When the question of a candidate to stand for County Council elections first came up, Sonnyboy’s was the only name offered by the Cascadu party group. The fact that he had been to prison did not seem to bother them. Sonnyboy, the secretary of the Hard Wuck Party group, Brinsley Brown argued, was a freedom fighter like Butler, like Mandela and other leaders who were imprisoned for resisting a system that was working to subdue them.
But this characterization did not find favor with Mr. Tannis. Perennially overlooked by the National Party for every position he offered himself for, he was outraged that Sonnyboy was being compared to Mandela or Butler. “Sonnyboy had a prison record. The man is a badjohn,” he said to my aunt Magenta. “Maybe I should have trained myself for politics by cuffing-down people, eh? Maybe instead of going to school and getting an education I should have learned to use a razor.”
As an organizer, Sonnyboy had exceeded by far the expectations of the Hard Wuck Party. In addition to organizing Cascadu, he had shown he could hold his own in an argument with any representative of the other parties. But, the Hard Wuck Party supporters were concerned that they would lose votes if they put up Sonnyboy. Indeed, they were concerned whether, as someone who had been to prison for criminal offenses, he could be allowed to stand for elections at all.
In the meeting that followed these revelations, the leader of the Hard Wuck Party, Didicus West, pointed out that what they had before them was a situation in which a resistance fighter was being seen as a delinquent. That was the absurdity of the present politics, he said. It was clearly a battle that he and the Hard Wuck Party must promise to fight – after the elections. Meanwhile, in the interest of time and resources and for the good of the party, he saw no other course than to ask Sonnyboy to withdraw from contention and give his support to a candidate other than himself.
Claude Cruickshank was the one screening committee member that disagreed. As far as he was concerned, the question of Sonnyboy’s eligibility to stand for election was one that needed to be answered immediately. If the Hard Wuck Party wanted to bring attention to the situation, and strike a blow for the real politics, there before them was a golden opportunity to make the eligibility of Sonnyboy the central theme of their election campaign or be accused of the absurdity of excluding the revolutionary from the revolution.
“Comrade,” Didicus West said to him at that meeting, “I am afraid that we shall have to live with the absurdity until we get into power.”
“Look at that, eh,” Sonnyboy said to me when I went to see him. “The revolutionary is banned from the revolution. I not surprised. Why should I be surprised?”
I could feel his pain.
And Sweetie-Mary, feeling for him, had responded with her mantra, “Don’t let them make you stop loving.”
“Why should I be surprised? You know what hurt me?” he began.
“You know what hurt him?” Sweetie-Mary said.
“Nobody tell them, ‘You can’t treat Sonnyboy so. After all he do.’ Nobody say, ‘You can’t do Sonnyboy that.’”
They were looking at me.
“You can’t do Sonnyboy that,” his grandmother said.
“But I am bigger than that,” Sonnyboy said.
“Don’t let them make you stop loving,” said Sweetie-Mary. “Let us show them. Let us work to elect whoever they choose.”
“Yes,” his grandmother said. “Show them the man
you is.”
The committee hadn’t yet chosen his replacement. There were two candidates. One was Carlos Nan King, a geologist and a part-time resident, whose relatives owned a fifty-five-acre farm on the outskirts of Cascadu. He was an avid Carnival player and a sportsman who had represented T and T in rifle shooting and had self-published a book of poems entitled Chin. Few people of Cascadu knew him. The other, the one who was well known to Cascadu and who they would eventually choose, was Manick.
