My Song

by Harry Belafonte

The nearest market was Brown’s Town, to which the villagers brought their harvested goods by donkey and cart. When their carts were full, they carried more on their heads, wrapped in colorful bandannas. If I was lucky, I’d be asked to go with one of my uncles, either to walk behind or, as a special treat, to ride on the donkey. (“Don’t crush the banana!”) Sometimes I was lucky enough to hitch a ride on one of the few trucks in the region. (“Hey, mon, you want a fender ride?”) I’d hop on the fender and hold on to the window frame, and we’d roll down the dirt roads, inevitably passing a group of bauxite workers headed home, their faces red from bauxite dust.

  The larger market, especially for bananas, was Ocho Rios, with its deepwater pier, where the United Fruit Company boats loaded up. Bananas, sugarcane, mangoes, oranges—all these were shipped, after being tallied and paid for by the UFC tallyman. “Come, Mr. tally man, tally me banana, / Daylight come and me wan’ go home.” Not by chance did that song become my signature; I knew of what I was singing.

  Once the men were paid, I’d follow them through the streets of Ocho Rios as they shopped for the enamel pots or the store-bought rockers their wives had asked for. They might also stop at the local pub and grab a few shots, and sometimes come home very drunk, their trucks bumping along the roads as their headlights swept the fields. Perched on the fender, I felt the cool night breeze on my face and pretended I was hanging on for dear life.

  When school was out, my father took me back to New York on one of his banana boat runs. I was eight now, old enough to get into new kinds of trouble.

  That summer, in our latest multiple-family apartment, I befriended a girl named Eleanor, who shared my interest in playing doctor. The scene is as clear to me today as it was then, a stark stage set in my mind. At stage left, the kitchen. At stage right, the bedroom. At center stage, connecting the rooms, a little pantry where canned goods are stored. A young boy and girl are fumbling with each other’s buttons in the bedroom. The boy’s mother is cooking in the kitchen. Usually the thick curtain between the bedroom and pantry is kept closed. Today, perhaps hearing her son in the bedroom and wanting to tell him something without moving out of the kitchen, the mother slides the curtain aside. The children freeze. The girl flees upstage. Mother and son trade horrified looks. Finally the mother speaks. “This one I’m saving for your father.”

  Absent as he usually was, my father, unfortunately, was home that week. For a day or two he said nothing, and I dared to think I might escape whatever terrible new form of punishment I was due. Then, on Sunday, just as I’d finished dressing for church, my father pulled me into the bathroom. I saw that the tub was filled with hot water: scalding, steaming water. “You know what this is for?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Get out of your clothes.”

  Slowly I undressed. I couldn’t believe he was going to put me into that tub. I started crying, and he whacked me across the face. By the time I’d gotten down to my underwear, I stopped crying. I’d come to terms with pure terror. I was ready to step in. Or perhaps my mind had shut down.

  Just before I stepped in, my father yanked me away from the tub. Once again he flogged me with his belt, so badly that my mother had to intervene. I blamed him, but I blamed her, too. She hadn’t known what the punishment would be. But she must have known it would be extreme.

  From Aunt Liz and Uncle Lenny, I’d nurtured a keen curiosity about numbers, as in the numbers. I could feel the excitement that playing the numbers stirred in the poor and the desperate, which was to say almost everyone in my world. The numbers had such power—to pay the rent, to restore marital harmony, to buy happiness, for a short while at least. And so perhaps it was inevitable that I would be drawn, one day, to a game of three-card monte in the street. In my pocket I had ten dollars my aunt Liz had given me to pass on to my mother for groceries. All I knew, after watching the three-card-monte dealer, was that I might multiply that bill if I took the chance. So I did, and suddenly the ten dollars was gone.

