Chapter 99
The mango tree was ten years old when Marcus was seventy. It had reached a height that provided genuine shade in the afternoon, which was when the yard most needed it, The third branch was fully formed. He turned seventy at home. Not a large gathering he was not, had never been, a person who required large gatherings for his own occasions. Nia made the meal. Elise and Joseph and their families came. Leroy and Sandra came.
In his Last Classroom he taught his last university module at seventy-one. He did not announce it in advance. He taught the module Language, Identity, and the Classroom with the same full attention he had brought to every module for eight years. At the end of the final session, he told the students , What He Said in his Last Class
He had prepared what he wanted to say. He had revised it. In the end he put the notes away and said what came, which was what he had always been trying to teach them to do. He was a archive in his seventy-first year, Marcus donated his professional archive to the University of the West Indies library: the original Kingston Voices Project documents, his correspondence from thirty years of public work, the annotated manuscripts of his four books, and his teaching journals , Elise's second child was born in Marcus's seventy-second year a girl, small and alert from the first hour, with Elise's precision of attention and something entirely new that was entirely herself.
Nia retired from active practice at sixty-eight, transferring her firm to three of her senior associates all of whom she had trained over fifteen years with the specificity of someone who understood that the work would continue past her and wanted it continued properly. There was a particular quality to the Kingston garden in November the light different from August, the green things different, the air carrying something that was not quite cool but was less entirely hot, Marcus noticed it in the mornings when he ran, and had been noticing it every November for fifty years.