Walking Stick
Cutters’ Epic
Hog Plum.
Guava.
Pommerac.
Breadfruit.
Dasheen.
Carraillie.
Long Mango in a yard
near Princes Town.
Bachacs negotiate a gorge outside the rotten
galvanized fence, freezing with our stride past in long evening
shadows.
Prometheans: nigger man and coolie woman,
chained to this chain of particular thought
and tongue, almost turn to ash in Ste. Madeleine.
We convene by Bird, longtime breather of black sickles
that dance around us like an illness.
Bird, whose stilted board house waits for paint and hardens
itself,
where the wavering insecurity of cane cutters, too,
hardens in the bachac’s drooping sun.
The lefthander’s cutlass mocks us from the corner.
Fork and hoe conspire when we curse
ourselves with no sense of irony.
Ste. Madeleine burns. Ogun dances the blade.
The Indian one whispers and swallows
scraps of Hindi left on her tongue.
The Shouter pantheon rattles.
We take turns sucking our teeth.
Dreams, man.
Dreams we can barely afford.
The Muslim shrugs. The Christian shrugs.
There, beneath the rafters and breaking
floor, we laugh and take our absolution in a glass.
Yes.
We swallow spirits,
have eaten sugar and salt, have held
no great contempt for the motion of grass or sand, for
Usine’s dust to sweeten our sharp,
embittered word.
Long Mango.
Dasheen.
Guava.
Cane.
Bush rum
bottle cracking,
thinning out blood—
too thick for a mainland.
A dying tractor pulls late and long through the old talk,
coughing like an old laborer.
We stop talking and look, like mourners.
What drives the cutlass and sickle lies entrenched
in vacant eyes.
A bounty of dead stalks passes us,
stripped and carted to Usine
like a sacrifice.
Light sepia
grin, still as photographs, lies—a bronze face dims, blackens.
Shines.
Some choose land, taking sugar for water. I remember almost
drowning.
Morning, My People
If you’ve ever been at a crossroads, with a history such as the one that makes us Caribbean, you’ll know one thing above all else: Sometimes you will come apart at your seams—but not always. Hold on. Sometimes, in spite of all, you will struggle to keep your integrity. Call it faith, if you like, or something quantum. But hold on. Lower the raised voice, temper the hurried pace of what you’ve come to believe is life here. Then, stop to ask, “How is it that I am here, now?” You discover that all pasts are prophecies.
We sometimes come apart, but how else could we be here if we hadn’t held on and held ourselves together through it all? In the very small hours of the morning, our man-made gods are indistinguishable from the spirits they emulate. Spirits are indistinguishable from the things they possess. The old—who’ve lived and now sleep less and less—know this. Regrets and hesitations cloud and consummate, and fears stalk the periphery, cloaked in silence. Not a perfect silence, though. Crapauds punctuate my misgivings as if they were friends, testing their stamina with long chirps and old, familiar songs (of a singular strain and tone). Adrenaline spikes, as expected, and I forget the irony of something sweet coming from such ugly things. In spite of my half-remembered prayers, it disrupts my efforts to be calm in this dark. I feel uneasy, but I know the Kiskidee will burst into song soon enough. Others will join in.1
I stand at the front gates of the Usine-Ste. Madeleine sugar factory with Jonadiah, a Moko Jumbie King from the South.2 We make small talk and smoke a few cigarettes, our exhalations lit by distant flickering lampposts. Stephanie, the Queen of the Band, is coming. Dawn will bring her. Her gold crown will catch light like a sieve.
Secretly, I want to believe those in the cars that pass (“one today, one tomorrow”) are not yet cynical enough to question the intentions of Moko Jumbies, of spirits whose smoking faces they cannot recognize in the dark. I want them to be afraid enough not to interfere with us at this hour. But these, we are often reminded, are dangerous, dangerous times: love is at a premium; our black lives do not matter as they should; and every shadow is armed. A stigma waits in every direction. My fears writhe in the penumbric orgy of hardened desperation, twisted minds, broken hearts, and idle hands. Jonadiah and I laugh, the talk making us seem more comfortable in the darkness. Thankfully, the moment hasn’t yet arrived for me to ask myself if madness brought me to this place at this hour, or if this is just another crossroads. Does some trickster god sit somewhere laughing and waiting to see if all my talk of “no panicking” will suddenly come apart? Is it Anansi or Eshu, who both know too well that I’ve run away from things before, that I’ve known too many crossroads? (I’ve shut my eyes to other things until they passed.) Or, is it just the sway of restless palmettos reciting an ancient Tempest? I am not yet terrified, but my thoughts of what it takes to make a photograph fade in that moment, and I lose my bearings. It’s a blessing, I tell myself, to try and find my way in a place I no longer understand. A blessing to lead people—and to follow them—into the dark. In the hollow of this fading night, I hear things. No panic. I know the living are the ones to be feared. (Eva taught me.)
