The dress code was Ernest Hemingway meets Wide Sargasso Sea. With the help of friends, I baked my great grandmother’s recipe for Achee Quiche. The rest of the food I don’t quite remember. But the dessert I’ll never forget. Another family recipe, my grandmother’s Coconut Jello. So good…I believe more than one song was written about it that night.
Around the table we wrote and recited exquisite corpse poetry, laughed and drank rum.
In the drawing room, amidst the glow of candle light, I sang folk songs from Cayman Islands with Aunt Julia Hydes picture an altar at the front of my keyboard.
I told the tale of the cassava cake, the tiger, monkey and anansi.
“It was raining…heavy the rain come down. Anansi, sat in his window…”
We jiggled coconut jello in our mouths and that night in the midnight hours, I sang about your guava eyes and Talia weaved rhyme with me.
The next day we filmed in the after glow of a glorious tropical and the scent of ripe fruit.
“Split me open…with devotion”