The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  One of the intruders entered the bedroom, and put a pistol to Isaac’s head, while another bound Evelyn’s hands with rope to her husband’s. For almost an hour Evelyn tried to talk the gunmen out of their ‘madness’ but one of them, his nerves starting to crack, snapped: ‘Shut up! You chat too much - you chat too much and you don’t say nothing!’ They yanked off Evelyn’s rings and bracelets, took all the electrical items they could find and, having found the car key, loaded their loot into Isaac’s jeep and drove off into the night. The police, alerted by a neighbour, gave chase, but failed to catch the robbers. ‘It was a nasty business, best forgotten,’ Evelyn said to me.

  Yet the intruders had showed an unexpected ‘kindness’, she added, in the care they took not to harm her or her husband. ‘They put a gun to Zaccie’s head and, yes, they hurt my hands with the rope, but I honestly don’t think they would have killed us.’

  ‘Violence would have been their last resort?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Evelyn replied eventually. ‘Violence and cruelty were their only weapons really.’

  12

  Revival Time

  Paul Bogle was said to have beamed out with a Baptist-Revivalist light as he preached from his chapel in Stony Gut. Revival, one of the great religions of the Jamaican poor, incorporates elements of Low Church chant and hellfire hymnal with the spirit-possession and ‘healing lore’ of West African root doctors and shamans. An outpouring of the Holy Spirit is experienced by some adepts as they sob, gasp and shake in ecstatic trance-like states.

  In the years after the First World War Bogle’s example was adopted by Alexander Bedward, a Revival preacher who fired his followers with a hatred for their oppressed condition in British Jamaica. The Bedwardite Movement, as it came to be known, was based in the semi-ghetto of August Town (now a part of Greater Kingston) and foreshadowed Marcus Garvey and the militant wing of Rastafari in its attempts to combat imperial British rule. Pilgrims journeyed to August Town to receive the Reverend Bedward’s healing ministrations and have their sins washed clean in Hope River nearby. Miracle cures were attributed to those waters.

  A belief in miracles pervades the Afro-Jamaican mind, as it does the Roman Catholic mind. In 1920, Bedwardites gathered in August Town to witness the long-promised ‘miracle’ of their master’s ascent to heaven. Addressing him by the Revival title of ‘Shepherd’, they crowded the Revivalist Church of Zion in anticipation of his flight. Bedward did not leave the ground (‘Bedward Stick to the Earth’, scoffed the establishment Gleaner.) The following year, in 1921, he marched 800 of his faithful on Kingston, stirring memories of the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. He was arrested by police on sedition charges and died in a Kingston lunatic asylum in 1930, the fate of many religious Afro-Jamaicans. While the ‘Lord of August Town’ was alive, however, the colonial administration was powerless to disperse his immense following. Even quieter Revivalist brotherhoods were galvanised into action by his fiery example.

  In August Town today the houses are broken down by poverty. I called on the last two surviving Bedwardites there. At first there was no answer when I rattled on their front door, so I rattled harder, again with no result. Eventually the door opened and a young woman appeared. I asked her if Esther Grant and Adaina Donnell were in.

  The woman looked doubtful. ‘I think they’ve gone to bed. I don’t think you can see them.’

  ‘It’s about Alexander Bedward. Could you tell them that?’

  At this point an elderly voice down the corridor piped up, ‘I’ve not had a message from Bedward in a hundred years, I’ve got nothing to say.’

  The young woman, turning her head, shouted back down the corridor, ‘The man here says he’s from England. He’s a traveller.’ The elderly voice replied, ‘Tell him to come in.’

  In the corridor a paraffin lamp burned dimly above a photograph of Bedward with the caption ‘Shepherd of August Town’. I was shown into a gloomy bedroom filled with chintz and dilapidated furniture.

  A woman was sitting in a chair with a card table in front of her. She was wearing a woollen hat and had been born, she said, in 1910. This was Adaina Donnell. Her sister, Esther Grant (born 1918), was lying in bed on the other side of the room, her head propped against a pillow. Mrs Donnell wiped her face with a pink hand towel, and began to talk about her life as a Bedwardite.

  ‘I was a small child then but I remember when Bedward baptise enough people. Bedward said God give him the Hope River, and I’ve seen people who can’t even walk get cured by him.’ Women, hoping to become pregnant, drank Hope River water personally bottled and blessed by Bedward, said Mrs Donnell.

