That’s why I’m here. Why all these young girls, mothers and grandmothers are here, I’m sure.
“Find your own place, find it clearly before a war, like a child’s game, don’t let it disturb your sleep.” Mother’s words.
It’s my common cause, because life is like a beautiful net in the middle of which we swirl around. To find one’s place. That’s why we sing in unison, whatever our differences.
I sing. It is balm to my heart. I don’t remember the last time I sang. I forget, indeed, that I can sing loudly, provided I have the strength to not see the chaos that surrounds me. This chaos that constantly brings me back to the harsh realities of the moment.
Pots, calabashes, wooden spatulas and other improvised instruments enter the dance to accompany the songs and slogans disseminated by loudspeakers. Then the music becomes thunderous. And the first shots, crossing the hubbub at its peak, break the joyful atmosphere. No one knows where this deafening noise comes from, accompanied by an infernal stench.
The head of the procession was sprayed with tear gas. It reminds me of the years when all schools, in full uproar, went down the streets. This time, it is women, out of nowhere, who move the streets. But the method of punishment for the unruly does not change, from one year to the other. In this world, no peaceful march is acceptable. The tear-gas bomb is the first response, heralding the imminent arrival of lethal weapons.
Some wounded fall. There’s a stampede on the road where the speakers take time to shut up. To hold on, my heart must cling firmly to life. No one is immune from a heart attack. A few of the zealous continue chanting slogans to the rhythm of gunfire and bursts from sub-machine-guns. The group eventually breaks up. This is the unplanned end of the rally that has not reached the party stage. It’s a missed celebration that ends in a fishtail, in total confusion.
Journalists arrive and film some scenes of violence. Women have the courage to speak between shots, cries and tears. A trellised shadow passes before my eyes. I’m already on the pavement on the other side. I run as fast as I can. I wander for a good part of the morning. Issa, who has felt nothing of the unfolding drama because he was sleeping peacefully, wakes up. He brings me back to reality. He wants to know where he is, if he can play on the floor, if he can crawl on all-fours and stretch his legs as he has learned to do in recent weeks. But it’s too late. I keep him on the bed of my back while he gesticulates. The area is cordoned off and I don’t know where to go.
Beverley Bryan
Jamaica-born, she migrated to England as a child to join her parents—a part of the “Windrush generation”. She was a member of the British Black Panthers in the early 1970s, and later helped found the Black Women’s Group and Organisation of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), which shared similar radical views. With Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe she co-authored The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (1985), which won the Martin Luther King Prize. In 1992, she returned to Jamaica to join the University of the West Indies (UWI) as a lecturer in educational studies, eventually becoming Professor of Language Education. She has been a consultant on language and literacy policies to the Jamaican Ministry of Education and other Caribbean governments, as well as serving as a member of the United Nations Literacy Decade Experts’ Group. She was also the Caribbean Coordinator of the Caribbean Poetry Project, a collaboration between UWI and the University of Cambridge that worked to increase the visibility of Caribbean writers in the UK.
A Windrush Story
The night before Marva left for England she had a strange dream. In the night’s eye she dreamt of birds flying, and from her own bed, she saw herself dip and flow over a crystal quivering blue-green sea. As she moved high and soared against the sharpening air, all fears and doubts about the path ahead sloughed from her. Here and now, she was supreme, no longer an anxious and confused twelve-year-old. Suddenly a cloud, imagined, flitted . . . The hawk hovered, and the slowly flapping wings cast a long shadow that seemed to blot out the sun. The knowledge that she was only dreaming stilled her fears so that she could calmly assess this new danger. Such tranquillity filled her sleeping self with wonder. Even as the hawk stiffened, and its body swerved ready to swoop, another distant voice emerged:
“Kwik! Kwik! Chickin ’awk wi get yu!”
