AFTER PARDI BECAME CHIEF MINISTER, Drumblair lumbered along as usual, showing not the least inclination to become the first house of the land. Mardi asked Miss Boyd to replace the curtains and recover the sofa, and Nugget from the Youth Club sanded and revarnished the furniture, suggesting an air of limited respectability for the old house. But it still kept its cobwebs and secrets, muttered to itself in the creak of its old stairs, had windows that wouldn’t latch when the rain waterlogged the frames and toilets that flushed on any tug they felt like flushing on. It was temperamental, and seemed to resent the prominence that threatened its disorder.
Mardi said she had to make many what she alternately called “adjustments” or “sacrifices.” She was learning to tie her creativity behind her back, and do the things she felt she should do. More and more she was having to make time for a long list of social functions and political obligations. Her work suffered. She had started to make appointments with a perplexed hairdresser, who watched her shake her head vigorously before leaving each week, until she looked very much as she had when she arrived. Her cupboards now featured hats and long white gloves.
“The Rastas have taken Samson.”
Mardi made the declaration matter-of-factly one morning as she used the smaller teeth of Pardi’s long silver comb to flatten the soft, steel-coloured curls against the nape of his neck. She always cut his hair. She held the scissors awkwardly in her other hand. The blades had been sharpened till they appeared to be thinning like the hair on the top of his head, as though in a show of support.
“What do you mean?” Pardi asked absently, his chin cooperatively tucked in and his mind dreamy from an activity he always found soporific.
“Just what I said, dear. The Rastas have taken off with my big head of Samson which was sitting in the studio.”
Years earlier, Mardi had separated Delilah’s head, which everyone preferred, and given it to Leslie Clerk. The huge head of Samson with all his hair had become a studio prop over which the coverings for clay models were strewn between uses, or against which Mardi would lean to appraise a morning’s work at a distance, steady her spent self, or sometimes just sharpen a tool against the whetstone in the grip of her hand.
Mardi was giving Pardi his fortnightly trim just as the long, wayward strands of hair reached that spot on his neck, her low-water mark, where she had decided they must be stopped, no matter what the fashion. The procedure usually took place upstairs at his bedroom window, but today they were down on the back veranda, far from the familiar view of the gate. For there were new and powerful presences on Old Church Road.
From his bedroom window each morning, sitting at his old wooden swivel stool and shaving his face, Pardi had ruefully watched months of dusty construction on the opposite side of the road. A modern flat-roofed bungalow had slowly emerged. It faced him squarely with open candour, a veranda the width of the house and glass doors whose diaphanous quality in sunlight faintly suggested coquetry.
Before this, the only neighbours had been a habitually quiet couple: a swimming instructor and his wife, a petite American beauty who, like Mardi, was an artist and valued the secret spaces of solitude. Not even their pool could be seen from Drumblair, as their life was built far back from the road in a twist of trees. Only the cars that ambled along to drop and pick up the aquatic students interrupted the sacred hush of Old Church Road.
Then they came. They moved in with a flourish, showing not the slightest breath of self-consciousness at the dislocation they caused with their trucks and boxes and battery of noise. They came as conquistadores, assuming their place and our acceptance of it, and treating us to their undisguised curiosity and amusement: four unabashed female presences who, from stage entrances left and right, crossed and recrossed their living-room in an assortment of bras and slips, bras and panties, towels and what appeared to be plastic bonnets, and sometimes nothing but a delighted yell as they clutched their bosoms and dashed across the scene visible from Drumblair’s second-storey.
Pardi called them “the Gaggle.” He wondered at their abandon. It was their irreverence, not so much to the world as to themselves, which he found perplexing.
“They’re dreadfully brash,” Mardi commented.
“They must be Americans,” Pardi concluded.
But they were not Americans, as he soon found out, for they arrived to introduce themselves. Ga Ga, Queen of the Gaggle, was a vibrant migrant from Santo Domingo, a distant relative of the Spanish Duke of Alva, she explained. She had three winning daughters whose cheerful dispositions could be heard from the grass-piece at one end of Old Church Road to the plum tree in the pasture at the other. They had lustrous, healthy hair and even white teeth, fine postures and dark, vivacious eyes, very like their mother.
