who took that Guinea girl
would croon when rum
anointed his tongue
And she left to mind
first mulatta child
would go at end of day
to ululate by the Bay
I am O’Rahailly, he croons
She moans, Since them
carry mi from Guinea
mi can’t go home.
Of crossover griot
they want to know
how all this come about?
to no known answer.
Still they ask her
why you chant so?
And why she turn poet
not even she know.
If you want to know exactly when my great grandfather landed on the island of Jamaica, if you want dates and time and proof as to where exactly he came from – provenance, provenance – I’d tell you if I knew.
But he himself was a man who deemed it fit to inform no one from whence he’d come, and why he would never return there.
Except when sprung by spirits he’d be at home in the Gaelic tongue, O such a torrential singing.
According to family lore, George O’Brian Wilson jumped ship. Maybe he just slipped over the side and swam into Lucea Harbour some time during the second half of the nineteenth century and assumed a different life. He was a survivor.
The family thinks he may have been from Galway, but for all I know he could have been a jump ship sailor from Cork.
‘Song of the Jump Ship Sailor’
I am from Cork, he said, so I peeled off that barque
easy as you please,
rolled into the night sea, and rode the white horses
into Lucea Harbour.
I am of Cork. I can keep a secret. I stopper for my own
bottled-up business,
took my personal oath of abjuration:
I abjure, renounce and abhor empire’s supremacy and authority
over humanity in general and myself in particular.
I come from Cork of the mighty river Lee, of crystalline streams,
green mountains and hills.
I unable seaman brave the ocean; fortunate not to have been born
a woman.
For women overboard are drawn down to sea’s floor;
weighted as they are by long reach-me-down drawers,
wool stockings thick as porridge, bone stays,
follow-behind-trains and bustles, iron-hoop crinolines,
petticoats, leg o’mutton-sleeved dresses,
weighty as the Queen’s dusty old parlour drapery,
their family’s saved-up gold guineas stitched into seams;
babes suckling at breasts, small barnacles clinging to hems.
Unlike those drowned Africans who are clad scant;
there’s equal opportunity for watergrave available
to enslaved women and men,
ten times ten thousand sleep upon the floor of the sea,
but I’m of Cork.
My Aunt Rose was George O’Brian Wilson’s favourite.
He’d give her six soda biscuits from a battered tin.
To the other grandchildren he’d dole out two biscuits each, saying:
‘Life’s not fair’s the lesson here I’m trying to teach.’
On this one thing all agree: he religiously kept up St Patrick’s Day.
Same time every year, him and him friend dem congregate and drink
and sing and jig.
Him and him wild friends dem who march down like a band of old soldier
from a place name Vinegar Hill.
Vineega. My mother and her people pronounced it, Vineega.
He and the remnant from Vinegar Hill drank and fiddled and jigged,
offering up high praises to their beloved Saint Patrick,
in that small village where Africans did not fail to venerate
in chant and drum-sound their own saints.
O the mix and mash up that went on in that place,
to the melodies of Europe
rolled the riddims of the Congo:
Bob Marley become the avatar.
For if in winter I fall asleep listening to Dolores Keane
I am guaranteed to be transported to the Island
where Jamaicans have a peculiar habit of calling all flowers roses.
Like the people of Hibernia we exalt the rose.
Unlike in other places, the Jamaican rose is ungendered.
There is even a posse of Jamaican macho men who call themselves,
‘Black Roses’.
To us all flowers are roses
Accompong is Ashanti, root Nyomekopan
Appropriate name Accompong meaning warrior
or lone one. Accompong
home to bushmasters, bushmasters being
maroons, maroons dwell in deep places,
deep mountainous, sealed
strangers unwelcome, Mi no send you no come.
I love so the names of this place
how they spring brilliant like roses
to us all flowers are roses
engage you in flirtation, what is their meaning
pronunciation? A strong young breeze that just takes
these names like blossoms and waltz them around
turn and wheel them on the tongue.
There are angels in St Catherine somewhere.
Arawak is a post office in St Ann.
And if the Spaniards hear of this
will they come again in caravels
to a post office in suits of mail
to inquire after any remaining Arawaks.
Nice people, so gentle peaceful and hospitable.
There is everywhere here;
there is Alps and Lapland and Berlin
and there is, Carrickfergus, Clonmel, Donegal
Hibernia, Kildare, Newry, Middleton,
Waterford and Ulster Spring…
I walked to school down Leinster Road
in a city where Leitrim, Antrim, Killarney, Dublin,
Clare, Waterford, Armagh and Sligo were brought
from counties down to avenues and roads.
