THE TOWN OF CASTLETON is closed for the night, but then the blue van crosses the ridge that spines the island from east to west, and they start the switchbacking descent to Kingston, the car leaning dangerously on the sudden curves as it descends to the lights below. Halfway down, they come to the crossroads town of Stony Hill at the outskirts of the sprawling city, and Bowra, shouting everyone into silence, instructs Johnny to stop the car in front of the only shop in town still open for business.
Bowra enters the bar first, his entourage coming along close behind. Except for the Rasta and Johnny, the group is well known here. The bartender hails Bowra, and the half dozen late-night drinkers at the bar greet the several members of the troupe cheerfully, and soon everyone is drinking and talking together. Harris controls the attention of several of the men by explaining elegantly and elaborately why they are out this late. We are on a peace mission to our brother Maroons in Nyamkopong, he begins, and then goes on to tell how for generations they have been lost to one another, but now they are going to extend the hand of Ashanti brotherhood and join forces. His voice rises and he begins to sketch out for his audience a scenario in which the Maroons deal with the PNP and Michael Manley the same way the old Maroons dealt with the British slavemasters. His gift is a preacher’s gift, and this is evidently what Bowra means when he calls him his mouth-man, for Bowra’s gift is different. Bowra controls Harris the mouth-man, and Harris controls the words for him.
At the end of the bar, Charles and Gondo and Pie have gathered around a bulky young woman in a tight T-shirt and cutoff jeans and high-heeled shoes. Charles seems enormous, nearly seven feet tall, because of the black bird that sits on top of his head, and he flirts with the woman, while Pie and Gondo affirm the truth of what he is telling her, that there is a beautiful bird on his head. She says over and over in a tired voice, You crazy, man, ain’t no bird up there. But soon she starts to believe them. It’s invisible, Charles tells her, but you can see it if you want to. As she reaches delicately up to touch it, Charles warns her that it may bite. It does, the woman yells and yanks her hand back as if from a flame and jams her finger into her mouth and starts to suck on it. Gondo laughs wildly and then breaks into hiccups; Pie smiles like a fox and takes a swallow from his glass of rum.
Near the door the Rasta and Steve are rolling joints, tapping and tightening them, lighting up, inhaling deeply, dreamily. In a corner, the two women are sitting at a table and drinking Heineken from the bottle, waiting impassively for the men to finish their usual mixture of business and foolishness. Aunt Celia smiles cordially but inwardly, as if at a remembered holiday pleasure, while Regine, with a somber, slightly impatient expression on her face, watches the yakking men at the bar. Her husband the Colonel and his brother the Captain have moved purposefully through the bar and have disappeared into a room beyond.
Johnny! Come forward, Johnny! Bowra’s voice booms out, and the white man crosses into the back room, where Bowra and the Captain are seated at a table with a third man. The stranger looks Syrian or Lebanese, is tall and thin, his black hair slicked greasily back in a pompadour. He is about forty and well dressed in a tan bush jacket open to the waist. His chest is covered with a pelt of black curly hair, and around his neck he wears a half dozen fine gold chains, each bearing a different emblem—a cross, a Star of David, a fertility symbol, a small gold coin, a Maltese cross, and a caduceus.
Johnny, meet Doc. Doc’s the M.P. for Gordon Hall. The whole district belongs to Doc. Right, Doc? Bowra asks, smiling broadly.
The man says nothing, extends his hand limply toward the American, without looking up at his face.
Sit down, Johnny, sit down, Bowra says. Have a drink. Want a drink?
No. A beer, maybe. I’ve got to drive all night, he says, sitting down opposite the one they call Doc.
This here’s Johnny, Doc. He’s the one I told you about. We call him Johnny. That’s what we call a good white man, Johnny. What’s your real name, Johnny? Tell Doc here your real name. Go ahead.
Johnny tells the man his real name, and the man nods, his face expressionless. Then the Captain, who had gone out to the bar for a few seconds, returns with a bottle of stout and sets it in front of Johnny, who reaches into his pocket as if to pay.
