by Grace Jones
Whatever we did, however innocuous it seemed to us, or whatever other children were doing, there was this huge accusing eye hanging in the sky watching us and reporting back to our stepfather and the church. They always seemed to know where and how we were up to no good. Perhaps they assumed without ever knowing for sure. Or they didn’t care if we were doing something wrong or not. Punishment was their way of keeping us in line.
After all, we got beaten a lot. Serious abuse.
There were tough leather belts on the wall with our names on them that were used to beat us. We would be beaten for what we were going to do even if we hadn’t yet done it—beaten in anticipation of insubordination. Each belt was a different weight for who we were and how old we were, but sometimes you’d get struck with a belt above your years—the worse the perceived sin, the heavier the belt. If it got particularly bad you had to climb a tree and choose your own switch, which would then be used to whip you. Mother and Father had no idea of the ferocity of Mas P, and we were afraid to say anything to anyone, because that would have made things worse. He would read letters, whichever direction they went in. Everything was intercepted. It was like living in a prison camp, one where your guardian—your step-grandfather—was your guard.
There was one level of chastisement for playing after school, one for turning the corner of the pages over in the Bible to keep your place, another because you were on the verge of doing something wrong, not sure what it was, but you might as well be punished already, and then there was the beating you knew you were going to get at the end of the day. You’d be at school all day knowing that at the end of the day you were going to get a whipping.
My grandmother was a gentle soul, and she was totally dominated by Mas P. I remember sometimes she would try and get in the way when he was going to hit us and stand in between us, but he was so much stronger. She was afraid to stand up to him. He would brush her aside with one arm. If she ever disciplined us, she would hit us with a cloth belt—nothing painful at all, something light torn from her dress, a gesture.
Every night was church night—prayer meeting, Bible class, general service. Saturday was a day off; we could crochet, study a bit, visit family, other church people. Sunday, all day God. It never stopped. You couldn’t move for God. It was only a word, but what a word.
We weren’t really allowed to play with neighbors. My first love at ten, eleven, was my neighbor, but that was us standing at the fence and looking at each other with puppy dog eyes. He had two sisters, and he became a quite famous cricketer—I remember his name as John Prescott, who played for Jamaica, but never made it to the West Indian Test team. Being with him felt really dangerous—we didn’t pet or anything, but he wasn’t part of the church. My two brothers liked his two sisters, so we would go over the road to play for a short time, out of sight we thought, hoping that God wouldn’t find us in our hiding place.
I wasn’t supposed to play with my brothers, because they were boys. I was meant to stay put and crochet. I loved to crochet; it was another form of relief. I used to crochet until the skin would come off my fingers, and then I would put on a bandage and keep going. I would make shawls and doilies for the house. My grandmother’s tiny sister, the one married to a man twenty years her junior—Mas K—was the one who taught me to crochet. Mas K’s profession was making knitted bed covers, so she was crocheting and he was knitting. For all of us it was a method, I think, of putting God away. It was our form of praying.
I had so many brothers I became very much like a boy, but was also very vain at the same time. I was very concerned about my looks. I was a tomboy in a dress, but then I didn’t have a choice—I wasn’t allowed to wear pants. I was doing everything the boys did in order to have someone to play with; otherwise, it would just be me and my aunt crocheting while baby sister Janet Marie slept. They played with me, but I was the girl. They would put worms on me, they would try and frighten me, so in order to play with them, I had to keep up. I would play in the stand-on-your-hands competition, but I was in a dress. I would be walking on my hands with my dress over my face, showing my panties, and the maid would catch me. I would always get caught and I would get a beating.
Competing became important, to break away from this permanent justice system set up to convict me. I was a very fast runner. I loved jumping, over the bar, across scrappy potholes in the street or into a gritty sand pit. I was good at netball. I played jacks. I hula-hooped—kept the hoop moving around my whole upper body without it falling down, spinning it around and around like it was a form of protection. I couldn’t come home with sweat on my dress, because that would mean I had played after school, and that was not allowed.
* * *
We had three or four people from the church who would do the cooking and cleaning, and they were like spies for God. God’s spies telling on us for the slightest misdemeanor. They would get us beaten, so we couldn’t stand them.
There was one in particular, Sister Leah, spying on us all the time. She would get us beaten so much; one time we all attacked her because we couldn’t take it. We all jumped on her back and started to hit her because we were so upset. She was getting us whipped again and again.
I protected my brothers as much as they protected me. We looked out for one another. If one of us got caught, the others would feel bad that we hadn’t protected each other. I would feel bad because their beatings as boys were more ferocious, although I had to watch them get beaten, and that was really bad. I think that bonded us, because it is not something that boys want girls to see. If I was there watching them getting a beating, without clothes, it was a shaming thing, but it brought us together. The girl would get a lot of punishment on the hand, or he would put you over his lap and lift up your dress and smack you that way. Since the attacks on the boys were more violent, I always felt responsible if they got caught. I was supposed to be looking out for them, up the tree, whistling loud enough to get them back in the house. I had failed in my duty. Bev, Bev—why didn’t you tell us he was coming?
