THE FIRST TIME I visited the country of Jamaica was in mid-December 1975, and I stayed until February 1976. Though I knew little about the island and the people who lived there, I had read two or three travel books on the subject, and I had visited other Caribbean islands in the past—Saba and St. Maarten’s in the Dutch Antilles and the several U.S. Virgins. But always as a tourist and never for longer than two fun-filled weeks. In the fall of 1975, however, it became apparent that I was going to be freed of my teaching obligations for an unusually lengthy midwinter break, so I determined to spend that time and regularly forwarded bi-weekly paychecks where I would not have to wage a day-to-day battle against the cold, snow and ice of another New England winter. I would go to some Caribbean island, any Caribbean island, and rent a house on a breezy hill overlooking the sea, staff it with a polite, scrupulously clean, black-skinned housekeeper and cook, smoke cigars I couldn’t afford to pay the import duties on, drink frosty rum drinks in the cool of the evening, and maybe take a swim in the pool every morning before I began my regular three or four hours’ work on the novel I had been writing for the last three years. I might even be able to rent a terraced flower garden with a fussy but cheerful gardener to tend it.
What I especially liked, however, was the idea of living in a pastel-colored, stucco-walled house up on a hill and away from the tourists, those loud, sunburnt, overweight Americans and Canadians, their whining children, their nervous shopping for souvenirs, their constant computations of the rate of exchange. This time, I told my wife and children, we will not be tourists. This time we will not even have to see any tourists! We will see only the natives! They will be black, of course, and mostly slender, smiling, and poor—but when they learn that we are not tourists, they will be honest, and they will like us, because even though we are rich and white, we are honest and we like them.
I phoned an old friend from college, a white man who had been raised in Jamaica and whose parents still lived there. My friend, whose name was Upton West, was a photographer who had recently become a successful producer and director of feature-length documentary films and books with subjects like auto racing, body building, integration in the South. He lived in New York City and New Hampshire, and when he was in New Hampshire I occasionally saw him for dinner, when we would eat fresh vegetables from his garden and thick slices of beef cut from black Angus cattle raised on his own land. Later, over brandy and cigars in the library, we would talk about our days at Chapel Hill, famous people he now knew, the future of the New Left, and sometimes the beauty and mysterious complexity of Jamaica.
Upton loved Jamaica and returned there often to visit his parents and their friends. Two years ago he had taken a whole month away from the production of his film on body builders to travel alone over the entire island, snapping thousands of photographs that he had vague plans for bringing together someday in a large paperback book. You would love Jamaica, he often told me. There’s a beauty and a mysterious complexity to the island that are unmatched anywhere in the world.
I was sure that Upton knew what he was talking about, because he had traveled to most of the beautiful and mysteriously complicated places in the world. If you ever decide to go down, he told me, let me know and I’ll have my mother find you a house. She dabbles in real estate. She trains the help in her own house. Upton’s father was a retired British army captain who dabbled in insurance in Montego Bay. Upton always referred to his father as the Captain. His mother he called Mother. She was an American out of a well-connected family from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and her marriage to the Captain had been celebrated in the society pages on three different continents. Upton thought that was amusing and once had shown me the clippings.
Over the phone I asked him if he thought his mother could find a house for me to rent for two months, a house close enough to the sea and a city like Montego Bay that I would be able to obtain the usual amenities, yet far enough into the country that I would not have to cope with the tourist business. Three bedrooms, a pool, if possible (for the kids, I explained), and a housekeeper who would be able to take care of some of the cooking. It doesn’t have to be anything luxurious, I assured him. We’re quite willing to accommodate ourselves to a few inconveniences. It was to be a working trip for me and an escape from the New Hampshire winter for my family.
Eager to share his beloved Jamaica with an old friend, Upton immediately contacted his mother and in two weeks I was corresponding with a man named Preston Church, an electrical contractor in Montego Bay who owned two houses in the small town of Anchovy twelve miles outside of Montego Bay. He lived in one house himself; his son and his son’s family had lived in the other before their departure for Canada. I did not then understand or attribute any meaning to this departure for Canada, because I did not then understand or attribute any meaning to the flight of capital and capitalists from a country whose government had determined to eliminate, even by gradual and democratic procedures, cap-ital and capitalists. Nor did I understand or attribute meaning to the flight of white people from a black country that had always been black but had only recently come to be governed by people who were black.
The son of Preston Church, I learned from Upton, had been a schoolmate of Upton’s and for ten years had helped his father run the contracting business in Montego Bay. They had done exceptionally well during that period, because from 1965 to 1975 there had been a building boom along the north coast of Jamaica, as increasing numbers of Americans and Canadians decided to invest capital in the construction of three- and four-bedroom villas that could be rented to other Americans and Canadians. Now, however, as Upton explained it, there had come a leveling off, and probably young Church could do better for himself in Canada. Therefore, when the elder Mr. Church wrote and told me that he would be willing to cut the cost of renting his son’s house practically in half if I would be willing to pay with a personal check made out to his son and mailed from my American address to his son’s Canadian address, I saw nothing wrong or particularly unusual about the arrangement. Naturally, his cutting the rent in half was something of an aid to my not seeing anything wrong or unusual. I merely felt lucky. It’s amazing, I thought, how lucky I am.
It was the wife of Preston Church, Abbie, who met us at the airport in Montego Bay. She was an extremely short woman with a blocky body and the tiniest feet I had ever seen on an adult. She chain-smoked Craven A’s and talked rapidly, unsmilingly, and walked ahead of everyone on her tiny feet first to the car rental desk, where I rented a red Toyota sedan, and then to her dark gray Mercedes, where her driver waited.
The house, when we finally saw it, was even more appropriate than I had hoped—four bedrooms, if you counted the maid’s quarters, high ceilings and sliding glass doors opening onto patios and terraces that looked down two thousand feet of hillside jungle to the sea. And a pool, too, with lights for night swimming. There were lights and switches all over the house and grounds, and it took an hour for Abbie to show me which switches operated which lights. I could flick a switch over a kitchen counter and flood the side yard with light from a cotton tree; a switch next to the bed in the master bedroom turned scary nighttime into comforting midday all over the grounds; a bank of switches on the patio threw the narrow, winding, private road out into the open for several hundred yards back down the hill toward the main road, halfway to the village center; and hidden in the leaves of the crotons and macca bushes and forty feet up in the breadfruit trees scattered through the terraced gardens in front of the house, blue- and red-lensed floodlights had been secreted, so that a flick of the switch on the living-room wall next to the glass doors would turn the place into something that resembled a cocktail lounge in a Florida suburb. Abbie was naturally quite proud of this system; apparently there was one to match it for the house she and her husband lived in, which, as it turned out, was only two hundred yards away, our only neighbor up here on this hill, for, as it further turned out, the entire hill was owned by Church.
When Abbie had finished showing the place to us and explaining how all its machinery worked and had introduced us to Caroline, the young woman who would be our housekeeper, a small, smiling woman whose starched uniform was so white and whose skin was so black that I did not see her, she wheeled on her tiny feet and trotted her box-shaped body back to her Mercedes where her driver, a man whose face was also so dark that I did not see him, sat reading the Daily Gleaner. Then she turned and said with sudden gentleness that my first name was the same as her son’s and that my two children, though younger than his, numbered the same as her son’s. How old are you? she asked me. I told her my age, thirty-five, and she sighed, then stuck her cigarette into her mouth and jerked herself into the front seat next to the driver. As she closed the door, she spat, It’s all that goddamned Michael Manley’s fault! Then she drove off, leaving me and my family in our house in the tropics.
One Sunday morning about two weeks later, by which time my family and I had more or less accommodated ourselves to our new environment—insofar as that environment went no further than the luxurious and, as I had by then discovered, walled-in compound owned by the Churches—my friend Upton and his father the Captain drove up in a dark blue Land Rover. During a pleasant breakfast on the terrace, while the Captain jovially complimented my wife on the quality of her coffee, Upton told me about the Maroons. It was the first time I had heard the word.
Upton had an interesting and engaging way of speaking: his accent was not quite British, not quite Proper Bostonian, not quite white Jamaican, but a unique amalgam of the three, which he uttered in a nasal monotone that made him sound as if he were reading aloud, an effect heightened by his habit of speaking not only in complete sentences but in whole paragraphs as well. The Maroons, he said, are a beautiful and mysteriously complex people with a noble and violent history. Direct descendants of the Ashanti, who were the most ferocious and independent of the Africans brought over to Jamaica in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they escaped in large numbers into the unsettled and inaccessible bush and quickly banded together. For the next hundred years or so they fought a guerrilla war against the British, until finally the British had to settle with them by granting them relative independence and several large sections of land back in the Cockpit Country here in the west and up in the Blue Mountains in the east. Since then they’ve lived in relative isolation, with many of the old African ways preserved, in small villages that are governed by self-elected officials. They’re not unlike, Upton said as he refilled his cup, certain American Indian tribes.
Remarkable people, the Captain added. The Captain’s way of speaking was opposite to his son’s: he never spoke in sentences. Expletives, fragments, bits and pieces. Honest too, he said. Not like your typical Jamaican at all. The Ashanti in them. Makes them proud. Quite a remarkable people. Fierce still, even today. Who…? he asked his son. What…? His name, the chief up there in Nyamkopong?
Phelps was his name, I believe, Upton said. Colonel Martin Luther Phelps was what he called himself. Upton had visited Nyamkopong two years ago during his tour of the island, and he had photographed the chief and a man Upton said was his Secretary of State. There was a book I should read, a brief history of the Maroons published and sold by the Sangster Bookstore chain. Then, Upton instructed me, I should drive up to Nyamkopong one day and meet Colonel Phelps. Upton said I should use his name as an introduction. Just tell him you’re a friend of mine, he said, getting up to leave.
Quite, the Captain added. Everyone on the island. Upton meets them all. Sooner or later.
