Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  It was as if I saw her walking above me on a wave as before I had seen black and white and brown faces walking below me in a pit. I saw the soles of her feet dance above me like bone in the mind clad in brown leather, white leather, black leather.

  Then in a flash she was beside me again and we were walking in the street that led from the front door into throngs of passersby.

  Funny the things one remembers! She had bolted the door securely behind her with a green, spongy-looking padlock and deposited the key in the purse with her weekly wage. The sound of a drum reached our ear with a curious ecstatic sigh and yet a funeral note. It was so muffled, so deep, so disturbing in low range yet ferocity of pitch I tried to seal my ears against it …

  I clung to my mother’s hand but the sound seemed to reverberate faintly in her peaceful, peace-loving body. It was as if I sensed her transition into a Blessed Fury … I placed my mind against the drum of her womb, so peaceful yet suddenly so mysterious … I thought I heard battle songs in the distance addressed however by the counterpoint in the Blessed Fury.

  How strange, how terrifying, how disturbing are the ramifications of the birth of truth in the Victim Soul that my mother seemed to me in this instant … Was this a measure of the counterpoint of which Deacon spoke on the eve of the holocaust when he and Jones and I dined in Jones’s house? He had confessed to his own failure as right-hand angel in the construction of the Mission. He had charged me to address the tragedy of Jonestown when he departed. He had nursed a Primitive morsel or bullet with which to slay Jones.

  I heard it all in my mother’s transition from peace-loving slave to Blessed Fury. I heard the music that Jones had sealed his ears against when he spat the Primitive morsel onto his plate.

  That music had sounded again in the miniature storm in the bushes where I lay on the Day of the Dead with shaking, fevered limb …

  Was this the very sound that Jones heard in the bone-flute, when we dined, even as he sealed his ears against it in order to prosecute the pact forged with the members of the Conquest Mission?

  Easy to blame Jones, but with the birth of truth – as I lay against my mother’s body – I knew we had all been reluctant to open our minds to the Virgin Sirens in the pre-Columbian bone-flute, Virgin regenerative Sirens, Virgin regenerative furies that we hid from ourselves, denied ourselves, everywhere in nature.

  Had Jones listened on the eve of the holocaust would he have named death in himself, would he have sought to cancel an equation between eternity and the conquest of all species that he harboured in himself as sacrificial victims?

  ‘Death’s essentialist vocabulary is conquest,’ I thought I heard the Blessed Fury say, but I was unsure of everything. ‘One needs to break the charisma of conquest in oneself if one is to build a new Virgin Ship.’

  Where lay the roots of my uncertainty about everything? NAME DEATH IN YOURSELF.

  Does the regeneration of oneself and one’s civilization, one’s uncertain age, lie through new translated rhythms of well-nigh unbearable counterpoint to complacent symmetry?

  The Virgin is a blessed fury when she secretes her involuntary and pagan Shadow-music in the bone of Mankind and in the torso and sculpture of mothers of humanity upon every battlefield.

  NAME DEATH IN YOURSELF.

  A terrifying commandment that breaks all commandments one associates with Privilege and Conquest.

  Virgin Sirens! Bone-flute in the cradle of mankind.

  How strange.

  Regeneration through Virgin Sirens.

  How strange to entertain the regeneration of oneself through the furies one has long feared. How steeped has one been – without quite knowing it – in uncanny dread of the masks one’s dead mother wears, or has worn, across centuries and generations, the mystical wilds or wildernesses, the mystical brides? How profound is the fall in one’s faint body at the heart of Carnival, one’s fall that breaks such charisma, one’s fall into a new birth of consciousness?

  I held my mother’s hand as I slipped in the throng and recovered my footing. I was suddenly faint. Suddenly apprehensive. Faint child’s body, child of humanity beneath my greybeard, fallen from a wave of the future back into the past. Wave-labyrinth and stairway of the Brain, ladder of the Brain? Wave-labyrinth and stairway of Spirit?

  I loved my mother, I stood in dread of her nevertheless, in dread of the masquerade of the womb, and its submission to death, even as she stroked my Lazarus-arm as a portent of a resurrectionary text in my Dream-book on my returning across a chasm from Jonestown to Albuoystown.

