One day with all three of them in it, the car shut down in the middle of Cascadu. Sonnyboy and Sweetie-Mary got out, and with his grandmother steering, they pushed it into the garage by Freddie where he left it for repair.
Sonnyboy turned his attention to the vegetable shop, where his help was needed. He did the running around during the day, worked at nights while Sweetie-Mary and his grandmother did what else had to be done. Without the daily problems with the car and with the additional time he put into it, the business began to prosper, Sweetie-Mary to cook more often, and the ideal of having a restaurant in Cascadu took shape. Customers who had left because they didn’t have this and that in stock, seeing the flutter of life in the place, started to return. In addition, the brotherhood of used car owners who saw him as one of them began to patronize him.
One afternoon his two good friends Gilda and Dog appeared carrying two small benches, a draughts board and a flask of white rum. Following them was a small group of men. They had come to set up in front of his place of business and to engage their passion of playing draughts and drinking white rum which they chased with plain water. Pretty soon draughts and the discussion of the game dominated activity at the shop. From the very first day she saw them, Sonnyboy’s grandmother warned him that having draughts-playing at his business place would bring bad luck.
Sonnyboy saw it as an attraction, as an indication of people accepting him. Bringing people to the shop could only help him.
“Help to sink you,” his grandmother said. “What they buying? You don’t sell rum and the water that they use to chase the white rum you give them free. What is your profit?”
“I don’t want my friends to think I behaving like a big shot,” he said.
“You have to stop them,” his grandmother said.
But Sonnyboy didn’t have the heart to do so.
It didn’t take a month for the first signs of the blight that his grandmother prophesied to appear. At first it didn’t seem a big thing. A few houses down the street, Rosie Ramroop put up a roti stall selling fruit juices and doubles and barra. Two weeks later, the van that brought his stock of goods was sold to new owners and they refused to allow him the kind of credit facilities of its previous owner. In the week following, Sweetie-Mary’s nephew Patrick pushed a marble into one of his ears and had to be taken to the hospital in Port of Spain to have it removed. Two weeks later, Rosie Ramroop, who made and sold roti and potato pies, brought a fridge run by kerosene and started selling trays of ice, and even Sonnyboy’s grandmother who
liked a cool drink began to patronize her. Sonnyboy’s customers began to drift off to Rosie Ramroop’s place. Sonnyboy finally began to believe. He approached Gilda and Dog in a roundabout way, pointing out to them that his customers were drifting away. They had noticed it too, they told him. But they did not even think that it had anything to do with them, and they continued to turn up every day for their game. Sonnyboy didn’t want to resort to violence. He didn’t want to get ignorant as everyone expected him to. He decided to wait. His grandmother wasn’t waiting. She tried her best to make them as uncomfortable as she could. She wrapped her head in a blue head tie and burnt incense in a homemade censer and trailed the smoke around them, all the while reciting the Magnificat. She placed cloves of garlic and the cut halves of yellow limes where she knew they would be sitting. She scrubbed the floor with gully root and water reeking of red lavender and asafoetida, but succeeded only in chasing away customers. Gilda and Dog kept on coming. A huge Coca-Cola sign with the single word Rosie’s, that could be seen from a distance, appeared in front Rosie Ramroop’s place identifying her shop as a bona fide business place. Customer after customer made the journey to Rosie’s.
One day, when it had one sweetbread left in the glass case and the last potato pie had stiffened like a piece of board and the bhajee was dry in the bin and the few ochroes had grown black and soft with fungus, and the only thing they had for sale was the three slices of fried fish in the glass case and the roasted bakes that Sweetie-Mary made, Dog, about to complete a series of moves that would wipe out Gilda, raised his head from the draughts game for the admiration of the spectators and saw that, apart from Sonnyboy, the two of them were alone. “Wait,” he said. “Where is everybody?”
Sonnyboy didn’t have the heart to answer him. But his face must have revealed his pain.
“Like things going bad, boy?” Dog said. “Pressure?”
Sonnyboy nodded and with his last ounce of patience he smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Pressure!”
Gilda, contemplating the draughts board, realized that he had lost the game. He stretched and yawned. “I hungry,” he said. “I wonder what Rosie have over there to eat?”
Sonnyboy did not speak.
“Well,” Dog said, “let’s go and see.”
And it was so that Gilda and Dog gathered up the knobs, took up their benches, their draughts board and made their way over to Rosie Ramroop’s establishment where they set down their benches, placed the draughts board on their knees and organized the pieces for their game. Sonnyboy made the sign of the cross.
Believing this was a sign that his bad luck had ended, Sonnyboy decided that he would celebrate by taking his family to the beach that weekend. Every week for months every time he saw Freddie, he would be told to expect the car that weekend. There was some one part that he needed to get to finish the job. He knew where to locate it, but, the time, boy. The time. He set out to see Freddie to hurry him up so he would get the car for the weekend. And so that she would share in the good news he expected, he got Sweetie-Mary to go along with him.
