The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  ‘Anyone with you?’ the man went on.

  ‘No - not exactly.’

  ‘What does that mean, not exactly? Either someone’s with you or you’re alone. Are you alone?’ The man’s voice sounded throaty, vibrant with triumph.

  After more questions back and forth we parted amicably enough. ‘No harm - was jus’ conversin’,’ said the man. ‘Go through!’ He stepped aside and, with a friendly air, pointed out Isaac Bernard’s house to me on a hilltop.

  When I got to the house, a thin, long-legged man was seated on the veranda, polishing a pair of shoes: stout, churchgoing ones. He sat looking at me with puckered eyes.

  ‘Who sent you?’ (Here we go.)

  ‘Colonel Sterling.’ (The recently elected colonel of Moore Town.)

  ‘Who do you represent?’

  ‘Represent?’

  ‘You’re with somebody. Tell me who.’

  I identified myself.

  Bernard Isaac, the fete-man, said to me, ‘You shall come in,’ and, waving his left hand at a chair, added, ‘You may sit down.’ Like many older Jamaicans he seemed to be afflicted with English politesse. I moved over to the indicated chair, and sat. Isaac poured a libation of rum over the side of the veranda, then drank some. He did this with his eyes closed and muttering an invocation in (I guessed) Asante-Twi.

  ‘What do you think of that, mister?’ he said, with the air of a showman exhibiting a trick.

  ‘It looks ceremonial.’

  ‘It is ceremonial,’ he said. Rum trickled down his chin like tarry sweat. To my astonishment, Maroon scouts had been watching me walk up from Moore Town. ‘All obroni have to be checked out and foundated with us,’ explained Isaac. ‘You might be a spy. You might be here on bad business.’

  I was about to say something but he put his finger to his lips for silence.

  ‘Maroons always a tricky people - plenty obroni have died and plenty sick and can’t cure because they try and fight us. Yes, them die for it. Or Nanny cuss them off. But hear me now, we Maroon people is a well-meaning people. Yes, a friendly people. We don’t move among strangers, but still and all we don’t attack obroni unless they attack us. The spirit ancestors - them throw the bad people out.’

  He laughed, then scowled. ‘Is the hand of God that throw them out.’ Isaac, like many Maroons, practised an evangelical Christianity combined with an African-derived ancestor-worship which involved the ‘science’ of telepathy and a belief in the paranormal. ‘I am foundated with Jesus, definitely so.’ From his wallet he removed a membership card for the United Holy Church of God. ‘But I also receive messages from the spirit world far, far away. And when I cut loose [meaning ‘die’], I fly up, go to Africa. Because all Maroon come from Africa. Yes, my foreparents them come from Africa. And,’ Isaac went on, with his eyes to the veranda roof, ‘you have met Colonel Sterling?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Colonel Sterling is a brown-skin man,’ said Isaac, with a hint maybe of disapproval. ‘Most of us Maroons is black.’

  ‘Is that a problem?’

  No - a Maroon community would accept anyone irrespective of pigmentation or ethnicity. ‘All the same, is mostly black we have up here - no Chinee or coolie people.’ He added, ‘Jamaica don’t have enough trouble as it is with coolie Hindians, but now we must have slant eye too!’ It was as if, having discovered his proud African ‘voice’, Isaac attributed a lack of authenticity to other Jamaicans. Maroons, in Isaac’s formulation, were a chosen people, an African elect. ‘Anyway Chinyman no good at domino or making Maroon food,’ he concluded gruffly.

  He stood up, staggered slightly, then disappeared a moment down a hall to fetch an abeng. ‘I use it for bugling,’ he explained, lifting it to his lips. ‘I use it to summon folks to meetings, as a call to arms and to make jollification at Christmas time.’ Through the abeng he blew three long, foghorn-like notes and, pausing for breath, stopped. ‘No one learn me how to blow - all my bugling is self-taught.’ He demonstrated an array of abeng signals - long and complicated Morse codes to communicate a warning, or summon help. ‘If you drop dead from a tree, I can blow this horn to announce as much. Or if you gets lost in the bush, I give a long-short-long message like this ...’ He blew again, and the notes rang out mournful across the foothills of the Blue Mountains.