They had brought along their goose-pecked gander, a mild-mannered entrepreneur who got little said but his name and the means by which he supported this evidently matriarchal tribe.
Pardi now cringed every time he passed through the gate, as enthusiastic greetings were extended to him from the vantage point of their veranda, and after he honked his horn and offered a fainthearted nod of acknowledgement he could hear their laughter following him down the road; they revelled in this formal, solemn, waistcoated anachronism appearing live before them.
He had thought until recently that his eye on the world was hidden within the darkened eyelid of his shaving window, that he could see out but nobody else could see in—as though the old house were shuttered by cataracts. But the arrivals soon located the window where he sat, and began waving brightly at him, startling him out of the morning musing induced by the buzz of the Philips. Although he still shaved at that window, he now pulled the mirror to one side and sat in the safety of the shadows. He had even planned to exchange his room for the one above the kitchen, overlooking the back yard, but relinquished the idea at the thought of the turkey’s gobbling disturbing his quiet time.
Drumblair felt under siege.
For most things he stuck to his room and his window, but he wouldn’t risk sharing such a tender and intimate ritual as his haircut, and relocated the procedure downstairs. Next to them, in the dining-room, Zethilda, the cook, was coming and going as she set the table for breakfast at seven sharp.
Zethilda had come to replace Iris, the bad-tempered cook, who fortunately had found a sponsor and gone overseas. Tildy, as she came to be called, was short and very black, with what Mardi decided was a moody Maroon nature which she seemed to bring from the eastern part of Jamaica, where she had been born. Like the ancestors of her region, who were runaway slaves, she found life a continuing battle.
“De end o’ de worl’ soon come!” she would say, not so much as a threat as in recognition of omens that confirmed her basic premise. Whatever she witnessed, she assured us, “Dese are truly de signs.” She was a doomsday chorus of one.
But if what Tildy extracted from life was unharmonious, what she gave back, filtered through her every expectation of gloom, had a radiance of being, as though she had refined it to the purest carat. Whatever she gave of herself must have been total, to have survived her own mistrust.
Her cooking was subtle rather than bland, with interesting twists in small portions, each little bowl adding a dimension to both the meal and the abundant potential of tropical variety, a feat the British had never achieved. No matter the extra mouths to feed, she would feed them, glaring at the serving dishes she offered with enough disapproval to make sure the unexpected diners took no more than the allotted one piece of plantain or three slices of oranged beet.
She was loyal and, despite her own reluctance, deeply caring. And she never overcooked meat.
“Dose Rastas shudda neber be dere in de firs’ place,” she announced stoutly, fixing a plate firmly in front of Mardi’s place at the table and releasing the shutter of her jaw to an odd, unlocked position, so that her chin dropped and her mouth hung open like the old-lady face of a nutcracker. She was referring to the other new presence, the Rastafarians. Their occupation of Mardi’s studio was the cause of serious unease in Zethilda. She disapproved of the Rastas as much as she approved of the bungalow-dwellers. If Pardi viewed the Gaggle as an intrusion, Zethilda welcomed them as “decent white people wid tall ’air.”
The smell of breakfast was accompanied by another irritable grumble as her bleak figure left the room. “Betta come an’ ’ave you breakfas’ ’fore it get col’, Barrister.”
“Coming,” Mardi called as though across the mountains, finishing off the coiffure by ad-libbing what she believed to be a barber’s flourish. “There,” she said in satisfaction, removing the towel from around his now limp shoulders.
Pardi uncurled from his trance like a cat pulled from sleep in a sunny spot. Peering into the unmagnified side of his shaving mirror, which he always brought along as part of the ritual but never used till it was over, he passed his brown hand over his skull as though to make sure he still had a forehead. He did, high and magnificent; his retreating hairline was making the sweep of his brow even more majestic.
