There were two Julie mango trees at 1 Scott Bushe Street, the house where I was born one Sunday morning, my father hustling home from 6.30 Mass at Sacred Heart Church, just three blocks away up Charles Street, to find me screaming my head off.
Next door, the Ferreiras, where Dixieland, the double second and the double-tenor were born, Portuguese genius improbably leading the way, but what is impos- sible in this country of ours, where Chinese, East Indian, African, European, Middle Eastern and other genes are all mixed up, so that most times one is unable to say who is who and what is what, next door there was another Julie mango tree, its branches overhanging our balcony so that at times it was possible to reach out over the balustrade, sometimes with an uncle or cousin holding on to your shirt to prevent you falling onto the galvanized fence separating the two properties, and pluck a full, rosy-cheeked Julie, the fruit coming away easily, detaching itself "jess so" from the stem, evidence that the tree was ready to give up its produce. I grew up surrounded by aunties, before they died of tuberculosis, uncles, cousins and Julie mango trees.
Both trees, the one at the back of the house, where Marmaduke the giant lizard lived, and the smaller, at the side facing the park on Wrightson Road, always seemed to have mangoes. There was no mango season for me and it was years before I realised that some people did not eat mangoes any time they wanted. The bigger mango tree was so prolific and well known in the neighbourhood that my uncles and their three-hole friends let loose the suggestion that there was a body buried under the tree which gave it some of its fertility and at nights as I sat on the high back steps and looked over the darkened yard it was easy for a small boy to believe in ghosts of murders past haunting my back yard. I learned to climb trees in that backyard Julie tree. Once you knew the way up, it was easy-pickings and I had a particular route up one side of the tree and would rapidly disappear up there whenever I did not want to be sent to Affee Koo by my mother to buy bread or flour or a shilling Anchor cigarette for my uncles.
The time when my father kept turkeys in the backyard made it particularly challenging for a small boy to climb. You had to bide your time and wait for the swollen-up male turkey to move away from his favourite spot under the tree and then make a mad dash from the safety of the back steps and scramble up the trunk, which fortunately divided in two just a few feet up, but many a time my heels barely escaped the outraged fellow. Getting down and back was another scene. In the meantime the tree was your home, your lunch, your pirate ship (from the top you could just see the masts of the ships anchored at the nearby port), your World War I airplane (Biggles was a big reading favourite), and your danger. I never fell but a cousin of mine, whose name shall go unmentioned, did and broke his fore-arm.
I watched in astonishment as the big fellow (and he's bigger now), walked his way out onto a small limb about ten feet above the ground and attempted to reach a particularly full-cheeked specimen by holding onto a twig, lost his balance and fell onto his hand. The mango remained on the tree until the bird-god came one early morning and ate out a side and my cousin remained in a cast for weeks. In fact the last time I saw him he was still in a cast. Julie mangoes have been called the queen of mangoes. For me it is the emperor of fruits and I have eaten ripe peaches and pears and figs and cherries and strawberries directly from their trees and tasted pineapple-flavoured Jackfruit, the foul smelling Durian, known as the king of fruits in southeast Asia and even the mamey-apple deliciousness of Persimmon.
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None come near the sweetness of a juicy Julie. But mango is not Julie alone. There are a reported 64 types of mangoes in T&T and some of the names roll easily off the lips, assisted by various calypsoes: mango rose, mango vere (the dollies of the past), calabash, dou doux, starch, the oddly named suce-ma-tante or "suck meh aunt," zabico, and graham. One of the West Indian Readers, I think, had a story of a little English boy who was taught to eat mangoes in Trinidad with a knife and fork and he did so until he met a little local girl, a native, as we were called then and still are sometimes by American bishops, who taught him that the only way to eat mangoes was, as it was delicately put, "in the bath." Jolly good. I wonder what else she taught him.