Bob Morris_Zack Chasteen 02

by Jamaica Me Dead

  “I’m on a tight budget,” I said. “It was all I could afford.”

  They both looked at me with real sympathy. Then Darlene perked up and said: “Well, honey, it is time to put on your party clothes. We’re gonna go out and play.”

  “Or,” Lynette purred, “we could stay in and play.”

  Darlene eyed my bed and made a face.

  “Our bed is bigger,” she said.

  “Plus,” Lynette said, “there are mirrors on our ceiling.”

  “And in our bathroom they gave us all these body oils,” Darlene said. “We got hot oils and cold oils and soothing oils and arousal oils.”

  “Only, we hadn’t gotten to use any of them yet,” Lynette said.

  I turned them toward the door.

  “Well, I’m sure you won’t have any trouble finding someone to use them on,” I said. “There’s lots of guys out there.”

  “But we like you, Zack,” Darlene said.

  “And I like you, too, but it has been a long day.”

  I got them to the porch, and they stood there pouting.

  “You owe us a rain check,” Lynette said.

  I smiled.

  “And we’re going to cash it in,” Darlene said.

  I smiled some more and kept on smiling until they walked away.

  30

  The next morning, Darcy Whitehall dispatched another big black Mercedes for us to take to Benton Town, but Alan wouldn’t have anything to do with it. He insisted we go in his car—a battered Honda Accord missing two hubcaps.

  Otee drove. I rode up front with him. In addition to the Browning in his waistband, Otee had brought along a long black rifle case that no doubt held what it had been designed to hold. It occupied the console and rested in my footwell. Alan took over the backseat, spread out papers from his briefcase, and started working on his laptop from the moment we were rolling.

  Fifteen minutes from the resort and we were on a snaky mountain road that looked down on a clay-colored river. The mountainsides were green, green, green—a proliferation of silk cotton trees and gumbo limbos and tree ferns. Every now and then, a mongoose would dart from the underbrush and skitter across the blacktop.

  Alan shut down his computer and closed his briefcase.

  “So tell me about this thing we’re going to,” I asked him.

  “Quarterly meeting of the Benton Town Co-op,” said Alan. “It’s a loose federation of church groups and schoolteachers and people from the community trying to take care of things that need taking care of. Electricity to all the homes. Running water. HIV-AIDs awareness programs. Meals for the elderly. And, of course, decent housing.”

  “Which is where you come in.”

  Alan nodded.

  “Homes for the People has built nearly a dozen houses in Benton Town. We’ve had quite an impact on the quality of life there. But, as you’ll see, there is still a great deal that needs to be done.”

  “Guess that makes you a pretty popular guy up there. You can count on the people of Benton Town to vote for you in the election?”

  “Let’s hope so,” said Alan. “Of course, some will vote against me just because I’m PNP.”

  I was no expert on Jamaican politics, but I knew that PNP stood for the People’s National Party, the ruling party, which had been in power since the late 1980s. The JLP, the Jamaican Labour Party, was its main opposition.

  Party faithful of every ilk were zealous about promoting their allegiances, wearing T-shirts in party colors and taking advantage of any opportunity that presented itself to promote their cause. All across Jamaica, hand-scrawled posters covered telephone poles. Political slogans were emblazoned on stop signs. And since political parties seemed to sprout like weeds after a rain shower—the Jamaican Democratic Party (JDP), the National Democratic Movement (NDM), the United Party of Jamaica (UPJ)—it was an island splattered with acronyms.

  “You got a good chance of getting elected?”

  “I think so,” said Alan. “Trelawny Northern generally goes PNP. But Kenya Oompong was born in the district and she’s standing for election, too. So that could siphon off some of the vote.”

  “Who’s Kenya Oompong?”

  “Founder of Nanny’s People United, the NPU, the one they call Nanny Two. A complete radical, a Marxist, but a smart woman. Brilliant, even. Went to the London School of Economics. Returned to Jamaica a few years ago and started organizing in the garrisons.”

