Home for the Hummingbird

Pat Ganase

Hummingbird. Josephine Baker. Marilyn Monroe. Washerwoman.

One performer has inhabited these iconic Trinidad Carnival roles in ways that will never be forgotten. Whatever was going on in her life, whatever might have been falling apart, she put on the costumes, came into character and created the magic that the moment demanded. Who has not heard the name Sherry Ann Guy and been awed by her Carnival presence.

This slip of a girl was a born performer, lithe and athletic, strong enough to carry heavy wings or backpacks, stoic to carry the smile of a Marilyn Monroe or ravaged Washerwoman. She learned to walk on stilts four or five feet off the ground for the Maco Jumbie in Santimanitay. “Fo’ day mornin’ in the Savannah; I learned to get up, fall down and get up, and balance a wing/ fan and long fingernails.”

Guy may have had problems reading and writing – she was diagnosed as dyslexic – but she lit up on stage. A sapphire exploding is how she was described after her first appearance as the Hummingbird (1974).

She had been schooled and choreographed, now a flagwoman now a bele queen now a hovering hummingbird. “When I won Individual of the Year, we had to have a band for the Parade of Bands; we got rum bottles with water, we got iron; T-shirts with the hummingbird image, we were a small band.”

She had been the vamp Josephine Baker, though just 11 at the time. It was, Sherry says, Peter Minshall’s tribute to coloured women in the Folies Bergere: “I had to be padded for boobs – Jean (Minshall) said you are giving her too much, reduce the padding.” It was a role she reprised ten years later, playing Marilyn Monroe as the butterfly Fly Fly Sweet Life.

She learned the traditional sailor dance for the Phoenix that was I have seen the bird of Paradise. “I used to swim a lot, play hockey and I was small so my weight and height had to be constantly checked to carry a backpack.”

In 1978, she was Phases of the Moon in Minshall’s band Zodiac. At 18, she applied and got the job as flight attendant with TTAS. When TTAS merged with BWIA (1980), the last hired were first out.

In 1979, she embodied a shimmering Splash in his Carnival of the Sea. She thought the young man she met looked like Michael Knight from Knight Rider. He was as young as she. In those days, you got pregnant, you had to get married. But he was not what she expected; and she was not what he thought either. Her son was born in 1980.

In 1981, the young couple were among the lucky homeowners in the first HDC housing scheme in Arima. When the marriage was finally dissolved five years later, the husband took the son to Canada. When she could not afford to continue to live in Arima, she applied for and was promised a two-bedroom apartment in Port of Spain.

It was Christmas 1986, and as a kindness, she was accommodated in a ground floor bedsitter at Charford Court on Charlotte Street with the expectation that within months she would have a two-bedroom apartment from the HDC. Then the person who was handling her case died.

Within a few months in 1987, her ground floor bedsitter seemed to be leaking from everywhere. The room – a bedsitter is one big room with plumbing in one corner that facilitates bath and toilet and kitchen sink – has been subject to underground seepage. The floor tiles have lifted and moisture along the walls grows mould and mildew. It is not a healthy space. Since then, she has been appealing to the HDC to move her to the two-bedroom apartment that was promised.

Notwithstanding the discomfort of her home arrangements, life continued. She always worked – in a grocery, a spa, a tea factory, a casino, warehouse, housekeeper – and took care of her health.

The first time that a two-bedroom was offered by the HDC was in February this year. It was in San Fernando. She went to look at it, resigned herself to move from the places where she grew up, and paid the deposit. When she returned expecting to receive keys, she was told “we don’t know when the work will finish, we have no materials.”

Since then she has reverted to her request for a two-bedroom apartment in Port of Spain. She could finish it herself if necessary but “I don’t know anyone in San Fernando.” She is not averse to work – “I would pack shelves, clean a house.” In her forthright manner, she calls a spade a spade and is determined but patient. Some people might see in her Jean Minshall who was the only mother she knew.

For all the rough treatment that life has dealt her, she is persistent and philosophical throwing everything in the hands of her God. Fifty years since Hummingbird, 60-year-old Guy says that time has passed quickly but she won’t give up.

“All I want now is a clean two-bedroom apartment in Port of Spain that I can make home.”