You will not find the body, which you may find incredible, or incredulous, but perhaps it is time at last to make space in yourself to believe such stories, and to believe the people who tell them. Go now then, back down to earth and then to Augustown; sit on a verandah and just be still. Just listen. It would be best, perhaps, if you go to the house that once belonged to Ma Taffy and where she once lived with Gina and Kaia. Ma Taffy is dead now, of course, of natural causes. But at that house they will remember her.
Now let the night settle into all the corners of that dismal little valley. Let the mongrel dogs settle into the potholes where they sleep. Let the music of speaker boxes play some sweet reggae music and let the guns bark. Let the men seated around the corner shop slap their dominoes on the table. Let everything find its rhythm, and then wait for someone—another old woman, perhaps—to turn her face towards the hillside that still wears its scar. Wait for a kind of remembrance to begin:
You remember Soft-Paw? Him was the first real badman from Augustown. Marlon was him rightful name. And him had a talent to just creep up on you and you don’t hear a thing. We all did think that it was Babylon that would kill him one day, but it wasn’t. It was him own people that do him in, throw the body over there in Mona Dam with concrete block chain up round him.
And remember Sister Gilzene—the one who did sing so beautiful? She dead on the same day when all that autoclaps did come to Augustown.
Lawd have mercy, yes! You remember that autoclaps?
The police left quickly that evening. After Gina fell, there was a sudden quiet that was not a peaceful kind of quiet. No. This was the quiet of old and hungry tigers that knew they still had within themselves the strength to pounce. Doors started to open and people walked into the streets, their backs upright, their shoulders squared, looking straight at the police—the police who knew this time to feel a little afraid because they did not have muscle enough to fight this.
After the police left, the schoolboys of Augustown tied together the laces of their old sneakers and threw them up high into the air until they caught over the electric wires—the wires that run from post to post, like Calvary repeating itself on every street. And why do they do this strange ritual, this throwing of the shoes whenever someone has been shot down? No one can tell you exactly. Maybe it is to create a path in the air, a suggestion to the dead that up there is where they should be walking.
The police left the body in the street. Ma Taffy went inside and came back out with white sheets. She wrapped Gina’s body with them and then neighbours helped her to lift the body out of the road and lay it down again in her front yard.
They blocked the roads that night. They dragged old fridges and stoves and tyres and sheets of zinc into the streets. They poured kerosene oil and set fire to it all. Black smoke rose into the sky and Augustown was hedged in by this burning. JBC-TV news and RJR radio reported that there was great unrest in the troubled community—that residents of Mona and Hope Pastures and Beverly Hills should exercise caution.
Still, at least one woman who lived up there in Beverly Hills was trapped in Augustown that night.
Remember her? Mrs. G. The principal lady. I believe the G did stand for Garrick. Good woman, that. I still see her now and then. Age catch up with her a little bit, though.
Mrs. G had gone back to the school. She had waited for an ambulance to come and take Mr. Saint-Josephs off to the hospital.
The teacher? Is him they call Oney now?
Yes—him same one.
The one-eyed madman is one of Papine’s regulars—a filthy, barefoot beggar whose hair has clumped into three magnificent locks. He wears a dirty patch over his left eye, but hardly anything else, so his long, crusted penis is often seen dangling by his knees while he walks about. The one-eyed madman sleeps on a bench in the middle of Papine Square. He does not sleep on a sheet of old newspapers, or on a pillow of cardboard boxes—just himself on the bare bench with the warm Jamaican night wrapped around him. If the square is his bedroom, then the street is his toilet. If you are in Papine early one morning, you might be so unlucky as to see the one-eyed madman squatting by the traffic lights, positioning himself over an open drain, a thick braid of shit pushing its way out of his body. For this, the one-eyed madman has had the foulest words and the largest stones thrown at him; he has been chased away, even by cars. Sometimes he runs towards Gordon Town and further up to the Blue Mountains, but always by nightfall Oney returns to bed down on his bench. By nightfall people will have forgotten the nauseating sight of his excrement, or they will have forgiven him. He is just another madman, after all. But because he is a madman, no one knows how to acknowledge the fact that they need him—that his presence gives an order and a sense and a balance to their days. It is almost certain that in the year that Oney dies, the people of Papine will walk around for months nursing an emptiness that they will not be able to explain. They will not care to know that the one-eyed madman’s leaving has upset their equilibrium so greatly.
On the evening when this man stopped being Mr. Saint-Josephs and became instead the one-eyed madman, Mrs. G stayed back after seeing him off in the ambulance. It was she who mopped out the classroom, then rearranged the desks in a neat and tidy order. By now the sun was down, and the crickets were chirping innocently, and she sat at one of the desks and cried. In the classroom she blamed herself, for on his very first day of teaching Mr. Saint-Josephs had stormed into her office. Should this have been a sign to her? And after he had left, Mrs. G had stared at the door and thought to herself, “This is not a man to be teaching young children.” Yes, she had actually had that precise thought, and so it was this that came back to accuse her. She wept.
