“By the way, thanks for rubbing my neck, miss. Thank you. Some of this is hard.
“So anyway, he put the gun in my back and march me over to his studio and open the door and push me inside. There was a back room where he used to keep old equipment and he took me in there and put one piece of beating on me. If you notice, in the front I wear false teeth.
“After he beat me up now, he made me crawl out the back door on my knees like a dog. When I got outside he admitted that he was the one who’d mashed up my studio and he took off his belt and ordered me to take off my clothes, said he was going to beat me like a little boy. Well, of course I wouldn’t do that, because he’d know. So I dare him to shoot me. I said, Shoot me if you bad. And he was bad. The bullet grazed my temple.
I don’t know what kinda police he could have been to graze a man point blank. But what happen really is that I fell and hit my head and while I was stunned and couldn’t help myself he took off my clothes to beat me and disgrace me, and well … you know what he saw …
“To even talk about it now just take me right back there. Truly, this is not what I really wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to talk to you about my music. I wanted to talk to you about that, but look now, look now. All these things is coming on. Maybe I’m talking too much … Is okay?
“Well, the fucker took a picture of me out there like that. I don’t know where he got the camera from. But I remember how my eyes hurt from the flash.
“One day later on now, I was working at Mr. Abe store, which is what I had to go back to again, and a man came in and drop off an envelop with the picture. Shortly after, the store phone ring and they call me and a voice say, As long as you stay out of the music business your secret well safe with me.
“The next few months was really hard. I just feel like everybody could look at me and know. A lot of women used to like me, and I used to fool around with a few of them, but I used to mostly just keep to myself. And I started to drink hard, and fight.
“The position that I was in force me to do something I have regretted to this day, even though it end up changing the world. When you know what it is to be your own man, it is hard to go back and be just ordinary. You understand? Is like if emancipation come and then the boss come a year later and say, well, they check the date and, well, right now it look like you get let go too early so you have to come outta your hammock or whatever and go back and cut cane.
“Miss, you know what I end up having to do? Work in secret for other producers. When they do the recording they would call me in to the mix and the mastering. You see this dub thing, I was the one who invented it in 1965. People think it came later. But sometimes when I got a song to mix I used to just rub out the lyrics and remake it, and add in all kind of echoes and reverb and all that. Cause to tell you the truth, that is how I was seeing myself—like somebody whose voice got rubbed out. The echoes and all that now, that was the way my heart was trembling inside. I make that music, that dub music for myself, as a way for me to express my way of feeling, and later on they pirate me and don’t give me credit. But one day, my life took a turn.
“It was the thirteenth of May. I will never forget. I was at Randy’s mixing the whole day and a musician came in and asked if I heard what happen and I said no. Well, suffice it to say, it was all over the radio that the car lick down the same producer who did mash up my life and he was in the hospital with a broke foot—man in there can hardly walk. And I say, Yeah?
“By the way, my back hurting me. I need to sit. You want a cookie? Them nice, man. Eat one.
“So, remember I told you I used to collect money? Well, when you have that kind of background you know all kinds of folks. So here is what I did. I organized some men who had just come out of prison and was looking for something to do, to go to the hospital dressed in khaki shirt and pants like porters and kidnap that fucker for me.
“No joke, no lie. They followed my instructions. Waited for him to go to the bathroom on the crutches. One went in there with the chloroform to knock him out and two roll in with a laundry trolley and cover him up and bring him out and put him in the back of a Transit van and bring him to me.
“You know where I asked them to bring him? The same studio him mash up. When the chloroform wore off the fucker was so frightened. At first he didn’t know where he was. He was just lying there on the floor in his pajamas with the heavy cast.
“Don’t ask if I didn’t beat him. Don’t ask if I never kicked him. But that is not all I did. I did worse. If he was going to hold a secret over me, the only way for me to win was to have a bigger secret over him. There was a reason why I got men from prison as compañeros. They good at that thing called rape. Five of them. Two turns each. No grease. The last thing I said to him was, You think is you alone have camera? Snap. Snap. Snap.
“For four years that fucker stayed out of my life. I rebuilt my studio and I was riding high again. I even got married. Met a little Christian girl from the country and took her for a wife. She was so simple. I used to tell her that if I use my thing on her she would cry. But it looked like she met a man who was giving her something extra, so after a while she told me that the devil come and take her and that although she wasn’t right to be involved in adultery she just couldn’t stand the constant mouthing off for the rest of her life.
“Suffice it to say, everybody wanted to work with me. And I worked with everyone. Johnny Nash came and worked with me. Bob Andy worked with me. Everybody who wanted a hit song came to work with me. And the musicians used to love to work with me, because I used to have the best equipment. If they wanted something custom I used to sometimes even build it for them.
“But when my wife left me I felt bad in truth. Is not an easy thing to live a secret life. I used to hear people say all kinds of things about people like me. I myself see people laugh at them. Sometimes I myself used to hate them because it was like they just brought so much unnecessary attention to themselves. Especially the men.
