IT WAS PARDI’S THEORY that a man knows when he owns his last dog. He does not know the date of his death, but he recognizes the dog who will grieve him.
When Uhuru came, Pardi knew.
Uhuru was a near-perfect Doberman, except that he was small for a male. He had those fierce black eyes whose menace is fixed in the obscurity of their darkness. His expression came from a carefully bred assumption that the world was to be mistrusted.
Zethilda swore he was colour-prejudiced, as he always greeted her with furious barking. To make matters worse, he embraced the diminutive figure of the comparatively fair Miss Boyd, who now came only twice a week, and bestowed upon her lavish, overwhelming kisses. Pardi assured Zethilda that her theory was flawed, since he was coloured and Uhuru never barked at him. And anyway, Mardi pointed out, Uhuru himself was black.
Uhuru would bring gifts to Pardi: a shoe, a lizard, a bone, and, up at Nomdmi, where he roamed his freedom joyously, a bird or a pine cone, or the seeds of roseapples, which he laid at Pardi’s feet for approval.
He was highly strung and, according to Mardi and Pardi, highly intelligent—qualities which Mardi felt were related. He was expected to be the perfect watchdog. Despite the protest of Mardi’s friend John, a man who truly loved and understood most animals, at the stipulated age Uhuru was taken to a dog-training school. There the perplexed dog spent six weeks locked in a coffin-like box, let out only for the few hours of his training. This was supposed to make him ferocious, but he returned home somewhat dispirited instead, and insisted on sleeping in the bathtub at first where he appeared to find the familiarity of enclosure comforting.
Pardi gave him his name. Uhuru was an African word for freedom. In a house where more and more he felt his wife inventing his surroundings, Pardi came to rely on Uhuru as a touchstone by which to measure life’s spontaneity.
The intimacy of tragedy came to Pardi when the wake of his political defeats had subsided. Disaster is epic, grief is ceremonious; both have their own momentum. But real life stretched on after that, he discovered. Only then were elections really lost or houses gone—in the dead calm of afterwards, when neither tears nor loss nor the shock of destruction could move one.
Jamaica’s birthday had come and gone. It was the sixth of August, 1962. Independence Day each year still leaves me with a feeling of sadness. Although the family attended all the public functions, it felt like somebody else’s party. This was the realization of a dream for which Pardi had struggled for a quarter century, and it was incomprehensible to me that he should be only peripheral.
It was a further irony that the celebrations took place in a new national stadium which Pardi had insisted be built for the new nation despite loud and widespread opposition as the project was felt to be unnecessary and costly. It was some consolation that over the years there was always applause when he entered that stadium, even at times of great party unpopularity when he might be booed anywhere else by the same people. This was particularly poignant at boxing events which were held there, when the three Manley men attended, Douglas at ringside as a judge, Michael cheering a protégé, and Pardi watching raptly after his customary welcome.
As national leaders, both Bustamante and Pardi were offered knighthoods at Jamaica’s independence. Busta accepted his, Pardi did not; within the context of his life, an honour from Westminster was unthinkable. But the title “Sir Alexander” came as an affirmation to the Labourites, and the absence of an official reward, for whatever reason, was subtly undermining and disheartening to the comrades, although by now in 1964 Bustamante was less in the public eye, as ill health had placed him in a state of semi-retirement. A political era was ending.
Pardi returned to Duke Street, the hub of Jamaican legal activity, where he rented a small office and offered his services as a consultant. But among the things he had forgotten about the law over a decade was the sheer boredom induced by the job. He had reentered what was for him an arid plane. Many of the island’s politicians were lawyers, and he wondered if the tedium of the first profession was at the root of this secondary ambition.
The only person he employed was a wise and competent secretary who sensed his lack of enthusiasm and tried to buoy him up with her warmth and valour, as if to say, life’s like that but we must make the best of it.
“There is nothing in life less creative than opposition” was Mardi’s new truism. She was frustrated by Pardi’s decision to remain in politics. She had wanted him to make a clean break and get on with the rest of his life. She suggested alternatives. He ignored them. Losing the election did not alter his motive or purpose.
Every weekday afternoon Pardi went to Parliament. The gazetted records of debate chronicled a steady stream of accusation and invective at him, and there were times when he felt that the leader of what was, in the light of our dominion status, still Her Majesty’s loyal opposition was more a recipient of abuse than a voice of constructive criticism. No matter what difficulty the government faced in this formative time of early independence, it was less concerned with implicating a history of colonial rule than with blaming the stewards of the previous government, and particularly, Pardi.
At first his life was simply a question of discipline. Sometimes just keeping faith in his own usefulness was his greatest challenge. He found that his return home in the evening had become like his nights in the trenches during the war, when one laid low to survive, and survived because one had to. And as in the war, he kept with him the things he considered essential to his soul, only now he carried them in his mind rather than in a knapsack: his program for an evening of music, his return to a good book, the plans for a piece of furniture he was working on at Nomdmi.
When he drove through the streets of Kingston on his way to Parliament or his law practice—even on his drives up to Nomdmi, when many of those walking the steep hill along the way hurled messages that he barely made out, as his hearing had definitely worsened—he could see that little of his country’s progress, of its prosperity, had reached the people he most cared about, those who needed it most. The failure gave him a dull, disappointed ache.
By 1964 the landscape had settled at Washington Drive. Pardi and Mardi had lived there for almost two years. Ebony Hill and Regardless encompassed the limited sphere of the family’s influence. It was not so much that life had shrunk; its elements were more concentrated, if not more intense. I remember it vividly as a happy time in my own life. For once that I can remember, we had the core of the family all in one place. All to ourselves. It was less wingspan but more bedrock. It was not that we clung together; more that being cocooned provided each of us with the means of a hibernation necessary for renewal.
Michael and Thelma’s marriage ended. My brother, Joseph, seven years old, went to live with his mother. Thelma seemed to take a prettiness out of the place when she left, taking her dresses and exotic-smelling bottles, her bony memorabilia of dried branches, flowers, and cones, and little else. There was little to take from my father’s house, and anyway she was never by nature a taker.
Douglas came to live with us. His marriage had also ended, and Norman and Roy remained with their mother; Douglas got custody of the orchids. He moved into his brother’s house, staying in what had been Joseph’s room and relocating his orchids next door, on his parents’ patio. My uncle’s presence was to be a rare gift to me. His mischief and dry humour reminded me of Pardi, of that side of the public man that others failed to see. He became the butt of every joke around the house.
