She stared at me long and hard. Finally she scowled and returned to her paper, muttering under her breath, “Rass man just dead and reach heaven and him come take over me shop! Boy, negar duppy really have gall!”
But even as she grumbled she became engrossed in the paper, which I took as her permission to proceed.
I found a rag and began to scrub and wipe the shelves until I could see the grain of the wood. Then I stood on a crate and repacked the tinned goods neatly by type, restoring order to disarray and clutter.
Some customers occasionally wandered in while I worked, many of them exchanging idle talk and afternoon pleasantries with Miss B as they helped themselves by reaching over the counter and plucking canned goods off the shelf with no payment or accounting other than a cheerful, “Put it down in de book, Miss B!” before they sailed out of the shop, laden down with merchandise.
One woman tried to grab a tin of bully beef out of my hand as I was stacking it on the shelf, but I held on firmly and refused to give it up.
“Miss B,” she cried out, playing tug-of-war with me, “will you tell dis damn man to leggo de tin o’ bully beef!”
“Give her de bully beef,” Miss B muttered, hardly glancing up from her paper.
“Not a backside!” I roared. “First de goods must stack. Den customers can purchase dem. Plus, I don’t see no money in her hand!”
Miss B glowered at me before climbing down off her stool, stomping to the shelf I was stacking, extracting a tin of bully beef, and handing it to the woman, who put it in her purse with the usual chirp, “Put it down in de book, Miss B!” as she disappeared out the door throwing me a dirty look.
“Woe, Baps!” my parson bawled. “Dis is rampant Manley socialism!”
After I had finished cleaning the shelves and restacking the goods, I stood aside and admired my handiwork.
Miss B, who had gone onto the veranda to gossip with a neighbor, waddled into the shop, peered at what I had done, and led me to a small back bedroom where she said I-could-spend the night, adding that she had not asked for my help and that she had been perfectly content with her shop before I interfered with it. I nodded politely and refused to be drawn into a senseless argument and, instead, stepped out onto the front porch of the shop, intending to take in the cool evening air.
The rickety veranda on which I stood was perched on the edge of a narrow country road that looped around a slab of mountainside before slithering down a steep curve. Ridging the distant twilight skies was a lumpy green mountain range dotted with cultivator plots and scattered shacks whose windows sparkled with yellow lights. Smoke uncoiled from a woody pleat somewhere deep within the mountain and was braided into lazy, twisting tresses of good hair by a soft breeze.
The evening was lovely as I strolled the one narrow street past rows of shops and small dwellings, bidding the occasional villager, “Good evening.”
Soon I was rambling the gathering dusk down a country lane while groundswells of guinea grass crested and glistened in tree-lined fringes on either side of the narrow road. A recent sprinkle of rain had fallen and the scent of cleanliness and freshness wafting off the earth made me feel lighthearted.
When I returned to the shop, Miss B was gone and the premises deserted.
I retired into the back room, took off my clothes, and lay down in the bed listening to the peaceful night sounds drizzling against the window.
The day had been long and trying. Dying had taken a lot out of me, and I felt quite drowsy.
* * *
No bed is sweeter than one in a Jamaican mountain village, and it took me no more than a yawn before I dropped off into a refreshing slumber.
And it seemed no more than a twitch before I awoke from a dream of being ridden by a rampaging hippopotamus. I was squirming and wriggling to squirt out from under hippopotamus oppression when I opened my eyes and found myself pinned under fatty Miss B naked atop me and rumbling wheezily like a leaky steamroller.
“What you think you doing?” I sputtered.
“Grinding you,” she grunted in my right ear.
“I tell you I want a grind?”
“Want it or not, you getting a grind.”
“Fatty woman don’t turn me on!”
“Dis is heaven. Every woman turn on every man. All woman have to do is jump on and the table spread and ready.”
“I not spread! I not ready!”
“You well spread. And you plenty ready.”