My pleasure, Doc says, waving a long bony hand at him.
Thanks.
My pleasure.
The four men drop into silence. From the bar out front comes the noise of Harris and Charles, Gondo’s hiccupping, the blat of raggae from the juke box and the roll of the Rasta’s reasoning with Steve.
Are you Labour or PNP? Johnny asks the man.
He looks up. Labour.
Oh.
The whole district belongs to Doc, Bowra adds.
Gordon Hall too?
Gordon Hall too, Doc answers.
They go on drinking in silence. Stacked high against the walls of the room are hundreds of beer cartons, Red Stripe and Dragon stout, mostly, and the place smells of stale beer. Windowless, the room is lit by a single bulb near the ceiling, and there seems to be no exit from the room except through the bar in front.
Is this your office? Johnny asks.
Doc laughs lightly, as if Johnny is stupid. No. I own the shop.
He owns the whole building, Bowra adds. And lots more too.
I bet he does, Johnny says, getting up from his chair. Well, Colonel and Captain, we’d better keep moving if we want to get to Nyamkopong by sunrise.
Good, good, the Captain says suddenly and he rises and departs quickly without saying anything to Doc or his brother.
The Captain’s not a Labour man, Bowra tells Johnny, as if to explain his abrupt departure. But he’s not the Colonel, he adds. Then he slaps Doc on the back, bids him good-bye and follows his brother out the door.
Thanks for the beer, Johnny says to Doc, and then he leaves too. By the time he reaches the van, everyone has already packed himself in. The noise of argument and teasing, complaint, song and boast, has returned, as everyone shouts, sings, talks, whines and brags at once. Again Bowra starts to chant, and again the others soon join him—Pie on the drum, Steve on the bamboo stick, and the high voice of Aunt Celia keening over the top—and again the van floats into the air and is quickly flying down the long winding mountainside into Kingston. This time, though, the Captain keeps the abeng in his pocket and instead merely sings the rollicking, repeating chant along with the others.
From Stony Hill at the northside edge of Kingston the road slips and slides rapidly past middle-class suburban homes, grows smooth and is suddenly lit by street lights. By the time the road reaches Constant Spring, it has become a boulevard with shops, department stores, shopping centers and drive-in restaurants along both sides. In the nightlight, the city resembles Los Angeles. Then at Mary Browns Corner the road levels and begins the run for Half Way Tree and from there quickly into downtown Kingston and the waterfront.
It’s raining now, and the road glistens. Traffic is light—only the cop cars and the cars of the night people flit past like shiny insects. And among the night people tonight come the Maroons of Gordon Hall, drumming and chanting their way to Nyamkopong to celebrate the birthday of their Captain Cudjoe. The blue van sails through the city to Half Way Tree, turns right and heads for Spanish Town Road, then right again toward Spanish Town itself, past the rows of warehouses and factories, then past the lands taken over by the squatters, the homeless ones who have come in from the country to huddle at the edge of the city in tiny patched-together shanties, where they wait to be removed by bulldozers, so the land can be developed in what developers call an orderly way. But the Maroons and Johnny and the Rasta see none of this—like Dorothy and her cronies on their yellow brick road, they fly past the disorder and rubble of the world without seeing it, because all they can see tonight is their goal tonight, Nyamkopong, the African city where their ancestors signed the treaty with the British and where Cudjoe ruled.
Spanish Town, built mostly of bricks, is an old city, the first British capital of Jamaica and before that the main Spanish settlement on the island. It’s also where Marcus Garvey was jailed, and when he prophesied that the walls of the prison would fall and the doors open wide for him, he was talking about this high-walled prison, dark and silent and wet as the van passes by. In the back seat the Rasta groans, Marcus, oh Marcus. Marcus, oh Marcus. The others, as if out of respect for the Rasta, fall into silence.
Marcus Garvey was a great man, Johnny finally says.
