Someone Wrote a Poem About Me Once

A Short Story.

The Jamaica Wine House was a grim little corner pub, in the depths of Cornhill, London. The yellow air in there reeked of warm cigars. The evening crowd was just filling out, and the grubby brick walls began to pulse with hungry shadows. Men with their hats off mingled, pints sloshed between red faces and gesturing hands, and old card packs were fanned along the damp counter.
A woman stood near the bar, next to the hunched shape of a man. She wore a plain blue dress, and her hair went down her back in a thick plait. Her features sparkled with a fine sweat, she was anxious, or maybe overheated, and she seemed to be waiting to speak to the man. The hour was late, and exhaustion had made her pale. Both her hands were wrapped shakily around her pint, and after finally taking a cool sip, she asked: “what are you writing, sir?”
The man she had spoken to was sitting in what had been her seat a moment ago. He was bent over what looked like the backside of a letter, and he wrote in studious spirals all over the crinkled white space. His fountain pen made splotches on his thick fist, and his black hair uncoiled from his brow like a piece of ribbon, or tongue.
“The seat you have, sir, it was mine before I got up for my drink.” She tried to be a little louder this time.
He glanced up slowly, and his lurid, hazel eyes were dreamy when they entered the light. “I’m writing about the sea.”
She sat down on the bar stool next to him, her lips hovering at the edge of her glass.
He smiled in approval at his work. “That’s why I’m writing in spirals, that’s how the waves go.”
The ink drops did look grand, she thought, like small rocks crowned in spray. “I lived near to the sea, once.”
“Where? And what name?” His tone was sudden, as if he had just realized something significant.
“It was not England,” she said. “My name is Antoinette. My lover has a name too, even if he doesn’t like it he won’t let me give him a new name.”
The man thought about this, and then moved his elbow off the bar counter to give her more space. He glanced at his letter. “I was given names I don’t like. But you, you Antonietta, you can call me Smith. Someone wrote a poem about me once, and she had the last name Smith.”
“Someone wrote a poem about you?” Antoinette was impressed. She fingered her left wrist, wondering what had happened to the bracelet there that she’d put on that morning. It was a bracelet from her lover, to commemorate the one year anniversary of him saving her from the burning house.
“Well it was really a poem for my Mother. Smith was one of my mother’s friends in debtor’s prison. My mother’s name was Mary.” Smith shook his head sadly. “My mother never was the same after leaving debtor’s prison.”
“Bad things happened to my mother too.” Antoinette frowned. “But that was too long ago. That world no longer exists.”
Smith tapped the piece of paper with his knuckle. “That’s the sea I’m writing about, a specific headland near our farm. I lived on a farm, it was a small farm, and for my whole life. It was taken away when my mother was in prison, but then we got it back again.”
“Where did you go, then? If not with your mother, and your home was taken away?” Antoinette replied anxiously. There had been many times in her life when home was taken, and turned into a bad dream.
Smith bowed his head. “I lived in the caves by the headland. I could see the prison from the headland. Everyone thought I was in prison, but not me. Never was I to be locked up anywhere again.”
Antoinette drank many sips of the cold ale, her weary head felt light as air and the heavy, noisy smoke was making her lungs constrict. She thought of the smoke in the burning house, and Johnny’s stricken face when he caught her. The way he’d said: you must run, now is your only chance, the only one you’ll ever get, he’ll never be made to pay—
“When my mother was free and bought the farm again, she didn’t want me on it. If I came to the gate she’d take up her bow and arrow and chase me to the headland.” He shook his head again in that same, grim, regretting way. “Never was the same, she was. That’s what irons do. They rot your mind, make you selfish.”
“Is that what you’re writing, as well?” Antoinette rested her chin in the heel of her hand and tried to make out his spirally writing, but the words spun and she struggled to focus.
“Oh no, I don’t write about her.” The conversation lulled. The bartender yelled something obscene in a voice that cracked. Someone next to Smith spluttered with rage and a lucky ace card flew off the counter and onto the dirty checked floor.
“You can live at my house. With me and Johnny.” She offered. “Theres always room. My parrot would like you.”
“I don’t like to sleep in one place. I am used to the wandering life.” Smith rubbed his inky, thin hair away from his brow. He appeared deeply troubled for a moment. “I hope you clip your parrot’s wings. It’s easy for a bird to escape in a city like London.”
Antoinette shook her head, a fierce flush coloring her features. “It is bad luck to clip a parrot’s wings. Bad luck.”
“Who is Johnny?” Smith asked, abruptly forgetting the parrots.
“My lover. He used to be a servant.” She laughed. “He is my servant now.”
“You’re rich.”
“I am very poor.” Antoinette blushed. “What I wanted to say is that Johnny’s mother was a madwoman too, like yours. His mother was from a long time ago, though.”
“Did she have a bow and arrow?”
“I don’t know.” She paused. “But, he often tells a story. I can tell it to you.”
Smith nodded. “Does it have the sea?”
“He didn’t live near the sea, there was only a pond, I think. His mother would succumb tp these fits of emotion about her neighbor. She’d become convinced the neighbor was ill, and that she could hear her cries. She’d send Johnny out on the pony in the middle of the night to get a doctor. It was like the story of the little shepherd boy who cried wolf.
“After enough times of being called to find no one ill, the doctor began to hate Johnny and his mother. He would shut the door in their faces. Everyone called Johnny an idiot, when they saw him on the pony under the full moon, they would hoot and howl at him, pretending to be the sick neighbor and trying to spook his horse. Johnny wasn’t an idiot,” Antoinette blinked away tears. “He was just doing what his mother told him. That is what boys should do.”
“You make his life wonderful I am sure.” Smith said, not liking to see her cry.
“He sewed me a red dress.” She was smiling again.
Smith smiled back, then awkwardly looked away.
“You aren’t going to drink anything?”
“No money, not ever.” Smith said softly. “All the thieves…”
“Take one coin for one ale,” Antoinette took out a gold piece from her dress pocket. “Johnny said for you to have it.”
“Johnny knows me?” Smith’s eyes were wide.
“He will when I tell him about you tonight.” Antoinette said plainly.
Smith took the coin, slightly anxious as he fingered it. “You remind me of an angel. Especially with your hair like that. Not many ladies have their hair down like that.”
“Maybe I am an angel, this is England after all and England is just something in a book. This is England, yes?”
“Yes.” Smith nodded, uneasy, “So I’ve thought.”
“You will be a famous writer then, very soon.” Antoinette said, and got up slowly from her seat. “Famous writers aren’t just things in books, either, I’ve decided.”
Smith swallowed hard. “Goodbye Antonietta. I’ll make you the angel in the sea.”
“Don’t write about me without Johnny there.” She said, as she disappeared into the crowd. “And make sure I’m wearing my red dress.”
“I promise.” He said, and turned back to his work.