As Miss B spoke, she was humping up a jamboree and her wriggling and jiggling was so powerful that I soon found myself clinging to beefy batty for dear life until the two of us exploded simultaneously on the bed with a noisy bellowing, after which she collapsed atop me with a juicy hiss that blew down my earhole and clean out my big toenail.
A moment of restful silence followed during which we moistened each other’s neck string with damp breath in the darkness.
“Dis is de first good ride I ever get from a fatty,” I praised her, panting for breath.
She sighed and shifted, causing a watery mound of cool, naked beef to slush atop my body.
“I going do it again!”
“You mad? I done for de night.”
“In heaven man don’t done until woman say so.”
“All dis riding going make me feel like a donkey!” I managed to sputter as she renewed the jiggling.
She scoffed. “You don’t see donkey yet. You soon see donkey.”
Chapter 8
My first night in heaven Miss B gave me twenty-five superduper grind before a frothy morning light curdled against the window of the small room. After time number twenty I heard myself gasping, more from shock than from real fatigue, “You right! I didn’t see donkey yet! But I see donkey now!”
Miss B chuckled and started up on lap number twenty-one.
The spate of super-duper grinding went throughout much of the morning, and at one point with Miss B grunting like she was getting clubbed, a woman from the village entered the store and cried, “Miss B? You back dere? I want some flour.”
Miss B bawled out brazenly in my earhole, “I grinding Baps, Cynthia. Serve yourself.”
After a delicate hesitation from the shop, the customer answered with a mirthful cackling, “When you done, I can grind Baps, too?”
“If anything left when I finish!”
“Dis is heaven, Miss B! You know it never use up here, you know you never use up here, even after all sisters share it! Hallelujah!”
“Glory be!” Miss B blathered her agreement into my ear, heaving tirelessly.
I grumbled that she was giving me a bad name in the village, that I was one man who didn’t broadcast my conjugal habits to the general public, but Miss B advised me to hush up and enjoy pum-pum in heaven, and even as she said this, she made me bawl out loud and lusty with sheer joy over her juiciness, which caused the sister in the shop to chortle her congratulations, “Yes, Sister B! Dat’s a good one!”
“Number twenty-four! I going for me quarter century!”
“I taking de flour. Later, Miss B! Enjoy de grind, Baps!”
“Thank you!” I managed to blubber politely, and just then Miss B rubbed up vigorously against me and I discovered to my surprise that she had a belly button.
“How come you have a belly button and I don’t?” I asked curiously, sinking my thumb into its squishiness.
“You grow it back up here. When you belly button ripe and full, you ready to born again.”
“Born again? Why born again?”
“After you in heaven for a set time, you must born again to control de population and give anodder man a chance. You return to earth to live and dead again, den you come back up for another stay. Dat’s how heaven run.”
“But how long you get to stay up here? And how you know when is you time to go back down? And where dem send you down there?”
“How me fe know all dat? All I know is what I hear. Dem say when you time come you go back inna whichever baby borning in whichever part of
de world, is dere you go.”
“Even if de climate cold? Like, a man like me who love warm breeze, me could born again inna Iceland, or one o’ dem cold place?”
“Hush up, man! You asking too much question.”
“But me no want born again in no cold climate!”
“Dat not you worry right now, for I going for number twenty-five.”
“Mercy!”
In the days that followed I learned a lot about the village of heaven in which I now resided contentedly as a newly arrived duppy.
The shop was perched on the slopes of a green mountain daily awash in freshening breezes. I dwelled in a land where the sun shone bright but did not burn, where the deep cool nights were bejewelled with starlight and the mountain air always tasted sweet.
Yet the village also had the usual customs, habits, and sights we know and love on earthbound Jamaica.
So village dog was properly mauger but not mangy; village donkey brayed crossly but did not kick down children at garden parties; village busha reigned over hilltop but could not work black man to death in the hot sun at a thiefing wage; and village sister backbit every reputation in the district but was not compulsorily ugly.
