“You can see your face yet?”
The boy opens his eyes and looks at his shoes.
“No, Ras,” he says.
The boy is thinking about the purple-lip baby his mother pushed into his hands. How he left them both on the bed and ran for help down the road. There had been a tune playing on the radio, something about Zion and needing to get there. By the time he came back with the neighbour-woman, his mother had already stopped breathing. Her white nightgown was wrapped around her like egg skin, the crying baby still between her legs, its purple-flower lips all quiver-quiver; and the radio going /dub revo/ lution/music to rock the na/tion. All night the boy chopped a path to Fall-down’s Zion, willing his mother to find her way to that guava-ripe place. The Riva-muuma with the blue-skin skirt would meet her there. She would show his mother her new Zionself in the clear river-bottom water.
“You can see your face yet?”
The boy looks down at his shoes and sees the reflection of Fall-down’s little brass Africas shimmering back and forth.
“You see your face?”
“Yes, I see mi face,” he says.
Of Cowries and True Names
Evening comes and the Kingston sky is pink and orange behind the billboards and electric poles. Fall-down pokes the boy’s back with the end of his staff. He has fallen asleep on the overturned bucket, dreaming of a shell in the Queen of Sheba’s navel. He is just about to steal it, when Fall-down wakes him. He rubs his eyes. Never mind, in his next dream, he will find his mother in the hospital freezer and put the Queen’s cowrie in her cold navel.
Out on the road there is an accident – a truck moving at full speed catches on sagging cable wires, pulling down electric poles with a panic of breaks and backed-up traffic.
“Oh Absalom, Absalom!” Fall-down shouts.
“Who?”
The boy still rubs his eyes. His mind is on his mother and he has no time for madman talk. The hospital put her in the morgue; there was no money for a funeral. Eventually her unclaimed body will be sent to the university where the young doctors will cut her up for their studies. Someone will drill along the sutures of her skull, separate the small bones of her ear, slice her liver with a silver blade, dissect her heart – unaware of the secret place in an upper chamber where she has written the boy’s name.
“But look all this time and I don’t even know how them call you,” Fall-down says. “What you name, youth?”
“Delroy.”
“Who you name after?”
The boy shrugs his shoulders.
“One day you will get a new name,” Fall-down says.
“And you, Ras?”
“Negus. My true name is Negus.”
RASTAMAN, 1978
Something Bout Leenah
[Electric Guitar]
“Bob Marley isn’t my name. I don’t even know my name yet.” June, 1974
Well… me like Leenah. Me like the dawta. Me like how her hands make reggae. That dawta can reason bout a drop of water or an ant or a stone. When me look on her, her eyes make four with mine; a she-lion. Me like that. Check this. One night in London, I&I dream she know mi true name. No joke. She was wearing a red dress and she smell like blood. Woman-blood. She come to me and she whisper mi name in mi ears. It write down in a book, she say. And she tell me the page and the name of the book. When I&I wake up, I forget what she tell me. But from that, me crazy for her. Me want her. Me thirst for her like how fire thirst for blood. But something bout Leenah. The groove right, but the time never right. The place never right. But me enjoy her still, you know? When London grey, you need a dawta like that.
England is a morgue, Rasta. Listen, after one year a London, me tired a that scene. England come in like America. I live a Delaware one time. America, the mouth of the dragon to rhaatid. I work few months as a welder. Me couldn’t live inna that place. Tribulation, Rasta. I go on tour, but me couldn’t live inna it. You understand. Everywhere you turn, you buck gainst Babylon. Law for this, law for that, where to piss, where not to piss. I-man don’t deal with law. I-man is Rasta. I-man lawless. Check this. Is America this: mow you lawn, pull out the weeds, stay in line, don’t get outta line, park your car here, don’t park it there, don’t holler in the street, don’t do this, don’t do that. One time Babylon stop I and cross-question I, say I cross street on red light. Bull shit. I-man is a African. I-man cross for the trinity – red green and gold. No man own I&I feet. I walk when I ready. Wake up people! Stand up for your rights. Is long time Rastaman a warn you and you nah listen. Wake up, Zion. Wake up! When them tell you to go right, you go left; when them tell you sing high, you sing low.
