The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah

by Benjamin Zephaniah

  A girl called Carol, who lives a few doors down from us, tried to stop me playing with them one day, saying they were all thieves and tricksters. When she asked me why I liked to play with them so much I told her: ‘Their girls have scars, and I like girls with scars. Fighting girls. Not crybabies like you lot.’

  I like them because they don’t keep asking where I’m from or talking about my skin colour. I asked one of the neighbours why nobody likes the gypsies and she said, ‘They’re not like us; they come from another culture, and they do things differently.’

  Culture. It was the first time I’d heard that word. I didn’t think the lady who said it meant it in a nice way but I liked the sound of it. I admired the gypsies and their culture. I liked the way they did things. And I liked their girls with scars.

  * * *

  * My birth date is the subject of much speculation. All my official documents say it is 15 April 1958 but my mum swears it was 15 March.

  2

  WAKE UP AND SMELL THE RACISM

  You see, back in those days, Hockley was a traditional white working-class area, even though it was only a couple of miles away from Aston, where there were lots of black families. Up until we moved to Hockley, my parents had been renting wherever they could find a landlord willing to let a house to a black family, which wasn’t easy in the early 1960s. But now we had our first council house. Like everyone else on the street, we just about made ends meet, with both my parents working all hours. Money was tight, but all the families around me were at the same level. You didn’t have rich people living side by side with poor people. You didn’t have kids with fancy clothes and toys living next door to kids with nothing. So no one compared themselves to their neighbours on the basis of wealth because we were all living the same way.

  But of course there was one immediately obvious way in which Valerie and Oswald Springer and their family were different. From the day we moved to Farm Street everyone knew there was a ‘coloured’ family in the neighbourhood. And from about the age of five or six, once I was going to school, I was coming up against people who didn’t want us there.

  As the months passed and I tuned my ear to the language of the people around me, I started to realise that some people were hostile; they used words to express their dislike of us that they didn’t use about white people. I was only small but I sensed in my heart that nobody around us was going to defend us. There was no point going to my teachers. Although they didn’t use horrible words, they were frosty and strict and religious, and ran the place along Victorian lines. Anyone who was regarded as different in some way had to fend for themselves. I did this by making friends with the other outcasts – the gypsies and the Irish kids.

  One day, someone had been horrible to me and I was sitting by myself in the playground when this kid with a really strong Irish accent came up and said, ‘I’ll be your friend.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘You’re still white.’

  ‘Yeah, but I’m a Catholic and I’m Irish. They pick on me too. We can be mates.’

  So we became friends. We found a game we both loved – we started nicking apples together, mostly from gardens. This soon became easy. One day he dared me to take an apple from a grocer. I dashed across the road and a car caught the very edge of me. I wasn’t hurt but I was shocked. I said, ‘I don’t think I wanna do that kind of scrumping anymore.’ But by this time we were really close, me and the Catholic boy.

  I was thinking that people in authority were uptight and not to be trusted to help you if you were in trouble. So in a bid to coax me in the direction of conforming, like the boys and girls that weren’t black or Irish or from a travelling family, I was enrolled in the Boys’ Brigade. The local branch met at St Mathias at the weekend and some other boys from the school had joined up. They told me there’d be orange squash and adventures but it didn’t seem much fun compared to the adventures I’d had with the gypsies and my Irish friend. Mum bought me a new uniform, which looked like something a sailor would wear, and I had to do an initiation: running from one tree to another, counting from one to ten, and swearing to save all the boys and girls in the world from folk that were not like us.

  The orange squash was OK, but there wasn’t much adventure, apart from marching in the street on Sunday mornings and banging drums, which I didn’t enjoy very much. We were rivals with the Boy Scouts, but we were forever being told that the Scouts were odd, doing weird rituals, and patting each other on the back all the time. But we didn’t pat each other on the back. We were the Boys’ Brigade, and we were soon to become the Man’s Brigade. So we did drill, our clothes were regularly inspected, which seemed a pointless waste of time, and we had to stand to attention a lot.

