The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  Hot and in need of a drink, I headed further downtown in the direction of Coronation Market (‘Corrie’ to Kingstonians). A slight wind was up when I got there and blue plastic tarpaulins flapped over the stalls. Built in 1936 on the accession of George VI, the market was a higgler’s domain full of bargains and trash: mango-sellers had set down their country load and tripe-vendors were yelling prices amid spillings of rice and brown sugar. Wealthier Jamaicans rarely venture down to ‘Corrie’. The few who do first leave their jewellery at home, then put on a hostile ‘screw face’ to ward off filching hands. With its hustling sales pitches, Corrie was a world away from the American-style supermarkets uptown; it was more like a residue of West Africa, overflowing with tin plates, plastic mirrors, scissors, razors, assortments of hair beads and hair braids.

  The market felt more edgy the closer I got to Tivoli Gardens, a ramshackle housing project, where porters were pushing handcarts at speed. Tivoli Gardens, formerly the Back-o-Wall slum, had been built in 1966 by the Jamaica Labour Party government or JLP. The inhabitants had been loyal to the opposing political party, the People’s National Party or PNP, and the government wanted rid of them. On the morning of 12 July 1966, armed police dispersed the residents with tear gas, batons and rifle-shot, then bulldozers rolled in behind the police, flattening the shanty. The newly installed JLP strong men were afterwards supplied with firearms (‘vote-getters’) in exchange for their continued political allegiance. With the construction of Tivoli Gardens, the lines were drawn for generations to come: JLP or PNP? For or against? Today when rival gunmen chase each other through the market stalls, as often happens, bystanders get hit, most of them women.

  Women make up 46 per cent of the Jamaican labour force, the highest per capita ratio in the world, and Coronation Market was effectively a matriarchy. In their heavy leather shoes and wide straw hats the higglers stood, hands on hips, over pyramids of yams and salted cod fish. Sometimes they travel for miles into Kingston by jitney (mule cart), and they run the peasant economy on which the Jamaican capital depends for its daily food. One higgler, glancing at my Bible-black notebook, addressed me: ‘You a preacher man?’ When I said no, she tried to sell me a ‘roots’ drink said to aid sexual potency. ‘It big you up nice, my dear, and make you evva ready for love.’ Jamaicans call these concoctions ‘front-end lifters’. I do not think they work.

  In my imagination, downtown had been a volatile place where white people inevitably become a target. (‘I went to the place where every white face is an invitation to robbery,’ Joe Strummer of the Clash said in 1977 of Kingston.) Instead I had found only friendliness and, in the market anyway, a sociable atmosphere. At the exit, a dreadlocked man was calling out to passers-by from a pile of lavatory rolls he had for sale. ‘Everyting mus’ go!’ To my (and possibly his) surprise I bought a roll. ‘Arright, man, rispeck,’ he nodded.

  Today I was going to the funeral of a High Court judge, Ronald Small, who had died in Kingston aged ninety-seven. The Jamaica of Judge Small’s childhood had been hidebound by colonial red tape, its justice system overwhelmingly white and stuffed with antiquated, precedence-ridden lawyers from the Inns of Court in London. I could imagine that Small had grown up with a complicated understanding of what he was and what he was not - at a time after the First World War, when Jamaica had not much hope of independence.

  The funeral was held in St Luke’s, an Anglican church at the Cross Roads section of midtown. In the pews sat august-looking members of the Jamaican judiciary in chalk-striped suits. It was a very British (or Anglican Jamaican) occasion. The Small family were conducted to their seats by an usher in a clerical dog collar. Among them were the poet Robin (‘Bongo Jerry’) Small and the human rights lawyer Richard Small.

  We learned that Judge Small had been a ‘very British’ Jamaican, who liked to relax at weekends in Edwardian knickerbockers and gave his daughter five shillings every time she recited a stanza of Gray’s Elegy. To be a Jamaican of this sort, it was implied, was to be a little eccentric; yet Judge Small’s pre-war education, with its jingoist myopia and labyrinth of Empire-era prohibitions, had been no less strange. School essays were set on such subjects as how to build a snowman at Christmas, scarcely relevant to semi-tropical Jamaica.

  The deceased was praised as a ‘public servant’ who had practised the ‘major export’ of the British Empire: British justice. The ‘sober, upright seriousness’ of the British judiciary together with the ‘stoical uncomplaining character’ (as Judge Small saw it) of the British were therefore honoured. ‘Never put your wishbone where your backbone ought to be,’ Judge Small had liked to tell his children.