No! Bowra bellows back. A great African! And then begins a long, screaming argument between Bowra and the Rasta on one side and Harris and the Captain on the other as to whether or not Marcus Garvey was an African. Harris and the Captain insist that Garvey was a Jamaican because he was born in Jamaica, and Bowra and the Rasta yell back that he was an African because he was a black man, and at least according to Bowra, a Maroon. Bowra and the Rasta agree that the only true Jamaicans were the Arawak Indians, but since none of them exist anymore, having all been slain hundreds of years ago by the Spanish and the British, then no one is Jamaican. Everyone is either African or Indian or Chinese or British or American or Canadian, the Rasta explains.
Or Syrian! Bowra adds.
Or Syrian.
But they don’t win the argument. It just gets lost in Gondo’s sudden, angry explosion of words, incoherent, disconnected words, as if he were having a fit or were possessed by a demon. He leaps in his seat between Bowra and Johnny, thrashes and angrily shouts a wild mixture of English and Ashanti words and expressions. Johnny, clearly frightened, slows the van, draws it over to the side of the road, and hollers at Gondo to shut up and sit still so he can drive. To the Colonel, he cries, Shut him up, for Christ’s sake! Hold him still, I can’t drive with him like that!
From the back of the van comes the thrumming sound of Pie’s hands against the goatskin, and then the high wail of Aunt Celia starts the song, Ah-ya-ya-ya-oh-h-h! Ah-ya-ya-ya-oh-h-h! Bowra, ignoring both Johnny’s plea and Gondo’s fit, joins in with his heavy voice, and the others swing in behind, until in a moment everyone but Johnny and Gondo is singing, the drum and bamboo stick shoving them along and shoving them faster and faster, smoothing their voices out and bringing them into formation. And then Gondo too has caught up and has joined them. His body ceases to leap about and settles back into its normal quiet twitchings. Finally even Johnny relents and hurries into line with the others and he too is singing, Ah-ya-ya-ya-oh-h-h! The van pulls back onto the road, speeds up, and lifts off again, rising smoothly over the coastal flatlands west of Spanish Town, heading through the darkness for May Pen.
On the other side of May Pen, before the land starts to rise toward the Mocho Mountains in Clarendon, they pass through a village called Denbigh, where the Colonel spots an open shop. He directs Johnny to slow down and pull into a lane on the left that leads them between a pair of cinderblock warehouses to a tiny shop fronting the lane. Three or four women with small children racing around them have set up charcoal braziers in front of the shop, where they are cooking and selling fish and hot peppers and onions. There is a small group of people—cops, prostitutes, gamblers, a few “soul boys” off the road from Kingston—at the bar and standing around outside, drinking and eating fish and peppers off sheets of brown paper.
Fish and peppers! Johnny says, and he draws the van over to the shop and parks it. All the men climb out of the van and head for the bar. Behind them, Aunt Celia and Regine stretch out in the emptied seats and close their eyes for sleep. Johnny and the Rasta buy Dragon stouts and step outside for the fish stands, while the others gather around their Colonel at the bar, order rum, and commence describing the purpose and significance of their journey to the barman and the men and women standing around in the small three-sided room.
We are the Maroons from Gordon Hall! the Colonel announces, when everyone has been served and he has spat the first sip on the dusty ground and has swallowed the second.
A tall, gaunt, rat-faced cop with buck teeth, a red-striper in uniform, leans against the juke box and takes in the group with an amused smile on his lips, a cold critical look in his eyes. He glances swiftly out at Johnny and the Rasta, then back to the Colonel, whose Kelly green bulk dominates the room.
What about those two? Are they the Maroons from Gordon Hall too? he asks.
The Colonel tells the cop that the short one, the Rasta, is a Maroon from Nyamkopong, and he’s helping the taller one, the white man, Johnny, carry them across the island to Nyamkopong, where the chiefs of the Maroons will celebrate together and have a big conference. Then he barks at the two men outside, instructing them to come forward and present themselves to these strangers, which they do, with apparent reluctance, both of them unsmiling and stepping warily into the presence of the cop, for he has made himself the center of the group of habitués and soul boys in the bar. They watch him as if waiting for his reaction to these loud country people claiming to be Maroons from the mountains beyond Kingston. Then, depending on how the cop takes them, they will react.