“Thank you, my dear,” he said graciously as he followed her to the table, resting the mirror on the sideboard by the large table clock which seemed to be Drumblair’s heart, if not its coat of arms.
He finished his grapefruit and turned his attention to the oily surface of the plate that collected the oozings produced by his latest fad, a deep-fat fryer he had discovered on his last trip through New York.
“It’s Freudian,” Mardi reasoned, “this preoccupation with oil. It’s because he really wants Jamaica to discover oil underground, like Trinidad.”
Now almost everything he ate was submerged in the deep pot, which hissed like Tildy’s disapproval at the entry of each morsel, and then surrounded it with a frenzy of liquid fat. His brief-lived culinary persuasions tended to put a strain on the running of the house; Mardi always kept a safe distance from the kitchen for fear of becoming embroiled in an area of life which, like mathematics, she had long since sworn off.
After a good many mouthfuls, he pulled the starched white napkin across his lips impatiently and reached for the salt dish and its tiny, silver spoon. “Why?” he asked.
“Why what, dear?” she answered absently as she tidily married her fork to the knife on her plate.
“Why have the Rastas taken Samson?”
“Oh, the Rastas. I don’t know why,” she said dismissively, as though trying to close a door she wished she hadn’t opened.
The Rastafarians had become the dread of Jamaica. Members of an entirely original movement, these disciples of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie had decided to grow their hair into long, matted locks, smoke the potent local marijuana plant, which they grew themselves and called “ganja,” and amble through the realities of Jamaican life, its heat and its squalor, rejecting its customs and vanities, beating their drums and dreaming of Zion, of Africa, and of their Lion of Judah, the unwitting Emperor.
Or so it seemed to nearly everyone else in Jamaica, who decided that they were simply dirty and lazy. The poorer people, among whom they lived, thought they were mad and laughed at them. The more well-to-do, who were at the time further removed from the problem, resorted to their customary bigotry. When they could find no plausible reason for their fear and hatred, they made one up.
At school I had heard they were dangerous, so I watched them from the safe distance of the car’s passenger window as they walked down the road in their dusty robes, with their matted fronds that reminded me of Bellevue’s watsonia lily plaits when they aged and started to fray, and their eyes wild and red with the effects of ganja, which I mistook for bloody intent.
When with high drama I was informed by the spellbinding Gaggle across the fence that there were Rastas living in Mardi’s studio, which for a while she had been too busy to visit, I fled to the house in alarm and announced to Mardi, “Ga Ga says there are dangerous Rastas in the studio!”
“Nonsense,” she said, “there’s nobody dangerous in anybody’s studio. The things you pick up!”
She explained that with all the politics in her life she had not been able to do any work, and so the Rastas had come along and squatted in her studio, and that that was all right for a while but they would soon have to move, for she planned to go back to work.
“If they squat for seven years you can’t move them any more.” Pardi warned her of this as though he were offering a formal legal opinion on the matter.
“I have a big piece in my head,” she announced, quite unconcerned by either his omen or the maverick zealots she would have to remove. “A totem pole.”
That was the first I had ever heard of a totem pole, and it was probably the first time the Rastafarians had heard of one too. The very next day, Mardi walked over to the studio and explained to them with great courtesy that she had to create this icon for her mythology, and so she must ask them, please, to vacate her studio so she could begin work.
There were three of them there that morning. One was sitting on the step at the front of the studio, gazing towards the sound of a late rooster whose crowing mixed awkwardly with the distant sound of traffic. In the studio behind, the other two shuffled in the safety of their chosen corners, which may have added acuity to a vision only they could see. One was on the floor on a bed of flattened cardboard boxes, and the other was propped up against Samson’s head, with a pillow of cloths and rags which were kept in the studio for wrapping the clay. Their quiet assurance seemed to her not so much defiance as a glimpse of an unfamiliar world whose customs would have to be explored to be understood.
She suddenly thought of Roger Mais, powerful and delinquent, who had written of a Jamaica she realized she scarcely knew except from the outside. He had written of this Jamaica from the inside, she felt. He had died in the year of all the brooms, leaving three landmark novels that she felt the need to read again.
