The Marvellous Equations of the Dread
Page 1
ALSO BY MARCIA DOUGLAS
Poetry
Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom
Fiction
Madam Fate
Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells
MARCIA DOUGLAS
THE MARVELLOUS EQUATIONS OF THE DREAD
A NOVEL IN BASS RIDDIM
First published in Great Britain in 2016
Peepal Tree Press Ltd
17 King’s Avenue
Leeds LS6 1QS
England
© 2016 Marcia Douglas
ISBN13 (Epub): 9781845233495
ISBN13 (Mobi): 9781845233501
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form
without permission
Whilst some of the characters in this novel share
names with people who had real life existences, here
they are figments of the imagination, and any
resemblances to real life events or persons
is purely co-incidental
For the healing of the nations
Look for me in the whirlwind.
— Marcus Garvey
GIVING THANKS
to Jeremy and Hannah of Peepal Tree Press for publishing this manuscript; to the National Endowment for the Arts; for the Book Semester Grant from CU English; to the musicians and historians who ignited my imagination; to Laurent and Avani for always believing in me, no matter what; to my supportive family; to Indira for cheering me on; to Cecilia for helping me put my voice out there; to Jamaica – dread and powerful; to the Most High Zion; to the great silk cotton of Half Way Tree; and for the marvellous equations of our ancestors. Ashe.
Versions of some of the chapters in this book appeared in The Edinburgh Review (2008) and Caribbean Erotic: Poetry, Prose and Essays (2010)
Credits for the photographs are as follows: pp. 87, 140, 281: author; p. 95: National Geographic, Volume LIX, no. 6, June 1931, p. 705; p. 231: internet, cropped from a photograph in the public domain, original source not known; p. 242: digital image from wikipedia of the cover art of Bob Marley’s 1983 album, Confrontation – used solely in fair-dealing to make reference to the album; p. 275: from L’Illustration, May 17th, 1924; p. 277: internet, original source not known, but in wide use; p. 278: Albert Tomson Album, The National Library of Jamaica; p. 279, 280: The National Library of Jamaica. All the motifs used as chapter headings were drawn by the author.
CONTENTS
Re-mix: Xaymaca, 1494
Version
Curfew
The Marvellous Equations of the Dread
Kingston Ringtune
House of Zion
And with Fullticipation, They Said
Nyahbinghi
Backstage Pass [Appendix I]
Studio Pass [Appendix II]
RE-MIX
Xaymaca, 1494: Taino Woman Studies the Future
A woman stands and looks out to sea. There are three ships on the horizon – they do not surprise her. She has seen them in dreams many times before: the white man on deck with his big feet and long boots, his hair the colour of stringy papaya. He thinks he has come to take her Xaymaca, this land of wood and sweet riverwater, but this island is stubborn and will not be moved. The woman has already seen that end from the beginning.
Far-far in the distance, past the ships and the memories of ships, she sees figures dancing on the water to the music of a man uprising on the waves, revolution on his cheekbones, fantastic dreadfulness in his hair, a lion roaring on his finger. Listen, children, to what he cries.
VERSION
LEENAH
There is a bass-line that pulsates along the faults of this island, from the Blue Mountains to Santa Cruz, from Plantain Garden to Rio Minho; then travelling the coast, troubling the waters. They say each year the blue-green sea rises higher, pulled by the music of the people. Bass riddim moves underground and the sea lurches, dragging flotsam, broken shells, and ground hipbones.
“Walk on the sand with reverence, hear?” These are the words I say to Anjahla. For the bones of our kin are in the waters – the grainy debris of slave cargo – fierce babymothers who jumped off the ships and into the ocean. They swallowed seawater but stayed strong inside.
“Are you a fierce babymother?” Anjahla asks.
“Yes,” I say. “I am fierce.”
“Mama,” she says. And I like the way her lips make “m”. “When I tell this story to my children, I am going to give it another ending. I am going to send the mothers a rescue ship to take them home.”
