Island Songs

by Alex Wheatle

  Panceta died the next day. Joseph buried her in the family grave. Feeling safe with Shimona’s promise that her family would continue working the plot, Joseph returned to Claremont.

  Claremontonians, satisfied with the night’s entertainment, went up to Joseph to congratulate him on his storytelling skills. Whether his tales were embellished or not didn’t matter to them. As long as they had ‘ah long peep inna Moonshine’s soul’ they were content. Joseph was now one of them.

  Hortense was preparing to depart but Cilbert insisted that they should both congratulate Joseph. They approached Joseph who was still accepting handshakes and pats on the back. “Papa,” Hortense called. “Me an’ Cilbert gone now.”

  “So soon?” Joseph answered. “Yuh don’t waan to stay here fe de night? Neville waan de family togeder so we cyan talk an’ reason about t’ings. Me so glad! Me don’t affe look over me shoulder when me walk down de hill where de poor people ’ave dem hut.”

  “Papa, Cilbert affe leave Sunday marnin. So me don’t waan to waste any time. Me place is by him side. Cilbert me first priority. Yuh affe understan’ dat now.”

  Embarrassed, Cilbert shook Joseph’s hand before leading Hortense away. In contrast, Jenny wouldn’t leave her father’s side. She was smiling at him in adoration as Jacob looked on at a distance. He finally decided to walk home, realising that Joseph’s return had brought him down a notch in Jenny’s estimation.

  Chapter Nine

  Kingston, Jamaica

  July 1957

  Shaken by the bus driver’s refusal to slow down when he negotiated corners and bends, Hortense peered out of the dirt-stained window as the bus approached the junction of Half Way Tree. Through the city haze, she saw a multitude of bobbing heads, heading this way and that. Hortense saw unsmiling faces that were coloured from light-honey to midnight-brown. They had uncompromising expressions, almost threatening. Now and then Hortense spotted the odd pink dot but when she tried to look again at these white faces, they were lost like a grain of white sugar in a jar of demerara. Hortense scanned the bruised shop fronts and peeling buildings as the bus inched forward and wondered why the capital of Jamaica was not glossed in brilliant white as in her dreams.

  Hortense watched men of leisure, their palms wrapped around warm bottles of Mackesons and Red Stripe beer. They were standing outside rum bars, sucking on their Four Aces, Buccaneer and Camel cigarettes while eyeing the young women who went by. A select few, most of them caramel-skinned, peered through their sunglasses, sporting pastel-coloured jackets and silk-banded, straw boaters. Hortense glared as they looked down at the chaos below them from rooftop terraces, sipping cocktails served to them by black waiters wearing ultra-clean white jackets and black bow ties. Thick Havana cigars slid between the corners of the diners mouths, arched by delicately trimmed moustaches. Her eyes returning to road level, Hortense could see shoe-shine boys, their heads almost drowned by cloth caps, waiting patiently with their buffers and boxes at the exits of drinking clubs and fine restaurants, their palms as dark as the back of their hands. Taking off her own shoes, Hortense spat on them and gave them a quick rub with her handkerchief. Slipping on her footwear again, Hortense resumed looking out of the window.

  She could see many men idling, walking in no particular direction while scanning the passing traffic with defeated expressions. “Lazy good fe not’ing people dem!” she muttered under her breath. A few of these men chanced their luck by beseeching the shiny-shoed and the clean-shirted, pleading for a shilling. They were ignored. Topless, grey-footed scavengers came into Hortense’s vision. They unashamedly searched the refuse bins for half-eaten snacks and discarded cores of fruit. The clientele of the bars paid them no mind. “Dey shoulda go ah country an’ do some hard work,” Hortense whispered to herself.

  Hortense studied the filthy streets, grimacing as she did so. Garbage was packed tight against the kerbs, spilling onto the pavements; squashed tin cans, crushed cartons, flattened cardboard boxes, smashed bottles, yellowed newspapers, fowl bones, goat carcasses, broken household appliances, unusable push carts, warped wheels, tyre strips, rotting vegetables, stains of soured milk and failed Chinese betting slips.