  All this was pertinent to my love for my mother, my dread of my mother. Did she instinctively know more than I gave her credit for? I thought I knew the facts of her coming death, they seemed unassailable to me. Why could I not save her? I wanted to pray but was unable to pray. I had had no language, it seemed, no word or utterance of prayer when, as an infant, I lay against her breasts and drew the sustenance of milk from her. And this lay at the heart of my faintness, faint infant body that I dreamt I placed upon hers as we moved through the processions towards her death. Not processions towards the Cross (in Christian textuality) but inwards and towards the body of a mother of humanity in which/on which one lay.

  When one names death in oneself, death the hunter, death the hunted, the processions begin. A tension mounts between the institutionalization of violence as the absolute premise of the hunt – hunter in slain hunted, hunted in predatory hunter – and a capacity in the body of mothers to portray (within a palimpsest of layered ancestries) an opening into the evolution of a hunter who saves creatures, who holds at bay the predatory logic of the hunt …

  I held my mother’s hand more tightly than ever.

  She was leaning over me protectively. I felt her work-hardened, chapped hands upon the flesh above the bone of my arm. She had fought for me against invaders and tyrants – as an Amazon queen in a Carib mask – long before slavery began. Her limbs against mine trembled with paradoxical weakness, she was vulnerable, she was frail, she was ill (a doctor had said) with acute angina.

  Her worn hands and fingers reminded me of the random shot that Deacon had fired which sliced two fingers from my left hand. I had felt nothing at the time. But now the numbness throbbed with pain. I had come abreast of the wound. I knew the sharp, acute pain now that I brought from the future into the past.

  We were in an alleyway within a procession that I had not bargained for. The Moon descended and stood over us.

  A tall Carnival evangelistic Cat fell upon us. Had it succeeded in crossing the chasm of the years in pursuit of me? Was it the perverse resurrection of Jones? Perhaps it had spotted the Nemesis Bag over my head which I swore was invisible to all. The blow it sought to direct at me fell upon my mother. I was dumbfounded. The facts I had accumulated on Carnival night 1939 had made no provision for this. One returns to the past, the facts are the same, yet nothing is the same. My mother saved my life. I understood it now for the first heartrending time. In my Lazarus-arm – with its missing fingers – she perceived a faint portent of an evolution of the hunt – long eclipsed in traditions we take for granted, in facts that we enshrine as absolutes – about which I would write in my Dream-book …

  She saved my life. She intervened and took the blow on her own head and heart it seemed. I had no memory of praying to her in her transition from peace-loving slave to Blessed Fury. Had I not prayed to Deacon in Jonestown and to Marie of Jonestown? Two different forms of prayer I knew. But now there had been no form of prayer. The language of prayer is sometimes hidden, incalculable, formless, in the birth of consciousness.

  Giants of Chaos

  Three days had passed since the Day of the Dead when I lay on a pillow of stone at the edge of the Clearing in Jonestown.

  I had made my way to the Cave of the Moon at nightfall.

  The shock of events had been so great that I remained hidden in the Cave above a Waterfall descending into the Jonestown river.

  This was three miles or so above the
Mission. I lay hidden but my privacy was soon to be breached. I heard the bell of the Church of Eternity tolling a requiem mass for the dead with the arrival of the grave-digger and his crew. They were accompanied by Mr Mageye (the magus-Jester of history), a Doctor (the magus-medicine man and God of poor people’s hospitals), and an Inspector of Police (the magus-clown of the Law).

  These were my three magi who were associated with the creation of a Dream-book or the cradle of Bone (as Mr Mageye called it).

  The tolling of the bell may have been caused by my phantom-Lazarus arm when I sneaked into the Church the day they arrived but quickly withdrew back to my Cave. I was to discover later from Mr Mageye that no one knew who had actually rung the bell. There was talk of a high wind blowing the stench of dead bodies into the sky and invoking a chorus of bells or lighthouse messages. Some – who those were I do not know – swore they saw the great-great-grandmothers of the dead rise from the brothel of the grave to declare themselves nurses of infinity…

  ‘A sacred jest,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘Slaves break every brothel in a sky of cloud, polluted cloud, in the teeth of their ancient masters to declare their love – despite everything – for their tragic, illegitimate progeny… Such is the vocation of a nurse in a poor man’s graveyard or hospital.’