  “Garrisons?”

  “The worst neighborhoods of Kingston, places of awful poverty, places like Grant’s Hill and Tivoli Gardens and Trench Town.”

  “Where Marley sang about.”

  “Yes. You know why they call it Trench Town?”

  I shook my head.

  “Because it has a ditch running right through the middle of it, a sewage ditch. Not a pretty place,” said Alan. “Each of the garrisons has allegiance to a different political party. The gangs that run the garrisons also run the dope trade. The politicians get the police to lay off the gangs and the gangs deliver the vote.”

  “Sounds like Chicago in the good old days.”

  “We get the system we deserve, I guess. And it’s not really in the interest of the politicians to change things.”

  “You talk about politicians like you aren’t one of them,” I said.

  “Trying hard not to be,” said Alan. “But Kenya Oompong and the NPU are trying just as hard to paint me as old guard, part of the privileged class.”

  “Not to burst your ideological bubble or anything, Alan, but your father is one of the wealthiest men in Jamaica. You are part of the privileged class.”

  He smiled.

  “Money,” he said. “It’s such a goddam burden.”

  31

  A few miles later we turned off the blacktop and onto a dirt road that twisted along a hillside planted in banana trees. Goats roamed with impunity, and Otee did an admirable job of dodging them while Alan and I talked.

  Alan was an easy guy to like. Smart, self-deprecating, not a shred of arrogance about him, seemingly devoted to a life of public service. A rare young man, indeed.

  “What makes you so sure the NPU isn’t behind the bombs?” I asked him.

  “It’s just not their style,” he said. “For all her faults, Kenya Oompong is not inclined toward violence. She started off by going into the garrisons, trying to get the gangs to put down their weapons and preaching reform. Almost cost her life. More than one garrison gang tried to do her in.”

  “What kind of reform is she preaching?”

  “A lot of it is typical Marxist dogma. The working class must rise up and throw off the shackles of oppression. That kind of thing. But she couples it with a back-to-the-land spiel, a sort of New Age nationalism. Says that Jamaicans should be living off the bounty of the island, tending plots and raising livestock, instead of slaving at resorts and taking care of white foreigners. It’s why they call themselves Nanny’s People. They’re following the same route the Maroons did nearly three hundred years ago when they said to hell with the plantations and headed for the hills. And it’s why they call her Nanny Two.”

  Otee let out a snort.

  “Bet Nanny Two, she coochie don’t shoot bullet,” he said.

  Alan laughed. He looked at me.

  “Part of the legend of Nanny was that she had a secret weapon for fighting the British. As the story went, whenever the Brits launched an attack, Nanny would throw up her skirt and show them her vagina and stop them in their tracks. Then, while they were standing there gape-mouthed, she’d fire bullets out of it and cut them down.”

  “Pretty neat trick,” I said.

  “Kenya Oompong has some pretty neat tricks of her own. She knows how to rally a crowd and attract attention, that’s for sure.”

  “She have a lot of followers?”

  “More than most people ever thought the NPU would have. She staged some well-publicized demonstrations at a couple of resorts in Negril. Convinced several of the staff—kitchen hel
p, housecleaners, maintenance crews—to quit their jobs and follow her to the hills. They squatted on property and claimed it as their own. That got the ball rolling and others joined up with the NPU. Now there are NPU settlements all over the place.”

  “I came across some squatters yesterday,” I said. “In the hills above Falmouth, off Old Dutch Road by Fishkill Morass.”

  “Oh, really? What were you doing up there?”

  “Just sight-seeing,” I said. “You familiar with that area?”

  “Not as well as I should be. It’s in my district. Or, rather, what will be my district if I get elected. I need to pay a visit there.”

  He didn’t give any indication of knowing about the land his father owned. And I didn’t press the matter.

  “Government doesn’t do anything to stop people from squatting on the land?” I said.

  Alan shook his head.

