The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  Jamaican police not infrequently die in the crossfire between rival gangs. ‘They’re doing some of the most dangerous police work in the world,’ said Shields. One gang might try to take over a drug sales location that belonged to another gang. Or one gang might attempt a drive-by shooting in another gang’s territory, hoping to scare off its customers. Shields was not worried by the small-fry Jamaican criminals - the Heathrow ‘stuffers and the swallowers’ who might do a couple of years in Holloway for cocaine smuggling. ‘No, it’s the big-time cocaine gangsters - the blood money men in Philadelphia, Manchester and London - that worry me.’ Each day they pump more guns and money into their Kingston ‘corner’. The deportee from Peckham will expect his ‘corner’ to have remained the same as when he left it. ‘But,’ Shields explained, ‘another man’s moved in - and that’s when you have a turf war.’

  Shields has pledged to bring Jamaica’s murder rate down by 4 per cent. ‘Not much, you might say, but I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep. If we reduce the killings by even one per cent, we’re doing very well.’ It is uncertain whether the government will consider appointing an outsider as Jamaican police deputy again. For the moment, it may not be irrelevant to point out that as a foreigner Mark Shields is not yet embroiled in, or compromised by, island corruption.

  In Jamaica’s catalogue of police and gangland brutality, Carolyn Gomes holds a special place. She is the director of Jamaicans for Justice, a human rights group she founded in 1999 with the aim of combating the abuse of state laws and capriciously wielded government authority. It offers legal instruction and assurance to the poor, and keeps a hawk-like eye on perversions of justice in both Kingston and the parishes. Though Jamaican police kill an average of 130 to 150 citizens a year, cases of police brutality make up only a small part of Gomes’s work. Many police officers are happy to cooperate with her. ‘We like Mark Shields,’ she told me. ‘He respects the Jamaican people - and you can always work with Jamaicans if you show them respect.’ Shields, I assumed, was civil and courteous towards Jamaicans.

  Gomes added, in her quiet, level voice, ‘Jamaica’s justice system has not moved on with the rest of the world’s.’ The dishonesty in Jamaican public life had made her wary of politicians and the machinery of the Jamaican state. Yet what I had not understood in all my months in Jamaica was the extent to which violence - and the threats of violence - had rendered the justice system inoperable. Failure of civic society had gone hand in hand with the failure of leadership. Pathologists are often too frightened to serve as observers at post-mortems. The post-mortem room at the Spanish Town Hospital has no refrigeration so what might serve as evidence disintegrates fast. ‘Call the Hearse’ by the reggae singer Bushman had articulated the problem:Somebody call the hearse

  Cause the body is getting stink

  It needs to leave the turf

  Make it quick because it’s getting rather worse

  ‘Have you been to the Spanish Town mortuary?’ Gomes asked me. When I said yes, she frowned. Bodies are brought in by the commercial funeral homes in the early morning, and piled up in corners, often on top of each other. The pathologists don’t get to the bodies until eleven - if at all. Usually they don’t even weigh the organs - and the bullets are left in the bodies. Currently, Jamaican hospital forensic laboratories come under the control of the Ministry of National Security and Justice; therefore scope for corruption, as well as error, is ample.

  Single-minded and tireless, in 2003 Gomes gave up her job as a paediatrician to work in the volatile Grants Pen area of Kingston. The neighbourhood encroaches on no less than four political boundaries. ‘You don’t cross them,’ Gomes said to me. Murders and assaults occur often enough in Grants Pen, but only exceptional murders are reported in detail by the press. One such occurred in 1994, when the police executed a youth on the premises of Nuttall Hospital in Kingston, where Gomes was then working. She was in her office when the police ran past in pursuit of the youth who had found his way, terrified, into the maternity department. The police dragged him out, laid him face down on the floor, and shot him six times in the head (once was not enough). That same day Gomes went on national radio to condemn the execution and within two hours she had received death threats. Extrajudicial police killings are not, on the whole, seen as unlawful by Jamaicans, many of whom believe in instant remedies for crime: death by firing squad, death by mass beatings. Fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, with its calls for the hangman, is partly to blame for the harsh justice, as well as public lack of faith in an overworked and inadequate judiciary.