This island—wind-blasted and wound-up, like all the others—is full of noises. I expect them. This causes no panic—not when the soft thud of rubber at the squared ends of cedar poles reminds me of more mundane things:
The pestle with its mortar half full,
the persistent throb of a healing wound,
the pounding of a closed frustrated hand on a closed wooden door,
the harsh beauty of our rhythms.
In a way, I suppose this makes me guilty of a rather localized blasphemy: humanizing one of our remaining fragments of a god, just when some would say it has begun its resurgence. I confess openly to it. I can only think in human ways, you see. When I first saw them at Victoria Square that night, my sentimentalities flared as if I’d recalled some ancient thing—or, a fragment of a thing I couldn’t conceive. But, getting close enough to see, to ask their permission, I saw they were more perishable than I might have thought. Sentient. Like my private gods, they’d know me by name and my grandfather’s name, calling me “Browne.” Not “Kevin.” Looking for them to show me who they were, I confessed my temptation to ask naïve questions. What could they show me about the limitations of the world that I’d refused, until lately, to see for myself? What does a Caribbean pessimist do with the unfulfilled imaginings of his former deities? Those questions, and other, more foolish ones, would have to wait. At least until Carnival was over and we had a chance to meet where we now find ourselves: in Ste. Madeleine.
By day’s end, moving from this graveyard to King’s Wharf in San Fernando, I will have seen them a bit more clearly, at least by the time I move the camera from my face, readjust my aperture, and admit to the enduring poverty of my oversimplified vision. I’m getting ahead of myself, and I sometimes forget that photography is often about taking the time for things to unfold.
Right now, it’s only Jonadiah and me, waiting and smoking. In an hour or so from now, day will break to reveal the undeniable decay of our surroundings, the brutality of a former grandeur, and the far worse brutality of inevitable obsolescence. Ste. Madeleine, home to a massive thing that was once a factory. It languishes like a Dimanche Gras monstrosity, bereft of whoever gave life to it, danced it into being, and moved it painfully, gloriously, across the stage. Every trace of this gutted behemoth of a onetime sugar factory will pass into oblivion, and our bodies will suffer the same fate as the interminable belts and gears of this broken place. But not yet. In the shared impermanence of the passing day, we would all come to possess a geometry of motion more finite, more complex, and more beautiful—not a dance, per se, but a certain angular beauty. For a moment, infinitely ours. And we, infinitely ourselves. Infinite in this finite moment.
So I begin here, with them—or, rather, I begin with a fragment of what their Mas invoked. I feel something ominous in this transmuted space. Something like history, or guilt, but I am not alone here.
Traditions ought to be treated as soluble things, like ink dropped in water or sugar left at the base of a cup left unstirred. In theory, they seem crystalline and discrete, their adherents requiring no explanation. There is a logic to them, a place and a role for every bolt and scrap. No thread will come undone, dangling at an unattended hem or cuff. The sugar and oil and rum will be consumed in tribute, poured as libation, drunk. The protocol has its function. Structures have their purpose (even if it means we must dance ourselves out of its grasp). But when festivals subside, they can dissolve with quick and troubling ease. We see how vulnerable they are, amid the misunderstandings and misrepresentations that arise, and in our constant negotiations of/with them. Their vulnerabilities are, of course, ours. Forgetting and carelessness are as cultural for us as the too easy kissing of teeth, as commonplace as old talk and the maco. This is not much of a revelation—a crisis, at times, but not always. I am more interested in the expressions of vernacular knowledge that cannot be imitated. In short, I am interested in magic—call it the magic of perishable things. That’s what we are, you know: perishable, finite. It’s what we have in common with Moko Jumbies. (If the coming and going of our seasons haven’t already persuaded you, then take note of your slowing pace at morning or evening, of your bones that will ache with coming rains and passing clouds, of gravel that will collect at the back of your throat at the passing of another Masmaker. And another. Their finite bodies, like ours, are infinitely engaged in the alchemy of change, of time and deliberate motion.)
