THE OLD MAN WAS RIGHT. You do return—to Anchovy and the house on Church’s hill overlooking Montego Bay, to your brother Terron, to Nyamkopong and the home of Mr. Mann, to the Maroons, to the library in Kingston, to Port Antonio, to Errol Flynn’s old haunts, to Evan Smith’s cabin on the knob that watches Navy Island, to the Gordon Hall Maroons and the obi man whose powers take you over, to the Rasta men and women who become your companions and confidants as you become theirs, to the idea of prophecy and history, you come back to all of it, all the bloody, dark and gorgeous island of Jamaica that is the almost perfect reversal of your own world. You return to the ground against which you can see your own otherness, and so you go on seeing yourself as if for the first time. Against the mahogany voices filling your ears, you go on hearing your own flat, tinny voice, the thin, spiraling shapes of your sentences and thoughts; and against those lean, black, languidly moving bodies, you see your own body, parchment-colored, abrupt and thick, a body evolved in rocky northern forests under dark skies thousands of years ago; and against the versions of the past that gradually get revealed to you, in tale, gesture, kinship, dream, and document, you begin to notice the complexity of your own past, for if you can begin to grasp a stranger’s past by means of his tales, gestures, kinships, dreams and documents, your past too must stand revealed in the same way. You are becoming your own stranger, and in that way, when you return to the island of Jamaica, as the old man knew you would, you are returning to yourself.
Your departure from Nyamkopong with Terron took you first to Kingston, where you slept on the floor of a hovel in the middle of a huge, warm, desperate pack of people huddled in the shadows beneath glass and steel air-conditioned office buildings, where pigs rooted in street garbage below billboards advertising holidays at Disneyworld and a black ram-goat lay in the gutter outside the library of the Institute of Jamaica and swelled to bursting in the midday heat. At May Pen, as you entered the city, you stopped the car and got out to stand and stare back at what you had just passed through, miles of tin shanties, old refrigerator cartons, abandoned cars, buses, crates—all of the structures taken over for shelter against the rain and burning sun. You saw hundreds of thousands of people living in mud and filth, without running water or toilets or lights, a plain of alleys where gangs of wild boys and packs of starving dogs roamed at night. Smoke from thousands of cookfires joined in a hovering gray haze over the plain. Beyond the plain on one side the deep green foothills and then the mountains shouldered toward the evening sky, while on the other side the turquoise sea turned bloody in the setting sun. Clinging to the foothills and peering fearfully down at the city were small, spacious communities of multileveled homes with picture windows, wall-to-wall carpeting, terraced gardens, and high iron fences, barred window grates, uniformed security guards. You stood there beside your friend Terron and stared at this place and believed that you had glimpsed the future. And that night in a candlelit corner of the room in Trench Town where you were staying with Terron, his woman’s sister, who could talk only of getting somehow, someday to the States where people don’t have to live like this, and her three small children, you wrote a letter to a friend in Boston, and you said to him that in the firmament of cities Kingston and cities like it will soon replace New York and Los Angeles, which in turn will soon replace those dying stars like London and Paris, which in their turn will join the wholly dead suns, cinders like Babylon, Carthage and Karnak. Faced with the realities of Kingston, Caracas, Lima, Mexico City and Buenos Aires, you wrote, we will grow nostalgic for Los Angeles and New York, and we’ll speak of their cleanliness, efficiency and beauty the way today we speak of London’s “old-world charm” and the delightful boulevards of Paris.
Two days and nights in Kingston, your daylight hours consumed at the library, your nights holed up inside the room where, according to Terron and the woman who lives there, you are safe from being assaulted and robbed, and then you leave the city and head east and slowly north around the rainy, mountainous tip of the island. You did not believe Terron and the woman, yet you did not dare test their warnings by going out alone for a drink in the evening or even for a drive in your car, for when you drove in daylight with Terron through this mazelike section of the city, men and boys shouted at you and pounded the hood of your car in anger as they crossed the alley in front of you. You knew there were still sections of the city where open, friendly faces would hail you cheerfully, where you could stroll at night and speak with strangers about the weather; you had visited those sections before, last winter when you first came over from Anchovy to read the materials on the Maroons in the library of the Institute. But seen from the swarming heat of Trench Town, those “safe” sections of the city seem now to exist on another planet.
