IT’S NOT QUITE MIDNIGHT when they arrive at Gordon Hall. A full moon floats between five-thousand-foot-high peaks and glazes the Maroons’ terraced crops with silver light, as the blue van works its way through the valleys to the town. They pass huts and houses scattered alongside the narrow, unpaved road, but no signs of life—the windows are shuttered and doors closed. Occasionally a dog barks as they pass, but no one calls out or pokes his head through a doorway to see what a car is doing this far off the main road at this time of night. A car coming through during the day would be unusual; one coming through at midnight ought to be alarming. Especially a van capable of carting out a half ton of ganja, with two strangers, one white, the other a Rastaman.
The van turns off the road onto a crumbly lane that loops around the base of a mountain. Below the lane on the right a narrow stream heads noisily through the darkness for the Flint River and northward, where it eventually joins the Wog Water River and enters the sea. Above the van on the left the side of the mountain seems to leap straight up for the sky. As the van curls around the mountain and has come almost full circle to the road again, there is a break in the side of the mountain, a cleft that opens to a yard and a house with a porch running along the front. Behind the house the ground rises a few hundred feet above the lane to a cleared plateau and then disappears into the bushy side of the mountain, which keeps on rising steeply until half the sky is blocked from view. The van pulls off the lane and onto the packed dirt yard before the house and stops. The engine at the back ticks as it cools in the night air.
Ashanti! a man’s voice cries from the darkness of the porch.
Ashanti baba! the white man answers loudly.
Johnny, that you? another, deeper voice calls from the porch.
The same! calls the American, as he leaves the car and walks in silvery moonlight toward the darkened house. The Rastaman too has stepped from the car and is standing on the other side, pissing into the bushes.
When the white man, the one they call Johnny, steps onto the porch, he is greeted by a half dozen men and women, blocky, dark figures illuminated only by cigarettes and the low flame of a candle guttering in a saucer on a small table in the corner. Next to the table, his back to the wall, Colonel Bowra is seated in a folding plastic-and-aluminum chair. The others are standing and leaning in the small space, filling it almost completely and with difficulty moving back so Johnny can make his way toward the Colonel. Behind him, standing off the porch, is the Rastaman.
You got Rasta with you, Johnny? barks the Colonel from his chair in the corner.
Yes.
All right, then you come forward too, Rastaman! Come on here!
As the Rasta pushes through the crowd and joins his friend, the old man, with difficulty, rises from his chair and takes a step toward them. I saw you coming, he says, and he wraps the two men in his huge arms and pulls them to him, the white man they call Johnny and the short, horse-faced, black man they call Rasta.
Ashanti, he says to each in his gravelly voice, and, Ashanti baba, they answer. Then everyone else on the porch comes forward and slaps the two on their backs and shoulders, offering drinks, food, chairs to sit on. They appear greatly relieved that the two have come. If they had not come, the Colonel would have lost face, for he was the one who made the agreement with the white man and the Rasta from Nyamkopong. On his assurance that the strangers would show up as they had promised, Bowra’s people came to his porch tonight with their drums and the abeng, wearing their suits and dresses and good shoes, with food for the trip and money and bottles of rum. If the white man and the Rasta did not appear with the van to transport them across the island all the way to Cockpit Country, they would all feel foolish, and they would all be forced to blame their Colonel for their feelings. For he alone insisted that the two men, Johnny and Rasta, would actually come to Gordon Hall at midnight tonight, January fourth, as they had promised back in April.
I saw you coming, Bowra says to the two. They have taken seats, Johnny and the Rasta on the porch rail, the Colonel in his lawn chair. He is wearing a Kelly green, double-knit, short-sleeved suit, is shirtless, and has a tan pith helmet on his head. The others on the porch are also dressed in clothes they probably take out and wear only once or twice a year—a long, purple taffeta dress on one old lady and on another a white dress that must have been someone’s wedding dress. The woman in the white dress is the Colonel’s wife Regine. She is powerfully built and, like the Colonel, tall. But where he moves slowly, ponderously, and with a certain care, as if he suffers from arthritis or the gout and it causes him pain to set his feet down, she moves with swiftness and power and a kind of recklessness, even in a crowded room, as if she were the only person in the room. Other people make way for her. The woman in the purple taffeta dress is called Aunt Celia. A singer, the Colonel tells Johnny and Rasta. She is old, probably much older than the Colonel, and it is difficult to imagine her voice having much force. She too is tall and, though thin, is broad-shouldered. Deep lines loop across and around her face, and when she smiles the lines seem to whirl. At the door that leads from the porch into the darkened house, a pair of old men hold onto each other as if to prop each other up. One man, large and toothless, wears a white shirt and scarlet necktie and on his head a battered black Homburg. Called the Captain, he is Bowra’s younger brother, and in one huge pawlike hand he holds the abeng, the Maroon horn. The man next to him, dressed like an undertaker, is smaller and older. His toothless face is ridden with tics and twitches, and he continually gulps, Ay-yup! like a Yankee farmer. Gondo is his name, and he and the Captain hold onto each other and embrace almost as if they were lovers. The Captain is the chief when I am away from the city, Colonel Bowra says, but since he is the abeng man, he will have to travel with us this time. Another man, one of the lieutenants, is to take over in the Colonel’s and the Captain’s absence. Gondo, Bowra explains simply, is the best Maroon dancer in the world. There are four other men in the group—Harris, a pipe-smoking, deep-voiced man—My mouth-man, Bowra says—has the same blue and brown eyes as Bowra and Mr. Mann in Nyamkopong; Charles, who is tall and lean, claims to have an invisible black bird sitting on top of his head, even when he wears a cap, he insists; Pie, a fox-faced drummer—the best in the world, Bowra says—and Steve, Pie’s apprentice, a large, muscular youth wearing a silver and yellow flowered rayon shirt with billowing sleeves, tight black pants, patent leather shoes, and a Levi cap set on his head at a precisely jaunty angle.
