Fire rush, p.25
Fire Rush, page 25
‘Been going fast for a while,’ I say, thinking to myself I’ve gone deep inna grief and fear and darkness, never knowing if I’d make it into the light again.
We walk past the abandoned railway station, a two-storey, wooden building with fishtail fretwork. It’s padlocked and chained and reminds me of the Safe House and the underground tunnels.
The village is made up of veranda’d houses, some mounted on pillars, some built with limewashed wattle and daub. Fiery, red bougainvillea splashed against the walls. Calypso playing on a radio somewhere. People calling out to each other across yards and plots of land. Everything and nothing going on.
We sit outside on the steps of the village post office drinking purple iced syrup that darkens our lips. A woman humming a hymn waves to us as she walks by. I think of Muma and her life in the orphanage. There’s no way of knowing whether she stayed in Guyana, or returned to London, or Jamaica. But there must be a reason she didn’t return for me. And here, where the orphanage is, seems like the best place to start.
Low-lying clouds swell and Doctor Breeze blows. Leaves big as lanterns swing in and out the green light of trees. A lizard climbs off a cottonwood tree on to the ground.
‘Anole lizard,’ Fern says.
I watch as it changes from brown to the bright green colour of pimento grass as it slips into the bush.
Camouflaged. Like me.
* * *
*
Carlton collects me early the next morning to take me to Moose’s grandma’s place. Need to pay my respects to her before I do anything else. We drive past seventeenth-century ruins and abandoned sugar plantations. The Black River, with its dark layers of rotting sludge, runs alongside the road.
We arrive in Maggotty and Carlton asks a man walking by the road for directions to Granny Itiba’s house. He points behind us to a narrow path hemmed in by bushes and Carlton turns the car around.
I see a house in the distance, isolated in a mangrove of hog-plum trees.
I’m worried that my arrival will be an aftershock for her. And I’m afraid of seeing Moose in her face. Afraid of not seeing him there. Carlton drives up the mule track and stops outside a small house of red clay and stones.
‘Nobody living here,’ he says. ‘Not. A. Living. Soul.’ He sniffs the air. ‘Mebbe she passed away.’
Human dust and shadow float in the late-afternoon light. Copper-coloured crops shimmering.
‘Ms Itiba?’ I shout.
A bird cries out from a tree where over-ripe mangoes and coolie plums droop from hooked spines. Carlton stands by the open car door, his nostrils flaring.
‘I smell something bad,’ he says.
‘I’m gonna check inside,’ I say.
‘Look yah, Missus Foreign, we can go back to the main road, check out the centre, ask about.’
‘I’m going in.’
He shakes his head and mutters words that sound like ‘Hard ears’.
I take off my shades and look at the house. Two wooden shutters at the front are open. I walk past a rotten tree-stump crawling with red ants on my way up the overgrown path. I push the rickety door. It moans and opens into a room with a waxed floor and Indian matting. It smells of oranges and thyme. Three cashew-nut dolls on a shelf on the wall, dressed in reed-grass dresses, mahogany-coloured faces with black seed eyes. Wooden beads and palmetto fans hang by a large window at the back.
Granny Itiba is slumped in a wicker chair by a table. Islands of white froth hair on her skull, eyeballs bobbing on watery eye rims. Nutmeg head toppled to one side. Her eyes float to the centre and she looks at me, then drifts off as if she thinks I’m a dream.
‘Ms Itiba?’
She opens her eyes again. ‘Thought you was a duppy,’ she says.
‘I’m Yamaye, Moose’s—’
‘Me bwoy, me beautiful bwoy.’
I crouch down and hold her hand.
‘It woulda nevah cum to this if him did stay with me.’
‘Let me help you.’
‘Bring me little sugar water please, madam.’
I go to the kitchen at the back of the house. Through a window I see a stream threading between cocoa trees. I scoop two teaspoons of molasses sugar from a stone jar into a mug and pour water from a plastic jug.
I give her the drink and she takes some powder from one of three bowls on the table and sprinkles it in the water and drinks it.
