The shiny man was just the first. After him came a few more exiled ex-soldiers and itinerant Igbo patriots, all repeating variations of the same phrases. Not all of them shone with the same vigor; in fact, each seemed duller and increasingly less impressive. The spectacle soon wore off. The members of the family and other children from the neighborhood stopped coming to watch, and my visitor and I would be left alone in the parlor with Grandma and her dogs, all of them asleep. Some of these men left to find my mother, though I never heard from them again. This wasn’t surprising because America was a place where people disappeared all the time, mothers in particular.
By the time I had completely lost the traces of our shared Nigerian accent, the men had stopped coming. And I was happy they did. They brought too much knowledge to assimilate about Biafra and Nigeria and my father and my godfather. Jamaica had its own complex expectations. I’d finally become indistinguishable from everyone around me, and I’d hoped that these men had realized that it was too late for my legacy. Perhaps America had been kind to them, and they lived there like my mother without regrets or legacies. Having learned to climb almost as well as Cousin Cecil and having learned how to survive Uncle Daddy’s rages, I wanted those trees and that endless sky to do for me what they had done for everyone else on the island. I wanted them to help me forget all that came before it.
* * *
That kind of forgetting was difficult because in Jamaica Africa was everywhere. Images of the continent were painted on zinc fences, drums could be heard behind random bursts of foliage, and songs celebrating the continent blasted in the streets from the door-size speakers framing the entranceways of rum shops or from the stadium behind the house where reggae concerts were held during tourist season. We children had to hear those songs in the streets because such music was banned in the house and only the older girls would dare listen to it late at night when Big Auntie and Uncle Daddy were out. Africa was the promised land for itinerant Rastafarians who appeared on every corner or under every other tree. Something about that religion turned everyone into a preacher or prophet. They entranced many young people, including the older girls, because of their association with music or the fact that they were always in the news. But they terrified Big Auntie, who like most of her generation had grown up being told that those men with the snakes in their hair and the spiderwebs in their beards kidnapped and ate children.
Like most people, my mother as a child in Jamaica had been taught that Africa was a source of shame. But she had then migrated to England only to fall in love with an African. Because I was so young, people still talked about it openly around me. In the 1950s and early 1960s, such a thing was beyond taboo—on both sides. Africans and Caribbean people thought themselves superior to one another, the former for having escaped chattel slavery and the latter for having escaped Africa. When folks back in Jamaica heard that my mother was going to marry someone from the continent, they were apoplectic. Africans were cannibals, even some close friends and members of her family said. She would be eaten upon arrival. Their men had many wives and she’d be locked in a harem somewhere and turned slave to her husband’s pagan appetites. At the very least, she would disappear into that great void from which Jamaicans were lucky to have been delivered in the first place by the light of Christ and the generosity of the Empire. Plus, she’d made it to England, the goal and destiny for all colonial subjects, so why would she ever leave?
I may have been too young to know the details of Nigeria, Gabon, and my father when my mother and I came to the island, but our arrival remained household lore. The way the adults told the story, my mother had carried me strapped to her back through fields of black smoke and across streets littered with the entrails of women and their children. It was as if she had come running across the ocean barefoot, back to the place where she was born. We had escaped, but from a place that many Jamaicans still associated with darkness, magic, and trauma. Despite the Africa-worshipping Rastafarians, “African” was still an insult, and being called that by Black people was the beginning of my consciousness of self.
Things only got worse after my mother left the island. The public knowledge that my mother was in America meant I was likely also to leave. That mobility was the ultimate sign of privilege and generated much resentment, especially among teachers who in those days were free to administer corporal punishment. It didn’t take long, though, for me to begin to cherish my bruises and scars. Being beaten was like being punished for my African past and for my American future.
In a culture enamored with stories, the wilder and more colorful the better, I was able to exploit the continent, a place Jamaicans thought was the source of all stories. Through storytelling, I established some power in the household, in church, and at school. And I wasn’t alone. We children were all desperate fantasists. We were made so by our hatred of our situation and our belief that we would soon be in America, England, or Canada, where we would quickly and joyfully forget the island and one another.
My particular skill at storytelling was due to the fact that I was a known reader who routinely risked a beating to read the books that Big Auntie kept on display in the parlor. Those books were for display alone, and for guests, but when night fell, I read them: David Copperfield, Black Beauty, Treasure Island, the tales of King Arthur. There was also Robinson Crusoe, Kidnapped, Kim, and others. Being caught with them under the sheets caused many of my beatings; worse were a couple of close calls when the candles I used for reading set fire to the sheets. These accidents never slowed down my hunger. I even traded with the Chinese boys at the end of the street whose family owned a shop that had books and comics with covers that had to be hidden from Big Auntie and Uncle Daddy due to their suggestion of paganism.