You a Maroon? the cop asks Johnny.
No.
Where are you from?
Anchovy. In St. James.
Long ways from here.
Yes.
And you, Rastaman. You a Maroon?
I-and-I am the son of a son, and I-father as well, back there to the ancient times when the Africans came into their captivity, and since those among them who cast off the shackles and chains of slavery came to be known amongst the people of the world as Maroons, so the ascendants of I-and-I would have I be also. Sar, the Rasta adds with a smile.
The cop turns to the barman. Give the Maroons a drink, he says. All of them, even the white Maroon, he adds good-naturedly, nodding toward Johnny. The Rasta too. The I-man’s a Maroon too. At least tonight he is.
Johnny feeds the juke box and the Rasta punches the keys, and soon the alley is filled with music and the noise of men shouting over it to each other. It’s a good juke, with forty or fifty of the newest songs on it, the sign of a critical and demanding and political neighborhood. Johnny and the Rasta nod and jog in place to the heavy beat of the records, Pie drums along on the countertop, while the cop and the Colonel try to ignore it and talk over it to each other about the government and other weighty matters appropriate to their respective positions. Charles is trying to dance with one of the women, but she wants to sit on a beer carton and watch, so he dances alone in front of her, trying to impress and seduce her with a shuffling, intricate step that seems slightly out of time. Harris, his pipe clenched in his teeth, is at the Colonel’s shoulder, his mouth at the ready. The Captain has stepped outside for fish and a chat with the women at the smoky stoves.
Gondo, though, after starting slowly, has begun to dance faster and faster, in perfect time, with increasing grace and lightfootedness, a tiny old man who soon seems to have left the ground to dance a few inches above it, whirling like a dervish in the crowded room, forcing everyone to clear a space for him in the middle. His unbuttoned black suit coat flares out around him like a skirt as he spins and dips, leaps up and drops through his own circles to the bare ground, while the music pounds along behind, his only perfect partner. The women and children leave the fish stands and come to stand at the open front of the bar to watch the old man, and everyone in the bar, even Charles, stops what he is doing and stares happily at Gondo, for the brittle, nervous, tiny man with the chirping voice has become liquid and weightless, has turned his old body wholly into music.
It seems that they remain for hours at the bar in Denbigh, drinking and eating fish and peppers, dancing and watching Gondo dance, full of brag, shout and argument, until at last the Colonel, on some schedule of his own, orders his people from the place, and they climb back into the van. Gondo has switched places with the Rasta and falls swiftly into sleep in the back. The others are soon asleep also, and then only Bowra, the Rasta, and Johnny are awake, the Rasta and Bowra talking in low voices about crops. Bowra complains that the land in Gordon Hall is too hilly and difficult to farm and wants the Rasta to tell him what kind of land the other Maroon villages have, for he has not traveled before to any of the other three villages.
Charles Town is the worst of the four, the Rasta tells him. All rock and hills and not much water. Moore Town is better than Gordon Hall because it’s in Portland, where the rain always falls and is situated among gentle river valleys with plenty of deep rich soil. But Nyamkopong in the Cockpit, the Rasta tells him, has the best land of the four villages for farming. The water and the soil settle into the bottoms of the cockpits, and, where the sun reaches the bottom, there are beautiful gardens.
Johnny aims the van into the night, driving easily, comfortably, while the two farmers talk. He smiles as the car leaves the ground again and flies.
The road climbs toward Mandeville, and the small engine at the back of the van begins to labor, and soon Johnny is shifting gears back and forth to keep the vehicle moving. With the others sleeping, except for the Rasta and the Colonel, the load seems to have tripled in weight, and though the car remains airborne, it flies slowly and low over the road.