‘The pain burns me,’ she says. Her voice is high, her eyes rolling. Her yellow, claw-like nails clutch her starched green dress.
‘Why did he want to go to England? What for? I nevah wanted nuth’n more than to be the country gyal that I was. Pounding gully roots.’ She pulls my head towards her chest. ‘Listen?’ she commands.
I hear a slow drum.
Drum.
Drum.
Her heart’s playing on the off-beat.
I tell her about the campaign, the silent marches. She says, ‘Cho! No rebellion without magic. Invisible smoke, false footprints. These.’ She points to small bottles on the shelf. I remember Moose saying that she was a magician. Now I think I know what he was trying to tell me.
I go outside and follow the tyre tracks to a spot under a tree where Carlton is waiting by his car.
‘I’ve upset her. It was a shock me turning up.’
‘These country people are hard, no worry yuhself.’
‘Can you buy some provisions for her? Meat, rice, butter, bread.’ I give him some money.
‘Look, Missus Foreign, we catch her at the wrong time, that’s all. She tired. Look yah, she have mango and yam in her kitchen. I tell you, that woman was up this yah morning digging up her food. Country woman dem strong.’
He sets off for the village and I go back to the house. Granny Itiba is in the doorway, patting her face with a white cloth.
‘That was not a proper welcome,’ she says.
‘I should have sent word,’ I say.
We sit at a wooden table inside, out of the sun.
‘My bwoy said you were his woman,’ she says. ‘He wrote every month, telling me everything, always sending likkle money. He is back where he belongs. On our land.’
She asks me to walk with her on the old paths. Moose will be with us. I ask her if she’s strong enough and she puts her hand on her heart, laughs and says, ‘Sounds like I am.’
‘Can I see Moose’s grave?’
She whimpers a little, and I put my arm around her shoulder.
‘His muma and poopa there too. Fever tek them. Scarlet fever. His poopa used to mek his own whitewash, dig out white limestone from likkle outcrops, where it bruck the surface.’ She holds up her yellow claws. ‘I put me bwoy in the heart of the banana bush,’ she says and she starts to bawl.
I follow her outside to the back of the house. She’s as thin and papery as mango leaves, but she’s still talawah – strong – walking with firm steps, her body steady and upright. The banana bush is close to the stream. I wade into it, pushing through dead leaves and red flowers and buds with new life bursting out. Six obsidian-black gravestones laying side by side. Moose’s gravestone is at the end.
MOOSE MARLON BOHITI
THERE IS A GREEN HILL FAR AWAY.
The clicking and humming of tree frogs and cicadas skim the silence. It feels like the night I first danced with Moose, when I laid my head on his chest. Bitter-sweet pain that at the time felt like a homecoming that was too late.
Carlton returns with the provisions. I stew goat meat and boil green bananas for lunch and we all sit on rusting iron chairs on the tiny veranda, trays of food on our laps.
The air becomes saturated with the buzzing of grasshoppers, high ultrasonic. Purple orchid bees and green butterflies float in indigo.
We sit and talk about Moose. Later, we watch the stars come out. Perforations in the violet sky, draining light away.
Carlton says it’s getting dark and we best leave. I clear the table and wash the plates and pots.
At the doorway she calls out to me, ‘Daughter, me spirit tek to you. Come, kiss me on me jawbone.’
I go back and kiss her. She takes my face in her hands and looks into my eyes and says, ‘I know why you come.’
When we drive away from the small house set back in time, I feel the acidic burn of grief in my gut and heart and throat. Wish I could stay longer on Granny Itiba’s wild, overgrown land, tending Moose’s grave, plucking mangoes from trees, digging yam from the earth. I want to walk the rebel paths that she walked with Moose and find my own freedom. Sit at her feet in the evenings, listening to stories of her and Moose in their Cockpit Country dreams. Her irregular heartbeat pounding like steady footsteps searching in the dark.
Carlton drops me at Miss Ermeldine’s lodging house. I pay him and he tells me that this is how the old live out their days in the bush.