“And what you will call your ship, Anjahla?”
She smiles and looks off in the distance. The horizon at Hellshire is hazy green, like the bit of seaweed caught in her hair. We are conscious of the warm sand under our feet. Egrets step deliberately.
The year we walked Hellshire, Anjahla was six, so I am jumping way ahead. Before that, there was Bob and Riva Man; and my mama and papa; and Winifred and Hector; and the Guinea woman, Murlina; and yes, the fierce babymothers; but even before them, there was the big silk cotton at Half Way Tree, and later, the young boy hung from it for singing freedom. They say he died with a word at the tip of his tongue; and even three hundred years later, is restless to remember it. He is the reason – centuries after his dancing feet, and a clock tower erected in place of the tree – that the hands of the clock always told the wrong time. The dead can be agitated by unfinished business that way. And they say, too, that Bob has unfinished spirit things here; our underground bass is the riddim he’ll ride on his return. Did Taino sister see that far? For there is something still –
RASTAMAN
[Cedars of Lebanon Hospital; May 11, 1981]
Zion ship a come-o!
LEENAH
Of Lions and Pigs and Sorrow Mango [Babylon, May 11, 1981]
On the day Bob Marley dies, the two stone lions in front of the New York Public Library roar. I&I know because I&I dream it – a roar vibrating my body as I walk up the steps. There are little bells on my sandals, my locs swinging against my back. Just when I shift my bag from one shoulder to the other, something ignites right at my tail bone, the sensation increasing to a roaring current, Rastaman vibration travelling my spine to the top of my head. As the roar leaves my body, I sneeze and look behind me, but no one is there and the lions at the curb are still stone. Later, I learn the news of Bob’s passing from television.
I met Bob years ago in the street in London. He was walking down the road, his mane uprising, and he asked me where in this raasclaat place he could find a coconut water. I was glad that even in the nippy March air, bundled up with my coat and gloves on, I looked like the kinda yard woman who might know a coconut watering hole. Still, I thought his question funny and I said, “No coconut trees here, mate.” He laughed and I liked the way he threw back his head and let his teeth scrape the air. I took him to the little West Indian pub on the corner where I worked and he sat by the window and drained a glass of orange juice and said, “Rastafari.” He leaned back into his chair as if he owned it, as if he had owned every chair he had ever sat on, as if he owned the whole earth. He said he needed to know where to find the sufferahs, the people; he had come for the sufferahs. Then all of a sudden he stopped, his eyes absorbing me like scripture. When he finally spoke, he said, “Why yu never tell me yu deaf?” I knew he had not realized.
“Reading your lips is like eating wild guava,” I said.
There was mischief in his eyes.
“Yu like wild guava?”
“Can a deaf girl know Jah?”
He smiled then and put my hand against his chest. When he sang
, No cry, I closed my eyes and felt his voice on my palm. It was the most irie gift anyone had ever give me.
That was when I began to know him – the misbehaving hair in his eyebrow, the cheekbones which could balance an egg or a flame or a revolution, his slim hands, the tinge of fire under his skin, the roar-blue of his shirt like the colour of the Caribbean in a particular herb light. It was because of Bob that I began to grow my locs again – the dreads that Sunday teacher in Jamaica cut off when I was twelve. Teacher threw them in the bin and set them afire. “Rasta filthiness,” she said. I was so shame. The whole street knew – the smell of my hair carried like news on the breeze. For the next eleven years the smell of burnt hair kept wafting back to me – on my bedclothes, in my school bag, from half-open drawers – and always unexpected as violence. Then Bob sang that day in the corner pub, and something else came back: Mama washing my hair in the river, oiling and twisting it as we sat on a rock in the sun. And her voice, Jah live, before she died. I had forgotten those words. I had even forgotten Mama’s name, Vaughn. Her name was Vaughn. Violence will do that to you. Make you forget your mother’s name. Perhaps I grew my dreads back to remember myself. The hair was stubborn at first, but soon grew restless, reaching downward toward tree roots and underground water, hunting for Mama and Papa, and Winnie and Grandpa Hector. Mama always said her dreads were transmitters – to the ancestors, to Jah – and mine became life-vines to Bob as well.
