How a Cup of Coffee Changed my Great Grandmother's Life

Mama, grew up on a cocoa estate in Brasso, central Trinidad. Every morning the family would start the day by drinking a calabash cup of black coffee in the yard, between the house and outside kitchen. The beans they used were from the coffee trees they grew on the estate along with oranges and the main crop, cocoa. She was the illegitimate daughter of her Cocoa Panyol mother, Francisca, and the neighbouring Portuguese estate owner’s son. Always a stain of shame on her mother’s family, and rejected by her father, she grew up an outcast in the village. To escape, she married a taxi driver who frequented the area and moved down South to live with him. But he was an abusive alcoholic and although she had five children with him in quick succession, she fled one night on foot with them, after seeing a message in her coffee cup that morning.

My grandmother, the eldest child, remembers this journey vividly as she had to lift her youngest brother at times as they walked through the night. They started off late, after her father had returned home from the rumshop and was passed out drunk on the bed. They walked all night and the roosters on the estate were crowing as they approached the family house. They had to go into hiding in the surrounding forest for a few days, since later that day their father came looking for them with a cutlass in one hand, a bottle of rum in the other, and cursing loudly. Eventually the villagers ran him out and he was never seen again. Mama then took up fortune telling to mind her keep, as she always had the gift of reading people’s future in their coffee dregs.

A couple years later she moved to Port-of-Spain to work in a cloth store, her five children once again in tow. People would come to her from all over the island to have their coffee dregs read. From a small white cupboard above the stovetop, she would take out a brown paper bag with beans from the estate. She would then take a handful and slowly pour them into the coffee grinder in a circular motion and watch them fall like black rosary beads as she muttered prayers to various saints under her breath in Spanish and English, depending on the saint. She would then grind them and light the stove top with a single match. In a small black pot, she would then pour in a cup of water and add the ground coffee, hot it over the fire and bring it to just before a boil. After, she would pour the dark liquid into a white enamel cup with a blue ridge, and let the person sip it in silence at the kitchen table while she prayed her rosary by the window.

Just before they finished their coffee, they would shake the cup in a circular motion and Mama would peer over their shoulder and examine the shape the dregs took. She would then tell them what the future held. She said the coffee helped her to tap into their mind and understand what they were feeling.

This morning as I was finishing my cup of coffee, I looked at the sediments swirling at the bottom of the cup as I gently shook it. I wondered what Mama saw in her coffee that faithful morning to give her the strength to make that long journey in the night with her five young children. Did she see hope for a better life if she fled? Or was it horror at what would happen if she stayed? And as my body slowly left the land of dreams and spirits of the past, I wondered if the time has come to tell her story.