Aunt Muriel now lived in a small cottage at the bottom of Ebony Hill, with her two corgis, Dylan and Gayla. Her driveway faced the gully, and from a studio Mardi had built at the back of Regardless she could see Aunt Muriel’s thoughtfully arranged garden of quaint cottage flowers.
I can’t remember when Aunt Vera finally left; she remained for a while, becoming the registrar at the Jamaica School of Music after independence. But since her departure remained imminent, Aunt Muriel, who had lived alone at the top of a hill and depended on visits from her elder sister for company, thought of moving to Kingston to be nearer the family. When her small Austin tipped over the side of the mountain road for the second time, its pilot having once again fallen asleep at the wheel, a home was quickly built for her at the bottom of Michael’s land.
It was a time when the family was not on show, and had no conjugal appendages. Maybe it was the only time I saw them all relaxed. On its own, the family had a capacity for resilience, a philosophical ability to shrug at what it understood to be inevitable. As a unit, that was its enduring strength.
There was no fence between the two houses. Where the lots met, there was a low retaining wall that edged the garage at Ebony Hill and indicated a border. The grass formed a natural cockscomb as it met at that line. Ebony Hill’s was thin and high and lawless, like the eccentric strands of a dishevelled head. The grass of Regardless, though younger, seemed more settled, less parched, probably due to Batiste’s careful tending of his now limited world.
Left to ourselves, we kept bumping into the reality of each other. We were not a family who knew the details of each other’s lives. Only Douglas and I were any good at small talk. Douglas and I gossiped. Usually, family get-togethers were dinners or meetings on specified subjects that evoked rapt discussion. Even alone with each other on these occasions, we were self-conscious. We were seldom affectionate to each other, but always concerned and interested. News of each other usually came from outsiders, or from myself as a go-between.
Now that we were in close proximity, there were daily surprises.
“Fancy, Doug gets up several times a night to raid the fridge!”
“How do you know that, my dear?” Pardi peered at his wife over the newspaper.
“Ray told me. He prowls around all night. Says he has to keep feeding his ulcer.”
Or Douglas, ever mystified by routine, despairing of his mother: “Does she bathe at the same time every goddamn day!” as she shouted from the bathroom when the water disappeared from her tap. Since the water pressure was low, bathing and garden-watering were mutually exclusive activities, and her four o’clock bath always coincided with his drop-around to water his orchids on his way home from the university. It didn’t occur to him that this fact also established the fixity of his own routine.
I now lived with my father. I enjoyed my role as woman of the house, although in terms of domestic duty this was little more than a title bestowed on me by Mardi, who was still trying to encourage a closer bond between my father and me. It was to become a pattern: in the troughs between my father’s marriages, I would get to know him, feeling for a time, as Mardi put it, as if “I had my daddy all to myself.” We did become close, which was in some ways the start of a friendship, and in others the beginning of a war.
Although I lived at Ebony Hill, I wandered conveniently between the two houses. At Ebony Hill my freedom was usually unlimited, as my father was seldom at home and Douglas was either indifferent or a good sport. I could play Ben E. King as loud as I liked, and we could all smoke. Also I was spared the embarrassment of Pardi’s oddly formal, hands-in-pockets interrogations of my friends. “And what do you think of television, young man?” he would ask.
As leader of the opposition, Pardi had received a smart twenty-seven-inch television set, a cabinet with doors. At least one could shut them, Mardi had remarked when it arrived. It was watched avidly but suspiciously by Pardi and Zethilda. Pardi’s government had established the state-owned national radio station, the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation in 1957. It was Pardi’s brainchild, conceived to reflect Jamaican culture, promote public education, and give Jamaicans their own voice. He intended it to be politically independent. Since independence the station ran a television service, and Pardi worried about its influence on the island. He turned up the volume full blast and considered the programming. He was concerned about its foreign content, and was wary of the political motivation behind the local material, much of which would be influenced by the opposing party who had placed their dynamic young minister of Culture and Development as head of its statutory board. Zethilda’s objections were more fundamental: she considered all television depictions a giant hoax.
Batiste, on the few occasions when he peered in from the garage, was unable to stop laughing at the display, hailing whatever was on the screen with “Lard, what a poppy show!”
Mardi’s attention to television never lasted longer than a few minutes because, according to Pardi, “she won’t sit still long enough.” She would have ignored its influence had she not been questioning her younger grandchildren one day about the Bible, among many other topics, in an effort to keep them quiet and see what they knew.
“Where was the garden of Eden?” she asked Joseph and Roy.
Blank silence.
“Well, who was Adam?”
Both together: “The son of Pa Cartwright!”
Like Pardi, she began to take a dim view of the new arrival.
If Mardi was content to have the whole family together and on its own, she made no smug show of it, settling naturally into matriarchal responsibility over her nest. She was saddened by the unhap-piness the demise of her sons’ marriages had caused them, but she was never one to fear change, and anyway the tension of both situations had been gruelling. But she liked these two women no less than before, and continued to relate to them as she always had, separate from their husbands.
“I am not a ‘couple’ person,” she would say, extricating the person like a segment from an orange, just as she offered herself individually to her friendships.
As for Pardi, he probably missed the presence of his daughters-in-law who he found vivacious and provocative; they flirted with him. They would have seemed so unlike the stern sisters with whom he grew up, who had firmly drawn a veil over the potential of sexual difference. He liked the surprise of a woman’s otherness which he had just discovered in Mardi, like a hitherto unknown flower blooming in his path.
Pardi was saddened by the wrecks of his sons’ marriages. His own marriage was now a long partnership, one in which each had slowly moved back into the room of the self. Although there were seldom any new details and one knew the phrases and expressions almost without having to listen or see, there was comfort in the knowledge that what had once been the vital sketching of outline had long since become a familiar portrait in one’s periphery, a fellow column holding up the logic of one’s world.
Worn down by a combination of my endless carping and the stress of their political problems, my grandparents’ resistance gave way during my summer holiday after The Mikado. I was allowed to remain in Kingston and was accepted as a day student at St. Andrew High School, an old and well-respected girls’ school whose kindergarten I had attended.
By the time I left boarding-school, Miss Boyd’s great-niece, Juanita, had married and moved to America, and her brother, Milton, was working towards a place in university. We kept in touch, but for the time being our lives had diverged, creating a void for me. This was filled by the discovery of two friends, Lem and Kik, whom I met at my new school. They were like yin and yang—opposites pulling me two different ways—but in my case no balance was achieved.
