When the black Rover pulled up next to me in King Street, I knew I was on my way to Up Park Camp. Sitting in the back of the car for a silent journey with two plainclothes officers up front. They parked, marched me into the building and deposited me in a well furnished but empty office.
‘You have heard about the Federation, I assume?’ He hadn’t even bothered to introduce himself coming through the door. He knew who I was and that was enough for him.
‘I heard.’
‘It is all Mr Manley cares about since he got elected.’
‘Not all he cares about, I’m sure.’
He was irritated at my insolence. ‘You don’t seem that enthusiastic.’
‘Should I be, Colonel?’
He twiddled his moustache. A long, twirled-up thing like a bicycle handlebar. It made him look ancient, like some old German Kaiser or a Confederate general with his short hair slicked back so neat. Or Wyatt Earp. Yes, that was it. All guns blazing at the OK Corral.
‘I am not a colonel. I am a major.’ He tapped his epaulette to show me the lonesome crown.
We sat. Quietly. Until finally I said, ‘I don’t know what you want from me.’
‘You don’t know?’ he said mockingly.
I sighed. ‘We’ve been through all of this before, Major …’
‘Hutton.’
‘Major Hutton,’ I said, repeating his name. ‘I can’t help you.’
He opened the file on his desk. Flicked over some pages. Fiddled with the edges of the paper. ‘I think you can.’
I didn’t say anything. And then he said, ‘Isaac Dunkley.’
‘Isaac Dunkley? Are you serious?’
‘I couldn’t be more serious, Private.’
‘I am not a private any more. I was discharged.’ I got to my feet and started towards the door.
‘The man is a communist deeply involved with all sorts of undesirables and Cuban revolutionaries.’ And then he waited a brief moment before saying, ‘And maids in your service.’
I stopped and turned to face him. ‘Maids in my service?’
‘A Miss Tilly Stokes. Maid at Matthews Lane. Am I correct? And her bus-driving – what shall I call him – man friend?’
Tilly? Really? So meek and mild about her chores. And the bus driver she told me she was happily settled with.
‘I still don’t understand what this has to do with me.’
There was a tentative knock at the door. A nervous corporal entered with a note in his hand, walked across to Hutton and handed him the envelope. Then he brought his feet together, saluted and left.
Major Hutton reached for his letter opener. A paperknife in the shape of a ceremonial sword.
‘A present from my wife.’
As if I should care.
He unfolded the piece of paper, read it and then looked up at me.
‘I now have in my hand the telephone number of the police station where your Mr Dunkley is currently being held.’
‘He isn’t my Mr Dunkley.’
‘Arrested by the local constabulary for unlawful assembly and public affray.’ He raised his dark, bushy eyebrows. ‘That makes you guilty by association.’
‘Association with what?’
‘Or perhaps you would prefer me to tell the Gleaner newspaper about how helpful you were a little while ago spying on Chinese communists.’
‘I did no such thing!’
‘I will not mention Lue Fah Yee by name, of course, but mud sticks. Private Wong,’ he paused, ‘can you begin to imagine how that mud would smell on you right now? And on your father’s business? To say nothing of the reaction from your husband’s – what shall I call them – associates?’
So I sat down and listened while he made a phone call to arrange Isaac’s release and in exchange I agreed to find out what Tilly and her bus driver were up to. And what Isaac was doing with his Cubans.
‘It was some massive crowd, yu know. Down in Duke Street. At di opening a di new House a Representatives.’ He was excited. Isaac. ‘People climbing trees and clinging on di fence so deh could strain their neck to see di new ministers parading into di House. In victory. Because it was time for a change and change had come!’ I knew what he meant. ‘Time for a Change’ had been the People’s National Party election slogan. ‘Wid di party flag flying and a thousand voices singing “Jamaica Arise”. It was glorious, Fay. Yu really should ’ave been there.’
We were in the soda fountain at Half Way Tree, where Isaac was drinking a beer he’d brought into the store himself and sipped openly despite the waitress twice telling him, ‘I am sorry, sir, but you cannot consume your own beverages on the premises,’ which he ignored. With a smile.
‘So yu get arrested, Isaac?’
He shrugged. ‘Ah, it was nothing. Deh didn’t have nothing on me.’ He stretched out his arms. Palms up. As if to demonstrate the absence of chains. ‘So deh let me go. Simple as dat.’