At Mandeville, when they pass the Alcan processing plants and where the yards, buildings and equipment are protected by eight-foot-high, chain-link fences and arc lights on aluminum poles, the people in the back seats start to wake. First Charles, whose low talking with his bird wakes Harris, who tells him to shut up. Then Gondo, who tells Harris that Charles needs to keep his bird happy or it will leave him. And then Pie, whose light drumming wakes Steve, and then the two women, both of whom start to sing quietly, Regine singing one line and Aunt Celia the answer, an Ashanti riddle song in which the questions change and the answers remain the same.
Bowra grumbles that he is cold and goes to work on the second bottle of rum, passing it to the people in back now and then but quickly demanding its return. Compared to the coastal flatlands, it is cold now, and dry and dusty along the road from the red clouds of powdered bauxite surrounding the huge dump trucks that haul the ore night and day into Mandeville from the mines at Williamsfield and Myersville and other, smaller outposts in the hills. West of Mandeville, though, the road starts a long descent, and in seven or eight miles, by the time it reaches the town of Spur Tree, the road has returned almost to sea level, where it is warm and humid again.
Spur Tree is a small agricultural town whose largest building is an open-sided banana packing plant, basically a large corrugated tin roof on poles. As the blue van cruises through the village, the place seems wholly asleep, but Bowra knows better. He says he knows of a shop in this town that belongs to a “big man,” the head of security for the Alcan plant in Mandeville, and he’s so big he’s able to keep the place open all night long if he wants to and the cops never bother him for it, even though he’s only got a tavern license and legally is required to close by eleven at night. Bowra’s never been to this shop himself, but he’s heard of it from a cousin who used to drive a truck over here for one of the bauxite companies.
Suddenly everyone is excited again and full of energy—Gondo jerking spastically and gulping, Ay-yup!, Harris and Bowra yammering rapidly in Ashanti, the women singing, Pie and Steve drumming away, Charles feeding his bird so it’ll be strong, the Captain arguing with the Rasta that the Gordon Hall abeng man, meaning himself, knows the old African codes, and the Nyamkopong abeng man, he’d heard, only knows how to blow it as if it were a toy trumpet. The old Maroons could send messages with the abeng, he tells the Rasta, and they used a code whenever they played it, a language, to make the horn talk. They didn’t just stand up and toot on the thing, he points out scornfully. They talked with it.
Out of this babble Bowra suddenly cries, Stop! and Johnny obediently pulls the van off the road to the left into a lot where a half dozen cars are parked in front of a darkened cinderblock building that from the outside resembles a pink bunker—windowless, squat and ominous-looking. This is it! the Colonel announces. Let’s go get a drink and dance with the girls!
He swings his bulky body out the door and the eight other men follow, the women once again slumping back into the vacated seats to sleep. Bowra marches straight for the door at the center of the building, yanks it open, and strides down three steps into a dimly lit, low-ceilinged room with a bar at one end and a dozen small tables scattered along the sides. The walls are painted garishly yellow and are decorated with Day-Glo posters of American pop figures like Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan.
In one corner is a juke box, but no one is playing it, and the place is silent when the Maroons enter. Not silent, however, for long. A few drinkers have gathered in a knot at the far end of the bar and seem to be engaged in private conversation with the barman. Scattered along the bar are three solitary drinkers, not farmers but apparently locals, in khaki work clothes, and then there are the usual bored, tired prostitutes in tight Levi’s, psychedelic T-shirts, and wedge-heeled plastic sandals. The men talking to the barman—there are four of them, and the barman is the fifth—are not farmers either but look more like truck drivers or machine operators. They’re all wearing the same dark gray uniform with their names on their left shirt pocket, as if they all work for the same company. They are hard-working men who have jobs that pay them well for it. They also look mean and very sure of themselves.
Rum! Bowra shouts down to the barman, as his entourage scatters itself along the bar in various groupings—Charles and the Captain heading as usual for the women, Steve for the Rasta, Harris for his position at the shoulder of the Colonel, and Pie, Gondo and Johnny for the juke box—making a sudden clamor of their presence, causing the group of uniformed men at the end of the bar to turn and stare at them without amusement.