  “Squatting is something of a tradition in Jamaica. According to the last statistics I saw, only nine percent of Jamaicans own their homes and forty-seven percent rent. The rest, as many as a million people, are squatters,” said Alan.

  “Must make for some nasty legal squabbles from time to time,” I said.

  “Oh, yes. Landowner wants to sell his property, the squatters can tie it up and stake a claim. Landowner most always ends up winning, but yes, it can get ugly,” said Alan. “It’s one reason why we started Homes for the People. Turn squatters into owners. Pride of ownership is a powerful thing.”

  The road got worse the farther we went, boulders occasionally blocking a portion of it and causing Otee to take precarious detours along nonexistent shoulders. It was treacherous going.

  After twenty minutes we rounded a corner and Alan had Oteele stop the car.

  “Just look at all that,” Alan said. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  Beyond us spread a landscape of slender, jagged mountains, some of them looking like dunce caps, others like cathedral spires. The seismic upheavals that created them eons ago had also formed hundreds, even thousands, of small, isolated, bowl-shaped valleys that pockmarked the blanket of vegetation as far as we could see.

  “Cockpit Country,” I said.

  Alan nodded.

  “British had another name for it,” he said. “Nanny and her people were always ambushing them up here, so they used to ride two to a horse, back-to-back. That way they could keep an eye out in all directions. Called it the ‘Land of Look Behind.’”

  “Gee, maybe I ought to sit on the bumper, watch our rear flank,” I said.

  Alan laughed.

  But I couldn’t help noticing that Otee had taken his hand off the wheel and let it rest on his rifle case.

  32

  The road ended in Benton Town, which wasn’t so much a town as it was a broad scar at the base of a mountain—muddy streets and ramshackle stores and glassy-eyed men sitting on rum-shop steps.

  It was about as downtrodden a place as I had ever been. The only exception was a horseshoe of new concrete-block houses set around a playground near the center of town.

  There was nothing fancy about the houses. They all followed the same cookie-cutter design with living room at the front, kitchen in the middle, two bedrooms in the back, but given the surroundings they might as well have been mansions.

  They were painted different colors and the owners had done what they could to lend personal touches. Small gardens. Flower pots along the porch. Most of the backyards sported fifty-five-gallon drums turned into homemade jerk pits.

  “This is some of our work,” said Alan, pointing to the houses as Otee parked the car alongside the playground. “We’ll soon have another dozen more.”

  Almost immediately, a group of kids began running toward the car.

  “Mr. Alan, Mr. Alan,” they squealed.

  Alan leaned forward to Otee and said: “I don’t want the children seeing your guns.”

  Otee said, “Get out, den, and me follow in da car.”

  I got out of the car with Alan and stood by him as the kids all got in their hugs. Alan spoke to a couple of them by name, asking about their parents.

  Then he turned to me.

  “We’ll walk to the co-op hall from here,” he said. “It’s only a short way.”

  He set off down the street, children in tow. I followed a couple of steps behind, with Otee bringing up the rear in the Honda.

  Every now and then, Alan would stop and exchange a few words with someone—an old woman doing her laundry in a washtub, a shopkeeper sweeping the steps of her store, a young man minding a vegetable stand. More children joined the others who had encircled Alan, reaching out for a chance to touch him.

  Everyone recognized him, and everyone seemed glad to see him. Alan, for his part, seemed quite in his element. I couldn’t imagine that the few hundred votes Benton Town might deliver would be so crucial that Alan Whitehall would devote much time here, but it was his campaign to run, not mine. I was just along to make sure nothing happened to him.

  And as far as I could tell, the only threat came from being hugged to death by small children.

  33

  The crowd at the Benton Town Co-op Hall spilled onto the street. Inside, it was hot and stuffy and standing-room-only. A podium sat in the middle of a low stage flanked by two tables set with pitchers of water and paper cups. Several men and women sat at the tables, wearing their Sunday best.