* * *
*
Fern has left a tray with fresh limeade and roasted cashew nuts in my room. There are moths clinging to the light. The sound of drumming in the mountains. I wonder how Irving will see out his days.
Oraca said our house was the centre of attention in the first year on the Tombstone Estate, filled with migrants from the Caribbean. Most Saturday nights Muma cooked food, Irving played records, organised card games. Muma set the scene, but she was an observer, Oraca said. People thought she was an extrovert because she was a singer, organised parties. But she always stood back, on the edge of it, watching, waiting. Oraca thought it was because she grew up in an orphanage. She said Muma found it hard to stay one place, it was hard for her to fit in.
I fall asleep and dream a red, pulsing heart dangling from the ceiling by a long nerve. Monassa’s voice coming from the heart:
Me face in the shadow of the moon
Me footsteps close behind yuh.
Don’t mek me come for you.
The heart turns black and falls from the ceiling, flying around the room, flying around my face. I scream, wake up. Something dark flapping near the window. I scream again. Miss Ermeldine’s outside my door shouting, ‘What happen?’
I get out of bed and open the door. Miss Ermeldine stands in a turquoise nightgown and turban. Her face crumpled on the right side, her right eye barely open.
‘Something’s in my room – a bat!’
‘You city people!’
She rattles the jalousies, but whatever it was has flown away. Miss Ermeldine sucks her teeth and closes the shutters. ‘You’re in country now. Rats, bats, snakes, spiders. We’re living side by side. They won’t trouble you.’
I go back to bed. The drums are beating louder, chanting, a male-toned drum, carrying a low note that travels far into the night.
25
Acoustemology
Early on Sunday morning at the end of that week, Carlton drives me and Granny Itiba the six miles or so to Accompong, the Maroon village. She wants us to walk the routes she used to explore with Moose so we can feel close to him, sense his spirit. We drive along the Black River with the sound of singing and tambourines coming from small churches. She speaks of the people who believe that the river is not dark from dead vegetation, but death. She sings:
‘What nega fe to do?
Tek force by force
Tek force by force.’
She tells me that this was sung by ten men from the area in 1816, just before they were executed for plotting a rebellion. ‘Black River falls in the dry season,’ she says.
At Accompong, Carlton drops us at the main road that runs up a hill surrounded by other hills. He says Accompong is Ashanti for the lone one, the warrior. He toots his horn three times and drives off, leaving a cloud of dust.
Granny Itiba is wearing a long, brown bandana skirt, a man’s navy plaid shirt and scuffed leather boots. A small rucksack on her back. Skinny plaits like branches all around her head. She takes a flask and scatters white rum on the ground for the ancestors. We move into the star-shaped valleys of dub sirens, bleeps and space-echoes. One hundred per cent humidity, our bodies raining. We walk single file on the overgrown path, thick bush patterned with peepholes, red lizard eyes watching. At first, I think I hear her whispering to me or herself not to rush. Then I realise she is saying: fire rush.
‘Me bwoy is tethered to me, always,’ she says of Moose.
I feel him in the leeward curve of the bush, his limbs camouflaged with black genip, his shadow dissolving into flat-bottomed basins of sound.
‘I’ll fight for our dreams for a new life, country living,’ I whisper to Moose, as if he can hear me.
‘Step!’ Granny Itiba shouts.
She’s in front, swinging her sharpened machete right to left, conducting the rainforest orchestra: vibrato of Jamaican blackbirds; rhythm-section crickets and grasshoppers clapping their bodies like castanets; 20,000-watt underground bassline. She stops here and there, singing and shouting to the spirits to let us pass. She sings in a high pitch, her voice trembling and cracking. It’s the rainy season, and the thundery sky is dub echo delay.
‘Come, me bwoy,’ she says.
I tell her about the other men who’ve died in prison cells.
‘Mountains will always trap rain clouds,’ she says. I think of Muma and wonder if she is trapped in the rainforest in Guyana somewhere.