Lem was solid in build and nature, energetic, headstrong, and opinionated, equal to any thought that was based on fact; practical, loyal, and loving; and in trap and skeet shooting, a champion shot. She was a born conservative. She was from one of Jamaica’s wealthiest families, and gave me a glimpse of an opulence I had never imagined; I remember being particularly struck by an electrical device that did nothing but produce ice. Lem sat like an example at the desk in front of me on my first day, and so she remained.
Kik was more nebulous, less sure of herself, and comfortable only with things that were open to interpretation. Even her face could totally alter, depending on what she wore, how she fixed her hair. She loved art and was talented at drawing, but seemed to lack the resolve of either ambition or self-confidence. She had a knack for living through other people, and a complete disregard for time.
It was curiosity that brought Kik into my life. We were dating the same boy. I invited her home one afternoon so I could vet my competition. We became friends, and dumped the common suitor.
Mardi, who came from a large family, worried about the “only-child syndrome.” She also knew from her own childhood that the dynamic of a family left to itself could be an ever-tightening circle. She liked throwing in a diversion and watching everyone regroup.
“It’s like putting dry rice in the salt-cellar. Stops the salt grains from sticking together and making a muck,” she observed. This process of “unsticking” had begun when Douglas and Michael were boys, and by now we had many adopted grains to show for it.
So Kik, whose parents had been transferred to another island, came to stay with us. She settled in with hardly a ripple. She was an Aquarian, which for Mardi was assurance of two admirable qualities, an empathetic nature and a fondness for the occult. Pardi referred to Kik as the dormouse; coming from a rural childhood, and belonging to a family of nervous and often insomniac early risers, he was bemused by her habit of sleeping till late in the day. But he found her comfort with silence restful.
In what was becoming an increasingly self-conscious relationship between my father and myself, due in part to Mardi’s continuing obsession with it, and probably also because our family structure was somewhat unusual, Kik became a mediator between my father and me. While Kik and I were harmonious enablers of Douglas’ meandering stream of consciousness, he was in turn good-naturedly indulgent. Sometimes we stole his dinners when we had to feed a friend, and replaced the dish in its customary place over a steaming pot with something as insubstantial as a raw egg that proceeded to poach, or a single green pea. On one occasion we acquired a life-sized poster of a blond pin-up girl from a downtown theatre, and this we attached to the ceiling over his bed with cellophane tape. We watched him late that night after he returned and quietly prepared for bed so as not to wake the household. He lay down on his back and was about to remove his glasses when he spotted the lady above him. He stared at the ceiling for a short while, shrugged, swallowed, closed his eyes, and in a major anticlimax to the event, proceeded to fall asleep with the light still on, his spectacles perched on his nose.
Ours was the middle room along a narrow, windowless corridor whose tiles, though the pattern matched, were in three distinct stages, from faded to bright, marking my father’s summer renovations. His last improvement had been a large airy room that looked back over the gully. It was built over the slope of the descending hill, so he had room beneath for a study. I came to realize that Manley buildings spawned studies or studios the way dogs have puppies.
My father had designed a walk-in cupboard and dressing alcove for my room. I was extremely proud of these additions, and in the alcove I hung my pictures of famous ballerinas. Kik impressed Mardi by saving her allowance to buy a tasteful nude from her art teacher, which she hung starkly between my frilly, Slavic dancers. I resisted a prudish urge to draw in the outline of sleeves and a skirt hem; it would not have been “cool.”
This had been Michael and Thelma’s room, the place where Thelma lay in bed to save Joseph, and our bathroom across the corridor was the one from which I had so often heard the retching of morning sickness. The young house already had its ghosts. The firm thuds of the dancer’s determined heels with which Thelma woke us were never totally gone from that place. They were a nagging memory of a time of distress.
I loved the precarious world of my father, with its jazz and boxing, its trade unionists and strikes, its battles for human rights, its struggles against injustice, its good guys and bad guys. And I loved his ability to create a legend out of sport or politics from the wealth of his generous enthusiasms. There was always some cause, some match, some game, some record, that prodded my consciousness up a notch.
My father was never a trivial fan of anything. If he was a fan, he was what he called “a deep fan.” His was a world of heroes: Joe Louis, George Headley, Jessie Owens, Herb McKenley; the three W’s, Harold Laski, Edward R. Murrow, Adlai Stevenson, Fidel Castro, Julius Nyerere, Nat King Cole. It was a world that smelled of stale cigarette smoke and coffee.
In the deep, bumpy Morris chairs there often waited trade unionists, or boxers and their trainers, for my father partially managed a Dixie and a Percy, local fighters whom, because they were basically nice men, he fed with steak and pep talk before each fight, as though either proteins or advice could nurture a killer instinct. I don’t remember that either did.
Although I didn’t like jazz then, the cool strains of Brubeck or Davis or Coltrane were like a musical score behind the lurchings of my father’s life, and seemed to hold the daily script together as he paced the floor in wide circles, talking on a telephone at the end of a super-long cord. This had been installed by a union delegate at the telephone company who found my father’s pacing at the end of a short cord too dizzying to watch.
It is strange how life can imitate landscape. Or maybe it was just my own longing for symbol and allegory, for the backdrops that place scenes in context for me. But I saw in the clustering of those two houses a slow and natural shift of my father’s life towards politics. As though the proximity of his father made this inevitable, the trade union became closer to the party, and my father became closer to politics.
Pardi named him for the Senate as spokesman on labour affairs when he was forming the new opposition. Michael found this more title than substance; he attached greater significance to his work in the party. I thought “senator” a fine title for my handsome father. As far as I was concerned, it was small consolation after our many disappointments with the advent of independence.
For me, watching Pardi and all his work shrink into the margins of a strange new text, this was a heartbreaking experience; one for which, however illogically, I blamed Jamaica.
Over the intervening years, much of the drifting population of Drumblair had disappeared; the loyalists had gone off to lick their wounds, the opportunists had crossed the fence. With the diminished traffic in their lives came a certain peace and a quieter home. There were times when Mardi sat on the veranda and her inviolate spirit, neither mellowed nor tamed by age, would risk surfacing to peep out at the mountains. There was a serene integrity to her life now that it was partially free of the contortions of social obligation.