Then he leant his head slightly to the side and observed me. ‘But what dis got to do wid you?’
‘I was worried ’bout yu.’
‘You? Worried ’bout me?’ He laughed. A great belly laugh that was so familiar it warmed my heart. But underneath it, beneath the carefree joviality, he was serious.
‘Father Kealey alright?’ I nodded. ‘So what yu want wid me?’
And that is how it all started again, with Isaac going on and on about how Manley had become obsessed with rooting out so-called reds from the PNP. ‘Because he fraid he going lose support if people really believe di Party under communist influence. So now every little thing dat anybody do, like di sugar workers’ strike, got dem shouting communist from di rafters.’
The other bee in Isaac’s bonnet? Alexander Bustamante.
‘Yu know he even try get di governor to mek a law so communism become illegal? And force di person deh accuse to have to prove he not a communist. Whatever happen to innocent until proven guilty?’
Isaac’s indignation was relentless.
‘He even have di affront to put dat advertisement in di newspaper day before di election. “Bustamante’s Final Appeal: Save This Country From Socialism”. But it didn’t mek no difference, Fay. Manley still win. Never mind Governor Foot’s big speech up di Myrtle Bank Hotel ’bout how all sections a di public must reject di communists. He didn’t mek no law. We still here.’
And that was the first and only time Isaac ever came close to saying he was a communist. Mostly he just talked about inequality and injustice and oppression. For months and months. And how a man is the consequence of his circumstances.
‘He also chooses, Isaac. He decides to do one thing instead of another. This thing instead of that. Like the mob who ran us down in Back-O-Wall.’
He looked at me over the top of the old copy of Public Opinion he was busy studying.
‘That he does,’ he said with resignation. And a sigh of irritation. ‘But he does so within the limited options he can perceive.’ So this was a different Isaac. An Isaac who was certain and who used words like limited options and perceive. No longer the awkward, tongue-tied bumpkin I met outside the Carib theatre all those years back. No longer Mr Tentative from Trench Town. That was over.
The new Isaac said, ‘He does so within the limited actions he can visualise for himself. Based on his skills, his resources, his confidence, his past experience, his expectations. He does so within the limits of his social context.’ Which made me physically sit back in wonder. ‘And his feelings or fears about being embraced or ostracised. He does so within the limits of his imagination and the consequences he can predict.’ And then he removed the spectacles he’d taken to wearing when he read.
The day he asked me if I wanted to go to a gathering I feigned surprise even though I’d been waiting for it. Cautiously edging my way towards it.
‘What’s it about?’ I asked him.
‘The people’s programme. Housing and education, medical services; employment; equal pay for equal work; right to union membership; guaranteed markets and fair prices for small farmers; lower prices for essential goods; protection of Jamaican industry; nationalisation of foreign-owned companies like the bauxite, electric and telephone.’ He recited the list like he was reading from a manifesto etched on his brain. And then he stared at me as he leant against the bus stop, there in Cross Roads.
So I said to him, ‘What about the Federation?’
‘The Federation?’ He licked his lips while he composed his response. ‘Well, on the surface of it, it seem OK. Good thing to strengthen our economic development and trading position. Yes sir. But the way they have it right now, it half free and half slave, with the British still ruling over everything. So, no. Our Federation should be completely free of the British government. And each country should have control of its own internal affairs. That is how I would see it. Plus, the money. You have to have control of the bank and taxes. Because without that, you not controlling anything at all.’
‘What about the rumours?’
‘Well if it true, really true, that they only trying to sever Britain’s preferred trade arrangements with its Caribbean colonies so the US can sell goods to Britain, then that is not a good situation for us.’
‘Yu believe it?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Karl.’ I was calling for him to come in from the yard. ‘What are you doing out there?’
‘Nothing. Just with Uncle Kenneth.’
I’d started to take him with me on my returns to Lady Musgrave Road. Old enough now at five. Mui? I left with Pao. Her glorious papa who, as each week passed, she seemed to become more and more attached to. More and more in adoration of. Looking only to him for whatever she wanted or needed. Food, drink, a helping hand, a show of sympathy or soothing comfort. Me? I was always second best. Or, more realistically, last choice, behind Zhang and Ma. And Hampton, who played childish games. A big, beefy man with a mountain of iron that he huffed and puffed with each morning lying on his back on the bench press in the yard. Squatting on his haunches and sitting in the dirt with her.