  Hortense’s view was intermittently disrupted by cyclists playing Russian Roulette with the traffic. They were transporting and selling all manner of produce, the ninety-five degree Kingston sun bouncing off their reflectors and the wing mirrors that they had retrieved from the many abandoned cars that lay strewn throughout the city, all stripped bare of anything remotely usable. Other pedal-pushers advertised their religious beliefs in the form of flags, badges, stickers and any other means they could think of as they hollered their religious convictions to whoever would care to listen and to those who didn’t. “Crazy, crazy people!” Hortense laughed.

  Truck drivers – transistor radios blaring out American Rhythm and Blues standards from their cabins – announced their presence with impatient blasts of their horns, the black smoke that their engines emitted adding to the close and choking atmosphere that hung above Kingston in a shimmering veil.

  Hortense began to tap her feet. She waved to country hitch-hikers, scantily clothed in reg-jegs, who were balanced precariously upon crates of rural produce atop pick-up vehicles. They returned Hortense’s greeting from their vantage point. Most of them had no personal belongings whatsoever, save the fruit they were munching, but they all shared a dream of prospering in the capital, despite not knowing where they would sleep for the night. Many of them had seen the farming lands they worked upon bought out by bauxite companies and only the fortunate few gained employment with the new corporate enterprises and the hotel chains that were being built on the north coast. Inevitably they would swell the Kingston slums for they could only offer their farming skills. Without any form of social security, the unfortunate country hitchhiker would need all his resolve and his faith to repel the immediate attractions of a life of crime.

  Hearing an altercation behind her, Hortense turned around and looked at the drivers. Motorists, jostling and tooting for space with fly-encircled donkeys, bewildered goats and tug-along vendor carts, harassed and harangued each other as if they were gladiators manacled to each other a minute before they duelled. Quick-eyed and cautious pedestrians, who dared to cross the busy roads, were encouraged to do so with the utmost speed by the threat of Jamaican swear words or the manic revving of engines. Unlicensed taxi drivers kerb-crawled the streets opportunistically searching for fares. It was no embarrassment to them that their vehicles had a door missing, no visible evidence of an exhaust pipe and no front windscreen. “Taxi fe hire!” they shouted, exposing the gaps in their teeth.

  Hortense smiled as she spotted a special constable adopting a rigid stance. He was wearing black pants with blue stripes and a checked shirt. He was standing on patrol outside a government building, his two foot-long truncheons dangling from his belt. Mesmerised by her surroundings, Hortense clapped her hands and smiled broadly. Suddenly she thought of David. She wondered if David’s first sight of Kingston was just as thrilling as hers. She then collected her bags from the luggage rack and hoped Cilbert would be there at the bus depot to meet her.

  Parking at the Parade bus terminal in downtown Kingston, the bus driver ordered his passengers off the vehicle with an impatience that could only come from a man born in the city. “Come people, yuh t’ink me ’ave time to waste? Get off me strikin’ bus before me look fe me whip! Me waan me rest before me affe drive back ah stinkin’ country where yuh people shoulda stay! Me don’t know why yuh come ah Kingston, becah we ’ave not’ing fe offer yuh an’ de ghetto is preparing her welcome.”

  Burdened with three bags, Hortense offered the bus driver a lingering eye-pass as she departed. Cilbert, dressed in capacious blue trousers, a sweat-stained white Fred Perry T-shirt and a brown pork-pie hat, was waiting on the pavement. He was lipping a bottle of Guinness while darting his eyes as if wary of peril; his ready grin had departed him sometime during his studies in Kingston. Hortense brie
fly smiled with relief when she saw her husband but her long journey from Claremont had made her weary. “Cilbert! Don’t jus’ stand up der so wid ya licky licky self! Come help me wid me baggage!”

  “Ya journey alright?” asked Cilbert, collecting two of Hortense’s bags and offering her a kiss on the cheek.

  “Nuh, mon!” Hortense replied, making sure the bus driver heard her. “Me t’ought me was gwarn to dead about six times. Me don’t know how some people get dem employment.”

  “But yuh reach Kingston safe an’ ’pon time,” the bus driver riposted.

  Kissing her teeth, Hortense offered a choice glare to the bus driver, then turned to Cilbert. “Come, Cilbert. Me cyan’t wait to see de place where we gwarn live.”

  “Don’t expect nuh palace,” warned Cilbert. “It’s small an’ we ’ave about sixty neighbour living inna de yard. But de rent nuh too bad an’ when yuh start work we coulda save ah liccle. Who knows? Mebbe widin two years we coulda forward to England.” Cilbert closed his eyes for a second, his head tilted upwards. “Yes, sa. England! Ah fine ambition.”