  Alan made his way toward the stage greeting people as he went. I stuck as close to him as I could. He hopped up on stage. I hopped up with him. After he introduced me to the men and women at the tables—trustees of the Benton Town Co-op—I took up a position in the wings where I could watch the whole room. Otee had chosen to stay in the Honda and keep an eye on things outside. I could see him through a window by the backstage door.

  It was obvious from the outset that we were in for a whole lot of speechifying. Each of the trustees took a turn at the podium, and nearly an hour passed before it came time for Alan’s introduction. There was loud applause and cheers as he stepped to center stage, but it was interrupted by a commotion at the back of the hall.

  All eyes turned to a tall, thickly built woman who was pushing her way through the crowd. She wore one of those African dashiki things, in a design of burnished yellow and fiery red. Her skin was almost blue-black, and she towered over most of the men in the crowd, the red turban atop her head making her seem even taller.

  A cadre of men and women wearing red-and-yellow T-shirts and red-and-yellow bandannas surrounded the tall woman in the turban, helping her wedge her way toward the stage. I recognized the bandannas. They were identical to the bandannas worn by the three boys who had been spray-painting NPU slogans on the wall at Libido the night I arrived.

  “Dat Nanny Two,” I heard a woman standing near me say.

  Two of the co-op trustees, both of them big, burly men, jumped down from the stage to stop the advance of the newcomers. There was pushing and shoving and shouting as they faced off with the woman in the turban.

  Others in the crowd joined in the fray. It was getting ugly. One of the bandanna-wearing women pointed a finger at Alan and shouted: “He PNP! He not for we!”

  Others in her group took up the chant.

  “He PNP! He not for we!”

  I glanced outside and saw Otee trotting toward the backstage door, holding the rifle at his side. As I moved in to the podium, alongside Alan, the woman in the turban boomed: “We have a right to be here! We will not be denied!”

  It put a hush on the room, and in the lull, Alan Whitehall seized the chance to speak.

  “Please, please. Leave them be,” he said. “She’s right. They deserve to be here.”

  It eased some of the rancor in the crowd. Then Alan Whitehall looked directly at the woman in the turban.

  “Kenya Oompong,” he said. “We welcome you.”

  He offered her a slight bow. Kenya Oompong held his gaze for a moment, then closed her eyes and sharply turned her head away—that Caribbean sign of contempt
known as giving someone the “cut-eye.” No one in the crowd missed it.

  “Now,” said Alan, “if we might continue . . .”

  He waited as the two trustees returned to their seats onstage. The atmosphere in the room was still prickly, but for the time being the situation was defused.

  I moved back to my position in the wings. Otee had opened the backstage door and was standing just inside it.

  “People of Benton Town,” Alan began. “And honored guests.”

  Another bow to Kenya Oompong, only this time I detected a slight smile on his face, as if he knew his equanimity had won the moment. Kenya Oompong drew herself up. She folded her arms across her ample chest, defiant, as she prepared to listen to what Alan Whitehall had to say.

  His speech lasted twenty minutes. He spoke with humor and with substance. The platitudes were few and well chosen. He spoke about the lessons of the past, the hard realities of the present, and the glorious promise of the future. All in all, it was as good a speech as I had ever heard a politician give. And that’s not intended to damn by faint praise.

  When it was over, applause once again rocked the hall. After it died, Alan looked at Kenya Oompong and said: “And now, should my worthy opponent wish to take the podium . . .”

  The tall woman let out a snort.

  “Cho!” she said. “Dat podium need airing out after you stink it up so. Me stand right here to say what me have to say. And me mek it short.”

  Her supporters nodded their heads, urging her on.

  “Give a monkey plenty money and even monkey can build a house. But dat don’t mean a man should sleep in it.” She shot a look at Alan, then turned back to the crowd. “You ’member dis: When monkey wipe his arse him don’t care where da leaf fall.”

  She spun on a heel and headed for the door. Her supporters followed her. And the crowd fell back to let them go.

  34

  “Gee, that went well,” I said as we rolled out of Benton Town on the bumpy dirt road. “But then, I’ve always had a soft spot for monkeys.”