He found his vehicle hoisted on bricks and blocks, stripped of wheels and rims. When he turned the ignition to start it, he heard no sound. He lifted the hood. The horn, the carburetor, the coil, the battery, the accelerator cable, the fan belt, the generator, and he didn’t know what other parts – all had disappeared. Freddie, it turned out, had been plundering his car to service other needy vehicles.
“Freddie?” Sonnyboy pleaded. “Freddie.”
Thank God Sweetie-Mary was there. She hugged Sonnyboy and half-carrying him, she dragged him away until they were a safe enough distance from Freddie, then she put one hand round his neck and the other around his waist and took him home.
The Hard Wuck Party
Sonnyboy had barely finished thanking Sweetie-Mary for saving him from getting himself in trouble when there appeared at his business place John de John, the novelist from Matura, with him Didicus West of the Hard Wuck Party and a band of his followers, each of them in green T-shirts and short khaki pants. They were on a recruitment drive throughout the island and had been directed to Sonnyboy as a businessman who had the social conscience, the fighting spirit and might want to throw in his lot with them, not just for the upcoming County Council elections but for the long haul.
The Hard Wuck Party, Didicus West explained,
had fought the last two elections without any of its candidates winning a seat and only the leader receiving the five percent vote entitling him to get back his deposit. That did not worry them. Because what it showed was either
the people didn’t hear us, or how far in advance of the country we of the Hard Wuck Party are. They were not perturbed either
to be described as a group of intellectuals who spoke a language people could not understand. “Since when do we have to apologize for intelligence, for intellect, for insight, eh, comrade?”
And they were continuing with electoral politics not only to see how many seats they would win (to be frank, they didn’t expect many) but to discover how far the people themselves had advanced in consciousness since their last trip to the polls. So the real politics could begin.
“We have spoken and written about the solutions to the nation’s problems. The only reason we can ascribe for the people’s response is that they do not understand that they possess the solutions in their hands. The politics can only make sense if the people accept themselves. That, Brother, is our message.
Believe in ourselves. That is the message. And that, Brother, is where you come in. We need people who people understand. Who can translate ideas to the masses. That is why we need you.”
This show of confidence in him, absurd as it was, cheered Sonnyboy. He felt himself in good company. The people of Cascadu had not understood him either. As he said to the leader of the Hard Wuck Party:
“It is like me. I have been trying to show them me. They don’t understand me either. And I not using any fancy language.”
“Yes,” said the leader. “We need to look around us
with our own eyes, to take our own inventory of the
place, of what is available to us, what use we can make
of things, how we can use things different to the way
they have been used before. Knowledge and imagination. We need to know the names of the birds that fly around
us, the plants, the weeds, what are they saying to us as
well as what they can do for us. Did you know, comrade, that there are in this country 93 species of mammals, 93 species of reptiles, 432 species of birds, 37 species of amphibians, as well as 644 species of butterflies and 2,555 species of plants. And we are still counting. We have been looking outward at the other, not inward at the self. We have no sense of the sacred, no sacred space, no sacred icons.”
“And how do we change it?”
“We. I’m glad you said we. Comrade, the new politics is to help us break the old molds and set ourselves free to create in Independence. We have to cease to play the same roles we were brought here to perform. And that is why, Brother, we want you to throw in your lot with us. We believe in the hard work, not the shortcuts.”
By the end of the session, each one of the members was introduced to Sonnyboy and Sweetie-Mary. They wanted Sonnyboy to represent them in Cascadu, to sell the party’s newspaper and attend their meetings in Arouca.
Sonnyboy was taken entirely off guard. Here, totally unexpected, was the opportunity he had been waiting for, to show the man he is. Now they would see him for what he was: a revolutionary, not a badjohn. But as he shook hands all around, he caught a glimpse of Sweetie-Mary’s patient consoling eyes looking at him and in one little part of his mind, a little voice squeaked, Sonnyboy, they trap you again. He pushed it aside.
“How many newspapers you taking, in a town this size?” Didicus West asked. “Twenty?”
“You have so many?”
“Ah-ha. You good,” the leader said, admiring his quickness. “Ten? Fifteen?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Ten.”
When the Hard Wuck people left, Sonnyboy found himself still ruminating on his own witticism – You have
so many? And what caused him to lean toward the
Hard Wuck Party was the quick-wittedness of its leader: Ah-ha. You good. But then he came back to earth to
figure how, in the community where no one read, he would get rid of ten newspapers. He should have decided
on five.
