by Kei Miller
I tell them about the man in Jamaica who, until the day before, was on the run from the police. The charge was rape, and one of the most brutal I had heard. He worked at a hotel and had secured the job despite a criminal record. He hadn’t worked there for a week when they say he went into a room and held two female guests at gunpoint. He raped one while pointing the gun at the other, and then had them switch places. At some point the gun fell from his hand; one of the women grabbed the weapon, shot the man, and he ran away, escaping over the balcony, a trail of blood behind him.
My god! The three women breathe. And, Wow!
But they caught him yesterday, I tell the women, and the story he tells is so different.
This is the story the man tells: there was no gun. Well, not at first. It was just his first week on the job, but already he knew of the seedy side of the hotel industry and that it could be lucrative. He knew that sometimes guests would ask more from him than just room service. He says the women had invited him to the room. They wanted a threesome. He obliged and that’s what he was doing. He said there was no gun—not until the door opened suddenly and it was the husband of one of the women. It was the husband who drew the gun; it was the husband who shot him and he had to escape over the balcony. He never stopped running, he said. He was so afraid. And it was only later that he heard his name on the news and he heard this whole story about a rape at gunpoint.
But, says M—the essayist—and then pauses. But, and she pauses again. But that makes so much more sense!
Yes, I say. I know. But the knowing brings me no comfort. I know why it is important to believe accusations of rape. I understand why we must believe the testimonies of women, so I do not know what to do morally with these moments of doubt, these moments when my belief does not come easily. There is a wonderfully vulnerable prayer in the Gospel of Mark, as doubtful as it is faithful. I believe, Master, says the father of a possessed child. And then, Help my unbelief!
I know, says M from the front seat of the car, as if to echo my own words. And then over and over, I know, I know, I know—both shaking and nodding her head. I know. You see, it’s not that we believe women. It’s that we believe whiteness.
And there was a sudden moment of comfort for me in that car. I realised how silly it was to worry that sometimes my convictions and my politics are not simple or straightforward—that in fact they are messy and conflicted. It is OK to hold onto a principle, even while being aware of its exceptions. In this world that we live in now, I understand the importance of belief, especially if it is all that one can offer. But if you tell me that belief must extend to everyone without exception, and that it is also retroactive, that my belief must extend to Carolyn Bryant and Willie Dougherty, then it cannot; it will not. If I believe in their testimonies then I become one of the men who pulled Emmett from his great-uncle’s house, and one of the men who pulled Frank from the train. But I cannot kill those boys all over again. I cannot participate in the crime that haunts my body.
It took thirteen years for my friend, T, to stand in front of one of those squat, ugly buildings that passes for a police station in Jamaica, the dullness and unfriendliness of its architecture only surpassed by the dullness and unfriendliness of the officers who work inside. Thirteen years after she had been pulled into the grass as tall as fences; thirteen years after a man she knew, a man she had called “uncle”, parted her fourteen-year-old legs; thirteen years after every thrust made her face scrape against a guava tree.
Inside, a female corporal leads her to a bathroom without a door and tells her to take off her clothes. The corporal has to confirm that T really does have a vagina. According to Jamaican law, “rape” is the insertion of a penis into a vagina; only vaginas are rape-able, so she must confirm that the alleger of a rape is in fact someone capable of being raped. Satisfied by T’s vagina—that she has one—the corporal instructs her to keep her clothes off for a while longer because now they must administer the rape kit and swab for evidence.
But it was thirteen years ago, says T.
Yes, ma’am. But is procedure. We have to do it, says the officer in that way that will brook no argument.
A half-hour later, with her clothes back on, T is standing in front of the officer who is leafing through one of those big ledger books that are the hallmarks of these stations. Sometimes, behind the counter, you can see mountains of them piled up to the ceiling. It is where reported crimes are written down and where I often think they go to die, shut away forever in those books. Having finally arrived at a clean page, the officer is ready to make an incident report in the ledger book. Yes, ma’am. So when did this incident occur?