  Gomes answered my next question - where do the guns come from? - with a slight weariness.

  ‘We really don’t know. Some say Haiti - as payment for drugs. Others say the Balkans. Maybe Manchester. Maybe Liverpool. Maybe even Northern Ireland.’ Like any other globalised economy, in other words, the guns come from all over the world. They are cheap, and getting cheaper; and to the new breed of Jamaican criminals who use them, so is human life. Gomes is reluctant to attribute all gun crime to Jamaica’s narcotics trade. The Jamaican police put the figure of drugs-related crime at only 30 per cent, a statistic which Gomes saw no reason to doubt. Social deprivation as well as the decline in ‘family values’ have helped to make Jamaica the country it now is. For Gomes, a committed Catholic, the ‘ravaging’ of Jamaican society by absent fathers is nothing short of a ‘tragedy’. Fatherless Crew, a notorious Kingston gang, is typically made up of youths whose fathers are in jail, abroad or, most likely, dead.

  But is Jamaica really the ‘fatherless society’ so often portrayed in the foreign press? Barry Chevannes, a social anthropologist based in Kingston, has devoted much energy to challenging the myth. Poor Jamaican men do not uniformly neglect their spousal and parental duties. The problem, as Chevannes sees it, is simply one of poverty. Fathers who can no longer provide are ‘pressured out’ of home and family; despised by their wives as ‘wutliss’ (worthless), they may well turn to crime. In 1991, with the aim of challenging the stereotype of the irresponsible Jamaican ‘baby father’, Chevannes set up a ‘discussion and counselling’ group in Kingston called Fathers Incorporated. Jamaican men, Chevannes said to me, must not be left ‘burdened with the blame’. All the same, generations of Jamaican boys have grown up - are growing up - without fathers. No amount of counselling can detract from that.

  I asked Carolyn Gomes whether the culture of ‘respect’ - and the gun violence that so often accompanies it - was an American import. (‘Respect’, on the revered rap album Ready to Die, by the Notorious B.I.G., glamorises violence in a way I had assumed to be narrowly American.)

  ‘No,’ Gomes replied emphatically. ‘The business of dissing and respect is home-grown Jamaican. When your life’s so degraded, you need people to respect you, you need a gun to stand out.’ Notions of ‘respect’ have hatched in the absence of civic values, said Gomes, and encouraged Jamaican men to pursue power and money for their own sake. American rap culture has made spectacular inroads into Jamaican life. Customised wheel rims carrying Mafia-gangsta names like ‘Soprano’, ‘Pistola’ and ‘Vendetta’ are all the rage. The motor accessories, harmless enough, have become an important part of the braggadocio and notions of ‘respect’ among young Jamaican men. Along with Nike footwear and spiffy track bottoms, those rims are advertised in the pages of American King Magazine (‘The Illest Men’s Magazine Ever!’) and on Black Entertainment Television. There are plenty of uptown cowboys, too, said Gomes, who pack guns and take drugs ‘Everybody is suffering here,’ she concluded.

  Kingston, like Bogotá or São Paulo, Johannesburg or New Delhi, has a thriving industry in personal security. Security firms seem to make their biggest profits in those cities where the gap between rich and poor is greatest. Trevor Macmillan, a Sandhurst-educated Jamaican, runs a security advisory business off Hillcrest Avenue in uptown Kingston. The business, pervaded by the neutral smell and faint hum of air conditioning, specialises in security for the home as well as for automo
biles (M16-proof windshields). Guard dogs are always to be recommended. Most of the dogs are imported from Britain because it takes too long to clear dogs through US quarantine. Black is the preferred colour as it is harder to see at night. ‘Jamaicans have a special terror of dogs,’ Macmillan permitted himself a grim laugh. ‘If things get really rowdy at a cricket match, all the police have to do is bring on the dogs. The crowds go quiet. You should see it!’

  Macmillan was one of those increasingly rare uptowners who did not carry a gun. ‘I’ve got a licensed shotgun at home but I never carry a gun - it’s too dangerous. Of course, for many Jamaicans, a gun is the symbol of authority. I mean, you can buy things with a gun - you can rent guns out.’ Macmillan should know: between 1993 and 1996 he served as Commissioner of the Jamaican police.