  It was all too regimented for me. I lasted three and a half weeks. I knew it was time to go when I stood in line with a group of boys and a rather intimidating moustache attached to a uniform went down the line and asked the boys what they wanted to do when they grew up. They all seemed to want to join the army, be firemen or policemen, but when it came to me I said I wanted to be a poet.

  ‘A poet!’ shouted the moustache. ‘A poet! When was the last time you saw a poet skin a rabbit? Think of something better, and when you do you’ll be one of us.’

  I knew then and there that was never going to happen. I was never going to be part of the authority culture.

  It was around this time that I suffered my first physical racist attack. I’d been called names at school but at least no one tried to hurt me. I had been playing football in the street with some friends one day, and I was walking home down Farm Street. It was hot and sunny. Birds were singing, dogs were barking and I was happy. I skipped with joy and made up rhymes about the sun and the moon and the dogs, reciting them quietly to myself. Then I heard someone behind me shout, ‘You black bastard!’

  I didn’t even have time to look around before the full-sized house brick hit the back of my head. The boy actually had the brick in his hand, and he hit me with it as he rode past me on his bicycle, so the force was terrifying. It was as if the brick went through my brain, bringing with it 2,000 watts of electricity. He looked back at me as he rode off and shouted, ‘Go home, wog!’ and for the first time in my life I had to ask myself where home was.

  I ran to Mum with my head pouring with blood, not crying but confused. As she cleaned me up, I asked, ‘Mum, where is home?’

  ‘This is home, Benjamin,’ she replied. ‘This house is your home.’

  Then I had to ask the big question, the one I really wanted to know the answer to: ‘What is a bastard?’

  I had heard the word black before, even the word wog, but not the word bastard. I needed to know what a bastard was, and no matter how much my mum asked me about the attack and how much pain I was feeling, all I kept asking was, ‘What is a bastard, Mum?’ But all she could say was, ‘Is a bad word, son.’

  After my first physical racist attack, the attack of the golliwogs, and other strange happenings, I was becoming more and more aware that some people didn’t like other people because of the way those other people were born. Not because of anything they’d said; not because of anything they’d done; not because they didn’t share their sweets or pass the ball when playing football – but because of the way they were born. I thought about it for a while and a big question arose in my little head. If you wanted to be treated well, and you wanted to be liked by everyone, was there anything you could do before you were born to make sure that you were born ‘right’? Or was there anything your parents could do?

  Around this time I’d found another friend; someone to play with when the gypsies weren’t in town. His name was Tommy. Tommy had lots of board games and he would let me go to his house after school and play with them. He had a sister, who was okay, but she didn’t have any scars, and sometimes I would see his mother, who, if she was going to explain anything to me, would start the explanation with, ‘In this country we . . .’ Or, if she was talking about the past, she would say, ‘In the olden days, befo
re the country started going downhill . . .’ I used to find it all very confusing. By saying ‘in this country’ was she telling me that she came from another country? And if the country was going downhill, did this mean we were all going to fall off the edge of the country because it would be too much of a steep slope? Yet more big questions for me to ponder, as I tried to understand the workings of civilisation.

  One day, as I was walking to Tommy’s house from school, his sister, who had gone ahead of us, came running back to us. She looked panicked.

  ‘You can’t bring him home because Dad’s at home,’ she said to her brother. Tommy looked at me, unsure what to say next. I thought the problem was one of space. I thought the house was too small for us, so I said, ‘That’s okay. I’ve always wanted to meet your dad. I’ll just say hello and then I’ll go.’

  Tommy’s expression quickly went from unsure to worried. His sister ran off back home, shouting, ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ And then Tommy said, ‘Sorry, you can’t come home. My dad doesn’t like black people. He thinks they should all be slaves.’