“It was around this time—1969—the same year I bought this house, that I myself started to go to church, to St. Mary’s down the road. And for the first time in my life I started to dream about myself as a child and see myself as a girl again, in frocks. Sometimes I used to wake up frightened. I really didn’t know what this mean. Because it wasn’t like I wanted to wear woman clothes in real life. But it was a thing that just began to come up over and over again in my dreams. Most of the times, though, I used to just wake up and kiss me teeth and just go on with my life. But truly, really and truly, some of the times I used to just wake up and bawl and ask God why. And I am not sure if I even wanted to get an answer, because honestly, I didn’t know what I was asking, like why what?
“I didn’t want to be a woman. I wasn’t asking for that. I didn’t want to be something I was not.
“Oh, what did I want to be? I never really think of it that way. Well, as you put it to me that way … well … just me.
“But you cutting my story and you say you have to go. Well, one Friday morning after having one of those dreams I was telling you about, I decided to go to a different church. On top of that I decide to go as a different person. As a person in woman’s clothes.
“Luckily, I am not a tall person, so it wasn’t too hard for me to get things in my size. Saturday now, I went to look. I didn’t go downtown, though, where people knew me. I went uptown to Half Way Tree and got a purse and stockings and a hat, and a frock and everything, and I packed them up in my Zephyr Zodiac and drove from there quite all the way down to Westmoreland. It took me about six hours going over all them hills, and I found a little guest house in Negril, right up on the cliffs, looking out over onto the sea. And it was only hippies down there those days. And those kind of people I figured didn’t really care. Some of them was just walking round naked. I saw two women ones that looked like they were friends, but I couldn’t stand to look at them.
“What I didn’t know was that I was being followed, that all this time that fucker had been pl
otting his revenge. When I got back to the guest house to change and come back to Kingston, is three gunmen I meet up in my room. I heard one say, Gunbutt him. Then everything went white.
“When I woke up I was in some kind of storeroom somewhere. My clothes were gone. There was a line of breezeblocks toward the ceiling so a little bit of air and light could come in. It had no color. Just the raw concrete. Like how it is in jail.
“I had a sense like I was in the country somewhere, because the only sounds I heard for two days was wind. No cars. No children. The whole time I think I heard one animal—a goat. And as much as I bawl out, nobody didn’t hear me and come.
“After three days or so passed now, one evening as the sun was going down I heard a car. I got nervous because I had gotten accustomed to being by myself and I never know who it was. But I was hungry and thirsty. Is not easy to go so long without water and food.
“As I listened, I heard doors opening and closing and footsteps coming toward me down a passageway. Before they got to me they stopped and entered an adjoining room. I heard them leave, drive away, but something had been left in there. For the next two days and nights I heard this thing moving around in there. Something of a good size. Breathing. Scratching itself. Sometimes in the night I would hear this Uuh-uuh sound, and I kept thinking to myself, Jesus, what is that?
“Well, I eventually found out. Two evenings later the car returned again. The footsteps—sounded like the same ones—came down the passageway again. By this time I am hungry and weak. The door opened slightly. I could see into the passage a little bit. What light existed was coming from another room somewhere, so all I could see was shadows, but everything was really dark. I smelled food and saw someone bend down and slide a plate across the concrete floor. Then someone put what I found out was a bucket of water and a cup and a towel and a rag. I asked the man who he was and where he was but he didn’t answer me.
“It wasn’t much. Just some fish and bread. I was so thirsty I nearly drink the bucket of water, but I was thinking that maybe they give me the towel and all that so I could get cleaned up before they let me out. Like maybe someone had paid ransom or whatever for me.
“I took my time to wash myself. It was like I didn’t know if I was going backward or forward in time. What I mean is that I didn’t want the life I had for the last few days but I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen ahead. I mean, why all of a sudden they were being nice to me? Feed me, and all that? Allow me to bathe?
“But it felt good to clean all the muck off me. For my skin to not feel sticky. To lose that sour smell. To smell good.
“Now, while I was eating, the room next door had been quiet for some time, but then some movement again. My skin right away just fill with cold bumps. I put my ears to the wall to listen. Through my other ear I heard footsteps coming. They stopped next door.
“I heard one man say, Watch it, it will bite. Another one say, What a damn thing big. Then a third one say, So what they plan to do with this ’rangutang though, eeh? Now, I knew what a ’rangutang was. It was a like a cousin to gorilla. The two of them is ape.
“I started to get a little nervous because I started to imagine this thing getting away. But then I heard a fourth voice, and this one sounded like it had some knowledge, so although I was tense, I kind of start calm down. This voice say, Look, all you louts need to do is move the damn thing to the other room. This thing has been brought into the country illegally and if anything happens to it at all, it is going to be hell to pay. And when he said that I heard a big commotion and a Uuh uuh uuh uuh.
“Then I heard them open the door over there and like a chain dragging, and like fighting and flailing and uuh uuh uuh uuh and like something big and heavy and thick bouncing off the walls and people running away and falling down, and I began to imagine them leading this thing outside, but I began to get really frightened when instead of going back the way they came, they move toward my door.
