St. George’s, Grenada, October 19, 1983
“I’m not staying here,” Alison said. They had arrived at a small house where chickens pecked in the front yard and the noise from the streets below was muffled.
“Come on, Alison,” Neville said.
“Why?” Alison said. “It’s men’s work, is it? I took the training. I know how to use a gun. You said I was one of the best shots you’ve seen, Neville. And I’m a nurse. You always said we might need nurses.”
“I don’t want to stay here either,” Pat said.
“It’s going to be dangerous,” Claude said, his face pinched. “I don’t want my child, our child, in danger.” He paced alongside the car, his hands on his head.
A woman came out of the house, holding the hand of a little boy. “Pat!” she shouted. “Thank God, thank God. I knew you were at Carp’s; you’re back, you’re back.”
“Ma,” said the little boy, but he stood at a distance with his thumb in his mouth.
Claude bent down. “Hi there, little fella,” he said. “Come and give Pa a hug.” The boy turned away and buried his face in his grandmother’s skirt.
“He ain’t seen you long time, Buck.” The grandmother looked tired, shrunken beyond her years under her headscarf.
“These ladies are going to stay here for a while,” said Claude, straightening.
“Alison, hello,” said Pat’s mother. She pointed to Felicity. “Who this American?”
“My name’s Lydia,” Felicity said. “I’m just a friend in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She was speaking through what felt like layers of heavy, wet cotton. Arnold had been shot in front of her. He had walked to school with her and defended her from bullies and showed her how to play marbles. Now he was dead.
“I’m not staying,” repeated Alison. She turned and walked back to the car.
“Pat, you’ll stay, won’t you?” Claude pleaded.
Pat’s eyes swivelled between Claude and the cars and her mother and her son. Then, she said, “I am the Minister for Women’s Affairs. I must show that women are an equal part of this Revo. We cannot be written out.” She sprang forward and hugged her mother, both women crying now. She bent down and tried to kiss her son, who continued to bury his face in his grandmother’s leg.
“Be careful,” her mother said in a resigned tone.
Felicity looked up, into the branches of a lemon tree, wondering if the child’s grandmother made him fresh lemonade the way Felicity’s mother once did. The sky was blue, so blue. The colour of Mara’s eyes. It was funny that it was Mara’s eyes she thought of and not Adele’s, whose father was right here beside her, handing her a lifeline to safety. She could stay with Pat’s mother and make her way to the embassy in the town below when the crowds dispersed. But she didn’t know Pat’s mother at all, and she didn’t like the hostile gazes she was giving her.
Claude said, “We need to go. Move, move!” He turned to Felicity. “Well, Felicity,” he said, and she imagined that his expression shone with remembrance and regret. “I wish you the best.”
“I’m not staying either,” Felicity said. Arnold had died for Grenada. She was not going to leave it now. She was not going to be the foreigner Neville and Claude thought she was.
Claude looked at his watch. “Please, Felicity.”
The Cuban stuck his head out of the window and shouted something in Spanish. Felicity ran to the car and wrenched open the door. Claude followed, shaking his head.
Neville said, “Well, that was a waste of time. One big commess.”
Pat said, “Abegunde wouldn’t come to me.”
Claude put an arm around her. “He was surprised to see us, that’s all.”
The car careened back down the hill and into the capital. The streets were thronged with people, chanting and waving signs that read “no carp, no revo.” The car had to honk to move people out of the way for the convoy to pass. Neville and Claude hung out of the windows, shaking hands and greeting people as the car rolled past. The crowds gradually thinned as they approached the large stone fort at the top of the hill, overlooking the capital. The car stopped in a large grey courtyard surrounded by steep stone walls with cliffs on one side, the ocean on the other.
“We made it first,” said Neville. The Cuban opened the trunk, and a large screw drilled into Felicity’s chest as Claude pulled out armfuls of weapons and began carrying them inside, as casually as he had once brought home groceries. They headed up a set of stone steps to a large suite of rooms. “We need to call Cuba,” Neville said, heading to a table that held a switchboard.
“Why?” asked Melvin, who had arrived in the second car.
“They’ll send troops to subdue Henry,” Neville said. “They promised.”
“Neville!” Claude said, aghast. “You want to use violence against our own people? Against our own Revo? Against Grenadians?”
“You’re going to bring the Americans here,” said Lee.
“The Cubans will hold them off.” Neville shrugged.
“Not forever!” Lee shouted. “America will crush them! You know it and I know it! Fuck, Neville!”
Speaking with an exaggerated calm, as if he were medicated, Neville said, “Americans don’t want any more bodies coming home in body bags. Not so soon after Vietnam. We just have to keep them back for a while, cause them enough losses for them to stand down.”