Tracing the fluidity of Stephanie and Jonadiah’s bodies, the more complicated things fall away.
Ask her to trace the jagged provenance of her own classic features, her nose and cheekbones. Ask him to recall his path from Government School on Rushworth Street, up through Carlton Lane, where the Moko Jumbie found him. Then consider the mysteries of their authenticity. And of your own. Then ask, as I do, “What is authenticity in a place like this? What is pure or genuine in the wake of our ongoing dissolution? Even our languages exist within a continuum of dissolution and constant change, our tongues often taking the kind of liberties we have yet to truly experience for ourselves. Our tongues, such disloyal ambassadors of the meanings we intend. We are not pure, nor are we capable of being authentic in such basic, essentialist terms. No, theirs is a distinctly Caribbean sensibility, refracting the influences that converge on their bodies, in the Mas they compose, in the images they allow me to make. And while it may seem inauthentic to have Orisha combined with the Moko Jumbie (itself a modified form of the West African Moko tradition being fused in the Caribbean with a Jumbie, a spirit), it would only be because we limit our understandings of modification to religious practices—Santería, Shango Baptists, Vodun. I don’t. These Moko Jumbies will not allow it. Not in Trinidad anyway, where our mixed gods bless and curse us with equal intensity. Not when modification is at the very heart of our Caribbeanness, transforming our perishing bodies—like magic.
Know that if, by chance, you hear it being argued that these Mas performances are not magical at all, it will almost certainly be by those who have yet to witness the ghost of Vaslav Nijinsky—the Russian ballet dancer—behind them the following year, floating across the Queen’s Park Savannah on the ancient shoulders and narrow petrified ankles of a Moko Jumbie.
Floating, in exquisite drag.
Floating, its designer would intimate, on the suspension of our disbelief.
Minshall’s Dying Swan, carried out of its mythic purity in carved cedar slippers, carried on the notes of a solitary tenor pan across the stage.
A Dying Swan, whose frantic wings are the careful, muscular arms of a black man meters high. The Jumbie of a ballerina as a Dying Swan, who now heralds the need for a shift in national and regional consciousness, shifting back to Mas. A proper Moko Jumbie re/appropriating the discourses of Empire to critical global effect. This is how we know that the ghost of a ghost is a man.
dressed as a woman
portraying a man
dancing as a woman
designed by a man.
There is no real contradiction here—no space, in this reality, for even the possibility of it. Not in the midst of this deliberative fluidity called Mas. There are no lines to blur, or boundaries that can deter its reach. No tricks. Not here—in the in-between—where past knows no past, and present is prophecy taking shape.
This is Mas. High, High Mas.
High Mas and the uneasy citizenship of these dark bodies, unfolding before me now in an abandoned place. King Sugar. Unfurling, as they make a haunted place their own, crafting precedent out of a forgotten place.
Jonadiah: The Fisherman of Souls.
Stephanie: The Sweet Waters of Africa.
Orishas of salt and sweet waters—
Water and Water
Ghost of Ghost
Spirit of Spirit
Flesh and Bone
Come by Sea
Dance by Rivers.
Small hours carry sound as if it were gossip, but their incantations are quiet this early in the morning. You will have to see what you cannot hear, feel what you cannot see. See how their black Caribbean bodies inhabit the design, as if they were almost drowning. I remember almost drowning—in the sea, in a river. They play the Mas as proof of something unforced—a constructed radicalism, maybe?—that betrays the emancipatory intentions of design and designer.3 See them invoke Caliban (Césaire’s modified version, naturally), floating as they undo the curse of the appropriating hand. See how your own gaze moves further afield, almost as if it were a Moko Jumbie.
This is High Mas: the Moko Jumbie in Trinidad, claimed and transformed, suspended between the relative stasis of “tradition” and the nonexistence of unattainable fantasy.4 For different (and, I suppose, legitimate) reasons, I expect they will continue to be cast in a narrow litany of symbolic actions. (Can Empire believe in magic?) And, certainly, the steeled frame for this ballet of sugar and oil will seem inevitable: that troublesome white gaze, and the bodies it will always try to colonize, has a way of making magical things seem mundane. Cast in the shadow of an impulse that consumes all it surveys, these portrayals of salt and sweet water deities will only be “prophetic” in an ironic sense: that it seems tragic and unavoidable, like the fate of the people who wish to believe in it, while their own taps flow rusty, or cloudy and over-chlorinated, or not at all.