‘What’s this?’
‘Just stuff.’ Karl glared at me, irritated at my interference. He was hopping on one leg, eager to return to whatever was occupying him. Then Kenneth sauntered in, looked me up and down before jutting out his chin at Karl and asking, ‘What yu want him fah?’
‘You are eleven years old, Kenneth. That is not how you speak to anybody.’ He stuck his hands in his pockets and leant against the doorpost.
I turned to Karl. ‘Ethyl found these things in your room.’ I held up the bag containing the toy cars and comic books. And in my other hand, the roll of money.
‘So what?’
‘I am not talking to you, Kenneth.’
I turned my attention back to Karl. ‘Where did you get all of this?’
He said nothing at first. And then: ‘Somebody gave them to me.’
‘Somebody gave you this?’ I unfurled the bills and counted them. ‘Fifty-five pounds. Someone gave you fifty-five pounds? And these other things,’ I said, emptying the contents of the bag on to the table. He cast his eyes to the floor.
‘It was me, alright.’
‘You, Kenneth? And where does a child get this kind of money from? Not saved from the few shillings you get from Papa each week. Of that I’m sure.’
‘Yu think yu so high and mighty?’ And he turned and walked away.
I knelt down to Karl. ‘Do you know where Kenneth got these things from? And the money?’
‘He gets them from shops downtown and sells them to other boys.’
‘Well, I don’t want you taking any more of Kenneth’s gifts. Do you understand me?’
There wasn’t any point in talking to Mama about it. She and I had never managed a civil conversation about anything in our entire lives. And as for Pao? What kind of role model was he anyway?
When I went to Isaac’s gathering I discovered that it was no union meeting or authorised PNP group. It was something entirely different. Not an organised party event at all but a collection of loosely associated people who seemed intent on arguing ferociously with each other and disagreeing about everything under the sun. Not only the wrongs and rights of the PNP and Jamaica Labour Party but also whether or not Castro was sensible to attack the presidential palace in Havana, especially since they failed to kill Batista and caused so much horrendous retaliation from the government.
And sitting there quietly in the back row of these chairs drawn in circles in this comfortable living room was Tilly. Tilly, who’d cooked and cleaned and washed and ironed without a single contentious word or opinion for the seven long years I had known her. And in the seat next to her the bus driver who would later that evening be introduced to me as Vincent, who also remained silent throughout except for near the end when he said, ‘Liberty is not begged for but won with the blade of machete.’ Which Isaac whispered to me was from Fidel Castro. ‘Although, technically speaking,’ he said, ‘it was Fidel quoting Antonio Maceo.’ The crowd appreciated it, though, because they clapped heartily and murmured to themselves, ‘Right on, comrade’ and ‘Yah man.’ Someone even raised his voice enough for ‘Patria o muerte’ to be heard above the general hum. Homeland or death. My schoolgirl Spanish was good enough to understand that.
Afterwards, when we were standing up with coffee cups in hand, Vincent said to me, ‘How long yu know Isaac then?’
I glanced at Isaac. ‘A while.’
Vincent laughed. A boyish chuckle. ‘Yu cagey wid it.’ And then he winked at Isaac, which prompted Tilly to elbow him in the side and say, ‘Miss Fay di wife a Yang Pao. Yu know.’
‘Oh, I sorry, miss. Yu say yu name Fay. Yu never say Mrs Yang Pao.’ He bowed his head. ‘I would never ’ave been so presumptuous.’
I surveyed the hot, crowded room now emptying into the street.
‘Were you serious about the machete?’
Isaac stiffened next to me. ‘Absolutely, miss. Machete and gun and cricket bat and stick. Anything we can lay our hands on to win our freedom.’
Tilly giggled nervously. ‘He don’t really mean it, Miss Fay. He just like to talk dat way. Vincent wouldn’t slap a mosquito on di back a his neck.’ She linked his arm and stroked and patted it to reassure herself.
I wasn’t so convinced. Not when I looked at the loathing in his eyes. His utter contempt for the system that had spawned us, me and him, and the relative privilege we enjoyed. Actually, it unnerved me. Frightened me, even, as I stepped into the darkened street imagining a strange man lurking behind every corner, with that look on his face and machete in hand. Remembering the toothless gunman in Back-O-Wall with his carved and polished baton.