Pardi and Mardi seemed to have fewer friends now, with treasured exceptions. One of these was a young, wiry Australian who taught music at the university, and knew her subject with the vehemence of one who has had to fight for it. In the “man’s world” of rural Australia, where Pam had grown up, a woman was expected to practise more useful skills than music.
Pardi was deeply fond of Pam, who had listened to music with them from their late Drumblair days. He was delighted by her academic curiosity, which gave her a tolerance for the local, unclassical strains. He would look at her for approval during his new stereo’s recitals, and sometimes offer one of his rare jokes. “Have you ever considered what would happen if cows could fly?” And he waited mischievously at the edge of what he thought a very risqué supposition, for the penny (and hopefully nothing else) to drop.
Mardi felt it was good for Pardi to have his own evenings—even if she invented them. To have interests without her. He always had had in the past, but now it was up to her to create them for him, as though he were some magnificent being of the deep stranded in the shallows, whom she must rescue, if she could only provide the tug of a great tide.
She tried to string the days smoothly across the week, so they reached the clasp of the weekend neatly and painlessly. The weekends usually took care of themselves. They would arrive at Nomdmi on Friday by two o’clock in the afternoon—the scratchy time according to Mardi, for which she had instituted a daily rest as a remedy. Even up there she sometimes gave him a bit of a prod with a visitor, or the family came for a meal and a game of bridge. They would stay till early Monday morning. In the last few years she had found that Pardi lived for the weekends “up the hill,” a journey which she always referred to as “to the mountains.”
She often invited Pam. Mardi liked Pam. “She’s not fenky, fenky … ,” she’d explain. When asked what that meant, she’d only lift her arms and let her wrists drop flaccidly. Aunt Muriel, who liked to feel anchored by logic, once remarked that she thought the word came from “fenks,” which was melted whale’s blubber. And Mardi had decided that “a little crush” in Pardi’s life would do him no harm.
Pardi enjoyed an evening with the young Australian. She was bright and sensitive, and had that unapologetic strength in her femininity that his wife had—the feeling of muscle under skin, of a mind in charge of beauty and charm. She had an unusual intellectual understanding of music which equalled her love of the art. And she had the audacity to confront the classics, a “piece of facetyness” common to cultures that have endured colonization, where self-respect longs to reject the traditional and accommodate fresh expression.
But Pardi noticed that Pam came into Regardless more softly nowadays, looking more gently at him, her eyes on sentry watch behind her glow. The last time she came he had seen her in a skirt for the first time, and she had spent the evening awkwardly arranging her knees beneath it. He missed her tomboyish shrug into a chair, and the toss of her chin while she appeared to listen from some Australian field of reminiscence, as if flat on her back in the outback with the stars spitting back at her. He sensed his wife’s handiwork.
In fact he sensed Mardi’s deft fingers everywhere, and her hegemony soon expanded to include the rest of her family. There were certain phrases she used that the family found very unsettling. “Now let us all be light-hearted,” she would say, as though waving a wand for a band of clowns. Or “Now let’s see what we can plan today….”
Pardi spent a lot of time trying to avoid this cheer. He missed the acreage of Drumblair, its alternate routes, its many chambers and shadows in which he could lose himself. But he still managed to disappear. One day, in search of cigarettes, which Mardi kept on a shelf in the clothes cupboard, Kik slid open the heavy door and found Pardi crouched among his long, black leather shoes, beneath the hems of his own jackets, which hung from a rail above. His face emerged from some sleeves with a single finger raised to his pursed lips. Kik replied with a similar gesture as she withdrew, taking with her the stolen pack of cigarettes. As she left, the house resounded with Mardi’s voice calling, “Noooorrrr … maaaaaaan,” from the veranda where his guests for that day were seated and waiting.
For quite some while Mardi had been suspecting that Pardi was avoiding his evenings of music because he had difficulty hearing. That was probably why he had stopped initiating them himself. It dawned on her that maybe his withdrawal was not altogether due to heartbreak caused by the loss of the referendum and the election. Maybe it also stemmed from his inability to hear. She was determined not to let him move into a world of silence.
And then Mardi had had one of her brainwaves, in the middle of smoothing clay across the back of a figure she was modelling. She was working on a government commission. It was probably the most important challenge she had ever faced. At independence Jamaica had partially redefined itself by naming its own national heroes. One of them was the deacon Paul Bogle, from Stony Gut, a legendary figure who had killed the Custos with a machete in the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865. Now the government wanted statues of the heroes, and she had been asked to do Bogle.
She had been thinking about up-coming changes that would end our harmonious era. Douglas was going away to start a UNESCO contract in Africa. Kik and I planned to go down to Barbados for the summer after our exams. With everyone gone, Michael planned to rent out his house and get a smaller place. Mardi was musing over how often life changed, and how people had to adapt.
That was when it struck her that the problem with Pardi was a failure to do just that—adapt. He must get a hearing aid. She knew he’d resist the idea, for she sensed that his deafness completed a wall behind which he had decided to retreat. Seeing this as her crusade for the day, she decided to convene a family conference behind Pardi’s back.
Mardi always entered Ebony Hill through the front door. It was strange that she came that way, for it meant walking all the way around the house when she could easily enter through the kitchen door fifty yards from her own garage. But she didn’t like entering anywhere through back doors, she said, not out of some misplaced notion of grandeur, but because she felt it was like sneaking up on people.
Besides, she loved coming around the driveway sprinkled with the joyous yellow overflow of the poui and ebony trees overhead which seemed more to interpret the sun than to interrupt it. A crude path ran up the side of a circular outdoor patio intermittently shaded by sweet-smelling, floppy white flowers that were sibilant with bees. The rough, crazy-paved cement structure resembled the crown of a giant molar. Ascending its rim at its shallowest point, Mardi was careful to step across the wide crack where the earth beneath had settled and caused the centre to sink like a fallen cake.
As she approached the plywood front door, frayed at the bottom by sun and rain, she was overwhelmed by the rich sound of Mongo Santamaría. She drifted in, looking deliberately temporary, and was taken aback by Michael, Kik, and myself in a neat line doing quarter-turns of a cha-cha-cha.
The large, L-shaped room rallied around the surging “Horse of the Morning” the way a lawn does around a magnificent tree. This horse was perhaps Mardi’s best-loved carving; this frustrated her for she felt she could never live it down. The visiting eyes’ afterthought soon found a rich collection of Jamaican paintings by younger artists. The presence of a television set, though small and seldom used, gained its attention simply by the contrast of its glassy, precise modernity in a room whose only permanence among the mild disorder of circumstances was art.
