Is Just a Movie

by Earl Lovelace

  “And you are?” I asked.

  “Jeremiah Jerry, Mayor of this republic here on the hill, Black Power activist in ’70, former member of the Regiment. Drummer. Agitator. Painter. Singer. Revolutionist. Artist. Guide to this treasury of our country. Gentlemen,” he said, turning to his fellows (for another fellow had materialized from the side street), “we have royalty in the house. A king of calypso.” And back to us, “Gentlemen, welcome. You looking for Clayton. I will show you where he living. I going up the road. Come.”

  He came over and shook hands all around, pausing before Sonnyboy, screwing up his face trying to remember where he knew him from. But Sonnyboy didn’t give anything away.

  And we set out again, up the hill, past the guardians

  of the street corner selling ganja, the suspicious eyes wondering what was our business, were we the police, what were we selling. And I am thinking of my guide, who is he? How much will he expect us to pay him? Should we offer him money? Will he be insulted if we did?

  And our guide questioning, seeking to locate us more precisely, “So where you know Sharkey brother from?”

  And once we tell him Cascadu, he set about telling us about Clayton’s family, from his grandfather Matthew who build the first house on the hill . . .

  without no tractor or crane, tote up a little track he himself made, the lumber and the galvanize piece by piece and cement and gravel and sand, bucket by bucket and bricks one by one, he alone, the workman and the builder. And after he finish build the house went and take up this strapping, smooth-skinned, black Vincelonian woman, Gracie, whose beauty he spied out first in the bustle of traffickers on the wharves when she get off the schooner with her bags of ground provisions and avocado and ginger and later where he see her selling at the Port of Spain market and bring her with him up the hill where he install her as his queen and who returned the blessing of his adoration by selling in the market and minding the five children she make for him plus another one he already had with another woman, this child who when the other five leave and go away would be the one to take care of both Matthew and Gracie in their old age and build a Shouters church and make three boy-children for a man who was working on the railway, one who would be the captain of the steelband . . . one would be a policeman and the other was Clayton –

  “Look,” he said, interrupting his history to tell us of the people and the places we were passing.

  That is the place there under that mango tree where Spree and some young fellars carve out the first notes on the face of a steelpan . . . And over there on the other side on Rouff Street another fella Lance was doing the same thing. Shango and Shouters, poets and artists, journalists and mas men. Everything that this country throw up, you could trace it to this place here.

  We walked in the bright morning along the winding road, past houses that had grown gray, precarious like spinning tops sleeping at standstill before they fall, up past standpipes without water and roads without asphalt, past people their eyes inquiring, What you want here? Our guide answering the unspoken questions: “They looking for Clayton.”

  “Clayton?”

  “Sharkey brother. The mad one. Miss Gracie grandson.”

  And we continued on, past the street blocks, each one manned by a more serious band of silent watchful men.

  I saw scrawled on walls the faded signs of Black Power, the portraits of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Makandal Daaga, on a little further to the likeness of His Imperial Highness Haile Selassie emerging out of the head of a lion, the poster of the National Party across which efforts to erase what was written had left a F—. And beyond that, across the road the steelband yard:

  . . . where the players beat out the tunes for Carnival. The

  whole hill assembled to go down with them to cross the savannah stage so we could show them that we here. Now, look what happening! You could hardly get fellars to play now unless you hand over cash . . .

  At the corner, I see the single Blackman’s shop barricaded with iron mesh. Who was he barricading his business from, I wondered. I watch the grimy apartment building, with barebacked children gambling on the steps, their eyes cold as concrete, their language with the same metallic ring and thrust of iron.

  . . . Now we have to protect ourselves from our own children. Because they have guns, not old guns, new ones in the plastic casing, because what we sell them is not their life, but another life, is not love, is the fight-down and the bling.

  It was hot. I wanted a beer. I also wanted to offer our guide a beverage. We went into the shop.

  “This is Mr. Mackie, the shopkeeper,” our guide said. “Mr. Mackie,” he said, calling to a stringy exhausted-looking man, “Mr. Mackie, look who I bring here: King Kala the calypsonian.”

  “Yes?” said Mr. Mackie, scrutinizing us from behind his wire cage.