  Panicked, I went back to my aunt’s apartment, because there, I knew, I would find more money—lots of money. The beds in the bedrooms down the hall were covered with packets of money about to be brought by runners to the lucky winners. I snuck into one of the bedrooms and slipped a ten-dollar bill from one of the packets. Surely Aunt Liz would never miss the money, much less accuse me of taking it. But she did. Hawkeyed businesswoman that she was, she discovered the shortfall that day, ticked off the possible suspects, and came to the clear conclusion that the culprit was me. She couldn’t call my mother—we had no phone—but the next time she saw her, she told her so. My mother reacted with righteous indignation. “How dare you accuse my son?” she snapped back. In the background I listened, sick with guilt, incapable of admitting what I’d done, until the talk became so heated that my mother told her sister what to do with herself … after which they did not speak again for the longest time. And I, burning with shame, had to pretend, for the rest of her life, that Aunt Liz had done me wrong.

  I learned from that day not to steal my gambling funds, but I didn’t learn not to gamble. All through my youth I would play for marbles, using cigar boxes for our game of choice. The dealer, so to speak, would cut three little Roman arches in one side of the box, and set the box in the gutter down a slope in the street. The game was to let your marble find its way into one of those holes from five or ten feet away. If it went into one hole, that was a one-puree payoff: The other pint-size gamblers had to give you a puree marble for the one you’d gotten in the one-puree arch. If you got your marble in the two-puree hole, better for you, and the three-puree hole, better yet. But if your marble didn’t roll through any of those holes, then you lost it.

  I played for purees in the street, and I bet on flipped cards—heads or tails—but after that incident with Aunt Liz, I always kept to my limit, as a child, as a teenager in the navy, even afterward, when I came back to Harlem and played poker, sometimes for pretty serious stakes. Not until I got to Vegas would I be so drawn to the lure and adrenaline of the big, big win that I’d start playing beyond my limit, and keep playing, until I had to stop—for keeps.

  It was time, my mother decided, to take her children home—home to Jamaica for a good long stretch, away from the dangers we faced in Harlem, away from its temptations, too. Dennis and I would attend a proper British-style school, and my mother would get some kind of work. She brought a trunk for herself, along with ours, and promised she’d stay. I was nine, Dennis was five, the year was 1936. For none of us did things turn out as hoped.

  We rented a tiny one-room house in Kingston, not far from one of my aunts, and for two or three weeks, my mother searched for work. Only there wasn’t any. One day I saw her, silent and defeated, her mouth set in a line, packing her clothes back into her trunk. I didn’t ask what she was doing, or why. I knew.

  That day, my mother enrolled me in the Morris-Knibb Preparatory School, which took in boarding students. That part of the plan, at least, worked out. The school started with fifth grade. Dennis was too young, so my mother would take him to an elementary school—humbler and less expensive than Morris-Knibb, because that was all my mother could afford—and have him board with a local family. I would see him every two weeks, my mother explained, for movies and ice cream. At least I’d had both of my parents, some of the time, until I was nine. Dennis would never get over the anger and loneliness he felt at being abandoned, or so he felt, at five, by both parents. It would haunt him, and grind him down, until he died of a heart attack at forty-four. And when he did, our mother would weep, racked by guilt for leaving him on his own those many years ago.

  When we got to Morris-Knibb, I begged my mother to change her mind and take us both back north. I didn’t care how small the next apartment in Harlem might be. I didn’t mind how much babysitting I’d have to do. I just wanted to be with her. She told me to buck up—“Get yourself together, boy!” She helped me find the room where I’d be bunking, and put my clothes in my little cubby. All too soon
we were back outside by the waiting taxi, and she was giving me a hug and saying good-bye. I watched the taxi roll off, and the school gates close behind it. Finally I ran at the gate, devastated, and put my face through the bars, howling with grief and fear. But the taxi never came back.

  My new teachers brought me back to the classroom and sat me at my desk. I wept and wept. I couldn’t eat that night; I didn’t take a proper meal for days. Then one morning I woke up and found myself completely self-reliant. My mother had abandoned me; nothing could change that fact. I would never again look to my mother for love. I was now a world of one. I was the only one I could trust, the only person who cared about me in this bleakly institutional place. I would have to protect myself by doing whatever it took to keep these new authority figures from zeroing in on me. I would resist all that they told me I should believe.