We finished a couple more steps, then my father led the way, still in a cha-cha-cha, to the dining table. He looked up at his mother sheepishly; he always felt guilty when his parents saw him enjoying himself too much.
“Oh, now I’ve gone and spoilt it … you all looked so happy doing that wonderful dance.” She sat down.
“Not at all … in fact I must be off soon … I’ve got this strike at JBC.” Michael looked instinctively toward the myopic curve of the television’s void surface which seemed to challenge the cosmic significance of Mardi’s horse. His interest in the new medium seemed limited to the employees of the station who were members of the NWU. They were now on strike in support of two wrongful-dismissal claims. It was dragging on, and Michael had stunned the island during a demonstration by lying in the streets of Kingston to block traffic. Wheels had rolled right up to his head. When he faced the walls of the station and addressed the structure as “Jericho,” the workers rechristened him, changing his nickname from “Young Boy” to “Joshua,” and the name stuck.
Mardi shrewdly recognized the significance of the episode in the development of Michael’s public persona. Although he had so far failed to get the two workers reinstated, the incident brought him into focus; for too long there had been a blurred perception of him as just the selvage on his father’s hem. Though the gesture was not as vivid as Busta’s going to jail, it would place him indelibly on the side of the workers. She often felt that her husband’s career had suffered for lack of just such a legitimizing moment.
Pardi too had been impressed by his son. “Passive resistance,” he observed with pride, and to mark his disapproval of the station management’s stand, he sent back his television set.
“How is it going, dear? You know your father sent back the TV set.”
“I know. I spoke to him. It was such a deeply principled thing to do … but we won’t win this one,” he said, but brightened the expression on his face. “Not to worry, Mother.”
She seemed to search the room for inspiration, but she was distracted by the sight of a Ouija board Kik and I had consulted the night before. “Something has to be done about Norman,” she announced, picking up the plastic oracle. She rubbed it against her thigh as though summoning a genie, and then placed it on the lettered board so that it faced the corner marked “YES.”
Hearing his son’s name pronounced by his mother, Douglas struggled out to the living-room, crumpled and curious. “What’s happened to Norman?” He paused for the answer, holding the back of a chair as though unable to arrange himself until he knew if it was worth sitting down.
“Not little Norman … big Norman.” Mardi spread her hands incongruously, indicating obesity rather than height.
Douglas sat down squarely at the dining-room table amid the breakfast debris, the Ouija board, the homework books, and newspapers, reached for a slice of cold buttered toast and looked mildly around him. The presence of his family always caused him to blink.
“Big Norman must get a hearing aid,” she said.
Douglas stared suspiciously at the jug of orange juice while he chewed.
“It will bring your father back,” she insisted.
“From where?” Douglas was being obtuse. We all knew Pardi’s hearing was bad.
“You see, he has come through an awful depression. It’s been so difficult, really. And he seems to have weathered the storm, and he’s tackling the damned politics again, that’s his choice. But he seems so—how shall I put it?—unalive around the house. Almost withdrawn.” She thought about this for a bit, as she appeared to assess her thoughts by repeatedly stroking a fold in the napkin. Douglas watched intently as if she were performing a magical trick that might produce a bird or a rabbit. “And I have been trying to put my finger on it… what’s at the bottom of it all. There is something a lot deeper than losing the election—some level at which he has refused to plug back in, one might say….” She looked at Michael for understanding. “I think it’s because he can’t hear any of us. Can’t hear his music, even.”
“Oh, dear.” Douglas grunted as he reached for the marmalade. He had apparently decided to make the most of her visit.
“I think he needs some fun in his life. Not to be so serious. He needs to learn to flirt again and be mischievous. We have to take him out of himself. He’s a terribly attractive man, you know. I’m trying to get Pam over more often, they used to have such lovely evenings … but it’s no use without a hearing aid. Deafness can make one so lonely….” Her voice trailed off into some silent cavern she had created in her imagination.
“I’m very worried,” my father confessed.
Michael too had been troubled by Pardi’s gloom. His father’s life was a less flexible journey than his mother’s. It had dug its roots deeper in, so it presented fewer options. Mardi’s life resembled a series of raids; her enthusiasms disappeared as soon as she was sated, and she could always start over again. Maybe this flexibility was the ultimate gift of her imagination. Pardi had to reach back to things to which he was unavoidably attached—like the law—or continue along the course already set for his political life. His purposes were more fundamental and consecutive, his goals predetermined, and he was bound to them.
“Are you okay?” Michael had asked his father recently, when he seemed very tired after a meeting of the party executive.
Pardi had looked at the night sky as if to judge the time.
“Son, I’m just getting old.”
If his mother was mercury, his father was steel, Michael concluded, and was pleased with the analogy.
“I agree he needs a hearing aid. It’s a question of how to convince him.” Michael appeared to be taking over chairmanship of the meeting. Mardi relaxed; this was obviously what she had wanted.
Pressing her hands in a wider circle as though the napkin were Plasticine she was spreading, Mardi explained that she had talked to Moodie, and he had suggested a modern hearing aid that was smaller and didn’t have the embarrassing line trailing from it. It was available in England.
“When are you actually going away, Doug?”
Her elder son pulled the newspaper towards him, creating a line of defense, and smudging round prints of butter onto its surface which my father stared at with predictable displeasure. Douglas looked uncomfortable at the reference made to his upcoming trip. He was plucking up the courage to take Roy to London with him. Roy needed an operation that was very risky, but without which he would always be sick. Douglas had wrestled with the idea of leaving things as they were, but watching his son one day, looking out on a world the youngster could only observe as a voyeur, he decided that the risk was worthwhile. As if this was all he could muster of fatherhood, he concentrated a lifetime’s worth of responsibility into one fierce objective. He would live with an awful guilt if he lost the gamble.
Douglas had told no one about this added agenda, not even Carmen. As far as we knew, the London trip was a routine stop on his way to the new job in Africa. “I think the duty has been delegated …” he said distractedly, and looked questioningly at his brother.
“… to you,” Michael answered, and they laughed gently, looking at each other in a rare moment of camaraderie.
To others, an uncomfortable silence always charged the space between the two brothers. But no one ever knew for sure if they themselves felt uncomfortable. At Ebony Hill they always sat firmly faced forward in their habitual places on adjacent sides of the table where they need not look at each other.