The barman moves slowly toward the Colonel. He’s a thick-bodied man, below average in height but powerful looking in a tight, dark green, GANJA OIL CO. T-shirt. Stopping in front of the Colonel, he crosses his arms over his beefy chest and says one word, Closed. Then he returns to his friends in the gray uniforms.
Bowra raises his eyebrows in mock astonishment. Closed? he asks Harris. Closed? With all these people drinking, he says, waving his hand grandly in the direction of the three solitary drinkers at the bar and the pair of prostitutes reaching tentatively for the bird they can’t see on top of Charles’ head. With all these people here, the man wants us to believe he’s closed?
Harris’ response is in rapid-fire Ashanti, a harsh, bass-toned, sputtering line of syllables that brings the Maroons and even Johnny and the Rasta, who don’t know what he has said, to attention and draws them quickly over to the Colonel’s side.
Come here, Bowra says to the barman, who looks up, surprised. Come here, man. The Colonel’s voice is not loud but is emphatic and utterly sincere. It is the voice he would use with a misbehaving child, as if he were more disappointed in the child than angry.
Me? the barman asks, pointing at his chest.
Yes. Come here. Come here, man.
Obediently, the man comes forward, while Harris chatters in Ashanti into the Colonel’s ear.
When the barman has come to stand before the Colonel, he is told to look into the Colonel’s eyes, which he does. Harris goes on talking in that strange, intense language as if the language in his voice were a drum in his hands accompanying Bowra’s confrontation with the barman.
Lifting one of his huge hands, Bowra points an index finger directly at the barman’s heart, and the man lurches backward, clutching his heart and howling with pain. Then Bowra brings his hand down, and the pain apparently ceases, leaving the barman gasping.
You all right, Larry? calls one of the men in the group at the end of the bar.
The barman doesn’t answer. He is staring into Bowra’s eyes as if fascinated by the blue and brown concentric rings. Two of his friends have taken a step toward the Maroons and are looking at the barman in puzzlement. Hey, Larry, you all right, man?
Charles answers them. The man is learning who the Colonel is, he explains. He’s all right.
Rum, the Colonel says calmly. Eight glasses and two half pints.
Silently the barman fills the order. When he has set out the glasses and the rum, the Colonel says, Thank you, and dismisses him with a little wave.
Johnny and the Rasta stare after him as he walks back to his friends, while the others grab for their glasses and pour out the rum. The barman and the Maroons too behave as if nothing unusual has happened, as if the barman merely changed his mind and decided to serve the group after all, since that would be the reasonable thing to do anyhow. They clearly are on the road and have stopped in for a quick, single drink.
Johnny looks at his friend the Rasta, who lifts his eyebrows and purses his thick lips. Then they each reach for a glass, and for the first time since Johnny has met the Rasta, he sees him drink off a glass of rum, and it is Johnny’s turn to raise his eyebrows and purse his lips.
Smiling sheepishly, the Rasta shrugs his shoulders, and Johnny slaps him affectionately on the back. Terron, this here’s Oz, and we’re on the yellow brick road, he says, laughing. I guess we can expect just about anything to happen. Jah will forgive you one drink of rum, my friend.
The others are heading for the door, apparently without paying for their drinks. Johnny turns to the barman, who seems to be ignoring them and is immersed again in his conversation with the truckers. Hey, friend, how much? Johnny calls to him.
He looks up slowly and seems not to know what Johnny’s talking about. What?
How much for the drinks?
Oh. Forget it. It’s late, he says. We’re closed now, he adds and goes back to his conversation.
Okay by me, Johnny says, and he and the Rasta turn and move for the door.
Outside, the two men stand for a moment and savor the cool air. The others have packed themselves back into the van. The eastern sky is a dark, silky gray color, but in the west it’s still night-dark, and the stars flash across it in belts and blankets. A light breeze is stirring and carries the smell of a cookfire. Somewhere in the distance a truck is shifting gears as it hauls its load of bauxite uphill to Mandeville.
