With the experience of speaking on the microphone announcing meetings behind him, and with the freedom to speak with authority that he had developed in his association with Rooplal over the years, Sonnyboy entered the discussions confidently. He discovered that there were people saying the same thing he had been saying for years: I not fucking taking that. And he marveled that they didn’t have to tiptoe around the issues. They spoke out bold: I not accepting the world as you have laid it out. These fellars had better words and more history, but the sentiment was the same.
And he told again the story of his father and the inaction of the people and set off a big argument in the Square about whether Blackpeople were to be blamed for their own bad situation. There were those who agreed with him, but others were astonished at his ignorance of a history that had also made Blackpeople their own worst enemy. Blackpeople needed to see the world through eyes of their own.
After that day, Sonnyboy returned to the conversations in the Square, and over the months he began to see the world through eyes of his own and to join in the idea that they had to take power to take back themselves from that terrible history. He was there to see the numbers grow at the meetings and the Black Power movement begin. Sonnyboy joined the Black Power marches to Woodbrook, St. James, Diego Martin, there in the Carnival of claiming. Space and self and voice, history beginning to belong to him. Sonnyboy felt himself coming alive, felt that his arms were now more his own, that there were things to be done. He explained to Big Ancil that he had to say goodbye to the announcing, he had to move on. And since in his own mind he was a soldier, he began thinking of the struggle as something that would pit muscle against muscle. He convinced the Black Power people of his ability as a fighter. They appointed him bodyguard of one of the leaders. They equipped him with a pair of binoculars for him to bring faraway objects near, and he walked around with his king sailor walk, his arms folded across his chest, and a face more serious than anybody’s own, one of the most conspicuous fellars there. But, he didn’t care; he was part of an invincible army, part of the making of a new history. He watched the police vans trailing behind them as they marched to San Juan, Maraval, Cascadu, Couva. He watched the soldiers nodding their heads at the thunder of the speeches. And he with his arms folded, or with the binoculars glued to his eyes as he searched the crowd, for what, he wasn’t clear. And, how quickly things turn around.
Nelson Island
Before his detention on Nelson Island, Sonnyboy had been to prison – not for thiefing, not for chopping up people in a dispute over ownership of land, or taking part in some big racket, defrauding the treasury; he went to jail for fighting, for defending himself against the disrespect and terror of a world that was ready to starve and stifle the underdog. Yes, he went to jail for fighting – on the streets, in the gambling club where he bust Marvel head with a bottle and, yes, a couple fellars feel the taste of his razor. But, there in political detention, as he listened to the Black Power leaders exchange stories of themselves and present insights from Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Walter Rodney of the violence rooted in the colonial situation, he realized that his I not fucking taking that was no different to fellars shouting for Black Power. He began to see that his lived rebellion had given him a place not at all inferior to that we had claimed for ourselves. He saw himself as a revolutionary like the rest of us. But even there, not many of us shared his view of himself. I myself didn’t really take him on until the day he said something that made me look at him again.
He was sitting just above the beach, looking down at the sea. We had been talking about the steelband movement, about the difference between rebellion and revolution. He said, “You know this is the first real jail I make. This detention here as a political prisoner is the first time they put me in prison for doing something. The other times was stupidness. Fighting Marvel, cutting a man. Stupidness.”
I took note of it, but didn’t say anything. However, I noted that he had taken the opportunity to present himself as someone on our level. We were the revolutionaries and although we were willing to grant him a role in the revolution, his being a badjohn did not quite qualify him as a revolutionary.
When the period of incarceration came to an end, we said our goodbyes. Fellars were going back to their various jobs, some as teachers, some as civil servants, some to the university. Sonnyboy felt a sense of adventure, not as if he had come to an end, as if he was now beginning. In his last week of detention, he had received a letter from his mother. It had made him feel a softness to family and he spent that week thinking of all of them, his mother, his brother and his father.
He decided to stop first at the home of his father, who had moved out of Rouff Street. Sonnyboy found him in a new housing settlement that had already begun to grow old. It was as if the architects had decided to reproduce Rouff Street, the same narrow streets, the same tiny rooms, little concrete boxes steaming in the day and damp at night, no playground for the children, no allocation of space for business, no new vista from their surroundings, here their humbling renewed.
When his father opened the door and see Sonnyboy standing in front of him, he didn’t immediately invite him in. Finally when he did, he greeted him with what Sonnyboy believed must have been a prepared speech:
“I allow you to come through my front door because you are my son, but I want you to know that this hooligan business of burning and looting, of mashing up a place where the people is trying to build, is something I can’t uphold. I hope you will get a job now and settle down. This badjohn business not going to pay.”
Sonnyboy felt ambushed. He felt as he had done at times when he had stood before a magistrate who was convinced of his guilt even before he heard a word of evidence. He searched his mind for something to say. He pushed his hand in his pocket. His fingers touched the letter he had there. It was one he had received from his mother a week before the end of his detention.
“Ma write a letter.”
And he said the same thing again in different words: “I hear from Ma.”
And when his father didn’t say anything he said it again: “Ma write.”
