No Telephone to Heaven

Chapter 3 details the migration of Clare’s immediate family—including her father, Boy, her mother, Kitty, and her sister, Jennie—from Jamaica to the United States. After the death of Kitty’s adoptive mother, Miss Mattie, Boy decides that the family has no reason to remain in Jamaica and flies them to Miami in search of a better life. The year is 1960, and racial tensions are high in the United States.

From Miami, the Savage family drives northward to New York City, stopping at a motel in Georgia. When Boy goes to the white motel manager, he is met with suspicion and confusion. The manager—a proud member of the KKK—repeatedly asks the light “apricot”-skinned but distinctively accented Boy if he is “colored” (55). Boy recalls the “128 categories” of different racial distinctions he was forced to memorize as a school boy and decides to reject this mindset: “No matter that at least one of the […] categories applied to him—no matter. He was streamlining himself for America” (57). Boy convinces the motel manager that he is white, initiating his commitment to “passing” in the United States.

Kitty is uncomfortable with the racial tension she experiences in America and claims that in Jamaica, there was not “so much hate” (60). She feels alienated from their neighbors, Italian-Americans who complain about the smell of her Jamaican cooking. In the interest of “passing,” Boy also cuts off contact with their relatives who have previously moved from Jamaica to New York. Kitty’s only connection with her homeland comes through a shop in the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy) selling “mangoes, yams, cho-cho [chayote], saltfish, plantains, callaloo, goat meat, and Jamaican curry to rub it with” (65). Among fellow Jamaican immigrants in this shop, Kitty breaks “her silence,” feeling “the loss of home, of voice” (65).

Boy takes a job driving a truck for a Brooklyn business—White’s Sanitary Laundry—run by a man named Mr. B., and Kitty likewise takes a job doing Mr. B.’s “clerical work” (73). Much of this “clerical work” consists of attaching marketing forms for the laundry featuring the fictional Mrs. White, an archetypical good wife with “gentle gray curls, pink skin […] Slender sculpted nose ending well above her smooth top lip, which had absolutely no hint whatsoever of the dark spiky hair that was common to all the older women in the neighborhood” (74). These flyers contain “reminder” messages written by Mr. B., “describing in his quaint sweet language that it was a wife’s duty to make her husband’s shirts, their crispness and their stiffness, a matter of her primary concern” (73).

Kitty’s husband silences her wishes and forbids her to go the Jamaican store in Bed-Stuy. Feeling oppressed, Kitty begins to pen her own transgressive additions to the Mrs. White flyers. She places these edited messages in the customers’ clothes. Kitty’s alternative messages include: “EVER TRY CLEANSING YOUR MIND OF HATRED? THINK OF IT” (78), “WHITE PEOPLE CAN BE BLACK-HEARTED” (81), and “MARCUS GARVEY WAS RIGHT” (81). Finally, Kitty uses a pen to darken the skin of the flyers’ Mrs. White illustrations and writes: “HELLO. MRS. WHITE IS DEAD. MY NAME IS MRS. BLACK. I KILLED HER” (83).

Eventually, a customer complains, and Mr. B. fires his two African American employees, believing they are responsible. Kitty feels guilty and confesses what she did to Mr. B. Her employer, however, refuses to believe that “[a] nice girl like [her]” (84) would do what she did. Distraught by the ways this incident exposes her own light-skinned privilege, Kitty separates from Boy and moves back to Jamaica with her darker-skinned daughter, Jennie.