At Port Antonio, when you visit Moore Town and Charles Town, you see what you expected to see, what your reading and reason had arranged there for you to see: two small settlements of subsistence farmers struggling to pay taxes on their land holdings so they will not be bought out by speculators or the government, which, they know, will send them and their children over the mountains to Kingston and the dream at the edge of the sea of going to the States and starting life all over again, the sad dream of forgetting the past. Moore Town has the paved roads, electricity and health clinic Mr. Mann told you about, and the Colonel there is a Member of Parliament who delivers the vote. Half the Maroon land in Moore Town is owned by people who do not live on that land. Close to Port Antonio and readily accessible to film companies working up travel documentaries for the tourist board, the dancers and drummers, you discover, perform practically as professional troupes, flowering into orders and symmetries at the urging of pamphleteers and public relations operations rather than at the urgings of the deep structures lying below the apparent chaos of community and tribe. Nonetheless, the grand chieftainess Nonny, you are told, lies buried here in this valley and soon the government will erect a statue to her and there will be a big ceremony to unveil the statue, with the mother of the Prime Minister and three of his cabinet officials coming over from Kingston for the occasion. Lots of dancing. Lots of speeches. Lots of foreigners. Do come. Lying, you promise you’ll attend and then, depressed, return to Port Antonio, where you find yourself stumbling over traces of old tales about Errol Flynn, obeah, corruption from high places to low, that for the moment seem to reveal more to you of what you are doing here, what the nature of your growing obsession with this place has now become, than does your pursuit of the Maroons.
Then, after a few days in the Port, during which you make a perfunctory trip out to Charles Town—where you learn how it is when Maroons come to be wholly assimilated, so that you know you are among Maroons only because the guide book from the tourist board tells you so; where the old man who calls himself Colonel whines bitterly that he had to sell all the stone in his quarry to the government to pay the back taxes on the few remaining acres of land that the government and land speculators have not yet purchased outright—that done, you decide to return to the States. Heading west along the north coast to Anotto Bay and then inland over the mountains toward Kingston, you and Terron, who has come to share your sadness of the fate of these Maroon towns, casually decide to check out Gordon Hall, which, from the map, is not far out of your way. You know by now what to expect: a typical country village in the hills, all the young men and women gone to Kingston to wait, the once-productive hillside land slipping back to bush, while the few remaining Maroons in town talk of themselves as an underexploited, potentially lucrative, tourist attraction, if only the government, instead of taxing them, would make a television film about them and build a hotel or guest house in the center of the town. And you know that at Gordon Hall the Colonel will claim the presence of Nonny’s grave, just as the Colonels at Charles Town and Moore Town, and he will tell you and Terron that the others are liars and all they want are the statue and the big ceremony of the unveiling because that will make the town into the “official” Maroon village, leaving nothing for the others. Tourism, more than any other single industry, corrupts and corrodes a people’s integrity and independence, you decide, as you try to locate Gordon Hall by asking in vain along the road to Anotto Bay. You no longer hate the tourists however; you view them now as victims of the same system. And, too, perhaps with a certain arrogance, you no longer fear that you are a tourist yourself. Indeed, you have at last started to ask, Who is this white American traveling with you and Terron? And because you have been asking that question constantly now—as you sat over beans and rice and jerked pork in Nyamkopong, as you squatted on your heels in a Kingston hovel and explained to a woman with three hungry babies why you can’t take her back to the States with you or, in the whorehouse in Port Antonio, as you asked questions about Errol Flynn and a twenty-year-old murder or as you listened to a paunchy professional Maroon in his comfortable middle-class living room in Moore Town tell you how much he, as a Member of Parliament, had done for his people or as you heard a skinny old Colonel in Charles Town weep about the nearly vertical land the government forced him, because he was the elected headman, to pay taxes on or as you stopped along the road and asked a pair of teen-aged girls walking uphill over the mountain if they knew where Gordon Hall was—because, through everything you keep on asking yourself, Who is this white American traveling with you and your friend Terron in Jamaica? Because of that question, you are not a tourist.