Then politely, even graciously, the two men made their way along the crushed stone pathway to their Land Rover. Upton was returning to Manhattan that afternoon; he was scheduled for tomorrow’s Today show. The Captain had to get back to Montego Bay and start preparing his annual first of January breakfast for a group of black Jamaican men he called “my old boys,” veterans of the Great War. Bit of a ritual, the Captain explained. Means quite a lot to the old boys. Biscuits, ham, eggs, lots of coffee. Fewer and fewer of them every year, though, he said, as he climbed into the Rover.
From the driver’s seat Upton called out to me. Get up to Nyamkopong on January sixth, if possible, he advised. That’s a day of celebration up there, the main Maroon holiday. It ought to be fantastic, from what I’ve heard. In fact, one of these Januarys I’m coming down precisely for the purpose of photographing that event. Maybe I’ll film it with a small crew for television. It’s the sort of thing that goes over beautifully on PBS.
I assured him that I’d do exactly as he had advised. I’d buy the little history of the Maroons, and I’d drive up there on January sixth, and I’d certainly look up Colonel Phelps. Give the old boy my regards, Upton said, waving good-bye. I waved back.
The Fighting Maroons, by a man named Carey Robinson, is a slender, unpretentious, and skillfully written history of the Maroons, popular among foreigners in Jamaica and sold, therefore, at the several stationers and bookstores in Montego Bay and even at some of the fancy hotel shops along Gloucester Avenue near the beach club at Doctor’s Cave. It describes, with surprise and admiration, a courageous and intelligent people, slaves who chose the wilderness over slavery and who managed to survive that choice. The book was written, I deduced, by a white Jamaican for an audience of white readers who wished to know more about the beautiful and mysteriously complex land of Jamaica. It was not written for the reader who wished to know more about the ugly and bewildering history of the enslavement of black Africans in the New World. And it surely was not written for the reader who felt morally compelled to attempt to imagine how it was to face the choice the Maroons faced: whether to be a dumb domesticated animal—livestock—or to live the life of a feral pig—livestock gone wild.
For that is where the word maroon originated, I learned as I read Mr. Robinson’s little book. It derives from the Spanish cimarrón which was a term generally used in the New World to refer to feral cattle, but in particular and in Jamaica to pigs that had taken to the woods and gone wild (again). A beast wasn’t a cimarrón merely because it had successfully escaped into the swiftly rising hills and wooded, pathless mountains behind the plantations along the coastal plain; it became a cimarrón and, in the case of human beings, a Maroon, only when it had managed to survive there and breed with others like it and provide food and shelter for itself generation after generation.
The morning that Upton West was being interviewed in New York on the Today show, I drove down to the village of Anchovy from Church’s hill and then down the winding seven-mile-long incline to Montego Bay and purchased there a copy of the book he had recommended. I read it that afternoon and that night determined to take Upton’s suggestion that I visit Nyamkopong, the nearest of the four remaining Maroon enclaves in Jamaica. I would go there the following morning, the third of January, alone, and, if it seemed “safe,” I would bring my family back with me on the sixth for the festival that Upton had mentioned over breakfast.
My anxiety over the safety of such a venture was not based on anything that I or members of my family had experienced in the several weeks we had been in the island. Rather, it was the result of a hundred conversations I had by then had with white Jamaicans, with Upton West’s parents, with the Churches, with Mr. and Mrs. Hilliard Beard, a retired American publisher and his wife who lived on the side of the hill adjacent to the Church property, and with a half dozen or so of the similarly white, retired and semiretired residents and visitors these people had introduced me to. Upton’s mother would telephone and invite me to come by their home in Reading for lunch or for drinks that evening, and, because of my friendship with Upton, my idleness and what I thought was my genuine curiosity about this class of human beings, I would accept. When traveling, one condescends to spend a considerable amount of time with people one would find excuses to avoid when at home. Or at least one believes he is condescending. As did I, when I would graciously accept their invitations and later when I would attempt to interest and charm these people and their always white, well-dressed guests—doctors, lawyers, realtors and developers, and, occasionally, because I was known to be somehow “in the arts,” clothing designers with boutiques in Montego Bay, Palm Beach, and Fifth Avenue, or a London librettist or the brother of the president of a large midwestern university.
At these gatherings the conversation seemed to turn obsessively to the subject of imminent racial war. A number of newspaper and magazine articles had recently appeared in the United States and England suggesting that racial war was a likely if not a necessary consequence of the Jamaican prime minister’s economic policies, and there had in fact been a recent rash of ghetto fires and street shootings in Kingston, events that from the distance of calm, affluent Montego Bay looked clearly political and, therefore, racial. So far, however, no rich or white people had been killed or even shot at. Still, the imagery was there, fire, and wild-eyed, ganja-smoking black people with guns and machetes and raised fists, and a charismatic, self-proclaimed “socialist” leader who was frighteningly popular with the illiterate masses. And the history was there too, three hundred years of relentless racial oppression and economic exploitation. Also, it was a fact that these white people, with their fashion designer gowns and jackets, their cut-crystal cocktail glasses, their parquet floors and real estate holdings, had a lot to lose. Many of them had children in private schools and colleges in New England. Many of them owned lovely, walled-in estates along the coast and in the hills around Montego Bay. Many of them owned several twenty thousand dollar automobiles, jewelry, antiques, boats, Belgian hunting rifles for dove-shooting expeditions in Nicaragua. Most of them had fleets of servants. And all of them, without exception, said that they loved Jamaica.
For these reasons they feared economic collapse and racial war as if the two events were one and the same. If the balance of payments looked bleakly out of balance, they would purchase a second vicious Doberman pinscher to patrol the yard. And if a crazy black man on the street was rude to them one morning on the way to the office, they would smuggle another thousand dollars to Miami that afternoon. Thus racial terror was explained in economic terms, and dissatisfaction with economic policy and conditions was expressed in strictly racist terms, so that it was not shocking, once it had occurred, for me to find myself listening to an elegantly dressed and manicured physician my own age recommend forced sterilization as a solution to the problem of “overpopulation.” It was, of course, the poor who were too numerous and whose uncontrolled breeding with each other made them only more numerous. And since with rare exceptions in Jamaica for three centuries the rule had been, simply and purely, as one’s skin color darkens so does one’s poverty approach inescapability, then the calm, good-looking physician before me was not only recommending forced sterilization, a kind of murder, but the forced sterilization of poor black people, a kind of genocide.
This was madness I had never seen before. And it frightened me. How could the island be safe for people like me and my family if people like this man had been running it for hundreds of years? So in that way I began to share in their fear of imminent racial warfare, and I too began to anticipate signs of its coming by how black strangers treated me on the streets of Montego Bay, in the marketplace, in the tavern at Anchovy, even in my own kitchen when I chatted with Caroline, the young woman I had hired as a housekeeper.
The morning I went to Nyamkopong for the first time I sat out on the patio and ate my breakfast of chilled mango, coffee and boiled eggs and talked with Caroline. She stood in the doorway to the dining room, one hand lightly touching the doorframe, one foot slowly scratching one of her muscular calves, and gave to the content of our conversation barely half her attention, or so it seemed to me, the rest of her attention scrupulously watching out for disaster. Before me a gold-tinted mist drifted up the blue-green, slowly ascending valley to where, a half mile west of the house, a pair of long ridges came together. To the east was the turquoise sea, and looking south I could see the curve of Montego Bay and the tan and white cluster of cubes that made up the city. A pale blue Scandinavian cruise ship had docked at Freeport where, presumably, tourists from Stockholm were already lining up to buy duty-free Japanese wristwatches and English china. Behind me the hill shouldered a few hundred feet further up to protect the Churches’ other house, more exposed to the sea and breeze than the one they had rented to me, their son’s home, the house built by the man my age, with my first name too, who was now in Toronto depositing the checks I had mailed him from my home in New Hampshire. I now understood why I had been asked to pay him in that careful a way, why the rent for this estate had been so absurdly low, why I felt one kind of guilt for having accepted the bargain offered by the Churches and a wholly different kind of guilt for having accepted the bargain offered by Caroline the housekeeper, whose time and labor cost only fifty cents an hour. Fifty cents an hour! I had exclaimed to my wife. Imagine that! Her husband’s out of work, and she has five children. How do they do it? I had asked, as if it were a trick performed by a carnival magician. That had been in the beginning, of course, for now, after two weeks of consorting with people who were complaining fearfully of having to get along on a hundred thousand American dollars a year in a country whose rate of exchange worked in their favor, I no longer thought of Caroline’s survival as a magician’s trick. I was beginning to see that it had something to do with character. Insights like this were only glimpses, however, glimmers that only now and then filtered through the fog of my greedy ignorance.
I asked Caroline about the Maroons. Had she ever heard of them?
Oh yes, sir, she had heard of them all right. “Dem ol’ Africans,” she called them, smiling.
What are they like? Is it all right to drive up there to Nyamkopong and visit them? I asked.
Don’t know, she shrugged, slowly scratching her calf with the toe of her other foot. You planning to go up there? she asked.
When I told her that I certainly was, and also that I planned to go up alone, her eyes widened in what looked like amazement and admiration. Then, saying nothing more, she turned and went back to the kitchen to prepare breakfast for the rest of my family.
I drained my coffee cup, grabbed my camera from the mahogany sideboard in the living room, and went out to the car. Inside, with the window glass and windshield silvered over by a skin of dew, I suddenly felt cut off, as isolated as a dream in a stranger’s sleep. The unreality of the last two weeks and my compulsion to sort out the truth by thinking about it, by reasoning and by applying to other people’s terrified descriptions of their world my own understanding of history, had driven me deeper and deeper into my head. Jamaica, which in the beginning may have been for me no more than an image off a travel poster, was now becoming an idea. What made it painful was that it was an idea I did not fully believe corresponded to any reality outside the books I had read, books that were not about Jamaica but were instead about abstractions like history and race and economics.
