IN FEBRUARY 1976 I moved out of my house in Anchovy and returned to the States to resume my normal activities there. In April, however, I was obliged to come back to Jamaica to attempt to answer certain questions concerning the Maroons that had become apparent to me only from far away. I rented a car, a banged-up yellow Toyota sedan, at the airport in Montego Bay, where Terron was waiting for me, and the two of us drove into the interior to the Maroon village of Nyamkopong, where I would stay for ten days in the home of a man who was my friend and who was also the village wise man, an old man of crackling intelligence and power who functioned as his people’s historian, jokester and magician, their conserver of language and rite. Terron was my guide and companion, my lightning rod in this storm, for it was that to me—a storm.
Following my ten days in Nyamkopong, I was to travel to the eastern end of the island to visit the remaining three Maroon settlements—Gordon Hall, Charles Town, and Moore Town—moving as impulse and circumstance indicated from one to the other of these tiny, isolated, mountain villages, sleeping in the back of my yellow Toyota and in huts and under the counters of crossroad shops and inns, interviewing the chiefs and old people, observing their conventions, recording their talk, learning their names for the things they lived among, trying to understand how they perceived themselves. Terron, of course, accompanied me throughout this journey, and even though we were moving through people and places and spiritual events that he himself had never encountered, he nevertheless protected me and facilitated my entry into this world. He was black and I was white; he was a Jamaican and I was a foreigner; he was a Rastafarian and I a questioning skeptic; he was a Maroon and I a direct descendant of their enemies; he was articulate and I was unable to speak without first translating my thoughts into words. Yet, despite my dependence on him, on his intelligence and good will, I trusted him completely, and because of this, the people I moved among, ordinarily angry against and withdrawn from strangers, white or black, foreign or Jamaican, seemed to trust me. The storm, therefore, continued to rage.
Traveling along the coast between Gordon Hall, huddled among the vertebrae of the seven-thousand-foot-high Blue Mountains that spine the eastern end of the island, and Moore Town, a village that seemed to have been glued to the side of limestone cliffs, Terron and I passed through Port Antonio, where we stopped for a few days, for Terron had been a child and adolescent there and had not been back since then, and he wished to visit a brother who still lived there and to walk through some of the rooms and along some of the streets of his childhood. After a few queries in bars along the waterfront, we learned that Terron’s younger brother Holmes was now living with a man named Evan Smith in Smith’s house on the edge of town.
I was exhausted by the time we reached Smith’s house. The demands on my attention during the past three weeks began to leave me at the end of the day too exhausted to recover fully by morning, resulting in a kind of entropy. I was running down. That very morning, in the shade of a bread-fruit tree in Gordon Hall, an old man with lines crawling over his face like snakes as he talked and hands holding sunlight like delicately woven baskets had revealed to me how the Africans, as he called himself and his people, had come to Jamaica. His tale had taken the form of a test. First a question, How did the Africans come to Jamaica? and my answer, I don’t know, the only correct answer, and then his answer, They flew over, followed by another question, Where did they land? Again, my answer, I don’t know, the only correct answer, with his, Over there on that hill. Another question, Where on that hill? and my confession of ignorance again, I don’t know, and his answer, On a tree. What kind of tree? I don’t know. A cashew tree. And why that tree? I don’t know. Because they were hungry when they arrived. And what was the name of this place then? I don’t know. Cashew Town. And who was here to greet them? I don’t know. Nonny the Warrior Queen and her brother Cudjoe. And who were her other brothers? I don’t know. Nyamkopong, Johnny, Quao, and Cuffee were the four brothers. And why are there four Maroon villages? I don’t know. Because there were four brothers, one village ruled by each brother. And so on, for hours, until at last, breaking, I found myself weeping, and the men in the room, the old man telling the story and my friend Terron and two younger men from the village, reached out and touched me and smiled into my eyes.
