by Ian Thomson
‘All these guys will have held a gun at some point,’ Mais went on, gesturing vaguely in their direction. One man was bare-backed and I was shocked to see a criss-cross of scars there such as a lashing might have caused. ‘That’s Cecil.’ Mais pointed out an elderly man crouched on the street corner. ‘Cecil’s a convicted murderer.’ I felt a tension: what was I - a privileged, detached, self-involved white man - doing here? It must have been obvious in my soft, educated face that I would never have to live the life these people were living. With a sigh Mais indicated the marks on the church façade, bulletholes from a drive-by shooting a couple of weeks earlier. ‘Oh my poor decaying city,’ he said as we picked our way through Hannah Town and smelled the acrid smoke from the hospital crematorium. Narrow fox faces watched us over the tops of zinc fences.
Today was the Feast of Saint Joachim and the church was packed with the Catholic faithful. A North American priest, Peter McIsaac, was giving the service, energetically preaching forgiveness and an end to violence. ‘Brothers and sisters!’ His eyes roamed over the congregation. ‘Picture it, the clouds of darkness over Kingston, and the people full of fear - unless we put away our guns.’ It was an odd mixture of Revivalist-Catholic fervour, superstition and holiday. ‘Does the Pope know about this?’ I asked Peter Mais, who was by my side. ‘I hope not,’ he smiled. The congregants clapped and swayed in their pews as the organist twisted and turned on his bench, feet flying beneath him, and the drummer hit rim shots off his kit, reggae-style.
On this Sunday at least the parish felt safe and united in their Afro-Catholic fervour, hand-clapping and the elements of Pentecostal hymn and testimonial. Afterwards in the refectory loudspeakers blared adorations to the Almighty in a ragga beat, as Feast Day food was served at trestle tables. Paper cups of soup, slices of pink-and-yellow coloured cake: it was a small celebration. Peter Mais showed me a tiny garden - the Princess Peace Gardens - opposite the church which his wife had built for the people of Hannah Town. ‘Vilma likes to come here and reflect on things,’ he said to me, indicating a small stone bench. Two weeks after I met Peter, Vilma, dreadfully, was murdered. His wife had gone to pray in Stella Maris church in uptown Kingston when a youth approached demanding her handbag. She refused, and the man stabbed her. She tried to run but the man stabbed her again in the neck and the face. She died in hospital. The result of her murder on 8 March 2006 was an outburst of indignation across middle-class Kingston: did Vilma Mais, a sixty-two-year-old mother of three, deserve to die in this way? The Kingston police, typically, could do nothing, and the indignation was quickly spent.
At the time of writing, the death penalty still exists in Jamaica, though most capital punishments are overturned in London by the Privy Council, Jamaica’s Court of Final Appeal. Thus an ancient British institution comprised of mostly white Law Lords has become the unlikely defender of human rights in Jamaica. A majority of Jamaicans - not just conservative, pro-monarchy Jamaicans - see hanging as the only effective deterrent to criminality: murderers must face death. Yet the British Law Lords, through the grace of Queen Elizabeth II, use their power to prevent executions. Such paradoxes are part of the West Indian confusion: Victorian moralities that have long disappeared in Britain linger on in Jamaica, where they are compounded by retrograde American attitudes to capital punishment.
I saw no reason why Jamaicans should not be allowed to make their own legal decisions. It is true that an indigenous Jamaican court might usher in an American-style Death Row, where many criminals are executed each year. Yet the Privy Council, surely, is too far removed from the social realities of Jamaica to pass informed judgement. An indigenous jurisprudence might be thought necessary to Jamaica’s self-esteem and its notion of autonomy.
Jamaica’s failure to wrest a genuine independence from Britain - its failure to ‘go it alone’ - had been foreshadowed in the short-lived West Indian Federation of 1958 to 1962. The Federation aimed to foster economic and political union throughout the British Caribbean and nurture the emergence of a West Indian identity (virtually non-existent at the time). Regional cooperation, it was hoped, would lead to the establishment of, among other things, a British Caribbean Court of Justice, promoting a separate judiciary from that of the parent country.
Ten British Caribbean islands, Jamaica and Trinidad pre-eminent among them, agreed to merge. Personal rivalries and insular prejudices, however, soon frustrated the purpose of the federative scheme which was to give the islands ‘Dominion Status’ (full independence) within the British Commonwealth. Jamaica regarded its smaller neighbours with condescension, and began to question the benefits of a federal form of government. While some significant advances were made (the University College of the West Indies is a genuinely regional institution), divorce seemed imminent.