We must do better than that. I think our long-muted sensibilities demand better of us. We are familiar with waters of every sort. They are too familiar to us, the living archives who bear the affective memory of an afterlife. We may have danced the grief out of our public lamentations, but we know the shape those hurts can take in our daily lives. We know how to hold on.
This same message is amplified in the immortal stride of Moko Jumbies, the mortal prophets of Mas. And if we choose, for a moment, to forget that their impossible gait only resembles those of distant gods retained in the minds of roughly transplanted people, we can still mistake them for magical things. (Anansi, moving spider-like across the stage?) We can gaze in awe—at their disproportionate limbs, the miles of fabric that clothe them, their defiance, their slow beauty—and remember that they are not merely given to spectacle or haste, or that they struggle to retain their relevance with the frenetic contortions of a dance that comes too easily. We might remember that theirs is also a discourse of intimacy, of silence, and of vision. We might remember that, although they fall from time to time, their height is a burden they seem born to carry. We might remember what Moko Jumbies say when they gather around a bottle and glass and cigarettes to talk and drink and smoke, or bathed in a sun’s setting light when darkness meets us on the other end of the day: “Stick is life.” This, in part, is what we might expect to find when we consider the utility of the Moko Jumbie, its “place” in these times; that in our encounter with the embodied ancestral knowledge of Mas, we also encounter the ancestors themselves and the imperfect, unmasked humanity of those who invoke them now. Those who, like this place, will be ancestors themselves after a time.
It seems inevitable.
Out here, nothing is immune to the indifference of passing time, and the reluctant decomposition of an abandoned factory is like any other structure left to crumble: this place is its own graveyard, its own memento mori. Now, as we walk around inside of it, we seem to be haunted. We look like addicts (“pipers”), who avoid the watchmen to scavenge the catacombs for copper wire. In the in-between of a once busy place, we look around as it threatens at every turn, in every abandoned room, to outlive us with its stained steel, vacant lockers, peeling paint, and settled oil—oil that would usurp the former national industry, proclaiming our citizenship. In an oil economy—a post-sugar economy—that citizenship is Oedipal. It now lies fallow, its former fields settled by government housing that covers the undulating hills like a rough pastel-colored patchwork of contemporary lives. In the light of such a moment, with these young Moko Jumbies strapping their new limbs to their existing ones, or stretched out on a gate, it is possible to see how the hardened muscles of laboring bodies can foretell the eventual disappearance of the places that bind them and the emergence of new ones that will attempt to bind them again. Breaking as they bind.
Tarodale, they call it. “Little Laventille,” others call it, its pastel homes laid out like a cynical homage to another place in Trinidad that we’ve learned to fear: Laventille, in the north of the island, near Cocorite, where other Moko Jumbies walk. Amid the rambling promises of politicians, we struggle everywhere to rise above our self-contempt, don’t we?5
Here though, in the still, over-sweetened putrefaction of this dead industry, we understand that there are no graves deep enough to contain a culture unaware of its death/that refuses death/that insists life. No force strong enough to deny it. In the darkness and the light that follows, we find that there is no chamber dark enough for a people who are deeply aware of the afterlife in which they find themselves. We remember that we cannot completely extract Mas from the framing mechanisms of history and language any more than the fabric that sways around us like a forgotten Mad Bull kite strung with fraying marlin. However much we wish it weren’t the case, they circumscribe our inventions in very real ways—we live the afterlife of a particular history, its unfortunate legacy embedded in our brains, leaping (though creolized) from our mouths. The ghosts of our conquerors still gather there to conspire. In spite of it all, we still manage to create, if dangerously, from our own dark chambers—the ones we dare to claim in these small hours. Walking into and out of that same place, Jonadiah and Stephanie insist themselves past the myth of a half-remembered authenticity, insisting a freedom to express themselves in terms that extend beyond the parameters of the festival, reaching not just outward to the world, but inward to the very interior of the island. To its heart—well, one of its hearts. Ste. Madeleine, where generations of sugar were cultivated and carted.