And so on this day in 1981, the 11th of May when Bob dies, this is how I&I immediately recognize the roar going up my spine and the whoosh and the wind and the power of his leaving. And I send him Jah-speed.
The next week, the island is in the midst of an eleven-day weeping. A friend sells his nine pigs – two sows, a boar and six piglets – for understanding the uncleanliness of pork to Rasta, he wants to honour Bob, and feels the only way to do so is to cleanse his yard of abomination. He changes his name to Ras Redemption and takes to singing in his sleep, funny little off-key tunes punctuated by selah, selah. It is also the only year his mango tree does not bear.
On the eleventh day, people line the streets from Kingston to Nine Mile to pay respect – breddren and sistren, youth watching from the top branches of trees, schoolchildren, madmen, preachers, murderers, market women, babymothers, thieves, shopkeepers, teachers, gangsters, politrickans, bus drivers, the sufferahs and the downpressers, the wicked and the I-nointed; and for fifty-five miles, a wave of grief passes through us, moving like a heat from one person to the other; and on this day, for the momentary passing of Bob’s funeral motorcade, there is one sorrow.
DUB-SIDE CHANTING
Track 12.0: Bob Marley and the Lion of Judah Meet
And at the end of the fifty-five mile weeping, the angel of Jah blows the fourth trumpet and the Book of Zion is opened. For eleven days since his last breath, the prophet-Marley has travelled a wind swirling with sea salt, fire dust, bay rum, and the molasses scent of ancestors, all the while the wailing of the woman-Rita pressing him on like a conqueror – straight to the right hand of Jah.
He lands on his feet, blinks in the star-apple light, sees a house with a kerosene lamp in the window, an old man outside peeling sugar cane, and he knows right away he has seen this place before – in a half-silence while smoking a spliff, at the bottom of a river in a dream. This time though, there is sense of arrival: a sign – “STUDIO D: THE DUB-SIDE” – is propped against a nutmeg tree; a dog barks from behind the house. The eleven-day journey through soul debris has parched the prophet’s throat and the old man, higherstanding, dips his cup in a water barrel, and waits.
Soon as Marley steps forward, the dog – a little Chihuahua – runs into the yard, almost knocks the cup from the man’s hand. The nutmeg tree leans to the side and the ground hums like a spinning record. Marley reaches for the cup, the taste, at first, as ordinary as St. Ann rain; but then – give-thanks-and-praise – the quench opens his Rastafareye, and all things are made clear: the Most High, His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the King of Kings, Elect of God, is revealed before him – the old man in the torn shirt eating sugar cane.
And so it is the prophet and the Judah-lion stand at the redgreengold sign. Both small in stature, they meet eye-to -eye, the lion longtime stripped of his medallions, epaulettes and custom-made shoes; and Marley, all bald-head now – his locs uprooted by the cancer, even the dread wig in which he was buried, left in the coffin, unable to traverse the space between Nine Mile and Jahliverance. The Judah-lion is the first to smile; he shows a row of missing teeth, his dentures samewise left behind, buried deep in the faeces his dead body was thrown in; the canines he depended on, now in the sewer under Colonel Mengistu’s toilet, incapable under such weight to make the dread journey. For such are the mysteries of the Dub-side: Rastaman without locs, lion without teeth.
In Babylon, Marley had hung a picture of His Imperial Majesty above his bed – H.I.M. regal and never-smiling. He smoked holy herb beneath that picture and made love there and wrote songs; he prophesied in season and out of season; called to pretty women outside the window; laughed and reasoned and dreamed dreams and awakened to the sirens in the street; traced downpressors, and longed for the taste of honey and pineapple – H.I.M. always watching sideways and serious. Much respect. Now the Judah-lion’s toothless smile is absent of worry or botheration, and Marley, standing there face-to-face with the Almighty, feels the urge to sing, his voice a seven-chambered instrument filling the yard, redgreengold fire in the sound.