His father still did not speak. Later, as if he believed he had made his own point with enough clarity and could now condescend to speak on other matters, his father said, “You hear from your mother, you say. How she?”
“She say she want to come for Carnival or Christmas.”
“Is how many years now she saying that?”
“She say if not Christmas, this Carnival for sure.”
“Lystra always saying that.”
As if those words, his own words, had the effect of softening him at a time when he didn’t want to be softened, when he didn’t want to yield, he looked at Sonnyboy, with what Sonnyboy thought was disappointment, as at a project pretty much lost, as someone who had taken a course that he was helpless to redirect, that regrettably he had to hold himself against; so when with no less sternness he said to Sonnyboy, “You want a beer?” it was not an offering of peace and conciliation; it was a gesture to fill, until Sonnyboy left, the space that had arisen between them. Sonnyboy accepted the beer as a gesture acknowledging the calm they had reached with each other and went to the doorway and drank it, commenting, because he needed something to say, on how well his father had kept the plants in the trough of earth in front the house.
“But they need some water,” he said.
“Yes, I have a little fella does come by and water them but I ain’t see him for days.”
He stood before his father, wanting to hug him, afraid to even offer him his hand to shake. And wanting to do something, to give him something as a mark of some kind of connecting. He felt in his pockets. All he had was the letter from his mother. He took it out and handed it to his father:
“Here is the letter from Ma.”
“But it is addressed to you.”
“Yes. But you keep it. She ask about you.”
He made his way down the narrow street to the main
road where he got a taxi, a little sad over his father, but consoling himself that he was on his way to Cascadu and a new life. In Cascadu he went into the gambling club with the intention of making peace with Big Head and Marvel, his opponents of long standing. But that didn’t work out either.
A Sad Reception
I was in Cascadu already when Sonnyboy returned, about him a watchful quiet as if he wasn’t quite sure how people would receive him, his hair tall, his long sleeves folded at the wrist, more restrained than of old and in a way more at ease, hailing out to everyone with the accommodating pleasantness of a man who expects to be honored, greeting people in the exuberant falsetto of the new salutation that he had picked up from brethren in the Black Power movement, “Power to you, Brother. Peace, Sister,” carrying a breezy confidence wherever I see him, at a football match, at the draughts games in front Cushe Barbershop, in the rum shop with his old friends Gilda and Dog, quick to put his hand in his pocket and sponsor a flask of the white rum that fellars were drinking, waiting for the acknowledgment to come, that he was one of our heroes, showing a new allegiance to Cascadu as if to make sure that his presence registered; so that for Carnival, although he went to the city to beat iron in Tokyo steelband and join his brother Alvin and the rest of the Apparicio clan, on Carnival Tuesday he was back in Cascadu with us for the stickfighting and the parade of the two-three bands that made up our carnival, and for the first time beating iron in the Cascadu steelband. Still, Sonnyboy find the open arms he expected closed to him, most of the people he meet drawing away from him in search of a new distance from which to engage him, as if he had become a man who suddenly win big money in a lottery or a hero who managed some great achievement that put him on a plane different from the one ordinary people on. Others, seeing him, looked up from playing cards or drinking or whatever they doing, trying their best to give the impression that nothing remarkable had taken place around him, and he begin to wonder if he had returned to the right town.
“Don’t worry, man,” I tell him. “People don’t have anything against you. Is just that you land up here in a confusing time. Everybody have to work things out for himself. Because you change doesn’t mean that people change.”
When I passed in front his grandmother’s house where he lived, I see him clearing the adjacent plot of land, to do some planting.
“Food,” he said. “Cassava and corn and pigeon peas and sorrel.”
When next I see Sonnyboy, he is driving a van owned by Gilbert Perry, a well-known supporter of the National Party, distributing various food supplies to shops around the countryside, talking still in the falsetto of a man who been away. He would still be driving the van when the canvassing started for the general elections. This time, the van had a loudspeaker attached to it and Sonnyboy was giving out pamphlets and announcing the meetings for Crispus Perry, the National Party candidate. I was surprised.
When I first saw him driving the van, I took it as just a job he was doing. I had assumed that his involvement with Black Power had created some distance between him and the National Party. He didn’t give me any explanation for what I saw as a new development in his political affiliation and I didn’t ask for any. I wasn’t thrilled about it. I had my own feelings about the politics. However, I didn’t have a job to give him. I tried to see his new activity not as his surrender, but as contributing to his efforts to get people of the town to see the man he really was. I looked on. I went to a couple of the meetings he had advertised. It would be at one of these meetings that he would start the fire that would spread and burn down almost the entire commercial sector of the town.
At that meeting, the speakers introducing the Prime Minister had such a long list of his titles to enumerate, so many of his enemies to identify, such a wash of his great achievements to praise, that by the time it was the PM’s turn to speak, the two gasoline lamps illuminating the platform began to sputter, the signal that they would soon go out. Not a soul there had gasoline to fill back up the lamps and the single gas station in the town had closed in the time the earlier speakers were speaking.
“Candles,” suggested Crispus Perry, the candidate for our district, then a slim, cheerful, fresh-faced business graduate who the PM had selected from the university to demonstrate that young people were about more than fruitless rebellion.