Now, after a supper of gungo peas, rice and chicken wings cooked up by Holmes, I was sitting at Smith’s rickety Formica-topped table with Smith across from me and a bottle of over-proof white rum between us. Holmes and Terron had gone out, apparently to visit old girl friends, cousins, aunts and uncles. Because of my exhaustion and because I liked this man Smith, I had declined their invitation to join them. Smith was in his early sixties, a man with a broad smiling face, a shovel-shaped beard speckled with gray, and a rasping, hurried voice. He was an intelligent man, one of the managers of the Port Antonio higglers market, but also an eccentric who lived alone, except for Holmes, who exchanged housekeeping and cooking for room and board. Smith had built his two-room cabin atop one of the bluffs that stick up like bony knees on the western end of the Port, had built it, evidently with Holmes’ help, shortly after his wife had gone to the States to live with her two daughters and grandchildren in the Bronx. He could have joined them, he said, but he had chosen to stay in Port Antonio. That was his chief eccentricity. He explained it by pointing out that his wife’s daughters were not his, though he had raised them as a father would, and that here in Port Antonio he was a man with many friends. I guessed that this smiling man’s wife was probably a strong-willed and demanding woman and that he might have a lady friend here in Port Antonio.
From the bluff I could peer out the open, curtainless window all the way down to the Port, could see its curve from Folly Point to Bryan’s Bay, with Navy Island in the middle, guarding the Port like a huge sleeping dog. The lights of cars driving up and down the dozen streets traced a map of the town, and the still lights of the banana boats, the private yachts and fishing boats marked the depths of the dark waters of the Port. Channel markers at the ends of Navy Island flashed like sudden insights, their locations forgotten as soon as the flash had passed, only to appear again seconds later seen as if for the first time. It was a warm, balmy evening, the smell of woodsmoke and cassia blossoms mingling with the breeze off the sea, while from the road far below me came the occasional honk of a car horn, from the darkness of the bush behind the cabin a transistor radio blatting reggae, the cry of a baby, a woman calling after her oldest son to come carry water as he scrambled down the rocky pathway to the road and the nightlife of the Port, bars and whorehouses and smoky backroom gambling dens or an interlude in someone’s packed dirt yard squatting on the ground in darkness and passing a ganja spliff back and forth.
Looking down at the Port, I naturally thought again of Errol Flynn, for he had kept his boat anchored in that darkness and, I had learned that afternoon from Holmes, at one time had owned all of Navy Island, had won it in a poker game at the Princess, a bar and whorehouse on the water-front. So I asked Smith if he had known Errol Flynn during the forties and fifties, when the man had made Port Antonio his primary place of residence. Talking with Smith was not like talking with Terron, because Smith translated himself for me whereas Terron would not, or could not. Terron spoke in images—not parables, allegories, symbols, or metaphors, but images—and translation destroyed his meaning. Smith, however, permitted different rules for the game, which of course meant that he communicated a different kind of information. Terron used language the way the old Maroons did, so that abstractions came across with the power of physical attacks, violently, irresistibly; Smith was better able to provide data. He was a type of Western man that Terron and the old Maroons and Rastafarians were not. In my fatigued condition, I was glad for the difference and for that reason risked a conversation concerning Errol Flynn.
Yes, he had known him, not personally, of course, only a few black people knew Flynn personally, those who worked for him out at his ranch or on his boat, and many women, though one may not want to call that knowing him personally. Errol Flynn was a bad man, Smith rasped, pouring himself an inch of rum, bringing mine back up to the same level. A bad man. Not like most men, though, who are bad because they have suffered or have something wrong with their heads. Errol Flynn was bad when he had no reason for it. Men cheat and steal and sleep with other men’s wives, and they mistreat children and sometimes they kill a man, and yet it’s always somehow understandable. There’s always an explanation. It doesn’t make them into good men, of course, but it explains why they were bad. With Flynn, though, it was different. There was never an explanation for why he did those things. He wasn’t even crazy.