Reflection

I set my piece at The Jamaica Wine House, where two characters engage in conversation. There is “Smith” who does not share his real name, and is both the solitary wretch from Charlotte Smith’s “Sonnet: On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic”, and the maniac from Mary Robinson’s “The Maniac”. Smith talks with Antoinette, from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. As the two characters talk, we find out Smith is the son of Mary Robinson who (in this story) went to debtor’s prison with her best friend Charlotte Smith, while he, Mary’s “maniac” son stayed out in some caves on the headland that was in view of the prison. We also find out that Antoinette was rescued from a burning mansion (Thornfield Hall), by a servant, Johnny, who it turns out is the boy William Wordsworth writes about in his poem “The Idiot Boy”. Johnny is now grown up and in a relationship with Antoinette. The pub Antoinette and Smith are at is a real historical pub in London, that was frequented by colonial merchants involved in the transatlantic slave trade:

“Every kind of mercantile business was transacted in the Jamaica coffeehouse: from ships and cargoes insurance, to and from the Caribbean, to the buying and selling of commodities by the candle. The Jamaica was a popular coffeehouse among the traders of the city that used its premises also as their business address.” [ Mike Scopa, “Transatlantic slave trade – Jamaica Coffee House in St. Michael’s Alley, Cornhill.”]

I chose this pub as a backdrop for my story, firstly to reference Antoinette’s story of being taken from Jamaica by Mr Rochester in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and secondly to show how so often these stories of mad people in early British Literature are steeped in a culture of racism, and colonial white supremacy that is not always spelled out, but is consistently present as an undertone. In conversation, Antoinette and Smith share their perspectives on the “mad” people in their lives, as well as their own stories, which are represented very differently in the original texts from which their characters were created.
I chose to work with these characters and texts because I was very interested in narrative surrounding madness; who gets to say who is mad, and why someone would call someone else mad. Is it because they are female? Is it because they are poor? Is it because they are showing societally-defined “weaknesses”? Jennifer Roseblade discusses this in her article “From Madness to Mental Health: Etymology and Literature.”

“The concept of “madness” essentially evolved when production and commerce became the new “ethical” mode of operation and when society found a fresh identity with the abundance of labor and profits. In this new type of society, “madness” rendered its victims productionless. Hence, the emergence of madness did not depend on medical study, proper diagnosis or treatments; it was instead based on moral judgment and made confinement a political strategy.” [Roseblade, Jennifer. “From Madness to Mental Health: Etymology and Literature.”]

Madness has been a theme in British literature again and again, as we see in Robinson’s “The Maniac”, and Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy”, but not often do we read literature from that time, written from the mad person’s perspective. There is always that distance, that othering—because the author maybe wouldn’t even dare to write from a mad person’s perspective because they themselves might be seen as mad, and symptoms of madness would exile anyone from that society, as we see in Roseblade’s argument above. If only people wrote from the perspective of these people suffering with something that no one really knew anything about, maybe people would realize how ridiculous it is to segregate people who, for whatever reason, can’t meet those abusive standards that our patriarchal, colonial, and capitalism driven society demand. The fact that all these texts are written looking at the mad person, not from that person’s nuanced perspective, just shows that the madness that is being portrayed is nothing to do with the individual’s experience of their mind and body, but only to do with a lens in which to categorize them in social/political context. Alison R Shimko writes, in her book “Though Troubled Be My Brain: Madness in Early Modern England; “Madness as a lens is significant because it differentiates between madness and sanity.” So in my story, I’m trying to remove this lens, and blurring those boundaries between definitions of madness and sanity, in order to re-humanize characters who I believe were portrayed as harmful stereotypes (such as Robinson’s Maniac), or were given endings that promoted the erasing of the mentally ill (Rhys’s Antoinette).

Works Cited

Shimko, Alison R. “Though Troubled Be My Brain:” Madness in Early Modern England, 1603-1714. Purdue University, 2018, docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3065&context=open_access_dissertations.

Roseblade, Jennifer. “From Madness to Mental Health: Etymology and Literature.”, scalar.chapman.edu/scalar/a-brief-look-at-the-evolution-of-mental-health-treatment- centers/the-entymology-of-and-literature-about-madness.

Scopa, Mike. “Transatlantic slave trade – Jamaica Coffee House in St. Michael’s Alley, Cornhill.” Layers of London, http://www.layersoflondon.org/map/records/transatlantic-slave- trade-jamaica-coffee-house-in-st-michael-s-alley-cornhill.

In-Class Texts Used:
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
William Wordsworth, “The Idiot Boy”
Mary Robinson, “The Maniac”
Charlotte Smith, “Sonnet: On Being Cautioned Against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because It Was Frequented by a Lunatic”