I kept thinking to myself, “Now imagine, here I am dead and on my way to heaven in a minibus while this man drives recklessly with total disregard for the safety of the motoring public. Next thing you know he’s going to cross Flat Bridge at an unsafe rate of speed and plunge into the river and drown everybody aboard, adding to de ole negar duppy population!”
Because he could see that I disapproved of this reckless driving, Hopeton leaned over from the cramped backseat where he was perched on the lap of a pretty brown woman who smelled of khus-khus perfume and asked if I would like him to administer a dose of duppy discipline to the driver.
I said that would make me very happy.
He reached over the seat and plunged his unwashed duppy hand straight into the driver’s potbelly, twisting and turning with grunts of concentration while he tried to get a good grip on the man’s gut. “Rass man eat too much pork rind,” he griped. “Make him gut slippery.”
Finally, after much maneuvering and squirming, Hopeton managed to pinch the colon, causing the driver to hiss a sudden, “Hi!” through his teeth.
Another tweak of duppy fingers and the driver winced and bellowed, “Whoa! I catch a stitch in my belly!”
Distracted by the stabbing pain in his colon, he slowed down to the speed limit and observed all traffic signs and appropriate cautions for the remainder of the trip. Hopeton withdrew his hand out of the man’s belly and sucked air happily between his duppy teeth.
I thanked him for applying the needful discipline to an unruly driver and we drove on in silence, the roar of the engine blasting in our ears while I thought ruefully about all the money I had wasted during my lifetime on milk of magnesia and Epsom salts.
Yet I could well imagine how people would laugh in my face if I came back and wrote that Jamaican bellyache was caused by duppy gripping you colon, and that the best thing you could do for it was to eat plenty pork rind to make your colon slippery to duppy grip.
They’d laugh so hard they’d pop.
Chapter 5
With our driver now practicing motor vehicle courtesy and observing all road signs and applicable speed limits, our minibus ride on the Spanish Town Highway was cramped but uneventful.
As we neared our destination, Hopeton leaned over the front seat and whispered instructions into the ear of the driver, causing him to brake to a halt at the roadside shoulder next to the old Ferry Inn.
Hopeton signalled me to follow him out, which I did, climbing though the kneebones of bewildered passengers who looked around to see why the driver had stopped when none of them had asked to be let out and no one was waiting for a bus.
“Why you stop, driver?” croaked an old woman who was sandwiched miserably between two sweaty men in the backseat.
“I stop ’cause I feel to stop!” the man barked, turning around to glare at the multitudes crammed mutely behind him.
He stuck his head out the window, drew a cantankerous breath of canepiece breeze, smacked his lips, and bawled to the world at large, “Now I driving off ’cause I feel to drive off!”
With that he revved the engine and roared away, but only after giving the appropriate signal with his indicator and looking both ways to ensure that it was safe to merge into the flow of traffic.
Hopeton slid down the embankment and strode off purposefully toward a canefield, warning me over his shoulder to please follow him closely.
It was a hot and dusty midmorning. We pushed into the thick cane growth and glided harmlessly through the sharp leaves. In the distance the Blue Mountain range was crumpled and pleated in purple shadows against the skyline. Overhead a John Crow unwound on a breeze.
I am a man who has always appreciated nature and valued local beautification programs, and even on my way to heaven I took note of my surroundings. Butu, on the other hand, don’t know bauble from bangle and bead.
We plodded past a cane cutter who was panting and sweating in the hot sun as he thinned out the stalks with a machete. Instinctively I said, “Good morning, sah!” which drew an amused chuckle from Hopeton along with a reminder that I was dead.
After walking a good distance we came to a rutted marl road and were about to cross when out of the canepiece oozed a fatty woman dressed in black and trailed by a harassed-looking guide with whom she had evidently been quarrelling. Hopeton yelled to the man, who answered eagerly and trotted over, both of them looking as pleased as higglers meeting up in the Miami airport.
“You catch one!” Hopeton exclaimed, shaking the man’s hand.