There are nine, then, who will be carted across the island to Nyamkopong, ordinarily a five-hour journey. There is the Colonel, who has moved off the porch and has taken the front passenger’s seat. Then his wife Regine, Aunt Celia the singer, the Captain with his abeng, Gondo the dancer, Harris the mouth-man, Charles and his invisible black bird, Pie the drummer and Steve his apprentice. And of course Johnny, who will drive, and Rasta, who knows the way. While the Colonel from his seat in the front gives orders, the others lug to the side of the car the round gombay drums, different from the Nyamkopong gombays, which are square, and the two joints of thick bamboo, which the apprentice Steve will beat on, the head-basket of cooked food for the journey, jerked pork and pieces of chicken, mostly, and several bottles of white rum. For a few moments they argue over whether they should lash everything to the roof, to make more room inside, but finally they decide to keep their goods and drums inside where they can get at them whenever they want, and everyone climbs inside, carrying and pushing pork and chicken, rum, drums and bamboo stick. The drummers and tall Charles and Rasta jam themselves together way at the back; Harris, the two women and the Captain are in the middle; and Gondo, as small as a twelve-year-old boy, is between Johnny and the huge Colonel in front. The car is loaded and stuffed. They are ready.
Blow the bugle! Bowra barks at his brother, who is next to the open window behind him. The toothless old man in the Homburg sticks his head out the window, puts the cow horn to his lips, and starts to blow—at first a weak, wetly sputtering tootle, then a stronger and clearer and more sustained hooting tone, like an owl’s, and finally a loud, lovely, warbling cry that echoes through the dark valleys.
Now, give me the rum! The rum! Bowra commands, and a hand, Harris’, passes the bottle from somewhere in back. People are complaining, arguing, chattering all over the car, as if the Colonel were their father and the others, including Johnny and Rasta, his quarrelsome children. Johnny hollers back to Rasta for directions. Do we head south toward Castleton and then straight for Kingston and Spanish Town and go up from there, or should we go along the north coast to Montego Bay and head inland from there? The Rastaman can’t hear him so he shouts for him to say it again. Steve the apprentice is trying to score some ganja from the Rasta, and Pie is drumming lightly across the worn skin of his gombay. Charles argues with Harris in front of him about the best route to Nyamkopong. Harris has seen a map of the island once and claims that Charles couldn’t possibly know how to get there because he can’t read. Charles reaches out and grabs the much smaller Harris by the throat and shakes him like a doll, and Harris screams with laughter. Aunt Celia has already started singing, a high-pitched gospel singer’s voice singing an African song that repeats, repeats, repeats a single musical phrase. And next to her Regine scowls and yells at her husband the Colonel, telling him to hurry up and get finished with all this monkey business so they can reach Nyamkopong before the entire celebration is over and forgotten. Next to her the Captain is talking to his abeng, blowing the spit from it and chiding it for its weakness. In front, Gondo twitches and jumps every few seconds and gulps, Ay-yup! The Colonel unscrews the cap of the rum bottle, fills his mouth, sprays the ground outside his open window. Then he passes the bottle to Johnny, Gondo making a spastic grab for the bottle as it goes by, and orders Johnny to do the same. Filling his mouth with the fiery stuff, Johnny sticks his head out the window and splashes the rum on the ground, then passes the bottle back to the Colonel, who takes a pull from it and places it on the seat between his legs.
They have been jammed into the car for fully ten minutes and haven’t left the Colonel’s yard. There are still more preparations. The Colonel draws from a jacket pocket a tiny glass vial and hands it to Johnny. Drink that! he orders.
Unscrewing the top, Johnny sniffs the contents and winces. What is it?
Never mind. Just drink it. All of it. You’re the driver and you have to be protected so you can get us there safely. Drink it.
Obediently, Johnny empties the vial into his mouth, grimaces, and swallows the oily liquid. Are we ready now? he asked Bowra, starting the engine. At the sound of the engine, everyone in the car suddenly goes silent.
The Colonel starts to sing, a high, slightly off-key, chanting song that is quickly taken up by the others in the car. Aunt Celia’s voice comes in at the top, an ancient, keening sound that gives the chant a timeless quality as it rises and rolls on and over itself. Pie’s drum and Steve’s clattering bamboo come in under the song and start to drive it, and in a moment even Johnny’s tenor and the Rasta’s deep bass have caught up and joined them, and as the car sits there in the moonlight with its motor running, the choir of voices and drums lifts it off the ground and, as if on the hand of a god, carries it through the air. Hurriedly, Johnny slaps the rising car into gear, flicks on the headlights, and now, as if steering a boat, spins the wheel and guides the vehicle above the yard to the lane and above the lane to the rutted, unpaved road that curls through the narrow valleys to the road to Castleton. As they leave the settlement of Gordon Hall, the old Captain sticks his head out the window and blows furiously on the abeng, a long, clear, rising note that finally breaks and fades away, and they are gone.
The valleys are again silent and dark. A light wind moves up from the river below and ripples the leaves of the banana trees on the terraces, making them glitter coldly in the moonlight. A dog barks once, then goes back to sleep. Someone somewhere in the village tosses an empty bottle over a cliff, and after a few seconds it smashes lightly against a limestone outcropping far below near the river. Another dog, startled by the tinkling sound, barks. Then silence. And moonlight and wind and shadow.