  Afterwards the organist struck up ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and the congregation filed out of St Luke’s into a downpour of warm rain. In the doorways people were putting up umbrellas. ‘I hope your father’s death was an easy one,’ I said to Richard Small, the lawyer. (My own father had just died; I felt real sympathy.) Small looked at me sadly: ‘Oh yes, you know, at his time of life - he died of old age.’ We agreed to meet later at his Kingston legal practice.

  At the legal practice, the noise of the traffic on Seymour Avenue was muffled by whirring fans. Richard Small, seated behind a desk, now seemed more wary of me. The values and standards of colonial Britain had not been as attractive to him as to his father. As a law student in 1960s London Small had been involved in the Caribbean Artists Movement, a Pan-African group which aimed (like the Harlem Renaissance in pre-civil rights America) to rehabilitate African identity in West Indian art, literature and music. He had also helped to set up the London-based Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, or CARD, which sought to combat racial injustices in 1960s Britain.

  Having returned to Jamaica, Small was part of a growing body of intellectuals who believed that Jamaica must separate constitutionally from Britain and become a republic. Republican sentiment had been more prevalent in Jamaica in the 1970s, when the ruling PNP had absorbed the orthodoxies of Black Power and sought to distance itself somewhat from Queen Elizabeth II (who had claimed that The Black and White Minstrel Show was among her favourite television programmes). But in those days Jamaica had more trading links with Britain, and the trappings of British colonialism had been more visible, more numerous and, for Richard Small and others, more deleterious.

  I asked Small what Jamaica had achieved in the four decades since the Union Jack came down: the fruits of independence, it could be argued, had failed to ripen.

  ‘ “Failed” is the right word,’ said Small, relaxing a little. ‘We got a new flag in 1962, a national motto, a national anthem, a flower, a fruit, even a national bird. But what has Jamaica done with its independence? That is the question.’

  He added, ‘Corruption is a very serious problem in Jamaica but we haven’t bothered to address it. Unfortunately,’ he went on with a rueful expression, ‘if you lament the corruption of drugs - the corruption of politics - Jamaicans may take you for a neocolonialist who wants to return Jamaica to the days of British law and British order. Well,’ he concluded, ‘I’m not going to get trapped into that foolishness.’

  After the hopes and frustrations of 1962 - the bunting, the maypoles, the float parades of the great independence party - why is the illusion of British power still so strenuously maintained in Jamaica? Jamaican senators, Jamaican cabinet ministers, Jamaican judges of the high courts must all swear allegiance to ‘Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, Queen of Jamaica’. Jamaica’s prolonged union with the royal family, surely, is a last vestige of colonialism-a subject people’s obeisance to Britannia and to that ghost of empire, the Commonwealth. What has Jamaica’s reward been for its loyalty? Few British people today take much interest in Jamaica or Jamaican affairs. ‘It’s not just ignorant British people who don’t know or care where Jamaica is,’ Small commented, ‘it’s by and large that British people don’t know or care where Jamaica is.’ Really? Back in the 1960s, Small insisted, most Britons thought the West Indies had to do with India. And now Jamaica,
once Britain’s most profitable sugar-bowl and slave depot, was being repaid with British neglect and, Small reckoned, abandonment to the United States.

  Unsurprisingly, republicanism is growing in Jamaica. In October 2007 Prime Minister Bruce Golding (of the ruling JLP) pledged to take steps to replace the Queen with a Jamaican president to be chosen by the Jamaican people. Elsewhere in the English-speaking Caribbean - St Lucia, Grenada, Antigua, St Vincent - the monarchy is also under scrutiny. Less affection will be shown to Prince Charles when and if he succeeds to the throne; he is too associated with ‘shame and scandal in the family’ (to quote the title of a Trinidadian calypso) to enjoy the uncomplicated reverence shown ‘Missus Queen’. In the meantime it was hard to disagree with Richard Small that the Union Jack had yet to come down completely on Jamaica. Having shaped Jamaica’s past for ill, Britain had not helped to shape its future for good. As Richard Small accompanied me to the exit, he said that in Jamaica, as elsewhere, conflict has been the legacy of empire.