This imperative both to move beyond and within the parameters is what fuels their attempts to engage those of us who inhabit the spaces in-between with an air of grace and rancorous humor. They seem to flow with comparative simplicity out of and into the in-between spaces that we try, with great difficulty, to navigate. This is not spiritual in the sense of the infusion of a disembodied wisdom, but rather the deliberate possession of a vernacular aesthetic whose face we know and have cause to follow. Magical. Following, then, beyond the familiar victories and disappointments of the season, I watch their metamorphoses, how they inhabit the leaking, rusted aftermath of this abandoned place, then outgrow it. Looking closely as they negotiate the remains of a destruction no one could prevent, I ask myself (I still don’t dare ask them), “What can man-made gods do for those of us who fail to recognize them? What good are prophets to those who ignore them? Where do they—or any of us—truly belong, if not in the absurdity of a Carnival? Is man the measure of a Moko Jumbie—or of Mas—or is it the other way around?” Is the ghost of a ghost a man? If so, then what is a woman? Who are they together and apart? Who can say?
As for me, although I am a god of my own shortcomings, holding sway over my failures and the troubles they bring, I see my abilities and aspirations much better depicted in the Moko Jumbies’ humanity. And, in spite of myself and the rest of us, these Moko Jumbies—Stephanie and Jonadiah—are human, each a party to the other’s strengths and insecurities. I harbor no illusion, nor do they. Their clasped hands, their sometimes uneasy embrace above my head, remind me of the gulf between my people and me—the tacit condescensions of distance and closeness that keep us together and apart. I see their fatigue in the unforgiving afternoon sun. They glisten and perspire and take long breaths, leaning against cold steel pipes. They flirt and laugh, but there are secrets. Secrets. They are so much like new lovers, still learning the curves and corners of the other with patient pleasure. Like old lovers, theirs is a private dialect of upturned lips and furrowed brows—faces chiseled out of sandstone and polished enough to reflect the damaged beauty of an entire people. Their quiet intimacies. The knowing looks they share of a desire to inhabit each other’s spaces are hard to miss. (Almost drowning in their company, I remember a riddle: Water stand up, water fall down—what is that? Sugar Cane.) Their subtleties are as light and hardy as sugar cane arrows before they are burned into ash and forgetting. Nothing lasts in this place, people say. I see how they fall and fall out, how they remain in mortal want of a reality that may be promised but never attained. Not here, anyway. Young as they are, I see how desperately each fights to stave off the effects of age and irrelevance in the other. Understandable, for if you’ve ever felt the lance of time—the agonizing back, the rusty hinge of a hip, the sunburned shoulders and hardened knees, the fractured heart—then you must have asked, “Where do we find ourselves, eventually, if not in each other’s imperfect care? What comfort can we honestly expect to receive in our acoustic solitude?”
The Strange Diplomacy of Remembrance
I sometimes wonder what becomes of a people who seem only to imagine a past, a people for whom the past brings no real comfort. I wonder if it is the same as having no future. I wonder if it’s a kind of widespread self-betrayal. Moko Jumbies, on the other hand, do not seem to share my anxieties. They seem to have no need to rush. It may be because they can’t fly or run away (like some of us do), or because the people they’re meant to lead have so far been unwilling to follow in their footsteps, or of those who’ve used tradition to make an imperfect way for them. People tend to blame the messenger, but who can say? Whatever happens, they stay with the people, in spite of how they or those people change or fail to change.
They remain. So I remain. Together, we manage not to come apart.
Bound as we are to this place—and to each other—we’ve inherited the hardened syntheses of race and class, of time and place, of bitterness and melancholy, of rum and oil, steel and sugar. But it’s only when stopping past the hills and looking into the empty cauldron of a place, or counting the sporadic flicker of lights that flash behind loosened aluminum sheets, that I can also understand how connected we are to such ugly things. When bodies intersect with industry in these small hours, each becomes the other’s master, having been exposed to the elements of their mutual neglect. Pipes leak. Some burst. Beams rust and petrify. And the workers and walkers who work and walk these spaces—these gangways, pipes, and beams—crystallize, then dissolve at the end of their respective days. Like tradition.
At the confluence of inadequate memory and vision, there is no difference between what we have made and what we have aspired and failed to be. No difference between a dead factory and the living descendants of its former workers. In truth, we do not need to ask what happened here. There’s always—always—been blood in the sugar. And fire. We’ve been (the) burning cane in this region for centuries.
Cannes Brulée.
Canboulay.
Remember flambeau.
Remember cutlass.