And look how things funny. We can’t stop run. We can’t stop. We run from one Babylon, find the next one. Breddren and sistren, hear me now – until we find-back Africa, until we find Zion, we can’t leave captivity. Dig? Rastafari.
Prince Asfa Wossen, His Majesty son, him contact me while me was in London. Look a man like that, the son of the Most High, have to run from him owna country because Babylon inna the very court of the Elect of Jah. Them woulda kill him! Tell me, Rasta, what sense it make.
Well, me no know why the prince give me him faadah ring, but him see something inside-a me, and him give me it. Seen? When him give me the ring, me never put it on right away. Me too shock. Is after him leave, me put it on and feel it heavy on mi finger. Is the ring the Most High used to wear on him left hand. Causa that now, me wear it on my right. For how I could presumptuous as to wear it on the left? Me fraid a this ring, Rasta. This ring no I-levate I, it humble I. From that time on, I&I realize say my life not in my own hands. Is in the hands of the Almighty, Rasta. People! Don’t look to me. Me is the messenger, but a no me the message. The message is Zion. A the message that.
Now that woman, Leenah, she know. I like how she stand up to me. Check her out. She look me in me eye and she listen me with her heart. Me respect her. Me find meself a tell her things me never tell no other woman. Or man. Jah descend on that dawta and she see me plain – no locs and no guitar; no herb and no mic – just I&I.
LEENAH
Kingston, 1978: Exodus
I returned to Jamaica the same year as Bob. My Auntie died and left me £400 and old Austin Cambridge; I sold the car and bought a ticket for home. I enrolled in UWI; rented a room from an elderly woman, Miss Ivy, in Mona. I kept her yard raked, and fed her cat; the rent was cheap. The 1976 shooting incident at Hope Road that had driven Bob away from Jamaica had blown over – well, sort of. When he visited one evening, Miss Ivy eyed him carefully from the enclosed veranda. He knocked on the front gate with a stone and she called, “Is who?” stepping closer to better look. A little dog began to bark, knocking down a bunch of oleanders in a pot.
“Have no fear,” Bob said, “it is I.”
Miss Ivy relaxed when she saw the twinkle in his eye, opened the padlock and let him in.
“Evening, Madda,” he said.
She was an old woman but knew all about Bob, his music, his ganja and the gunshots at 56 Hope in ’76.
“I don’t want no trouble today, you hear?” And she showed him to my room.
Bob visited only twice, and both times on the run to somewhere else. Jah-Jah work was calling and, anyway, he was used to pretty women coming to him, not the other way around. Still, there was something which made him unable to let me go.
“Mind education don’t turn you into a damn fool,” he said, rifling through my books.
“Not with you keeping me in check,” I said.
I noticed that he was wearing a bandage on one foot, that he walked with a slight limp.
“What they do to you now?”
“The raasclaat toe,” he said.
I remembered. He had injured the toe in France during a football game. But now, as then, he brushed it off. “Rasta live!” – the limp becoming the up-beat in his dread walk. That night I would never have believed the sore had become melanoma.
I poured him a drink and lit up his spliff. “No pr
oblem,” I said, “Miss Ivy gone to bed already.”
Dawta of Zion-O. He still remembered the song.
It was breezy, the curtains blowing. Miss Ivy’s cat watched from the dresser in the corner, while next door in the already-dark, a woman’s chemise fell from the clothesline, the yard wet from afternoon rain.
Dawta of Zion, Jah-Jah Zion calling come. The hum in Bob’s throat came from afar, from deep underground; I&I felt its vibration beneath my bare feet. We passed the spliff back and forth quietly, the cat purring, smoke rising into the pepper plant on the windowsill.
“I had a dream that I found my mother’s loc,” I said. “It was buried in my navel and I&I pulled and pull until it all came out.”
Bob reached for my hair, brushed two fingers along the length of a long loc.