Now they sensed her sympathy, and the placid presence of Batiste in the high grass posed no threat to them. If they absorbed anything from her firm but gentle lecture, they gave no sign; their movements were few and totally unrelated to her presence. It was as if they could not see her from their world.
As she prepared to leave, formally offering her hand to the presence guarding the door, a deep voice struggled out of the gloom behind him.
“I man like ’im lacks!”
She was relieved to hear the voice, for the figure on the steps still showed no sign of response.
“What is it you like?” she called to the man leaning against the huge head. She had never been able to speak dialect, and the Rastas had further modified the language. She presumed that by “I man” he referred to himself.
The large frame sat forward, and the bundles against which he rested fell to the floor. He gestured to the wooden head he had appropriated. “De lacks ’pan ’im ’ead. I man sey me like dese lacks. Man mus’ nat cut ’im ’air, so Jah seh.”
He was stroking the long gouges in the wood, his huge hands moving over the ropes of Samson’s hair.
Moved by his show of appreciation, she asked, as though she were speaking to a small child whose concentration she wanted to keep, “Why mustn’t man cut his hair?”
“’Im strength wi’ sap. A man’s strength is in ’im ’air.”
As though some evangelical purpose had now been achieved, the guardian of the steps reached out and took her hand in both of his, and looked at her conspiratorially.
“One love, daughter.”
The meeting was over. By the next morning they had left. The place was neatly swept, a couple of large sheets of her paper from the cupboard were filled with small, infantile drawings, and there was a round, blackened patch with stones outside the door where they had cooked their food and smoked out the mosquitoes.
And the head of Samson was gone.
“So they took it! I’ll be damned,” he said thoughtfully, pinching up some spilled salt with his right hand and tossing it over his left shoulder once, twice, three times, to counteract any bad luck. “Maybe they liked it!”
“Then I think I should be flattered,” she said, as she looked over at me where I was still playing with the sour sections of a halved grapefruit. “No one else liked my Samson.”
She often said she wondered why people were always critical of her work when she used a larger, bolder style, as she had done with Samson. She found that the bigger tools seemed to release the wood more quickly to its nature, chasing away the orderly epidermis, the years and years of stratification, each knot knowing its place more deeply after each season.
Wood was always old; people didn’t understand that. You had to challenge it, for it already had its habits. You asked a piece of wood to go back through the journey of its growth, to reclaim the flexibility of its youth when it was facetious and nubile. Then you asked it to interpret itself, and accept another face. It was a story in the telling, a mound of clay in the rough. If you could only free it, fight your way through to its independence, its origin, then it could begin. But how could you reflect the turbulence, the sheer impatience of a young country, with small tools and fine, tidy outlines?
“I’m afraid of Rastas. I’m glad they are gone,” I blurted.
“Silly girl,” chided Mardi.
“Why are you afraid?” Pardi stopped short; he even stopped chewing. This made me nervous.
“Because their eyes are red and I don’t like their hair. It’s like tree roots. It frightens me.”
“Well now.” Mardi lifted her torso to the height of her surprise, which she dramatized for Pardi in that conspiratorial way adults have when they create parables for children.
“Good, Lord! They shouldn’t frighten anyone! They are deeply religious people, Pie,” he said with genuine bewilderment.
I took refuge in the source of my information: “Well, that’s not what they say at school.”
“They are talking a lot of middle-class bunk,” he spat.
“You know, dear, their hair is spotlessly clean,” Mardi said thoughtfully. “They created quite a putta-putta out there at the side of the studio, where they bathed with my hose and washed their long hair. Batiste saw them!”
“’Im shudda chase dem down de gully! Batiste too fraidy-fraidy,” Tildy muttered contemptuously as she circled the table to collect Pardi’s plate.