And the book I had read about the Maroons—what was that really about, I asked myself, but the historical, racial and economic superiority of the people the Maroons had fought against? And if I believed that particular idea was true, then the reason I was driving into the backcountry to see these people for myself was a tourist’s reason—merely to wonder at their quaint peculiarities. But if I did not believe that idea was true, in heading off to where no one had invited me, I was going as a social scientist, to collect evidence that would support my own idea about history, race and economics. Is that all I can do with this place, these people? I asked myself. Is it only possible for me to think about them? Why can’t I simply see them, talk to them, engage myself with them the same as I do with my neighbors in New Hampshire? The people I dealt with here were essentially the same as the people I dealt with at home—carpenters, farmers, upholsterers, and now and then a professionally trained person, a doctor or lawyer or schoolteacher, and once in a while a rich man or woman. At home, though, my neighbors were people, concrete people as real as I; here they remained abstractions, and only I was real. It made me feel very lonely. Part of the problem was race, of course. But it was larger, or at least much more complex than anything I’d yet imagined. I believed that I was just as cut off from the white people I had met as I was from the black, just as separated from the middle-class American and Canadian tourists as from the decadent Jamaican neocolonials, just as alien to my old friend Upton West as to the black woman who served me coffee on the patio. It was as if I had slipped into an episode of Pilgrim’s Progress and everyone I met there and every place I went to had a strictly allegorical function and no real life of its own—except for me, who, alone among the characters, was also the reader of this book.
It was still early, about eight o’clock, when I left the compound. That was how I referred to it now, the compound, because of the cut stone walls, the elaborate lighting system all over the grounds, and the location of the two houses up here on the hill facing the sea and valley, our well-protected backs to the village and villagers of Anchovy. The Vikings had built compounds like this when they conquered Ireland and Scotland: walls to hold off the peasants behind them, and terraces and towers facing the sea, where the next set of raiders would come from, pillaging seafarers like themselves who would come to displace them, as the British had displaced the Spanish here in Jamaica, and then the British had been displaced by the Americans and Canadians, and now, if you believed the Wests and the Churches and their friends, the North Americans were being displaced by the Cubans or possibly the Russians.
Down the hill I drove, following the steep, narrow lane to the village, goats scattering before my car and scrambling nimbly up the rough limestone hillside to stop and stare back at me with dull irritation, scrawny chickens fluttering for the gutters as I passed the dozen or so small cinderblock houses at the base of the hill where the lane crossed the railroad track and turned onto the main road that connected the interior and the southwest coastal towns of Black River and Savanna-la-Mar to Montego Bay. Strings of children in uniforms—boys in khaki shirts and pants, girls in brightly colored jumpers and white blouses—were walking to school, while cars and huge smoke-belching buses top-heavy with sacks of yams, breadfruit, and greens whizzed past, horns blasting at the curves and quick bends in the road to force the children into the gutters as the vehicles flashed by. Shopkeepers were opening their shuttered taverns and small, dark grocery stores to the traffic, selling “box milk” and sweets and ten-packs of Craven A’s to the kids and people on their way to work, those few in town who had jobs, because at this time in these country towns over half the employable adults were without jobs. And because the public schools were operated after the British model, which meant that parents had to pay for uniforms for their children and for their books, pencils and lunches as well, most of the children were not able to go to school for longer than a few years, when the uniform would get passed down to the next youngest child and the older one would go to sit on a wall in the shade of a breadfruit tree with the other children and talk all day and dream and grow slowly and bleakly and barely literate into adulthood.
Turning left at the main road in Anchovy, I drove south, inland, across the relatively flat grassland plateau to Montpelier, still in the familiar parish of St. James. Sleek red poll and hump-backed white Brahman cattle grazed sleepily in the pale green guinea grass, while behind them, in the shade of cottonwood trees or at the top of a rise facing the meadows, glowered the great houses and barns, one after the other restored in the last thirty or forty years with the energy and cash that depends on a capitalist government’s attempts to foster an industry by means of subsidy and tax benefits. These fat cats whine about what they call socialism and creeping communism, I grumped, and the country remains only a little less “socialized” than Canada.
From what I could see, the Prime Minister of Jamaica, in almost any industrialized country of Europe or North America, would have found himself only slightly to the right of the center and probably, instead of calling himself a socialist, would have said he was a Christian Democrat. In the peculiar contest of Jamaica, however, Michael Manley, because he was attempting to institute a public education system and a realistically graduated income tax and something like an economy designed to feed, clothe and house the majority of the people who lived in Jamaica, was indeed a socialist. What had happened in modern Jamaica was that the old British colonials had been replaced by a breed of home-grown parasites, neocolonials who, rather than endure the presence of a black entrepreneurial middle class, a class whose existence would had to have been deliberately created by means of decent public education and health care systems, instead had permitted the entrepreneurial functions and rewards to fall into the hands of other groups of people—mainly East Indian and Chinese immigrants, people who had not sufficient identification with the land of Jamaica, people whose history lay elsewhere and who, therefore, were extremely unlikely to need to replace the white Jamaicans who sat at the top of the pyramid. The Indians and the Chinese moved horizontally; the blacks could not be counted on to be satisfied with that. No, if Jamaica in the next decade were indeed to collapse into famine and chaos, as the Wests and Churches kept insisting it would, to be followed, as they assured me, with a “Communist takeover,” it would not be because of Manley’s policies; it would happen because the country had already died, sucked of its lifeblood for tens of generations until, a generation ago, there was nothing left for it but a series of last agonies.
At Montpelier, little more than an ESSO station, railway shipping station, post office and police station for the farmers and grain producers of the area, I forked to the left, and slowly the land started to lift toward hills shaped like bright green bowlers, strange hills that seemed to have been taken from a child’s drawing. Scrawny blond dogs loped alongside the road and ignored my car as I passed. Kids smiled, waved and called, “White head!” and adults gazed blankly after. Bickersteth, Seven Rivers, and alongside the Great River, Cambridge, Bruce Hall, and Catadupa, where I stopped at a roadside shop for a Dragon stout and confirmation that I was on the right road.
Oh yes, man, you’re on the road to Maggotty, the barman assured me as he cracked open a warm dark Dragon and set the bottle in front of me. I loved these combination bars and grocery stores the Jamaicans called shops. Usually one side of the room was given over to the sale of tinned food, soaps, boxed milk, and cheese from New Zealand in circular tins the size of paint buckets, rice, flour and sugar weighed out and wrapped in brown paper, and sometimes fresh meat from a pig or goat slaughtered that morning in the back yard, as often as not with the head of the beast grinning from the counter while flies danced joyously in the air around it. On the other side of the room, beyond a screen plastered with cigarette and beer ads, was the bar, a counter ten or twelve feet long, no stools or tables with chairs, nothing to accommodate anyone who did not wish to stand against the counter and drink.
In one corner there was inevitably a juke box that played three songs for a nickel—the ever-present reggae, of course, but also a dozen or more records by people like Al Green, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin. Jamaican taste in music, and I mean the taste of the average working-class Jamaican in the backcountry, was perfect taste to me—impeccable and serious, knowledgeable and refined. Sometimes a whole culture has perfect taste, as in New Orleans three-fourths of a century ago or, regarding architecture, in New England two and three centuries ago, so that a wholly ordinary person, even children, can make aesthetic distinctions usually thought to be the exclusive prerogative of only the most elaborately educated members of the society. It seemed to me, regarding music, that Jamaican culture was wise in this way, and for that reason a barely literate or even illiterate workingman, toothless, barefoot, alcoholic, a man who believed that Queens Elizabeth I and II were the same person and thought Jack Kennedy and Jimmy Carter were brothers who had separately employed Martin Luther King on their farms, a bizarre man to someone like me, such a man when it came to music had flawless perfect taste. He could instantly distinguish the phony from the authentic, the derivative from the original, the merely sentimental from the genuinely romantic. And he would be a scholar in this field, would know precisely by what routes and through the work of which musicians calypso had got bebop from black nightclubs in Florida and become ska, how ska got rock and soul from London, Liverpool, New York and Detroit and had become reggae, reaching its literary and self-conscious phase, was now reinvestigating African roots while at the same time getting itself electrified in Nashville and Los Angeles. This old cane cutter, scratching the welts on his forearm with the back edge of his machete, would know the effect of poverty on the sound of reggae, how cheap guitars imitating the tinny thin sounds of the Beatles on Japanese transistor radios and plastic stereos from a Woolworth’s in the Bronx had stripped sixties rock of its baroque density of detail to produce a high, thin clarity not heard in Western popular music since the 1920s.
I left the shop, turned my car onto a one-lane road, headed southeast into the hills. I was in Cockpit Country now, the roads unpaved and curling along the edges of ocular pits, huge pocks, with strangely shaped hills extruding from the earth like weathered stumps rounded at the tops. The sides of the hills, almost vertical, were covered by a dense, impenetrable skin of macca bushes and short, twisted trees, now and then the bone white ground showing through where a slide, like a gash, had occurred after heavy rain. Because the cockpits themselves, deep adjacent craters ridged by their linked edges, were the result of slow underground erosion of the essentially limestone surface, a process directly opposite the familiar process of uplift, the land forms seemed bizarre and even wrong to me, an unnatural landscape. Valleys aren’t supposed to be created by the land’s dropping; they’re created by rivers or when the adjacent land rises. Though topology expresses its own geologic past and can be read as a text, this text was backward to me. I had always understood craters as the result of eruption or penetration, valleys as the product of uplifting, of emerging, standing slabs of earth—all male processes, somehow, Here, though, the land forms were the expression of female forces. The power of this geology was the power, by yielding, to create space, not by coming forward, to penetrate space. It was the difference between tai chi and karate. It was the difference between a Druidic stone circle and a ziggurat, between Stonehenge and Sumer. And for me to perceive it as “natural” required an enormous shift in what had seemed natural up to now, natural and therefore inevitable. The tourist in me took another step backward, and the traveler came forward one.
On the map where the three parishes of St. James, Trelawny and St. Elizabeth came together a large area is marked “Cockpit Country.” It’s an area of about four hundred square miles, and there are no roads or settlements marked on it. The roads crawl like vines around the edges, sometimes sending a single tendril into the area for a few miles before it disappears, as if that blank space on the map had swallowed it. At Mocho, Niagara, and Elderslie, I was traveling along the edge of this Cockpit Country, passing through tiny settlements of a few dozen cabins perched over dark red ground, a patch of yams and an ackee or breadfruit tree in back, the chassis of a wrecked car in front, with five or six small, half-naked children playing by the road, waving and calling out to me as I drove by. “Whitey!” and “White head!” they cried, and sometimes just “White!” I tried always to smile and wave back, but the road was getting rougher with each mile and more twisted as it switchbacked up and then quickly down the sides of the hills and along the rims of the cockpits, and I was forced to hold grimly to the wheel with both hands and keep my gaze fixed in front of me.