Michael related better to his elder brother as a concept, or a phenomenon. Up close, his brother seemed to bewilder him. It was like watching a child pushing at round holes with triangular blocks; things never seemed to fit. Mardi often contrived their relationship. Maybe she had always done this, leaving them stranded in an uncomfortable scenario of her invention.
Although Michael and Douglas had seen little of each other as children, except on their seaside holidays, there were brief interludes in New York, when Michael would visit him at Columbia University, and in London, when they were both married and briefly shared a flat. Michael, always intrigued by uncommon talent and struggle, removed his brother from a void and placed him firmly, and at safe distance, among his pantheon of heroes which he mentally counted and replaced like a child’s regiment of toy soldiers.
His brother had progressed from being simply older, initially taller and therefore stronger than himself, to the mysterious sibling with an aura. Douglas who endured and survived a tough rural boarding school. Douglas who was a boxer and track star, emerging as the first sprinter to equal their father’s hundred yards’ record. The wry, unpredictable brother who graduated from school in a packed auditorium to the sound of discords from the chapel organ played by the music teacher, a humourless Hun alarmed by the lack of cooperation from the instrument’s stops, because Douglas, the deeply mischievous firstborn, had rearranged them incorrectly beforehand.
And then there was Douglas’ ambidexterity which Mardi referred to with odd semantic fascination. She spoke of it as though it were a parlour trick. One day, in what Mardi described as a churlish moment, Douglas announced that his mother had in fact concocted this condition to divert attention from her heinous crime in standing idly by whilst his teachers forced him to use the unnatural right hand, when he was in fact left-handed. But for Michael it was another talent which increased his awe of his brother, and it sailed endearingly along with the legend of him.
Since his return to Jamaica he was the brilliant brother with the doctorate.
Mardi looked across the table from one to the other in satisfaction, either at settling the problem, or at the harmonious way in which her sons had collaborated.
“There, that’s settled then,” she said, “you’ll track it down, Doug, and we will have to find a way to get it back here.” As she got up to go the phone rang. Michael went to the small alcove that was the nucleus of the haphazard house. He lowered his voice after the initial “Hallo,” and went down to his room clutching the phone, the extra-long black cord disappearing under the door.
“That’s a sure sign,” I observed.
“A sign? A sign of what?” asked Mardi.
“He’s talking to the girlfriend.”
“Oh, you children!”
“The Ouija board says he’ll get married again,” said Kik.
Pardi watched Mardi crossing the lawn as she returned to the studio, and noticed how quickly she still moved. Above her tall frame, her head darted like a small bird. Age for her was merely another wild horse to break. He loved her for that, particularly since nowadays he could feel an indifference in his own physical self. It liked to be left alone. And yet his was not a state of settling fat, more the narrow determination of quiet ruin. He knew this was his final age. He felt capable of just one last surge of energy. He did not speak about it but it lurked behind all his thoughts, not as a spur but as a way out.
He had watched his wife’s transplantations over the years the way he checked on the young grafts on his mountain farm. “It catch,” as old Dixon would say at the sight of the pale green shoots of reaffirmation. She had done it again. The new studio was a more earthen place than the one at Drumblair, which had smelled of trees and wood shavings. Every niche was sealed with a seam of clay, and its smell, damp and poignant as though from the secret folds of the ground’s body, seeped up out of the cement.
He had sat on the veranda for an hour this morning feeling excluded from Mardi’s locked world in the studio. He used to find the drift of short, sharp phrases from her carving reassuring. But it was quiet in the studio, for now she worked in clay. He had lost his sense of her, and the silence was full of her idiosyncratic secrets. It wasn’t till he saw her returning furtively from Ebony Hill, hurrying towards the studio, that he realized with surprise that she had not been in there at all.
She must have gone off on one of her “now let’s get the day organized” swoops. Probably the next intrigue in the continuing drama of keeping the family afloat.
Pardi was proud that she was recreating a moment of Jamaican history with the statue of Bogle. He knew this would one day stare down over the passing years from the steps of the Morant Bay courthouse. He was reminded again that the lens of the artist’s eye in its considered blink could have more impact on events than all the daily machinations of planning and building. As a politician he found the thought humbling.
Many people disagreed with Bogle being a national hero, but Pardi approved of the choice. Marcus Garvey was obvious; he had spoken to the concerns of the black world, especially in America. George William Gordon, like Paul Bogle, had played a role in the Morant Bay rebellion, a bright, self-educated mulatto who had been able to represent the emancipated Jamaican workers to the officials in desperate times. But it was Bogle who had been the ferocious hand of outrage hitting out from the body of unrest. Although the rebellion had been efficiently quashed and Bogle executed for his role in the uprising, he had become a symbol of change in the island, for he had expressed the will rather than the promise, the deed rather than the word.
Mardi was going to use fibreglass for the cast, a new substance which was said to be lighter and easier to use than plaster of Paris. She planned a monumental figure. It would be a hell of a job, and Pardi was planning to build a second studio for her, nearer the house, with a higher ceiling to accommodate the work.
“You’ll have to raise the roof,” he had suggested.
“I always do,” she had quipped.
He heard the door scrape, and she stuck her head out of the studio. “Norman, come and see before I cover the clay,” she called. “And be a dear … ask Tildy to bring us coffee.” She withdrew again, leaving the door ajar.
Uhuru looked up at the interruption but opted for staying put.
Pardi was hungry. He was on a new diet designed to shock the body with proteins. He had several boiled eggs a day, which Zethilda prepared with less outrage than one might have expected. Even Zethilda grumbled less around him. Sometimes Uhuru was the only one in the house whose manner was truly natural.
When he entered the studio, Pardi stood for a while absorbing the progress of the clay figure before him, while Mardi dampened rags over the small sink in the corner. She had done a good morning’s work. She was always reluctant to leave the peace of her studio. She valued this small wooden haven even though its solitude and defiance were modest statements compared to her studio at Drumblair. It was not lost in trees and high grass, but tucked into the edge of a lawn behind two large beds of ice-blue plumbago shrubs.
Beside the studio she had placed a grim-faced, cross-legged Aztec god who held a bird-bath aloft. The birds refused to use it, congregating with their usual squabbles around the more traditional stone bath that had been at Drumblair. “Well, they’re used to it,” she said, for they too had come from Drumblair. But she believed this savage deity protected her privacy, and on any occasion she deemed special, or to make a wish, she gave it an offering of an orange. The squat figure was intimidating, and we all took this ritual very seriously until one day, in a high wind, it blew off its plinth and we discovered that the god was made of plastic. The birds were very smug.