‘Yu think Vincent is right about the machete?’ That is what I asked Isaac as we walked to the bus stop.
‘Long time ago some old Russian said that so long as society is divided into classes, so long as there is exploitation of man by man, wars are inevitable.’
‘Lenin,’ I said.
‘From his mouth in 1905,’ he replied. ‘Or was it his pen?’
‘He also said that war is a bestial way of settling conflicts in human society.’
Isaac grinned at me. ‘Yu been reading.’
‘True or false?’
He spied down the road to see if a bus was approaching. No such luck.
‘What do you suggest?’ he asked. ‘Slavery is bestial. Poverty, unemployment, selling your labour at a miserable price, persecution, exploitation, sickness, unsanitary conditions, illiteracy. They are all bestial.’ He studied me carefully. ‘How are they to be overcome,’ he paused, ‘if not by war? Or do you think all the rich people will just get up one morning and decide to give away everything they got?’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Their supermarkets, wine merchants and wholesalers, and palaces in Lady Musgrave Road?’
‘We are just the buffer class, Isaac. The real rich people, they are nowhere to be seen. Not by you, not even by the likes of me. Most of them don’t even live here. They far off across the waters in England and America and everywhere else. Just like it always been.’
And then, looking back at me over his shoulder as he walked down the crowded bus, he said, ‘Yu damn right about that.’
* * *
I didn’t say anything to Tilly the next morning. Nothing about the evening before. But I regarded her differently. She carried herself differently too. That wasn’t just in my imagination. She was straighter. More upright. Prouder-looking. With a new disdain on her lips as she picked up the dirty clothes Pao had left on the bedroom floor and rinsed through the dishes from breakfast. And, bizarrely, that was the first time I saw Tilly’s black skin. She was African. Not Chinese like Pao and Zhang and Ma. Not light-skinned, mixed, like me. She was black like Hampton and Finley who came and went with Pao and were his to command. Like Tilly was here for Ma to command. And with my eyes now opened to her colour, I saw her resentment.
I continued going to the meetings with Isaac. Never saying a word but escaping scrutiny because I was a woman so nothing was expected from me. Would have been pooh-poohed had I dared to comment. Considered a kind of insubordination. Women were not there to talk, the few of us there were. We were there to listen. And admire.
What I discovered was that a war was already being waged in the townships of West Kingston. One neighbourhood pitted against another. Lines drawn in the dirt at street corners to protect the nothing they had. Nothing apart from opinion about this or that party or leader or policy, and the illusion that one day they would be better off by virtue of having supported one instead of the other.
The truly demoralising and heartbreaking part? People’s preparedness to rob, rape, beat and maim over it. Even kill. It was the violence. The physical and mental brutality that I found so very hard to swallow. Almost as if they did not recognise each other as fellow human beings, only as rival targets.
And, even then, when Major Hutton called me to task I refused to say anything.
‘It has been months, Private. You must know something.’
‘No, Major. Nothing to report.’
I was sweating. Nervous. He was agitated. Irate.
‘You are playing the fool with me, Mrs Yang.’ He closed the file on his desk. Slamming his palm down on the flimsy, brown cardboard cover as hard as he could. ‘But I’m not going to stand for it. Do you understand me? This is not a game we are playing here. An empire is at stake.’
I almost laughed out loud, but stopped myself just in time. It wouldn’t have helped matters. I did try to pay better attention, though. What was it that Vincent was actually doing? And, as it turned out, Vincent was a bag man. On his bus route. Collecting donations from the idealistic better-off to support the efforts in Cuba. Funds transported by olive-skinned, Spanish-tongued compadres who came and went and who, while on the island, instructed Vincent and his like in the ways of revolution. Lessons he cascaded in living rooms and backyards across Kingston to people eager to fashion a more radical approach to a new society. Not the gradual transition the elected Social Democrats promised but something faster and, unquestionably, more furious.
And then one night in the heat of debate someone said, ‘The rich will never give up their riches. The powerful will never surrender their power. Both must be taken by force.’