Alexander Bustamante, the opposition leader of the JLP party, forced a referendum on the matter and in September 1961 Jamaicans voted ‘No’ by a significant majority. Jamaica’s departure brought the West Indian Federation to an end. In January 1962, seven months before independence, it was formally liquidated. The British authorities had no option now but to contemplate what the federation had been intended to avoid: the piecemeal ‘independence’ of its Caribbean colonies in the uncertain world of the Cold War and greater intrusiveness from the United States.
Outside Kingston’s Supreme Court was the usual miscellany of supplicants and poor. I was frisked at the entrance and told to proceed to the Jurors’ Clerk for permission to attend a trial. The clerk’s office stood on the first floor of a building erected in the dying days of imperial rule. About half the benches were filled with people waiting, the anticipation of more waiting to come on their faces. The Jamaican justice system has been described as a lottery where the dice are loaded against those who cannot afford to sway the course of justice through bribes or other influences, such as, occasionally, sorcery: toads with lips sewn together are used to warn witnesses not to speak.
The Jurors’ Clerk, Leslie Chamberlain, was sitting in his office doing the Gleaner newspaper crossword. He was a pale-skinned Jamaican with a strikingly officious manner. ‘Introduce yourself,’ he said to me petulantly. I was taken aback by his tone, but what could one expect? Chamberlain and his underlings only ever saw the failures and aberrations of Jamaica. But in these Empire-era offices with their sad, grave atmosphere of collapse, they could lord it over others. Leslie Chamberlain’s authority proceeded from a formidable knowledge of the operations of the British judiciary.
‘Introduce yourself,’ he repeated. I handed him an official letter from my publishers; he frowned and picked up a pencil from his desk, tapping the letter with the sharp end.
‘And who is Neil Belton?’
‘It says there - Senior Editor,’ I replied.
The clerk seemed a very fastidious, mincing man (what Jamaicans call fenky-fenky). ‘So you think you have a pass from Favour and Favour? I’m afraid that’s impossible,’ he added flatly.
‘Impossible? What’s not possible?’
‘It is not possible for you to attend a trial,’ he went on peremptorily. ‘For that you have to go to the Registrar’s Chambers.’
‘How can I gain access to the Registrar’s Chambers?’
‘Only through the Chief Court Assistant and Supervisor in the Criminal Registry,’ he explained, with intensifying satisfaction.
‘But that’s you, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but this letter will not do.’ Already I could feel the deadly stranglehold of red tape, Jamaica’s legal system clogged up at all ends with Victorian-era delays.
‘Please take away your piece of paper.’ Mr Chamberlain pointed to the letter and, putting on his best official voice, added casually, ‘Anyway, you could never attend a trial. You are in jeans. You must wear a tie.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’ (He himself was not wearing a tie, but affected an overweening imperiousness, I suspected, to make up for the chaos of his surroundings.) Angry, I turned to face the eight or so juni
or clerks in the office: ‘Can anyone lend me a pair of trousers?’ I asked. ‘Or a tie?’ The room, piled importantly with Jiffy bags, filled with an awkward silence; eyes shifted nervously as I walked out.
Downstairs I said to a policewoman, ‘I’m inappropriately dressed for court. Where can I buy a pair of trousers? And a tie?’ After a moment’s hesitation she suggested Hanna’s Betta Buy at 18-20 King Street. ‘They stock a wide range of merchandise and’ - she looked at me dubiously - ‘and they should satisfy all your clothing needs.’ I thanked her and set off. The store stood virtually opposite the Supreme Court on a street lined with Lebanese dry goods stores and Chinese jewellery outlets. I explained my predicament to the shop assistant. ‘I’m inappropriately dressed for the Supreme Court. What’s your cheapest pair of trousers? And tie?’ Minutes later I emerged from a cubicle in a pair of sky-blue nylon trousers with ‘IMAGINATION’ picked out in sequins on the right buttock. My tie was a subdued pink with a daisy pattern. I could feel the nylon sticking hotly to my legs as I walked back to the Supreme Court. Had I taken leave of my senses?
