She put her arms around Sonnyboy and hugged him to her bosom and he put his arms around her neck and he stay there, hearing her heart beat, feeling her body heave, tasting the tears dripping down from her eyes onto his face before she break away, blinking and laughing: “Go and eat your food. Hold up your head. Look at me. Look!”
Sonnyboy had looked at her live these lessons, herself scrubbing and washing and wrestling the two rooms they lived in into a home, with red lavender in buckets of water, with gully root and sweet broom and blue soap, the four corners of the house smoked with incense, the floors brightened with linoleum, the windows with curtains, the furniture with varnish and the walls with paint, the troughs of earth in the little space in front the house planted with aloes and ginger lilies and wonder of the world, with marigold and zinnias and croton and Jacob’s coat, the plants at her front door flowering with a joy as fertile as the faith she expressed in her singing and her contagious laughter: the scandal of her jokes doubling over the women fetching water or washing or bathing at the single standpipe on the street, lifting them in these magical moments above the mud and the rubbish gathered in the drains, to a height from which to look squarely at the world that looked down on them, the women holding their bellies with two hands to keep from bursting with the sweetness of the pain of the dotishness that flowed from human beings, all of them joined now to a sense of community. Among them the wonderful simplicity of human exchange, plants for their front gardens, remedies for illnesses, consolation for the mother of the girl who get catch with a belly, compassion for the mother of the boy gone off to jail, the exchange and generosity: a dress, a pair of shoes, exchanged, one keeping the children for her neighbor so she could go and release the pressure, dancing to the music of Fitz Vaughn or Sel Duncan; his mother waiting her turn, returning fortified from the standpipe by which she had to bathe, with a bucket of water, her petticoat dripping, the form of her body outlined underneath it, without apology to anyone except perhaps Sonnyboy’s father, the man she had enlisted to help her save herself and him. From her own strength, doing her all to prevent the place from weighing him down, seeing that his shirt was ironed without a crease, that his food was secure, protected from flies underneath the wire netting of the safe, giving him the last of the cocoa or coffee and she and the children drinking teas from shrubs in the yard, vervine, carpenter grass, and Sonnyboy’s favorite, fever grass, consoling him when the fella he was working with as a mattress maker and upholsterer of chairs wouldn’t pay him the money he work for, agreeing with him that “Lance, man, you not cut out for this shit. You have too much talent. You too good-looking to take this set of pressure. And, boy, you have a good voice, you could sing.”
She watched other women watching him when they went to a dance, her mother babysitting the children. He and she in the same color and styled shirt and pants, dancing, her two hands round his neck and the comfort of her bosom against his chest. She watched him move among people with his movie-star smile and relaxed stance, confirming her thinking that no, this cell and prison of Rouff Street is no place for you, expecting him to take off and go away and get out of this place and praying for him to stay, no family to help them, the four brothers of his, each with his own battle to fight, the one older than him who fancied himself a singer, setting out every morning, decked in his white ruffle-fronted shirt with the puff sleeves red, his guitar round his neck, to the Botanic Gardens or the Lady Young Lookout to find tourists to sing them verses of popular calypso or made-up ones of his own on the beauty of the tourist woman, the cleverness of her husband, the loveliness of the island. After they give him some change, going back in time to clip tickets for the 12:30 show at the Pyramid cinema where he held down a job as a checker; another brother, George, the saga-boy, dapper, pants seam cutting, shirt collar upturned, gold chain on his neck, gold teeth in his mouth, every time you see him is with a new woman holding on to him as if she fraid he will fly away if she let go; Calvin, the sportsman, good at cricket and football, going every day to the savannah to play one of the games, sometimes with a bat in his hands, always his wrists bandaged, a knee band or ankle band on, walking with a limp to draw attention to his dedication to sports as well as to his heroic survival; Bruce who coulda been a heavyweight boxer find himself in prison for beating, one by one, seven fellars who sampat him after a dance; and Lance, he, Lance, the one with such good looks and talent and all the promise, stay anchored here making mattresses and upholstering chairs, not, as she thought at first, because of her and the children. Because of a steelpan.
Pan
Lance have this pan, a carbide pan, big enough to sound, big enough so it could play two notes, then three, Borborpee dorp! Boborpee dorp!
Every Monday and Tuesday midday he would go to the empty train carriage at the railway station to jam with the fellars from the abattoir, each man beating out the rhythm on his own pan or calling out the ringing rejoicing spirit from his own piece of iron.
One day Lance forget his pan in the train carriage. When he get it back two days later he discovered from its face and sound that someone had beaten it out of shape and out of tune so that it didn’t give him the usual sound when he struck it. He was ready to kill. Thank God Lance didn’t find the man who commit this brutality on his pan.