It was horrifying. Not the thought of my loss, because God knows I didn’t deserve what I had. Not even the anticipation of the bloodshed, as wasteful and barbaric as that would be. But the realisation that these men, sitting so comfortably under the whirling ceiling fan with ice-water at their sides, had no idea that their lofty ideals bore no resemblance to the bedlam unfolding on the streets of West Kingston. Because what was happening over there was not revolution. It was not the roaring of the masses as they brought down the structures that oppressed them. It was something far less grand. Far less noble. It was the whimper of the powerless flexing their muscle against their equally powerless neighbour. With the warlords reaping the benefits on both sides.
And even then I still said nothing. Because who was I to interfere? Who was I to take sides? Who was I to play traitor once again?
‘I have a new proposition for you.’ Hutton squinted at me. ‘Why? Because, Mrs Yang, I know you are keeping something from me.’
Major Hutton’s new office was a cupboard with the tiniest of windows over which he had draped a chequered blue and yellow curtain, making the room even darker than it was. In broad daylight. I didn’t imagine that was army regulation.
I sat. Crossed my legs. Wiggled my foot up and down. Refused his offer of a cool drink. Neither soda nor water.
‘So, this is the thing.’
I waited. He pursed his lips tightly before saying, ‘I’m going to arrest your husband.’
My brows raised and eyes widened. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am quite serious. I told you I would not stand for you playing the fool with me.’
‘But Pao is not a communist.’
‘So you say. And actually I am quite prepared to believe you.’ He tugged at his collar. Uncomfortable in the heat. ‘Nonetheless, he is a criminal. Illegal gambling, stolen goods, protection, racketeering. There is no end to his talents, it seems.’
I was stunned into silence. He was smug. ‘Ah, now I have your attention.’ Then he was gloating. ‘I have sworn and signed statements, Mrs Yang. This is no joke. A Chinaman on a farm in Red Hills with whom your husband has been falsifying records to procure illicit chickens and eggs. A US navy sergeant, now returned to American soil thank goodness, from whom he has been receiving stolen navy supplies. A practice which it seems has been going on for some good time. So there you have it. Even if the Chinese in Chinatown will say nothing of his antics. Loyal fools.’
He twiddled his moustache. ‘What do you have for me? Or would you prefer that I pick up this telephone right now and send the father of your two young and, I understand, quite beautiful children to the penitentiary? Directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred pounds.’ And then he tucked in his chin and half-smiled with his lips pulled tight across his uneven teeth.
The whole ridiculous scene would have been comical. Except it wasn’t. So I coughed up everything I knew about Vincent. And in exchange Major Hutton promised to leave Pao alone. Now and for ever because really he posed no threat to the Great British Empire.
Two days later Isaac told me that the police had waved Vincent down on Old Hope Road and searched his bus. And then taken him and the small canvas holdall of money he had at his side to the station where he was charged with drug trafficking and remanded for trial.
‘Drug trafficking?’
‘That is what they say.’ He carefully scrutinised me before finally raising his head in a kind of acknowledgement, with a look that told me he knew. But he didn’t say anything because if he did he would be forced to do something about it and he didn’t want to put himself in that position. Not with the wife of Yang Pao.
Tilly didn’t say anything to me either. Actually, she never uttered another word to me after Vincent’s arrest. She just came to Matthews Lane and did her work and avoided me as best she could. Surveying me out of the corner of her eye when she thought I wasn’t looking.
Why I did it? Apart from to save my own skin. And Pao’s. Because Vincent and his friends were wounding the country, and the ordinary Jamaicans who honestly all they wanted was a decent life and some prospects for their future. And because the organised violence he was supporting, in word if not deed, wasn’t revolution. It was feudalism. With the warlords holding their territories to ransom, and the people of those communities paying them homage and delivering unto Caesar his due. A share of everything they had, including their loyalty and physical support for his posse. Because every warlord saw himself as a cowboy roaming and taming the Wild West. And in return, as these things go, the people received services like healthcare and schools. And protection. From those very same posses who, on another day, would tear them and their homes apart. Not a bad exchange in the absence of anything else. But it was still a confidence trick. A political mirage.
Pao, on the other hand, as much as I despised him, was all above board. Gambling, protection for Chinese shopkeepers, stolen goods. Everybody getting exactly what they bargained for. Including the women in the house across the street from Sissy. Pao wasn’t peddling an illusion. He was making a living. Against British law and sensibilities, for sure. But not against the Jamaican people.
So I felt bad about it. Betraying Vincent to the authorities. But not as bad as I felt about the innocent Lue Fah Yee.