Manick
For all the boys who lived in the Settlement, the savannah was a place to play. For Manick, it was a place to graze the cow. He would walk the cow along the edge of the savannah in the part near the forest where the ground was swampy and the grass tall and let it graze, happy to field a ball when it was hit his way, running it down and heaving it from there on the boundary sometimes into the hands of the wicketkeeper. If his father wasn’t home he would take a chance to take his turn at bat. In that situation, not looking at the ball closely, lashing out at it and getting out quickly so he could hurry back to the cow on the edge of the savannah, accepting I suppose that he was not free to bat like Franklyn and Berris and Evrol and the rest of us who lived, like him, surrounding the savannah, and who were free to play uninterrupted on weekday evenings and, if a match wasn’t playing, nearly whole day Saturday, going on until awakened from the trance of our play by the voices of mothers or grandmothers bawling: Evrol! Beresford! Regis! And then you’ll hear one of the boys scream and the others take off running, because Miss Ruby or Miss Ruth had arrived with a switch or a belt. Miss Pearlie didn’t shout, she just appeared with whatever instrument of terror she had to hand, a broomstick, a scrubbing brush, a pot spoon, a side of slippers, a wet shirt from her washing, the only warning of her presence the gasp of anticipation when she was near enough to Evrol to deliver the blow, and all you’d hear is whoosh, as Evrol disappear. Sometimes, to play a joke on Evrol, one of the boys would steal up behind him and make the heaving breathing-out sound of his mother and Evrol would bolt. Aunt Magenta hardly ever called Franklyn and me to come home, and the two of us would stay in the savannah till it was too dark to make out the ball. Ramesh and Soogrim didn’t have a cow to graze, but they didn’t let dark catch them in the savannah. If you wanted to see Soogrim run all you had to do was say, “Soogrim, look, your father!”
Manick father was not so strict.
He had arrived at the Settlement a few years earlier, sitting on the high seat of a steamroller, steering its massive wheels back and forth over gravel and asphalt and stone, and had cleared the plot of land in the bush behind the savannah, and then we see him and maybe two other men passing along the track at the side of our house, and next thing we see is a building, a wooden house with three rooms and a gallery, with a hammock and a bench the only pieces of furniture we could see from the road. From that location, he would edge himself into the consciousness of the Settlement, not so much as our neighbor, as a man living in our neighborhood, doing nothing to change his status of stranger beyond his mumbled good evening to my aunt Magenta as he went through the track that passed at the side of our house, stamping his presence on Aunt Magenta as . . . a lonely man whose heart and homeland was somewhere else, showing no interest in nothing Cascadu had to offer and offering nothing himself, displaying no symbol or evidence of belonging to anything we could recognize; in his yard no cluster of jhandi waving in the breeze. From his house no sound of prayers, or of Indian music, no offer of parsad at Eid, no deyas for Divali, no abeer staining his clothes for Pagwah and no preparation for Christmas or Easter or costume for Carnival either, not showing any interest in the old churches or the new, neither Catholic nor Anglican nor the Adventist nor the Pentecostal that had begun to sweep up all the souls in the Settlement except my aunt Magenta and her flock who was Shouter Baptist, his only interest the cricket matches played on the savannah, and even those from the distance of his own house, so that I often heard Aunt Magenta wondering as she looked out in puzzlement from her kitchen at his lonely house whether he might not be a fugitive from justice, a fella who chop up his wife and run away with another woman or commit some other heinous criminal act like burning down somebody house and coming to hide out here behind the savannah, You think I making joke? To her, this idea not so far-fetched, since there was nobody in Cascadu who knew him or knew anyone to whom he was related or where he come from, all she (and I suppose the rest of Settlement) could see was that he had a woman that hardly ever leave the house and a girl-child that nobody ever see on the road, the two females going out not even to the shop, th
e only one to provide a sign that it had people living there, this boy, Manick, seen toting water or grazing the cow, going to the shop, going to school, the only one of the family whose name was known to Settlement, so that we referred to his father as Manick father and his mother as Manick mother and his sister as Manick sister, all of them, except, in time, the sickly mother (who one Saturday in the middle of a cricket match appeared astraddle Manick father back, the father staggering under her weight as he toted her along the track by the side of the recreation ground to Ram taxi waiting on the road to take her to the hospital) visible only on weekends when Settlement Cricket Club was playing at home, and you see them in the gallery of their house, the father lying in his hammock from where he could see the game, on the floor beside him his newspapers and his slippers so he could read or get up and go and do whatever work he had to do whenever he wanted to do it, and Manick and his sister sitting on the bench, all of them, we would learn from Manick later, waiting for Franklyn to go out to bat and when he did, when Franklyn start to bat, the father not moving, saying nothing while the crowd roared in acclamation at the genius strokes Franklyn made, clearing his throat uneasily, the words that he seemed to want to say filling up his mouth, choking him, so when he did speak it would be in a hoarse voice, asking Manick or his sister to bring a cup of water for him please; and he would drink the water as if to wash down the words that had stuck in his throat, without shifting his eyes from Franklyn out there in the middle.