  I wasn’t educated enough to be angry. ‘What’s a slave?’ I asked Tommy.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘But whatever it is, he thinks you should be one.’

  As soon as I got home I asked my mother what a slave was and she said: ‘A long time ago our people sinned, and God punished us for those sins, and slavery was part of that punishment. But don’t worry, just be good, and if you are good you can receive redemption and go to heaven.’ She smiled and finished by saying, ‘There’s no slavery in heaven.’

  Trying to work out civilisation was hard enough, but now I had to work out the merits of heaven, which I immediately thought was a strange concept, but then I thought most of the concepts and stories that came out of the Bible were strange. I remember thinking at that very moment that as a place to hang out for eternity heaven sounded okay – a place where there was peace and clouds and women playing harps and, best of all, no slavery. But I didn’t like the idea of having to wait until I died to get there, and to get there I had to be so good, so perfect, so well behaved that I couldn’t play with the bad gypsies. So I said to my mother: ‘Mum, I don’t want to wait until I die to be free from slavery, and there must be some good white people alive, or why would God make us live? We could have all stayed dead or unborn.’

  My mother looked at me as if I was mad, and I looked at her as if we were living in different dimensions. We might have sprung from the same heritage, but our experiences were already diverging.

  3

  JOURNEY TO THE MOTHERLAND

  The story of my poetry can be traced back to my mother. It was she who gave me words, she who gave me rhythm, and it was she who gave me my appetite for verse. At times she spoke in rhyme, not necessarily to encourage me to become a poet, but because it was the way she spoke. For instance, when me and my brothers and sisters were young, Mum would say things like: ‘Let’s go to the show; we have to go now, you know, cause if we don’t go now we cannot go tomorrow.’ She would stretch out syllables to make sure certain words rhymed, which is something all dub poets do. That’s me mummy.

  Rhyme was in everything she did and said, and so rhyme was part of our day-to-day lives. She was always singing and there were plenty of nursery rhymes or skipping songs for the girls. She never wrote any of this down, but she could rhyme a line for just about every situation. She would never call herself a poet; for her it was a great way to aid her memory and entertain us.

  Lineve Faleta Honeyghan was born in the parish of St Elizabeth, in the southwest of Jamaica, on 29 June 1934. Her little area was known as Bluntas District, thirty minutes’ walk from Treasure Beach. I’ve been there many times and I’ve always been struck by the appearance of people from that area. Most of them are very light-skinned and there is a reason for this. The history of the area shows that at times African slaves were allowed to mix with some of the Irish and Scottish folk who were sent there for being naughty in Britain, so many of the names and the physical features of the people reflect that. When I was young I remember my mother boasting of her Scottish ancestry and feeling ashamed of any African connection she might have.

  There’s a story that members of my family tell, which all of my Jamaican relatives believe to be true. It’s the story of a ship that sailed from Britain with a mainly Scottish crew of forty men who got into trouble at sea. They fetched up on the coast of Panama and the captain asked if they could land but they were refused permission, so they turned around and managed to get to Jamaica. At Treasure Beach they were given permission to land. They soon recovered from their ordeal but it was so nice that instead of moving on they decided to stay, and being all men it wasn’t long before they began to chase and marry local girls. We were always told that we partly descended from these explorers, and not the ‘criminal’ kind.

  My mother’s grandfather was William Moxam – not your average Jamaican guy but a Scottish white guy whom my mother still remembers. He had a shocking temper and used to smack her and beat her all the time. He would come down on her with fury for any little ‘wrong’ thing she did. Even though she was only a little girl, William would not spare her.

  My mother was born in the same house as William and his African–Jamaican wife, Caroline. Their daughter, my grandmother, Adelyn Moxam, married a dark-skinned man called Honeyghan, and they had a baby, my mother. My mother’s sister went on to marry another mixed-race man, so all of her cousins are very light-skinned, but my mother was darker than all of my auntie’s kids because her father had been black, so she was a shade darker.

