4

1939 – 1944

Circumstances of my Birth

In the sweet by and by
We will meet on that beautiful shore

Hymn

Grandma died peacefully in her sleep overnight. So peacefully, in fact, that I was unaware of her death although I slept in the same bed as Grandma. Sweetie, a neighbour, had come down the rock strewn path from her house to request some alterations be done to a dress. She had crossed the street and had knocked at the door several times before I roused myself from the bed in which Grandma and I were sleeping to go to the door and answer.

Normally Grandma would have been awake long before and would already have made a pot of bitter bush tea which I was able to tolerate only because of the thick molasses Grandma would put into the tin cup with the tea. This morning no smell of bush tea flavoured the tiny one room wooden hut.

Sweetie leaned over Grandma’s bed questioningly. “Miss Mabel… Miss Mabel, you hear mi?”: then louder with apprehension, “Miss Mabel… Miss Mabel?”

That morning my grandmother seemed not to recognize her name for she kept right on sleeping. I jumped back into bed and began shaking her shoulder. I did not then realize that Grandma would not get up this morning, nor any other morning for that matter.

Sweetie however, seemed to realize, though as if unsure that Miss Mabel, was indeed henceforth and forever without life, she hurried to get some help, medical or otherwise. When she returned some time later I was still busy trying to rouse Grandma from a sleep which I did not know was permanent.

Shortly after Sweetie returned with a neighbouring woman, death with its peculiar magnet began to attract attention to Mabel’s house. The first to arrive on te premises were children who set up outside the fence at the side of the road. Leaning on fence posts they waited in silence, anticipating something. Grandma’s death had broken the tedium of the village morning. Next came curious adult villagers, some talking solemnly among themselves. A few of Mabel’s intimates came through the gate and entered the house. One of those who had entered, came back through the gate to say something to an acquaintance outside the fence as if to confirm something to the group assembled outside the fence. Shortly after, the group started to disperse. One of the departing bystanders pointed skyward. A flock of Red Headed Turkey Vultures, harbingers of death, seekers of carrion, circled expectantly. About Grandma, the village made a collective pronouncement to this effect: “In the midst of life we are in death. the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” And that was that. I was left to fill in the blanks about life and death using the limited repertoire of experiences then available to me.

Grandma through ancestral or local practices, was sent to her great reward with a wake. In the early afternoon of the function to pay their respects to Mabel, the locals converged on her residence. The odour of rum permeated the tiny one room cabin where Grandma’s corpse lay as if in state. The music was loud. To communicate their respects for the dead the mourners had to elevate their voices above the music and in the din some people were crying, some laughing, some singing, some eating. I was somewhat confused myself, not quite knowing what to do at the wake, to cry, to laugh, to sing or to eat. I cried a lot, ate a bit but could manage neither to sing nor to laugh.

The wake lasted far into the night as people trickled in after the labours of the day to share a few moments with Grandma’s corpse which dominated the small cabin laying in the central position on a makeshift table in the only room. My best recollection of the event was that it was a party such as would wake the dead. The sum of Grandma’s earthly fatigue however, was such that she was not disposed to wake. She remained quite dead even during and especially after the party.

Mabel Henry’s headstone in Kellits, Clarendon: In Sacred Memory of Mabel Henry, Born 3rd Aug. 1882, Died 14th Dec. 1944

The kerosene lamp in Mabel’s hut was refilled before the last people left and the music died. I spent the night in Mabel’s presence on a cot. An Aunt slept in Mabel’s bed while Mabel spent the night in her coffin. Next day they buried Mabel in a plot outside the wooden cabin, about fifty feet from the house on one of the inevitable hillsides, the village itself being perched somewhat haphazardly on the side of a hill.

The confusion that I felt during the wake sprouted, took root, grew and flourished between the wake and the burial of Mabel, my mother’s mother. Apart from my now dead grandmother, I felt attached the way members of a family feel attached, to only one other human being, that being my playmate and cousin, Thelma with whom I shared my Grandmother’s protection. I was sure that Thelma, two years my senior, was unable to play the role of guardian since she had even less adult status than I. I had been granted preferential status on Grandma’s bed having developed the control of my bladder to a more reliable extent than had Thelma. Bladder control was surely a prerequisite to social success in an adult world. Thelma’s unfortunate incontinence had banished her to the floor where her errant waters would disturb none but her.

Where did I belong? Who was I? Where was I going now? Who would take care of me? My mother, a young woman of very humble origins and more than passing beauty, had departed the village four years earlier and in a hurry at my birth to escape the shame of motherhood at seventeen. She had gone over the mountains from Kellits, down to the hot coastal plain and into Old Harbour Bay, a village where one of her brothers resided. In Old Harbour Bay she took refuge from the disapproval of right thinking people and the wrath of her God-fearing mother, my late lamented grandmother Mabel. There, far from her sin, she would sometimes hide among the underbrush in a fetid, mosquito infested gully trying in vain to escape the heavy burden of her guilt, unaware that guilt, though a heavy burden, is terribly portable. Kellits her former home, my birthplace, remote and difficult of access, would see her only once more on the occasion of the burial of her mother in February of 1944. I would also see her on that occasion although by then I was not quite sure who she was and how she was distinguished from the passing parade of human beings at Mabel’s wake who came in and went out of the tiny wooden cabin in which my Grandmother lived her latter years and I lived my early years. My mother stayed in Kellits enough time to consent for my father to assume responsibility for my upbringing and departed for her new life.