  2

  Trench Town Mix Up

  PJ’s housekeeper, Valerie Salmon, was a wise, self-contained woman in her early fifties, who flip-flopped round the kitchen in the mornings frying plantain and boiling green banana. ‘Jamaica always was kinda in a certain bankruptcy,’ she told me one day, ‘but after Hurricane Dennis it a whole lot worse.’

  Valerie’s was a typical story of rural migration to Kingston. Thirty years ago, in 1976, she had arrived in the big city with money sewn into her coat lining. The crime rate was no deterrent to her; Kingston was - still is - the island’s industrial and economic dynamo. Each week the city is pushed a little further outside its boundaries as countryfolk like Valerie continue to migrate there in search of work, and the government is obliged (if reluctantly) to bring services out to the proliferating shack colonies. It was to a government housing estate-a tenement yard - that Valerie arrived, travel-stained and bewildered, in the summer of 1976.

  Firearms were ubiquitous and the inhabitants took advantage of Valerie as a newcomer. The guns offended her countryside propriety but what could she do? Life in the ghetto, thrashed and twisted, was controlled by gangsters who did the bidding of the politicians. ‘If you didn’t have gun,’ Valerie said to me, ‘the drug men kill you - if you did have gun, them kill you even worse.’ In her view, there will always somebody at the top in Jamaican society who dictated the terms to those below. All Jamaicans had ‘prejudice’: even the poor in the shack dumps uptown looked down on those in the squatter colonies downtown. ‘I don’t know if it’s a master-slave thing or what,’ Valerie said, ‘but is so life go.’ Jamaicans call this social ordering - the sense that a hierarchy lies beneath all social interaction - ‘ranking’.

  ‘Uptown Top Ranking’, the pop-reggae hit of 1978 (sung by the teenage Jamaican duo Althea and Donna), while hardly a social commentary, emphasised the distinction between Kingston’s wealthy uptown and its impoverished downtown. In recent years the distinction has blurred as crime has crept uptown, and now even middle-class areas with their tranquil, shaded gardens are affected by inner-city violence. Everyone in Kingston - uptown, midtown, downtown - seemed to be frightened of everyone else. The fear had spread like a contagion up into the hills to penetrate the burglar-barred communities there.

  But down in the ghetto, you are still in the presence of the aftermath of slavery, said Valerie, ‘the giant evil’, and you are not allowed to forget it. See for yourself, how the men and women stand by the roadside for hours - sullen, numbed; how the children are un-childlike; the women, hardened. The ghetto folk have become the ‘property’ of politicians, turned into ‘things’, judged Valerie. She was a woman of formidable intelligence with a tough yard-woman wisdom and a very Jamaican lack of sentimentality.

  Trench Town, the ghetto I was to visit that morning, had been developed in the 1940s to accommodate West Indian troops returning home after the war. It had decayed into a violent place, disaffected. Trench Town’s tenement yards gave rise to the much misunderstood term ‘Yardie’, meaning a Jamaican who lives or operates overseas, often but not necessarily in the criminal sector. Kingston gang members are getting younger; they feel they must kill and carry ever ‘better’ weapons in order to rank themselves higher. Today Trench Town is known as ‘Fatherless World’, ‘Congo Zone’ or ‘Hellhole’ - names that had once applied to the Chicago housing projects where Barack Obama had cut his teeth. It might have been dangerous for me to visit on my own, so a Kingston pastor, Bobby Wilmot, was to accompany me. I was told to wait for Pastor Bobby outside the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Halfway Tree, midtown.

  Halfway Tree was heaving with early morning commuters, a hectic interchange of cars and buses. The congestion in Kingston eases slightly between eleven in the morning and two in the afternoon. Second-hand cars from Japan - ‘deportees’, Jamaicans call them - have worsened the traffic and made life in the city intolerable for many. Maids and other domestic staff were riding buses uptown to serve the comfortable classes there, much as Soweto’s black inhabitants travel into Johannesburg. Not least because of the distance involved, the journey north is an ordeal for these people, involving hours of travel on cratered roads. The inhabitants of the ghetto seem to come home only to sleep.

  I kept my eyes fixed on the hazy mass of traffic crawling my way: Japanese deportees everywhere. I was about to phone the pastor when from the petrol-fumed depths of the traffic a voice called out to me, ‘Morning, Mr Ian. Glad to see you lookin’ so well this Lord’s honest day.’ I climbed into Pastor Bobby’s Japanese jeep. Three mobile phones were clipped to his waist like grenades and a sticker on the dashboard proclaimed, ‘No Jesus No Life. Know Jesus Know Life’. Bobby Wilmot looked happy and, at forty-four, he looked good, too, a beaming, good-natured man of transparent kindness. He was one of several Trench Town evangelists who acted as brokers among the ghetto’s warring gangs, working hard to regenerate the area.