From the map, and from Carey Robinson’s little book, which had traced the course of the two Maroon wars in admirable detail, with charts and elaborate descriptions of British troop movements and Maroon guerrilla ambushes, I knew that I was now in Maroon country and that many of the people I was seeing were the descendants of those wild Ashanti warriors. According to Carey Robinson and also to my friend Upton West, these people were supposed to look different from the ordinary Jamaica countryman—taller, straighter, more muscular, and with a slight reddish tint to their skin.
Though I wanted it to be true and did attempt to see that difference, I could not see it. In fact, if anything, the people I was passing as they walked along the road with bunches of green bananas on their heads or carted water in cube-shaped tins or simply stood by the road, watching me, seemed stockier than the people of Montego Bay, and darker. The red was in the soil, rich in bauxite, a deep red soil the color of dried blood that in this dry season made a reddish dust that settled over everything. The huts and cabins, the vegetation, the road, animals and people all seemed to be on the other side of a red-tinted lens, so that only when I looked up at the sharply blue sky could I be sure that the redness over everything was not the expression of my own eye.
This was the region, during the first Maroon war, that Cudjoe had held for forty years against a half dozen British commanders, one after another falling victim to disease, heat and insects, the tangled unmapped country, these endless cockpits riddled with caves and narrow passageways known only to the Maroons, and the brilliance and courage of Cudjoe and the several separate bands of Maroons he had united under him. From the accounts of the period, British accounts, Cudjoe was not so much brilliant as wily, not so much courageous as stubborn, and not so much a leader as ruthless. But, looking back to the early 1700s and imagining the difficulty of conducting a successful forty-year military campaign against the mighty British army on a tiny island in the Caribbean, with no allies and nothing but three or four rag-tag, quarrelsome groups of ex-slaves who variously spoke versions of several African and at least two European languages, with no weapons except what they made or could steal in raids on the coastal plantations or took from the bodies of the soldiers they killed, and no food except what they could grow in hiding in the cockpits, an army that had no bases and had to move with its women, children and old people or leave them to the British and re-enslavement or worse—imagining that difficulty, one has to believe that a merely wily, stubborn and ruthless man could not have succeeded for six months. If the British hadn’t killed him by then, his own people would have.
By now, when I passed a house or a small, hand-cultivated field, the people would stop what they were doing and stare at me with hard faces. Children no longer smiled and waved at me or called out the color of my skin to me; instead they got behind the nearest adult and peeked around pant leg or cotton skirt. Every few hundred yards my Toyota slammed the oil pan or banged the muffler against the craggy limestone road, and I winced, suddenly picturing my isolation if the car broke down here. I could handle a flat tire, but that was about all. The men and women whose country I was passing through did not look friendly or helpful. I didn’t dare stop and ask for directions, something, like most men, I was reluctant to do anyhow, anywhere, but here my old barely conscious reasons for driving on regardless of not being sure where I was—fear of losing face (real men are supposed to have a good sense of direction; only sissies get lost), fear of being misled, and a simple unwillingness to delay my forward motion, gambling that as long as I was still moving away from where I had started I was somehow moving closer to my destination—these fears were suddenly given a strange new cast that originated, I knew, in my fear of black people. And even more complex than that, my fear especially of people whose ancestors had fought generations of a just war against my ancestors. Will Americans traveling in Vietnam two hundred years from now feel as I do today? I wondered, as I struggled to separate the several braided strands of my fear, the purely racist strand from the political one, the narrowly economic from the broadly historical. Will a middle-aged American traveler in the twenty-second century, lost in the Montagnard highlands, look at the grim face of a man in a rice paddy next to the road, and suddenly picturing the maddened faces of both their ancestors, drive quickly on, preferring to remain lost a little longer?
My map was out of directions altogether, and when I came to forks in the road I took the one that looked the more traveled—right, then left, then right again. There was no logic to my turns; I had no sense of drawing gradually nearer to a settlement. Now and then I saw a cabin, thatched roof and daub-and-wattle walls, a small shed built from old odd-shaped boards a few yards in back that, I knew from the smoke trickling out the hole in the roof, was a kitchen. Sometimes a woman’s sweating face stared expressionless out a window as, taking great care on the rutted track so as not to smash my rented car, I passed slowly by.
At last I began to see small groups of houses, two and three at a time, alongside the road. Behind them, where the ground fell away from the ridge and became the steep side of a cockpit, I saw short, terraced fields tended by men and boys and sometimes women. In the distance, far from any house, more land was similarly cultivated. There was some cane, but mostly I could make out yam plants on poles and corn stalks spaced in what seemed to me erratic relations to one another. No neat rows or files, no geometric patterns—spirals, rather, and splotches, blotches and patches, one crop mixed indiscriminately with another, kalaloo and onions sprawling at the feet of pole beans and yam plants, corn stalks planted like bystanders around a cabbage patch.
Then I was in the village of Nyamkopong itself. Or at least I hoped it was Nyamkopong. Along the curling length of a high ridge that linked a dozen craters were scattered fifty or sixty small houses facing both sides of a central lane, with several narrower, grassy branches off to either side, houses at the end, a small masonry building that was an unfinished church, another, finished, painted white. I passed three or four shops open to the street and, at the far end of town where the ground lifted and flattened into a kind of parade ground, a new masonry schoolhouse and a bare playing field in front of it. Then the cockpits again, with cabins in the distance and the road quickly becoming a footpath.
I turned my car around at the schoolyard and drove slowly back to the center of the village where two shops on either side of the street faced each other. A half dozen people, old people, stood in the shade and watched me. I stopped, and realized that I didn’t want to ask if this was Nyamkopong, not because I was afraid that it wasn’t but because I was reasonably sure that it was and thus the old woman staring at me with her set face would be able to snarl, Of course this is Nyamkopong, you idiot! So instead I took a chance and politely requested the group to direct me to the head man. With no sign to go on, I was relying not on the evidence of my senses but on a connection between my intuition and my reason to determine where I was now located. I felt as though I had just dived headfirst down a well.
A young man, short and wearing a red, yellow and green knit wool tam and beige sweater, a bearded man and, as I could see from the bulbous shape of his tam, wearing Rastafarian dreadlocks, emerged from the mauve darkness of the shop on my left and pointed grandly down the street ahead of me. The Colonel lives there, he informed me in a large voice, and he called me his brother.
The old people, men and women, said nothing and stared darkly after me as, greatly relieved, suddenly exhausted, I drove slowly away. This is not a brave thing to be doing, I thought. Why, then, am I so afraid? I would have liked to have been like Gauguin in Tahiti, all awash with open-eyed enthusiasm for the newly revealed alternative to bourgeois France, or Forster in India, skeptical, shrewdly compassionate, confident that what one did not know at the moment was really not worth knowing at the moment, or Dinesen in Africa, tender and secure in the tower of her absent self. But I could be none of these people, and as a result I saw very little at that time of where I was and what people I was among.
Oh, certainly I saw the way the light at midday glared off the palm fronds, baked the dirt yards dry and turned the tin roofs of the buildings to griddles, and I saw how the people wore sweaters and caps and complained that it was winter while I sweltered in my Dacron-and-cotton, short-sleeved shirt. I saw how the Colonel’s pink, four-room, cinderblock house was the largest and best kept in the village, saw his department store furniture and dishes, saw the plump, well-fed faces of his children; and when one of those children ran for him in the fields and brought back to the house a scrawny, rabbit-faced, brown man wearing tattered clothes and dirtcaked rubber boots, I saw that the Colonel, despite his office and its emoluments, in a country that accepted bribery as the sole legitimate access to those in power, was still a poor man. I heard his mannered Jamaican English, his careful avoidance of patois, his ingratiating queries about me. And I heard his sharp, sudden command to his sour-faced wife in the back room to bring us a bottle of rum and then his polite request that I sign his guest book and write my home address next to my signature just below the name and address of the Canadian professor who had preceded me by about six weeks.
I saw and heard it all, and yet, throughout, it seemed that I saw and heard nothing, because at every moment I was aware of these people being black-skinned. Yes, consciously I could and did methodically and sensitively add to that awareness my new information about them—that they were Maroons, that they lived on what amounted to a government reservation and that they owned their land more or less communally, that they were among the best farmers in Jamaica, that they were proud of their Maroon past even if only partially aware of it, and that, however they saw and heard me, they did not see and hear me the way a black American would. Even so, I could not stop viewing them as if I were seated, not on a stoop in the Jamaican bush, but in Detroit or Roxbury or Watts. And that is why I was afraid, afraid the way only a white American can be afraid and the way Gauguin and Forster and Dinesen were never afraid. They may not have known precisely where they were when they found themselves in Tahiti, India or Africa, but they knew they were not in Paris, Cambridge or Copenhagen. And that, at least, let them see more clearly than I could now where they had traveled to and whom they were moving among. A white American, I was blind, and lost.
Colonel Martin Luther Phelps, whose name I realized after a few moments was in honor of the Reformer, not the American, drank off his rum with me, obviously glad for the break in his workday. I didn’t dislike the Colonel, but he kept moving and talking like a barber or tailor, a nervous shopkeeper who continually referred to the sloth and bad habits of his neighbors so that no one, least of all I, would confuse him with his neighbors. He smiled and spoke enthusiastically of the village’s upcoming celebration of the heroic Cudjoe’s birthday, inviting me to join them and to bring my family, for, as he stated over and over, the Maroon people wanted the world to know of them. And all the while he nervously took care to straighten and thereby indicate the pictures that hung on the wall behind him of his children in the States, the glasses, ashtray and bottle of rum on the table before us, the plastic doilies on the sideboard and tables at the ends of the sofa, even getting up quickly in the middle of a sentence to close a door off the tiny living room so that I could not see the clutter in the room beyond and the members of his family seated on the double bed where together—mother, daughter, and two small sons—they listened intently not to our lofty conversation but to the slabs of emotion and fantasy coming from a radio soap opera taped in a London studio and broadcast daily from Kingston—old stories about working-class girls from the provinces being corrupted by upper-class male executives in the cities, characters played by white English actors whose accent, though it made their characterizations into comic-book figures for me, seemed to make them wholly believable to the people in the next room.