I learned in spite of my beatings that in Jamaica reading was publicly acknowledged as a good thing. I was encouraged in it as much by those who could read as by those who couldn’t. Some of the latter would ask me to read to them, in the park, under the trees, on the roof. I even began teaching the house girls how to read when Sabbath ended and the house was gearing up for the new week. It wasn’t unusual to walk through the streets and have some ragged Rastaman or khaki-clad sugar-cane cutter single me out as that boy “who good with book.”
The actual amount of time I spent in that house before migrating to America remains contested. Where I exaggerated the length of time, my mother exaggerated its brevity. The truth was that I lived there for at least three years. The actual time was blurred by the fact that before my mother left for America I regularly stayed at the house after school and on Friday nights before church on Saturday. I would also spend holidays there. Also, Big Auntie never gave me my mother’s letters after she left, so I had no choice but to accept that she hadn’t written any. Making things worse, my rivals in the house told me again and again that my mother had forgotten me and would never send for me as was the case with so many other mothers who left their children to dissipate in the island sunlight.
Telling stories, then, was as much an act of survival as it was a display of faith. We spent hours doing so, usually in the tangle of iron, wood, and magic that was the backyard, or in the back of Uncle Daddy’s bus when it was packed with the household and heading up into the country for trips that took entire days. And when we boys were alone, we clustered in the branches of the guinep and mango trees that hung over the wall separating our yard from the stadium. There we were safe from girls as well as the rude boys and young dreads who ringed the stadium and went through our pockets if they caught us on the grounds.
When we weren’t focused on our histories or imagining our futures, we acted out American television programs, particularly the ones that featured Black Americans. This latter obsession drew into our competitions many of the beltless, shirtless, and shoeless boys from nearby yards. My cousins and I would even practice the accents we heard on those programs at church, thereby risking eternal damnation, which would be worth it if we could spend eternity sounding like Black Americans.
Entire afternoons were spent at conferences held atop those trees, recalling our sources, debating modes of elocution like preachers of a faith we considered so orthodox that it did not need the indignity of a name.
None of us in the household were allowed to visit movie houses, which were where most of the learning of accents took place. They were also where all the rude boys and bad men congregated. The women there wore noisy bracelets on their ankles and had indifferent eyes. Rumor was that the oldest daughter in the family regularly went to movie houses. This was probably why she was the first to wear an Afro while the other daughters and cousins spent as much time ironing one another’s hair as they did studying or praying. She spoke Black American almost as well as some of the actors on TV. She was the first to slap our palms when greeting us and the first to introduce us to foreign slang. After we’d gotten used to “giving her five” and listening to her speak what the house girls called “speaky-spokey,” she began entangling us in handshakes we thought went on too long until we began seeing them on television and then in the streets.
She was the only one in the house who had any interest in my name. It was because of her that I always spoke it in full when asked and translated the middle part, Onuorah, which I knew meant “voice of the people.” She especially loved that part. It seemed to guarantee an epic life or hearkened back to one shared before the white man came (and I’m sure she was the first person I heard use the phrase “the white man”).
Thanks also to her I didn’t shy away or pretend to be Jamaican when asked where I was from despite the mockery or ostracism that could follow. My willingness to publicly acknowledge my background impressed her. What mattered most to me was that she offered protection for very little in exchange. Along with Uncle Daddy, she was brutal when it came to meting out punishment to the children of the house. And when it came to people outside the house, she was fearless. She took on the boys in the street and even chased random Rastas out of the backyard who yelled “African bush baby” at me as they scrambled up the stadium wall.
The oldest daughter also protected me from her sisters and some of the older girls in the house in exchange for my stories. Calling them memories, I shared them with her while we crouched at the radio and record player in the parlor listening to reggae when Big Auntie and Uncle Daddy were away. Sometimes she would let me surf the static in between stations in hope of hearing a fragment of that song about Major Tom. Grandma would often be in the parlor with us amid her heavily breathing dogs, but her knowledge of what we were listening to was as limited as her hearing. In between reggae songs and with deepest gratitude, I joyfully crafted for my cousin an exquisite Africa she could use in the streets.
As entertaining and distracting as these stories could be, we children never lost sight of what they truly represented—our desire to leave the house and island. And that desire could be so strong that it created a distinct kind of madness among us, a delirium at times so strong that we became shameless. It eventually caused my stories to lose consistency and my lies to become at times so blatant and contradictory that I didn’t care if they were believed or not or even if they were entertaining or not.
With others, the madness drove them to quite desperate acts. On each of their birthdays, the Cousins June religiously packed and repacked their suitcases, expecting to be taken to the airport to be finally reunited with their mother. Marching into the parlor, they wore their finest church clothes, held hands, and sat waiting until the sun appeared and disappeared. Cousin Robbie, who had been sent back to live with his grandparents in the countryside after learning his mother was not going to send for him, had gotten a young girl pregnant when we next heard of him. She was too young to carry the child to full term, and her “husband” buried it on the seashore next to a boat Robbie claimed to be building for the three of them. Eventually, he converted to Rastafari only to return to the house stabbed and lifeless just as the roots of his hair had begun knotting up and turning red from sea salt.