  From the bus depot, a cautious Cilbert led Hortense due west of the city. Their destination was Trenchtown. Hortense noticed that most of the downtown grocer shops were owned by people of Chinese origin and she wondered if they had to tolerate the same abuse as the Chinese family who ran a grocer’s in Claremont market. Once out of the shopping area and the general hubbub of downtown Kingston, they found themselves in a bewildering network of alleyways and dusty, narrow lanes where skinny goats, scrawny chickens and fat cockroaches were fellow pedestrians. The heat seemed to grow more intense. Hortense felt her soles crunching hard-backed insects. Her white frock was now flecked with fine dust and soot that drifted from the many fires of the shanty dwellers. She noticed that Cilbert didn’t strut with the same cocksure assurance he displayed in the country. He was constantly checking behind him, his eyes on permanent alert. “Hold on to ya t’ings,” he advised. “Robber-mon an’ all kind ah criminal der about.”

  Fifteen minutes later they arrived outside a two-storied stucco building of twelve apartments. It was encircled by a seven foot concrete and zinc wall. Surrounding this and other government yards, hugging the outside of perimeter walls, were squatter camps where the denizens fashioned their homes out of termite-ravaged timber, levelled oil drum cans, jagged, bitten sheets of corrugated roofing and fourth-hand bed sheets. Hortense looked on the poor wretches who lived in the shanty huts and shook her head. A barefooted woman, three small children about her feet, was stirring a blackened pot full of banana slops over a flickering wood fire. She didn’t bother to swat away the flies that were lapping around her head. An elderly, white-whiskered man, dressed only in a soiled pair of shorts, was unashamedly crawling on the dusty ground, collecting cigarette butts. Cilbert took Hortense by the arm and led her inside the government yard.

  Hortense found herself in a horseshoe-shaped forecourt, at the centre of which stood a water standpipe. A few of the female residents were still taking their midday siestas in the shade offered by the perimeter wall. A young woman was breast-feeding her baby outside her front door. She was singing to her child, regarding her two-month-old son as only a mother could.

  “Me’d rather be inna me grave an’ be ah slave an’ go back to me fader to be free.

  Oh yes, Lord. Me’d rather live poor an’ clean dan live life craven an’ mean.

  Oh yes, me Lord. Me’d rather give anyt’ing me could spare dan tell ah sufferah me cupboard bare.

  Oh yes, me Lord. Me sweet sweet Lord.”

  Next door to the mother, an older woman was scrubbing her walls. Another head-scarfed woman was stoking a fire with strips of tyres. Beside her were the four communal toilets and four shower cubicles. Hortense, turning around on the spot and guessing that the men must be at work, commented. “Dis not too bad. De only t’ing is since we walk from de bus depot me don’t see nuh green or big tree. Ah shame. Me sight nuff cacti an’ acacia ’pon de narrow lanes ’pon de way here, but nuh mighty Mahoe ah stan’ proud like inna country. Me gran’papa would nah like dis place at all! But me realise why dey call dis place Trenchtown. De smell from de open sewage pit dat de shanty people use nearly tek off me nose!”

  Uneasy about something, Cilbert led Hortense to their ground floor apartment. Hortense nodded with approval when her shoes echoed off the tile flooring. She lifted her eyes and discovered that the apartment consisted of one room and a kitchen shared with a neighbour. There were two double beds situated against opposite walls, a pine china cabinet and two cane chairs that required remeshing. A tired-looking, beaten up sofa was pushed against another wall.

  “So, dis is it,” said Cilbert matter of factly, secretly thinking of Mr DaCosta’s spacious home and grounds back in Claremont. “But wid de grace ah de Most High, it’ll only be ah short while we stay here. But at least we togeder at last, under we own roof. Now we cyan mek ah fine life togeder.”

  Closing the door, Hortense went up to Cilbert and tossed his hat to the floor. “So, Cilby,” she said seductively. “Yuh don’t waan to christen me ’pon me first day inna de big city? Me need ah massage becah de bus seat tough like police station bench. Yuh gwarn give me ah massage, Cilby?”