After a while of pleasantries, I started to find the Colonel irritating, mainly because I saw how much his manner was the type that pleased people I now disliked—people like the Wests and the Churches—so I rose from the blue plastic-covered sofa and said that I would leave now. He stood also, and as he reached to shake my hand and urge me once again to return on January sixth for the celebration, he suddenly extended his reach into my private space and plucked something tiny and unfelt from my throat. Rubbing his thumb and forefinger together, he warned me to be careful of the ticks out here in the bush.
Yes, I said, thank you, thank you. I asked him to say good-bye for me to his wife and family, and quickly headed back to the safety, as I suddenly thought of it, of my car. There seemed to be no perspective I could hold consistently enough to trust. I declared to the Colonel as I left his house and crossed the packed dirt in front that I would definitely return on Tuesday the sixth. He smiled appreciatively. And I’ll bring my family! I shouted, touching my throat where the tick had been.
Unlocking the car door, I ducked into the vehicle as if it were a hut and swiftly cranked the window down, opening it to fresh, cooling air and the broad, bearded face of the Rastafarian who had directed me to the Colonel’s house. He didn’t look as young now as he had at the shop; he seemed to be in his mid-thirties. His dark brown eyes were wet like a horse’s and though his face was crossed with a huge smile, it was lined with worry and puzzling thoughts. A serious man, I decided. His nose was shaped like a shoe horn, broad and smooth, and he had huge teeth. Once again, he called me brother, gave me an old sixties black-power handshake, and told me that now I should see the rest of the village of Nyamkopong, home of the Cockpit Maroons, whom he called his “ascendants.”
I got out of the car, closed the window and locked the door again, which seemed to meet with approval from my friend, and followed the man down the road. What is there to see here? I asked him, a tourist again, needing someone to tell me what to “see,” as if I could not see on my own.
The boneyard, he answered, and then unexpectedly moved close to me, too close, and began to chat, a sudden master of chat, it seemed, for nothing he told me was of consequence; regardless, he held my attention, forced me to concentrate on trivia as if it were of the most crucial importance to me. Over there was where the mother of the schoolteacher lived. Her father had been the Colonel before Martin Luther Phelps. And there was where the Chinaman would set up his diesel generator and speakers for the music on Tuesday. Down the road a friend of his, a man named Rubber, was setting up his generator and sound system. There was lots of money to be made on January sixth, he told me, because the Maroons came from all over the island to celebrate their victory over the slavemasters. And over there was the house owned by a woman who had two boys by him. A good woman, he told me, but not heavy enough for him. Heavy? I asked. Yes, too thin. “Maugre,” he called it.
His name was Terron Musgrave, and I decided, while we stood and peered down at the late nineteenth-century graves in the high grass behind a small whitewashed Presbyterian church, that Terron was a hustler. I would make the same decision many times over again before I left Jamaica for the last time. It happened whenever I did not understand him.
What I couldn’t understand now was why he was guiding me through these very conventional and, to me, boring aspects of Nyamkopong: here the nineteenth-century Protestant church; there the home of the schoolteacher’s mother; there the school itself, a gift from the government of Canada, it turned out; and over there the Chinaman’s stereo system. A native New Englander, I had looked at thousands of Protestant churches and graveyards a hundred years older than this one; and I had seen too many cinderblock school-houses built in the 1960s in the small towns of America; and as for the Chinaman’s outdoor stereo system, it reminded me of what my students at New England College liked to set up on the quad in early May.
My tour seemed to be coming to a close. We had looped through the town and were approaching the Colonel’s house and my car from the other side, so I asked Terron if I could buy him a beer and pay him something for his trouble. Declining the beer by smiling graciously and explaining how he had long ago withdrawn from “the alcohol world” because of having come “to know I,” an expression I did not then know how to translate, he nevertheless agreed to accept whatever I wished to offer him as payment. But first, he said, he wanted me to meet his father.
Suddenly I trusted him again and felt ashamed for having thought him only a charming country hustler. Of course! His father! What a natural and simple impulse, to want to introduce me to his father, I thought, as if my visit were a prized possession that he would want to share with his people.
He began to walk faster, passed my car and the Colonel’s house, and turned down a grassy lane toward a blue stucco house at the end where a dust-covered pig and some scrawny white chickens scavenged in the yard in front. Over the door in rough hand-painted letters were the words “Trelawny Town” and the dates 1738–1739, which I knew was the date, new style and old, that had ended the First Maroon War, the one that had closed off the hundred years of guerrilla warfare that had begun when the British took the island away from the Spanish.
As we neared the house, it must have become clear to Terron that I was under the impression that he was taking me to meet his genetic father, his “real” father, as they say. No, no, this was his spiritual father, he corrected me, a man of much culture who knew all the history of the Maroon peoples and who besides all the knowledge had in his care the Maroon Treaty, for he was the Secretary of State for the Maroon peoples, and besides, Terron said with obvious scorn, this man was much heavier than the Colonel.
Heavier? I asked, spreading my hands to indicate girth.
Yes, a wise man. Much culture, lots of culture in the upstairs.
Ah, yes, of course, I said, stumbling behind him over the rough ground.
When I drew up in front of the house, I realized that it was like a Hollywood set. The blue stucco front of the house, with two bay windows and a wide door between, was barely one room deep and was attached to an old and larger daub-and-wattle cabin behind it, while off to one side was the typical kitchen shed, blackened and scorched like an old kettle, from generations of cookfires. While the Colonels house had been in fact and not just appearance a four-room stuccoed cinderblock house, a bungalow, not a cabin, this one was a bungalow only if looked at from a certain angle and distance.
A scrawny, spotted dog with an intelligent face stood at the top of the front steps and barked rapidly at us. Scattered over the bare ground around the house were rusted-out buckets, old, emptied rum bottles, flattened toothpaste tubes, the pink arms of a baby doll, a worn-out tire, the spirochetelike peelings of a half dozen breakfast oranges: all the evidence of the usual busy and distracted Jamaican family life. I could see smoke wallowing from the kitchen shed and could smell pork cooking. Somewhere in the back of the house a tinny transistor radio was rapping out reggae and Kingston disc jockey fast-talk.
We stood at the bottom of the steps, and the spotted dog at the top kept barking, while behind us the pig rooted and the chickens scratched in the dirt. The direct sun was very hot. Sweat blossomed under my arms and drifted down my trunk. Off to the sides of the house, where the ground tipped and fell away to cockpits, banana trees clustered with a tall breadfruit tree and a pair of ackee trees just past blooming and, further down, in the usual random-seeming patches, yam plants and a few stalks of puny corn. Several yards beyond, at the beginning of the impossibly tangled bush, was a battered two-door privy that looked as if it were about to topple into the cockpit.
I looked up and saw that an old man had come out of the house and was trying to quiet the dog by patting the air above the dog’s head, which seemed to work, for the dog quickly ceased yapping and slinked back inside. Then the old man smiled at us. He wore a porkpie felt hat carefully squared on his head and horn-rimmed glasses, a plaid flannel shirt and baggy gabardine trousers held up with braces.
Come in, come in out of the sun, he said and waved us inside. He moved slowly, carefully, as if with a certain discomfort, but he stood extremely straight, his head as erect as a young man’s. When I had climbed the five steps to the doorway, I saw his eyes for the first time—pale blue, like agates, except that the blue outer ring of the pupil held a brown center ring around the iris, like a pair of concentric blue and brown rings around a black planet.
Terron introduced me by my first name, and the old man removed his hat with his right hand, shook mine firmly, twice, with his left, and said his name. Mann, Wendell O. Mann, he pronounced, and then, like an English gentleman, “Delighted,” with a pleasant nod of his head. Replacing his hat on his head, his close-cropped hair black except for a white streak running from front to back, he bade us follow him inside where it was cooler. His skin was as dark as any Jamaican’s but for some reason I could see this man despite the darkness, as if my eyes were at last growing accustomed to the absence of white skins and had dilated sufficiently to bring in details of texture and form, so that I could see his high, almost oriental cheekbones, his crisp mouth and lips, the delicately woven net of lines covering his forehead, the veins that disappeared above his temples into his hair.
We followed him—Terron, the master of chat, silent for the first time since he had appeared at my car window—through the door into the hallway beyond, where there was a long, narrow table in the center, a closed door leading off the hall at either side, and a third closed door at the back. The table was bare, the walls, painted pale blue, were bare, and the room, if it was a room, was chairless.
Mr. Mann bellowed in rapid-fire patois toward the closed door at the back, and I lost him completely, only to understand when, a few seconds later, the door opened and a ten-or twelve-year-old, shirtless, barefoot boy appeared carrying a wooden kitchen chair, followed by a second boy and chair, and then a third. They placed Mr. Mann’s chair on one side of the long table, stuck mine and Terron’s on the other, and then took up squatting positions on the stoop just outside.
Sit down, sit down, he said, and we did, while he barked again at the boys and sent one of them scurrying off. We waited in silence until momentarily the boy reappeared with a packet of Craven A’s and a sardine tin ashtray. The old man tapped a cigarette out, offered one to me, then to Terron, and the three of us lit up, inhaling deeply and smiling with pleasure. Then he began, in careful English, to ask me questions.
They were polite but effective questions, framed as statements but demanding answers that provided concrete information, You are Canadian?
No, I’m American.
Ah, and from New York?
No, New England.
A pause. New England, he slowly repeated, as if I had lied.
Actually, I’m from New Hampshire … near Boston, Massachusetts.
Ah, yes, he said. Boston. And near Boston you are a businessman?
No, no, not that. I’m a college teacher, I rushed to correct him, as if it were a far better thing to be a college teacher near Boston than a businessman.
He raised his eyebrows; he had heard my rush and what it implied, and now I had heard too.