“Catch one?” the woman bellowed roughly. “Please do not talk about me as if I’m a fish! Have some respect. I only just dead!”
“She miserable no rass,” the man sighed to Hopeton out of his mouth corner. “And she say she not crawling through no damn culvert. I always get de troublesome ones.”
“Troublesome ones?” Hopeton whispered. “You don’t know troublesome yet. I had one man from St. Mary last week who tried to shoot me!”
“Go ’way! You too lie!”
With the two duppy guides talking shop and swapping stories at the fringe of the canepiece, I edged over to the woman and bade her a good morning.
“I just dead,” she said crossly. “Nothing good ’bout dis morning!”
“Well, I just dead meself. But now we on we way to heaven, thanks be.”
“Heaven! Through a culvert? What kind o’ heaven is dat?”
I tried to ease her fears but she would not be satisfied. She raved about being chucked on a minibus like she was a crocus bag of yam.
“Did you travel on a minibus, too, or did you get to ride in a proper fiery chariot?” she asked suspiciously.
I assured her that I, too, had suffered the indignity of minibus transport, although my duppy had been good enough, at my request, to impose discipline on its driver.
“You see dat!” she boomed indignantly to her guide. “His driver was disciplined! But I had to ride with an indisciplined driver! Why Jamaicans must practice favoritism even after dey’re dead, eh?”
Her guide had no answer to this inquiry, but merely glanced nervously over at her.
I invited the woman to sit down on the embankment and tell me about herself.
She snorted that dirty Jamaican soil had not come in direct contact with her law-abiding batty for well over a quartercentury and she didn’t intend to give it the chance now just because she happened to be dead.
However, after much fuming and fussing she grudgingly told me her story.
She said that she was a decent churchgoing woman from Portland with no criminal record whatsoever, a homeowner with a substantial bank account, if it was any of my business; that this morning she had gotten up intending to attend church service—being an Adventist—and had just put on her finest frock when pain lick her in her belly and she keeled over dead. Next thing she knew, she said, there was this impertinent boy telling her she must ride a minibus at her age and crawl through a culvert to reach heaven. She said grimly that she had almost made up her mind not to go anywhere with the wretch, but he sweetmouthed her and begged her to follow him, which was how she found herself traipsing through a canepiece in the broiling sun when she could have been haunting various and sundry wretches in her parish and wreaking duppy revenge.
Finished with her story, she harrumphed crossly and began fanning herself with a kerchief.
“Hopeton say duppy can’t feel heat,” I remarked, staring at her makeshift fan.
“Stop calling me duppy! Me name is Eugenia Jones. I have me green card to America, and God only know why I didn’t use it when I had de chance! I’d be sailing down a lighted tunnel right now instead of stomping through a stinking canepiece.”
“We must make de best of things. Negativity can’t help our common cause.”
“Me and you have no common cause, sah! Is only dat we happen to dead together.”
I shrugged and settled down on the embankment.
“How much longer you going keep decent people waiting in de hot
sun?” she bellowed at the chatting guides, whereupon they immediately scurried to our side and we resumed our trek through the canefield.
We walked for another twenty minutes or so until we came to the dried-up watercourse of a straggly gully, which the guides clambered down briskly, drawing a protesting squawk from Eugenia, who had to be coaxed down it like a sore-foot heifer.
We resumed our walk in the blazing sun, marching down the gully mouth with no crunch underfoot and leaving no footprints in our wake. The sun beat down on us but drew no sweat.
“It look like duppy never need deodorant,” I remarked for the sake of conversation.
“I can certainly smell you!” the cantankerous woman declared.
I was going to answer her but I exhorted myself, “Baps, don’t let ole negar spoil you journey to de Heavenly Kingdom!”
So I held my peace and trudged at the rear of the group, taking my mark on the heifer rump that swayed and rocked ahead of me and threatened, with every twist and bend, to plug up the narrow gully mouth.
Half an hour of grim, speechless walking and we came to the culvert.
Milling about this most abandoned and unlikely spot for a portal to heaven were recently dead souls and their spirit guides, and a scattershot queue with neither discipline nor geometry to recommend it unravelled all over the canepiece. Men and women and a few children slouched and slumped in this line, energetically chatting.
