I'll Never Write My Memoirs

by Grace Jones

  The Pentecostal movement in Jamaica and Rastafarianism emerged at about the same time, and they are obviously very different. The Rastas presented themselves as self-determined, spiritually empowered rebel heroes with an anticolonial political cause they represented visually. Pentecostalism recommended moral redemption through transformative Christian rituals, defeating local circumstances by spiritually rising above them. At heart, both are rooted in biblical Christian fundamentalism, both formed self-reliant communities, and both reflected the changes in Jamaica that led to independence. Bishop Walters and his Rasta at the gate clearly had something in common; even if they were in disagreement, they were both talking about methods and aims. They were somehow closer than it seemed at the time. One looked more like you imagined Jesus to look than the other.

  * * *

  Our house was a modest detached bungalow set among other similar dwellings. There was a small, very neatly kept front garden, and a beautifully maintained lawn as perfect as they wanted me to be. The garden was a way of presenting moral tidiness to the surrounding neighbors. There was a working backyard sucked dry by the sun. A couple of lush fruit trees would produce mango and breadfruit. A lavish palm tree spilled out over the roof of the bungalow. Flowers splashed everything with color.

  The kitchen was the heart of the house, always full of vegetable shavings and chicken bones. The stove where food was cooked had an air of magic. A corridor ran parallel to the main living room, where the bedrooms and a basic bathroom were. The smartly curtained living room had very pretty tiles on the floor. They’re still there, even though my mother thinks they look old-fashioned and has always wanted to replace them with something modern, like patterned lino. When I go back to the house they are a vivid, very solid reminder of all the objects and textures that colored my childhood, many of them now vanished, some still remaining, making me feel charged with both a sweet sadness and a weird exhilaration. Perhaps it is relief that I made it out of what once seemed so forbidding and sheltered, a place of exploitation and oppression, one that now seems so small and harmless, even cozy. I’m never wistful or sentimental when I go back, things getting slower as I get closer, but I definitely feel as though the dreamy past is being held in place, erased of all the nastiness.

  Mas P was a very good welder, and he produced lovely ornate ironwork as protection for the doors and windows. I don’t know if that’s what he did for a living, or how he made money, but the metalwork he did back then is still there today, and, disconcertingly, it is quite beautiful. He definitely had a clear eye for practical solutions, reflected in the way he ran the household with an iron will and meanwhile took care to decorate and protect the house.

  At night, large moths the size of bats would settle on the walls. You would be afraid to chase them away, because you heard that they were how your ancestors took new form. It was a time and place where ghosts seemed to be always hovering at the edge of our reality, the dead ready to pop up out of nowhere and send shivers down our spines, or even scare the hell out of us.

  There were plenty of bushes and thickets in and around the town, where the duppies hung out—duppy was the Jamaican patois word for “ghost,” but a duppy was more than a ghost or a spook. It was a malevolent spirit scheming toward some terrible outcome, the very reverse of what it is to be human. I’m not sure I knew anyone who had seen one, but you knew for sure that their heads were turned backward on their shoulders and they carried a chain. And you must never call one a duppy to its face, because to do so gave it power.

  To believe in duppies was a definite sin in the eyes of the church. You couldn’t ask for any help with how to deal with the duppies. You were left to fend for yourself.

  There were a lot of secrets that the adults kept to themselves. We had a separate dining table, so we didn’t join in with the adult talk. I was asked to eat with the adults once, because I knew how to do it properly, how to sit and be quiet and next to invisible. All that sitting and keeping still accounts for my restlessness in later years. All that boredom meant that now, later in life, when I get bored I am dangerously bored. Instilled in me is a desperate desire to break free of whatever confinement I feel is holding me back. The boys were more rowdy; they wanted to eat quickly and go out to play. That never went down well.