  ‘Yes.’ Mrs Grant was speaking now. ‘Bedward was a wonderful healer. Even some Catholic people went there and got better by the water.’

  The sisters asked me if I was baptised and when I said yes, they enquired, ‘In a river?’

  ‘No, in a church, probably.’

  ‘Oh!’ Mrs Donnell looked at her sister, then at me. ‘In a river is much better, man.’

  ‘When I was a baby girl,’ Mrs Grant put in, ‘my mother tell Bedward I’m sick, so he put some water in a basin and I’m bathed until the time I’m better. And since that time I don’t get sick. Oh, I was a little stronger then than I am now, but I’m still quite hearty.’ She had not been to the doctor since 1918.

  ‘The year you were born?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Grant said, ‘when I did born.’

  ‘But today it’s not the same,’ Mrs Donnell shook her head. ‘They don’t keep the church no good any more.’ The Church of Zion had long ago lost its roof and been converted into a basketball court, the sisters said.

  Mrs Grant said, ‘All the good people have gone home [meaning they had died] and all of Bedward’s relatives have gone home too. Yes, all of them dead out.’ She paused. ‘We don’t even have his grandsons here now, all of them done away with and dead out.’

  And did Bedward really attempt to fly? ‘No, nothing happened like that, my dear,’ said Mrs Grant. ‘They jus’ try to make the Bedward myth more sweeter, nice it up.’ Who did? Why, the British government, Mrs Grant went on. Jamaican religious life is filled with mystic healers claiming descent variously from Abyssinian royalty, Jesus Christ or John the Baptist, and no doubt Bedward was prone to phantasmal visitations. According to another legend, he had attempted to fly with his followers to Africa. That yearning to ‘fly back to Guinea’ is characteristic of Neo-African possession cults, and it is one of the most pervasive themes in slave songs.

  Each Sunday, the Bedwardite sisters take a taxi to the Church of Christ (not a Bedward church) to attend morning service.

  ‘You don’t fly there?’ I teased.

  ‘No, we don’t fly there,’ they replied crossly. ‘Is a taxi we take.’

  St Thomas is the poorest parish of Jamaica, from where the poorest Jamaicans had left for Britain and the United States. Working as kitchen-hands, road-sweepers or lavatory attendants, they experienced foreign city life at its rawest and most exploitative. In their darkest hours some of them took comfort in the Afro-Christian beliefs that had transformed their lives back home. At night in the St Thomas countryside funerary rituals still take place, designed to keep the dead safely in their graves through a drum and dance rhythm called Kumina.

  Over the years, Kumina has merged into the more common Nine Night ceremony (the name for the nine-day period of mourning held to ensure a ‘good’ departure from this world for the deceased). A Nine Night, in turn, may absorb elements from other Afro-Caribbean religious cults such as Pocomania, Revival and the older Native Baptism.

  The dwindling belief in an afterlife - the consolation that we might join our loved ones in heaven - has made Jamaicans less respectful of such Revival-inspired mortuary rituals. These days Jamaicans may prefer to rely on the commercial funeral home, though this often leaves them with funeral expenses they can ill afford to repay. In urban areas especially, the consolation afforded by a Nine Night has been replaced by a hankering after a goldenc
rusted casket. Now even death wears bling.

  In remote St Thomas, however, the bereaved still face the mystery of the end of life in Kumina. The corpse can be kept on ice for up to two weeks while relatives gather from all parts of the diaspora to pay their respects. In St Thomas returnees attend more and more Kumina rituals as the friends and family they had left behind in the 1950s and 1960s age and die.

  A Nine Night was due to take place this evening in Leith Hall, ten miles east of Morant Bay. The deceased had been repatriated from New York and was now awaiting burial. If I wished to attend, I was to mention the name of a friend to one of the mourners.