He started telling me how Flynn had come to own Navy Island and what he did over there afterward, how people would stand on the docks in the Port at night and gaze in horror across the half mile of water to the flickering firelight and dancing bodies on the beach facing them. As he told this a slow smile spread over his broad face, almost as if he admired Flynn, so I asked him about DeVries and the death of his wife, did Smith know that particular story, insofar as it concerned Flynn? Oh sure, sure, everyone knew that one, but it wasn’t too interesting. What interested Smith were the special kinds of debaucherie that went on at Navy Island after Flynn had won the island in a poker game at the Princess. Everyone used to watch from the docks, he repeated, and once in a while kids, boys, would sneak into the water and swim across, but no one ever saw them again, except when a few weeks later their bodies would show up tangled in one of the channel markers or caught on the rocks at the point near Titchfield. The official report always said they had drowned trying to swim over to Navy Island, which was acceptable, Smith said soberly, because the current is strong in places, especially when the tide’s moving. Navy Island is owned now by big guys from Miami and Las Vegas, he told me. Flynn sold it to them before he died.
I didn’t believe him. I wanted to hear about Errol Flynn and Dr. Menotti and his son Dario and DeVries the butcher and his dead wife Waila. Did that happen the way Terron said it did? I asked him, and told him quickly what I understood Terron to have told me.
No, of course not, he said, laughing. A lot of people in Port Antonio believed that story because for most of them a Doctor was an obeah man. These Jamaicans are backward people, he explained, pouring another inch of rum into our glasses, and it’s much easier for them to explain events by pointing to magic, voodoo, and obeah than by pointing to the facts. The facts in this case were that DeVries killed his wife and then was seen trying to dispose of the body, so when he lied and told the police that she had gone to Kingston to visit relatives, they arrested him. The witness, a man who worked for Flynn, saw DeVries early one morning out at Dolphin’s Bay, saw his wagon and old horse, which were well known, by the road and then saw DeVries out on the cliff hacking at something with his machete. This all came out at the trial, and there was nothing DeVries could say to defend himself. Flynn and Dr. Menotti and his son had nothing to do with the case, except that the witness happened to work for Flynn and that was why he was out on the road past Dolphin’s Bay so early in the morning. And except that Dr. Menotti happened to own the land on both sides of the road at Dolphin’s Bay.
Beyond that Smith wasn’t even faintly interested in the Doctor and his son, and the only thing about Errol Flynn that interested him was what he used to do out there on the beach at Navy Island. But I could see that he was interested in the DeVries case itself, because he had known DeVries back then, he told me, had known him since childhood—they were both about the same age—and he had always been a bad man, wild, violent, and everyone had been saying for years that someday he would kill someone. Then, for some unknown reason, Smith was telling me about the hurricane of 1938. In those days no one knew when a hurricane was coming until a few hours before it actually hit, when suddenly the rain would slow and stop and the air would get heavy. Birds would fly inland in flocks, and the sea would turn silver and smooth as a fish’s belly. But the hurricane of 1938 hit Port Antonio in the evening, so that the only warning they had was the sudden cessation of the rain that had been falling relentlessly for three days and nights, a warning that most people misread entirely, believing that all it signalled was the welcome passing of the storm. People opened their stores, threw up their windows, went out for walks in the street, and had conversations on corners for a change instead of inside their houses and cabins.
Smith was a young man then, unmarried, and he had gone to a dance at the Marblehead Pavilion, where now there is a hilltop hotel with a famous view of the mountains and the sea. In those days it was a dance hall, and it was customary on a Saturday night for young single men and women to meet there and dance and walk home together in pairs. At the dance Smith met for the first time the woman he would marry, a woman slightly older than he who had two young daughters. Their father had gone to the States to work in the orchards and had jumped contract and hadn’t returned. The woman was a nurse, working for a doctor in Port Antonio, and she was lonely and she liked him, and he fell in love with her, and after they had danced for a couple of hours they had started the walk back down the hill to town, when the hurricane struck. The wind started to blow, in gusts at first, then steadily and building, and the rain started falling, first in billowing sheets and then, driven by the wind, rushing straight into their faces, as if being shot at them by a weapon. Heads down, they ran, the young man and woman, down the long, steep, hillside road to town, and then down the street toward the woman’s house, where her sister was staying with her two daughters.
