I remember the policeman with his eyes riveted to the carpet. The Canadian woman looked around the room. Through the hallway door. Seeing things she wanted to memorize. I saw her blue eyes flick over two charcoal pictures. The Rasta man and the Rasta woman. I remember my son standing between the policeman and the woman. He looked calm, protected, and distant. He looked as though he had chosen new parents. A new allegiance grew among the three of them. I remember hearing all the words the Canadian woman spoke. She used a calm, unpointed, objective monotone. She was talking about persons I had never met. But all the time, she was talking about me and my wife and the boy. I tried to follow each word, but I couldn’t understand the language she used. The meaning of her words was above my head. She was speaking in English but her words came from books. She must have read these books many times and had memorized their texts.
“As his teacher, I cannot minimize the moral responsibility I have towards the social development of this boy, and even though he may have parents of his own, in a nuclear sense, I would be remiss in my responsibility if I didn’t take it upon myself to take this action and seek to protect this boy, with the help of the authorities, from the environment in which, through no fault of his own, he now finds himself, and . . .”
In all this remembering time, I am still no farther inside my house than the few feet behind the front door with the two locks. From that morning when the policeman came with the summons charging me with the criminal offence of assault to cause bodily harm towards my own son, I have been walking in a dream of frightened thoughts. I read the Star to see if any other father has been found guilty of this offence, to find the sentence imposed on those fathers. And when I find it, I feel lost. I find myself walking up and down at work, at home, in the kitchen as I make dinner, in front of the house, in the cold whitened garden where all the roses and flowers I’ve planted have now become stiff brown pieces of stick. And each time I’m inside the house, I find myself turning the pages of the Bible to the Book of Psalms, just as my grandmother had been driven to her gold-leafed Bible to search for a verse to dull the thorns of her life and problems. But I’m not seeing the words or the blurred wisdom of those words, for they are the same as the counselling the young Canadian woman had given me . . .
“Your Honour, I have been the boy’s teacher in grade seven, grade eight, and grade nine. His reading difficulty was the first clue to more basic problems in the home. Lack of security and so on. When I asked the boy to read ‘My father is at work,’ he would read ‘My father gone from home.’ This invention in perception led me to investigate the assault. I noticed that his attention span was getting very short indeed. We care for all our children. So I called in the police and the authorities of the Children’s Aid Society in order to protect this boy.”
“Thank you, Miss Barron.”
“And begging your pardon, Your Honour, if I may add one more point. The boy was an active participant before this happened. He has a healthy socialization tendency. Only after the problem I mentioned did I discover that his jaw was broken and . . .”
“Thank you.”
“. . . I examined the boy two days later. I found lacerations to his left side. Between the second and fifth ribs. In my estimation, the blow was caused by a sharp object. From close range.”
“Could this blow or these blows have been delivered by a human hand? A fist, doctor?”
“A savage fist, Your Honour.”
My wife was wearing black. I did not tell her to accompany me in this colour of the funeral, but she wore black because she wanted to look like a “good mother.” She was sitting about ten seats away from me. I saw her raise her neck. And I saw her eyes fall on my hands. Your Honour had just mentioned “a human hand.” My hands were in my lap, one covering the other.
The room was large and bright. There was a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II. Something like a coat of arms or a seal, complicated in its intricate design and workmanship, was on the wall. Out of the jumble of colours, white, blue, red, and green, I could distinguish only an animal. A lion. There was another animal too. It had one horn. I had never seen one of these before, and I didn’t know its name. Words were at the bottom of the seal, in a foreign language. I could read only the MAL in this message. I did not know what it meant.
The room was panelled. It was quiet even when they were talking. There was a Canadian flag on the wall. A police officer stood beside me, outside the wooden dock. They had put a chair for me to sit on. I was the only person in this dock. Every now and then the men and the woman lawyer who represented me would say something in whispers. They were all smiling. I felt they all liked me because they smiled each time they looked at me. I smiled too.
A man who called himself the Crown said, “This vicious disregard for civilized practice and the principles of this country . . .” He looked at me, then he looked at the jury. Then, pointing at me without looking at me, as if he knew where I was, that I would not run from the dock, he said, “You have heard the evidence . . .”
The judge, Your Honour, sitting above us, dressed in black with some purple in his uniform, whispered something to my lawyer in Latin, then he looked at me and looked at my son, who was sitting across from me in the same row, without a wooden dock to protect him. It was as if he and I were in argument, as if he was put there to debate against me, just as I had seen people on television sit, pro and con, professional man and con man; or in the legislature down on Queen’s Park, where big men in three-piece suits argue among themselves across a floor of thick carpet.
The minister of my church, the St. Clair Baptist Church, a Jamaican immigrant, had come, he and four “sisters” from the congregation, and was sitting on my left. Each time the man who called himself the Crown said “this vicious disregard,” and each time the black-and-purple-uniformed judge spoke, I looked to make sure they were still there, the minister with his highly polished mahogany skin and the four sisters, and my wife dressed in black as if she was attending my grandmother’s funeral. The six of them held down their heads as if they were ashamed of me each time the Crown repeated “this vicious disregard.”