  For nine nights the body remains in the deceased person’s home or ‘dead yard’. During this time, mourners gather to propitiate the ‘duppy’ (restless spirit) of the deceased through song, dance and offerings of drink and cooked food. The individual is not considered to be fully dead until his or her duppy has been appeased and ‘successful’ entombment taken place. (As they say in Jamaica: ‘No call man dead till you bury him.’) If the dead person is not properly buried, his or her spirit may return to ‘ride’ (as in a nightmare) the living, haunt familiar places and people, avenge enemies and generally make mischief. Even more so than Rastafari, Kumina represents the most obvious rejection in Jamaica of Anglican orthodoxy and High Church instruction; as in West African and West Central African non-Christian belief, the living must be protected from the dead.

  Again, as in Africa today, a variety of ruses are adopted to prevent the soul’s unwanted departure. Care is taken, for example, to ensure that no parts of a corpse - hair, fingernails - remain above ground, otherwise they might be put to magic use. On the ninth and final night (known as the ‘set-up’) the duppy is invited to leave the dead yard and not come back.

  Middle-class Jamaicans object that fussing over a corpse in this way is uncivilised. Jamaica Superstitions (1894), by the Anglican Reverend T. Banbury, condemned the Nine Night as ‘Satanic’ and tainted by obeahism (belief in sorcery) and other Neo-African ‘devilry’. But in Jamaica, good and evil are not always antithetical. Magic designed to harm white planters occupied a nebulous area between good and bad. In 1831, Nine Nights were outlawed by the Jamaican government as being insufficiently ‘Christian’. The ban was impossible to enforce, however, as the dead in Jamaica are too powerfully allied to the living.

  I went to Leith Hall with Peter, Evelyn Matalon’s cook, and her driver Prince. They were familiar with the variants of Revival and happy to accompany me to the Nine Night. By about ten o’clock we were deep in Kumina country. Prince, one hand on the steering wheel, ripped open a packet of Black Cat cigarettes with his fingernail, lit one and said to me, ‘Should be some good Revival tonight, Mr Ian.’ He blew out a cloud of high-tar smoke and watched it whip out of the window.

  ‘Spliff?’ Peter asked from the back of the car; he reached for his stash of collie weed under the seat and began to roll a paper. ‘Herb like fruit,’ he added with a grunt, ‘keep you healthy, keep you mind clear, a-true, Princey?’

  ‘A-true, Petes,’ said Prince. The ganja would be resinous, richtasting and very strong. Too much of it, and one would be seeing double and across time. Best to leave it alone. As Prince accelerated on through Lyssons and Prospect Point, a hot, oily smell came from the engine. I leaned out of the window for some fresh air and, in the huge darkness above us the stars hung low, burning steadily. The moon was the colour of a blood orange.

  About a mile before Leith Hall the road petered out among shacks. Here the land had been ‘captured’ from the government by the rural poor and squatted on. After five minutes we saw a fleet of cars parked at a crossroads. ‘This is it,’ said Prince, slowing down. ‘This have to be it.’ Our headlamps disclosed a milling of people outside the dead yard. Prince dowsed the headlamps, and stopped the car. A stench of rubbish came in sweet and heavy through the moon-illuminated night.

  We left the car and walked towards the house, a low concrete building with striped metal awnings. There were voices, the slap of dominoes on a backyard table and a dog set up a terrific barking. The noise quickened the pounding of my heart. At the entrance to the dead yard a woman stopped us. I mentioned the friend’s name, and the woman let us in. At the back, a crowd of mourners was gathered on a concrete terrace, some of them standing, others seated on folding metal chairs. A blue plastic tarpaulin was stretched across the crowd to form a roof. We were outdoors and it might rain.

  Nearby, in a cleared space, two Kumina drums stood unattended. This space was considered sacred and the drums were stuck round with lit candles. The audience, laughing and chatting sociably, were in most part drably dressed, though some appeared to be well off, with branded baseball caps, spiffy tracksuits or pressed jeans and glittery jewellery. I assumed they had flown in from the United States. The Jamaican population in America is even larger now than that in the United Kingdom (though Britain has a larger percentage of Jamaican people than America). Mine was the only white face in the audience, but, oddly, no one seemed to pay it any mind.

  At intervals a musician ambled in to spray the drumheads with rum. Tonight was the third night of the Nine Night, when the spirit is believed actually to rise from the corpse. The body, apparently laid out on blocks of ice inside the house, was not something I cared to see. My father had just died, and the sight of his own body in the hospital mortuary stayed with me; he, too, had had to be ‘repatriated’ from abroad for burial.