  Mr. Mackie used to bring out a dragon band. His brother, Tank the stevedore, used to play Robber: “Stop, I say stop, you mocking pretender. Bend your knees and drop your keys and call me the master. Because if I stamp my feet, I would cause disaster.. . .” You remember that speech, Mr. Mackie? Bat, devil, dragon, jab molassie, all used to come from this hill. Today if you see one dragon you see plenty. My uncle Hector was a tailor. He used to play Black Indian. Prince, the joiner, was the leader of the Fancy Indian band. And we were ready, eh, Mr. Mackie? . . .

  “Years ago,” said Mr. Mackie. “Those days, mas was holy, was sacred. You didn’t just put on a costume and jump into a band. The costume was only one part. King sailor had to dance the sailor dance. You couldn’t just pick out a sergeant costume and wear it, or be a major just because you like it, or because you could afford to pay for it. You had to dance to get your rank. Bat, Dragon, Imp, Jab Molassie. Everything you play, you had to master the movements, the song or the speech. Mas of beauty and purpose. It was serious business.”

  The streets of the city was our own, eh, Mr. Mackie? George Bailey, McWilliams, Cito Velasquez and his King sailor, Terry Evelyn, Errol Payne, and all the other mas, Dragon, Robber, Bat, Wiley, Jab-jab. We had the steelband moving to perfection. We were ready for Independence, eh, Mr. Mackie?

  “All that beauty, all that power, all that imagination, that community, that love,” said Mr. Mackie. “What we do with it? What happen to it?”

  “What stop it, Mr. Mackie?” Our guide was asking the question in my mind. “Politics stop it?”

  “We get trapped, all of us,” Mr. Mackie said.

  Every year, for years, the big-shot people try to waste us down, “what we doing playing mas when we hungry, when we have no money,” as if they were so concerned about our welfare. We didn’t take them on. We know that what the mas was doing was fortifying a community, was holding up a people their system had set about to waste down. We know that celebration was not just mindless fun, it was rebellion, it was community, it was creativity. And we keep on, eh, Mr. Mackie? Until, yes, the people we vote for, the politicians come with the same sad song, “we should look to our education, together we aspire together we achieve,” and a set of talk without a dream. “Because there is nothing more to rebel against,” they tell us. “We independent now. This is the time for construction not rebellion.” So, we surrender. We give up rebellion. We give up the mas. Eh, Mr. Mackie? Mr. Mackie is our historian. And we wait for the construction.

  And Mr. Mackie: “We didn’t give it up. They stifle it.”

  We had the Bomb Competition pan musicians, showing their genius on an instrument, that could master any music. We had the people pushing pan, celebrating community, inventing. It was something that we had control of. They invite the steelband into the savannah and start the thing that they call Panorama that would take the pan out the street Carnival and put it on a stage, we the supporters following them there, eh, Mr. Mackie? And for a moment we try to carry the streets onto their stage, but that stage was too small for all the people . . .

  “It was the pans they wanted on their stage, not the

  people.”
/>   And that is when everything start to mash up: they separate

  the musicians from the movement, the community gone to one side, the youth off to another, the old stagers gone to the savannah trying to keep faith with their bands, all of us left

  as spectators.

  “I tell them vote for somebody from up here, get somebody from up here who know what people feel, who know what people do, what people go through, who appreciate the value of the things we do.”

  And we do it, Mr. Mackie. We vote for one that is supposed to be our own. We put up a fella from up here, Mr. Mackie.

  “Mr. Gentleman,” Mr. Mackie said, looking directly at

  me, “let me give you this advice: Beware of people

  who think they know you. We put up a fella from up

  here. But that is the worst thing we do, because he know

  us too well. He see what we put up with, so he believe we will settle for a place without lights, without water. He see that we could make the magic of making bricks without straw, we could tote bags of cement and buckets of gravel and sand through a track up the mountain. He see us making miracles and believe we must continue to make miracles.

  “Now, look at us. What was performance in Carnival is now the reality of life. The devil is no longer in the make-believe of Carnival, he is right here on our streets. The Midnight Robber is not a character in our fiction, he is in possession of real guns.”

  The people to represent us must be people who see that the monuments we have created is bigger than the pitch lake and the oilfields and the sugarcane plantations. They must see us.