T sighs. It was thirteen years ago.
Thirteen years, ma’am! And the officer raises her brows as if she is hearing it for the first time. That is a long time!
T says there was a part of every moment of the two hours spent in that station that she was ready to leave—ready to just walk away. It was only that she had prepared herself for all of it, even though she knew the statistics and knew it was unlikely that anything would come of it. But there was no moment she was more ready to leave than when the officer said incredulously, Thirteen years, ma’am!
It is possible that at that very moment, in another country perhaps, a man has come forward after ten years, or twenty, or thirty, to finally tell his story. Despite having lived a whole life, and having had a career and a family—he has come forward now to tell the story of the gym teacher or the priest, and not a solitary soul will raise their eyes and say, thirty years! It took you a whole thirty years to come forward? Empathy and understanding will be offered immediately. He will be believed immediately. Implicitly, everyone will know why it took thirty years. They will know the powerlessness and fear he must have felt as a child and the memories that must have haunted his body all these years. They would understand the bravery of this moment, what it means for him to come forward with his story—at last—and they will hold his hands and his shoulders and say, Good for you! Good for you!
I know there is a crime that haunts the bodies of black men, and a crime that haunts the bodies of women, and I know that these hauntings are not equal. I know that women have wept over the slaughtered bodies of black men—sometimes their fathers or their brothers or their sons or their husbands. I know they have marched and signed petitions and stood in front of parliaments and screamed, and sometimes they just wish that men would weep for the bodies of their women in the same way—would march and sign petitions and stand in front of parliaments and scream.
There are crimes that haunt the body, and I wish I understood it back then, because I would not have asked my sister any questions. I would have jumped in the car immediately and taken her anywhere that she wanted to go. And though I think she knows that I would drive a thousand miles for her, sometimes the greater love is the one that is willing to drive just a few metres—just from one gate to the next—any distance, no matter how small, just to make certain, as she was trying to make certain, that the crime that haunted her body would never become flesh.
5
AN ABSENCE OF POETS AND POODLES
This is what happened: somewhere in northern England I entered a house after a long train ride. It was a grand house marked by a kind of gentility. It sat in a gentle landscape; gentle walks into the countryside rolled out from its centre, and one imagined that in times gone by gentlemen in top hats would come knocking on the door. It was the kind of house that sits stoically in the present but aches towards its past.
In the house, a small dog runs up to me, wagging its tail and licking my ankles. The owner of the house, who has just picked me up from the train station and is helping me with my bags, calls to the dog.
“Lola! Lola, stop!”
“Her name is Lola?” I ask, incredulously, and stoop down to pat Lola’s black curls. Lola turns on her back to offer me her tummy.
“Yes. We named her Lola.”
&nbs
p; “That’s uncanny,” I say. “My friend in Jamaica has a dog—a poodle-Shih Tzu mix exactly like this, and her name is Lola as well.”
It is now my host’s turn to look at me incredulously. He opens his mouth, “Oh my! I didn’t realise you had dogs in Jamaica!”
My brows furrow and my host is suddenly embarrassed. He stammers but then says nothing. The small silence is awkward between us. In that moment, I am certain I know what it is he meant to say. He meant to say, “I didn’t realise you had HOUSE dogs in Jamaica.” Or else, “I didn’t realise you had houses in Jamaica—the kind of houses that could accommodate house dogs. This is not my imagination of Jamaica.” But he didn’t say this, which was probably for the best, and even then I could see that inside his own mind he was having his own small battle and adjusting his thoughts.
“Shall I show you to your room?” he asks me next. “You can relax a little before the reading tonight.”
Somewhere in northern England I entered a house a second time for the day. It had been a long day of train rides and car rides and in the evening, a poetry reading. In the morning I would have to catch the early train and return home, but tonight—tonight I will rest. Lola does not run up to greet me this time. She is sleeping in her basket. The owner of the house kneels down to pet her and she whimpers blissfully kicking out a leg and turning in her sleep.