  Forgetting his dislike of his new environment, Cilbert lifted Hortense off her feet and carried her to the bed. “Me had to tek ah day off from work an’ dem nah pay me. But der is nuh better way of spending me free time.”

  Next morning, sitting together on a city bus that wound its way through the downtown area then up towards the hills that backdropped Kingston, Hortense and Cilbert were watching the bare-footed children who were stationed at traffic lights and bus stops, selling nuts, guinep and naseberries to motorists. Hortense noticed the desperate look in their eyes.

  “Yuh sure dis Miss Martha is kindly?” Hortense asked. “Me never talk to ah white person before. She related to de new Queen ah England? She ah millionaire? She wear dat shiny somet’ing ’pon her head? Her face blister from de sun like dried red pepper? Yuh cyan see de blue vein inna her feet? She ’ave ah liccle flat bottom? She ’ave legs full of mighty dimple? She sweat like rainwater ah run down de trunk of de mighty Blue Mahoe after hurricane ah lick?”

  Cilbert couldn’t help but laugh. “Nuh, sa. Her husband is ah captain at de soldier camp up der inna de hills. Well past Stony Hill. Ah place call Newcastle me t’ink. Miss Martha is fine. When me connect her phone she give me tip to buy two drink. So she well kindly. She tell me dat she need ah cleaner to help around de house an’ me tell her dat me wife soon come from de country. So she tell me to bring yuh come. So, Hortense, ah fine opportunity dis.”

  “How do me talk to her? Me affe call her Lady Martha? Me affe bow? Me affe wash her foot-bottom? Nuh way me laying down fe her husband!”

  Cilbert chuckled again. “Nuh, nuh, sa. Jus’ call her Miss Martha. She easy to talk to an’ she nah gwarn wid high graces an’ look-down-nose dat some white people love to do. She fine. Yuh will see.”

  Not convinced, Hortense opted to peer out of the window. “Hmmmm.”

  Miss Martha’s bungalow crested a hill. Hortense, already mightily impressed by the ‘palaces’ as she called them, that lined the quiet avenue, peered into the English-made motor car sitting outside Miss Martha’s white-painted, iron gates. “She mus’ be ah millionaire!”

  Cilbert rang the door bell that was built into the stone gate-post and Hortense smoothed the creases in her frock. A faint ding-dong could be heard somewhere inside the house. Hortense tried to suppress an attack of nerves. Before her was a manicured lawn that had three young, leafless trees sprouting out of it; the tallest was no more than head height. A croquet mallet was resting on the grass surrounded by yellow and red balls. The lawn was framed by beds of flowers and Hortense almost sneezed when her nose caught the powerful scents. In the middle of the front garden was a circular white table, shaded by a large red, white and blue umbrella. The yellow-painted house, its width spreading out to thirty paces,
was riddled with bullet-like holes in the stone-work; Cilbert knew this was an escape for high winds. The generous yellow and white striped canopy ensured that the verandah was covered in shade.

  Shielding the bright sunlight with her right hand, Miss Martha, an auburn-haired woman in her late thirties, emerged from the house. Walking with assurance she was wearing a knee-length, sleeveless floral-patterned dress. Hortense and Cilbert straightened their postures as she approached them. She opened the gate. “Good morning, Cilbert! I heard the bell and thought my gardener would answer it but he seems to be late today.” Martha turned to Hortense, offering her a warm smile and her right hand. “And this is the delightful Hortense, I presume? I know your husband has been missing you. Men have their requirements, Hortense, so I’m sure Cilbert is most pleased at last to have you in Kingston.” Martha winked mischievously.

  Taking hold of Martha’s proffered hand, Hortense was unsure of what to do with it. Cilbert squirmed with embarrassment as Martha ran her eyes over Hortense. “Such rich skin,” she commented approvingly. “And nicely toned. Pretty eyes. Now I understand why Cilbert pines for you. When he connected my phone all he would ever talk about was you.”

  Hortense shot Cilbert a quick glance, wondering how well he knew Martha. “Come inside,” urged Martha. “We’ll talk on the verandah. It’s nice sitting there in the morning but in the afternoon there is no escape from the sun, despite the canopy. My husband, when he was planning this house, had the front facing the wrong way. I advised him to make it face south instead of west. But what do I know? To him I’m only a woman and our common sense is habitually ignored by our men.”