“Thank you, Jesus!”
She had watched Lance come home with this bruised and wounded pan and begin to pound it to get it back into shape so he could get the lost notes of the rhythm. After days of hearing him pounding and pounding, she tell him, “What you doing? You not going to get it to sound the same way again, you know.”
“I know.”
“You know? So what you doing then?”
And is then, before he could answer, it hit her: somewhere in pounding to find the lost note, Lance had begun to hear a note that as yet hadn’t made a sound. And what he was doing now was trying to get not the note he had lost but the note behind that note, a note unsounded and sacred and surprising and potential – to get that note to sound.
Now Lance in a trance. Lance is a sculptor of iron. Lance coming home early from work to work on the pan. Afraid it would burst from his pounding, Lance build a fire and he heat the pan and when the metal hot and soft he push out the note, not the note yet, a little bump on the face of the pan, making the bump bigger little by little by little and then another bump, each bump a note, a sound, she and Sonnyboy watching the whole operation, Lance hammering again, pounding and pushing out the metal, shaping the notes to fit on the face of this pan, tightening the space or widening it, flattening it or deepening it to get the note to correspond to the sound in his head, in his heart, in his belly, in his stones, Lance envisioning a whole new world of sound, taking the music of the drum to another pitch, another plane, Lance going over the whole process again and again to get this new and audacious music out of his drum. And all this time, her mother and those neighbors, who know the trouble she seeing, looking from Lance and his patient tenderness with the pan to her to see what she doing with this man, and she could hear them thinking, if he had with you the patience he have with that pan, if he had with his children, with work the patience he have with that pan . . . She tried her best to be supportive. She wanted to assist. But, they were right. She couldn’t help but observe his patient tenderness with the pan, and she find the same words leaving her head and finding her voice: “If you had with me the patience you have with that pan . . . If you had with work, with your children, the resolve you have with that pan . . . If you had . . . if you . . . if you . . . if if if . . . if . . .” And although in her belly she could feel the value of what Lance was doing, in her mind she wanted from him an explanation to help her mother and the world understand what a woman like she was doing with that man; but, Lance didn’t have the words to answer, and instead of sitting down feeling guilty and small, or struggling to find the words to console her, anytime she start up, started to talk, he would get up and leave and go to the empty lot across the road and sit down on the boulder
underneath the mango tree where a growing congregation of idlers were cheering him on as he journeyed into the heart of the pan. When she look at him, the man she see in front her was not the man she know. That Lance was gone, this man was spirit, Ogun.
But the world don’t stop demanding money for things. The children have to eat. They have to get uniform and shoes to go to school, she tell him, not just to reproach him about his neglect of her and the children, more to get him to appreciate the role she was playing to free him from the death and defeat of this place; not, as she said with the undertones of jubilation and triumph and frustration at being put into this situation, not to do all this for you to spend your time reshaping a steelpan, but to be a man to make a dent in the iron of this beast of a world. She wanted him to say something, to make clear his position. But he wasn’t hearing. He couldn’t hear. One day when he was with his congregation in the yard across the road, she take Sonnyboy and his brother Alvin with her and go by her mother further up the hill in Zigili Trace to stay, making, after she cool down a little, the occasional visit back to him with a bowl of pigeon peas and rice or dumplings and saltfish, offerings of her goodwill and also to see if it had left him, this pan jumbie, this spirit that had claimed him; and when she discovered that it had not, she pick up the rest of her clothes and go back up by her mother, this time to remain. And it would be there eventually he would come to see her, at first with a promise to change, but, later – as someone surrendered to a more urgent calling than seeing after the welfare of she and his children – to bring little gifts for the children, a toy on a birthday, two-three copybooks at the opening of the school term. Once he brought them each a pair of gym boots into which he had placed a dollar bill, the magnificence of this gift lighting up Sonnyboy’s face and bringing tears to her eyes, because she was glad to see Lance trying, for by then he had made himself not the principal individual responsible for the well-being of his children, but one of many contributors to their welfare. Sonnyboy watched as the hill wrapped itself around his father, feeling at first resentful of the community for taking his father away from him. But, later, as he realized that in giving himself to the community, his father had given the community to him, Sonnyboy began to feel a sense of belonging. He began to hold himself a little more upright, to set down his feet with more careful steps that carried up his shoulders and crafted his limp into the delicate rocking, crawling dance of the king sailor navigating the perilous tightrope of the hill, his mother knowing the trouble such a dance attracted, watching, proud and frightened, speaking to him with a calming gentleness, asking “How school going? How your shoes fitting?” Her gentleness deepening, as she felt the weight of her children’s upbringing falling more and more on her single shoulders, taking him up the hill to the Shango yard by Mother Olga where she begged Shango and Obatala to intercede for him, and the better to cover all options, she tied her head and mounted the hill with him to the Shouters church for Mother Olga and Mr. Trim to put their hands on his head and pray for him. But things didn’t change. At home she began to hum the hymns of resolve to keep off despair, as a declaration that for all her burdens she had not surrendered:
Jesus on the main line, tell him what you want, tell him what you want right now.