“Candles?” Aunt Magenta and Mr. Oswin Tannis had together made the same exclamation. And Mr. Tannis, a retired sanitary inspector and a veteran party supporter who had been responsible for bringing in two busloads of supporters from Laventille and San Juan to bolster the crowd in attendance, still smarting from being rejected by the PM as the candidate for the constituency in favor of young Perry, just sucked his teeth in disdain and turned away, leaving Aunt Magenta to explain to Crispus Perry that the sight of lighted candles at an election meeting would give it the look of a wake, symbolism the Opposition would be only too happy to seize upon and make merry with.
It was then that Sonnyboy stepped in with the suggestion that as an alternative they use the flambeau, a simple device consisting of kerosene in a rum bottle, with a strip of cloth inserted to serve as the wick. This, he reminded them, would produce a light that would not only shine more fiercely than the candles but would give that more militant an ambience to the meeting, since, on the authority of the eminent anthropologist Dr. JD Elder, the flambeau was the light used by Africans released from enslavement to celebrate, symbolize and commemorate Emancipation. With their agreement secure, Sonnyboy, with his demonic efficiency, flung himself into action right away. He went next door and knocked on the side window of the shop, which was legally closed at that hour, and without much trouble persuaded Lutchman to open up and sell him a gallon of kerosene, the accommodating Lutchman – “Anything for you, boss” – going out of his way to give him a number of rum bottles into which to pour the kerosene.
And is only after Lutchman close back the window, smiling with his splendid teeth to himself, no doubt, with what must have been the mischievous satisfaction that his help had not fully aided them (Let them take that if they want to believe that because I is Indian I against them, let them take that), that Sonnyboy made the unsettling discovery that he had kerosene and the bottles, but no cloth for the wicks.
The PM had been waiting to speak. With the formidable contempt for inefficiency, and the monumental appetite for spite that had made him the most exemplary political leader in the Caribbean, feared by cabinet ministers and worshiped by the rank and file, the PM had noted, with an impatience bordering on vexation, the last brilliant gleam of the gas lamps flaring to their death. Without surrendering his irritation, he shifted in midstride so to speak, the way a great batsman adjusts to the demands of the moment, he put the notes to his speech in the bulging pocket of his black jacket, stood up, cleared his throat and to the consternation of party organizers, though not to people who knew the kind of bad mind he had, was about to deliver his address in the darkness when, with the gesture of sacrifice that was to surprise everybody, Sonnyboy, who had done so much work already, ripped one pocket off his shirt, rolled the fabric lengthways, inserted it into one of the rum bottles filled with kerosene, set it alight, and stood with self-satisfied repose looking at the rest of the men to follow his example and tear off their shirt pockets for use as wicks. The young candidate, Crispus Perry, was wearing a necktie and blazer that had him sweating, and offered up the handkerchief he had been using to pat his brow; the two older men, Thom and Tannis, with no such expendable item to hand, hesitated at the thought of ruining their good shirts and looked resentfully at Sonnyboy for putting them in the awkward position of having to choose between loyalty to the party and the well-being of their clothing; however, they began to empty their shirt pockets, albeit slowly. But Sonnyboy, anxious to emphasize the urgency of the need, snatched at the other pocket of his shirt, with such determination that he ripped the shirt itself, only to discover a split second later that his calamitous action had been in vain and that had he waited for just a mo
ment longer he would have been rescued by the resolute action of my aunt Magenta.
Music and Magenta
My aunt Magenta wanted three things from life. She wanted a son to see about her in her old age, a daughter to go out into the world and do the things that for one reason or other she didn’t have the chance to do, and a man, good enough and strong, whose face she would be glad to see when she get up in the morning. It had fellars who buzzed around from the time she was nineteen, good, able-bodied working man who didn’t have gold teeth in their mouth. It had fellars with jacket-and-tie ambition, and one who was a singer, not of calypso, of sentimental songs. They were OK fellows, but they didn’t move her.
The man who moved her was a charmer, a fella who had this rascal power from the start, a quality barely camouflaged by his police uniform, his eyes a little brighter, his voice a little smoother, his gaze a little more unsettling, setting off the alarm in her belly and a flash of roasting heat up her neck, causing her to bite her lip and breathe in deeply to prevent herself exploding. People warn her about him. Everyone know he was a womanizer and a heartbreaker, but Miss Know-It-All see only the set of his broad shoulders, the high cheekbones, the smile, the long legs, the smooth steps of a foxtrot dancer, all flowing together to give him the name they called him, Music. She thought it was love. She believed that she alone by herself could be the world to him in the way he was her world. For this miscalculation, from Mr. Music, she had a son. She was twenty-two. He stick around long enough to see if he could give her the daughter; but by that time she was a little wiser, and she watched him drift away with the smooth deceptive motionlessness of a sailing ship leaving harbor, looking like it not moving at all, and when you look again it gone, leaving her with a tied-up story that she didn’t even try to decipher – scholarship, study, a friend in England, immigration. She was a nurse already and she had to get married or resign. That was the rule. And she wasn’t vexed with Music, and she wasn’t sorry for herself.
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