Leslie Chamberlain squinted quizzically at the razor-sharp folds in my trousers. ‘You should never have come to court looking the way you did,’ he began. ‘I don’t know how things are done in England’ - his voice had taken on the old note of stridency - ‘but here you must dress with befitting decorum.’ I persisted and eventually he relented. ‘Go to Court Number One! It’s a criminal court.’
The court was empty and a smell of old dust hung in the air. Occasionally an usher in a white tunic dropped by to see if anything was happening. Nothing was happening. Jamaica is a land of waiting. Lawyers go to court fully expecting delays and sometimes, where it suits a client, they may even delay justice themselves. After an hour of waiting I realised to my alarm that my wallet was missing. I must have left it in Hanna’s Betta Buy. I hurried back to the shop. The staff, slow-moving in the afternoon heat, looked at me nonplussed as I pleaded, ‘If you find my wallet, please bring it to Criminal Court Number One.’ As I spoke I was aware that any authority I might have had was undermined by my clothing.
Back in Court Number One, the accused was brought in by an usher who held him from behind by his trouser belt. This was another way to show who pulled rank. David Evans, thirty-four, had been driven from Death Row in the Spanish Town jail, and was dressed for his court appearance in a pair of spotless jeans and spotless ‘pussboots’ (sneakers). The Privy Council had upheld his execution; his case was under review. Neither the judge nor Mr Evans’s defender could be found, however, and to the assembled personnel the bailiff announced unnecessarily, ‘There has been a delay.’ The accused stood in the dock looking uncomprehending and resigned. How many times had he been reprieved from the gallows? Once? Twice? The slowness of Jamaica’s judicial process seemed inhumane to me.
At last the judge came in, wearing a wig slightly askew, and scarlet robes. We all stood up. ‘Evans, rise and face the bench,’ the Clerk of Courts intoned in his best Gray’s Inn accent. ‘David Evans,’ the judge sighed and hitched his robe (he pronounced the name ‘E-vans’). ‘I’m afraid the woman defending you is on duties elsewhere. In fact,’ he looked at the clerk, ‘I believe she’s on holiday.’ The judge manifested a slight impatience as he went on, ‘We’ll bring you back to court in two months’ time, Mr E-vans. On the fourteenth of September. Is that clear?’ The accused stirred himself slightly, nodded his understanding, and the judge concluded self-importantly, ‘We shall now adjourn for luncheon.’
Everyone rose, and in the emptying courtroom I was startled by the appearance of the policewoman, who said my wallet had been recovered from Hanna’s Betta Buy. Impressively it had been returned to me with its contents untouched. There seemed to be more ordinary human decency in that gesture than in the courtroom I had just left. Gratefully I returned the wallet to my (sequined) trouser pocket. On leaving the court I bumped into the unwavering Leslie Chamberlain. ‘I see you aren’t wearing a tie,’ I said to him, pathetically vindicated. He gave no answer.
The death penalty has been on the Jamaican Statute Books since 1864, but it is rarely imposed these days, and the signs are that hanging will soon be reserved for particularly ‘scandalous’ cases only (serial killers or multiple child murderers).
Brian Massie, a Canadian Catholic priest, had served as Death Row chaplain in Jamaica for eight years. During that time, from 1986 to 1994, he accompanied a total of sixteen men to their execution in Spanish Town’s District Prison. From his current home in Winnipeg, Canada, he spoke to me about those days. The prison death block, known colloquially as ‘Gibraltar’, contained fifty cells each measuring five feet by eight feet. Only those who were about to be executed had their own pail in which to defecate, said Massie; the rest had to use a communal latrine. At 8.15 a.m. on the morning of any given hanging, a group of prison guards would arrive to tie the condemned man’s hands behind his back with a leather strap. As Father Massie walked with the prisoner to the gallows he would recite hymns in order to fill the silence. ‘No one had the courage to look the condemned man in the eyes,’ he told me.
In the death chamber different nooses hung over the trapdoor; the length best suited to the size and weight of the prisoner was selected. Nothing was said; the following ritual took place in silence. The man was positioned on the trapdoor: a hood was put over his head and the noose round his neck. Beneath the gallows was a concrete pit with a drain to collect the body waste. At 8.30 a.m. precisely the prison superintendent would give the signal and the hangman pulled the lever. The man vanished through the trapdoor and the noose snapped his neck. ‘Oddly,’ Father Massie said, ‘it was often easier to kill younger men - older men died slowly and noisily.’