Another Canadian woman was now speaking. She wore spectacles with plastic frames. Her hair was thin and long and blonde. It was the same colour as her spectacles. The makeup on her lips and cheeks was red. When she spoke, the red lipstick became her words, wide, round, sharp, high, and violent. “I have seen many cases of assault in my fifteen years as a social worker at Children’s Aid. And I can say that never, but never, have I seen a case as violent and brutal as this one. I have known many coloured immigrants. I sympathize with their problems. I understand they have to adjust to our way of life. And to our way of doing things. To our civilization and our society. But never, never, never in my fifteen years have I seen . . .”
I looked up in time to see her take a piece of pink tissue from her purse. She applied the pink tissue to her eyes, then her mouth. She looked now like a woman catching her breath lost by a sudden punch in the ribs.
“I’ve made two trips to the West Indies, to Jamaica. For a firsthand, on-the-spot study of the cultural and social derivation of West Indians living here. My conclusion is that what we in the profession refer to as the predisposition for cultural violence among West Indian parents has its origins in the harsh historical background of slavery.”
When she said that, my black suit tightened around me. The dock was now a vial. I became a specimen inside that vial. I could feel the sweat under my armpits. I became embarrassed that I smelled. I could not remember if in the rushed order of dressing I had rubbed the penis-shaped bottle of Right Guard over the thick black hairs under my arms. I was sweating. The room was cold but I was hot.
The Baptist minister and the four sisters shifted on the long wooden bench. My wife stirred too. I knew she stirred because I know that noise, that special rustle of her shiny silk dress. I knew she moved the same instant I became hot.
I jumped up.
I saw my grandmother. I saw my
mother. I saw the clean little house. I saw the whiteness of the sun on the road brutalizing it at the hottest time of the afternoon. The round clock on the wall said eleven. I saw myself on that warm road. And then I saw myself painted in their words, in the dock, by this brittle lady.
“Nooooooo!”
My lawyer, in a black tailored suit, with her gold chain catching the light, got up from her chair and tried to cut me off; and then in a quick movement she apologized to the Crown and to Your Honour in case I said too much, to make it bad for her and for myself.
“No!”
“Take the accused away.”
It was the man in the black and purple, Your Honour, as they called him, who said it. He used a voice that was the same as if he had said “take the cream away.” He must have used those four words many times. There was no emotion, no passion, and no feeling in his manner. I thought he would have at least turned red, become angry, and used the same anger in his words to match the faint protest in mine, or even to match my passion. I wanted to remind him that I was this boy’s father, and as his father, I could discipline him. My grandmother had disciplined me.
The court was silent now. My word of objection had cut the tongues of the court’s sanctity and whispering dignity.
“Take the accused away.”
I was a dried fallen leaf that had to be raked away to keep the lawn pleasant and clean. Or a piece of banana skin kicked out of the way with a well-timed movement of the foot, to remove its slight danger from the path of law-abiding pedestrians who take cleanliness and safety for granted.
The police officer came into the wooden dock. With a sharp, short, practised click, he snapped the handcuffs on. With an equally practised push, I was on my feet and moving down to the basement cells, as if I had been released through a trapdoor.
As I was going down, they were still saying things about me.
“This is his first offence, yes, sir.”
“He is at present employed.”
“Checking with his neighbours, we learn that he stands in his garden talking to the flowers.”
“I would recommend a light sentence, under the circumstances, Your Honour.”
“They must be taught a lesson, that they’re not back in the West Indies.”
“I recommend a psychiatric examination.”
I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who I am. All I know is that I’m alive. I’m on a white bed, a bed with white sheets and a white pillow. And I’m wearing white pyjamas. I’m happy, and sometimes I feel like a child, like the little boy I was in Barbados when my mother would say, “Boy, you hungry? You hungry, ain’t you?” And she would feed me, and I would smile and eat whatever she gave me. It is like this, in this large room, with many small beds, all the same size; the same cleanliness, the same white walls with no pictures or photographs on them; and the bright clean light from the fluorescent bulbs. A woman with hair that is strong and looks like bright steel comes every morning since I’ve been here. She’s dressed in a rich brown suit and brown shoes that shine. She asks me questions, and I give her answers by nodding my head and smiling.
“You feel lonely in this place, don’t you?”
I nod.
“You hate this place, don’t you?”
I nod.
“You don’t think very much of our system, do you?”
I nod.
“The system has done you harm, hasn’t it?”
I nod.
“And you would do anything, anything at all, to get back at the system, wouldn’t you?”
I nod.
“Even destroy it?”
I nod.
“You’re paranoid. Don’t you feel paranoid?”
I nod.
“You’re a violent man. You resort to violence to settle things which you can’t settle with words, don’t you?”
I like to nod my head. I nod nicely and properly, so she won’t be annoyed with me. I like to make her happy. Each time I answer, she smiles and looks very happy and writes something in her book. And she smiles with me after she’s written these things in her small, black-bound book. I smile and she smiles some more.