  It was all very hush-hush, a lot of whispering, and on no account were we ever allowed in my grandmother’s bedroom. Even now when I visit my mother’s home, her mother’s old room seems very foreign, like some sort of ominous sanctuary. It’s filled to a heavy melancholy stillness with buried secrets and hidden energies. The house had a certain smell, from all the cooking, even because of all the dire whispering and judgment, which added to the atmosphere. Houses can be the most dangerous of spaces where even the way the furniture is arranged feels as though it is trapping you there.

  * * *

  I remember my school, and the schoolyard, near the looming Victorian prison and the sinister gallows, a sign of the town’s old national importance. There were solid icons of the colonial past everywhere. The square we used to pass through is still there and is a big piece of history from when the Spanish came and then the British. There are a lot of Spanish buildings, very old, elaborate Spanish-type villas, and a Georgian splendor that is very out of place under a hot midday sun.

  The narrow alleyways, old cream-colored buildings, and dusty roads, many leading nowhere or out into the country, all very tightly packed into each other, would remind me later of the sinister backdrops used in horror movies. A classic horror movie landscape always reminds me of growing up, probably because every day often felt like it might end up with something nightmarish straight out of a scary movie. There was a venomous, vindictive look in Mas P’s eyes when he was about to beat us that was completely monstrous. He conned us into believing he knew everything—he was the all-seeing eye that nothing could escape. It was a look I was to use later in my life when I needed to create a very definite impact in a photograph, video, or film.

  The only acting class I ever took was in New York with Warren Robertson, who had been taught by Lee Strasberg, the father of the American Method. He was seen as some kind of guru and had been named acting coach of the 1970s by the New York Post. The 1978 book he wrote about acting was called Free to Act: How to Star in Your Own Life. One of his exercises was called Sexual Tennis: “Stand a few feet apart and confront each other with your chosen intention. But as you do that, imagine you are trying to bounce a ball back and forth and you can only use your hips and pelvis to do this.” One rumor circulating told a story of Warren helping a male student to conjure up feelings of fear by holding a loaded gun to his groin. Warren was pretty committed.

  In the classes, I was very shy. Warren could read your mind. I called him a warlock. He was very perceptive. He could see by the fact I sat at the back of the class that I did not want to be in the group; I wanted to be alone. Some people love being in a group. I was never good in gangs after growing up in a gang of boys that I was always on the outside of. I trained myself to work well in isolation. Warren sensed that and told me it was best that I work with him on a one-on-one basis.

  He was more than an acting coach. I learned a lot about myself. Working with someone like Warren is about much more than acting. It’s about facing up to who you are and how that can be of use when you act. His technique was to liberate you so that you could use everything you had inside you. He would basically hypnotize me to get me to open up. He diagnosed that really I was acting out Mas P in all my performances: the fixed stare, the dominant stance, arms folded, the lashing out . . .

  I was always the first in our family to try things, accidentally or intentionally—especially if there was a sense that what I was doing was forbidden. I was the first in my family to drink poison. I don’t remember, but my mom tells me that I did it when I was really little, four or five. It was hidden under the bed and it looked like soda and it turned out to be kerosene. I almost died. Frothing at the mouth, blacking out, collapsing under i
mages of Jesus, trembling fireflies, and a vaporous local Rastaman.

  Certain rituals stick in my mind. There would be the sudden ringing of a bell and you’d hear the cries—They’re burning the mongooses tonight! There were a lot of mongooses and they would eat the fruit in the trees planted on our plots of land. Barbed wire would be wound around the tree trunks to stop them climbing, making the trees look mean and creepy.

  The mongooses would eat your crop, so you set a trap, and when you caught them, you set them on fire and burn them. It was like a celebration—the bells would ring, and we’d all go out and watch the mongooses be burned to a crisp. Jamaica had a problem with snakes, so they brought the mongooses to kill the snakes. Which they did. So there are no snakes in Jamaica. Bendy-spined worms but no snakes. And then that became a problem because the mongooses ate the fruit, the mangoes and breadfruit that were such an important part of the diet. And then people burned the mongooses. They would shriek like cats being skinned alive.