You stay at Gordon Hall two whole days and nights, in astonishment and confusion, all your expectations broken in your lap. Gordon Hall is not at all like Moore Town or, worse, Charles Town; it is closer to Nyamkopong in character, and in certain ways closer to the Nyamkopong of a century ago: independent, suspicious, scornful and proud. There are Ashanti passwords, rites, songs, gestures, lore—you stand in the center of a circle of men, you and your brother Terron, who is no less a stranger to these people than you are, for though he is a black Jamaican and claims to be a Maroon from Nyamkopong, he cannot understand their questions. They are firing questions at him in another language, a foreign tongue, these glowering men with their powerful arms folded across their chests, and Terron starts to stammer, his childhood affliction returns, and the master of chat finds his tongue stumbling. He cannot understand what these angry, suspicious men are saying to him, and he can’t make them understand him because he is stammering. When, as if working it up with his fingers, he forces an inappropriate smile onto his face, they see his fear and his embarrassment, and to punish him, divide you from him, call him a nigger who can’t speak his own language. To you they speak in Jamaican patois, proud of their ability to speak your language, and one of them, a stub of a man with a pipe in his mouth and a voice like a bull’s, brags that he can speak Spanish English and French English as well as American English, but not Italian English. Having watched them humiliate and dismiss Terron, you realize that they can be dealt with only in complete sincerity, so when they begin to address you with the questions designed to reveal if you are either ignorant and honest or ignorant and a liar, you answer as honestly as you can. No, you do not know the Ashanti passwords, and you do not know the names of the gods, and you do not know the names of the thirty-six herbs and where they grow, and you do not know who their Colonel is or what his powers are. You do not know anything about these people. You have come here this great, long and difficult way because you want to know yourself, and yes, you are afraid. And when they ask you what you’re afraid of, the dark? you answer, “No, the light.” But because you are not, like Terron, a black Jamaican professing to be a Maroon, and because you do not, as he did, claim to know the names of the thirty-six herbs and then, when challenged, fail to name more than twenty-three and at that name them with painfully stammered words, smiling falsely throughout the broken speech, that you are greeted with an embrace from each of the four men and taken to meet the Colonel. Terron they send back to the car, but he has already gone there.
The Colonel is a gigantic man, and the first thing you see is that his eyes are the same as Mr. Mann’s, blue and brown concentric rings for pupils, lizard-lidded, and his skin is satiny black, ageless like Mr. Mann’s. But in temperament this man is opposite to Mr. Mann, for he is fierce, blunt, omnivorous. Taller than you by three inches, and several times as large through the trunk and shoulders, he draws you forcibly to him by grabbing your forearm, until your face is yanked up close to his and you can feel his breath on you, can see into his unblinking eyes while they search the eyes of that white American who is traveling with you. Long seconds pass while you permit the man to see whatever he sees there, when finally he releases your arm and lets you step away.