  Before I left, he asked me for a sum of money - what he called, in Asanti-Twi, takefa. The elder was poor, with few extenuating circumstances. We regarded each other for a moment as I took out a couple of Jamaican $500 ‘Nanny’ notes (about £10). The transaction made me feel dirty - as though I was buying Maroon knowledge and had obliged the fete-man to sell it to me. He flattened the notes on his knee and then, bizarrely, pressed them against his eyelids for a second.

  ‘Why do that?’

  ‘Because we call money “eyesight” in Maroon tongue,’ Isaac answered cryptically. (Back home, I could find no explanation for why money should be referred to as ‘eyesight’.) I did not touch on the missing UNESCO grant, but instead asked Isaac about the trip he had made in 2003 to Surinam in what used to be the Netherlands West Indies. ‘Surinam!’ He echoed excitedly. The Maroons of Surinam were kin to Jamaica’s and even spoke a Creole language, Saramacan, cognate with Jamaican patois. Yes, the Surinamers used the abeng too. ‘Only their gears are more fashionable than our gears - they wear wrap-skirts and waist ties like sashes.’ Jamaican Maroons wear no such tribesman finery.

  As Isaac spoke, his eyes seemed to be looking far into the future, or perhaps into the past. I found him inscrutable and, in some way, sinister. He was a powerful person, with a confident and slightly haughty manner, and was said to be a good community leader. He was convinced, he told me (with the kind of smile that usually goes with a wink) that Maroon culture would survive modern times. For how long? In 1946 the African American dancer Katherine Dunham had come to Jamaica in search of ‘wild exotic Maroon music’ but at first could find only radio broadcasts of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway.

  At about 6.30 p.m. the sun went down in a haze of dust particles, and by the time I got back to Moore Town it was dark. A full moon was forming on the edge of the sky and I stood outside my room watching the moon riding, careering, through the clouds. Gene Pryce invited me to join her in a game of dominoes on the porch. (Every Jamaican village has its domino expert, who does little else but ‘play domino’; a domino could feature on the national flag.)

  Gene set the domino tiles out on the table.

  ‘Come, Lenny,’ she called out to her husband, who had also been gazing up at the moon. ‘Sit down for domino.’

  ‘All right, Gene.’

  ‘And come, Ian, you too.’

  ‘Soon come,’ I said, throwing Gene a newly acquired phrase.

  A bat swooped round the lamp’s uncertain light above the table. ‘Double 6’ was a new game to me. I banged down the bone pieces hard. A bottle of rum rested between me and Lenny, and Lenny was drinking tots of the stuff. ‘Thought you had me trapped there, Lenny, my dear,’ said Gene, celebrating a domino victory over her husband. A neighbour called Michael (‘Come, Mikey’) presently joined us for a round. He sat at the table with his eyes modestly lowered, and remained silent throughout. One by one, other domino hotshots followed Michael to the game of ‘Double 6’. The players sat packed in tight under the lamp, chatting. A group of children, lured perhaps by the presence of the obroni (or the sound of concentrated chatter), stood on tiptoe peeking over shoulders. I looked up at the spangled night sky: life here was not so bad.

  ‘What’s your job?’ Colonel Sterling asked me - the question so sudden, I had to think before answering it.

  ‘Well, I write.’

  ‘A writer, you say?’ the colonel replied with a degree of Maroon stateliness. ‘Well then, you can write how we Maroons are at the crossroads now. Yes, any kind of development-a new school, a new church - will come at the cost of having something of our old ways eroded.’ The colonel laughed mirthlessly. ‘It was hoped - it was expected - that Maroon famil
ies would pass on African culture to their children, but this has not happened.’ In order to safeguard what might soon be lost, Sterling was planning to open a Maroon Cultural Centre.

  ‘With the UNESCO money?’

  ‘With some of it.’ He looked at me cautiously.

  ‘A sort of museum?’

  ‘A sort of museum,’ he agreed.

  Though Colonel Sterling was, comparatively speaking, a newcomer to Moore Town (having been raised in Cornwall Barracks in the 1950s), the attention he paid to his adopted town - its history, its people - was impressive. The controversy surrounding the UNESCO grant was part of a quarrel that had been simmering for decades. The trouble started, said the colonel, because of petty political jealousies. Moore Town’s JLP faction, led by one Charles Aarons, and others of his political persuasion had long prevented Sterling and his PNP allies from obtaining their rightful share of local power. Now Charles Aarons of the JLP was spreading wild rumours about the colonel’s financial improprieties. ‘If only Aarons would simmer down,’ Sterling said, as we sat talking in the muggy, rain-washed morning, ‘Moore Town would not be so ... troubled.’ The remark carried a barb that would surely rankle with Aarons.