“Since when is this Cuba’s fight?” said Claude. “We don’t need them here anymore than we need America here. This is our Revo. A Black Revo.”
Neville said, “It’s too late for that, Claude.” He put a pair of headphones on, flicked some buttons on the switchboard, and directed Claude to address the Cubans in Spanish.
Having realized where Neville was, a stream of people began flowing into the room. A crowd had followed the convoy of cars up the hill. Looking out the window, Felicity saw an ancient basketball hoop, its iron ring glazed with a flaky green sheen, listing to one side. Schoolboys in uniform hefted a soccer ball towards it and cheered whenever someone managed to hit their target. Music blared from radios in the courtyard and people blew on conch shells, the watery echoes travelling over the din of the music and laughter. This was a celebration. The people had their leader back.
“I’m almost finished your speech, Neville,” said Claude. “What do you think of this? ‘The people are the Black pearls of freedom, and we are all precious. Each one of us has our place on the string’?”
“Whatever you think is best,” said Neville.
“You should go down to the Square and do the speech there,” Claude said. “Not up here.”
“No,” Neville said, his eyes glowing with Revolutionary fervour. “I’m not running away. I’m staying to fight.”
A rumbling began outside. Lee ran to the window. “Shrimps,” he said. “Neville, come see.” Five large army Jeeps filled with soldiers were entering the courtyard.
“They’re here,” Neville said. “Henry’s people are here.” He began giving orders. “Fortify the doors. No one in or out.”
Guns rattled below. Felicity watched with a growing sick feeling as bodies fell and lay in red patches on the concrete. Other terrified people ran and began to jump over the stone walls of the fort. Their bodies hung in the air like black crows, a final voyage past the sun’s weary eye before they plummeted out of view. She retched and grasped at the windowsill.
“Maybe we should send the women and children out,” Claude suggested.
Neville said, “Not yet. They’re safer here.”
The people remaining in the room began to arm themselves. Alison and Pat lifted heavy guns over their heads as easily as did the men, Pat’s stomach protruding below the ammunition belt. Felicity heard bangs, pops, screams, and then booted feet running up the stairs. There was a hammering on the door. “Neville Carpenter and all supporters, come out and surrender!”
“Ssh,” Neville cautioned. The pounding on the door grew harder.
“Never!” shouted someone in the room. “Never surrender! Forward together!” The chant was taken up by others. A few seconds later, the tick of gunfire began. Felicity dropped to the floor as small round holes appeared in the metal door. The bullets clicked against the stone walls and fell to the floor. Others hit their marks, and people cried out as bursts of blood spattered the room. Neville shouted, “All right, we’ll surrender, but we’re sending out civilians first. Women and children. Some wounded. Let them pass, and then you can deal with us.”
The machine gun fire stopped, and a voice said, “That will be acceptable.”
“Go now!” Neville said. “All of you, go, go, go!”
“I am not going,” Alison said, serene in her certainty. She stood next to Neville. “There are people in here who need medical assistance. Whatever happens to you, happens to me, and so be it.”
Felicity looked at Claude. He was whispering to Pat, his hand on her belly. Pat broke away and went and stood by the mangled door, tears rolling down her cheeks. Then Claude beckoned to Felicity. She made her way through the smoke, past the groaning bodies of those who had already been shot, to where he stood by the shattered window.
“Felicity,” Claude said. “You have to go now.” Felicity nodded. Claude took her hand between his, and said, “You were never here, you understand? You go home and do what you were always meant to do. You’re one of the world’s greatest singers now, and the world needs you.” He tried to smile but his face contorted into a grimace. “We’ll bring you back for another showcase when this is all over.”
Even now, as all their lives hung in the balance, she thought of pushing him against the wall, kissing him, begging him to take her again, right in front of everyone. Even now, she thought of spilling the news about Adele. But then Claude said, “Pat’s agreed to leave too. Go with her to her mother’s. Take care of her for me, please. Take care of my child.” There was no more time, Felicity thought. There was time only to leave. She had a mission. To get her daughter’s half-sibling to safety.
Felicity and Pat waited in the crush of people trying to get onto the stairs. Soldiers pushed them with the butts of their guns. Eventually, there was space for them. Near the bottom, Felicity stopped. A rubber tire was burning, fire blocked their way. It wasn’t large, she reassured herself. She could jump over it. Soldiers stood at the top of the stairs and at the bottom. She told herself she would not miss. She bent, took off her high-heeled sandals and held them in her hands, took a deep breath, jumped, and soared over the fire. The heat of the flames washed against the bottom of her feet. Thudding down safely on the other side, she winced as she jarred her ankles. She put her sandals back on and saw Pat, stricken, on the other side of the growing fire. A soldier stood behind Felicity, making no attempt to help. The stench of burning rubber made Felicity cough as it tore through her lungs.
