IN MY POEM ‘Guinea Woman’ (p.30) there is a sailor whose ship sailed without him from Lucea Harbour. The sailor was named George O’Brian Wilson; he was my maternal great grandfather, and he was an Irishman. He was probably Scots-Irish, because he named my grandmother Margaret Aberdeen Wilson.
The Jump Ship Irishman
who took that Guinea girl
would croon when rum
anointed his tongue
And she left to mind
first mulatta child
would go at end of day
to ululate by the Bay
I am O’Rahailly, he croons
She moans, Since them
carry mi from Guinea
mi can’t go home.
Of crossover griot
they want to know
how all this come about?
to no known answer.
Still they ask her
why you chant so?
And why she turn poet
not even she know.
If you want to know exactly when my great grandfather landed on the island of Jamaica, if you want dates and time and proof as to where exactly he came from – provenance, provenance – I’d tell you if I knew.
But he himself was a man who deemed it fit to inform no one from whence he’d come, and why he would never return there.
Except when sprung by spirits he’d be at home in the Gaelic tongue, O such a torrential singing.
According to family lore, George O’Brian Wilson jumped ship. Maybe he just slipped over the side and swam into Lucea Harbour some time during the second half of the nineteenth century and assumed a different life. He was a survivor.
The family thinks he may have been from Galway, but for all I know he could have been a jump ship sailor from Cork.
I am from Cork, he said, so I peeled off that barque
easy as you please,
rolled into the night sea, and rode the white horses
into Lucea Harbour.
I am of Cork. I can keep a secret. I stopper for my own
bottled-up business,
took my personal oath of abjuration:
I abjure, renounce and abhor empire’s supremacy and authority
over humanity in general and myself in particular.
I come from Cork of the mighty river Lee, of crystalline streams,
green mountains and hills.
I unable seaman brave the ocean; fortunate not to have been born
a woman.
For women overboard are drawn down to sea’s floor;
weighted as they are by long reach-me-down drawers,
wool stockings thick as porridge, bone stays,
follow-behind-trains and bustles, iron-hoop crinolines,
petticoats, leg o’mutton-sleeved dresses,
weighty as the Queen’s dusty old parlour drapery,
their family’s saved-up gold guineas stitched into seams;
babes suckling at breasts, small barnacles clinging to hems.
Unlike those drowned Africans who are clad scant;
there’s equal opportunity for watergrave available
to enslaved women and men,
ten times ten thousand sleep upon the floor of the sea,
but I’m of Cork.
My Aunt Rose was George O’Brian Wilson’s favourite.
He’d give her six soda biscuits from a battered tin.
To the other grandchildren he’d dole out two biscuits each, saying:
‘Life’s not fair’s the lesson here I’m trying to teach.’
On this one thing all agree: he religiously kept up St Patrick’s Day.
Same time every year, him and him friend dem congregate and drink
and sing and jig.
Him and him wild friends dem who march down like a band of old soldier
from a place name Vinegar Hill.
Vineega. My mother and her people pronounced it, Vineega.
He and the remnant from Vinegar Hill drank and fiddled and jigged,
offering up high praises to their beloved Saint Patrick,
in that small village where Africans did not fail to venerate
in chant and drum-sound their own saints.
O the mix and mash up that went on in that place,
to the melodies of Europe
rolled the riddims of the Congo:
Bob Marley become the avatar.
For if in winter I fall asleep listening to Dolores Keane
I am guaranteed to be transported to the Island
where Jamaicans have a peculiar habit of calling all flowers roses.
Like the people of Hibernia we exalt the rose.
Unlike in other places, the Jamaican rose is ungendered.
There is even a posse of Jamaican macho men who call themselves,
‘Black Roses’.
To us all flowers are roses
Accompong is Ashanti, root Nyomekopan
Appropriate name Accompong meaning warrior
or lone one. Accompong
home to bushmasters, bushmasters being
maroons, maroons dwell in deep places,
deep mountainous, sealed
strangers unwelcome, Mi no send you no come.
I love so the names of this place
how they spring brilliant like roses
to us all flowers are roses
engage you in flirtation, what is their meaning
pronunciation? A strong young breeze that just takes
these names like blossoms and waltz them around
turn and wheel them on the tongue.
There are angels in St Catherine somewhere.
Arawak is a post office in St Ann.
And if the Spaniards hear of this
will they come again in caravels
to a post office in suits of mail
to inquire after any remaining Arawaks.
Nice people, so gentle peaceful and hospitable.