She jumped and fell to the floor. Her little cousins, Delcy and Loris, continued to sleep peacefully on the bed above; no one else in the house had been disturbed. The only sounds that she heard were the competing choirs of crickets and tree frogs. Wanting nothing to disturb her further, to remind her of the journey tomorrow, she concentrated on the night-time chorus and slipped into a, now, dreamless sleep.
That morning, she overslept but was shaken out of her slumbers by Delcy and Loris playing noisily over her grandmother’s insistent voice:
“Marva, is how yu stay so late? No mek mi haffi trow some liks pan yu tail.”
With Mammie’s presence, the fears and shadow of the night returned, and yet Mammie was sounding as though this was just an ordinary departure. Not that after losing her husband, she was also about to lose her eldest grandchild and be left with five younger ones to manage until it was their turn to be “sent for”. But Marva, who knew the whole truth, simply said:
“Yes, Mammie, a hear yu.”
She took in the straight back, with one hip hunched high under the folds of the long, faded dress. Again, the tightness in Marva’s chest and an urge to confirm the knowledge that burdened her, that made the prospect of leaving so overwhelming.
It went back to the conversation she overheard as she rested by the concrete stilts that raised the front of the house, quietly mourning the death of her grandfather. Reverend Matthews’ voice had come drifting down:
“It’s a great shame she has to leave, Madda Cole . . . so soon after . . . Tings moving faas in England, but couldn’t the bigger one stay back? You don’t know when . . .”
Mammie’s voice came back sharp but heavy: “No, Reverend! Is di laas chance Lucille have. Marva have to go. Jackson know how tings stay . . . keep Lucille mind fram it. The Lord will provide.”
And so shadows came and lengthened like the hawk. Part of her wanted to go—not to carry water from the stand pipe again; to use toothpaste and soap all the time and not just when parcels came. But most of all to see her parents after nine years: to have those hazy faces become solid and real.
And now Marva turned and faced her grandmother. The eyes grown grey and glazed with age gave nothing away except the bustling activity that drove her.
“Chile, don’t dawgle. Ready yuself.”
The morning Marva left, all the leading figures of Priestman’s River came with their last-minute messages for family in England, as was the custom. Among them, Teacher Parker came with a letter for his brother, who had hardly been heard of since he gave up his farming lands at Pampey Gate. Reverend Matthews came and gave his customary Bible. Then came Gaddy Beck inspecting the going-away outfit, the puff-sleeved, two-streamer dress she made for every child in the district who left for foreign lands. Mammie received them, dressed in her best dark-rose pink crepe, conversing with Gaddy Beck, who would watch the children until she came back from the airport.
Then in the distance the horns of the bus, Carlton Express, growing louder as it shuddered to a halt on the grass verge. All was pandemonium. But Mammie mounted the bus slowly and the other passengers made way for her progress.
Marva looked out of the window to her young cousins, who were now beginning to understand the finality of the occasion. As the bus geared up they began to sniffle—Loris, Nordal, Hugh, and Delcy lifting baby Errol. And when it swerved off, belching smoke, Nordal and Hugh ran behind, waving desolately.
Marva stored that memory and added the passing scenes of grey stone walls, topped by the golden love bush and the pastures that reached out to the variegated blue horizon of sea. On and on, through districts she hardly knew—past Fair Prospect, to Manchioneal, and then to sleep.
It was not until they
reached Town that she woke with a start to the frenzied orchestra of horns tooting as voices swirled around. Mammie moved slowly down the steps of the bus, ignoring the vendors, but making sure a side-boy was there to help with the case across the busy road to the next bus. This much grander vehicle moved smoothly and swiftly out of the flat peninsular landscape to PALISADOES AIRPORT, signalled on the bare, square building ahead. Once inside the airport reception area, Mammie left her, while she went to process the travel papers. Marva felt a kind of anticipation over-riding fear and dread. This was heightened when Mammie came back with a lady exquisitely dressed in a lemon two-piece suit, white gloves and cloche hat with a small veil.