Smith spent the next three days at the woman’s house, a three-room cabin located on one of the narrow alleys that cut back into the bush from the Port. He spent his time comforting the woman and her sister and children, nailing back boards and sheets of galvanized metal as the hurricane wrenched them loose, telling stories with them, singing songs, all of them warm and secure together for three days and nights while the hurricane battered the Port, the whole island, eventually the entire Caribbean and Gulf Coast. Until at last it moved away and slowly chewed a path north and east along the Atlantic.
The sky brightened into a silvery, satiny canopy, and the rain stopped. Birds returned from the hills behind the Port and hungrily headed out to sea. Dogs were barking, babies crying, engines starting up. The woman cooked Smith a large breakfast and sent him on his way, a happy man. Strolling down the street, whistling, nodding hello, and chatting with everyone he passed, he made his way toward his mother’s house, which was situated, as it happened, a few buildings down from where DeVries lived and kept his butcher shop. As he approached DeVries’ building, he first had to pass a small walled-in garden that the butcher had planted and tended, a vegetable garden that gave enough produce for his family with a little left over to sell to the higglers. Smith passed the wall, a flimsy structure made of scrap lumber and cast-off sheets of roofing tin, and heard a sound—Whap!—like the sound of someone beating a carpet. That seemed strange to him, beating a carpet right after a hurricane. Then he heard a man’s voice, cold and harsh, You bitch! Again the hard slapping sound, and again the curse, You bitch!
Smith stopped, his whistle had died, and he felt sorry for DeVries’ wife: It was a glorious morning, people were alive, the hurricane had passed over and had left them all among the living. But on a glorious morning a man’s wife was being beaten, Smith thought sadly. A shame. A damned shame. Again the crack of a hand against flesh, and again the curse. Smith cringed and walked slowly on, passing the ramshackle wall and nearing the house itself. He peered into the house as he walked by an open window and saw a woman inside, a woman he knew. It was DeVries’ wife. She was a pretty young woman, Smith told me, slender and brown. She was cooking ackee and salt fish—he remembered the smell—and she smiled at him. He smiled back, tipped his hat—he had a brown porkpie hat then; he wished he had it now—and quickly walked away, thinking about DeVries, trying to understand what kind of man would beat his girl friend with his wife not twenty feet away.
I got up from the table and discovered that the rum had been working on my body without my knowing it, for I had difficulty gaining my balance and nearly fell forward onto the table. Feeling like a tower about to topple, I stepped carefully outside and walked a way into the bushes, where, my feet spread, I stood and urinated, and while the water noisily splashed from my body, watched the town and port below, the half mile of black water between the docks and island that Errol Flynn had owned, and the flashing channel markers where the mangled bodies of curious boys had been found. On my right and about three miles away at the same altitude as the knob where I was standing were the lights of the hilltop hotel which in 1938 had been the dance hall where Smith had met his wife.
Smith was right—it was difficult to understand what kind of man could beat his girl friend when his wife was barely twenty feet away. That was the kind of man who could kill his wife, however. And a satisfactory way of explaining why he killed her, Smith had reasoned, was simply to describe him as the kind of man who would beat his girl friend in the garden while his wife was cooking breakfast next door. One didn’t need a motive to explain violence; there are none. One needed a psychology. And for Smith, and now for me too, DeVries’ psychology was available, whereas the Doctor’s and his son’s and Flynn’s were not.
I buttoned up and started unsteadily back toward the house, when suddenly I realized that, yes, the psychologies of the white men might well be a mystery for Smith, but not for me. I understood them, just as Smith understood DeVries. It was DeVries who had been the mystery for me, in Terron’s story as much as in Smith’s—a man who would peddle his own wife to another man and who, when it turned out that the client had slain her, would take her body and destroy it and toss the remains into the sea, a man who, when accused of killing her himself, would double in on himself and go silent, a man who would finally let himself be executed for the crime. That business of Menotti as obeah man, of course, I discounted altogether. After all, I understood the white men. I was one myself.