Honour to the Ones Transported.
Honour to the one who passed from the Nonesuch caves;
fossils of sea creatures shellacked to cave walls;
starfish medals pinned to cave-chests phosphorescent
beam-back to the ones lost on crossings.
Honour to those far from ground of where born;
who faced the sea with full heart and called
a new green field, Athenry.
For the ones force-shipped, as units of labour, for rebellion,
for stealing of Trevelyan’s corn, the ones bonded
to sing praise songs in strange lands,
who stripped off names like shirts and shifts of cotton or flax;
and lay them down as place markers of homeland.
Ireland lived at our neighbours’ the Lynches.
Mr Lynch, a man who could have walked undifferentiated
through any county of Ireland.
A man who named his son Dreamy; and his daughter Patsy.
A travelling salesman who belonged in the pages of Ulysses,
or on stage as a character in a play by Eugene O’Neill.
A man who’d done his wife some beyond-repair wrong
for she kept up spite and maliced him, till one day
she made her way across Busha Lynch’s flat Bridge,
passed through Bog walk and went to live in Sligoville.
First free village for the unslaved; Sligoville where you
looked for William Butler Yeats.
Country Sligoville,
I will arise and go with William Butler Yeats
to country Sligoville
in the shamrock-green hills of St Catherine.
We walk and palaver by the Rio Cobre
till we hear tributaries join and sing
water songs of nixies.
; Dark tales of maroon warriors
fierce women and men
bush comrades of Cuchulain.
We swap duppy stories, dark night doings.
I show him the link of a rolling calf’s chain
and an old hige’s skin carcass.
Love descended from thickets of stars
to light Yeats’s late years with dreamings
alone. I record the mermaid’s soft keenings.
William Butler I swear my dead mother
embraced me. I then washed off my heart
with the amniotic waters of a green coconut.
In December Sally water will go down
to the Sally gardens with her saucer
to rise and dry her weeping orbs,
O to live Innisfree in a hut of wattles and daub.
My mother’s maternal grandfather would never visit Duanvale.
Duin means dark he said; and he himself had passed
through darkness. He had not part nor lot with David’s psalms;
he had passed barefoot, bareback through the valley of the shadow.
He would never again be shoeless: he became a cobbler.
He would never again be bareback: he became a saddler.
He was a man of large appetites: he had known great hunger.
He had been a man comfortless: he took a creole wife,
he took my Guinea great grandmother.
And I lived for thirty years near the cooperage in St Andrew hills
where wild Irish boys once steam-bent wooden staves
into big-bellied barrels strong to contain sugar seas
of amber rum.
Rowdy, rowdy, rowdy all the way home.
Passing by Dublin Castle on the way to Irish Town
stopping in at Red Light to visit the soldier Pegeens;
comfort women, comforters of the regiment.
Others called them Soldier Peggy; Pegeen, Pegeen,
my mother said.
My Aunt Ann married a man name of Moran. A brown man
with eyes like peridots which happen to be my own birthstone.
Peridot: gemstone of ones born under the sign of the Lion.
The man had lion eyes.
My Aunt Ann was alright with being by blood and marriage
somewhat Irish. She showed love for the sons and daughters
of Kathleen O’Houlihan by hailing cabs for those who’d tied one too many on.
Many is the cab fare and steadying hand she gave to any Dicey Riley
taken to the sup upon St Paddy’s Day on Montreal’s streets.
And every year she’d order by catalogue, boots that seal snow and ice
from sole, crafted by Irish cobblers.
How do you feel about all this mix-up, this advantage-taking white man taking advantage of African woman business. Enraged? Angry? Bitter? Conflicted? All those things.
Hear Ann: No use eating out your liver over what done
happen already—
Have you seen what hate can do to a body?
How it can duin.
My aunts all went to sea themselves. Booked passage, boarded vessels, crossed oceans, made their own luck in foreign lands like O’Brian Wilson.
My aunt Ann loved the duin of her skin, dark as the cocoa her own father cultivated. He, a man who wanted no part of cane’s history, preferred to sweeten his morning mug of coffee or cocoa tea with logwood honey.
Reconciled with what occurred in that small village my Aunt Ann would say:
Our people, they came from all over. Some were sons of bitches, some were good people, some were chancers, some deserve honour, and at least one was a near-saint. They were griots and storytellers, free and enslaved, they were pagans, they were mystics, and did I mention a few were sons of bitches? But all of them made us, she said, and all of them made you a poet.