Mardi looked disapproving and hurt. I had got used to Pardi and Mardi re-evaluating most of the things I heard in school. I liked their legend of the world; it was inclusive. There was always enough room for the things no one else seemed able to accommodate … white mice or ducks, Easter chicks dyed pink and blue and yellow, even Rastafarians no one else seemed to want, and sometimes things as big as small islands. It made life more harmonious, more capable of surprise.
“You know, I get so sick and tired of this hysteria in middle-class Jamaicans. The minute a person takes off the traditional dress and habit of Britain, we all go into a state of shock. Year after year we are struggling, we say, for independence, and yet the minute a Jamaican wears his hair in his own way, or dresses the way he wants to dress, or believes in God the way he wants to believe in Him, or even smokes his own damn tobacco, there’s all this big hullabaloo!” Pardi said this in his “winding up the argument” voice as he prepared to leave the table.
The middle class, of which I was then unaware of being a part, became for me a baffling phenomenon.
“But they all want to go back to Africa,” said Mardi.
Pardi gave a stout blow of his nose into his handkerchief and buried it again in his pocket.
“Yes, but that’s nonsense. They will find they can’t be Jamaican in Africa; they can best be Jamaican right here.”
“And I’m not so sure about that tobacco, dear,” Mardi added mildly.
“What do you think Blanche smokes in her pipe, for God’s sake?” he asked as he rose from the table, scraping the wooden legs of the chair over the squawking tiles. “When I was a small boy in Guanaboa Vale, I can remember all the countrymen smoking their ganja. Nothing new about that. The Jamaican has his white rum and smokes his ganja, and why not? An Englishman has his whisky or his port and his Virginia or his South African tobacco. I say it’s about time Jamaicans unshackle themselves and do whatever it is that comes more naturally to them or we’ll never have true independence.” He punctuated the word “independence” with a kiss on each of our foreheads, open quotation, close quotation, as he set off for work, bracing himself for his exit past the neighbours’ gate.
“Amen, and a fine Jamaican three-piece suit you are wearing, too!” mocked Mardi. She loved him in this mood. She seemed to love everything for the first time in a long time that morning.
Now that she had her studio back, Batiste hoisted a tall plank in the centre. Purple-heart from Janet Jagan in British Guiana. Cheddi Jagan had been in Jamaica, foraging for a structure for his newly formed political party; he wanted to base it on the People’s National Party constitution. Everyone wanted to use it as the basis for new political parties, or at least borrow bits and pieces of it. As a democratic structure it worked. It had an elaborate infrastructure of small groups that could exist anywhere. Each group had its own chairman and secretary. All these groups were represented at the constituency level, and again at the national level. All party policy had to pass through this system; even the president and vice-presidents were elected that way. Many of the islands were watching Jamaica as it slowly gained ground towards internal self-government, and it was now the performance of the PNP that they were noticing. Mardi found it remarkable the way Pardi managed to ground everything he touched in a set of rules and principles.
“It’s the only way to make anything last,” he would say. And he would give whatever it was a set of rules, a system; a constitution. Mardi had to admit that sometimes the rules worked; as in the party, or Jamaica Welfare, or the Boxing Board of Control. But sometimes they didn’t. His system of growing grapes, enshrined forever in its set of rules, was misguided, so she supposed the grapes would remain sour and acid in perpetuity.
He was in fact creating his own cosmos in perpetuity. This would go on for ever and ever, making each innovation concrete, stone on stone, brick on brick. He was building. In the meantime, she was running his constituency for him, opening schools and making the right speeches, cutting ribbons and more ribbons that stretched their bright throats against the blade of the scissors.
“Mr. Howler and Mr. Fart,” she had said last week in a speech, by mistake; oh dear, she winced at the memory. Poor Mr. Fowler, poor Mr. Hart. Poor her!
“I must get back to work,” she muttered to herself as Pardi and I were leaving. Standing beside the rosebeds, Batiste shaded his eyes and watched the car circle him on the driveway, and Mardi fled down the overgrown path towards the studio, giving a furtive look behind as though checking to see if she had escaped unnoticed. Batiste smiled peacefully in the bright sunshine.