During the days leading up to what Mardi referred to as the “palaver of independence,” a smart new hotel, the Sheraton Kingston, had commissioned one of her carvings. The work was a very large bas-relief in purple-heart which she had to carve at the site, not yet having a place to work at home.
The hotel was still under construction, and she used to pick her way carefully over rubble among the workers who averted their eyes as she passed, and pointedly refused to acknowledge her presence. Occasionally she saw a “cut eye” or heard the anonymous suck of teeth behind her, which she knew was a message to her husband. She had lived through years of political animosity, but this was different. It was more personal and painful, as though the electorate felt betrayed.
It took every ounce of determination for her to finish her work. The composition was unusually controlled for her, completely stylized, and its discipline almost stoic. The outlines were so precise that she seemed to be simplifying life for herself, telling the story with neither emotion nor opinion.
She would never forget the raw sensation of working in front of other people. The inner world she needed to draw on was trapped beneath her defensive shell. She had once carved the figure of Christ on the cross at a church, but there the silence had translated into aloneness. She had worked high up on scaffolding, and the movement of people beneath her had sounded like the tentative steps of mourners trying—oddly—not to disturb the dead.
One morning she looked down from her perch at the Sheraton to see a toothless mason gaping intently at her as she worked. He was balancing a trowel heaped with wet cement, and wearing a kerchief knotted at four corners on his head, presumably to protect him from falling paint and dust. For a startled moment she wondered if he was planning to hurl the wet cement at her or, worse yet, at the carving.
Assuming he was compelled by the figure she was working on, Mardi explained, “She is Mother Earth,” and waited for his reaction.
He stared at the composition of man, woman and child amid the foliage that rose behind the emerging bulk of a woman. His arm relaxed, lowered by the weight of the trowel, and he lifted his chin and returned his bemused gaze to her. “Modor earth,” he repeated.
“Yes,” she went on, “that’s what I call her. You see, the man is responsible for so much … his woman, his child, even the things he grows on the land. But Mother Earth has even more to be responsible for. So she has to keep calm. For everything ultimately depends on her, and she can’t lose her head, not even in the bad times.”
He listened patiently to her sermon.
His name, he said, was Jeremiah. From then on there was a truce of sorts in the place, and although she never received a welcome, sometimes she caught a friendly glance when she arrived; if there was an argument, someone would whisper and look towards her and they would lower their voices, which demonstrated respect if not kinship. Now and then a worker would come and watch her for a while on his break, and the mason, Jeremiah, stopped every day after that first encounter.
One day when the carving was nearly completed, Jeremiah stood by its base, considering something he saw there. Mardi found him noticeably altered. He had changed his clothes to go home, and seemed much younger than before. He now had an overbearing row of large, even teeth that overwhelmed the frustrations of his face and gave him a stretched and awkward look.
“Who dis man response for, lady? De two woman?”
Mardi looked at the figures in the carving. “Oh, I see what you mean. No, no. The woman with the baby is his ‘baby-mother.’ Remember this other one is Mother Earth!”
Jeremiah frowned, though his mouth remained spread open over its bright new pearls.
Aware that Jamaicans know their Bible, Mardi embarked on a recitation with her most God-fearing voice:
Man that is born of a woman
Is of few days, and full of trouble.
He cometh forth like a flower,
and is cut down …
Jeremiah nodded with recognition, as he seemed to find the reference in his mind, and stated with satisfaction, “De Book of Job!”
She prowled on over the last phrase:
he fleeth also as a shadow
and continueth not.
Jeremiah looked at her as though she finally made sense, if not the carving. Then he studied the work for a last, long time.
“Me t’ink me unnerstan’, lady.” He hesitated, and then moved his face nearer to hers and whispered, “He cometh forth … me know who de man is now.”
She decided she’d call it He Cometh Forth.
Despite Jeremiah, she knew that she could never attempt to work in public again. That was why they built this small wooden studio on Regardless’ hillward brow. She didn’t know why, but the things she wanted to do, the things she felt she was meant to do, were much easier with her youth out of the way. Youth was like a too-tight skin which had encumbered her, and imposed expectations on her that always felt unnatural to fulfil. For the first time she felt peaceful… not like a motionless lake, but like a high tide swollen and brimming and secure in the moon’s gravity; the creatures of the sea had lived and died in her, and she held beautiful formations of coral, and crabs would feel safe to come to her…. When she woke in the mornings she was happy.
And she was free of Drumblair too. She had lived every minute of the house, but had not mourned it. Through her window she could see all the small houses going up on its site; because the place was unrecognizable; it caused her less pain. She sidestepped mourning for the past by throwing her future into Regardless.
Either influenced by that last difficult work, the new studio, or in a mood for experimentation and change, she had turned to the less resistant medium of clay. It was quicker, she thought, and allowed freedom of movement. And it was lovely. She felt she was back at the beginning, starting over with the elements. She loved the concept of these elements working together. Clay had to be watered, and it had to be fired. Earth, water, and fire.
She had a large silver kiln installed in the garage, which Batiste surreptitiously used to house seedlings, his going home clothes, or any secret he wished to keep safe from the ever intrusive Zethilda. Mardi regarded the kiln as a firmament, creation’s ultimate challenge, “so like life, and what comes through has stood the test!” she averred.
Her studio was littered with newborn terracottas and unborn clay. Mardi was determined to keep things simple, to keep light of heart. A twist of fate had offered her a new dimension. Carmen had written a children’s story called “Land of Wood and Water,” and Mardi agreed to illustrate it with pictures of animals. These became working drawings for small terracottas: Tyg the Tyger, Owlie the Owl, and Goatie the Goat. Tyg, spelled with deference to Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger,” she made for me. She said she was doing for me what she’d done for my father years ago with “Horse of the Morning.” She was giving me something I would value, and something that was in a sense an expression of myself. She challenged me to get to the bottom of the tiger’s nature, for she considered the tiger totally at one with the urges of his own being. She also said something about never wasting a movement, the significance of which I suspect I deliberately ignored.