Granny Itiba tells me that there are no police here in this region; their ancestors fought for that. She says Moose was free here. She points out Moco John, broadleaf, beefwood and bloodwood. I think of all the blood that’s been spilt and wish that Moose had stayed on this land. That we’d met here in another lifetime.
She rests at the bottom of a hill, and I climb to the top with fire in my lungs. I see nothing but the tips of green mountains, pools of water that look like turquoise rocks. I can only imagine the karst, the sea of bones, where the Maroons are buried.
The air smells of old gunshot.
I call out to Muma and Moose, and their names bounce back and drop into caverns.
I feel alive, in my body, as if for the first time.
I climb down and we walk further into the thick bush until we’re enclosed under a forty foot high canopy.
‘Our foremothers used the rainforest in their fight, herbs and spirit,’ Granny Itiba says. ‘Not pen and paper and marching up and down.’
She tells me that women gathered peacock flowers so the seeds of their bodies, their babies, wouldn’t be born to be thrown across the Black Atlantic to go down in history as slaves. Women with black-rice teeth singing in the rainforests, their voices travelling backwards in their throats so no one would understand their words, boiling the magic seeds of the peacock flower, drinking it as they pressed down on their bellies, pulling out the fruits from their wombs.
I wonder how Muma felt when I was in her belly. Maybe she thought about drinking herbs to flush me out into another world, like the women in my visions who jump off slave ships into the sea.
We stop again, at a litter of stillborn rocks that Granny Itiba says are five million years old. We drink soursop juice and eat cashew nuts wrapped in lace-bark cloth.
‘Our women were focused on their mission, concentrated as three-pointed gods,’ she says. ‘They set fire to the Black Atlantic with seeds and song. That was their rebellion. Better to sing ourselves burning into the understorey of the rainforest than go across that black sea.’
She looks into my face as if she can see everything. ‘Set your ghosts free if you want liberty,’ she tells me.
She follows the vibrations of trees and underground water, taking us into cloudforest, the star-shaped valleys of runaways. Deep in the bush, alternating light and darkness, same as the lights in the Crypt. Mist floating around large, human-like cacti. The sound of thunder in the hidden sky. Red-earth streams running down from the mountains, percolating downwards, into the networks of caves and rivers beneath. Liquid-filled leaves dripping time. Mosquitoes sucking blood outta my body. Panting and sweating, swigging water.
Am I fooling myself? Is that Moose’s voice rising from the fractured white karst calling, ‘Lonely, lonely.’
Granny Itiba moves further away, into sonic space. My body feels stronger than it ever has. The muscles on my thighs pumped and straining. I step up my pace, jump over a small rock and land in a thick padding of red vine. There’s a raw, stinging sensation in my right foot, as if I’ve stepped into broken glass. I look down and see red ants crawling around my ankles. I brush them off, but my skin is blistering, my ankle swelling. I call out to Granny Itiba.
She hurries to me. ‘Sit down. Eh-eh! Fire ants.’
The blisters spread up my leg and my ankle puffs out like an inflated bullfrog.
‘I can’t breathe.’
‘Tek it easy. Slow de breath.’
‘I’m gonna pass out.’
She gives me the small bottle of rum and I take a sip. My heart drops inna my stomach and I vomit.
‘Stay here, child. Leaves and bark are inlaid with secrets.’
‘Don’t leave me—’ But she slips off the narrow path and disappears.
A crack of thunder far away. I hope the rains come. I’m so hot. I hear the women rebels singing, or is it the acoustics of the rainforest, underground streams, the caves pushing upwards?
I imagine all the things that could go wrong: Granny Itiba’s heart gives out and I can’t find my way outta here alone; my foot turns black and has to be amputated; a wild animal attacks me; I fall into a bottomless sinkhole.
My leg is burning, and my whole body is hot. I take off my T-shirt, leaving on my bikini top, and roll my yellow jogging bottoms up above my knees. I step off the path in the direction that Granny Itiba went. It’s shaded by a large cluster of tall mahogany trees. I sit under one, leaning against its trunk, and it takes the weight of my feet, the weight off my grief.