  My choice of Mr Mageye as magus-Jester of history was crucial to the creation of my Dream-book (or cradle of Bone) in the years that followed the catastrophe of Jonestown.

  He gave apparitional weight and comedy, for instance, to the way I dressed, the wretched Nemesis Bag that I wore over my head.

  ‘Do you know Mr Mageye,’ I said, ‘you were at my mother’s funeral (her coffin was borne sky-high by beggars) when three threads sprang from the Nemesis Bag and sprouted into three blades of grass, the colour of velvet, on my mother’s grave? It was a relief, it was as if a ton had lifted from my head …

  ‘When I arrived in New Amsterdam, took up my abode in Trinity Street and began to write I was virtually in rags. But I felt light as a feather. The year was 1985.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘your mother’s death in Albuoystown caused quite a sensation. I have a yellowing newspaper with me. Carnival Argosy, dated 1939.’ He pointed to a headline which ran as follows: WOMEN OF THE BROTHEL AND BEGGARS IN PROCESSION TO GRAVE OF THE VIRGIN OF ALBUOYSTOWN.

  ‘I wandered in a state of limbo for seven years before I began to write,’ I said to Mr Mageye. ‘But all the time I was being written into the Dream-book with each thread that fell from the Bag on my head and from the garments that I wore. These became the substance with which to dress innermost Bone into the composite populace in my book. Is it my book? It’s as much yours, Mr Mageye. I am not even sure of the Day or the year I began to write. The Maya speak of Dateless Days that become a medium of living Shadows in which history retrieves an emotionality, a Passion, to unveil the facts and go deeper into processions into the body of the womb. Think of the Virgin of the ancient city of Palenque. She died resisting a Hger to save the life of her son. One of her arms was torn from her body. It gestated in space. It gestates still in forgotten traditions of fiction and grief in Beauty. There are many languages of the Imagination that affect us in the fibre of dismembered cultures that remain mysteriously whole in their resistance to the predatory coherence of fact that masquerades as eternity. The true fact is Love’s intervention in blended times within dreadful circumstances I grant. The true fact is the undying originality of such interventions. Without this art is dead. IMAGINATION DEAD IMAGINE.’

  Mr Mageye applauded my wild outburst.

  Emotionality and passion gave substance to his apparition in the Dream-book. It was as if one fed him with one’s blood and flesh to make him live. And an irony, a paradox, flashed into my mind. Tigers seek to live on the flesh of women. No wonder Jones had been addicted to brothels in San Francisco when Deacon and I met him there for the first time in 1942.

  Deacon and I had both been the recipients of scholarship prizes that took us to San Francisco College, where we met the young American. Our prizes had come out of the Fund that the ghost-Frenchman (my ancestral father) left when he returned to Napoleonic France in 1800. Jonah was two or three years older than we were. But he seemed even older. He intrigued us with fictions of whales, Moby Dick, whales that swallowed civilizations and threatened the Virgin Ship.

  His sense of humour was broad, sometimes Whitmanesque, but threaded with anger and despair.

  ‘Survivor Ishmael,’ he said, ‘hangs on Aeneas’s Ship, on Jason’s Argo as well. He hangs in dread of a brothel of history. Is Medea a whore or a Virgin Queen? Aeneas betrays Queen Dido. He had promised her fortune and then he abandoned her. He was a hero and a monster. Yes, Aeneas betrayed her,’ Jones said and smacked his lips with a curious satisfaction.

  A silence fell over us like a beam from the brothel of history. I nailed it nevertheless into the deck of the Virgin Ship.

  Deacon was pensive. We listened to the young American with a sense of foreboding. Deacon was of Indian descent. His grandparents had arrived as indentured servants from South India.

  ‘Mind you,’ I said to Mr Mageye, ‘I am speaking of his adoptive parents who were rice farmers and rearers of cattle and horses. No one fathoms Deacon’s ancestry. He fell from the stars as an infant child. War in heaven, rebellions in heaven, it is said, in accordance with savannah folklore.’