19
A party for Tarquin
SO, THAT Saturday night I was staying home. Happily staying home. I didn’t have a date, didn’t have a boyfriend. I didn’t feel like hanging out with the girls or with my gay fashion designer/dancer friend. I’d decided I was going to go to bed early and read till I fell asleep; I’d probably listen to conjure-man Miles Davis playing soft and low Someday My Prince Will Come which was my go-to album when I wanted to be alone.
But, just as I was about to slip into my nightgown, the phone rang. It was Bernard asking, ‘Hey, want to go to a party?’
‘No, not really.’
‘I bet you’ll change your mind if I tell you it’s a party for Sir Laurence Olivier’s son.’
‘So how come you’re invited?’
The minute I asked that, I knew there was a catch.
‘Oh God, Bernard don’t tell me this is another one of your little social climbing moves.’
‘No, man,’ he whispers. ‘It’s Felicity.’
‘So, you need me to protect you from her. Not doing it.’
‘Actually, I told her you and I are a serious item, and I think she’s determined to take me away from you.’
‘Eff off.’
‘Just come, do, please. It will be a nice lime’ (which is what people from the Eastern Caribbean call what you do when you hang out and party with your friends) ‘and you can meet Felicity.’
‘Bernard, I’m not your dober-girl pinscher.’
And just as I was about to launch into a speech about friends not using friends I experienced a soft punch to my heart. Just like that, as if some hand rolled into a loose fist inside a soft suede glove had bopped me gently on the left side of my chest, and I thought, no, friends take stuff for friends. For family and for friends. That’s what you do, that is just what we do.
My dear Bernard loved the idea of being able to say he’d been to a party where he met Sir Laurence Olivier’s son. We, his friends, gave him hell about his predilection for social climbing, and he would just laugh and says something like, ‘Do you know who I met yesterday? Peter Finch! His wife Eletha is a Jamaican, and they came to the hospital to see her mother.’ Bernard was a sweet soul, all his friends loved him because he was kind, funny, handsome, brilliant and if it wasn’t for his always wanting to hobnob with the nobs I guess he would have been perfect.
So, Felicity. She was a doctor at the hospital where Bernard was an intern and was determined to bed him. Felicity was no fool, she had sized my friend up, and identified his weak spot. An invitation to a party for Sir Laurence Olivier’s son hosted by some other member of the island’s British expatriate community would reel Bernard in, and she was so determined to get him that she even agreed that he could bring along his girlfriend (me).
So, I went along, and I won’t wait till the end of this to say I’m glad I did because my friend died about ten years later and I’m grateful for every single memory I have of him.
I scrapped my plans to envelop myself in a cloud of baby powder, and ease into my white cotton nightgown, and instead I got dressed up in an outfit that, as I think about it, would be right in Vogue (literally) today. It was reddish and gold jersey and the top could be worn by itself as a mini dress or over the matching narrow-cut pants. I finished it off with a long narrow scarf loosely draped round my neck with one end flung carelessly over my left shoulder.
They arrived in Felicity’s red sports car and I met said Felicity for the first time, she was from England and looked to be at least thirty.
‘Oh God, girl, you look great,’ gushed Bernard, clasping me to his bosom.
‘Hello,’ said Felicity. ‘Nice to meet you, Bernard’s told me so much about you.’
‘And he’s told me a lot about you.’
No, there was no time for a drink before heading out to the party, so we three packed into Felicity’s red sports car. Felicity insisted that Bernard sat in the middle right next to her, and then I swear she said this:
‘You won’t know this, but there was a dancer named…’
‘Isadora Duncan?’ I said.
‘Oh, you…’
‘Yes
, she was throttled by her scarf. It was blowing in the wind when she was driving a convertible and the scarf got hitched in the spokes of the car wheels.’
People always assume that I don’t know anything. I guess I just look as if I don’t know anything. I have found that this can work in my favour; many is the time I have been greatly underestimated by people who have then written me off and left me alone to just get on with doing what I do.
Anyway, Felicity turned her red convertible down Hope Road and made a right turn when we got to the traffic light by Kings House and we took Lady Musgrave Road up to Barbican Road and we picked our way through Cherry Gardens in the cool November evening, the wind filling our hair as we breezed through Manor Park and began the ascent up Old Stony Hill Road. Felicity talked above the noise of the wind and the traffic, addressing all her comments in loud sideways volleys to Bernard, who was normally soft-spoken so only every second or third word or so of his could be heard above the noise of the traffic.
Redemption Ground Page 9