I moved noiselessly, a virtual mute through my experiences for the next few units of my life, probably the result of shock. In this my time of dependence I was now bereft of an identity, for the mediator between the relatively empty slate of my existence and the world had just been relieved of her duties.

I was alone to construct a world view. I knew for a fact that the world ended at the edge of our village, there being no evidence to the contrary. I knew positively that the total population of the world was contained in the area called Kellits, though occasionally one of the people I recognized would leave the region for sometime and re-emerge from wherever the other place was. I was certain that human life was fragile since two people, my grandmother and a neighbour girl had died suddenly. I feared a second trip to the barber, my first being so fraught with terror that I had bolted out of the chair, run outside and headed home still trailing in the wind the white towel that barbers pin around the neck to keep hair from dropping through to the shirt. I wished a speedy death to the manufacturers of shoes for after my first blisters, I rebelled at covering my feet with the hardened skin of deceased cows. I had a particular terror of the lines of electric cable which had recently began to be strung on wooden poles on the sides of roads leading to the village.

My early culture taught me above all to be fearful. I knew, for I was told repeatedly by the people around me that if I misbehaved, a man with a machete would cut my neck off, although I was unsure why he would leave my head untouched while relieving me of my neck. I believed that duppies, ghosts and rolling calves, malevolent spirit entities of an ill-defined nature, came out after dark to do whatever they do on the night shift to torment whomever for whatever good reason they had to torment. I knew, for my grandmother had told me, that the Devil actively recruited adherents for his cause and was the sponsor of all my bad thoughts. Jesus, the powerful adversary of the Devil was the Purifier and Giver of eternal life. If I died or the world ended without my giving my heart symbolically to God through His Son Jesus, God, the stern judge would punish me and cast me into a pit of fire. There I would burn forever! I thus learned to fear men with machetes, unseen devils and specters, and a powerful and an invisible divinity capable of looking into my heart and soul to find the impure motives of my conduct. I would later add dogs to the list of things that I had to fear.

Gaston Garfield Girvan (1903-1945)

At the death of my grandmother, and in the absence of my mother who was long gone from Kellits, the scene of her shame, my future lay in the hands of my bachelor father who at 40 years of age was unaccustomed to being fettered or constrained by woman or by child. My father, the eldest son of planters, also became an agriculturalist. Gaston Girvan set up his produce transportation business in Kellits, purchasing bananas from growers in the region and trucking the shipment to central markets for redistribution and export. True to his chosen profession of planter, he did what he could to disseminate crops in and around the area of his business. The greatest success for the investment of his seeds however, seemed to have been the production of a rich human harvest, his children, for which the environs of Kellits proved exceedingly fertile.

His charms, a combination of good looks, physical strength and social prominence made him the natural target of very many women, each trying to pry him loose from his stubbornly entrenched bachelorhood. In this small, rural backwater he played the role of cavalier and benefactor in very convincing fashion, coming down from his residence on a hill at Shooters into the village of Kellits on horseback, greeting the locals going into and coming from the village center.

My father was a gifted individual in many respects. He was also a tireless womanizer and ample proof of his prowess were the children who could have called him ‘father’ had he lived long enough to hear himself so claimed.

My mother, Ena Henry, a local young woman, was one of the victims of Gaston’s charms, though to put their relationship in a more reasonable light, the ingenue of 16 was ruthlessly exploited by my father, a relatively worldly 36 year old. My mother, in her pragmatic peasant style, was far from being bitter or judgmental at the person whose passions had forced her to flee her home and kin. She accepted her fate with the characteristic stoicism of rural peasant womanhood, went about the rest of her life ignoring the contretemps which frequently were to visit her.

Ena Henry Williams, Circa 1944

Other women from the village found themselves in the family way and my mother noted, not without a perverse kind of pride, that my father had succeeded in bedding and breeding two sisters from the same local family simultaneously!

At Mabel’s death then, I was left in my father’s charge. In father’s care, I felt alien, superfluous and unwelcome. I have no memory of my father’s house in Kellits, though by all reports it seemed to have been noteworthy especially judged by the standards of this remote rural outpost. To the best of my recollection, I was not a resident in his house at Shooters. I led an ill-defined existence, hanging around the property and business of Miss Ena Rose, a rather stout, austere white woman, trying to keep from under foot as customers came and went. I was the stray dog, cowering, not quite knowing when to flee, not quite knowing if its presence would be detected and what would be the consequence of being discovered.

Miss Rose was the possessor of big busts and a large two story building, with a food store on the main floor and at the top of a very steep staircase, a narrow balcony overlooking the main street, dusty in the dry times and muddy in the rainy season. This balcony gave access from the outside to some rooms on the second floor which served as sleeping quarters containing single beds and camp cots in the middle of otherwise undecorated space. Mrs. Rose’s building also served as headquarters to a political party and I recall, soon after being in my father’s charge, seeing a local political rally from the balcony. A group of people below were singing the praises of the local candidate, Gaston Girvan.