  Deacon was pensive. He had been affianced – in keeping with East Indian indenture custom – to the maiden Marie of his own age, when he left British Guiana to take up his scholarship. Would he betray her? Would he betray the young Marie of Port Mourant, the maiden, the Virgin Marie of Port Mourant?

  ‘Three Maries,’ I said to Mr Mageye, ‘appear in the Dream- book. Marie – this Marie – is destined to be Deacon’s bride. When I saw her myself on visits to the Courantyne I fell head over heels in love with her. I would have married her like a shot. I hated Deacon. I was jealous of him. Hate is too strong a word. But the truth is we were antagonistic to each other. Racial antagonism? Racial antagonisms between East Indians and Blacks and people of mixed descent? It’s rife in British Guiana. It’s rife in the Guianas – Dutch and French as well. Surinam. Devil’s Isle. Guyana.’

  ‘Will he betray her?’ asked Mr Mageye.

  Deacon caught the drift of my silent conversation with Mr Mageye.

  ‘Never, Never,’ said Deacon. He bared his arm. On it was tattooed the Constellation of the Scorpion. ‘This gives me immunity to pain,’ he said. ‘Why should I inflict pain on my bride?’

  ‘All the more reason why you may,’I protested. I bared my arm. On it was tattooed an imprint of Lazarus.

  Deacon glared at me. ‘Heroes are saviours of the people,’ he said. ‘They build strong gaols and fortresses and coffins. But in the end they save the people, don’t they? As for you, Francisco, fuck you! Lazarus eh? You are a ghost’s ill-begotten son. I shall take you under my wing. I shall adopt you as brother and son. I shall even give you my Mask to wear in times of Carnival. Then everyone will think you are me and you shall be honoured.’

  I shrank from him. I had not a word to say. But I pitied poor Marie. She was the adopted daughter of the Doctor-God of the poor people’s hospital of Port Mourant. Her parents had died in a car crash on the busy road between New Amsterdam and Port Mourant.

  ‘The Doctor is your magus-medicine man,’ said Mr Mageye.

  ‘Deacon has taken him in,’ I said. ‘Deacon has persuaded him that Marie and he will give birth to a true Lazarus …’

  ‘But you,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘you …’

  ‘I may have magi within my book but I am a surrogate of the cradle of the Bone that will flesh all races into genuine brothers and sisters …’

  Deacon may have overheard my silent conversation with Mr Mageye. He bit his lips savagely until blood came. Heroes eat the flesh of monsters in themselves to fuel life, to strengthen life.

  The friendship, the curious enemy friendship between Deacon and Jones and me, was a phe
nomenon of the modern age, indeed of many past ages.

  Jones’s terrible moods of anger fuelled our resolution to face the world, to withstand insults, racial insults in America.

  ‘All who aren’t white are black,’ said Jones. ‘I shall protect you. You are all one to me.’

  ‘Are Alexander and Genghis Khan one to you, Jonah? Would you have recruited them to sail on the Pequod? They were sons of gods, they were fallen angels like me. Brace yourself Jonah for a new peasant uprising across the Americas. All you need is one man who contains millions …’

  ‘God help that one man,’ I said, ‘when he opens the door of the cell in which the Old God resides …’

  ‘What Old God?’ Deacon cried. But Mr Mageye put his hand to my lips. His face became grave as an Enigma or the Sphinx. And I said nothing. Indeed I was plagued by uncertainties and my allusion to a Prisoner upon Devil’s Isle, or Old God, was rash in all the circumstances. Jonah was angry. Old Gods were useless unless they could bring time itself to a standstill.

  Phenomenal as it seemed, peculiar in the light of common sense, a strange aspect of the fuel that drove us into forging a treaty or a pact – a pact between the white American Jonah Jones and racially mixed and uncertain ancestries within Deacon and myself – was anger.

  Though I had said nothing when Deacon taunted me as a ‘ghost’s ill-begotten son’ I was angry as much with him as with myself, angry with Jones as well in some classic, elemental way. Jones’s antecedents had owned slaves, they had decimated the peoples of ancient America from the sixteenth century onwards. An astonishing factor in all this was that Jones appeared to be the most angry one of us. No wonder he revered Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym. Such classics of anger seemed rooted in the cosmos itself.