“Miss, when my door open and I saw the shadow of this big everlasting hairy thing, I ran to the back of the room and bawl out, Lord God, Jesus Christ, deliver me from evil, and they slam the door and is pure darkness again. And I could hear heavy, dragging footsteps inside, just feet away from me.
“I said to myself that if I just keep quiet it maybe wouldn’t bother me. I heard like sniffing. And scratching. Then nothing at all. My heart was beating hard. Then it began to beat harder when I hear one of the man them say, So this ’rangutang thing will really sex a human being for true? and another one say, I hear them have nature for woman just like man. Then the first one say, No, me can’t believe that, and the other one say, So what the bloodclaat you think we leggo him inside there for?
“Then all of a sudden I heard one loud noise and something charging toward me. And I start to kick and punch before I felt the grab.
“The two of us now start to tussle on the floor. I hadn’t really eaten for a while, as I said, and it was bigger than me and stronger than me too, and as I was fighting with it I feel like it was trying to get me on my back and between my legs. And lemme tell the truth. Before that I was thinking it just wanted to eat me or kill me. I wasn’t no kind of animal expert or whatever. It was just survival I was dealing with. But when this thing had me on my back in the corner and I realize what was going to happen, I really start to fight now. Cause I heard when the man say this thing will fuck a human being and the other one say it have nature, and I put the two of them together and say that, well, they say monkey is second to man and that this monkey now, maybe his nature tell him to take me as a wife, and you know what? Nobody was going to help me.
“And I knew this but I was still shouting out. And I’m getting shaken. And I’m getting hit. My head lick against the wall a dozen times. And you know what? After a while I just give myself over to what’s going to happen. I just accept that this is what was going to happen to me. And I felt something inside me in that place for the first and only time. It was painful. It was strange. And I tighten up to lock it out. But there was so much force. So much pressure.
“And you know what I did? I just put my mind to it. Thinking like this would make it stop. I don’t even know why this came to mind. But that is what it came to my mind to do. To not fight, to just give in so it would end quickly. Oh God. You don’t know what I went through.”
I didn’t know what to say at this point. I mean—would you? There was something spectacular in the violence, in the cycle of revenge, that I didn’t want to acknowledge. And there were also questions I wanted to ask. Like how she got out of there and did she see a doctor or call the police. And then I realized that these were questions of a normal kind and that what I’d just heard about was—for want of a better expression—something else.
I had to go. I had to go. And I said this: “I really have to go.”
She looked down at the floor and replied, “Go on.”
When I got to the door I turned back to say goodbye and she held her hand up for me to wait, then she came over. We hugged again. And something happened in that moment that had never happened before. While holding a woman, I wanted a kiss.
I led her down the short hall to the room from which she’d rescued me, lay on my back in my white dress, and took her in my arms and used my fingers to massage her scalp and took the weight of her frail body—which was not too much to bear.
She cried. In the pitch of a little girl, she cried.
“And you know what was the worst part?” she said when she’d composed herself.
“Oh, my sweetie,” I said, “do tell,” while thinking, This can’t possibly get worse.
“It wasn’t a ’rangutang. It was just that fucker in a monkey suit!”
A few years later, while traveling through Heathrow airport, I picked up the Guardian and saw a small obituary. Seminal reggae producer Joe Haddad had died. Yes, he’d worked with everyone he’d mentioned and more. Yes, he’d built a lot of the original equipment that gave the industry its start. But he wasn’t credited a
s inventing dub. However, he got partial credit for something else: the possible inspiration for a hit released in 1969 by Toots and the Maytals and a bigger hit for the Specials ten years later:
I see no sign of you
I only heard of you
Hugging up the big monkey man.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
CHRIS ABANI is a Nigerian poet and novelist and the author of Song for Night (a New York Times Editors’ Choice), The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail (a PEN/Beyond Margins Award finalist), and GraceLand (a selection of the Today Show Book Club; winner of the 2005 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award). His other prizes include a PEN Freedom-to-Write Award, a Prince Claus Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He lives and teaches in California.
COLIN CHANNER is the father of two children, Addis and Makonnen. He is also a fiction writer, occasional essayist, and university professor. His fiction includes the national bestselling novel Waiting in Vain (a Critic’s Choice selection of the Washington Post) and the novella The Girl with the Golden Shoes. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1963. He founded the Calabash International Literary Festival Trust in 2001, and received the Silver Musgrave Medal in Literature in 2010.
KWAME DAWES is an award-winning Ghanaian-born Jamaican poet. He is author of sixteen books of poetry and numerous books of fiction, nonfiction, criticism, and drama, and has edited nine anthologies. Dawes is the Glenna Luschei editor of Prairie Schooner, a chancellor’s professor of English at the University of Nebraska, and associate poetry editor for Peepal Tree Press in the UK. He is also the programming director of the Calabash International Literary Festival.
MARCIA DOUGLAS grew up in Kingston, Jamaica. She is the author of the novels Madam Fate and Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells, as well as the poetry collection Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom. Her one-woman show, Natural Herstory, is based on her fiction and features the voices of seven Jamaican women. She teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
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