  A stout, middle-aged woman began to serve us cups of steaming ‘mannish water’ soup made of the entrails, testicles and head of a goat. (The risibly awful Rolling Stones album, Goat’s Head Soup, had been part-recorded in Jamaica.) I looked into my cup and something peeped up at me through the steam. Chunks of harddough bread made the liquid’s saltiness more palatable. ‘Mannish water’, so named for its apparent aphrodisiac properties, is a favourite at country weddings, as well as at funerals.

  Amid a stir of interest, two drummers arrived and, in a sort of benediction, they sprinkled more rum over the immediate audience, made up (according to Prince) of the dead person’s siblings, male and female. Chacha Beng, the chief drummer, wore a blue cassock, and many rings. A man of some importance, he was able to control the success, or otherwise, of the Kumina rhythms. As he straddled the playing kyas (the leading Kumina drum) he carefully tapped the stretched goatskin a couple of times. The younger man meanwhile took up a larger drum, the kbandu, likewise cylindrical and split-sided.

  The drummers were now joined by five other musicians, also men, armed with shakers (‘shak-shaks’) and catta sticks (which make a ‘rackling’ sound against the drum’s side). With a nod to the audience, they raised the percussion above their heads, much as a Vodoun priest might raise a sacrificial dove in Haiti. The drama of the moment was heightened for me by a rumble of the kyas, which settled into a low, rapid thrumming, as both drummers began to beat out a rhythm with their hands. The beat spread out, reached a pitch of strong, rapid strokes. An African call-and-response-a low hurrying beat - was ringing out now. And round the Kumina orchestra a group of men and women had begun to dance.

  They started a slow, counter-clockwise shuffle, the jerky movement of their arms oddly resembling those of ska dance routines. Alternately bending forward and straightening up in rhythmic sequence, the dancers took an intake of breath, and released it with a James Brown-like ‘huh’. Revivalists call this form of respiration ‘trumping’-a form of hyperventilation. The percussionists with their chattering beat kept the dancers in a continuous whirl, until cheekbones and foreheads took on a polish of sweat. One of the men had gone into a swinging, hip-thrusting dance of his own, clearing a space in the crowd. He was a Leith Hall cop, I was told, and his pistol was protruding nastily from his waistband; the safety catch was on, I hoped.

  Then a woman began to shake, threw back her head and gyrated her arms in rapid circles. The duppy had entered her and seemingly put her in a semi-hypnoidal state. She stood up, staggered forward from her chair, her
body colliding hot against mine, whirling away. Now she swayed a little towards Chacha Beng. Her eyes were closed, her lips were slightly parted and her breath was coming and going in little spasms. The audience stood calmly by, strangely unmoved by the display, though not for long. Three women dashed after the possessed woman, as she was now swirling away towards the entrance by the road. The crowds parted to let her through; she fell down, stood up again, did a spinning turn with her arms extended and began to tear away her blouse. The women coaxed her back into it and, mindful of her decency, replaced a stray strap.

  The helpers now prevented the woman from dancing blindly out into passing traffic. They placed sprigs of herbs in her cleavage as a ward against ‘unwanted’ ancestor spirits. And they staved off men who wanted only to bump and grind drunkenly against her. I breathed in the hot body heat of the dead yard, closed my eyes and let a memory intrude of my father in that cold, unforgiving mortuary overseas. His body had been brought up to me from underground storage and lay in unremitting stillness under a shroud. I could not believe that this was my real father, in a real hospital mortuary. That freezing place, with its hum of refrigerators, contrasted starkly with the human heat of the dead yard.

  Peter had been apprenticed in Kumina rhythms by his father and, after a lull in the drumming, he played the kbandu at Chacha Beng’s invitation. Cheered on by Prince, Peter rode the rhythms so hard that he raised the mood in the dead yard to an ecstasy. ‘Yes!’ Peter shouted encouragement. ‘Is it!’ The woman now lay motionless on the ground for perhaps half a minute, until she stirred, signifying that she was conscious enough to stand. Quietened down, she was led back to her chair by the helpers, where she sat slumped and spent. At this point Peter and the musicians cut off their rhythms so abruptly that they seemed to hang there in the air for seconds afterwards. During this break more alcohol was smeared on the drumheads and poured down throats. The night was not yet over.