The watchdog, in the end, was less than hostile. The watchmen overslept. We inspected the abandoned computers, gauges, and notebooks. We goose-stepped livewires, water puddles, sledgehammered paths, and whatever other dangers awaited us. All so we could find a space for something beautiful, so we could find beauty in a space that never possessed it. In the wake of failed nationalized experiments—sugar and, lately, oil and natural gas—industry and technology can appear to eclipse what we think of as “tradition.” But we also know how stubbornly, how beautifully, we resist.
We looked askance at these ruined things, knowing that they signified the coming ruin of other things, the choreographed descent of flesh and metal into entropy. How perfectly they showed us things about ourselves we would rather avoid: the deaths of loved ones, our own deaths, the gradual silences of people we once knew as they go about their lives unconcerned about us, the loneliness we feel as new ideas of ourselves take shape after the collapse of our once rigid hypocrisies, the encroachment of self-pity and bitterness, the struggle for forgiveness and grace. We resisted, imperfectly, to make Mas and to play it as a literal reflection of ourselves.
For many of us, reflection involves recovery work: the stirring up and denial of traumas, of beatings, both private and public, to see what we find in the darkness, what we see and ignore. It’s messy. Every gesture, every word, every claim will disrupt a legacy that runs deep in our breakable bones. Deeper still in our history (the sighing, epic memory of our former selves). In the search for ourselves, we find that we are often compelled to speak from absences, to (re)create presences from our splintered echoes. This aligns with the role of Caribbeanist Photography, as I’ve noted, which is grounded in continued attempts to offer visual evidence of the obvious, and to go in search of what is missing. In so doing, it offers us new ways of seeing for ourselves. And, if it is the threat of invisibility we face, or the deliberate unseeing and unhearing of our classically underclassed bodies, then we ought to consider what it is that speaks to us from the deep, as well as the high.
We know that if we stand in the sun long enough, our shadows will make Moko Jumbies of us. We will need to be more than mere sundials unto ourselves, though, marking the passing of our days with patience, with the sophisticated complaint and quiet regularity of a timepiece. We will have to let the romanticism of our singular powers fade and put aside the myth of our self-sufficiencies and false authenticity. We will have to believe, as these walkers do, that our presence—our being present—will complement the pantheon of supernatural creatures that traverse the in-between. In doing so, we will remember and reaffirm (for whoever cares to see) that our lives are not abandoned factories, our hearts are not gravestones. Nor are we the direct descendants of sugar. Things will change again as they did for us when the sky darkened and we prepared to leave (only to return, to see it once again as we met it and to retrieve what we’d left behind). They have to change.
So take a breath.
Stand still. Get your bearings.
Then walk, slowly at first, into it.
Know that Moko Jumbies signify our human ambitions to be what we cannot be, allowing us to portray the inevitable acceptance of our limitations, the imperfections of humanity, the lying shadows, the moving dust, and the defiant ashes of which we are all composed.
By day’s end, I would discover that there are differences between ourselves and the things designed to make us suffer, even though there may be no difference between sea sand and sugar for people who understand that the grief of crossing an ocean can never be sweetened. Some time later, I will think of my mother and my children. I will think of blood in the sugar and the legacy of diabetes that marks our bodies in this unfeeling place, removing our limbs, leaving us hobbled. Other things will become clear to me: Stephanie hunches her shoulders when she stands, shifting her hip to the right so she can untie a knot; imported Demerara sugar granules adhere to her warm hands, beneath her nails; she needs to eat sweet things whenever she walks the stick—sweets, in tribute to Oshun so she can walk without falling and so undermine the buttresses of this rotting colonialism. And then, to clear the rot of neocolonialism, its newer, more potent form. Sugar alone will not do. Almost breathless by sunset, I would learn that even now the dilapidated heart of this haunted place is incapable of loving my people—monsters, or their eroding carcasses, cannot love. No matter. I prefer to go in search of them—my people—in the asymmetrical sinews that stretch across the chest and burning shoulders of an exhausted Moko Jumbie. Jonadiah is made of flesh and blood. He is a man. And as he stands without his stilts, bathing half-crucified in fluorescent light against a brick wall, I consider the amputations of spirit that we have all had to endure, just to be able to walk and live here. I consider the prosthesis of “tradition,” and how our knees buckle collectively beneath the marvelous, perishable things that collect like cane trash in our skins. Here is a man. Here is a woman. Multitudes rumble in the spaces between them, and my hands shake as if something beautiful were about to happen.