“Would you like a nightcap?” he offers. He has been oddly silent for the car ride back home and so his voice almost takes me by surprise.
“Thank you. I would like that.”
I go to my room to put down the books I had read from and then join my host in the sitting room. There is a glass of sherry waiting for me—and it is this, the sherry, the fireplace, the mantelpiece (not Lola)—that all seems to belong to that world of gentility that the outside suggests.
The silence feels awkward again but only because looking to my host I see that he is on the verge of saying something, but is struggling with the words. His brows are furrowed and every now and again his mouth parts to speak, but then he closes it again.
“That was an extraordinary reading you gave,” he says, at last.
I smile. “Thank you.”
“No, no, no,” he says, almost impatiently, as if I haven’t quite understood what he is saying. “It really was quite extraordinary. One of the best readings I’ve heard.”
He is almost trembling now and I’m stunned by the tenor of his praise. It feels that a mere “Thank you” will not do.
He turns then to look at me and I see now the confusion on his face. “What was it like,” he asks, “having a talent like that and growing up in a place like Jamaica?”
Yes, I leave a space in this essay for the silence I have been trying to write about—that silence in which so many things that should be said are never said. In that moment I could not say the things I wanted to say, nor ask the questions I would have liked to ask, because I would have appeared rude. I would have seemed like an inhospitable guest. And also, I could not say them because they were too important. I looked into the man’s eyes—wide and earnest—and in the blue of those eyes, the grey-blue of his questions, I also saw the blue of the Caribbean. In the blue of the Caribbean, I saw the green of my island, its shape like a giant manatee swimming out to deeper sea. I saw the whole Caribbean, the islands so quaint; on those islands was an absence of poets and poodles, which is to say, they were primitive places.
In his eyes there were no poodles, but there were, in fact, many dogs. I could see them clearly, marauding around rubbish heaps. Malnourished dogs—mongrels mostly—whose ribcages protrude like xylophones, like some as yet unplayed music. I thought, maybe these are the dogs about which, on 5 February 2007, a sleep-deprived German ambassador to Jamaica wrote a public letter. Whether this letter was about the dogs or addressed to the dogs, I am still not certain. His Excellency complained that the mutts barked with such gusto and so incessantly that for six months he hadn’t had a full night’s sleep. He even quoted the Noise Abatement Act. He asked respectfully that the Noise Abatement Act be quoted to the dogs. He asked that they be made aware that, dogs though they may be, they were in fact breaking the law. He respectfully requested, that across the island dogs were to be quiet between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., to allow foreign diplomats uninterrupted sleep. An absence of poodles, but an island full of uncouth, unmannered, uncaring bitches and sons of bitches—that’s what the Caribbean was. That is what I saw in the man’s eyes.
And in his eyes there were no poets to speak of—no one sitting at their desk, a library of books rising behind them, writing, considering carefully the place of each word. There were storytellers though: old, toothless women who would quote the Bible and who would read omens in the moon and who would tell such charming stories to a circle of barefoot grandchildren in tattered clothes—stories about Bredda Cow and Bredda Rat. It is not that this man did not know that Derek Walcott was also from the Caribbean, or Kamau Brathwaite, or Lorna Goodison—but that these facts lived in such separate and isolated rooms. They never met each other in the long corridor of his brain—that corridor being so thick with carpet that guests walked by each other’s rooms, but softly. No one is ever disturbed. No one meets each other in the mornings at the breakfast table.
I never do get around to answering his question. It is just left there, awkward and lingering in the air. I have my own questions and though they are un-asked, they too seem to hang in the air like a gnarled fruit. I would like to know why I seem to him to be such an unlikely product of my country. I would like him to tell me if he sees all black intellectuals—artists, poets, composers, scholars, novelists—as unlikely products of their communities. I would like him to tell me if he thinks accomplishment is a peculiar outcome of the black experience? And also, I would like him to tell me what precisely he had meant by “a talent like that ”? What was my talent like? What was its shape, its sound? Did it have eyes, or fur, or legs? Could he tell me what kind of poet he had expected me to be? Was there a specific role I had not fulfilled? And had I been the kind of poet he had expected of me, would that not have prompted a whole other set of questions? Would I have been writing a whole other essay?