  My impression was that Pastor Bobby liked the glamour that went with forging turf truces. ‘The job keeps me busy,’ he said as we stalled in traffic on Slipe Road, exhaust fumes coming in through the window. We were heading for a primary school in the heart of Trench Town, the ‘Joy Town Learning Centre’, and were making slow progress. Rastafarians sped enviably past us on their boneshakers; they at least had the right idea.

  On the ghetto outskirts, Pastor Bobby seemed to be much liked. People called out to him from the roadside ‘Highly bless!’ or ‘Pastor B!’ and I felt a warmth of understanding between them. He spoke of his work like a tent-show revivalist, in passionate, declamatory outbursts. ‘Yessir,’ he said to me, teeth flashing with confidence, ‘you mustn’t be a lone ranger in Trench Town - you must fellowship on the street.’

  The heat was blistering. ‘Here, boss, step out of the sun,’ the pastor manoeuvred me into a patch of shade as we got out of the car by the primary school. Zinc-fenced shanties stood to our left and right; there was a clump of palms, and through the branches a tin roof glinted. Mopping his brow, Bobby explained why the school, on its inauguration in 1994, had been named ‘Joy Town’. ‘We wanted to get rid of the entrenched - the Trenchish Town mentality of Us and Them. So, for a mental readjustment we hit on Joy Town.’ In its previous incarnation the school had been a Women’s Institute; Pastor Bobby showed me the cornerstone laid in 1947 by ‘Mrs H. M. Foot’, wife of Jamaica’s then colonial secretary Sir Hugh Foot (brother of the British Labour Party politician Michael Foot). British colonialism had extended even to women’s welfare. Pastor Bobby parted bead curtains at the doorway, and ushered me into a hangar-like room full of empty desks; the children had yet to arrive. A sour smell of chicken pervaded the air.

  The school stood on the infamous JLP-PNP borderline of Seventh Street. Back in the mid-1970s when Kingston had been riven by political violence, Seventh Street was a fire-scarred danger zone that served to divide and even destroy families. Those on the Rema side of Seventh Street were centre-right JLP (or ‘Jelly’); those on the Arnett Gardens
side, socialist PNP (or ‘Peanut’); and down the middle, well, they might have been informers. Even today, just walking on the wrong side of Seventh Street can be a potentially fatal act. ‘There’s no safe middle ground in Jamaican politics, never has been,’ said Pastor Bobby. ‘Either it’s PNP or JLP. Black or white.’ In this land of extremes, he reckoned, there wasn’t even much of a middle class any more. What Jamaica needed, in Bobby’s view, was an alternative to the old two-party Westminster system bequeathed by Britain.

  Moving off, we drove across scrubland, the morning still hot and shadowless as we continued on past the razor wire and watchtowers of an abandoned remand centre, and through vacant lots of tall, spiny grass until we came to one of the neighbourhood’s most volatile zones: Rema, a JLP-loyal garrison constituency.

  On street corners, pariah dogs prowled round heaps of burning rubbish. ‘I’ve seen quite a few shoot-outs here in my time,’ the pastor was saying, ‘and the cowboy shows are still running.’ He had no sooner spoken than a crowd of tense-looking women emerged by a roadblock of tyres and corrugated metal sheets. Bobby slowed down as one of them shouted out to him, ‘Pastor B!’ She looked flushed with rage, affronted. I quickly put away my notebook (it gave me a provocatively official air) while Bobby addressed the woman through the car window. ‘Wha gwaan?’ We soon found out.

  A youth from Federal Gardens, an adjacent gang turf, had been executed that morning by the police; now another young man, Courtney, had been killed. Right here, in Rema. By the police? No, by a rival gang. The roadblock was to prevent retaliatory drive-by shootings.

  Bobby got out his handkerchief, wiped his brow. ‘Lord of mercy,’ he said, and with a distressed expression added: ‘Me a tell you something, Ian. Misery cause people to act desperate and kill. And idleness, Ian, it breed vice. And you see what happen when a man idle? You see when a man hungry? A man go tief! A man go kill!’