Children darted in and out of the cane, romping and playing hide-and-seek, and a few of the more venturesome ones, who had just mastered the art of duppy flying, filled the skies overhead, provoking the queued-up adults with swooping, squealing dives as they playfully tried to knock the hats off the heads of the ducking women.
“Mind you fall, children!” one old woman was periodically bellowing at the dive-bombing kids, who shrieked with joy as they skimmed the canepiece and plunged recklessly near the ground, swishing past the bobbing heads of the adults, some of whom swatted at them as they would at mosquitoes.
“Why you don’t try and fly, too?” a woman teased another ahead of her in the line. The other kissed her teeth with contempt and replied tartly that just because she was dead was no reason for a decent woman to behave like a common bush bird.
From the general hubbub around me I overheard nearly universal criticism of the culvert, with many among the women griping that crawling through a drainpipe was bound to dirty up their frocks and make them enter heaven looking like street urchins. One woman gloated smugly about how glad she was that she had been wearing only a pair of old dungarees when she had been run over by a gravel truck, that she would have been very put out if she had to crawl through a culvert in her good frock.
Another fervently declared that she was grateful to God for allowing a gunman to shoot her down outside the beauty salon after she’d just gotten a perm, for at least her hair looked its best for entering heaven.
“Why did I have to dead first thing in de morning?” another woman carped. “Why I couldn’t dead after I’d washed my face and combed my hair?”
Behind her stood an elderly dignified gentleman who grinned at the antics of the swooping children while listening with amusement to the grumbling women.
When one woman demanded to know what he found so funny, the old man murmured that after years of being bedridden with rheumatism and finding himself now able to walk without pain, he didn’t care if he had to jump down the mouth of a pit toilet to get into heaven.
Even though we were all stone dead, there was such festivity and jubilation in the air, such a splatter of laughter and squeals combined with the shrieks of the romping children, that the canepiece rang with the excitement and babble of a duppy jamboree.
The line sputtered slowly forward as one by one the dead entered the culvert with their guides and disappeared, and soon I had inched up to the moment when it would be my turn.
A swirl of peering bodies surrounded the entrance to the culvert as some duppies became fainthearted at the last second and refused to take the crawl. They were huddled aside with their guides, who earnestly inveigled with them.
Standing stubbornly apart from the crowd was a woman with a parasol, who was shaking her head adamantly at her imploring guide. She was not crawling into no culvert, she blared. For all she knew, these so-called guides were demons funnelling them into hell. She bawled that from where she stood she definitely smelled brimstone coming from the culvert, which pronouncement caused a gasp of alarm from those near the head of the line.
A woman turned to me and worriedly asked if I smelled brimstone.
I sniffed the air carefully and said that I did not. Eugenia, however, began squealing at the top of her lungs, “Yes, is true! Dis culvert definitely smell of brimstone!”
Emitting a mass squeal of fear, the coiling head of the line shrank from the mouth of the culvert as if whipped by a blast of breeze.
“Dere is no brimstone smell!” a guide yelled over the noise of the fearful crowd. “De lady is mistaken! Dere is no hell!”
“Me don’t trust no negar duppy,” another woman declared grumpily.
“Please, you holding up de line!” a third guide cried over the confusion.
“I not crawling into hell, sah!” the woman who said she-smelled brimstone declared. “I staying right here in Jamaica.”
With that she hoisted her parasol and set sail across the canepiece with her guide trundling after her, begging her to reconsider.
“People, hear me!” bellowed a guide, who seemed to be the headman. “If you walk ’way like dat woman, you going roam Jamaica like a good-for-nothing duppy who live inna cotton tree! Dere is no brimstone! Dis is de path to heaven!”
The elderly gentleman stepped forward.
“I don’t do nothing for de Lord to burn me in brimstone,” he announced confidently. “If dis pipe lead to heaven, I am ready to enter.”