And you are here in Jamaica on a holiday? he went on, smiling.
No, not exactly. I told him that I had rented a house for two months in the town of Anchovy in the parish of St. James and was living there until mid-February when I had to return to my teaching. But as I said it, I knew I had evaded his question.
And you spend your time in your house in Anchovy, resting and learning about the people of Jamaica?
Yes, I confessed. And I have my family with me, my wife and children, I weakly added.
You are an educated man, he declared, who is trying to learn about the Jamaican people, and now you have come to Nyamkopong to learn about the Maroon people?
Stammering, I first said yes, then no, I didn’t think I should be called an educated man, but yes, I was trying to learn about the Jamaican and now the Maroon people.
Terron had remained silent throughout, listening and smoking his cigarette with satisfied concentration. But it was somehow as if he already knew what my answers to Mr. Mann’s questions would be and was unfamiliar only with the questions themselves, because he watched the old man when he spoke to me and turned back to his cigarette when I spoke. The three boys, however, still squatting in the doorway, watched me and not the old man, their faces expressionless, not curious, frightened, or bored, merely attentive. Everyone in the room seemed to have a kind attention that I did not have and, further, that was wholly foreign to me. I couldn’t even imagine how to simulate it. I felt scattered, my own attention ricocheting around the room and across time, from this present moment back to my life in New Hampshire, to my life of “resting” in Anchovy, to my timid drive up here this morning, to my conversation with Colonel Phelps barely an hour ago, bouncing from the clear and intense face of the man in front of me over to Carey Robinson’s little book, to the engraving reproduced there of Cudjoe, an ugly, frog-faced, broad-shouldered man with a hunchback delivering his short sword to a tall and gallant British military officer, then leaping again, to Captain West and his son Upton, who was my friend, and then to my friend’s mother, who dabbled in real estate and servants, and the Churches, whose son had fled with his wife and children to Canada, where the cold air, his father had told me, made his nose bleed.
The Maroon people, Mr. Mann said in his rapid, gravelly voice, are the heart of Jamaica, and the British are the head. But I am glad that you are American because I love the American people, especially Mr. Kissinger, who as you know is also Secretary as I am the Secretary. Some day before you return to your home near Boston, I will give you a message to take to my brother Secretary Mr. Kissinger. He paused then and lapsed into quiet diminishing yes, yes, yeses.
We smiled across the table at each other. It grew silent. Then it occurred to me, and I turned to Terron, who was listening to his cigarette, and asked him if I could send one of the boys to the shop on the street for some rum.
Yes, Poppa loves his waters, Terron said without a smile, and he called one of the boys over, a kid about twelve who had been eyeing the pack of Craven A’s, waiting, I knew, for us to empty it so he could grab the foil liner and strip it of the white tissue backing that made such an excellent wrapper for rolling pen-sized ganga cigars. I passed the boy a couple of dollars and asked him to bring us some rum, and Mr. Mann, perking up, swiftly followed by ordering one of the remaining two boys to bring us some glasses and water. Nothing for the Rastaman! he shouted, and Terron laughed and chanted, Alcohol world, alcohol world! I-man no deal with no alcohol world!
Some talk about white rum followed, its power to heal and to make ill. Wisdom is not for the weak-minded, Mr. Mann warned, and said that except for the Rasta brethren, who refuse alcohol because of their preference for the herb and their knowledge of the bad effects of mixing two types of wisdom, he didn’t trust a man who would not drink white rum, even though he well knew that most white men would not drink it. You have to choose your wisdom, he pronounced. Just like Gary Cooper said, you have to choose your poison. Water and oil won’t mix, so taken together they’re good for nothing, can’t drink it and can’t use it to run your machine. One or the other, rum or the herb. Only boys and fools try to use both, except for the weak-minded who happen to know themselves, and they use neither one.
By now the boy had returned with the rum. Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ instructed us, Mr. Mann said, pouring the rum first into my glass and then his, that he that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith! Which is why we call this thing spirits, he explained, as he raised his glass and emptied it, following with a nip from his water glass.
I knew to reverse his procedure and nip at my rum and practically empty the water, then placed my hand over the top of my rum glass while he refilled his own.
Turning in his chair and peering intently at the ceiling as if for inspiration from above, Mr. Mann suddenly blurted, Veni vidi vici! I came, I saw, I conquered. And so uttered the great Queen Elizabeth when she last visited the country of Jamaica as it was about to commence the celebration of its independence from the mother country of Great Britain, thanks to the wonderful work of those national heroes, Sir Alexander Bustamente, Honorable Norman Manley, the father of the Prime Minister Michael, Marcus Garvey, who commanded the prison walls in Spanish Town to come down and they obeyed, and Nonny, the greatest of all Maroon scientists who slew the British soldiers by firing bullets at them from her cunt. You have heard that story? he asked me.
No, no, I said. All I knew about the Maroons I had learned from Carey Robinson.
Well, briefly, the great Queen Elizabeth heard about this beautiful land of trees and running waters from Sir Francis Drake, who was an expert sailor, even better than Christopher Columbus, who had come over here in his sailing ship at the same time but hadn’t been able to control his men, so they mutinied on him and left the poor man for dead on the beach near Ocho Rios, what’s now called Discovery Bay. Sir Francis Drake came along, on his way back from conquering India, and heard pathetic cries for help, so he told his men, Wait! I hear someone crying for help! So they pulled in their sails and went ashore at Discovery Bay and found the poor, skinny man Columbus, all filthy and with his beard long and matted, and they saved him just as the Arawak Indians were sneaking up to kill him for what the Spanish had done to the Indian people on the island of Jamaica, which was to make them slaves and work in the gold mines and kill them until they all ran away to live in the bush and teach the Africans there how to live in the cockpits. The Africans were there because they had learned over in Africa how the Indians were being treated by the Spanish, and so they sent the warrior queen and scientist Nonny and three hundred of the best Ashanti fighting men across the ocean to aid them in their struggle against the Spanish. But this was the same time as the English people were starting to make slaves of the Africans and bring them here to work on the plantations, and when these Africans in slavery heard about Nonny and the free Ashanti warriors up in the cockpits with the Arawak Indians, they started sneaking away from their masters to join them, until pretty soon there was a whole army of them up here and in the mountains in the east, all men, too, except for Nonny who was their chief and their main scientist. This is why Columbus’ men had mutinied and why the great Christopher Columbus himself was so frightened as he stood alone there on the beach, crying out pitifully for help. Sir Francis Drake was Queen Elizabeth’s chief sea captain before Sir Winston Churchill took command against the Germans and their Kaiser and after Julius Caesar was the chief of all the fighting forces of the Empire, and he had lots of business waiting for him back in England because he had been over there in India for so long, it was a big job, conquering India, so he didn’t stay in Jamaica long enough to learn of the Maroons or how the Spanish were treating the Arawaks in those days, he didn’t even know that the British themselves had started to capture Africans and bring them over to force them to work the sugar plantations and be slaves. He just picked up Columbus from the beach at Discovery Bay, who only had one friend by then, his servant Friday, an African who had remained loyal to Columbus when the rest of his men had mutinied, and Sir Francis Drake carried the two men back to Spain where he dropped them off and sailed home to England to report to his queen, the great Queen Elizabeth. Now Christopher Columbus and his assistant Friday, who couldn’t speak English anyhow, although Columbus could speak it fine because he was an educated man, never mentioned to Sir Francis what had been going on in the island of Jamaica between the Arawaks and the Maroons in the war against the Spanish or even about how the English plantation owners were capturing people in Africa and forcing them to work themselves to death in the sugar fields. No, he just said that he was an explorer and his troops and sailors had mutinied on him and had gone to America because they had heard about the gold strike in California. That’s why Queen Elizabeth didn’t know about the slavery business. But Sir Francis did tell her how beautiful the island of Jamaica was, and so she claimed it for part of the British Empire and promised some day to come and visit us over here. Sir Francis promised to bring her over on his own ship, the Golden Hind, but he died before he had a chance, and then Sir Winston Churchill was too busy with fighting the Germans and Kaiser Wilhelm to do it, so she had to wait until nineteen and sixty-two before she could come over and see this place. She had been pretty busy herself because of her fights with Mary, the Queen of the Scots, and Queen Victoria, who wanted to be queen of the whole British Empire, and they had to be put down and beheaded first, but as soon as she had things under control back in England Queen Elizabeth came over, and when she found out what had gone on here on the island of Jamaica, she understood why Jamaica had decided to be independent of the English and elect our own Sir Alexander Bustamente as Prime Minister so there could never be slavery again on the island of Jamaica. There was a great celebration for her, as it was her birthday jubilee, and a whole group of us Maroons went down to Kingston and did the Maroon dances for her, which surprised her and made her think she was in Africa instead of Jamaica, until Sir Alexander Bustamente took her aside and told her our history, just as today I am telling it to you. And then she understood and was glad that the island of Jamaica had decided to be independent, and she was proud of the way the Maroons had fought her own British soldiers all those years in the cockpits and she decided then and there to make Nonny into a national hero along with Marcus Garvey and Sir Alexander Bustamente and Honorable Norman Manley, the father of the present Prime Minister. That’s when she said it! Mr. Mann proudly exclaimed.
Said what?
Veni vidi vici! I came, I saw, and I conquered! And a great cheer went up and down the whole island of Jamaica, and men threw their hats into the air, and women held up their babies for the Queen to look upon. Oh, it was a great day for us Maroons!
The pint bottle of white rum was emptied and all our cigarettes had been smoked, mine as well as Mr. Mann’s. Without my knowing, the boys had scuttled in from the stoop and had pilfered both boxes for the papers inside and now were seated on the bottom step outside passing a pair of huge joints between them. At some point in Mr. Mann’s narrative, Terron too had left his seat to go out and sit on the stoop, where he was puffing on a spliff rolled in brown bag paper, a cigar-long cone of perfumy ganja that, when the old man had lapsed into reflective silence, he extended to me.