In the priest’s view, the death penalty was a ‘social sin’, whose abolition would be a triumph over the ‘darkness and moral confusion’ of twenty-first-century Jamaica. Death Row merely added to the island’s unnecessary suffering. ‘I may be a bleeding heart, but to me the human species is redeemable - redemption is part of the mystery of man,’ Father Massie said. One would have to have a heart of stone to disagree.
10
The Negotiator
Garfield Ellis, a Jamaican writer in his late forties, is part of what his publishers call the ‘new wave of island prose’. In his fast-paced novel For Nothing At All (2005), Ellis tells the story of a group of school friends whose lives are torn apart by the gun culture and urban turf wars that erupted in Jamaica in the 1970s. Wesley, the narrator, is a bright boy determined to succeed at his school in Central Village, near Spanish Town. When a schoolmate, Skin, shows him a gun he has picked up, Wesley is horrified. Skin, for his part, can act out long-nurtured fantasies of cowboy-style vengeance (spaghetti westerns were all the rage then in Jamaica). Disastrously, however, a local thug named Danny Bruck Foot steals the gun; overnight, Central Village moves from a ‘playground to a field of death’ as Wesley and his friends become prey to Danny and his homicidal brethren.
The novel is interspersed with scenes from Wesley’s childhood spent around Spanish Town; joyous bouts of truancy (‘sculling’), a time of rural innocence. These passages, heavy with nostalgia for ‘better days’, serve as a counterpoint to the chapters set in the 1970s, when public life in Jamaica soured under the influence of a murderous, politically sponsored greed. Wesley, finally corrupted by local drug barons, shoots Danny Bruck Foot dead, and is jailed. His friends by now are either all dead or in prison like him.
When I met Garfield Ellis in New Kingston, the city’s midtown business sector, I told him how much I admired For Nothing at All.
‘I see the book’s been well received. Yet you paint a very bleak picture of Jamaica.’
‘And it’s getting worse,’ Ellis replied. ‘I’m worried, really worried. Yes, it’s gonna be bad. Bad for us all.’ According to Ellis, the decade following independence was a turning point when, in the space of just a few years, Jamaica lived through an accelerated cycle of political temptation and
folly. ‘The Seventies demystified authority,’ Ellis claimed. ‘Now anything with any status is under fire. There’s no regard any more, no respect for people, or for the past.’
There was something in the Jamaican people that ‘required them’ to have an autocratic foreign hand, Ellis believed. Having gone through the euphoria of post-imperialism Jamaica had now gone back to a stage where it had to be run by outsiders. More than eighty American firms now operate in Jamaica, with a total US investment estimated at more than $3 billion. ‘Our banks, corporations, airlines, the judiciary, hotels - they’re all foreign-run.’ Submission to foreign (chiefly, American) interests may be the price Jamaicans have to pay for failing to make it on their own after independence, said Ellis. ‘History’s repeating itself. We’re perpetuating another kind of imperial colonialism,’ he judged.
At Sligoville, a village in the hills above Spanish Town, Garfield Ellis’s bitterness was echoed more despairingly by Monsignor Richard Albert, a straight-talking Jewish convert to Catholicism, originally from the Bronx in New York. ‘Right now there’s anarchy in Spanish Town,’ he said to me. ‘And the kids don’t care if they die today, the next day, the next week: they don’t care because they’re already dying.’ The monsignor’s job, as he saw it, was to prevent the almost-dead from dying.
Albert knew the gang-infested ghettos of Spanish Town better than anyone. He spoke out fearlessly against the politicians and drug barons who manipulated the poor for their own ends, and saw himself (or so he intimated to me) as a tower of common sense and decency amid the ‘moral bewilderment’ of modern Jamaica. The poor revered Albert: ‘The Negotiator’, they called him, after the film of that title starring Samuel L. Jackson. Albert’s speciality was to negotiate between the police and the ghetto dons involved in narcotics trafficking. This lent him a reputation for extraordinary courage, as the police rarely venture into Spanish Town’s ‘zinc communities’. In addition, the monsignor had been able to persuade wealthy Jamaicans to donate money to Catholic-run schools, training schemes, libraries, soup kitchens and counselling services. ‘I exhort and I badger the wealthy,’ Albert said to me. ‘I tell them, “If you don’t see to the needs of the poor today, you’ll face an even greater social peril tomorrow.”’