Heaven is also a land where you can look exactly the way you wish. You can transform into any shape, form, or color you prefer, can crimp you eye like a Chiny, straighten your hair like an Indian, bleach your skin like a white man, or turn as scrawny as a mosquito.
One day the subject of Miss B’s big belly came up, and I asked her bluntly why she continued to resemble a breeding Red Poll cow when she could just as easily look like better, but she growled that she happened to love herself black and fat, which was why she hadn’t availed herself either of government bleaching or thinning. She boastfully declared that she liked being beefy, loved her jelly belly, and was perfectly content to perch on her stool and float on a tube of batty fat. She challenged me to say that a fatty wasn’t a comfortable, smooth ride and better by far than any bony woman, and I mumbled that certainly, much positive could be said in favor of womanly beefiness. She glared at this wishy-washy answer and I muttered sheepishly that being no expert on female fattiness, I wasn’t the right one to ask.
She flew into a tirade and demanded to know if she hadn’t made me come fifty-five times last night. Could a bony woman have accomplished as much? I said with dignity that I didn’t see how such a thing was possible.
“I practice fatty power!” she cockadoodledooed.
I had thought Miss B was brazen and rude in her ways, but I soon found out that in heaven there is no shame, expulsion, or favoritism practiced on the human body, no apartheid of bodily parts such as we have on earth where a woman will earnestly declare in public, “Cross me heart!” but will sooner dead than say, “Cross me pum-pum!” But that is exactly what a decent woman might spontaneously avow in heaven, where pum-pum and hood worship in church as respected members of the congregation.
One day Miss B announced that she wanted me to attend church with her on Sunday. I objected that since I was now in heaven, I was in no further need of churching, but she replied that reaching heaven had nothing to do with church—Jamaican people just loved to jump up in church on Sundays and would continue to do so even if they were in hell. She informed me that she liked going to church on Sundays; furthermore, next week I was going, too.
True to her word, the next Sunday Miss B hauled me off to a village church.
The service commenced with a hymn, to which I contributed a dutiful croak. I was right in the middle of singing “Rivers of Babylon” when, to my horror and astonishment, Miss B reached over and wantonly patted my crotch like a parson feeling up a collection bag to see if it was fat.
I hissed that she was being out of order in a house of worship and drew away. Miss B whispered that she had been moved by the spirit, adding that in heaven all body parts—from hood to eyebrow—participated fully and equally in formal worship.
We had a furious mouth-corner argument.
I indignantly maintained that my hood had had a good upbringing and had been raised to sneak out at night only in canepieces, behind a bush, in unlighted bedrooms, or in the backseat of a car hunched in the shadows of a country road; that it never came out on a public street unless drawn out by an unruly streetwalker in the middle of a heated dispute over price. Miss B coolly advised me to look around, and when I did I beheld that a sister racked by the spirit would joyously reach over and knead the privates of any convenient elder. I also saw that the elders patiently endured this ecstatic groping without raising objection or lodging complaint, many even smiling indulgently at these sisterly antics.
But I was determined that no woman would seize hold of my hood while I was in church without observing appropriate restriction. I whispered to Miss B, as she sidled up to me once again, that since it was evidently the custom and I was a stranger to the district and did not wish to depart from tradition, I would permit an inspirational feel-up during the service when the spirit moved her, but not while she clutched the hymnal. She hissed that this was a ridiculous colonial regulation, adding that she didn’t intend to draw out my hood into open air to play patty cake with it, she only wished to express her joyfulness by giving it a worshipful squeeze.
But I was firm: It was either hood or hymnal, not both. With a sigh, Miss B was therefore forced to reluctantly put down the hymn book whenever she felt moved by the spirit to paw me up, even though she fiercely rebuked me afterwards for fostering a backward colonial mentality.
For a good while—I don’t know how long, for time is hard to keep track of in heaven—Miss B and I lived in contentment. I helped her around the house and shop during the days. Come evening time, she would cook for me, boiling up some serious dumpling and giving me fatty pum-pum like it was locusts during the days of the Egyptian plague. During these happy times, no man in heaven was happier or slept sweeter than I, Taddeus Baps.
