Big Auntie casually tossed the bag at Cousin Cecil. Then I was suddenly trying on new clothes, or rather new clothes were being tried on me. I was held fast by a couple of the older girls while at the same time a comb was doing its painful work. Big Auntie herself did the honors and in doing so conveyed the significance of this event. The clothes were truly new, not old and repackaged. They were better than the ones I wore to church and so crisp as to be uncomfortable against my skin. I had only one pair of good shoes, worn on Saturdays for service or at weddings, but apparently those weren’t good enough so the household packed into the bus and rushed downtown to the shopping district. There they bruised my feet with shoes so tight and so fine that they had had to be brought out from the back of the store.
By the time I was swept back on the bus, some of the older girls surmised that I was going to be a page boy for one of the weddings the family regularly hosted for the church. Cousin Dale was the last to have received similar treatment, along with Cousin June the Younger who had been conscripted as the flower girl. They had both been called inside the house from the backyard, quickly dressed in clothes that had come from barrels that had been kept from them, and unceremoniously dragged to a wedding. The best part of that event was that, because it was their first wedding, the two of them actually thought that they too had gotten married. For almost a week they clung to each other and kept their distance from the tribes and factions in the house. They were eventually told the truth by the older girls, which saddened and angered the two children. We began calling Cousin Dale Divorcé.
They’d gotten “married” at Montego Bay’s downtown Adventist church. Our regular church sat on the top of a hill with magnificent views of Montego Bay not only due to its altitude but also because it had no roof or completed walls. For as long as I could remember, it had been unfinished due to a never-ending need for donations and the erosion of support as younger parishioners migrated to the church downtown. We sat on stones during Sabbath school, and the preacher and choir sat on wooden planks stretched between unpolished bricks. The downtown church was where most of the weddings the family hosted were held. It had a roof, walls, colored glass, and a pool that allowed for indoor baptisms. Needless to say, the downtown church was preferred by the older girls. It was popular among the boys their age who were all too afraid of Big Auntie to visit the house except during the reggae shows when the crowds and the lights made the stadium’s wall easy to climb without being seen.
But as the bus passed our hilltop church, there was nothing to explain what was happening. There hadn’t even been a rumor from the house girls, who knew everything in advance of everyone and could be convinced to tell in exchange for anything from a spoon of condensed milk to a well-placed finger. Who was so important that we had to leave school at lunch and rush to buy shoes and trousers downtown?
We sat in our typical seats and played the usual games as the sea air blew brine through the bus windows. Through those windows came also the whine of the same old women selling fried fish or breadfruit with their faded head ties and skin cloudy with ash. There was the same sky, always blue even in storms, bluer even than the postcards that showed perfect waterfalls, which is what tourists said the moment they stepped out of the airplanes and into Uncle Daddy’s tour bus. And there were the same tore-up-pants boys jumping on the running board to catch a ride whenever the bus slowed. We saw the same red-eyed Rastafari inspiring the same derision from Big Auntie but a snicker of complicity from the older girls, who seemed always to be plotting a coup that would never occur.
But then the bus turned onto the slender cliffside road that led to the airport. By the time the glare of landed planes was visible, the whispered debate had shifted. This mysterious trip had nothing to do with my being a page boy for a wedding. Someone was arriving. Cousin Danny suggested that it had to be my mother. I’d suspected as much but dared not assume anything for fear of being wrong. I didn’t want what happened when Cousin Beverly got told one day that her mother was coming. She began behaving the way those about to leave were entitled to. Even after Big Auntie told her that her mother had canceled the trip, she sat in the parlor waiting in her church clothes, back straight and chin aimed at us aggressively. Why should she believe anyone in a house full of lies? She was there the next morning when we came out for worship service, which was held before sunlight made its way through the house.
If it was my mother who was arriving, that would explain the clothes and the shoes and the hair and the unexpected solicitude. Even if she was only visiting and would eventually become one of those mothers who merely sent down barrels and begged for annual photos of their children in church or school clothes, this trip would be a public victory. If this arrival was as close as I would ever get to my own departure, I would claim every moment, though not so obviously as Cousin Beverly did. I’d already learned from the boys in the streets, from American television, and from the Rastas that indifference was what real power looked like. A real man looked like he didn’t care.
At the airport, Big Auntie dragged me from the bus. She pulled me through the crowd as if I were one of the many bags she carried to market. I lost my feet and glided across the tiles, fearful of being beaten if these new shoes were scuffed. My voice was impossible even for me to hear. There was no escape from the sound of Big Auntie’s booming voice. Her hand clutched my wrist tightly, the same hand that I had once bitten deeply as she covered my mouth while I struggled against a tetanus injection after having my foot cut open while chasing the Two-Gun Kid into the backyard. That bite left a lifelong scar, my mouth permanently etched in her palm.