The Judah-lion listens, his eyes moist. He puts his hand on Marley’s shoulder. “Whothe son are you?” His words, spoken without teeth, are sea foam.
The question stirs remembrance in Marley of the ring once worn by His Majesty-self – black onyx with a lion engraved in gold – which would prove he is a son of the Most High. He had guarded it from thieves and lovers, fire and water, and now, standing before Selassie-I, he feels for it on his middle finger, eager to establish that he is indeed a son of the Judah Lion, that he has fought a good fight and has been a careful steward.
He takes off the ring and puts it in His Majesty’s palm. H.I.M. holds it to the light, contemplates a while, a little smile on his face. “My ring is in replica all over the streeths of Addis Ababa,” he says, then drops it in a tin of cane trash. “This is just another one.”
*
Somewhere down in Babylon, a breadfruit falls with a loud clap on a zinc roof. Tribulation. Marley tries to read His Majesty’s face, but he still smiles. “Someone has tricked you,” his eyes say. The prophet looks back at the place where he landed. Under the nutmeg tree a fog rises up like herb smoke, and the way back to Babylon has vanished.
HERE-SO; HALF WAY TREE
The Fall-down Angel of Hope Road
Back in Babylon where the weeping has subsided, it is raining and a radio at a bus stop on Hope Road plays a Marley tune as a fall-down angel taps foot to the one-drop beat. Every town has them – breddren and sistren who wander the streets, turn over garbage bins, point in your face and cry, “Babylon!” Some people call them mad, some people call them poets, some people call them fall-down angels.
The fall-down of Hope Road is afraid of no one. He is known to pull his ratchet knife out his back pocket and stare-down anyone from Governor General to bad dog. Sitting at this bus stop and then that one, he plays fool to catch wise and knows everybody’s business. To this day, if people want to know the real Jamaica, they ask a fallen angel and if they want to know Bob’s business, they ask the fall-down on Hope Road.
And so it is, back in Babylon at the intersection of Half Way Tree and Hope, Fall-down smiles a little smile as he imagines the Prophet on the Dub-side, his cancer-foot healed, and even the criss-cross lines which once marked his palms all disappeared, the skin a new parchment. A schoolboy shelters from rain beside the fall-down, and sings along with the radio, from time to time strumming an imaginary guitar.
“Zion,” the fall-down whis
pers to no one in particular. His head is tied around and around with a red cloth and little brass Africas dangle from his ears.
“What about Zion, Fall-down?” the boy asks, for all the schoolchildren know the mad angel and mock him.
“Robert Nesta Marley must find where Zion is.”
“Tell me about Bob,” the boy says, as Fall-down reaches and cups his hand to taste the rain.
“Few gateways to Zion, but Bob will find one of them.”
“How you know, Mad-Ras?”
Fall-down does not answer. Every now and then there is a soft chime, and the boy is uncertain whether the clink-clink comes from the radio or from the little brass Africas.
“I bet you, not a raas ting go so,” he says.
The rain is falling harder and a huddle of birds cuss over a piece of stale bread.
“There was a time when a boy would not talk to an angel like that.”
“Tell me about Zion,” says the boy, strumming guitar. “Where it is, Fall-down?”
“Somewhere special.”
“But how you get there? You have to dead like Bob?”
There is another clink-clink, and a man’s voice on the radio cries, “Bloodfiah!” For a while Fall-down does not answer. His eyes are far away, past the rain and the backed-up traffic, past the fence across the street and the birds on the cable wires.
“No, you don’t have to dead to get there.”
“Take me to Zion then,” the boy says. “Get me outta this raas place.”
Fruit flies circle his head, following him like specks in orbit. Fall-down taps his staff.
“Every now and then, somebody find it without looking,” he says.