In the months to come, Sonnyboy sold three newspapers, one to Mr. Tannis, one to Manick and one to me. The others he kept on display, spread out on a string in the vegetable store, eventually to be given away to customers who needed wallpaper. Sonnyboy attended the regular meetings of the Hard Wuck Party in Port of Spain and Arouca, and brought back the hard work message to Cascadu, telling people who came to the shop about the need to educate themselves, to accept yourself just as you are, telling them to discover the names of birds, to identify your sacred spaces, to move from being just workers in the place to becoming guardians of the space. In these causes, the intellectuals of the Hard Wuck Party were turning things over and helping people to see the world anew. Revolution, they said, was the turning over of things. And even before it happened, they had to see it. Teaching steelband playing in the schools should be seen as the steelband yards becoming schools, taking calypso to church meant that the calypso tents must be places of worship. With this orientation, ideas that had been easily accepted before were scrutinized and turned over. They renamed the seasons to fall in line with common usage. Instead of wet season and dry season, we were now given mango season and kite season. They used as well the language of sports and childhood games like pitching marbles to describe the attitudes to everyday life and political gambits. They took the vocabulary and symbolism which our education had ignored and gave it a new importance. Chinksing, buttards, fein, zantay, all found their way into the language of politics. Following their lead, Sonnyboy utilized the stickfight dances and movements as the basis for physical exercise. Twice a week he assembled his grandmother and other party group members in the yard of his place of business to sing stickfight songs and to strike stickfight poses and go through the movements of the stickfight dance until they were sweating. Cascadu was on its way to becoming the intellectual and spiritual center of the island.
In the years I had known Sonnyboy, this was the first time I see him so enthused, so confident that he had a
part in the building of something that would take him, take us, to at least a more interesting place. He was like a big Boy Scout, overflowing with belief. And it was the force of his enthusiastic belief that made him the rallying point of the Hard Wuck Party in Cascadu. In the beginning some people laughed at his passion and winked at each other as he spoke, but he did not see or acknowledge their cynicism. He set up a party group in Cascadu with himself as chairman, and as secretary/treasurer Brinsley Brown – a small pig farmer, a former supporter of the Butler Party, one of the unfortunate car owners waiting on Freddie to repair his vehicle; as committee members, he roped in Gilda and Dog, who while supportive of him had remained playing draughts in front Rosie Ramroop’s business place without afflicting her with any discernible sign of blight.
About him and indeed about them all was a sense of performance that attracted people. The Hard Wuck Party was fun. In the party newspapers there was a column on medicinal plants, one on native birds, another on sacred spaces. With his new concern for the environment, Sonnyboy joined a group of hikers. Some Sundays he would take Sweetie-Mary, his grandmother and the children and go to the forest, to waterfalls, to beaches. He returned from these adventures with plants, with feathers, with shells, with stones. He began writing little epigrams that he plastered over his shop. His delightful madness drew visitors on the way to the beach and made his shop the place for the people of Cascadu to congregate on a Saturday afternoon or a Sunday morning. People came to the shop just to read what, inspired by the intellectuals of the Hard Wuck Party, he had written.
He gained an even wider audience for his work when The Cannon featured him in a story with a picture of him in stickfight pose taking his supporters through their paces and a list of the thoughts credited to him, entitled Sonnyboy Speaks.
The voice of the people is the voice of God.
Righteousness shall prevail.
We shall overcome.
Who don’t want to hear will feel.
I will not let you go until you bless me.
People do to you what they already do to others or to themselves.
You are not the enemy.
Accepting yourself is accepting God.
Denying yourself is denying God.
Monkey does always climb the right tree.
These were not ideas he had copied, but positions he had arrived at on his own. And it was with that sense of self-discovery that Sonnyboy and his few party members, without feeling intimidated by the greater intelligence of party intellectuals who were expected to have all the answers, began to ask questions of themselves aloud for the first time.
What is Life?
What is the Good Life?
What is Community?
Why Democracy?
Who is a Representative?
What is a Citizen?
How Do We Learn Our History?
The Basis of Land Distribution?
Should Everyone Have a Home?
What Is Dev
elopment?
These provided the subjects for discussion. Soon the party’s name was on the lips of everyone in Cascadu, first as a kind of joke, but then because it suggested delightful serious fun. They gave parties, not grand affairs but nice. They invited me to sing old-time calypsos and had people singing along. They had cookouts and family sports day with greasy pole and running races. More and more people appeared wearing with pride the short khaki pants and green T-shirt, with its arresting slogan: Power to the Hard Wuck. And although my aunt Magenta had no intention of abandoning the National Party, she asked me to get her a pair of khaki short pants and one of the green Hard Wuck T-shirts. Because of the activities organized by Sonnyboy and his group, Cascadu, a town unknown to the Hard Wuck Party in fifteen of its sixteen years of existence, came to be mentioned by the Hard Wuckers as one of their strongholds, one of the few constituencies where their candidate had a chance if not of winning a seat in the general elections, certainly landing one in the County Council elections.
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