  Mary Morris-Knibb was a prominent figure in Kingston who would soon become the first Jamaican woman elected to a political post. Like most islanders, she adopted the British way of life, and modeled her school accordingly. We learned British history and etiquette, took on British accents, read British newspapers and accepted their editorial opinions, followed soccer and cricket, and swelled with pride at being a part of the British Empire, especially when viewing such movies as The Charge of the Light Brigade, even though we were among the many conquered nations of Britain’s empire. The only thing British we didn’t like was being oppressed.

  I was an exception in one regard: I hated cricket. This was not the way to ingratiate myself with my new classmates and teachers. Soon enough I became known as the hard case in school—it didn’t take much—and the inevitable caning followed, for some minor infraction I can’t recall, as there were so many. I lay down on my stomach, and four upperclassmen held my arms and legs while the principal gave me five or more lashes across the bottom. I might have cried, but I never became the subservient little student the caning was meant to produce.

  Eventually I was told to board elsewhere; the teachers didn’t want to see any more of me than necessary. So I went to live at Mrs. Shirley’s, where three other boys boarded as well. All four of us had bunks in the same room. For this, and for feeding me, my mother sent Mrs. Shirley a stipend each week. Whatever she paid, it was too much. One night not too long after my arrival, I woke up covered in bites. “Must be mosquitoes,” Mrs. Shirley declared over breakfast the next morning. “No, ma’am, I don’t think so. I think some bugs in the bed.” Mrs. Shirley slapped me. “No bugs in my bed!” I stormed back to the bedroom and stripped my bunk in rage, while she stood frozen behind me. There, around each button of the mattress, were hundreds of bedbug eggs. Embarrassed, Mrs. Shirley told me it was time for me to leave.

  Over the next four years, various relatives and friends of relatives took me in—not for love, but for money. Meager as my mother’s earnings were up north, a small sliver of them bought a lot of room and board in Jamaica, where an American dime had the value of a dollar. The household I remember best was that of my mother’s sister Geraldine, whose skin was almost Tahitian in tone. Aunt Gerry, or Aunt G, as I called her, had upped the already high social standing her light skin conferred by marrying a pink-faced Scotsman named Eric Pigou (pig-ew). In the Pigous’ capacious house at 17A Connolly Avenue in Kingston, I learned just how rigid Jamaica’s racial stratification could be.

  Mr. Pigou was the postmaster, or so I remember; perhaps he was one of two or three. Either way, he earned a good enough salary to maintain a two-story wood-frame house with a tennis court and highly manicured lawn and garden. The Pigous had three children, two girls and a boy—Phyllis, Violet, and David—all of them as white as their father. In addition, there was Annette, or Nettie, an adopted child, or “ward,” as she was described to me, some six or seven years older than I. Because she was adopted, and because her skin was mulatto, Nettie lived in the back of the Pigous’ house, in a small downstairs bedroom by the back staircase. That’s where I lived, too, in a bedroom next to Nettie’s. The Pigous’ children were in upstairs bedrooms, much larger than Nettie’s and mine. When company came, Nettie and I were forbidden to make an appearance, and ate in the kitchen with the servants while the Pigous and their guests took their dinner in the dining room. The Pigous didn’t want their friends to know that there could possibly be dark-skinned next of kin living in the house; it would have tainted their reputation. Eventually, I would learn the Pigous had a deeper secret to keep. Nettie was Gerry’s daughter by another man. Whether Mr. Pigou knew this and let Gerry keep Nettie under his roof, or didn’t and simply believed Nettie was a ward, I never knew.

  If no guests were invited, Nettie and I did join the others in the dining room. In truth, we preferred the kitchen, for the Pigous dined with excruciating formality, their backs ramrod straight, every aspect of culinary etiquette strictly observed. We knew the precise moment to pick up our serviettes, shake them once, and place them on our laps. We tipped the outward side of our spoons into the soup just so, moved the spoon outward, then drank from the heel of the spoon. And so it went from soup to nuts. The Pigous made stilted dinner conversation in high-British accents—I can still see Mr. Pigou turning his spectacled gaze to me and saying, “My dear boy, that is not what one does at the table”—as properly as any English lord or lady at high tea. Was it really just a generation ago that Aunt Gerry’s parents had shaken off the yoke of indentured servitude, only to seize all the trappings and affectations of their overseers? So it was. And in less than twenty years, strangers who met me would assume I was a highborn college graduate, so ingrained were these bits of culture the Pigous and Mrs. Morris-Knibb had appropriated from the British, and passed on, in their stern way, to me.