I lacked any status at this time for I had no past with my father. In every way he was a complete stranger to me, as was I to him. In fact I was initially unaware that the man in whose presence I found myself was related in any way to me. I have no recollection of ever having seen him before the death of my Grandmother. My father after forty years of unbridled independence was unprepared and unwilling to have a four year old child in his charge. His intolerance of my tantrums was sufficient proof that he was not disposed to the social responsibilities of fatherhood.

The first confirmation that I had some antecedents came from playmates who began to report from the adults in their world that my father was the man who owned a business involved in the transportation by truck of farm produce, specifically bananas. Since in the early forties, in a remote rural community the association with trucks in however peripheral a form was enough to confer great status, my playmates began to defer to my wishes and curry my favour and I began to feel some sense of attachment to someone, however theoretical it might have been at this time.

I envied the village children with whom I sometimes played, those who had a clear notion of their place in the environment of the village, for although obviously very poor, they carried themselves with an assurance that was not accessible to me. My status as newcomer was a source of discomfort for me for I was a stranger in the hamlet in which I was born just four years previous. There was no human continuity from my first years and, for all it mattered, I was a newborn at five years old, a hundred yards from the place of my birth in an indifferent and potentially hostile domain.

Despite this growing awareness that I had not lost everyone after Mabel’s death, I still suffered under the new disciplines imposed by Miss Rose, a very crusty, insensitive woman, and by my equally insensitive, severe father. I became aware that I had come into my father’s world and altered the equilibrium of his forty years and longed for the simple and familiar life that I led in my grandmother’s little cabin.

My tenure in Gaston’s protection was however destined for short duration, a matter of a few weeks. By now the disease that was to end his life must have declared itself, for less than 18 months later he would die of leukemia. As if in some Dickensian melodrama, my father disappeared from my life after this very brief interlude and I found myself walking in the company of yet another stranger up an interminable approach across a field to a house set in the middle of rolling hills on the outskirts of Kellits.The guardians of this estate were three ill-tempered, rottweilers which allowed none but a select group of humans beyond the entrance door of the house. Tethered by a substantial chain to a wrought iron gate at the doorway, these three barked incessantly their menaces upon the approach of any but the mistress of the house and about three others, the trusted servants of the mistress.

The Mistress, Miss Harper, a light skinned woman around thirty years old was probably a confidante and/or lover of my father. Miss Harper was a very kind person who tried to assure me that she had my best interests at heart, though by now my confidence in my environment, especially in the adults in that environment, had diminished or virtually disappeared.

My only concern at this place was to maintain enough distance between myself and the three terrible animals. I surmised that any attack against me would be to my head and face since when I looked straight ahead my gaze fell at the level of their angry mouths. I spent no time in the house except to be ushered in at mealtime by one of the friends of the beasts. Even with the protection of the helper however, the monsters strained against their chains in attempts to get at me, the intruder. One hapless rooster paid with his life for its indiscretion of strutting too close to the terrible three. For as long as I stayed with Miss Harper the canine reception committee reminded me of how unwelcome a guest I was in her care.

At this crucial point in my early development, I learned that the human element in my environment was composed of transitory contacts with strangers. I resigned myself thereafter to the fact that I would be henceforth an intruder into whatever my environment. From then on my alienation would become self fulfilling. I became increasingly morose expecting more of the same. The little bits of good fortune that came my way were aberrations to the more typical quality of life: a grinding if unspecific misfortune com- posed of stubbed toes, crabby dogs with huge teeth, dead and dying people, steep, hard to climb roads, cow’s itch (the local variant of poison ivy) and thorns in the foot, all of it a catalogue of unmitigated bother. Life was inconvenient. I had become precociously cynical, an old man at five years old. I learned to withdraw into myself to defend myself against the frustration and disappointment of being moved around into new situations before I had a chance to understand the previous situation.

The duration of my stay with Miss Harper was certainly less than a year, between my short stay with Miss Rose and my eventual transfer to Kingston in 1945, the year of my father’s death. While staying at Miss Harper’s estate, I attended my first school on the porch of the neighbouring residence of a Mr. Boothe, but I was unable to overcome the feeling of transience. I was aware that this was a mere station on a voyage to someplace, I knew not where. I developed no relationship with Miss Harper. She was rarely at the residence in Kellits. Being a single woman of means and having other interests in the city where contacts with people of her social stratum were more numerous, she naturally gravitated away from the tedium of country life among the uneducated and unendowed peasantry and toward the richer, evolving community in Kingston. She was joining the growing ranks of rural landowning gentry who would opt out of the moribund agrarian economy to cast their fate to the energetic winds of urban life, fleeing the menace of dark country nights where spirits resided.

Miss Harper’s estate was to be my last stopover in the village of my birth but one event remains indelible in my mind, at once capturing the flavour of a remote rural community in the early nineteen forties, social and technological transitions, the terror of the unknown and the contagion of collective fear.

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