  Sandhurst, I supposed, had inculcated in Macmillan a love of Empire and England. He loved cricket. He loved the thick, wine-red carpets of the British colonial administration. His commercial empire, not unlike the British Empire, separated a handful of wealthy people from the rest and barricaded them inside fortresses. In Kingston, entire parts of the city had become fortified gated communities, surrounded by the ‘have-nots’ living in permanently excluded zones. Macmillan spoke of these Jamaicans as though they were a people apart, different from him. (‘Jamaicans tend to be highly reactive’. ‘Jamaicans are harder then the rest’.) A part of him, I suspected, wanted Jamaica to go back to the days of ‘British law’ and ‘the London bobby’ but, he said, ‘There’s this brutality in Jamaicans,’ and, given the chance, they would be more repressive than British law would allow. ‘Jamaicans want to bring back hanging. Jamaicans don’t want softly-softly,’ he said.

  And DCP Shields?

  ‘Shields is the great white hope for upper-class Jamaicans,’ said Macmillan, ‘but he isn’t getting the resources and the help he needs from the Force.’ Why was that? The police had become more biddable and corruptible in recent years, in Macmillan’s view, and Shields stood in the way of vested interests. The corruption seemed to have a direct connection with police abuse and violence. Jamaican police were often in the national news for beating - sometimes even killing - people who had shown them insufficient ‘respect’. But the culture of corruption had caused the lack of respect, and loss of self-respect.

  Macmillan added, with a wave of the hand, ‘What Jamaica needs is a new Force. The Force has to purge itself of all known - or merely suspected - corrupt policemen and put them on early pensions.’ Arresting those who are merely ‘suspected’ of wrongdoing sounded a dubious, extra-legal note, surely. Macmillan would not be drawn, but sat for a moment in silence. Something close to chaos, he continued, could now be seen in the Jamaica Constabulary. Police Academy graduates find themselves at the mercy of their regional superiors, who tell them, ‘Here we do it our way.’

  The Constabulary itself is not respected as it should be by the government. A white foreign DCP drafted in to deal with corruption was obviously a political gesture. The entire Jamaican police force is understaffed and under-resourced, and in need of investment. Seventy per cent of police stations are in disrepair, the floors caving in, ceilings collapsed. Morale is low.

  As I left, Macmillan asked me, ‘Are you mobile?’

  ‘Mobile?’

  ‘Always carry a mobile phone with you in Jamaica. You never know when you may need it.’ He took my hand and, holding it between both his hands, said: ‘Be careful.’ In 2008, shortly after I met him, Trevor Macmillan was appointed Jamaican minister of security. One year later, in the spring of 2009, Mark Shields resigned as DCP: he had had enough of Jamaica.

  In the cool, rhododendron-rich heights above Kingston is a house signposted ‘John Hearne’; John Hearne, the Jamaican novelist, had lived and died here after a period spent teaching in Leeds in England. Here, uptown, an undertone of fear can be felt on dark nights, when moonlight casts black shadows across the trim lawns, guard dogs bark and the house alarms go off. Hearne’s widow, Leeta Hearne, was nevertheless still resident, an ironic, bright woman who had come to Jamaica from England as a teacher in 1953. Her sitting room was filled with tattered cane chairs and a brocade sofa. Leeta was seated on the sofa most evenings, pouring out tea; I went to visit her many times. (‘I’m sorry,’ she would say, handing me a cup of Darjeeling, ‘you’ll have to make do with a Christening spoon.’) I enjoyed her company and the stories she had to tell - good and bad - of Jamaica.

  Not long ago a man had come down off the roof, very drunk, demanding money and brandishing a machete (‘cutlass’ in Jamaican). The police shot him dead. Leeta’s sensibilities, like those of many Kingstonians, had become blunted by the violence, yet she refused to be lured into any nostalgia for those ill-defined ‘good times’ when Jamaica apparently had no crime and the police were incorruptible. Some Jamaicans, she said, are wilfully detached from the present, and live in a cocoon of fond remembrance. Over the fifty years she had lived in Jamaica she had seen many changes but even in those ‘charming’ pre-independence days you could still feel threatened by a hint of violence in the air.