When Franklyn get out after batting, Manick father would look around as if for something he had misplaced, heave himself out the hammock and with a new force and drive, slip his feet into his slippers and hurry outside to tend the tomatoes or the baigan in the backyard, or trim the fence or cut grass for the cow, all of it done with a sense of urgency as if he, his family, the community too and the whole district, if not the world, needed to immediately exert some equivalent force and style to match Franklyn’s batting; so that Manick and his sister felt compelled to find something useful to do, so that at the fall of Franklyn’s wicket, Manick would rush to get a book to read or a bucket to go for water or a knife to go and cut grass for the cow, his father still mumbling with an acknowledgment magnified by what Manick at first thought was either envy or regret: That boy could bat. The little bitch could bat, a verdict that he must have contemplated and thought on and weighed from watching Franklyn match after match and from looking after each game to find out if that judgement still held good. He could bat, saying it to himself more than to any in his house, each time with more admiration and regret and certainty, so that it appeared to be a conclusion that he would have preferred not to have to come to, his regret at Franklyn’s ability suggesting to Manick that he (his father) had set himself the task of finding a deficiency in Franklyn’s batting, and finding none had to look again to see if he could discover the flaw that he wanted to be there but that was not there, at least, not yet, not even to his own eyes, his assessment of Franklyn’s batting having more weight because it was arrived at not with any cheer or from any generosity, but was forced out of him only because he could find no evidence to the contrary. And it must have been this – what by then had to be incontrovertible evidence of Franklyn’s superior ability – that must have caused him as time went on to be a little more civil especially to Aunt Magenta who he must have found out was Franklyn’s mother, looking at her, when he passed in the track at the side of our house, to see if he could spy out what she might have contributed to the genius of the boy or to discover in her the flaw not immediately evident in Franklyn’s play, this look, looking, making my aunt Magenta a bit uncomfortable, causing her to remark, “I wonder what this Indian man looking at me like that for?” Alarmed that it could be intimacy he was seeking (“I wonder what kind of woman he take me for?”), not knowing then that intimacy was the last thing on Manick father mind, coming only later to appreciate the explanation put forth by Clephus, that for him (Manick father) Franklyn’s batting represented the people of the Settlement, not only talent but application, discipline, and to accept Franklyn was to remove any impediment to accepting the community that Franklyn represented and from which he (Manick father) had held himself aloof. And it was in order to justify to himself his keeping his distance from them that he continued to carry on his weekly examination of Franklyn’s batting with the objective of finding grounds to reject them or (and this he said with a certain caution, thinking it was better to err in the direction of Manick father’s rejection than to assume he wanted to be one of us) that he was sitting there using Franklyn’s batting as the measure by which he would measure the people of Settlement not because he wanted to reject them, but because he wanted to join them (he too had heard unflattering stories about them), and Manick must have been in the same quandary because he had looked on in bewilderment, not sure how he should relate to us, uncertain that he had his father’s permission to enter our world, feeling himself in a limbo place with no guidance how to move.