  We didn’t have separate bedrooms, so I would sleep in the same room as my brothers. Max was a sleepwalker and I remember at night he would sit straight up. It used to scare the shit out of me. He would get out of bed and start walking. As a child, when it’s dark, seeing your brother jerk upright in front of you and walk around the room is pretty freaky.

  My imagination was quite vivid when it was dark, with all these thoughts swirling around, and there were no streetlamps. I would be asked to go and get a bag of sugar from the shop around the corner for my grandmother. It would be beginning to get dark. Scared of the old pirates and the smoking Rastas, the charred, screaming mongooses, and the evil eye in the sky, the trees that would hang over tall walls like hulking dinosaurs, the duppies lurking in the woods, the rustling creature faces in the mad patterns of the leaves, my zombie brother walking into walls, and most of all the wrath of Mas P, I would sprint barefooted like Usain Bolt—that was another reason for me to be beaten, because I was barefoot, and I was not allowed to not wear my shoes. I didn’t like shoes. They were like chains. I needed to find freedom where I could.

  * * *

  My mind was filled with hallucinations, many of them passed through to me from the church. Pentacostalism is one of those religions where they believe everyone else in whatever religion is going to hell, and they scare the pants off you.

  In Bishop Walters’s version of the Pentecostal Church, when you are baptized you are baptized in the name of Jesus, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I did feel as though I had a relationship with God, with Jesus, if only because I was young enough to feel the vicious heat of that hell being talked about. And this was a church that was all about talking—speaking in tongues was proof that you had been saved. It was evidence of salvation. Jesus himself had prophesied that it would be a part of the believer’s experience. It said so in the Bible, so it had to be true. Jesus said, “These signs will accompany those who believe; in my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues” (Mark 16:15–18). The speaking in tongues process was something else that appealed to the Jamaicans’ love of presentations that seem larger than life.

  When I was baptized at seven, I spoke in tongues, but then again, a monkey can do it. I’m not saying that it is all mumbo jumbo, but as a child you are not mature enough to really understand the concept of speaking in tongues. You hear it in church, you hear it all around you, and there is power in numbers. Everybody’s doing it, and as a kid, controlled by fear, egged on by your own sense of daring, you start speaking in tongues.

  You’re babbling incoherently, making random sounds, you know how to do that, but it feels like it’s important and its making you important. Everyone around you reacts as though you are speaking the language of heaven, as though the words are flowing out of your spirit. It’s like you get high on it, you get intoxicated. I got the spirit! I felt it! It can become musical, with voices falling and rising and the repetition of various phrases—Yes, Jesus, we love you, Jesus, praise the Lord, hallelujah. The hidden things of God get revealed.

  I didn’t know what I meant, but I believed, because everyone around me believed. You do it every day, every day, every day, you hear it at home, at school, at church—the prayer, the laying-on of hands, the spirit—you’re told it’s a gift, directing you to heaven, and you speak in tongues. You really believe and you really go into a trance. That’s what it is, a meditation; you are taken somewhere else, and words pour out of your mouth, your eyes are closed, someone is at your ear talking to you, whispering, God this, God that, the power of God, it’s inside you, it’s speaking through you, and you repeat it, and repeat it, and you get it, you’ve got it, you believe it, you really do, of course, there is nothing more pure than a child really believing. I believed! I believed it was supernatural. And I believed it was natural, and that it happened to everyone in the world, to the kid next door, to everyone everywhere. I didn’t realize that this was not the norm. We weren’t let out enough long enough to hear any difference.

  I didn’t start to doubt God, or faith, or the belief. I never had a distinct moment when I turned on the religion that had been tightly wound around me squeezing the freedom out of me. I didn’t have a moment of revelation, that it was all nonsense, or dangerous, or superstitious. I started to want to find out things for myself. I wanted to have my own experiences. And it was in this environment, snagged by all the strictness, that I began to discover pleasure in rebellion—rebelling against authority was not necessarily a method of establishing independence, but it was one of the few pleasures I could find for myself. For me, expected from a very young age to follow the rule or else, being naughty became a great pleasure. I’ve never lost that feeling of taking delight in a certain amount of mischief.