Despite my confusion, the chaos of the terminal was nothing new. For all of us children, the three institutions that governed our lives were school, church, and the airport. The last was the most sacred since its promises were most often fulfilled. But it was the first time any of us had entered the departure lounge. We’d usually be left outside peering in, checking for the faces of other children we knew. I looked back at my housemates to see if they understood the machinations behind this unexpected event, but all I could find in their faces was confusion and then jealousy. Had they known what was to happen to me, they would have become intimate. Some would have forgotten the scars and bruises they’d caused. They would have confessed past crimes or shared secrets as if I were a bottle to carry messages on an open sea. Others would have been uncommonly harsh, hoping to make it impossible for me to recall the past without wincing.
Because we were inseparable, Cousin Cecil was allowed to trail Big Auntie and me to and then beyond the departure lounge. With me on one arm, he still clutched that fateful plastic bag dotted with pink shapes and reddish textures. We’d both been in a growing panic since arriving at the airport. Cousin Cecil’s cream-colored skin reddened about the ears and cheeks now that it became clear that this arrival was a departure. My mother was not coming; the Phantom was leaving. Cousin Cecil suddenly erupted in a gush of tears loud and clear enough to dwarf even Big Auntie’s steady bellowing. His eyes became desperate as we approached the gate. He began to pull me, his loyal opposition, his brother in a world relentlessly of women, away from his own recently acquired mother. I enjoyed his bawling and the fact that his pulling slowed Big Auntie’s progress through the crowd, causing her to bump into men who turned in anger only to curl up in front of her like certain weeds do when touched.
Held tightly behind his mother’s geographic girth, Cousin Cecil still held the bag. He seemed unable to release it even after realizing its responsibility for the destruction of the world that we had made together. The last thing I registered before entering the plane was a line painted across the grainy tiles that was flanked by starched uniforms and defended by hardened expressions. It was the only thing with fresh paint in the entire airport. On one side in block letters was written PASSENGERS and on the other NATIVES.
I prayed for the plane to quickly break the terrestrial atmosphere like a spacecraft or to fold into itself like a time machine a
nd open on the other side of held breath. There would be robots there and machines that didn’t care where anyone came from and were eager to serve those of us lucky enough to arrive. That was where the song about Major Tom came from, I just knew it. But what soothed me most was imagining everyone calling out to me from the island below, begging me to come back as the ocean came crashing down on them. Jamaica was sinking like fabled Atlantis.
The flight attendants put small plastic wings on my lapel and touched my face. They had been waiting for me.
2
Heroes
These are the things I left behind.
* * *
• My King James Bible, left to me by my Jamaican grandmother. Her death soon after my mother had left for America brought my mother back to the island. It was a brief reunion, and though we spent some time together, my memory of her is filtered through a crowd of family and friends, her face behind a curtain of tears.
It was I who’d found my grandmother, or rather she who’d found me. I’d woken in the house she owned with my mother to find her sitting on the edge of my bed smiling broadly underneath her famously wide nose, muttering in the high-pitched voice that she usually reserved for screaming. Her wig was on, which was unusual for that early in the morning. She was gazing emptily at me, not as she would a stranger but as if I were someone else. By the time the house girl came running, my grandmother had made her way back to her room across the hallway. Her back was as straight as ever, reminding me as she died to always maintain my posture.
It was after this that I moved into Big Auntie and Uncle Daddy’s house in Montego Bay. My grandmother’s King James Bible was one of the few items that didn’t need to be hidden from the other children. In it I kept my torn-out copy of the Oath of the Skull from The Phantom comic. I was too smart to keep it hidden in obvious places like the book of Psalms or Exodus or Revelations. I kept it where no one would look, in the narrow space between Zechariah and Malachi.
* * *
• A yellow plastic star from a toy cowboy set I’d stolen from Cousin Cecil. The word MARSHALL was still visible on it despite the badge having being mauled by the two house dogs that trailed Grandma. It was a visiting missionary from Loma Linda University who had sent the gun set to Cousin Cecil for Christmas. It arrived complete with a bandolier, a star, a thin rubber mask, and a plastic gun, and it immediately conferred on cousin Cecil the title of Two-Gun Kid despite the fact that the gun was confiscated by Uncle Daddy, who deemed it inappropriate for Seventh-day Adventists.
I should have stolen the mask instead.
* * *
• Three of Cousin Danny’s sketches of buildings taken in retaliation for the theft of one of my books that was eventually found without its cover. Danny denied stealing it, but the empty white back was scribbled with the dimensions of some unfinished streetscape with a horizon full of skyscrapers. Even though Cousin Danny had started this back-and-forth, he still gave me a vicious beating on an afternoon memorable because of the winds announcing a storm.
Storms or hurricanes meant no school. With the electricity gone, each of the tribes or nations in the house huddled in its own zone. Storms made the backyard even more wondrous as water flooded Montego Bay and we launched armadas of paper boats from the back door. If it was a proper hurricane, we would be sent into the hills above the city to stay with aunts and uncles older than Grandma and who needed to be reminded who we were each time. There we waited for the rains and winds to stop so we could tramp through acres of mud deep enough to sink down to the belly and go hunting for blue crabs washed up by swollen rivers and deposited in unlikely places such as latrines in hilltop villages. As we opened the doors, the crabs spilled out in the hundreds, crackling and skittering blue.