It was late and so I went up to my room. It was a grand room in a grand house, but the questions that prevented me from falling asleep immediately seemed suddenly grander than them all, heavier than stone or bricks. I opened the large bay window and lit a cigarette. It had been a day full of journeys and I was tired, but looking out just then at the fields outside and the walking paths that rolled out from the house, they seemed so much less gentle than they had earlier, as if all that gentility hid a world of danger.
6
THE BOYS AT THE HARBOUR
In Kingston, at night, the harbour is beautiful—almost as beautiful as the boys who gather around it, the boys who are still young and still have dreams as big and bright as the fireworks that light up the waterfront each New Year. On that night—the first day of the year—the waterfront does not belong to the boys, but to a new throng of people who wouldn’t normally venture into this part of town, people who have learned a long time ago how not to see these boys. And maybe even tonight, though it isn’t the New Year, if you pass by the harbour, you will not see them either, sitting as they do in the shadows, under the sweet almond trees—these boys talking about their big and bright dreams.
It hurts a little to hear them speak these dreams—to hear them speak about a future I sometimes doubt will be theirs. Me going to live in one of dem big, big house pon de hilltop, the boy says, looking behind, not to the water but to the hills that rise over this brutal city. I follow his gaze and look to those lights, glittering like sequins on the hills—the hills to which the New Year’s crowd will return. The house that I grew up in is on those hills as well, and I too will return there in just a couple of hours. My father’s house is emitting one of those lights. And me not going to work fi nobody neither, the boy contin
ues. Me going to be mi own boss. Just a little money fi start mi business. That’s all me need. He says none of this as if it is a question—as if the future is in any doubt. He says it as a simple fact—something that will happen in the near future. When me start mi own business, you will see where it take me! And he looks again to the hills.
I try to smile, but I worry that my smile might not be convincing, or that the boys might think it patronising. I wonder when it was that I stopped believing in the world as they do. It strikes me as selfish, my lack of faith. If anyone should have lost faith, it is these boys who have been kicked out of their houses, who have slept in gullies, or in bus sheds, or right here at the harbour. I wonder how it is that they have kept their faith, but maybe faith is all the more important when you have so little else.
There is a sound, strange and terrifying, like the strangled voice I imagine death might speak with.
Kling-Kling! Saville says, pointing, and we all look towards the harbour, to the thing he is pointing at, and I only barely see the shape of a bird sailing across the water—a bird that is the same colour as the night, so it is quickly lost within it. Soon there is only its sound. I think about the bird, about its feathers that just became one with the water. I think of the water as a large feathered thing—a giant crow sulking in the night.
The boys will stay here, talking, laughing, arguing until the sky turns pink and the sun begins to rise up over the harbour, its light shimmering off the zinc roofs and fences of the shanty town nearby—and at that time the harbour will not be as beautiful as it is now. But there are many hours to kill until then. Sometimes, in the wee hours of the morning, a car, its tinted windows wound all the way up, will creep by. It will not stop. Not at first. It will drive right by the group of boys and then turn right, driving up past the National Gallery, and then it will be lost to the hapless streets, gone out of sight. In a minute or two it will return from the other side. Here it comes again—creeping by the waterfront. One of the boys might then ask, “Who working tonight?” and someone will shrug and walk towards the road, towards the car making its second approach. I notice there is always something a little exaggerated in the swing of the boy’s hips as he walks out. Maybe the car will stop this time, and the boy will lean into the window that has finally come down. I imagine words are exchanged. I have never been close enough to hear the words, but the boy might come back after to gather his things and then will go back and into the car.