For two sleepless days and nights you and the Colonel, whose name is spelled Bowra and pronounced Bowray, sit there on the porch of his two-room cabin, and while people come in and go out, women, children, henchmen, sons and daughters, cousins, aunts and uncles, and food is brought forward to you and the Colonel, roast afoo yam and jerked pork, beans and rice, a chicken, and rum is always there in a quart bottle between you on the table, as the sun goes down and bats dart in the darkness, and as the sun comes up again and the heat of the day passes over you, and as the sun goes down again and the valley passes into darkness again, and then as the sun rises again—you go on talking with the old man, one mad speech after the other, first he speaks and then you speak, on and on, as if there will never be an end to it: stories from your childhood, all the history you can recall, your impressions of the city of Kingston, of Nyamkopong, detailed descriptions of people you have come to love, Mr. Mann, Terron, whom you praise and praise until Bowra relents and sends for him to come up from the car and be fed; and Bowra tells you his stories and the history he believes, gives you his opinions of the other Maroon villages, and yes, he has heard of Mr. Mann and he knows their eyes are the same, but his and Mr. Mann’s lights are not the same, he informs you, and it’s by his lights that you know a man—until at last you find that you have come to an agreement with the old man: you will transport him and his wives and henchmen, his “cabinet,” nine people in all, from Gordon Hall to Nyamkopong for the celebration of Cudjoe’s birthday next January sixth; and then you will transport Colonel Martin Luther Phelps, Mr. Mann, and up to seven more from Nyamkopong to Gordon Hall on the following August first, when they have their feast day and celebrate the victory over the British; so that through your good offices, if you are somehow able to be in the country at those times, the Maroons of the two villages can come to know each other and together can make themselves stronger against the government than they are alone. You have agreed to be their agent, but the old man does not believe you will keep your part of the agreement, so more hours of discussion and chant and obeah follow, until at last you both believe that you will keep your part of the agreement: in return, he has promised that he will teach you to fly, and even if you cannot learn to fly because you are a white man, still, you will see him fly: you will see what you want to see, he promises, and now you believe that he will keep his part of the agreement too, so you are free to go.
Then, within a week of your return to your home in New Hampshire, you learn that a large private foundation has awarded you sufficient funds to enable you to return to Jamaica for a full year. The grant is supposed to enable you “to continue your work in the writing of fiction,” the endless, unfinished novel that has languished in a file cabinet since last January. And by the end of August, your affairs are in order and you have again arranged to rent from the Churches the same house in Anchovy that you rented the previous winter. Then, with your wife content with her work and friends in Anchovy and Reading, and your children enrolled in a Franciscan school in nearby Montego Bay, you quickly drop back into your old, easy routines—writing on the unfinished novel in the mornings, wandering through complex questions of prophecy and history all afternoon with Terron and various of the Rasta brethren, and mastering the futher intricacies of dominoes in the backroom of Barrett’s shop in Anchovy. You visit Nyamkopong regularly and relate to Mr. Mann all that you learned in your travels last spring in Kingston, Port Antonio, and at the other Maroon villages, and you make the arrangements with him and Colonel Phelps for the exchange of visits with the Gordon Hall Maroons. You confess to Mr. Mann that you have not yet delivered his message and book to Henry Kissinger, but you will, you will.
Most of your time during these autumn months, however, is spent in Anchovy, very little of it in Nyamkopong. The press of family life, and your ongoing work on the novel and the pleasures of the company at Barrett’s keep you close to home. Declining all invitations to join the Churches or the Wests or the Beards for “drinks and dinner,” you spend night after night and many of your afternoons yakking with Barrett, the terrier-faced proprietor who got his stake together years ago by working in London as a bus driver and now runs a taxi in Montego Bay along with his shop here in Anchovy. His dour, careful, tub-bodied wife runs the shop for him all day, while he drives his Toyota van back and forth from hotel to airport and at night holds forth at the bar. You also use up many of your hours gossiping idly with Yvonne, the barmaid, about everyone else in the neighborhood—she’s your age, burly and thick-armed, intelligent, and has opinions that, after a few weeks of merely talking politely with you and angling for tips, she’s begun to share with you. She’s a sexy woman, and you enjoy flirting with her, though you know also that she’s the mistress of a man named Bush who lives in Anchovy and is a cop in Montego Bay. The idea of your daring to do anything to make him angry is so far-fetched that no one, least of all you, Bush or Yvonne, takes your flirting seriously. In fact, in November Bush himself presents you with a ticket to the Policeman’s Ball, to be held in early December at the Royal Caribbean Hotel and Beach Club, and asks you to join his table with Barrett and his wife, Yvonne, Barret’s brother Frank who runs a dry cleaning business in Montego Bay, and three or four other men and women you’ve never met. Though flattered by the invitation, you tell yourself that you’re curious, you’ve never been to a Policeman’s Ball, and besides, you’d like to see more of these rising black entrepreneurs like Barrett and his family and the cops like Bush and his friends, especially in what you know will be a highly self-conscious setting, a ball, with bands and big-name entertainers from Kingston, everyone dressed to the teeth and spending as much money as possible.