Young Max was the most rebellious of all of us, and the bravest in how he rebelled. He didn’t care if he got beaten (well, he acted like he didn’t care). One day, when we were walking to school, he suddenly said, “When we get home I am going to break all the windows.” There were plenty of glass windows in Jamaica. He had decided he was going to break all the glass. Something had pushed him to the limit.
We’d say, “You are crazy! If you do that you will be picking whips for weeks!” Being naughty outside the home so that others could see was the most rebellious thing to do, because that would totally break the example we were meant to be setting. Everything had to look perfect from the outside. Max would be determined to make the biggest scandal ever. Nothing would put him off, however much we warned him, even if he knew he would be whipped.
He said he was going to do it. And he did. He said, “I will run,” and we said, “Where are you going to run to?” There was nowhere to run. You run and run and run, but sooner or later night falls and you come back to the house and you know what’s going to be waiting for you. There was nowhere to run, and no one was going to hide you. It wasn’t like Sicily and the Mafia: Who is hiding this child? Whoever is hiding this child will be put on a ship and sent to America! Sure enough, though, he would throw those stones, and he would run, and he would get caught, and he would get it worse than ever.
There were very few days I didn’t get some form of punishment. It was nastiness. It was humiliating. The God they spoke on behalf of was the jealous, unpleasant one straight out of the Old Testament. This God that was their idol, whom they looked up to, was a petty, unjust control freak, a capricious bully who bizarrely kept regular hours. He didn’t seem a very godlike God.
It was all about the Bible and beatings. We were beaten for any little act of dissent, and hit harder and harder the worse the disobedience. It formed me as a person, my choices, men I have been attracted to—all that can be traced back to how I was brought up. It was a profoundl
y disciplined, militant upbringing, and so in my own way, I am very militant and disciplined. Even if that sometimes means being militantly naughty, and disciplined in the arts of subversion.
There were good things, too—times when the light broke in, when we could turn mounds of dirt into palaces in our mind; but these moments were brief and forbidden seeming, little stinging jolts of pleasure among all this fixed, malevolent sternness, pleasure that was warped in my mind because it would inevitably lead to pain.
The rain would intrigue me, how suddenly it appeared, wet and warm, another surface altogether, another dimension, something that might even cancel dread. It was a hint of another force, something beyond the limits of a world being made up around you by the church, and my grandmother and her petty, brutal husband.
My parents left us behind because they believed it was for the best. I don’t remember feeling any resentment that they had left us to suffer this aggressive attention. In many ways, at the time, we didn’t think about how horrific it was. It was all we knew, as if it was ordinary, how children everywhere are treated. We had little else to go on. Over time you realize how bad it was, and the problem with that is you feel anger years after the event, when there is nothing you can do about it. It can still control you.
When they went to America, my parents saw how kids there were allowed to grow up, and they felt that it wasn’t disciplined enough for them. Maybe that was one of the reasons we didn’t join them immediately. But then they didn’t know how bad it was for us, because my mother didn’t grow up with Mas P like I did—she didn’t know that kind of abuse, that level of violence. The bishop was powerful, but he wasn’t looked upon with as much explicit fear: He was actually very calm, almost frighteningly calm, as if he could quite easily swallow whole his entire family.
If you saw Mas P, there was something in his eyes that revealed how angry he could get. You can see the spite, the intensity. You can really feel that fire had descended to the earth. It’s fascinating that those who put the fear of God in others are often those who live with the most fear—of others, of difference. Those who demand that you conform the most to how they live are the ones who are the most scared and intimidated by life.
I have learned over the years to be able to see in someone’s eyes what they are like, if they are prone to violence. You can look in their eyes and tell if they are a serial killer! I haven’t seen a serial killer, but I have badly misread a couple of guys. They seemed very peaceful, but they turned out to be pretty dark. Sometimes you don’t see it immediately; it’s something that comes out when certain buttons are pressed, when you say certain things.
If you looked into the eyes of Mas P in a photo he looks insane. You can see how he wanted power. Or how he wanted to hurt people. Hurt children. My brother Noel thinks he looked as harsh and bitter as he did because he wasn’t getting any sex, or if he was, only once or twice a year. At the time, I couldn’t imagine his sex life, or anyone else’s. He was cruel simply because he was cruel, for no reason.
* * *
We were mostly locked inside our closed, paranoid community and we didn’t even go outside the church to go to school. The church had their own school. All Saints Apostolic Church, All Saints School, tightly bound together. Everything outside was very alien to us. Even the barber across the street seemed foreign—if you went there you would be grabbed by a ghoul and who knows what would be done to you. This was how it was made to seem, that you must never go into these other places that weren’t approved by the church. We had no radio, no TV. It wasn’t allowed. Information was completely restricted. It was school, church, school, church, back and forth.
Until you were old enough to go to the public school, you learned the Bible, and nothing else. I know the Bible. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy . . . I’ve tried to forget. A lot to remember as a child, a lot to forget later. It becomes a part of you even if you don’t want it to. You try a lot of things maybe you shouldn’t to see if it will help get rid of some of that Bible detail you have stuck in your head. You’re fighting the Bible you hate to read; you’re battling with a God you don’t believe in. It never leaves you, once it has been planted inside you with such force.