  “The people,” said Mr. Mackie. “The people to represent you is you.

  “And even you have to know who you are.

  “The hope?” Mr. Mackie continued, turning to Claude. “You asking me about the hope?”

  I was hearing another verse of my calypso:

  Imagine, if you will, the conditions of people on top this hill

  People whose offerings make us see

  Our common humanity

  Give us the pan, give us the mas

  We leave them in the labasse to catch their arse

  I saw the mountains of filth, the film of heat, the dogs, the youth with their eyes alert watching, with an old caution and defense and calculation, past the signs of The National Party Forever and torn posters with pictures of the leader of the political party, across which someone had painted in the one expletive FUk. And further up, the last stage of despair and affirmation and release, the final statement for everybody to see. On the wall with the leaders and the chiefs and the politicians, somebody had drawn the likeness of a pistol and underneath it had written in an artistic cursive handwriting: Everybody muddercont.

  I looked at Claude. He had gone quite gray. “What do you call this place?” he asked the guide.

  “This is the part we call Congo,” Jeremiah Jerry answered. “Up there,” he said, pointing at another hill, “is Beverly Hills.”

  Coming out the trace was a woman stately like an orchid, her shoes held in one hand to save them from the mud. I heard the tinkle of the steelpans, of rain, of drizzle.

  We walked past the standpipes without water, the children agile and bony and up to the flags and the hut, our guide waving his hands, calling the name, Clayton, sent on again. Through this dark bright place damp, where water had made its own meandering tracts, here and there a child pushing a roller, little boys in a box cart, a yard with a little lawn, a yard with a coconut tree growing. And then the house with the flags of the Shango palais in the yard.

  “Over there,” said our guide, pointing to the yard with the flags.

  “Over where?”

  “Over there, the house in the Shango yard.”

  It was one of the yards with a flower garden, marigold, Jacob’s coat, wonder of the world, zinnias. Dogs lay silent, serene almost as if nothing was to be allowed to disturb their leisure. There was a calabash tree and sugarcane plant and soursop, a sense of peace. As I stepped into the yard, the dog didn’t bark. A woman came to the door with a sense of inquiry and then as if she knew who we were and was expecting us, she smiled.

  “We looking for Clayton,” I said.

  “I am Clayton’s mother.”

  She came outside to meet us and took us into the building at the side of the house, the palais, with its earthen floor and its benches arranged up against the walls. Dorlene was there, sitting on one of the benches, and she introduced us to the mother. Clayton was inside the main house, resting. She was sorry. He had just taken medicine, which got him groggy and made him sleep. She was sure he would like to see us, after we had come all that distance. She was thinking to wake him.

  “Don’t wake him,” Dorlene tell her. “They could come back.”

  “You will come back?”

  “Yes, we will,” Claude answered.

  We didn’t stay long. Soon we were ready to leave. Dorlene decided to leave with us.

  “Take care of her,” the mother said.

  Dorlene said her goodbyes and we walked out together.

  “Take care of her, you hear. Take care,” the mother

  said.

  The scent of marigold, the sound of whispers, the light growing dark.

  “And I am sorry,” Dorlene called to her.

  “Don’t worry, darling. God is love. He’ll be all right. We working on him. He will get better.”

  A taxi was going downhill with space for one passenger. We put Dorlene in it. We thought of waiting for another taxi, but we didn’t want to split the party up, and it was I who now wanted to walk.

  We set out downhill. No one said anything, but we were all touched. I could feel Sonnyboy uneasy as if he felt he should make some response to revisiting this place he had in some ways escaped. He didn’t say anything. I had many questions for him, but I didn’t ask them.

  And we walked in a silence that I soon realized was due to the absence of the running commentary by our guide Jeremiah Jerry on the way up the hill. We continued down the hill in silence. I was waiting for Sonnyboy to say something; but, it was Claude who began to speak.