There is everywhere here;
there is Alps and Lapland and Berlin
and there is, Carrickfergus, Clonmel, Donegal
Hibernia, Kildare, Newry, Middleton,
Waterford and Ulster Spring…
I walked to school down Leinster Road
in a city where Leitrim, Antrim, Killarney, Dublin,
Clare, Waterford, Armagh and Sligo were brought
from counties down to avenues and roads.
Honour to the Ones Transported.
Honour to the one who passed from the Nonesuch caves;
fossils of sea creatures shellacked to cave walls;
starfish medals pinned to cave-chests phosphorescent
beam-back to the ones lost on crossings.
Honour to those far from ground of where born;
who faced the sea with full heart and called
a new green field, Athenry.
For the ones force-shipped, as units of labour, for rebellion,
for stealing of Trevelyan’s corn, the ones bonded
to sing praise songs in strange lands,
who stripped off names like shirts and shifts of cotton or flax;
and lay them down as place markers of homeland.
Ireland lived at our neighbours’ the Lynches.
Mr Lynch, a man who could have walked undifferentiated
through any county of Ireland.
A man who named his son Dreamy; and his daughter Patsy.
A travelling salesman who belonged in the pages of Ulysses,
or on stage as a character in a play by Eugene O’Neill.
A man who’d done his wife some beyond-repair wrong
for she kept up spite and maliced him, till one day
she made her way across Busha Lynch’s flat Bridge,
passed through Bog walk and went to live in Sligoville.
First free village for the unslaved; Sligoville where you
looked for William Butler Yeats.
Country Sligoville,
I will arise and go with William Butler Yeats
to country Sligoville
in the shamrock-green hills of St Catherine.
We walk and palaver by the Rio Cobre
till we hear tributaries join and sing
water songs of nixies.
Dark tales of maroon warriors
fierce women and men
We swap duppy stories, dark night doings.
I show him the link of a rolling calf’s chain
and an old hige’s skin carcass.
Love descended from thickets of stars
to light Yeats’s late years with dreamings
alone. I record the mermaid’s soft keenings.
William Butler I swear my dead mother
embraced me. I then washed off my heart
with the amniotic waters of a green coconut.
In December Sally water will go down
to the Sally gardens with her saucer
to rise and dry her weeping orbs,
O to live Innisfree in a hut of wattles and daub.
My mother’s maternal grandfather would never visit Duanvale.
Duin means dark he said; and he himself had passed
through darkness. He had not part nor lot with David’s psalms;
he had passed barefoot, bareback through the valley of the shadow.
He would never again be shoeless: he became a cobbler.
He would never again be bareback: he became a saddler.
He was a man of large appetites: he had known great hunger.
He had been a man comfortless: he took a creole wife,
he took my Guinea great grandmother.
And I lived for thirty years near the cooperage in St Andrew hills
where wild Irish boys once steam-bent wooden staves
into big-bellied barrels strong to contain sugar seas
of amber rum.
Rowdy, rowdy, rowdy all the way home.
Passing by Dublin Castle on the way to Irish Town
stopping in at Red Light to visit the soldier Pegeens;
comfort women, comforters of the regiment.
Others called them Soldier Peggy; Pegeen, Pegeen,
my mother said.
My Aunt Ann married a man name of Moran. A brown man
with eyes like peridots which happen to be my own birthstone.
Peridot: gemstone of ones born under the sign of the Lion.
The man had lion eyes.
My Aunt Ann was alright with being by blood and marriage
somewhat Irish. She showed love for the sons and daughters
of Kathleen O’Houlihan by hailing cabs for those who’d tied one too many on.
Many is the cab fare and steadying hand she gave to any Dicey Riley
taken to the sup upon St Paddy’s Day on Montreal’s streets.
And every year she’d order by catalogue, boots that seal snow and ice
How do you feel about all this mix-up, this advantage-taking white man taking advantage of African woman business. Enraged? Angry? Bitter? Conflicted? All those things.
Hear Ann: No use eating out your liver over what done
happen already—
Have you seen what hate can do to a body?
How it can duin.
My aunts all went to sea themselves. Booked passage, boarded vessels, crossed oceans, made their own luck in foreign lands like O’Brian Wilson.
My aunt Ann loved the duin of her skin, dark as the cocoa her own father cultivated. He, a man who wanted no part of cane’s history, preferred to sweeten his morning mug of coffee or cocoa tea with logwood honey.
Reconciled with what occurred in that small village my Aunt Ann would say:
Our people, they came from all over. Some were sons of bitches, some were good people, some were chancers, some deserve honour, and at least one was a near-saint. They were griots and storytellers, free and enslaved, they were pagans, they were mystics, and did I mention a few were sons of bitches? But all of them made us, she said, and all of them made you a poet.