The wizard of Oz, the Rasta says in a low voice. The wizard of Oz.
They’re silent for a moment, while a rooster crows.
The wizard of Oz was a fake, Johnny says. Remember?
The Rasta says he never saw that movie, he just heard about it.
Well, he was a fake wizard, Terron. A phony.
No. It couldn’t be. Or they wouldn’t have called him that.
What?
A wizard. A wizard is a wizard, he explains.
Yeah, I guess so, Johnny says, and the two walk to the darkened van, where everyone is sleeping. The Rasta slides in between Johnny and the snoring Colonel from the driver’s side, then Johnny gets in and starts the engine. One or two in the back stir and mumble, then slump back to sleep, as the van bumps onto the road, turns left toward Santa Cruz and Maggotty, and builds speed.
For the rest of the journey the American and the Rasta remain silent, and the others sleep. Now and then, with a casual wave of the hand, the Rasta tells the American he should turn right or left, as the van works its way slowly west and then north toward Cockpit Country, through Santa Cruz, Lacovia, and Newton, until they are in the valley of the Black River and nearing the town of Maggotty. The sky behind them has gone to a silvery white and ahead of them has turned to zinc, and the stars have disappeared. Smoke from cookfires curls up from kitchens behind the shanties and cabins alongside the road. Here and there an early-rising farmer walks from his cabin to his fields, or a child sleepily carries a tin of water from the standpipe near the road back to the house.
A few miles outside Maggotty, the American says in a low voice, It’s all right, I know where I am now. He enters the closed-up village, passes the shops and stores, the doctor’s office, the ESSO station—familiar territory at last. They cut through the Appleton factory grounds, pass by the men coming in for the first shift, pick up an unpaved road on the other side, swing past the rows of worker’s cabins, and start the long run through the deep green cane fields. As they pass the river where Johnny and the men and boys from Nyamkopong used to come to bathe, the sun cracks the horizon behind them, splashing sudden waves of golden light across their backs and over the motionless stalks of cane. In the distance the hills of Nyamkopong above the rapidly rising haze are flooded with sunlight.
The Maroons are awake. They know where they are, even though they have never been here before. Pie brings his drum to life, Steve joins in lightly, and Aunt Celia starts a mournful song full of the ancient grief and happiness of coming home, the cry for time found and lost forever. Regine’s powerful voice wells up, and then Harris and the Colonel, Charles and the Captain and Gondo are singing also, a wailing song that Johnny and the Rasta cannot join, and in silence, their faces washed with awe, they listen and stare straight ahead at the winding, rising road to Nyamkopong.
At Whitehall Johnny stops the van, for this is where the land of the Maroons begins, and the Captain blows the abeng, a cry, a wail, a plea, three separate blasts on the horn—and they enter Cockpit Country slowly, ceremoniously, in the pathetic little blue Japanese van, the ancient sounds of the abeng preceding them, as the sun springs free of the horizon, shudders a second, and ascends into the sky. Now they come unto Nyamkopong, the African city of Cudjoe and his fierce Ashanti warriors. Now comes the Colonel from the brother city of the Maroons in the east, now come the chief of the brethren from Gordon Hall and his captain and lieutenants, his women and drummers and dancers, bearing gifts and offerings for their beloved brethren and the gods and a deep desire to exchange views and wisdom with their wise and ancient brethren of Nyamkopong. Now comes the heart of Jamaica to embrace itself and to know itself in the presence of its counter-part here in the east. Let the others stand away, let the sons and daughters of the slaves and the sons and daughters of the slaveholders and all those who came after—let them stand away on this day and honor the sons and daughters of those who waged war against the slaveholders and slew the slaves who aided their masters, who endured the wilderness of the Cockpit and learned to survive and thrive there, who kept alive the dances and songs and the knowledge of the sacred herbs and the names of the gods and also kept alive the memory of an African language—who kept their powers. This remnant of a remnant, honor it.