I Be Here

I Be Here
by Trevor Scott Barton
Ordinary Time 2020

Scene 1

“Po lidda fella,” said the old, weathered woman with skin as dark and wrinkled as bark and arms as thin and knobby as the farthest reaches of the branches of the island’s ancient oak trees. She spoke with the flavor of her Gullah ancestors, who had created a new language in the lowcountry of South Carolina by mixing the west African words they happily learned while they sat on their mothers knees with the English words they were forced to learn when they were stolen away from their own people and lands and brought here to America.

She lived a holey floored, crack walled, Duck taped windowed shotgun style shack on John’s Island left over from the days of slavery and the Jim Crow laws. She fished along the inlet and the shoreline each morning trying to catch red fish, sea trout and flounder to go with the fruits and vegetables that grew out of her garden. She wove sweet grass into baskets from the late mornings to the early evenings.

“Jus sits dere,” she continued, “Eva monin’ as de sun rises ova de ocean an sits on de wada like a ripe tomata. Neva says one word. Jus sits dere a’watchin de wada and a’list’nin to de waves.”

One day she walked over to him and stood beside him. The sun cast her shadow over him as to protect him from the brightness of the new day.

“Wha’s yo name?” she asked kindly. “My name’s Mattie. Could you tell me yo name?”

He turned his earthy brown eyes to her. He didn’t say one thing. She figured he didn’t understand her. His Mami and Abuelo were migrant workers picking peaches and tomatoes in the lowcountry summer until they were ready to move down the coasts of Georgia and Florida with the fall and winter. She thought maybe he only spoke Spanish, since his family had made it to the United States from the farms and fields of El Salvador in Central America.

Suddenly, he whistled. It astonished her, and she almost fell over into the sand. The sound was unlike any whistle she had ever heard before. A usual whistle has two notes and a high pitch, but this was an unusual whistle. It’s sound had all kinds of notes in it, and the pitch went high and low, low and high and all kinds of places in between. It was as if the great composers had written his whistle at the height of their compositional powers.

“Ya know, it was like he was a’tryin to say somepin to me in a be-yoo-tee-ful way,” she explained, “But I din’ hab no idée whad id was.”

He looked back over the water and at the sky again, and was very still and quiet. She felt a wide compassion for him in the deepest part of her heart.

Scene 2

“Poor baby,” said the labor and delivery nurse as she held the new baby in her soft, supple hands at Mercy Hospital in Miami, Florida.

“Born at a time like this. And his family has no papers. Who’ll take care of him and his family? Who’ll work to heal their wounds?”

His name was Hilcias. His Mami and Abuelo had just crossed over into the United States. They had ridden a train ominously named The Beast all the way from the scorched earth of El Salvador to the border of Mexico and what the weary, broken migrants called the promised land.

His Mami was pregnant with him and the time had come for her to deliver him. A car had stopped in front of St. Mary’s Church in the middle of Miami. The silent driver made the sign of the cross over her and his Abuelo and put them out on the street with nothing but the tattered clothes on their backs. The old man shoes were as battered and wrinkled as his skin. Her sandals had fallen apart many miles ago so she had no shoes at all.

His Abuelo lifted the iron knocker on the stained oak church door and let it fall back onto it’s tarnished iron plate. He did this again and again until a nun cracked open the door to the night.

The nun had worked in the inner city for many years and had seen many things. But never had she seen the suffering and beauty she saw in the faces of Maria and Josef at the church door that night.

Their eyes were alight with beauty – the beauty of being in a new land without war, without violence – the beauty of bringing a new life into the world.

Their bodies were heavy with suffering. They were covered with the dirt and sweat and blood of thousands of miles of migration along the migratory road.

Their shoulders sagged under the weight of months of homelessness. The only homes they had found during the journey were the small spaces of simple kindness that people had shown them along the way.

They were very still and very quiet.

They didn’t make a sound.

The old nun wrapped her arms around Maria and Josef.

“I’m here,” she whispered.

“I’m here.”

Scene 3

The old Gullah woman wrapped her arm around Hilcias as the tide rolled in and out in the dawn. She placed her warm, calloused hand on his cheek.

“I be here,” she whispered.

“I be here.”