Charles

Houses at Murnau by Vasily Kadinsky

I met Charles on a street in Charlotte Amalie about a week after I arrived in the Virgin Islands with two hundred dollars and no plan. He was Haitian, a contractor, and by the end of the conversation he had pointed me to a structure behind his house. Eight feet by ten, pieced together from boards that had never seen a lumberyard. “You stay there,” he said. “We work first. We figure the rent later.”

The next morning he took me to the dump. The Bovoni landfill, where the island’s discards waited for whatever barge could be made to take them, was where Charles got his lumber, his tile, his fixtures, the brass hinges for the kitchen cabinets in the house he was finishing for a couple from Connecticut who would pay him forty thousand dollars. He worked the piles with recognition. A teak panel from a sailboat. A length of mahogany trim from a Frenchtown renovation. A box of brass cabinet pulls in its original plastic.

He named what he picked up with the reverence of a man teaching a stranger the names of streets and the associated lore in his hometown. “You don’t need Home Depot where we come from,” he said day after day as a wry mantra. I love that Charles and I became a we.

Charles’ mantra pointed to a perceptual error that was so foundational to my thinking that I need needed someone brilliant like him to wake me from my cognitive slumber. Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger, defined dirt as matter out of place. Discard is an inverse operation: matter that has been put out of place by the perceiver, then mistaken for matter that is out of place by nature. The Bovoni landfill was full of teak and mahogany and brass because the previous owners had stopped seeing them; the materials themselves had not aged into uselessness, had lost no part of what they were. Charles had simply declined to perform the misperception. For him the lumberyard and the dump were the same room, distinguishable only by which one the rest of the island had agreed to enter.

Years later, I listen to people describe their own histories the way tourists described renovation debris, as material that had passed its moment and now belonged on a barge to somewhere else. The barge does not come. What is in front of you, looked at, is teak.

The shack I lived in is gone, a hurricane Maria took it a few months after I left, but this sentence remains. I rebuild from what is in front of me; the material is teak.