“Marva, Miss Clover here will go wid yu—tek yu to Lucille. She will be at airport.” Miss Clover was a church sister from Hope Bay leaving domestic servitude to join her children’s father before she too could send for them. Like her fashion, she was bright, airy and talkative:
“Hello, Miss Marva. We’ll soon leave. Ai, ai, no cardigan?! Inglan soo soo cold.” She stopped when she found her answer: “Yu madda will bring sumting to airport.”
Mammie hovered, because now this was it.
Trepidation, longing, dread: everything came to Marva, feeling her grandmother’s softness for the last time: “A wi. . . . wi come back soon. Soon, soon, Mammie.”
“Yes, mi chile.” Mammie looked at her sadly, steadfastly: “A so it mus go, Marva. Mi wi manage . . . Gawd bless. . . .” Her voice began to falter. “Jus don’t figet yu Mammie.”
Her voice told Marva she was ready to accept her future, as she wanted her grandchild to accept hers.
There Marva stood, the young girl starting her life, facing the old woman maybe ending hers. They didn’t need to say anything because both had silently acknowledged what they knew. The tears simply slipped silently down and on to her arm.
All Marva could manage was: “A wi come back soon . . .”
The night before Marva came to England, Lucille could not sleep. The anticipation and dread for her daughter were too much. She left her husband to sleep off the tiredness of a ten-hour shift cleaning railway tracks. Her six months of pregnancy made it hard to rest, especially with the continuing nausea and the news of her mother’s illness. Jackson had not managed to keep it from her. Long after the passage was booked, she had accidentally found Mammie’s letter to him, carelessly tucked behind the family portrait photo. So now Marva was on her way. Lucille pulled herself heavily out of bed and to the kitchen, trying not to wake the tenants in the house. She took the packet of tea from the blue locker and measured out the spoonful needed for her brew. As she stirred, she went back over all the plans for the future that had led them to this moment.
When news had spread that England was a place you could go to get more than farm work, it was just a matter of saving the money bit by bit, with help from Brother Freddie, who went first, and Jackson with his post-office job and a little farming. And they came and worked on the railway, the buses, the hospitals and in factories—glad of the opportunity to work and send for the next one. Now the British Government seemed determined to keep out Jamaica people. All the talk of “vouchers” and fresh papers had made them realise they had to do something to get their child to them.
Sending for Marva was not a hard decision. Even now with news of her mother, it seemed clear that maybe this was the last chance. The alternative made Lucille shudder. After all the insults, the rudeness and the one-roomed living—now mercifully over, with the house in Clapham—to swallow all that battering in the cold, and then return with nothing but more children? People would just look and laugh, wondering what happen to the big house England people say they were coming back to build.
No, things would get better. Once she had the baby, she would be back in the factory. Marva would be able to help a little. Lucille smiled, thinking of the daughter she had left nine years ago. How would she know her? She had no photograph. How big was she? Would the cardigan she was taking to the airport fit?
Then she heard Edith, her friend and best tenant, coming in from her night shift on the railway. Edith would look after the boys while she and Jackson went to the airport. Edith’s brother had sent the money for her and then her gentleman Joe had sold his land, borrowed his mother’s savings and taken the boat with Lucille. Edith and Joe still had no children, but she heard them every night busy trying. With Jackson awake now, she bathed in the cold bathroom with the sluggish geezer—happy still that it was theirs and that there was no one to rap impatiently and hurry her along in her heavy pregnant state.
A sharp knock on the front door told her that her brother Freddie was here ready for the airport. He was the first in the family to reach England, the one who sent for her and allowed her to send for Jackson. Now she hurried, not wanting him to find something to complain about, but also eager for what was to come. As she reached the front-room door, she heard Jackson’s final words: “. . . not when she pregnant.” Then she knew that Freddie and Jackson shared the truth but decided today would not be the day for the reckoning of her anger: it was her daughter’s day and she needed her strength to meet her. Instead, Lucille turned back to Edith and the instructions for her still sleeping sons.