But even that would not sustain her, and she had her eyes open now out of necessity for another man, not as pretty. Fellars start to come around, and she find herself accepting favors from a fella she would have rejected a few years earlier as too tame, too surrendered, but was glad he was a little more stable, less inclined to roam, would care for her, didn’t have no steeldrum beating in his belly, wasn’t carrying no lost note in his stones, accepting this change as part of the life she was born into, having discovered some time ago that it was useless to complain, not only about him, the man, Sonnyboy’s father, but about anything around her, the roads, the houses, the area, the schools, the violence, the hard times, each article of frustration linked to the chain of strangulation that was this hill. Everything was on her shoulders, and when things didn’t work out with the fella, she sang to Jesus, wishing for the miracle of winning a lottery, for her aunt in the States to send for her. In a rush of optimism, counting the money she would make working over there in the States, dreaming with the children the things she would buy for them, the butter to put on their bread, the leather shoes, the shirts, the pants. And all this time making miracle after miracle to create the magic of a meal from the scraps she could afford in the market, until one day after the market, she put down her basket, she sit down on her front steps and when she go to get up she feel the whole town pressing down on her. Yes, it was too much and she came to the realization that really, yes, she really was not able. This thing that she find herself having to face was bigger, more monumental and rooted than she had imagined. It was not just a challenge, not just a test of endurance and strength that could be overcome by work alone, or by faith or by fortitude. This place? This place was something that was set up and maintained by the great spite and wickedness and – let me give her a word – cynicism of a pitiless Power. It was not something she could change by herself alone. This was a place she had to leave. Sonnyboy noticed her change of rhythm.
He recognized that she had replaced the cheer with which she lifted up herself and the neighborhood with a new triumphant resolve to escape this place, to leave it and go.
Every other day she was at the Post Office sending a letter to her aunt in the States or inquiring about one she was expecting as she sang:
Jesus on the main line tell him what you want,
tell him what you want,
with a kind of upbeat defiant joy in order to coax good fortune into her life, making dance steps while she washed the clothes or cooked so as not to be forsaken by joy, while three streets away his father pounded and tuned the instrument they called the pan, working for the day when the new notes would fly out from the nest of metal, slip off the face of the bowl of steel and rise into flames of sound, the first steelpan notes in creation. Sonnyboy listening for the sound too, for the note, beginning to rush home from school to go to the yard in Zigili Trace, to be there when at last his father would play the notes that he had carved on the face of the steelpan and music would fly out and angels would rejoice and his father would come home, bringing food for the table and a ham for Christmas and his mother wouldn’t have to leave and go away to America.
Mammie
And then, that evening, Sonnyboy going home from school, walking up the hill that branched into Rouff Street when he hear his name called. When he look around, it was his mother, behind him, returning home, hurrying up the hill to catch up to him. She had left that morning to go to Maraval to check out the possibility of a work with a woman who wanted a housekeeper to live in. She had gone, expecting to convince the woman who wanted the housekeeper that she could do the job without living in, since she had children of her own to mind. She had walked to go and walked to come back the four-five miles since she didn’t even have money for car fare (buses did not run there). The woman was sympathetic, but she really had to have someone to live in. However she had a friend, she said, higher up the Maraval road, who wanted somebody. The woman give his mother the address. It wasn’t very far, she tell her. If she catch a taxi at the corner, she will get there in five minutes.
Taxi?
“Yes,” his mother tell her. “Thanks. Thank you.”
But she didn’t have money for taxi, so she had to walk back home and it was there she was heading when she see Sonnyboy. She would go and see about the work next day by taxi, but, the taxi fare? The only person she could think of getting it from was his father. So, she had steered Sonnyboy in the direction of Rouff Street.
“All I want from your father is taxi fare to Maraval. Nothing else,” speaking out loud as if she wanted to make it clear to herself as well as to him that she wasn’t doing this to try to get back with him. “And if he don’t have, for him to go and get it borrow from his brother or one of his friends.”
He watched his father take up the pan and set it on one knee and with a stick in his hand begin beating the pan, coaxing out the notes,
Is Just a Movie Page 4