The watchful Bull, whose horns kept his head safe from being touched, she made for Douglas. Pardi identified the animal as “a real meadow bull, sultry in the afternoon sun.” Having thus rewarded the family for being family, she made the sure-footed survivor, the goat, for herself. When Goatie the Goat came safely out of the kiln in one piece, we each got a phone call with the announcement “Baee, baee.”
Things seemed to be falling into place. The house, though small, was manageable. Pardi was broke from his years of politics, but their debts had been paid by the sale of Drumblair. He had a much smaller salary from the government now—even augmented by the fees from his legal briefs, it hardly covered the costs of his office and home. It was her steady flow of commissions that helped them pull through. And now this, a chance to do this vast statue of a national hero. She felt she had been validated by Jamaica.
Pardi had lowered himself into his customary seat. Tildy brought in the coffee with an indecipherable undertow of grumblings to do with Aunt Muriel’s cook, Mae.
“What’s the matter, Zethilda?” Pardi enquired, balancing his dripping cup over its saucer for a slurp of steaming coffee.
“Look like Mae gone off again, Barrista!”
“What did she say?” Pardi looked at Mardi for volume.
“Oh, dear, it’s really so tiresome.” Mae’s employment was interrupted by spells in the mental home. Mardi turned round from the window and leaned against the ledge of the shelves as though bracing for another family ordeal. “What’s happened now?” she shouted at Zethilda, who had no problem hearing her.
“Mae bay like a daag all night in the yard … look like it a full moon. Dat time she gone off ’er ’ead. Doctor send for the man dem wid de straitjacket.”
Mardi took a deep breath, blinked profoundly and mouthed, “It’s Mae,” at Pardi.
“Why does Mu persist?” he asked quietly.
“Because she’s a superb cook,” Mardi said almost to herself, and her eyebrows lifted as though in salutation of Mae’s gift. “There is something perverse about their relationship.”
Zethilda hesitated by the door. Having no further bad news to offer, she mumbled something about at least being able to sweep out chips, which Mardi realized was a criticism of her use of clay, and left.
In the centre of the room a muddy grey figure, still just bulk and outline, grew from the modelling stand. Already Pardi could sense the sturdy presence of Bogle. The original maquette Mardi had been working on was up at Nomdmi. It was a figure standing very straight in a great pause, both elbows pressed to his sides, with his right forearm lifted to hold a machete flat against his torso, the blade pointing to the ground. That head was slightly inclined; he seemed to be looking down at what he had done.
Even in the rough this figure was different.
“This is new,” Pardi said. “Both arms are up?”
This figure was astride, its arms extended like wings at shoulder height and bent at the elbows; the hands met at the centre of the chest and clutched the handle of a machete whose blade pointed towards the ground. She had worked on this only a few hours this morning, modelling clay with her thumbs and wire-tipped tools.
“Well, yes. You see, I felt the other was maybe a bit too”—she seemed to both pull and press the edges of the form, the way one would straighten clothes on the shoulders of a small child—“too tentative, really. You see, when I was down at Stony Gut, where he was born, I met this old woman who knew Bogle’s son … she was fascinating. And I came away with one word she used … bold … she said Bogle was a bold man.”
And she turned to look at Pardi as she said “bold,” blowing the word out of her small mouth as though setting a bubble adrift.
“I like the symmetry,” he said. “It is bold. The figure looks planted.”
“He can’t be apologetic, can he? He has to be so very sure. It’s one of those moments, isn’t it?”
“Indeed,” he said and got up to circle the model stand. She stepped back, giving him room.
“I see you have almost transformed the machete into a sword—as a symbol of the act. And the way he holds it… it’s more deliberate, more like a quest. I like that.”
“Bold. That’s what I want to capture. I was thinking, there are times when history cries out for a statement. Something irrevocable. Now Gordon, he was more a middle-class voice, wasn’t he? I mean, he spoke on behalf of the masses with a rational voice. That’s what we are still trying to do. Even Garvey … he was a psychological force. His was a great stone rolling, calling other stones. But this … this was just one brave moment, the sudden slamming down of a fist or a foot, saying, Enough! Stop! This was not conscious, but it expressed the will of the people. The blood of a dam that burst….”
She stopped and, in the ensuing silence, shrugged as if she was resigned to the certainty of detractors.
“One can say the act is just a bloody murder. I daresay a lot of people will feel that way. People say he’s overrated; he was a simple hero. But the world is mostly made of the simplest people. The workers, the uneducated, or the poor. And they may have the hardest time finding their voice, expressing their feelings, but when they do there are an awful lot of them, and you’d better listen to what they have to say!”
“Deacons are not necessarily simple people,” Pardi said.
She looked sympathetically down at the figure and pressed some small bits of clay firmly but fondly onto its head. “He would have known that his own life was over … he had done a terrible deed chopping up the Custos. But this was his great sacrifice to fight a terrible system.”
“The cross created by the arms aloft and the weapon perpendicular is reminiscent of the crucifixion,” Pardi said, sketching a small cross in the air before him.
“Yes. This is his sacrifice. But his head will be upright, looking at the future—both his demise and his hope for change. This is what I told Ray … I said, look dear, he is a fighter, not a martyr. In his face you will see confrontation and the sort of bloody determination that is at the heart of human outrage. No other cheek to turn … no happy heaven of resurrection … no fairy tale. This is a man whose moment of truth is today. He has staked everything …”
“Yes.” Pardi looked at the piece as though he could see the features there already. “You mean ‘God’s angels in the path to see.’ It’s no use seeing angels if you’re not prepared to wrestle with them.”
“That’s it! Not whether he’s done the deed or not done the deed. You’ve put it in a nutshell. He’s prepared to wrestle those angels.” She was lost in the hills of Stony Gut, fighting her way down treacherous winding paths towards a destiny in front of a country courthouse where the Custos of the parish would be slain.
And Pardi, letting himself be carried by the moment, fell into a half-forgotten recital of Browning:
And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is—the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
De-dah, de-dah, de-dah, de-de-dah
You of the virtue (we issue join)
How strive you? De te, fabula!
“Or something like that,” he trailed off.
“Kid, that’s ‘The Statue and the Bust’!” She was full of their life together, suddenly one with journey and road. “That was little David. And here we have the mighty empire looming over poor Bogle, like Goliath in the figure of the Custos, with all his pomp and ceremony. And the other day I heard that in addition to Browning’s wife being a Jamaican, his great-great-grandfather was a shoemaker and tavernkeeper in Port Royal. How it all comes round full circle in this life! Oh, Kid, we’ve got to get you listening again….”