  Aarons’s house, a big, bland-looking concrete construction on the mountain path up to Cornwall Barracks, was planted round with white, green and red flags on tall bamboo poles. The flags indicated that the occupant was a ‘science-man’, one of those Jamaicans who mediated between the world of the living and the unseen world of the spirits (and was perhaps also a practitioner of ‘anti-social magic’, or witchcraft). According to the Pryces, when Aarons was in spirit possession (myal) he was able to perform such extraordinary physical feats as climbing coconut trees upside down, and devouring glass.

  Aarons appraised me suspiciously: his ancestors had advised him not to talk to obroni. He was wearing dark glasses, which enhanced his mystic appearance. After the first flush of suspicion, he seemed prepared to talk. And what he wanted to talk about, above all, was Colonel Sterling.

  ‘Me and Sterling, we used to be as close as batty and bench,’ (the colloquial Jamaican expression sounded a ribald note) ‘but now is knives we have in each other. Yes, I’m vex and I’m disillusioned.’ Among the colonel’s shortcomings, apparently, was his inability to speak Asante-Twi.

  ‘Does he need to?’

  ‘Yes!’ Aarons retorted in a surprised voice: Asante-Twi was the language of the old people, of the custodians of Maroon life. The surviving traces of the language were guarded possessively by town elders such as Aarons, whose company Sterling (because he spoke no Asante-Twi) had no right to keep.

  Aarons added, ‘Moore Town’s a sad place today.’ He repeated, ‘You don’t find Moore Town a sad place, mister?’

  ‘I haven’t noticed any sadness.’

  ‘But look at the state of our roads! Everything overgrown - Nanny’s town’s turned to bush! Is this what Nanny’s children deserve?’ Of the UNESCO donation he demanded to know: ‘Where is it? What has been done with it? It need investigation!’

  The quarrel went deeper than money or politics: it involved religion. Colonel Sterling, a Seventh Day Adventist, disapproved of Charles Aarons’s practice of obeah. ‘The colonel say I sup with the devil - that I oppose to goodness. Well, I just play my Maroon drums in reply to that.’ Aarons was the devil - Sterling was the devil. Aarons hated Sterling, and he hated him with an intensity he was unable to mask. The thwarting of the colonel was a duty which Aarons felt compelled to fulfil - for the sake of Moore Town’s ‘salvation’.

  Aarons removed his dark glasses. He had a cataract in one eye. A tall, narrow hand-drum called a gumbay stood by his side, and on it he began to play a ‘Coromantee’ war dance rhythm designed to bring destruction on enemies. (I did not ask who these enemies might be.) As Aarons played, the flowing, ever-changing syncopations sounded to me like Caribbean mento folksong overlaid with rhythms from Gold Coast Africa. But Aarons was playing something more ancient. This was Africa as it might have sounded in the sixteenth century, not the deep booming of a Revivalist or Salvation Army drum, but a sharp staccato beat struck off a tightdrawn goatskin.

  Aarons rubbed his hands and said, ‘The drumming was to your liking?’ We might have been at a classical concert. For Aarons, too, had absorbed a colonial British emphasis on ceremony and formal correctness. Maroons might look reverentially to Africa yet, paradoxically, they had adopted the British military title of ‘colonel’. Queen Elizabeth II remained for them the Great Ruler of the Universe, moreover, associated in the Maroon mind with a benevolent and fair rule. In 1796, at the end of the Maroon Wars, the British Crown became the guarantor of Maroon laws and the Maroons’ special ‘treaty status’.

  Understandably for some black nationalists the ‘Britishness’ adopted by Maroons signals a lack of ideological purity, even a covert loyalty to imperialism. Is that fair? In spite of their anglophile insistence on pomp, Maroons have always taken a great pride in their African identity. And this identity has not been acquired at a distance from an autocratic Ethiopian monarch - Haile Selassie - but was passed down the generations and still lives in the ‘Coromantee’ spirit of Moore Town. I felt privileged to have stayed, if only for a few days, amid the runaways of eastern Jamaica.