“Now, let me ask you a serious question, may I?”
I nod.
“If your son left potato chips on the couch or on the carpet again, would you knock him down? You would knock him down again with your fist, wouldn’t you?”
I nod.
“If he came home later than ten o’clock on weekends, after you told him to get home by eight, you’d hit him with a chair again?”
I nod.
“And even break four or five or six ribs, more than the first time?”
I nod.
I like this small lady with the steel-grey hair and brown suit and shiny brown shoes. She reminds me of my grandmother.
One morning she brought me a chocolate bar. It was a Kit-Kat. My grandmother bought me a Kit-Kat chocolate bar every other Saturday when she went into town. I used to suck off all the chocolate until the bar became the colour of bone, and then squeeze the rest of the bar between my tongue and the roof of my mouth until it disappeared. It lasted longer that way.
“If you had your way, if you had it in your power, you’d do something to the teacher, wouldn’t you? You don’t like her or the lady from the Children’s Aid Society or the entire legal system, do you?”
I nod.
And it went on like this, these happy mornings with the lady in the brown suit who’d come and ask me these questions. And I’d nod my head all the time because I wanted her to like me and feel I was a God-fearing, obedient man. I wanted her to feel that I myself was obedient as a little boy, just as I wanted her and all the others to feel that my own boy should be obedient.
And then one morning she didn’t come.
When I was tired of waiting for her and was about to drop off into a doze, they awoke me and told me to dress in my black suit, that I was going back.
They made me think I was going back home.
When I got back, I would clean up my garden and paint the front door black and take off one of the locks because it was getting warmer now and I wouldn’t freeze my fingers to the bone trying to find two slits in the door. And I was going to see the minister and thank him for losing two days’ work by coming to court. And I would see my wife again, and we’d lie on the bed on Sunday nights and listen to calypso music and look at the ceiling to see if the two cobwebs were still there. And I would write to my mother and tell her that if God spare life, we’d be coming home for Christmas with the boy. She has never seen the boy.
And I would call my employer and tell her I’m sorry but this nice lady in the brown suit was asking me a lot of questions and I wanted to be nice to her; and since there were so many questions, I had to skip work longer than I expected . . .
But they put me in the back of a yellow panel truck, locked from the outside. It had chicken wire and bars at the top of the back door. Through this I saw people disappearing from me, getting smaller, Chinese and Japanese in size; and even those walking with their faces towards me were going backwards. They were all cut into small pieces by the mesh and iron on the door. Travelling backwards like this, I was soon between tall buildings and then underground. I could smell the fumes and the dust of parked cars and moving cars, all of which came through the chicken fence. I started to hear music.
It was loud music. Music from my part of the world. Did the neighbours who cooked curry and others know I was in this yellow panel truck? Underneath the heavy, stubborn, and fatal beat, a beat like the determination of tribal drums—heavy wooden gavels on thick animal skin, and iron on iron—I heard these words: Yuh running and yuh running and yuh running away . . . Yuh can’t run away from yourself . . . Must-have-done, must-have-done something wrong . . . I was in a dream. I was in an elevator. The light around me became better. I was now standing between two police officers. I wished the lady in the brown suit was with us.
The two police officers did not speak with me; and
in the elevator they looked up and down, reading the numbers of the floors to themselves; and there was only the humming, the soft murmuring of strained muscles in the contraption that made the elevator rise with our weight.
I was back in court. When I entered, all conversation was cut short and heads turned in my direction.
The words of the underground song, Yuh running and yuh running and yuh running, and the gavel beating on heavy skin and the striking of iron on iron were running through my mind, and I began to feel the peace in the soft questioning voice of the lady in the brown suit.
The man dressed in black and purple began to speak. It was a soft voice, a voice I felt contained no feeling and no sympathy; a voice that I had now become used to hearing, even when people said the worst things about you, when people made decisions that sent you unemployed through a winter, when they said things that did not help you understand that your telephone had been cut off, that your heat had been stopped . . .
“. . . in view of the psychiatrist’s report, it is the opinion of the court that the defendant shows a tendency . . .”
He must have been talking for some time, for I could see my lawyer lean back, sit up, shift in her seat, adjust to the ceremony of words.
And then it was over. It was over without a stir. It was over without confusion. In this room with no wind blowing, with the temperature even at the breathing point, with no coughing or clearing of the throat, in this court with the same sacred stillness of the front pews in that church in Barbados, it was over. The last words that I heard from the man on the raised seat, Your Honour, were, “Five months . . .”
Five months. Yuh running and yuh running and yuh running away . . . And the lady in the brown suit who had been so understanding in her questions passed before me in a swift brown blur. And then my lawyer came over and rested her hand on my shoulder. I could not even feel the weight of her heavy acknowledgement. Her perfume was like the Kit-Kat chocolate bar. She was looking above my head, not into my eyes; and just as I looked around to see if there was someone behind me, I saw my son walking between my wife and the Canadian teacher.
The Austin Clarke Library Page 50