But for those who got visas, everything in the house, in the yard, on the island seemed to belong to them. At least for the days or weeks before their flights. Every word they said was true and their mood dictated the mood of house, school, and church. All prayers were for them. It was as if their skin in the glare of island sun had become indistinguishable from whiteness. When riding in Uncle Daddy’s tour bus, they got to sit where tourists usually sat, and should they wish to skip worship service in the house—something otherwise unthinkable—all they needed to say was that they were packing. Big Auntie and Uncle Daddy would be excessively kind to them, affectionate even, knowing that the child who was leaving would now be responsible for their parent’s continuing obligations to the household.
When my turn to leave the island finally came, I was robbed of that opportunity to move about the house with my nose upturned and my heart hard to the sudden warmth and affections of the household. I wanted them to know that I had always understood that this condition was not permanent. I wanted them to see how easy it would be to forget them. America would be my revenge. I’d even prepared a speech, composed late at night with the bedsheet over my head while my cousins who shared the bed with me—Cecil and Danny—kicked at my chin and nibbled at my ankles. It was the kind of speech one would expect from the voice of the people. Because I didn’t know I was leaving when they rushed me to the airport, my speech was never heard. My departure seemed less a triumph than a mere accident, less a choice than an act of deception.
* * *
We all expected that Cousin Violet would be the next to leave. She was reaching the age where her unusual behavior and increasing distance from the world we all shared was less and less explicable. What had appeared magical or playful began to seem an advancing sickness to the older girls and outright demonic to the adults. Big Auntie thought an early baptism would make a difference, but when Cousin Violet came up from the green water cackling and giggling, it seemed obvious that things would get worse.
She was silent all the way home from her baptism, sitting in her usual seat in Uncle Daddy’s Japanese bus, staring out the windows as wide as TV screens with her lips pursed tightly. Turns out she’d kept some of the water in her mouth, and she spat it into an empty cola bottle as soon as we got home. She stopped it up with melted candle wax and toilet paper, and hid it somewhere in the backyard. She hid it so well that Cousin Mark exhausted himself trying to find it, as did Cousin Cecil. No matter how hard they hit her—knowing that her habit was never to make a sound, which made us boys ever more hostile due to envy—she never revealed its location.
Or maybe it would be Cousin Danny who would have been next to leave. We called him Architect due to his habit of drawing incredibly detailed maps and blueprints on the empty pages of school or church books or on pieces of cardboard. Sometimes he described his own buildings and cities as we lay in rapt attention in the trees or under the bed. His America was a visual one, and he proved to us that he belonged there by the vividness of his descriptions and the complexity of his cityscapes. The streets were precise and had angles so sharp that they seemed able to draw blood. The skylines were so balanced that the lack of trees or recognizable signs of nature was easily forgiven. Where I imagined a place with endless space, open and sprawling, Cousin Danny emphasized lines, walls, borders. If anyone had earned the right to leave simply by the amount of time spent waiting, it was Cousin Danny.
The only boy younger than I was Cousin Mark. We called him Barrister because of his skill at argument and his composure when under pressure. He was beaten less than the rest of us and we attributed that to his gift for persuasion. The truth had more to do with the fact that his mother sent money directly to Big Auntie and Uncle Daddy, no barrels, no packages, just more cash than anyone else. Though his skills were lost on Big Auntie and Uncle Daddy—by the time things progressed to that level, there was never room for argument—Cousin Mark was able occasionally to mitigate the violence of the older girls against us. Because of his mother’s money,
we assumed he wouldn’t be next. We thought him too valuable for the household to let go.
Cousin Cecil and I were the same age, but because of his particular ethnic mix, he looked younger or was allowed to act that way. Missionaries in particular loved him and commented on his almond eyes and curly hair, and kept him by their sides for as long as they stayed. He was the only boy who actually belonged in the house, so he would not be the next to leave.
It turned out to be me. I was the next to leave.
Returning home for lunch from school one day, I found the entire household arrayed as they had been when I met my first African. Since visits from Biafran ex-soldiers had long stopped, I didn’t assume this to be a similar event. But everyone’s eyes were on me as Cousin Cecil and I came in through the white metal gate that led through the bars surrounding the front patio. Most houses in that area had the same type of bars, all the same color white. It was as if everyone lived in birdcages.
Within seconds of our arriving, Big Auntie took from me a bag she’d asked me to carry to school, a pink floral-patterned shopping bag that my schoolmates had spent most of the morning mocking. It was a woman’s bag, but I never dared ask her the reason why I had to take it. Cousin Cecil had laughed while my schoolmates called me “mamma-man” or “battyboy” as they followed me all the way to school that morning and back to the house that afternoon. It was obvious now that the bag was to guarantee that we’d be back home for lunch rather than roaming through the city streets with the children of “Sunday worshippers” as we were wont to do.
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way Page 2