“I miss my mother is all. Sometimes I feel her – like she rolling my hair in her palm. You believe in duppy?”
“Me believe in evahliving.”
“Same thing. Country man like you must know duppy.”
“Let me see your navel,” he said.
“What for?”
“I want to see it; blow likkle herb on it.”
The curtains swayed and Bob leaned over and puffed into my hair. The smoke filled my locs; quickened them. Surrounded by haze, I had the sensation of catching fire. His hand was between my thighs, the metal of his ring against my skin.
Outside a horn honked and the cat jumped off the dresser.
“Rhaatid.”
“What?”
It was Peaches. She had followed Bob. The curtains blew white flags through the window.
That was the night, after Bob left, when the angel climbed into my dream, holding his primordial book. By the time he arrived, I had already turned out the lights and pulled the nylon curtains. At first I thought it was Bob come back, but then I saw the silhouette of wings. In the morning I wanted to attribute it all to the lambsbread spliff, but there was the yellow pollen on the sheets to account for, and the scent of pomegranate on my bedclothes. Every night the angel came – for a week. On the last night, I lifted his book, heavy in my hands, and was sure I heard the clink-clink of his Africas, and his voice – an abeng – as he paused at the window.
“What is your name?” I asked in the dark.
“Negus,” he said. “My name is Negus.”
FROM BLOODFIAH, RECORD OF DREAMSLOST
Track 12.0: The high wind of 1979 or; the falling of Fall-down
The woman closed the book in her dream and handed it to the angel through the parted curtain. He kissed her hand, then shot away in a rush of dust and light – straight to Mt. Zion High – the book, all woman scent, tucked under his arm. He expected to arrive with quietness, to sit and sniff the pages and record her name with hibiscus ink, but immediately upon landing, his wings exploded like feathers from a king’s bed and he felt himself falling.
He fell down through the tail-ends of sour dreams, a shower of white flies, the debris of insurrection and pestilence, the stink of death and, finally, through galloping rain. As the ends of his red scarf parachuted above him, he held onto the book clutching it to his chest. There was a hurricane simmering out at sea and it snatched him by the ends of his sleeves, swirled him into its path. In a torrent of green and blue hummingbird plumes the storm gathered speed as he spun towards its centre, legs and arms flailing, through the open eye.
In the middle of anarchy, it was warm and still. Afloat on his back, the falling-down twirled light as ganja pollen and he wished he could rest never-ending in that balmy place. A refrain of languid fern and the imperviousness of lizards played in his head. He opened his mouth and it filled with mist.
The falling-down had almost forgotten himself when, toward morning, the storm lost power and spat him out, and he fell head first into an impatient sea that frothed and tussled and washed him up onto Hellshire Beach. All day he slept in the hot sun, his ledger book of happen-tings under his head, the red cloth over his body.
HERE-SO; HALF WAY TREE
Mosquito
Now Fall-down stands in the middle of the road directing traffic; his staff points left then right, his earrings bright in the sun.
“No worry, all directions lead to hell!” he calls.
Delroy watches from the sidewalk, looking out at the traffic; the street is busy with shoppers and schoolchildren and workers going about their business, and it occurs to him that he alone has nowhere to go. His auntie and cousins in the country already live ten in one room and do not need another mouth to feed. He watched from a hole in the zinc fence as Auntie took his new sister and left her on the steps of Mt. Ephraim. He crouched there watching babysister all night until Mr. Bishop came and found her. Mr. Bishop so old he hardly heard the baby cry the cry of a lost pea dove, but when he felt a little arm flay against his ankle, he jumped back – “But see here!” – picked her up and held her to the sky. Delroy walked back to town all the way from St. Catherine, his mother in the freezer waiting for someone’s silver scalpel. And now, if she doesn’t get bury, the student doctors at the hospital will study her, put her liver in a jar. He-only left, he stands at the curb, his empty stomach like a knotted scandal bag inside him.
“Which hell you looking?” Fall-down calls to a woman in a big Volvo. The woman throws away her cigarette and closes the tinted windows.
“You think you in heaven, but you living in hell,” Fall-down sings.