  * * *

  I remember once somehow I was allowed to stay in Kingston with my dad’s sister, Aunt Sybil, the sister of the aunt who never married. It could have been two days, but it seemed like two weeks. She straightened my hair, which almost broke the prime rule; we went to the cinema, where I was supposed to burn in hell sitting next to all these sinners. It was the first film I had ever seen. I have some strange memories of voluptuous visions as I sat in the cinema. The pictures on the screen were so big, eyes in the sky, but wonderful, and from somewhere else that seemed ruled by a better, more exciting kind of magic.

  It might have been The King and I with Yul Brynner. I don’t know for sure, or even whether it was in color. If it was in black and white, it seemed to be in color, new kinds of color, bursting with promise. But I remember it was huge, and watching it was like looking at a dream. I was overwhelmed. It made me wonder how you could end up in such a world. I was all dressed up, but not for church, and the ugly bristly kink was taken out of my hair. It was seen as a sin to straighten your hair, so every morning I went to school, I had to do my hair to make sure it kept its shape. It was very painful. Sybil said, “Oh, they’ll kill me if I let you back home with straight hair,” so we had to wash it and put it back to church normal.

  There was a delightful naughtiness about Sybil—I’m going to get you away from these crazy people for a short while and show you a little bit of . . . life! I never forgot that. This burst of something else, this flash of possibility. I still remember those days so well. It was a big, big, big moment. She treated me as if I was an equal. In a way it made me not so afraid. Everything else was about fear, and that sort of thing can keep you from growing. Jamaica is a land of growth—things grow so fast; it’s nature in spectacular, bewitching overdrive—so it was weird to be in a situation where spontaneous personal growth was frowned upon.

  Even looking into the boisterous public bar that was on the corner next door to where my great-grandmother lived on the main street in town made me feel like my eyes would melt. The thought of having an alcoholic drink made me think I would burn in hell. The family kept telling us every day that because we had again done something wrong, we were going to be flung into the fires of hell. It was brainwashing. I ended up
thinking that if I misbehaved, I would be condemned to hell and lose the power to feel love, happiness, or anything other than cruelty and misery. There was so much fear. Sybil showed me another way—I didn’t know how I was going to get there, but I knew it was available. She exerted a liberating effect on me, even awakened in me the idea that I was young, with my own mind, not a smaller, insignificant version of an adult.

  Aunt Sybil had been a beauty queen when she was younger, Miss Whatever-it-was, where you ride down the street during the carnival wearing a crown. She did marry, but she was too tough for her husband, because she was very driven. She said she had to read everything she put into the library. An amazing woman—confident, knowledgeable, with such a strong will—and I love her. Sybil is an example of the very strong women who take leading roles in Jamaican life, and she was such an inspiration while my mother was away. I was lucky have such an inspiring female role model in the family.

  I was young when I was given permission to occasionally visit her. Eleven, something like that, ten, perhaps. She’s now in her eighties, still going strong. They all live long in my family. There’s a whole lot of longevity. The women in our family live into their nineties. It’s genetic. Sybil was very worldly. She had been to London in the 1950s to study, she liked to drink, she was normal. She went to church, and had some of the Joneses’ high-minded toughness and moral fiber, but it didn’t take over; it was never taken to the extreme.

  Wearing nail polish was seen as an act of rebellion at home, but Sybil showed me it was nothing horrible. My apparent vanity was my worst sin to the church family. I’d want to put makeup on, pluck my eyebrows, paint my nails, as I saw other girls at school doing. If I ever did, I would try and take it off before Mas P came home. Seeing Sybil now and then was a revelation, simply in terms of how you could put on makeup without it causing a catastrophe—it seemed to represent freedom.