By the time they reached the airport in Freddie’s new saloon, Lucille’s spirits were lifted. They joined the other Jamaicans waiting for passengers. Freddie hailed a few who were past tenants of his. The minutes stretched on, until a burst of activity told them the arrivals were coming through. The colour and the warmth of those clothes further lifted Lucille. She scanned the crowd expectantly. Then she saw the woman in the two-piece lemon suit holding the hand of a serious-looking young girl who wore a familiar dark pink dress. Miss Clover brought her to Lucille, who rested her hands on each shoulder:
“Marva, let me look at you good.”
The girl was thin and straight but not too unhealthy. Thank you, Mammie. Aloud: “You looking well. The cardigan jus about fit. By the way, how she stay?”
Lucille saw her daughter’s face in tortuous movement and pulled her close:
“Is alright, Marva. A know. A know . . . Me an yu father will mek it up to yu.”
Marva hugged that promise for the future: “Yes, Mamma.”
It was enough for the time being—to feel the shadows lifting and fading:
“Yes, mi chile, mek wi go.”
And then out together, towards the chill air. And home to the newly arrived telegram from Gaddy Beck, lying patiently on the table, waiting their return.
Angela Cobbinah
A UK journalist of many years’ experience, she started her career with the North London Press and went on to become a founder member of the independently owned Camden New Journal. Her interest in Africa led her to work for Concord magazine in Nigeria as a features writer during the days of military rule and, on her return to England, for a wide range of African publications. She then joined the BBC World Service, before becoming a production editor and reporter-at-large of News Africa magazine, which saw her re-visit West Africa. In 2007 she became co-editor of Black History 365, an award-winning magazine that was both a response and a challenge to Black History Month. She now works as a freelance writer and editor and is features contributor to the Camden New Journal, Islington Tribune and West End Extra stable of newspapers, with an interest in local history, the arts, health and housing. She is also production editor of Africa Briefing magazine. She lives in London and has two children and three grandchildren.
Black Tracking
I was sixteen when I first spoke to a black person. By this I do not mean the two other black kids who attended my school, as we spent all of our time avoiding each other, and I don’t mean the Pakistani boy, who was fostered by a local family one summer and kept on being referred to as my “long-lost brother”.
When I tell you that I grew up in Cornwall, you’ll understand. Even now it seems one of the whitest places on earth. As the only black girl in the village, my isolation was made worse by the fact that my moth
er was Hungarian, so obviously different that she might as well have come from another planet, too. Sure, I had friends but while they were preoccupied with boys and clothes and reading the latest Jackie, I was trying to work out my place in a world that had just been rocked by the black power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games. I watched that, and I watched the funeral of Martin Luther King, and I felt an unfamiliar emotion. Call it connection or kinship, or the bubbling of a youthful rebelliousness, it was something I knew I could not talk about with anyone else.
My father, Jimmy, was from Ghana and had been sent to England to study public administration in the 1950s, one of a select group of people being prepared to take over the reins of government come Independence. Once he completed his course, he had to return home to take up a job. I was three months old. My mother, a midwife who had settled in Britain after the war, declined to go back with him as there was the not inconsiderable problem that he already had a wife and four kids. Their parting broke my mother’s heart, but she never had a bad word to say about him and always called me Korkoh, my Ghanaian grandmother’s name.
He kept in touch until I was eight. I still have that last telegram he sent me from Tarkwa, the mining town in which he lived: “Many Happy Returns, Korkoh, love Daddy”. One day my mother saw a picture of a pathetic group of political prisoners in the Sunday Express, victims, it claimed, of “African dictator” Kwame Nkrumah. My mother swore that Dad was one of the prisoners and that was why we no longer heard from him. She placed the cutting in a drawer and occasionally would take it out and gaze at it sadly. I would not find out whether she was correct until many years later but for now all I had for a father was his smiling photograph on the front-room wall and my mother’s fond memories of him.
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