The night of the ball you all ride out from Anchovy to the Royal Caribbean together in Barrett’s taxi, with the radio speakers front and back blaring Barrett’s favorite tape, Diana Ross and the Supremes. The women are wearing brown, wavy-haired wigs and sherbert-colored gowns and shoes with matching handbags, and you men are wearing your best dress suits, straw hats, gold watches, shined shoes. Bush has a toothpick stuck in his mouth and takes it out only to grab a slug from Barrett’s bottle of rum as it gets passed up and down the van. Bush is cool, never says much more than what’s minimally required: he specializes in a yes or no that makes you feel like apologizing for having asked. Tonight, however, he’s more gregarious, is even smiling, and is recalling to the others last year’s ball when Barrett had to be carried into his house and dumped into his bed fully clothed. Mrs. Barrett laughs at the memory, as does Barrett himself. His brother Frank has a story to top that one, and then Yvonne has one too. You’ve never seen Barrett drunk, or any of the others—their capacity for drink has continued to astound you: Yvonne, Mrs. Barrett, Bush, all of them seem to be able to drink straight white rum hour after hour, and when finally you have to leave for the night, dizzy and sick, to avoid making a fool of yourself, you always leave them behind, coherent, comfortable, wondering why you want to go home so early. So you listen and laugh along with the others at the tales of foolish drunkenness.
Barrett parks the van in the huge lot outside the glass and tan concrete structure. Fountains burble and royal palms clatter in the cool evening breeze. The lobby is jammed with gorgeously dressed people, most of them looking muscular and compressed in their clothes, as few of them fashionably thin as unfashionably fat. Their faces are mostly tough, smart, determined and confident—these men and women are the winners in a terrible contest—and the lobby of the Royal Caribbean is where they’ve come to be seen and acknowledged by each other, and only by each other, for no one else can know and respect the grit and sacrifice and deep selfishness it’s taken for them to be here. For a moment you yourself forget what the obstacles are, and you search the noisy, per-fumy room for Indian, Chinese or even white faces, but when you realize that the only non-African face in the room belongs to you, you remember.
Inside the ballroom, the crowd is thinner and quieter as parties settle themselves around their tables and order drinks, flashing digital wristwatches, pinkie rings, bracelets and necklaces, lugging out fist-sized rolls of bills to pay when the waiter arrives with the tray of drinks. After a few rounds, with the band playing, a five-piece rock-and-roll band from Miami, if you believe the Day-Glo lettering on the bass drum, people’s voices start to lift, and the ballroom has suddenly become crowded, and there are a dozen couples dancing. Not all that skillfully, either, you notice. Men move gregariously from table to table, shaking hands and slapping upholstered shoulders, cops and small businessmen and petty bureaucrats and politicos, while the women remain seated and talk to each other about people at other tables. And everyone drinks feverishly.
You are having a loud, wonderful time, a hell of a guy. You dance with Yvonne and she shows you a few new moves and compliments you besides. You even dance with Barrett’s wife, and everyone laughs good-naturedly. A hell of a guy. Bush tells you how he’s going to become a sergeant next year but to get any higher he’ll have to come up with a thousand dollars, which isn’t bad because as a lieutenant he’d make that much back in a month. Barrett asks you if you’ll write a recommendation for his teen-aged son to a business college in London, and if the boy is accepted by the college, will you write a character reference to help him get the visa? Sure, sure, great kid, happy to be able to help him out, you say, slapping Barrett on the back. And good luck, Bush, on that sergeant thing.