That afternoon I’d run from cousin Danny out into a wind so strong that it slowed me down enough for him to catch me in the empty green lot at the end of the street where the circus would be in those summers when there was no revival tent service held there. Now the lot held people from the hills outside Montego Bay who had lost their homes in the latest storm. They had built fires in empty oil drums and made beds out of thickets of weeds and brush. The smell of burned corn was everywhere. The sight of these people and their sudden shantytown slowed Cousin Danny to a stop.
Realizing I was running without being chased, I turned back to see him fall to one knee, his fingers circled like a lens. It was a position he’d learned watching surveyors when they came to examine our roofless and incomplete church. Watching the refugees scuffle and wander, hearing the children and mothers call to one another over the zinc and cardboard used to make walls and roofs, cousin Danny forgot all about me. He was there to the rescue, saving the people, building a city, delivering them however briefly into shelter.
* * *
• My church clothes left in Grandma’s closet. High-altitude shoes with thick wooden heels, pants thin at the waist with wide thighs and flared at the cuffs that still looked good even though the cuffs were closer to my calves than my ankles. This was high fashion then. My four-pocket dark gray bush jacket with thick black stitching around all the pockets was folded on top of the same hanger that held the pants. There is a picture somewhere. I was quite sure I looked just like a member of the Jackson Five or other Black American groups whose pictures were all over the girls’-room walls.
In the left top pocket of the bush jacket was a small empty packet of sugar Cousin Cecil and I had taken from one of the hotels where Uncle Daddy collected tourists for day trips. We spent the entire evening and night expecting to be found out and beaten. We made sure not to share what we’d done with any of the other children, even Cousin Mark or Cousin Danny, for fear of the power they would then have over us. That we weren’t caught gave the sugar an additional sweetness.
The next day in the schoolyard, the boys from our class stood in a queue that disappeared into the distance as I remember it. They came forward with one finger extended humbly for a taste of authentic American sugar. Cousin Cecil complained that we should be charging them and said that we could even have mixed in regular Jamaican sugar to keep this concession alive. I refused. I’d learned from America that power worked best through flagrant acts of generosity.
* * *
• My “foolish space books,” as Big Auntie called them, left in Hortense’s room at the back of the house. Hortense didn’t think them ungodly as did everyone at church and didn’t raise a fuss whenever she saw the covers. For her, they were not satanic at all. They were about the many places other than heaven or hell. I wondered what my mother would think of them. Word in the house was that she wasn’t truly a Seventh-day Adventist and only passed as one in order to attend their college, considered by many to be the best on the island.
* * *
• A 45 record. The label was so scratched on one side that the name of the singer or group was unreadable while the opposite was marked VERSION with a simple drawing of a lion’s head. Church Brother Wesley’s youngest boy found it in the bushes on the far side of the stadium where it no doubt had fallen out of the record box of some local sound system. Knowing its value and risk, he had run straight across the park with it clutched to his chest. Any boy from any household or from any of the schools in that narrow corner of Montego Bay would have done anything to get that treasure. He arrived at our house too terrified by his transgression to keep it.
Like all of us, he’d never touched a record before and imagined it too fragile to be put into his schoolbag. As he’d approached our front gate with his frightening prize, a boy named Garth had edged up to the wall that separated his yard from ours. Garth had been identified as an up-and-comer by the local rude boys who lurked around the gates of the stadium behind our houses. They did him the honor of nodding their heads when they saw him walking through the streets with his pants open wide enough to billow at each step. He was the first of his age to wear that street style, zipper and belt buckle left open, and he chewed a long stem of grass in what we called
cowboy fashion. He leaped up now to the top of the wall, eyeing whatever it was that was so closely clutched, suspecting its value by the desperate attempt to conceal it.
We were at the base of the guinep tree playing cricket with a bat made from broken fence wood and a ball shaped by wrapping tightly what cousin Cecil claimed were miles and miles of wire. We heard the house girls screaming at Brother Wesley’s boy to stop running like that in the house. Breathless, he stopped in front of his older brother, who was playing cricket with us, and handed the record to him before resting his hands on his knees so he could breathe. Seeing what he held, we immediately looked up to the tree-lined high wall that separated all of the yards from the stadium. As expected, Garth was already there with some picky-head boy whose penis could be seen dangling from his open pants as he stepped across overarching tree branches. Before they had a chance to climb down the wall, we went inside the house, gathering in the washroom among the damp clothes hanging from wires stretched from corner to corner.
After a restorative silence, the boy, terrified, said he wanted us to keep the record. We had to keep it.
Cousin Cecil reminded the brothers that reggae music was not allowed in our house. The record would also be dangerous to keep because for some members of the church its very shape and the wide hole inside would be so suggestive of its sound that it would be blasphemous even as an object. The only records allowed in the house were American country music and gospel, all of which came full-size with small holes and were clearly labeled with pictures of white people and endless sky.
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way Page 3