  Leeta was prey to a language disorder called nominal aphasia, where periods of articulacy are sabotaged by what she called ‘vocabulary amnesia’. Her forgetting was like a metaphor, she said half-jokingly, for Jamaica’s own historical amnesia, where the past had been conveniently forgotten.

  She had little difficulty, however, in speaking about her husband John Hearne. His first novel, Voices Under the Window, published in London in 1955, unfolded in a fictionalised West Indian island (in reality Jamaica) at a time of gross social inequalities on the eve of the Second World War. It was followed by four other novels set on the same imaginary island of Cayuna. While other Jamaican novelists were chronicling Kingston poverty and the rise of Rastafari, Hearne in the 1950s and 1960s chose to write instead about the Kingston bourgeoisie and the agricultural middle classes of which he was a part. His work irked some West Indian writers. George Lamming, the great Barbadian novelist, thought that Hearne had glorified ‘a mythological, colonial squirearchy’. Yet Hearne’s last novel, The Sure Salvation (1981), was set on a transatlantic slave ship during the early nineteenth century, and provides a powerful indictment of the ‘Africa Trade’.

  Initially pro-PNP, John Hearne had lambasted wealthier Kingstonians behind their burglar bars uptown, who lorded it over the ‘Quashee’ or black majority. In the mid-1970s at the height of Michael Manley’s socialist experiment, Hearne commented:Look at those bastards up there. They live like kings and Trench Town is less than two miles away. It’s a wonder they haven’t all had their throats cut by now.

  On his death in 1994, Hearne was virtually forgotten, though he had been ‘widely read once’, his widow said ruefully. Leeta Hearne, with her English tea service, seemed like a planter’s wife in an Indian hill station in the 1940s, mindful of the country’s past deficiencies and fearful of what was to come, yet unable or unwilling to leave. One evening as I was getting ready to go she glanced up at the roof, wary that someone might be up there again. In an hour, she said, it would be dark, more than enough darkness for us all.

  21

  Night Nurse

  Down Orange Street past the Rockers International record shop (the reggae bass reverberating heavy in my gut), past the high-rise Gleaner building, I was back among the clacking of the domino players in the Parade, and back on to King’s Street and its KFC and Burger King. Everywhere I went that day the voice of Wilmot ‘Motty’ Perkins could be heard chivvying callers on his radio chat show. ‘Motty’ is probably the most controversial political commentator at work today in the Anglophone West Indies. The whole of diaspora Jamaica - not just Jamaica - often seems to be engaged in either an attack on or a defence of some opinion Perkins has just aired on the radio.

  His call-in show manages to inform, educate and often amuse with its litanies of doom and frequent settling of scores. Perkins must have a streak of sustained vindictiveness, as the unkindest things are said on the show. His
greatest contempt is reserved for Michael Manley, in his view ‘a good, charming, civilised man, but also a dimwit’. To his enemies ‘Motty’ is a tiresome, even quixotic figure who revels in controversy for its own sake. ‘Perkins harks back to a time when Jamaicans spoke the Queen’s English and when there was an assumption of British law and order,’ said the Kingston-based historian Roy Augier (not, since Augier is an anti-imperialist, an endorsement).

  Yet Perkins is so much more than merely a scourge of government corruption. He made his name in the early 1970s when, along with John Hearne, he was a sharp-shooting political journalist initially sympathetic to the PNP’s black nationalist, Pan-African agenda. Gradually, however, as Michael Manley failed to provide career and investment opportunities, Perkins withdrew his support, and in his gossipy Gleaner column, ‘Listening Post’, he portrayed an increasingly autocratic and high-handed leader. Under Manley, Perkins claimed, state security had begun to hunt down and murder opponents, acting like vigilantes. In 1978, five opposition JLP activists were executed by the army on Kingston’s Green Bay firing range. The Green Bay Massacre, as it came to be known, marked the low point in Manley’s ‘disregard for law’, said Perkins, who has devoted much of his radio air time to ‘investigating’ an event which occurred thirty years before.

  In 1979, similarly disillusioned, John Hearne wrote a now notorious article for the Gleaner, ‘Snoopy Go Home’, in which he compared Michael Manley to the cartoon dog who could bark all right but did not know how to find his way home: Manley, Hearne implied, was full of sound and fury that amounted to little.