16

Ping-a-ling-a-ling, school bell ring

Knife and fork a fly fi dumpling

Mi lick two shat off a Shabarankin

Di shat buncks back an lick mi dumpling

Mi dilly, mi dally, mi reach a Ochi

Mi si two gal ‘a play dally shandy

Dem panty ‘oley ‘oley like mi granny chimmey

*

Clint Williams 1991

Child’s rap from Old Harbour Bay

(Thanks to 5 year old Clint Williams)

***

Access to the Caribbean from the West Coast of Canada is relatively difficult. It involves traversing a continent, an ocean and three times zones. The motivation for the trip has to be strong because there will be many stages between departure and destination. Add another complicating factor, the chaos of Christmas travel at the time of seasonal migration. Expatriates are responding like salmon to some primeval push to reconnect to their birth place and families, bringing gifts for everyone from Granny to little Priscilla. The more affluent of the ex-pats are experiencing a lack of sun and an excess of snow, the winter blues, conveniently labelled “Seasonal Affective Disorder” and for therapeutic reasons are heading south joining a number of “Great White Snow Birds” intent on becoming seasonally brown. Most troublesome of all for the Christmas traveler to the Caribbean, the Indigenous “Large Bottomed Higgler”, is hauling prodigious suitcases of merchandise purchased off shore for resale back in Kingston. Pity the baggage handlers, those two small men with large hernias in the airport in Kingston who must load and unload these obese containers.

The arrival at Kingston’s Norman Manley Airport could have been cause for celebration. After all I was heading “home” after nearly thirty years in Canada. The little waif with the squeaky vioce, the chronically insecure non-entity was heading back to show that he did have qualities enough to function reasonably productively and with a family of his own to prove it. But after nearly 20 hours of travel and little sleep, the daunting prospect of negotiating the lines for Customs and Immigration seemed an ordeal of irritating proportions.

The voyage started in Victoria, B.C., had the appearances of a marvelous adventure. My wife and I were to travel from Seattle to Dallas, Dallas to Miami, and Miami to Kingston. The decision to choose this circuitous route was done with a view to saving money, a difference of probably around two hundred dollars from the normal trans Canada flight to Toronto in the evening, an overnight stopover and a morning flight from Toronto to Kingston or to Montego Bay. We would later come to regret this choice.

We departed from Vancouver Island at Victoria’s Inner Harbour late in the afternoon the week before Christmas to sail to Seattle. It was drizzling. It was windy. We boarded the Clippper, a high speed catamaran and headed out of the protected waters of the Victoria’s Inner Harbour out into the Pacific to cross the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Within ten minutes we were bobbing on the suddenly belligerent Pacific. We spent a very uncomfortable half an hour pitching and being tossed about in the middle of the Strait in the midst of a storm known in the North West as a “Pineapple Express”.

Originating in the mid-Pacific near Hawaii, these storms bring warm winds that pick up moisture from the ocean and deposit great quantities of rain on the North West Coast of the United States and the South Coast of British Columbia.

The next three stages of the trip were routine enough except that we were traveling overnight. We left Seattle at midnight for a 3 hour 45 minute flight to Dallas. After a one hour stop over in Dallas we had a 3 hour flight to Miami. Another one hour and 30 minute stopover in Miami and a one hour flight to Kingston and we arrived hung over from travel near noon of the day following our Victoria departure. A taxi took us from Kingston to Old Harbour Bay, the village where my mother had lived since shortly after I was born.

Fatigue and emotion marked the next few days; fatigue of course since we had just experienced the constant vibrations from three air crafts and a wobbly catamaran over two days with only the illusion of sleep broken frequently by a change in the regular drone of the aircraft. Emotions ran high since after an absence of nearly forty years I was attempting to find a link with my mother, a link apart of course from our common biology. In the few days of our visit to her place of business and at her home an uncomfortable silence was the norm. Neither she nor I had developed the vocabulary nor the repertoire of feelings necessary to communicate and since we had had no life together when I lived in Jamaica, except for a week or two during one of my summer holidays, there were few common experiences to recount. We had no emotion to express to each other. Any sentiment would have been counterfeit. She did however express her pride in my general development and in my education and was pleased that I had married a woman of quality and that I had two fine children.

As the two weeks of our stay progressed I began to realize that my mother’s way of expressing her feelings was by fulfilling any desire that my wife or I expressed, as long as that desire was within her power. She would send her helpers far and wide in search of fruit out of season and provide sea food in abundance any time of day or night.

Kitchen at Auntie’s Hot Spot, Old Harbour Bay, 1991; Click on photo to enlarge

A connection, albeit tentative, began to evolve from the stomach upwards to the region of the heart. In the end we were reluctant to leave on this account. We had been indulged so thoroughly that we had become virtual children of privilege in that environment in two short weeks.

The two week stay in Old Harbour Bay at Christmas presented a tableau of a culture so greatly different from the one in which we were operating that it has left its imprint in an indelible way. The surprisingly diverse culture of the region invites the visitor and the resident alike to share its riches. African, East Indian, secular and religious traditions serve up a smorgasbord of musical expressions. Music is the main course in the holiday feast as well as the appetizer, the soup, the salad and the dessert. In fact you cannot be physically present in the town and not partake of the musical bounties offered so generously by the inhabitants of Old Harbour Bay. Towards Christmas the visitor had better just resign himself to being entertained from dusk to dawn. Relax, enjoy yourself, sleep will be virtually impossible for the next eight hours anyway.

The week before Christmas, the Jonkanoo practitioners honouring the African heritage would pound non-stop on their drums until the early morning. Ethnic East Indian drummers would respond from another quarter. The thunder of the roots reggae sound systems would stimulate the roots of the neighbourhood mango trees. Neighbours on one side would play Country and Western hurtin’ songs, and through all of this musical stew would come the massed voices of a couple of congregations of God proclaiming people.

On Christmas Eve I went to bed at 11:00 p.m. with the whole neighbourhood throbbing with many drums, many voices and roots reggae. By then, nine days after my arrival in Jamaica, I was able to get to sleep and remain asleep in the midst of a scud missile attack. I awoke at 5:00 a.m. to the waning rumble of drums and the rising choruses of Christmas carols from the traditional early morning Christmas service in two nearby churches. The morning winds were blowing unevenly permitting uneven waves of sounds, first from the direction of the drums then, when the gusts subsided, from the direction of the churches. For a minute or two, the declining energy of the drummers would dominate over the voices of the early morning worshipers, then depending on the caprices of the breeze, the drums would subside to be replaced either by “O Little Town of Bethlehem” or by “ The First Noel”, which were being sung in the two different churches. Soon a great host of screaming roosters from near and far, the desperate bleating of a lost baby goat and the inevitable “dog war”, a cacophony of crabby canines, rounded out a beautiful daybreak in a marketplace of sounds.

***