Once we started to go to the public school, about three miles away, we used to walk between our house and the school, out into Spanish Town, with its dreamlike Emancipation Square still pretending the town was important, the lanes and alleys planned centuries ago busily crisscrossing each other even as they now coexisted with ruins, even slums. The world stretched a little into a new shape, into something other than a biblical nightmare. The walking was freedom because there was no one watching and it was the island, without it being of the church. I remember the trees, the foliage, the larger-than-life plants and luxuriant grasses relishing the climate—you’d see the jerky imaginary faces of animals in the trees and in the shadows.
Real animals with chunks gouged out of them foraged for food on the streets. There were mad mottled dogs roaming about that you had to deal with. You had to work out your route to try and avoid these emaciated terrors. If you couldn’t, you made sure you had two or three rocks ready to throw at them. You didn’t have a bag then, you carried your books, but God forbid you ever dropped one and it got dirty or torn. They had to be in perfect shape, however hot it was, however sudden the rain, and even if you were chased by starving dogs. If you were chased by the dogs, you had to make sure your aim was good. Throwing a stone in their general direction isn’t going to chase them away. You have to hit them. Stop them in their tracks.
Fighting the mad dogs builds character. I run into a lot of mad dogs to this day, so that helped me prepare. It’s all connected. From the mad dogs on the way home from school to the mad dogs in the music business.
For us, that was the best time, walking on our own through the brambly lushness of Jamaica, the way plants and scraggly grasses grew in a feisty, random tangle, always something new to explore. It felt like freedom. It was outside the immediate reach of the church that at home wrapped you up in a jagged cocoon. And school was very strict. Very British Victorian. They would have the cane. Our headmaster was from Wales. Big belly, like a blubbery white whale. He would saunter off to get the stick and waddle back, prolonging the inevitable. School discipline seemed less of a burden than church discipline, because it didn’t seem as though it was being handed down from God, ruling things from misty afar. It was more pragmatic somehow, not rooted in fanatical fundamentalism.
Once in a while we were allowed to go to the beach with the family, or to eat somewhere—say, Port Royal. I remember stories about how the port used to sink, and then reappear, because large parts of it had fallen into the sea in the great earthquake of 1692. Some said it was because it had been singled out by God. It was known as the richest and wickedest city in the world, filled with brothels, inns, and drinking halls. The deepwater harbor near Spanish shipping lanes and their ports made it a haven for pirates, smugglers, and buccaneers. A hundred years after the earthquake, one of the biggest, busiest cities in the Americas had been reduced to a quiet village. We didn’t know the details; we heard the rumors, that it was a ghost town run by pirates.
I remember being very afraid of seeing the mysterious Rastas swarming in packs through the town on their dented bicycles. They were like Hells Angels, except they were leathery, bearded Rastas wobbling a little on bikes with their knotty, dreadlocked hair, which took a lot of patience to grow, which was the point. Their souls were bent and bound into those knots as though their hair symbolized imprisonment and yet freedom.
The Rastas had only surfaced in the 1920s and ’30s, but they seemed to have been around since the beginning of time, keeping themselves to themselves, an ancient sign of a mystical, pre-Columbian Jamaica that had been nearly erased by centuries of colonization and outside rule. They would lurk at the edge of vision, as tangible as phantoms, mostly silent, working something out, lamenting their own captivity in Jamaica, nonchalantly loping off into th
e forest and the hills, possibly dissolving into the rivers and streams. They were used to hiding out, and would abruptly yet listlessly materialize out of nowhere. Now you see them, now you don’t.
I had no idea what they were up to. We were told to run when we saw them, and hide under our beds. They were demonized. The church considered them eyesores, drug addicts, a bunch of crackpots who lived in filthy caves. Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopa, wouldn’t get off the plane when he visited in 1966 because he was scared of all the Rastas around the plane. They worshipped him as a messianic figure destined to deliver them to a paradise of peace and goodness and greeted his arrival by banging drums and smoking their sacred herb, halfway between sun-cracked warriors and ancient herdsmen. They were visually amazing looking, and I became less and less scared of them, and more intrigued. They had these red eyes that later I understood were from the smoking. Red with weed, the healing hazy fog thickening easily around them suggesting all manner of fluid, life-enhancing rhythm.
They would take over all the land on Spanish Town Road—the road that turned and twisted from Spanish Town to Kingston, where the ghettos spread and they could hide—living in hunchbacked wooden huts, and they refused to pay tax, and they rejected attempts to control them, and they said, Man is free, leave us be. They became known more around the time of Bob Marley, but they were around for years before then.
I used to see Bishop Walters, my draconian grand-uncle, standing at his gate talking to one particular solemn-looking Rasta guy, which was very intriguing. He never let him inside; there is always this thing about the gate in Jamaica. You stand and talk at the gate for a long time, but you never let them in. There is a whole book to be written about the gate in Jamaica—an interesting barrier between one state and another, between one stage and another.