When Manick was thirteen his mother died and two years later his sister get married. For her wedding, his father sell the cow. His sister moved out, and for a while he and his father watched the cricket together, the father in the hammock and he on the bench, until one Sunday close to two years later, his father returned from a river cook in Salibia with a band of people that included Elsie, a young woman smelling of rosemary and perfume, with two big deep pools for eyes and a face on the verge of mischievous laughter, her hair not oiled like his mother’s used to be but open and fluffy, her lips red, her stare bold, her voice thinner, higher, like the whine of a mosquito, but sweet, like she was a singer. A month later, Elsie moved in and his father changed from the man who busied himself working most of the time Manick knew him to a fella who on an evening bathe and put on a short pants and a sleeveless merino and stretch out in the hammock with Elsie sitting beside him in the same hammock, cracking the shells of peanuts she had parched and feeding the nuts to him, or when balata was in season opening the ripe fruit and slipping the berries one by one into his mouth, the operation broken off now and again with he tickling her and she catching fits of laughter. On a weekend her family would come to visit and Manick father would send for his single village friend, Mr. Alan, a Black man, who himself was a loner, having nothing much to do with the village either or with Carnival or the church, his garden his religion, to partner him in a game of All Fours against whoever Elsie family bring, the talk about food and cooking and cricket, all of them dismissive of the politics, the whole world out of order for them, his father especially with a sense of superiority, making a joke of everything, talking as if to convince himself that nothing here was worthwhile, nothing worth the effort, sweetened by his belief that it had a pack of arses running the country, ruling the population of jackasses, this opinion presented so insistently that none of his mates (if you could even call them that) dared to disagree with him and he would carry on with his commentary while the others grinned and looked for ways to accommodate his opinions without the offense of disagreement while out of concern for his blood pressure (for he managed his emotions poorly, and his laughter often turned to rage) Elsie would leave her cooking to sap his forehead with Limacol or massage his neck and shoulders with coconut oil and soft candle.
On the occasion of Hindu feast days, his sister and his brother-in-law Doon would come and bring sawine and sweetmeats for them, but Doon wouldn’t stay.
One day, Manick came upon his father and Elsie in the hammock, Elsie feeding him peanuts and he tickling her. Seeing Manick witness to such an intimate exchange, his father said to him, “You not going to go to the savannah and play cricket?” as if it was something he permitted him to do regularly. Taken by surprise, Manick stood open-mouth before his father, struggling to find what to say until his father waved him away. “Go.”
So it was that at a time when his boyhood was nearly spent, and with the pent-up enthusiasm of years of being on the edge of the boundary, Manick found himself at liberty to go to the sava
nnah to play cricket with the boys of the Settlement. And whether it was from his years of watching from his gallery or from the closeness of the boundary where the cow grazed the grass while he fielded and heaved back the ball for the players, Manick found that he not only had a good throwing arm but as a cricketer he had talent, he could play. We welcomed him, happy to have an extra man for our games.
And so he went through the initiation of becoming one of the boys, the butt of our jokes, the one to be ordered about, engaging in our quarrels, our many near-fights, our running races, cultivating his cricket until he began to bat, not with the easy disdain of Franklyn but with great care, little chance-taking, protecting his wicket, with a careful flourish all his own until the team became confident that he could anchor an end. Yet there were occasions when something dangerous and daring would come over him, and with a gleeful spite, as though trying to break out of the very mold in which we had set him (and in which he had established himself ), he would start to lash ball from off the wicket with a fury that silenced everybody and made us look at him again, and begin to see him (I thought) as one of us and someone quite his own. And when eventually we picked him for the team, it was as much for his patient plodding as for his moments of crazy hitting.
So Manick was one of us, playing cricket and later joining us under the streetlamp where we practiced karate and ballroom dancing, where we sang love songs and old calypsos, and shared with each other our dreams, our world opening up to him, leaving him to feel what he would describe later as a certain indebtedness that he found no way to address until his father get married to Elsie and he invited the boys to the sit-down part of the wedding, the eating part, with buss-up shot roti, baigan, tomato choka, chataigne, curry mango and curry goat. He was always on the look out for another occasion to invite us home by him, but none would come; and we would remain in this one-sided relationship, linked by cricket until Black Power come to Cascadu and meet us on the corner under the streetlamp sifting the matter between reality and dream, every one of us wanting to escape Cascadu, I on my way to Port of Spain to become a calypsonian (I am putting myself there on the street corner with them, but in fact I was away quite often); Romesh, the only one of us who didn’t have a lot to say, with his hands in his pocket, twenty years old, getting ready to married. Beresford thinking about going away to Canada, Franklyn just waiting for them to call him to cricket trials to represent Trinidad and Tobago, then the West Indies and tour England and bat at Lord’s, the Mecca of cricket; Soogrim, waiting for his then bedridden father to dead, everybody about to go off on his own, and he Manick working as a Public Works checker, keeping a record of materials brought in for bridges and roads, saving up his money to go away to study in England, saying again and again how great it will be to be there in England to see Franklyn when he come to play at Lord’s. Franklyn. At Lord’s. At the Mecca of cricket.
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