Family Land

The buyer’s man came twice before anybody took him seriously.

The first time he left a card with Berris, who lives on the land and therefore gets everything first, and Berris put it behind the clock and forgot it. The second time he came with a folder and a figure, and the figure was large enough that Berris did not put it behind the clock. He photographed it and sent it to the family group, and that is how eleven people in four countries came to be arguing by Tuesday.

· · ·

They set the meeting for the Sunday, under the mango tree in the yard, because that is where meetings happen at that house and because the front room does not hold eleven.

Seven came in person. Auntie Bev was on a phone propped against the sugar bowl, from Brooklyn, where it was cold. Michael was on another phone from Bristol and kept freezing. Two did not answer at all, which everybody noted and nobody said anything about yet.

Berris had cut the grass. He had also, without being asked, put out the good chairs and made coffee, and Simone from Kingston noticed both of those things and understood them as an opening statement.

“So,” said Uncle Danny, who is the eldest and therefore ran it. “Everybody see the number.”

Everybody had seen the number.

“All right. Before we talk about the number, I have one question for the room, and I want a real answer.” He looked around. “Who have the title?”

· · ·

Nobody had the title.

What they had, after an hour, was this. There was a deed. The deed was in the name of their great-grandfather Ezekiel, who had bought the seven acres in 1947 from the estate breakup, cash, and had died in 1971. He left no will. The land had passed the way family land passes in that country, which is to say it had not passed at all: it had simply continued, with his nine children holding it in common, and then their children, and then theirs.

Simone, who does contracts for a living, did the arithmetic on the back of an envelope while Uncle Danny talked.

“Danny.”

“Mm.”

“It is not eleven of us.”

“What you mean it is not eleven.”

“Eleven of us is in this conversation,” she said. “If Great-grandpa die without a will, then it go to his nine, and seven of them dead now, and it go down from them. I count it this morning.” She turned the envelope around. “There is about thirty-one people with a claim on this ground. Some of them we don’t know. There is a whole branch in Canada from Aunt Vida that nobody in this yard has spoken to since 1998.”

The phone from Brooklyn said a word that made two of the younger ones laugh.

“So we can’t sell,” Michael said from Bristol, arriving three seconds late as usual.

“We can sell,” Simone said. “We would have to find every single one of them and get every single one to sign, and if one of them is dead we would have to find their children, and if one of them will not sign, that is the end of it. People spend ten years doing that. People die doing that.”

· · ·

The argument came then, and it was the argument that family has had in some form since 1971, only this time it had a number attached.

Michael wanted to try. He said ten years was ten years but the money was the money.

Auntie Bev said her mother was buried on that ground and she would not have a conversation about a hotel over her mother’s head, and Michael said nobody said hotel, and Bev said she knew exactly what they wanted it for and so did he.

Karlene, who is thirty and had been quiet, said the thing that actually needed saying, which was: “Berris, how much is the taxes?”

Everybody looked at Berris.

“I pay it,” he said.

“I know you pay it. How much?”

He told them. Then, because she kept looking at him, he also told them how long he had been paying it, which was nineteen years, and that the water was in his name, and that the wall at the back had gone in the hurricane and he had rebuilt it with his brother-in-law and had not asked anybody for a cent because asking eleven people for a cent is harder than building a wall.

The yard went quiet in a way it had not been all afternoon.

“Why you never say?” Uncle Danny said.

“Because is my grandmother house,” Berris said. “And because every time somebody call me about this land in nineteen years, is to ask me something, not to ask me how I do.”

· · ·

They did not sell. They could not, and by the time they understood that they had also stopped wanting to, and it is hard to say in which order those two things happened.

What they did instead took the rest of the afternoon and was, Simone said afterward, the only productive meeting that family has ever held.

They agreed that the thirty-one had to be found, not for a sale, but because a piece of land nobody can prove they own is a piece of land that somebody else can eventually take. Simone said there is a government program for this, for regularizing family land, and that it is slow and free and mostly involves paperwork, and she would start it.

They agreed that Karlene, who is good with people, would build the list: every descendant of Ezekiel’s nine, with dates, with contact where she could get it. She said she would need help with the Canada branch and Auntie Bev said leave that to her, she knew a woman.

They agreed that the taxes would come out of a pot, and that everybody who was working would put in, and the amount was small once it was divided by people instead of carried by one, which is the whole of what had been wrong for nineteen years.

And they agreed — this took the longest and was Uncle Danny’s, and he had to say it twice before the phones understood he was serious — that Berris’s name would go on nothing and Berris’s position would change anyway: that the house he lived in was his to live in for as long as he lived, written down, agreed by all of them, and that anybody who came to that gate in future came as a guest of the family and not as a landlord.

· · ·

The buyer’s man came back in November and Berris did put that card behind the clock.

The list is at nineteen of thirty-one. Karlene has a spreadsheet and a WhatsApp group that is, by general agreement, the most irritating group any of them belongs to. The Canada branch turned out to be four people and one of them cried on the phone.

They had a thing at the house in July, not a reunion exactly, thirty-odd people in the yard and a tarpaulin because of the rain. Somebody’s child asked why they were all there and Uncle Danny, who is eighty-one now, said the true answer, which is the answer to the whole business, and which is why they will still be arguing about this land in fifty years.

“Because the old man never leave it to nobody,” he said. “Him leave it to all of we. So none of we can sell it, and none of we can lose it, and every last one of you have somewhere to come back to. Him know what him was doing.”

“Did he?” Simone said. “Or did he just never make a will?”

“Same thing,” said Uncle Danny, “after seventy-nine years.”

❧