No thanks, I said. One kind of wisdom at a time. Then I got up and, after thanking Mr. Mann and assuring him that I would return with my family for the celebration on the coming Tuesday, I took my leave, walking slowly, carefully, struggling to clear my head before I reached my car and had to drive the long, dangerous road back to Anchovy.
Captain West reached out his long arm and, while he pumped my hand, peered over my shoulder into the darkness beyond. He was holding a gin and tonic and wore cherry red trousers and white buck shoes, a pink, short-sleeved shirt with a dark blue and white polka dot ascot at his soft throat. Preoccupied, or distracted, I couldn’t tell which, he hurried me into the living room, while he remained behind, still scanning the yard where I had parked my car next to a brown Mercedes sedan.
Mrs. West, her wide face florid and sour at once, sat me on the sofa next to her and demanded to know what I would drink. One of the servants, presumably one that she trained in her own house, as the brochure had it, a young man wearing black trousers, white shirt, dark gray bow tie and cummerbund, came forward for instructions.
White rum, I said.
Mrs. West looked across at me as if I had asked for LSD, and the servant, apparently puzzled, looked as if I had just named a drink he had never heard of before. It was bad form, I knew. But I persisted. No ice, I said, and half water.
Expressionless again, the man nodded and withdrew.
It was a small dinner party, and I had agreed to come, despite my promises to myself never to visit the Wests again. But I was still unable to give up my belief that I could remain outside the two worlds I had discovered in Jamaica—the world inhabited by the Churches and the Wests, and the world I believed was inhabited both by the Maroons and also by the half dozen black Jamaican men who lived in the town of Anchovy and with whom I had lately been drinking and from whom I was then learning to play dominoes in the back room of Barrett’s shop. I had learned by then that, with regard to the second world, I had no choice but to remain outside, an observer with clouded vision at best. With regard to the first world, however, I believed that the simple exercise of my will was sufficient to guarantee my remaining outside. Yes, I told myself, I am white, and I do understand and speak their language, but, after all, I was raised by working people, tenement dwellers, people who for countless generations had worked with their hands and backs. Surely that counted for something. Surely my class status, or rather as I saw it, my lack of class status, permitted me the luxury of remaining detached and untouchable, uncontaminated by these people—in the same way that my race and inability to speak or easily understand their language deprived me of the easy trust and intimacy of the Maroons and my new friends at the domino table at Barrett’s.
I was seated next to Mrs. West and we talked at length about her son’s success. I drank before dinner rather steadily, then at dinner also, swiftly becoming drunk. At some point during dinner the slender young man who had brought me my first drink (after that I had bellied up to the bar and fixed my own)—a man I had by then learned was the son of Mrs. West’s “regular” maid, the sleek heavy-set woman now serving vegetables—refilled my water glass by pouring from my left side, after I had emptied it and set it there myself, precisely between me and the young man’s employer-trainer. Mrs. West, her chunky body wrapped in a bolt of sumptuously colored African cloth, realized what the man was doing, glared at him ferociously, then cracked him sharply across the hand with the flat of her butter knife, causing him to drop the pitcher of water to the floor.
You idiot! the woman shrieked. He had ducked to the floor to retrieve the pitcher, which luckily had been nearly empty anyhow and hadn’t spilled more than a few ounces onto the waxed parquet. From the right! Serve from the right, you idiot!
I looked down at the man’s woolly head at my side, then across at the horrified face of his mother, who had stopped serving the vegetables and held the ladle of snow peas and almonds in midair. The Captain was still looking nervously toward the windows and had heard nothing. There were three other people at the table, an elderly couple from Beverly Hills, where the man had been an extremely successful film producer for several decades, and a middle-aged Fifth Avenue socialite whose second husband, a Greek shipowner, had recently died. They had been talking together about radios and had gone silent for a second at Mrs. West’s outburst. Then, as if the interruption had been no more than a phone call for someone else, the three had gone on chattering about radios.
I got one for my birthday, the baldheaded film producer said in a whining voice, and honest to God, the thing gets every station in the world, but I haven’t the foggiest idea of how to make it work. I can’t even get Burbank on it! he happily exclaimed, and his wife and the widow laughed to see such a smart man made a fool by a mere machine.
By now the young man had retrieved the water pitcher. Mrs. West waved him away without looking at him, and he disappeared silently into the kitchen, while his mother went on serving snow peas. I slumped in my chair and felt myself collapsing inside.
Excuse me, I said to Mrs. West. But I think I’ll have to leave. I’m not feeling well.
Of course she understood. The perfect hostess dealing with the imperfect guest. The silly young American, he should have left the white rum alone. Typical male show-off. He sees the blacks drinking the stuff like water and decides he’s man enough to do the same. Of course he’s ill. Those people have stomachs like iron. But he’s sweet. And polite. Good of him to remove himself before he starts acting up and makes a fool of himself in front of the important guests from Beverly Hills and Manhattan.
The Captain saw me to the door. Plucking a five-cell flashlight from a shelf near the door, he walked me outside, down the steps to the driveway where I’d parked my car. He kept flashing his beam across the moist lawn at shrubs and trees as he walked along beside me.
What are you looking for, Captain? I finally asked him.
Teefs! he barked.
Teefs?
Thieves. Dem teef yeh, he said, imitating patois. They’re all about the grounds. Thanks to our friend, Mr. Manley! he said, his voice rising with rage. All there for the taking now. There’s your social equality for you. Right? Promise them the moon, then tell ’em you can’t deliver because the other fellow’s got it. So what happens. Looting! Rape! Murder! Economic collapse!
He opened my car door for me and, patting me gently on the shoulder, wished me good night and hoped I felt better by morning. I thanked him, and as he warily picked his way back to the house, I drove rapidly, recklessly, up the long hill toward Anchovy and the compound, home.
The road spiraled upward in the darkness, gigantic cottonwood trees blocking out the stars and moonlight, away from the enclave of sprawling whitewashed houses with swimming pools and high fences and Doberman pinschers padding silently across the dew-wet lawns. This was Reading, not a village as much as a white settlement with a sea view, proximity to the shops and businesses of Montego Bay, and neighbors you could trust because they were like you and struggled alongside you to protect the same interests. Atop the hill—Seven Mile, it was called—was Anchovy, a true Jamaican country town where the Churches and I and my family were part of a distinct minority and the compound on the ridge above the town an anomaly, where the four or five thousand Jamaicans who lived in the town were black and mostly poor subsistence farmers, domestics in the houses of Reading, clerks, laborers and cops in Montego Bay, shopkeepers and tradesmen in Anchovy itself, or unemployed. Half the men in town were in this last category, and one-fourth of the families in town had no one, man, woman or child, who was employed. They kept a goat or two for meat, a half dozen chickens, sometimes a pig in the bushes behind their cabins, grew yams and a little corn in the corners of their yards, and spent endless days and nights waiting for things to change, drinking and talking in shops like Barrett’s till after midnight, smoking ganja on the back steps, playing dominoes, listening and dancing in place to reggae from someone’s radio turned up loud and placed next to an open window on the street. Sometimes a car full of thick-bodied black men and their skinny women would drive through on their way from Savanna-la-Mar to Montego Bay for the weekend, and they would stop at Barrett’s for a cold Heineken and some of Barrett’s famous jerked pork, and the locals would gawk at the new blue Mustang outside and then would come timidly inside to look at the strangers’ clothes and the rings on their fingers. Sometimes a pair of tourists in a rented Japanese car would come through town, lost or just exploring the back roads, and hot, curious or confused, would stop at Barrett’s or one of the two other shops in town for a cold beer and directions. And sometimes I found myself there, sipping on a glass of white rum, chatting with Barrett or his barmaid Yvonne or one of the regulars, when one of these couples, usually a young American man and woman in Bermuda shorts, came in, sunburnt, blond, drip-dry people with open faces and pockets full of credit cards. I would turn away from them, study my drink as if it held my future, and listen to the Jamaicans in the place ask them where in the States they were from, how long were they going to be in the country, and how did they like Jamaica so far?
When at last I arrived home, that night of the debacle at the Wests’, I parked my car, walked quickly past my house and along the narrow path, down from terrace to terrace, until I came to the far end of the compound. Behind and above me the house cantilevered into the tops of the fruit trees and the mahoe that surrounded me here, down at the edge of the bush, where Church’s elaborate outdoor lighting system barely reached me. There was an old, rarely used iron gate in the cut stone wall down here, beyond it the torn remnants of a paved road that Mrs. Church had told me the hurricane of 1967 had destroyed. Before the hurricane, she had said, you could drive down the backside of the hill all the way to Reading and Montego Bay without having to go through Anchovy.
Pushing the gate slowly open, I slipped through and started walking, picking my way with care over the chunks of old asphalt and marl and around the potholes that like miniature cockpits made the road impassable except for a donkey or a man walking. Here and there moonlight fell in wedges on the road and showed me my way as the road turned and twisted along to the top of the ridge and away from the Church compound before starting the descent to Reading and the Bay. Sweating now, I was walking uphill, fast, pushing my feet out in front of me recklessly, in a kind of tantrum, angry at the Wests, that awful woman shrieking and hitting a grown man for pouring water from the wrong side, and angry at the Captain for his mad terror, his visions of machete-wielding, brain-washed, Communist guerrillas come to rape his woman, pillage and burn his property, and perform obscenities on his old white body, and angry at the tourists whose prosperity and innocence protected them from knowing the reasons behind the obsequious questions and politeness of the “natives,” and angry at the full-bellied black Jamaicans who ran the country, the corrupt bureaucrats and cops and petty officials who never took off their sunglasses, and angry too at the British-educated Jamaican intellectuals, white and black alike, who condescended to their own history … and then there was this new anger, anger at myself, a cold fury at the dreamy American who dealt with outrage by feigning illness, by politely excusing himself from its presence, who persisted in dealing in easy categories with the people he was living among, who saw Maroons, saw working-class Jamaican countrymen, saw shopkeepers, saw white autocrats, plutocrats and neocolonials, saw tourists and speculators, intellectuals and smugglers, saw petty thieves and obeah men, saw farmers and preachers, woodcarvers and prostitutes, saw Rastafarians and Christians and pagans, saw all those classes of people, and could see no further. The dreamy American had found himself, for the first time in his life, truly alone.