  Jamaicans used to comment on the colour of people’s skin all the time. Sometimes it’s hard for non-Jamaicans to understand, and to some it sounds racist, but that’s not the case. It’s a bit like saying, ‘Pass me the black ball, not the green one.’ It’s just how they recognise and describe people; they simply mention such things in passing. People were called black, red, yellow, collie (Indian) or Chinee (Chinese), but most of the people in my mother’s family were light-skinned, or ‘red’.

  The Jamaican side of my family was neither rich nor poor. By no stretch of the imagination were they wealthy – they had very little money but they had lots of animals, including cows, goats, chickens – and my mother even had her own horse. A lot of that was down to William Moxam. He had a strong work ethic and he strove to buy land and ensure that even if the family was short of cash they would still have food. They would grow yams, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, corn, cashew nuts and more. So they always had food and clothing, most of which was homemade by them or by neighbours, and most of the food – animal and vegetable – was grown in their yard.

  My mum remembers with some pride (to my horror), how she actually drank milk straight from the cows’ udders, especially from her favourite cow, Rose, who was particularly quiet and demure. At night she would tie up Rose’s calf so he couldn’t get to her to take the milk. Then, in the morning, Rose’s udders would be full and ready for my mother to drink from. She claims that the cow didn’t mind, and would shake her tail approvingly. I think differently, but I wasn’t around then to object.

  The most important person in my mother’s life was her uncle, Richard Moxam, known to everyone as Moody. Her mother washed her and put her to bed, but Moody played with her, he gave her money and advice, and he would listen to her if she had something to say. He, like many Jamaican men of that time, went to Cuba to find work, and it was he who gave my mum her names: Lineve Faleta. It was said that he was a bit of a ladies’ man, and my mum thinks she was named after one of his Cuban girlfriends. To family and friends my mum was known as Faleta.

  So Faleta was born at the family home in Bluntas. That was a perfectly normal thing to happen. There were midwives in the area, but they weren’t trained as professionals; they were just women with experience (which usually meant they’d had a few kids of their own) who would pass on their knowledge to other women by word of mouth, and sometimes trial and err
or. If there was any trouble during a delivery they would call the hospital and a bed would be made available if they could get there on time.

  My mother came from a big family; she had two sisters and five brothers. She was the eldest girl and the second eldest child, but the older boy died young, so my mother ended up being the eldest. By Jamaican standards she had a good education, starting school at seven and leaving at sixteen. By all accounts she enjoyed it, using her time constructively to learn as much as she could. She loved school so much that she attended even on days when she didn’t have to. On Fridays lots of pupils didn’t turn up, attendance was very lax, but she never missed a lesson.

  After my mum finished her school studies she went to Munro College for a further two years. Now, don’t start thinking of European-type private education, as it was nothing like that. It was as far away from fee-paying college in England as you could get. It had very few facilities, very few up-to-date books, and the staff looked like they weren’t being paid, but she still had to pay and, as ever, Uncle Moody funded her. The family lived by the seaside, so to reach Munro College she had to take a long bus ride up a steep hill, which she hated, so she stayed at the college and only went home at weekends.

  She graduated when she was eighteen, and spent the next couple of years enjoying herself, going to parties and dances, but living at home. She had a carefree life with few problems and she always had a bit of money in her pocket. Although her father was around he had very little to do with her. He never gave her a dime – he didn’t have much money anyway – but he was a distant figure. Uncle Moody was the complete opposite. He travelled, he owned land and hired people, and he gave her all she needed. He loved giving presents, and my mum loved receiving them. He was particularly generous on birthdays or during celebrations like Christmas and Easter. My mum, and the rest of the community, recalls how she once had six new dresses – an almost unheard-of abundance. She was the talk of the town, and for the following few months wherever she went they could see her coming along the street in one of her lovely new dresses.