A witty, bass-toned emcee has taken over the mike, and after introducing the members of the band, has started to introduce himself as a singer. He mentions the hotels in Kingston he’s worked and with much flattery compares this hotel and crowd to the Kingston hotels and crowds, so that everyone looks at everyone else and smiles proudly. He praises your good-looking women, your fancy clothes, your long, sleek cars parked outside in the lot, and he praises Montego Bay, the gold coast, the beaches and hotels as if these too were yours. Then he starts to sing, voice and diction like Lou Rawls’, songs from the repertoire of Tony Bennett. You approve, and you applaud each song furiously, stamping and whistling after “I Did It My Way” and “Chicago.”
The emcee takes a break, inviting you to drink and dance and have a good time before the floor show starts. By now you are feeling drunk, so you excuse yourself from the table and head out toward the lobby to find the men’s room. At the end of a long, tiled hallway a group of men has gathered to smoke and talk at the entrance to the men’s room, and as you pass through the group you nod and smile familiarly. Inside, though, there are mirrors and bright fluorescent lamps, and fifteen or twenty men washing hands, buttoning and zipping flies, straightening neckties, and when you have peed and have come to stand in front of the bank of mirrors to check out your tie and hair, you suddenly see your white face and pale hair, your shockingly blue eyes and pink hands. My God, you had almost forgotten how weird you look! And now that you can see it again, you realize that everyone else can see it too, and then you notice how all the men are trying not to be seen staring at you.
You hurry from the men’s room, reel past the crowd outside without a gesture or word, and rush back to the ballroom, where you seat yourself in the rear of the room and as far from the others as possible. The emcee has returned to the mike and is now introducing the floor show, an act, he says, that brought down the house at the Jamaica Hilton, blew them away at the Pegasus, knocked them off their seats at the Playboy Club—it’s the Fighting Maroons of Jamaica doing their world famous War Dance!
Amplified drums, and then a dozen brown showgirls leap onto the dance floor, strutting and bending in an old Las Vegas routine to the beat of the drums, which are quickly joined by rattles, cymbals, marimbas, until what you hear is a version of a Trinidadian steel band that would sound right on the Johnny Carson show. After the girls have gone through their cheerleader routines and have tossed a few good-natured humps to the laughing audience, each hump accompanied by a loud thump of the bass drum, a man, young and small with a dancer’s body and wild dreadlocks flashing, leaps into the middle of the circle, and he begins a cheaply erotic dance routine with the showgirls that causes the audience to start laughing and clapping in time. The man dances up to one, then to another of the girls, pretends to reject one after another, until he comes to the lead dancer, whose glittering bikini is bright green, in contrast to the others’ which are gold. The man is wearing only a sequin-covered loincloth, also bright green, and he slashes at the air with his locks, swirling his tan body around the girl he has chosen. She has gone all modest now and crouches submissively beneath him in the center of the ring, which has opened in front to give the crowd a better view of the action that will surely follow.
You rise from the table, and no one notices as you leave, or at least no one asks you where you are going. In the lobby you find yourself alone, the shouts and cries of the crowd behind you, and slowly, your head reeling from the drink and noise, you walk through the glass doors to the parking lot, where there is only the sound of the royal palms chattering against the silence of the star-spiked sky.
When finally you find Barrett’s white Toyota van amongst the hundreds of cars, you open the side door and make your way clumsily to the far corner in back, where you curl up like a question mark and try to fall asleep. You try and try, but you can’t, and you are still wide awake when, hours later, Barrett, his wife, Bush, Yvonne, the brother Frank and the others come laughing drunkenly back to the car. They stumble into the van, giggling and poking at one another, and they think you are asleep. You go on lying there in the corner, pretending to sleep, and all the way home to Anchovy the people in the car talk to one another as if you weren’t there, and they never once mention you or any other white man.