The Baker’s Story

Look at me. Black as the ace of spades, and ugly to match. Nobody looking at me would believe they looking at one of the richest men in this city of Port of Spain. Sometimes I find it hard to believe it myself, you know, especially when I go out on some of the holidays that I start taking the wife and children to these days, and I catch sight of the obzocky black face in one of those fancy mirrors that these expensive hotels have all over the place, as if to spite people like me.

Now everybody—particularly black people—forever asking me how this thing start, and I does always tell them I make my dough from dough. Ha! You like that one? But how it start? Well, you hearing me talk, and I don’t have to tell you I didn’t have no education. In Grenada, where I come from—and that is one thing these Trinidad black people don’t forgive a man for being: a black Grenadian—in Grenada I was one of ten children, I believe—everything kind of mix up out there—and I don’t even know who was the feller who hit my mother. I believe he hit a lot of women in all the other parishes of that island, too, because whenever I go back to Grenada for one of those holidays I tell you about, people always telling me that I remind them of this one and that one, and they always mistaking me for a shop assistant whenever I in a shop. (If this thing go on, one day I going to sell somebody something, just for spite.) And even in Trinidad, whenever I run into another Grenadian, the same thing does happen.