“Pat!” Felicity shouted. “Pat, jump, quick!”
Pat was cradling her stomach. “I can’t! I’m too big!” she yelled over the crackle of the flames.
“You can do it. Come on. Do it for the baby,” Felicity shouted. “Back up and run!”
Pat hesitated. Felicity thought she would go back up to Claude, and he would think that Felicity had taken off and left Pat to fend for herself.
“Patricia!” she shouted again, and Pat did it. She jumped, landing in Felicity’s opened arms.
The soldier behind Felicity turned and called to the one standing outside the door to the courtyard. “Pat? Patricia Jack? Don’t let her pass!” He approached Pat and pressed her against the wall, motioning to Felicity to go through the door. Felicity took a step towards Pat, reaching for her hand to drag her to safety, but the soldier turned his gun on her. “Leave her and come!”
“It’s all right, Felicity,” Pat said, her voice bending around the words. “Go now. Go.” The smoke thickened. Bangs continued from upstairs. The soldier pushed Felicity to the door. She stumbled through. The sunlight smacked her in the face, blinding her. As her pupils adjusted, she saw that the courtyard was thick with people screaming, bleeding, running. Plumes of smoke billowed from the windows ringing the yard. People were fighting to get through the only gate out of the fort. She headed in that direction, stepping over abandoned signs — “No Carp, no Revo.” Pushing through the crowd, she heard someone shout “Brother Carp!” She turned and saw soldiers marching a group out into the courtyard. Neville, Claude, Alison, Lee, Melvin, Lawrence, Frank, and Kingdon, their hands in the air, no sign of the weapons they had had earlier. The soldier who had forced Felicity out of the stairwell led Pat to join the group. They were marched at gunpoint to stand against the wall beside the rusted basketball hoop.
Felicity sensed time shimmering above her head, sliding through her fingers. She saw Pat, her hand on her stomach, looking down at a pool glinting on the ground between her legs. She saw her head turn to the soldier behind her and knew that she was pleading for her baby’s life. The soldier prodded her back with the tip of his gun. She faced the wall.
There was a scuffle behind Felicity, and yet another soldier shoved her out of the way, pushing someone else towards the group lined up against the wall. It was Elrick, the young soldier from Neville’s house. “You told them we would be coming to the fort!” the soldier accused.
“No, I never did!” Elrick said.
“You were at the house. You talked to them. You told them —” The rest of the conversation faded into the roars of the crowd as Elrick, too, took his place against the wall. Felicity’s ribs seemed to collapse inward, crowding the breath from her lungs.
A crackling sound came from high up on the wall above the basketball hoop. A voice projected from the loudspeaker affixed there. “Attention, people of Grenada!” it said. “I speak on behalf of your prime minister, Mark Henry —” There was a hail of boos.
“We want we leader! We want Carp! We want Carp and Buck! No Carpenter, no Revo!” Undaunted in the face of the unfolding brutality, the people in the courtyard raised their voices to the sun above them, sent their chants out to the rim of the Caribbean Sea, gleaming outside the walls of the fort.
“These are enemies of the state!” shouted the voice. “They are obstacles to a true socialist Revolution. They must be eliminated!”
If Felicity hadn’t been watching the exact spot where the murder took place, she might have missed it. It happened faster than her eye could blink, faster than her head could turn, faster than two decades of memories could tumble through neurons and synapses. Faster than those whom death was rushing to claim could roar and flinch against it, or stretch out their arms to receive it, it came.
The line of soldiers lifted their guns, and in an instant, Felicity was looking at the place where Claude had been, at the parts of Claude now littering the ground, the parts of Pat, the parts of their child, the parts of Alison intermingled with the parts of Neville, forever linked with him at last, the parts of Elrick, his young dreams dashed. Kopf und Schultern, Knie und Zeh, she thought. She remembered cradling that head, being held to that chest, weeping in those arms. Those big brown eyes that would never turn their warmth on her again. Augen, Ohren, Nase und Mund.
The guns cried out again, this time firing on the crowd. More bodies scrambled over the stone ramparts of the fort, backlit by the sun, falling. On one side, rocks, on the other, the sea.
Felicity allowed herself to be borne by the swirl of bodies through the gate. Part of her longed to die with Claude, to end this agony, not to have to live the rest of her life seeing him explode into pieces before her. She stumbled as she was vomited out onto the road by the crowd. The heel of her sandal snapped. She could hear herself wailing, but the sound was trapped in her body, absorbed by the noise around her, the screams and chants, the Jeeps roaring up the hill to the fort, the guns still barking out metallic death.
Claude was dead. The final lines from “Laurie’s Song” echoed in Felicity’s mind as she stumbled down the hill of this beautiful, deadly island. The time has grown so short, the world so wide.