He stands in the Volvo’s path and stretches his staff a few feet above the ground, inviting the woman to proceed with her car beneath the limbo of his snake. The woman honks her horn as the taxi driver behind begins to honk his; soon Half Way Tree is a cacophony of horns. Fall-down raises his staff like a conductor’s baton, throws back his head, laughs, then takes a bow.
“Half-way trick,” the boy says as Fall-down steps back on the curb.
But the performance over, Fall-down is suddenly serious again, in that way he has of moving from jester to mystic all in one breath.
“Someone just call me,” he says.
“Bout what? All the pretty-pretty mosquitoes in Zion?” the boy mocks, still hoping to sustain a lightness of mood.
Fall-down laughs a bent little laugh then walks away. When he comes back, he is leaning on his staff.
“Listen, I have three thousand years experience that you don’t have,” he says, and the boy, all quiet, sees that in the space of a moment, time has descended on the fallen one, his eyes drawn wild and god-red.
“Too much ras-man talk,” the boy says. “Talk plain,” and he takes two steps back, away from the eyes catching fire.
Fall-down looks up at the sky, the horizon lined with billboards and electric poles. As he crosses the street, he hears a voice in his ear: “Rhaatid!” It is full of vexation, a slight huskiness around the edges. He is sure it is Bob’s.
“But look how Bob call me, all the way from the other side,” he says, his eyes far-off. “He don’t find Zion yet?”
“Zion?” says the boy, his words high and lifted up.
“I-thiopia, youth! I-frica!” A dread calls from a mini-bus.
Fall-down cocks his head to the side, listening again for Bob.
“Is true? Zion inna Africa, Ras? Why you never tell me?”
But Fall-down cannot hear. He has already taken off, the brass Africas clinking, past the man selling panties and brassieres, past the street evangelist on the corner.
“And next time, don’t tell me bout no foot-slip riva-mumma cave-shit to raas,” the boy calls, “or is gun-fire!”
“Rhaatid!” Fall-down hears again in his ear, and this time the angel keeps on walking, and does not come back.
CURFEW
LEENAH
Rasta Angel
The angelman who climbed through the window is my babyfather. But how can I tell this? How can you tell people you slept with a man who climbed through your window? Slut. That slut, Leenah. And how do you say you might have been dreaming when it happened?
My daught
er looks like her great grandmother, Miss-Winnie. Everyday I check her for signs of wings. Lately, her shoulder blades protrude at an awkward angle. I take her to the doctor and he says it is a rare deformity; in fact, this is his first time seeing such a thing. Not to worry – she is perfectly sound, he says. When she begins to walk and then run, the blades shift inwards and outwards, catching bass rhythm. I watch her run by the sea, and imagine her ascending in flight. I name her Anjahla, my angel. “You are my Rasta angel,” I say.
And the doctor is right – she is perfectly sound, and smart too.
“What happen to my father?” she asks me.
“I hardly even knew him.”
“You slept with a man you hardly knew?”
In school she is a bright girl who asks the teachers questions they don‘t know how to answer. Anjahla wants to know how much salt can be held in a teardrop and the weight of a heavy heart. She wants to know the meaning of the star in the middle of a star apple, and why if Jah love is free, people don’t want it.
“Where you go and get this child?” Ms. Shawn asks.
Sometimes I see her watching the sky or studying leaves, like she looking for signs. But then again, why not? We live a life of signs and symbols – she already knows Deafooman. To speak Deafooman, you use your hands, your eyes; every part of your structure. Sometimes, I wonder: What does Anjahla sound like?
“What you sound like?” I ask her.
“I sound like a butterfly catching a breeze,” she says.
I like the way she signs, “breeze”, like someone who understands the true blessing of finding just the right current that will permit liftoff. More than anything, I want to hear my daughter’s voice.
“Sing me a song,” I say.
And I put my hand-middle against her chest, the way I used to with Bob. I close my eyes and feel her breath go in and out, her I-bration against my palm. I feel her sway, chasing after her breeze.
The Marvellous Equations of the Dread Page 4