  Outside the Pigous’ proper household lay a very different world. On Kingston’s busy streets, peddlers sang their goods for sale. “Guava jelly, guava cheese … yellow yam, yellow yam, come get your yellow yam!” The fishmongers were the best; they had a new song for whatever their catch of the day was. At the wharf, mento bands would sing to the endless stream of tourists disembarking from cruise ships. Even politicians sang to gather crowds before delivering their speeches. A politician named Simpson had an artificial leg made of cork that buffered the stump against the wooden peg. “Cork Foot Simpson the Vagabon’ / if I catch you I chop off de other one” was the verse written and sung by the opposition candidate. Simpson won the contest, and on the night of his victory rally he responded by singing his victory rebuttal.

  All this music I took in, along with my first snatches of classical music as I passed a big hillside house, its large front lawn set off by an imposing gate. Whoever lived in that house listened to the BBC all day, or so it seemed. The British announcer spoke through crackling static that dramatically heightened the distance his broadcast traveled. I scampered up a Bombay mango tree that hovered over the road at the edge of the property and perched in the comfort of its crisscrossed branches. Those great orchestral waves of the London Philharmonic wafted to where I sat, endlessly sucking on the nectar of one of several sun-ripened fruits easily reached from my nesting place. I listened to Beethoven being played by a conductor whose very name bespoke British pomp and majesty: Sir Thomas Beecham.

  Despite that, I was lonelier now in Jamaica than I’d ever been in Harlem. To the Pigous I was a boarder—a dark-skinned boarder. In Nettie I had someone to share my lowly status, but the difference in our ages made us housemates more than friends. The older Pigou children had lives of their own; so did the other students at the Morris-Knibb Preparatory School, most of whom lived at home, and who regarded me, rightly, as a loner, best avoided. Alienated and hurt, I grew more rebellious, until Mrs. Morris-Knibb suggested to my mother I might be happier at another school, and so began a series of short stints at schools whose names I just dimly remember: Mico, Wolmer’s Boys’ School, Half Way Tree. Decades later, when Michael Manley, the prime minister of Jamaica, awarded me a doctorate from the University of the West Indies, I would tell him I was surely the only recip
ient of this honor who had the distinction of attending every school in Kingston.

  I did have one passion, and for a while, I felt sure I’d make it my profession one day. Every morning at five o’clock, I’d sneak out of the Pigous’ house and scurry over to the Kingston racecourse to see my cousin Charlie Gossen, the island’s best jockey, put his horses through their paces. Charlie’s mother was Liz, my numbers-boss aunt. On Jamaica, he was famous, the greatest jockey of his day. He let me assist in mucking out the stables and grooming his horses, and eventually he taught me to ride. We both felt I had promise, until, to my mortification, I had a growth spurt that just wouldn’t quit. Charlie told me sympathetically—looking up at me—that I’d have to find a new ambition.

  At last, in the winter of 1940, my mother came back for my brother and me. Perhaps I imagined that she just couldn’t bear to be separated from us anymore. In fact, the war had more to do with it. The Nazis were marching through Europe, conquering one country after another; the latest to fall was France. My mother was not alone in fearing England would be next, and that the British Crown’s colonies might be put under Nazi rule before she could rescue her sons.

  Both Dennis and I were ecstatic to be reunited with our mother, and our joy wasn’t diminished in the least by seeing that her newest apartment, on 114th Street and Manhattan Avenue, was her smallest yet: a single room partitioned into two, with a common toilet down the hall. The three of us slept on one side of the curtain my mother had made to divide the space; on the other side was a kitchenette and dining area. My parents were legally separated. As they were good and obedient Catholics, divorce seemed out of the question. My father, I was told, had taken up with a German woman named Edith. My mother was single, but she did have a friend in the janitor of the building, a very light-skinned black man named William Wright. From the way he and my mother chatted on a daily basis, I don’t think it would have surprised me to learn that they had a romance. Before long, Bill Wright would become my stepfather.