Prior to this, solitude had been abstract and something to admire, had even been a source of pride and something of a lived metaphor for certain of his philosophic beliefs. Oh to be sure, it had always been a painful thing, solitude, but in the past he had admired his pain. Now, for the first time, he was ashamed of it. It seemed a condition that, by his fear and his weakness, he had imposed on himself. Honest enough to admit his fear of the blacks, intelligent and sensitive enough to know that he could not know what it was like to be someone he feared, he was also too weak-willed not to curry the approval of people he loathed but did not fear. Up to now, he had avoided taking the moral position of love and hate; he had merely approved or disapproved, like some kind of judge sitting in comfortable isolation from the doings of men and women on earth. He had merely approved of the poor blacks, the Maroons, and the shopkeepers and small farmers of Anchovy; and he had merely disapproved of the whites, the wealthy plutocrats of Reading, the black functionaries, the innocent acquisitive tourists; and this was what had brought him to feel such a profound anger at his isolation.
Then, stepping over the crest of the ridge, where the bush seemed to fall away, I who was that man saw before me in the wash of moonlight, a boarded-up stuccoed house, deserted and fast becoming a ruin. It resembled my own house across the valley two miles away, with terraces and patios, an orange tile roof, paths and stony flower gardens, except that the jungle was taking it over. Vines and creepers clung to the walls and probed gutters, crevices and holes, splitting the doorframes and window cornices from the walls. Chunks of marl and limestone, worked loose and washed by several years’ rain, had collected in heaps on the driveway and along the garden paths. A light breeze blew up from the sea, unimpeded all the way from Montego Bay below, seven or eight miles across jungle and tumbling hills and cliffs.
Slowly I made my way around the side of the house to the terrace that faced the sea, where there was an open, confident view of the glistening black Caribbean and, hugged by the hooked arm of land on the west, the clutch of lights that was Montego Bay. Off to my left on the same ridge perched the Church compound; around to my right the ridge drifted downhill to the broad coastal plain behind the bay; behind me, a few miles through the hummocky jungle, were the village of Anchovy and the narrow road that led one way down Seven Mile to Reading and the other inland across the Cockpit to Nyamkopong. Stepping across the broken terrace on the sea side of the deserted house—its owners with their cash and valuables doubtless in Canada or Miami, like the owners of my house—I walked to the edge, where a retaining wall dropped ten or twelve feet to the jungle below. And, thinking carefully, I decided to despise the Wests and the Churches and all the people who resembled them, and to love a people I might never understand and definitely would never become. Then I left the house, ruined and overlooking the sea, and walked quickly back in the darkness through the jungle to my own house, where my family silently turned in their beds and dreamed dreams of each other and me in our home in New Hampshire.
Tuesday, January sixth, was a hot, sunshiny day, after several days of cool rain, and the dirt yards at Nyamkopong, the playing field outside the school, and the roads and pathways were drying out when I arrived with my family. Hundreds of cars, mostly battered and patched ten-year-old American sedans driven up from Kingston, lined both sides of the road from the Colonel’s house all the way through town to the school, where on the field a wooden pole and rope merry-go-round had been constructed. A primitive machine that could, with little alteration, be used to grind wheat, it was powered by four muscular young men who, running in a circle around a vertical center shaft, pushed on the four arms of a pair of waist-high axes that had been lashed to it. The center shaft, its base in a socket dug into the ground, was topped with four longer axes from which four rope swings had been suspended. Babies and small children paid ten cents each to be swung for thirty or forty revolutions by this man-powered machine, the faces of the children alternately wide-eyed in delight and grim with fear of the height and speed of the spin.
It was midmorning when we arrived, and the town was a continuous throng of people and noise, food, rum, and the smell of burning ganja, reggae blasting from the Chinaman’s sound system and the installation belonging to Terron’s friend Rubber, next to which Terron himself had set up a stall to sell Ital food—Rastafarian cuisine of unsalted vegetables puréed in minced coconut and boiled rice from Guyana. At the stall a dozen or more dreadlocked brethren had gathered to eat from bowls made from gourds. Behind the board counter the master of chat held court and reasoned with his religious brethren, while next to him his tall friend Rubber, stoned and sweet-faced, dropped one 45 after another onto the turntable, the bass of his huge rented amplifier, rented from an East Indian grain dealer in Maggotty who’d invested some of his extra capital in high fidelity equipment to rent to other would-be capitalists like Rubber, turned up so loud it rattled one’s rib cage when one passed the high bank of huge speakers. Rubber had placed the speakers strategically, or so he apparently thought, at the entrance to a dirt dance floor fenced in by sheets of cast-off roofing tin. His plan had been to charge admission for the use of the dance floor, but so far only six or eight teen-aged boys, probably friends of Rubber’s and probably let in for nothing, were inside the fence, bopping and hopping alone to the music in corners of the yard, their faces lost behind the brilliant pressure of the music, their bodies swarming with the relentless beat, a beat that worked just as effectively on those who stood outside on the road and watched the crowd—teen-aged boys and girls looking for each other, card sharks and shell game con men, their game boards strapped to their shoulders and waists, looking through the crowd for players, mothers looking for their children, cool-eyed Rastas peering through the haze of their mysticism for “argument” and a spliff, fat daughters and sons up from Kingston in their new clothes looking out for someone they knew in the old days who would admire and envy them, old men rum-drunk and full of quarrelsome talk sifting the crowd for alliances and opponents, a hip Levi-clad crew of technicians and cameramen from the public TV station in Kingston looking through eyes borrowed from New York and London for footage of Jamaicans to show to other Jamaicans, the ones still in Kingston and Montego Bay who happened to own TV sets, brown, East Indian, Chinese and white Jamaicans, mostly, some of whom were here in Nyamkopong today, dressed like their counterparts in Miami, short-sleeved, sun-glassed, curious, slightly embarrassed by the sweaty fervor of the crowd, its drunkenness, the motley colors and petty crime that seemed to thrive here as nowhere else, middle-class Jamaicans simultaneously pleased by and proud of the peculiarly Jamaican character of the crowd but hoping also to be regarded as separate and distinct from the crowd, so that, as they passed Terron’s stall, for example, the men would point out the knot of brethren gathered there and would explain to their neat wives the peculiarity of the salt-free, porkless, often meatless diet, and the Rastafarians’ awe of the coconut, which the brethren called dreadnut, as if strolling through a museum and explaining to their wives the meaning of the more esoteric pieces of sculpture.
But a museum was the last thing it resembled, this celebration of the birthday of Cudjoe the great Maroon chieftain. It was more like a medieval country fair than anything else, a midwinter rite designed to push the circle of time around again, like the rickety but effective merry-go-round up in the schoolyard, a device thousands of years old, man-made for the relief of man from the pressure of gravity and the brevity of childhood, a circle opposed to the straight, unbroken line of time.
It was a day of circles and spinning. Nobody could have been convinced to line up: people gathered in knots and clots and moved in spirals and wheels, dancing in Rubber’s and the Chinaman’s yards to the amplified reggae, boys and girls wheeling around each other in orbits that intersected and then interlocked with other orbits; and over at the schoolyard children played ancient circle games and chanted rhymes from seventeenth-century England and timeless Africa; and in the shops quartets of men faced each other across squares and slammed ivory dominoes onto the board between them while bystanders and kibitzers hovered behind and drank rum and made side bets; and beyond the schoolyard downhill a way and into the bush where there was a clearing around a tall cotton tree, a hundred or more of the villagers danced the old Maroon dances to the beating of the square goatskin gombay drums, a huge, thickening circle of human beings, their arms locked around one another, their feet and bodies moving up and down, backward and forward, in a rugged, mesmerizing version of the more stylized, individualistic dancers to the reggae up on the street.
At one point, after I had come to rest near the dancers at the cotton tree, I saw old Mr. Mann coming down the path from the schoolyard. He was dressed in a dark suit and broad, flowery necktie, his fedora squarely on his head, and under his arm he carried a thick ledger book. Walking carefully, picking his way over the rocky path and greeting everyone near him, he passed quickly into the crowd of dancers and then suddenly reappeared at the center, bobbing and moving in energetic, perfect time to the drums. Though I stood a way outside the circle of dancers, the old man spotted me and smiled broadly, causing many of the dancers to follow his gaze, some to scowl when they saw me, some to join him in his smile and then to turn intently back to the center of the circle.
My children were taking their turns at the merry-go-round up at the schoolyard, while their mother and aunt watched over and photographed them. Earlier, Terron had waved us into the circle of his brethren at the food stall and had passed spliffs around and then bowls of Ital kalaloo and rice, chanting Rastafarian neologism and apocryphal biblical verses into our astonished faces, whirling us faster and faster with the blend of sound, until we had spun away, waving promises of quick return. And now, as I gradually found myself being pulled into the huge, slowly rotating crowd of dancers by the cotton tree, I recalled Mr. Mann’s story of Columbus and Sir Francis Drake and the two Elizabeths who were actually one, the Africans who were both slave and warrior, and I realized that I had misunderstood him completely: I had thought he was making history up. It hadn’t occurred to me that he had been telling the truth.
And soon I was dancing too, for an old woman on one side of me and a fat man on the other had each slung an arm around me, and my arms had slipped around them, so that I too was facing the center where Mr. Mann danced, still clutching his ledger book, his hat still squarely on his head; but he was sweating now, we were all sweating, some with broad grins on their faces, some darkly scowling, some grimacing in deep passion, as here and there one of the dancers would shudder and fall, eyes rolled back, body rigid and trembling on the ground, while the people next to the fallen dancer would back away a few steps and keep on moving, with the drums filling our heads and chests, slowly banging our hearts around into time, the blood pumping in the same time past our ears and back down through our throats, sweeping through our bodies in swift circles of time, until it seemed there could be no end to this day, this hour, this second of awareness of the tree towering overhead, the sky spinning above the branches of the tree, the crowd moving like a spiral nebula toward a still center, where a smiling old man with a book in his hands nodded and danced in place, watching us watch him, as if the whole thing were his gift to us and his whole pleasure were the pleasure we took from him.