Sometimes at the end of the day, as Miss B was locking up, she would turn and bawl over her shoulder, “Baps, do me a favor! Run ’round to Miss Simpson and give her a good grind.
When you reach back, honey-bunch, you supper will be ready.
I cooking up some fry fish and bammy for you.”
In this way, she would occasionally lend me to Miss Johnson or Miss Shirley or Miss Higgins, who were her sturdy church sisters and quite used to sharing among themselves such staples as sugar, flour, hood, and tinned milk, making me occasionally feel like the district grinding post. Of course, I could have refused, for there is no slavery in heaven, but that would have made me into nothing better than a worthless dog-in-the-manger. So I did as I was told, and everyone was happy. Only my indoor parson was cross at this state of affairs, and one night as I was walking home from Miss Higgins’s house down a dark and bushy country lane, I heard him fuming, “Dis heaven is a land of pum-pum and dumpling. I wonder if we in hell.”
So things were running nicely between me and Miss B and everything was prospering.
Then one night I got the shock of my life, and everything between us suddenly mash up.
I had been peacefully snoozing on Miss B’s belly in the dingy back room, the croaking lizards, crickets, and whistling frogs lullabying me into the blissful sleep of the fully satisfied fornicator. I had enjoyed a long and sweet belly ride and had spent the past three hours toasting in the cozy creaminess of her blubber. She had been drowsily urging me to confess that when it came to lovemaking and reign over the connubial bed, a fatty was total queen, and I was in the middle of a good-humored joshing with her about it when I got the funny feeling that the tip of her head was being noiselessly sawed off.
It was puzzling to see a woman’s head disappearing in neat sections, and I stared long and hard at her until her brow was almost all gone before I gave a gasp of alarm and remarked casually that in the bad light it looked as if her headtop was disappearing.
Miss B catapulted upright. She flung me savagely off her belly and onto the floor, and groped wildly
at her head. “Rass!” she bawled. “I crowning!”
“Crowning?” I sputtered from the floor, where she had pitched me.
“I getting born again, Baps!” she shrieked.
As she bellowed her anguish, she began frantically plucking at her head, which, before my eyes and in the glow of the night sky, was being cleanly sheared off like a cucumber chopped by an unseen cleaver.
“Help me!” she yelled.
“How? Wha’ happening?”
“I sliding through a birth canal. Grab me foot and pull me back!”
Jumping off the floor, I seized hold of her fleshy calves and began a fierce tugging that did nothing to slow the ghastly sectioning.
“I can’t stop you!” I cried helplessly, as her entire head vanished, leaving only a fatty neck stump wobbling headless atop her tree-trunk chest.
“I don’t want to born again!” Miss B howled, her voice echoing as if she were wedged in a narrow tunnel.
She had slid down past her bosom by now, and even as I-strained to hold onto her kicking legs her thighs oozed out of-sight with a nasty gurgling, leaving me grappling with two slippery and twitching feet. With a vicious kick they were suctioned violently from my grasp and her whole body had disappeared.
“Miss B?” I cried aloud to the empty room.
I heard nothing but the high-pitched piping of insects outside the window. When I turned up the flickering kerosene lantern, not even a coil of pubic hair remained of Miss B.
I sat down heavily on the bed, wondering what to do next, when suddenly in the jitterbugging lantern glow Miss B’s face broke the surface of the pillowcase and wavered there as if afloat in the puddle of linen.
“Is all right, Baps!” the face whispered. “I going back as a Jamaican! I borning again in St. Elizabeth! Hallelujah!”
“Request a change of venue to St. Ann! St. Elizabeth is a fart of a parish!”
“Hush you mouth, Baps!” she scolded patriotically.
“Miss B! I going talk to God! I going beg him to ease you up!”
She chuckled as if at a private joke. “God don’t have nothin’ to do wid dis, Baps. Walk good, me love!”
The Duppy Page 5