  Claude’s Belonging

  Claude didn’t just love those he called the people; he wanted to be one of them. “And you would understand my predicament,” he said, “if you grow up with a piano in the living room of a house that none of the villagers would be invited to enter and into which none would come, even on Christmas Day when its doors were thrown open and the table laid for them, with ham and ponce crema and sorrel and ginger beer and rum, and you would hear the people festive on the street, cuatro and shack-shack and guitar and parang singing sweetening the air, as they go to every house in the neighborhood except your own, deliberately passing it straight because your father had made himself custodian of a piano that by accident had fallen onto his veranda, making the possession of the piano that he couldn’t even play puff him up with such self-importance that he shut himself and his family away from all but the most essential contact with the village.” So that Claude had no playmate who was allowed to enter his yard and none he could leave the prison of his yard to go out to.

  So, after he put down his book and examined the moss on the trees, after he dig up the earth for worms to inspect and dissect, he would watch birds head for nest and the evening surround the forest and night spread over the land, and hear the breathing of the trees and the hoot of spirits out there in the dark, the douens with their little children bodies, their broad straw hats and backward-turned feet calling, hoot! hoot! Hoot, like jumbie birds, as they ran through the forest playing, Claude trembling at the thought of being outside in the dark peopled by spirits at the crossroad, La Diablesse, the lagahoo, soucouyant, and the phantom dragging along a coffin by a chain, all that to be erased by sleep, morning bringing him the world anew, and he would go past the bay leaf tree, through the gate, out into the day, past Pory land and Sylvan garden and Carabon estate, glad for the sun, for the light, for the tadpoles flitting across t
he shallow pools made by rain in the track marks of tractors, for the bridge and the river below it, flowing clear and glassy, the bands of tireless silver fish bunched together like racing cyclists, the coscorobs, drifting by solemn like monks, a single guabine in the lightly striped suit of a prisoner, its mouth open, like it dreaming, drawing him into its timelessness, until the horn blast of a passing truck remind him that is school he going to and he would set out again, carrying the timelessness with him into the morning sun and the noise of traffic, trucks carrying gravel and sand and lumber, vans transporting bananas and oranges and yams, on his way these formidable women dressed in green, in black, in white, in red, their heads tied with bulky colored kerchiefs, the scented oils on their skin smelling of mystery, of magic, of obeah, saying Good morning, Miss Gloria; Good morning, Miss Dolly, good morning, good morning, not only out of politeness but from a respectful fear. These women could put a light on you. You could go blind for looking them bold in the eye. Good morning, child; good morning, darling. Good morning, Sweets. And the men on his way, Hailings and Carlton, Ottie and Sylvan, fighters, dancers, pan men, cricketers, all of them with this power of belonging, of ownership, behind them this world of spirit, of mystery that he, Claude, was only able to navigate because of the guidance of Orville, a boy his own age, one of the tribe of Bascombe children, grouped by the town under the single name Baachac, a species of destructive brown big-headed ants, the indomitable nest of them living three-four houses down from him. Orville could whistle through his fingers, Orville could make flips without his hands touching the ground, Orville could run faster than anyone else, Orville could play a flute, Orville could drum. It was Orville who cautioned him not to point his finger at a funeral, otherwise the pointing hand would rot, who instructed him that if he went out in the night, when going back home, he should enter his house walking backwards so as to fool the spirit into thinking he was going in the opposite direction. It was Orville who let him in on the rites to avoid a flogging, the words to chant, the number of stones to throw over his shoulders as he approached his home – by St. Peter, by St. Paul – the leaves of which plant to pick. So when Claude hear his mother saying, as she watched Orville or one of his tribe go past her fence, “Be glad you not like those people,” he knew that she didn’t understand. The truth was that he felt that theirs was not a life from which he had been saved, but an adventure of which he had been robbed. Orville had an uncle named Sandy who for Carnival blackened himself with black grease, strapped two horns on his head, reddened his tongue and played jab molassie, Orville blackened too with a tail made of bobbins strung on wire getting to play too, going with him all over town, beating with two sticks the pitch-oil tin in the compelling jab molassie rhythm. Orville had another uncle named Nelson who for Carnival played bat. And one they called Crappo who was a stickfighter and drummer. And these people could also sing and dance and play cricket and football. Everything resided in these people; so, when, as one of the elect, Claude won the scholarship that would take him to St. Mary’s College in Port of Spain, he decked himself out with the heroes of that world; while St. Mary’s fellars were mimicking the Irish priests and getting the images of themselves from them, he was walking with stickfighters’ drums beating in his belly, he was hearing Shango rhythms in his head.