“Good for you, sah!” The headman guide burst into a frenzied clapping, which was feebly taken up by other guides at his glowering prompting. “Step dis way, sah! Nothing to fear!”
The gentleman got down on his knees behind his guide and positioned himself at the mouth of the culvert for the crawl into heaven.
He chuckled. “Look at me with rheumatism crawling on hands and knees into heaven! I shoulda dead long time ago instead o’ listening to fool-fool doctor. Goodbye, sah! See you in paradise.”
With that he scurried energetically into the culvert as spry and frisky as a young lizard.
As the gentleman’s feet slipped into the shadowy maw and disappeared, the headman broke into another frenzied clapping and scanned the teeming crowd, which was still eddying about dubiously. “Who’s next? Dere’s no brimstone! Ten seconds and you in heaven.”
“You want to go before me, sah, go!” the woman in line ahead of me stood aside and saucily invited.
My heart was pounding madly as I cautiously leaned over and took another lingering sniff at the culvert.
The old gentleman had had a full head of white hair and I reasoned that if this pipe led to hell, I should at least smell hair being singed. But I smelled nothing except the faint odor of cane drying in the sun.
Mumbling at Hopeton to please excuse me for a moment, I stepped from the head of the line and strolled away from the crowd into the canefield where I could have privacy. I had just ducked into the thick green stalks when I saw Hopeton’s anxious face peering at me through the blades.
“Mr. Baps,” he croaked nervously, “don’t run ’way from me now, sah!”
“If you must know,” I snapped, “I came to say goodbye to me hood.”
“Your hood going on a journey, sah?”
“Don’t be a jackass! Everybody know dat hood don’t abide in heaven.”
“Oh, no, sah! In Jamaica heaven, hood thrive and prosper with no superannuation!”
I stared sharply at the wretch, wondering if he was lying to-me.
“No shearing of hood take place at heavenly gate?”
“Who
tell you dat lie, Mr. Baps?”
“A nun.”
He said, “Oh,” and proceeded to assure me that although the churches had been pushing for centuries in favor of compulsory shearing of hood at heaven’s gate, the government had repeatedly said that no such policy would ever be implemented—and as a Jamaican, I should know that no government minister would ever vote to part with his beloved hood.
“So what you say now, Mr. Baps?” he asked eagerly.
I swallowed hard. “I say, let’s go to heaven!”
“Yes, sah!” he practically bawled out in my ears, and we trotted briskly to the head of the line where the crowd was still darting and swirling around the mouth of the culvert.
“Make way,” Hopeton barked officiously, elbowing through the people who were circling the culvert mouth and warily sniffing it for brimstone, “Mr. Baps bound for heaven.”
Squinting to accustom my eyes to the light, I got down on hands and knees and followed Hopeton, who was crawling ahead of me. As soon as I was completely inside the dim and narrow pipe, I felt a strong draft sucking me into the walls.
“It breezy in here!” I cried to Hopeton, and just as the words were out of my mouth, I was swirled against the rough concrete pipe and sucked through its walls as if by a strong undertow. Before I could even blurt out, “Backfoot!” I felt my body seep through the concrete pipe and ooze out onto the other side, where it settled on a grassy hillside in a puddle of duppy flesh.
Chapter 6
Like many Jamaican boys of my generation, I was brought up to believe that in order to become a decent man it was necessary for various adults to lick me down several times a year. Now that I am grown, I look back fondly on this childrearing philosophy, which I did not fully value as a stupid youth who was being regularly licked down. But you grow up, learn proper values, and take on a new perspective about life.
Once, after I was already in my forties, I remember meeting up with one of my old teachers at a dance and going over to congratulate him on busting a slate over my ten-year-old head during a difficult arithmetic lesson. I explained to him that after I had recovered from concussion, I not only knew all my multiplication tables, I had mastered long division as well, which I credited to his tutorial braining. Scowling, he took what I said the wrong way and warned that if I didn’t stop persecuting him he would summon a constable. And no matter how hard I tried to assure him that I was not being sarcastic or cynical, he refused to take credit for his arithmetic clubbing.
The Duppy Page 3