The minute hand on her watch had spun around the dial twice before she decided it was finally time for her to go—that Mr. Garrick would be at home, worried. She drove out of the school, but soon found that every road in Augustown was blocked, hedged in by fire. She made no fuss about this. She parked the car, stepped out of it and into the warm night of Augustown. It wrapped itself around her in a welcoming way. The night seemed to tell her that she was a part of this.
Mrs. G walked, and she walked until she found the lane where candles had been lit all the way down and shoes had been thrown over the overhead wires. She walked up to Ma Taffy’s verandah, where the old woman was sitting in absolute silence, the boy Kaia weeping into her lap.
“Welcome,” Ma Taffy said. Mrs. G nodded and took a seat herself. There would be a time for these two women to talk, but that time was not now.
In the streets they had set up some big speaker boxes and they played sweet music throughout the night. The Tamlins singing “Baltimore,” and Bunny Wailer making them Rock and Groove, and J. C. Lodge reminding them that somebody loved them.
Oh Lord, you remember those tunes? Now them was singers!
There wasn’t any great outpouring of sadness. Nobody read a Bible verse. Nobody offered any remembrance or any impromptu eulogy. No one went up to Ma Taffy and Kaia or Mrs. G to tell them how sorry they were, and how everything was going to be OK. No. It wasn’t going to be OK, and it wasn’t that sort of night. They were just easy together. Sitting out in the streets and drinking rum and Red Stripe beer, and all the time the body was just lying there in the yard, wrapped up in the white sheets.
It was getting close to midnight. Then Ma Taffy got up, just like that, and said, “Turn it off. Turn off the music.” There was a great shuffle to do this. The lane slipped into a sudden silence. Ma Taffy descended the stairs and went into the yard. She drew Kaia along with her. They stood over the body. Ma Taffy began to sing.
Hers was not the best singing voice. It was old and crackly and could not stay on any one note. It didn’t matter. She sang. Mrs. G went over to join them, as if she were family, and she put one hand around Kaia and the other hand she stretched out. That’s when the body began to move.
No one gasped. No one fainted. It was that sort of night. It was a night when such things seemed like the most normal thing in the world. More people were now joining in on the song. Who could offer a descant offered her descant, and who could offer a bass offered his bass, and who could offer a tenor offered his tenor, and so on.
Just like that, a thing will rise up into the air. And so they sang. The body rose off of the ground. They sang some more. They sang until the body was floating above them, wrapped in its white sheets. Now everyone was lifting their hands up to the heavens. The body just kept rising and rising as if it wanted to join the crowded sky.
On the night of the autoclaps, the sky was velvet blue. A sliver of moon was shining.
The body rose, the sheets billowing about it. It grew smaller with distance. It soon looked like a white bird up there, flapping its wings. The bird oared the night air. It circled around Augustown. It squawked.
Then the bird began to beat its wings harder. It rose even further up into the sky. It rose so high that it soon became just a dot of white light.
And they will tell you that this is where she is right now, risen up there in the heavens, in a section of the night sky that overlooks the vast sands of the dry river and the poui trees and the zinc fences and the lanes that run in untidy directions; that overlooks Kintyre and ’Gola and Dread Heights and Armagiddeon Yard. Up there is sky and emptiness, though such emptiness depends on human presumption, a terrestrial idea of scale and distance. In fact, there are many things up there, many kinds of stars: pulsars, quasars, white dwarfs and red giants. There are asteroids and meteoroids and comets and dust. Up there, there is water—endless lakes of it—enough to drown the earth a million times over. And there are clouds that taste of raspberries and that smell of rum; and planets of ice and planets of diamond; and at least a dozen dogs and chimpanzees—the remains of failed space missions, their carcasses forever floating about in space. Up there is the Lion of Judah, the black god, Marcus Garvey, Bedward, Emmanuel-I, Selassie-I, Jah Rastafari. And these are just the things we have names for.
Gina? That person that once was me. I am none of these things—not asteroid, not star, not angel. I have become something else. I am just another “Once Upon A Time,” another “Crick Crack,” another “Quiet as it’s kept,” another Invisible Man, or perhaps Woman; just another voice without a mouth; another consciousness without a human body; another story pulsing its intermittent light among the galaxies. I am floating.
But wouldn’t you like to be me? For what is more human than this, the desire to escape the troubled earth and its depressing gravity? What is more human than the desire to rise above it all, to fly?
Down there is Augustown. 17° 59' 0" North, 76° 44' 0" West. It sits between two hillsides, and one of these carries on its face a scar—a scar that feels to many as if they wear it on their own skin. Down there they look up each night to see me and imagine that one day I will return, more dreadful than ever, with lightning in my hands and with judgement to mete out on Babylon. If only it were so! But it is not. It is not so. I am simply here, up here, another nameless thing in the sky.