to know if she had “cried for [her] mother yet” (104). When she truthfully told him that she had not, he lashed out in rage, accusing her of having “more feeling for niggers” than for her “own mother” (104). Clare retaliated, citing that she, just like her mother, “was a nigger” (104).

Soon after, Clare’s younger (and darker-skinned) sister, Jennie, moved to New York. Envious of her sister’s deeper connection to their mother and their homeland, Clare asked Jennie why their mother did not bring Clare along with them to Jamaica. Jennie replied, “One time she say she feel you would prosper here. She say is because you favor backra [white people], and fe you Daddy. Don’t feel bad, man” (105).

Jennie soon after began to wander the city and became addicted to drugs. Boy remarried a light-skinned Italian-American widow. Clare finished her undergraduate studies and moved to England for graduate school with the financial help of her mother’s brother.