  17

  The Killing of a Chinese Shopkeeper

  I had come to Annotto Bay, a dank coastal outpost of St Mary parish, by bus from Port Antonio. Mosquito-infested and poor, the town had warped jetties and boats upended on marshland, and exuded a sense of things rotting. The grocery shops, many of them, were owned by Chinese who had settled here in the 1840s as contract labourers. The Chinese residents were not always liked. They tended to live apart, venturing into Annotto Bay only on market days to buy supplies. To some Jamaicans, they were ‘economic oppressors’, an easy target for resentment.

  In 2004, an inexplicable (or at least still unexplained) murder took place, of a Chinese couple, Ilene and Winston Chin, at their home in Highgate near Annotto Bay. Their shop, ‘Chin & Co’, was empty now and the windows still boarded against looters.

  Annotto Bay also has another unfortunate association. As I related earlier, Father Martin Royackers, a Canadian Jesuit, had been gunned down outside the Catholic rectory in this broken and marginalised parish of St Mary on the evening of 20 June 2001. According to the police, nobody had heard the gunman’s shot, at any rate nobody had come forward yet.

  I rang the bell to the rectory and the door was opened by Jim Webb, whom I had met earlier in Kingston. His pale face and slightly reticent manner still spoke of an absorbing melancholy.

  Along a dark, earth-smelling corridor Webb led me to a terrace overlooking the sea, where a lunch of fried pork awaited us. ‘I hope pork’s to your liking?’ He asked the question with some trepidation: ‘I thought you might be vegetarian.’ Beneath us the Caribbean Sea brought in a scummy-looking tide where a group of children was fishing hopefully for snapper and other food, feeding out their lines. ‘They never catch anything,’ Father Webb commented dolefully. ‘Nobody ever does.’ A couple of birds circled on a high thermal out to sea, like black wreaths.

  Watched by the children, we sat down to eat. In the uncertain light the scene looked bleak enough. Most of the children slept four to a bed, said Father Webb. They sailed paper ships in the gutter, rolled hoops across rubbish-strewn beaches (as some were doing now), and failed their exams: but by twelve they had learned to shoot guns, and by twenty, if they had migrated to Kingston, were dead. Martin Royackers’s death remained a ‘great trial’ to Webb. Police files had been checked, suspects considered, resulting in nothing. ‘Martin was ready to die, I believe, though what exactly provoked his death I’m not sure.’ A contract hit? Many have suggested as much. ‘Martin’s assassination was political,’ Webb agreed. It was the best he could surmise.

  Prior to his murder Royackers had managed to re-assign sixty acres of idle land to St Mary farmers. This had offended local business interests. Very little land in Jamai
ca is under church or government control; it remains either in the hands of the plantocracy or giant (usually foreign) business corporations. With Father Webb’s help, however, Royackers had returned a portion of land to the peasantry and encouraged small-scale cultivators to set up cooperatives. The Jesuit-run St Mary Rural Development Project had helped to transform the hillside communities of the parish.

  However, Royackers’s confrontational personality could make him prickly and hostile in the presence of authority. ‘We priests are human,’ Webb explained, ‘we share some of the prejudices of our backgrounds and upbringing - and maybe Martin was pugnacious by ... circumstance.’ From rural Ontario, Royackers cared little for social niceties. Even Jesuits found his attempts to reconcile Christianity with communism peculiar. ‘Martin was a curious mix of Opus Dei and Arthur Scargill,’ a Canadian friend of his, Richard Greene (incidentally, the editor of Graham Greene’s letters), told me. ‘Very right wing theologically, but very left wing politically-a combination that’s not that all rare among Catholic priests in the Third World.’

  On that fateful day in 2004, a Jesuit deacon had risen early to find Royackers’s supper uneaten and the refectory lights still on. The priest was discovered lying face down and his body plugged with a single bullet, powder burns at the entry indicating that the killer had been less than five feet away. ‘I may not be comfortable in Jamaica,’ Royackers had written in a letter home, ‘but, like the morning’s first drag on a cigarette, the noise and heat and insect bites remind me that I am alive.’ The Klondike sleaze of Annotto Bay appealed to him.

  Father Webb offered to take me to see the effects of Royackers’s land redistribution project. In Jamaica, where everything waits for the government (and is often corrupted by politicians seeking ‘fish head’ - bribes) a private scheme such as St Mary Rural Development was new and encouraging. We would go in a week’s time.