6

1945 – 46

Kellits to Kingston

Chi–chi, new bus, bam, bam old tram

Mid 1945, nearing my sixth birthday, my personal rapture involved a bus journey from the region of my birth in the remote hills of the parish of  Clarendon, Jamaica with a detour through Old Harbour Bay to the unlikely paradise of the Windward road area of Kingston. I arrived in Kingston at a time when transportation within the city was changing. In the next few years the noisy old electric tram cars would be replaced by new diesel buses with air brakes. The rural regions however would retain the country buses, smoky old vehicles held together resourcefully by the independent owners. Transportation for the peasantry would, of course, mean the oldest vehicles crawling over the poorest roads.

One morning, in Kellits, I boarded a bright red bus festooned with hearts and cupid inspired arrows entwined with ribbons and lace. The bus proudly proclaimed itself, “Romance Bus Lines, Proprietors Mr. and Mrs. Love.” This would be the first time that I would travel in a motorized vehicle, the first time that I would go at speeds faster than my little legs could carry me. I should have been flushed with excitement but crushed by a load of big boned peasant business people transporting farm produce and live chickens from one small centre to another, I felt particularly exposed and vulnerable as the only unaccompanied child on the bus.

I was put in the charge of the bus driver who was given information of my destination and told that in Old Harbour I would be met by someone. I worried that the driver, by now blocked from my view by standing passengers, would forget about me and my destination. I fretted that if no one met me in Old Harbour, I would be abandoned somewhere along the way or would circulate more or less forever on the bus stopping here there and everywhere, watching little feral goats on the roadside whiz past the windows, contemplating large barefooted women, heads wrapped in red and black bandanas, moving my small body away from live chickens bound at the feet with string and sullen men with glistening sharp machetes who boarded and disembarked from Mr. and Mrs. Love’s Romance Bus Lines.

I brooded silently in my discomfort, anticipating an end to the ordeal of the bus ride at every stop to pick up or release passengers. My distress was to have some duration, however, for it seemed to take the whole morning before my bus ride ended in the middle of a town square dominated by a large clock tower, the main streets bustling with street peddlers.

The bus driver informed me that this was my exit but I was somewhat ambivalent about leaving the bus for I had survived the trip from Kellits to Old Harbour and now I was unsure of the fate that awaited me, not recognizing a single face among the people awaiting the bus by the side of the road. I was overwhelmed, felt nauseated and vertiginous in this ant hill crawling with humanity.This was Old Harbour! A half an hour’s walk from the town centre of Old Harbour to Old Harbour Bay in the afternoon sun with an agent of my protector would be my reward for enduring the oppression of heat on an overcrowded country bus reeking of diesel, urine, stale perspiration and chicken fumes.

I was met in Old Harbour Bay by a person whom I recognized as having already played a part in my life in some remote past of my long history. Aunt Sissy, as she called herself, although quite emotionally distant from me, nonetheless seemed bound by some force other than kindness to satisfy my physical needs.

I spent the few days that I had with Aunt Sissy in Old Harbour Bay indulging my unrequited infancy, sitting regally on top of a counter in her little bar in Old Harbour Bay, sucking cream soda through a baby’s nipple mounted on a pop bottle. Curious customers who asked: “Who dat lickle boy deh?” would get the reply, “Is mi son, nuh.”

Outside Ena Henry Williams’ Restaurant and Bar: 1994, Fifty years after the first stop after Kellits.

During my short stay with Aunt Sissy, I remember feeling myself the centre of the attention of many of the people in the neighbourhood of the little store and tavern where Aunt Sissy held sway. Of course, I was sharing vicariously the importance that she had been creating for herself in Old Harbour Bay. As the woman of a successful ethnic East Indian fisherman with his own boat, she had acquired through Arnold Williams, a niche in the fishing industry, the economic base of the community. Aunt Sissy was an ambitious young woman. She had already begun to use her considerable initiative to great effect, owning and managing a little bar in the village.

I was both intrigued and seduced by this dynamo of a woman who called herself Aunt Sissy and would gladly have exchanged a promising future in some shining metropolis for a continuing present in the humble environment of this woman in Old Harbour Bay.

I was however, destined for Kingston to live with my father’s family in an area where the surroundings were somewhat more benign than in the tough streets of Old Harbour Bay and where the opportunities for a bright little boy full of promise were more numerous. I said a reluctant goodbye to Aunt Sissy, and was again put on a bus bound for Kingston, there to be met again by someone whom I did not know.

In Kingston, once again in tow behind some benevolent adult or the other, approaching the front steps of a residence of strangers, I resign myself to another new set of discomforts, learning who these people are, learning how to behave to meet new expectations, learning how to be safe in this new circumstance, not knowing what if anything I learned in Kellits would be of use in my new life. I am reborn a third time. I must start again for there is no momentum in my life. Gone are my grandmother, my cousin Thelma, my mother, my father, Miss Rose, Miss Harper and gone are the familiar strangers on the undifferentiated and unnamed streets of Kellits, my village birthplace.

In the city a new confusion superimposes itself on the one I felt at the death of Mabel. I am speechless and panic frequently in the presence of this abundant crop of new faces in my father’s family. I will remain mute for a long time, muttering monosyllabic affirmations and negations, “yes, no.” I communicate only the bare essentials.

The complex geography of the city fuels my general uncertainty and I feel a growing sense of incompetence in the face of the intricate network of roads and alleys which are now part of my new reality. This incapacity to deal with my new environment of course renders me more dependent on the new strangers in my life, strangers to whom I must now relate. I am a little alien in Kingston, an infant exile from a strange land to a stranger land. I am a frightened, bashful alien in my father’s family, dispossessed of the few people whose faces reassured my five year old eyes. I start my life again.

I grow sullen and unresponsive and soon begin regretting the absence of the status that I had in Kellits prior to my Grandmother’s death. There, I had led a relatively privileged existence being Mabel’s only grandchild in the vicinity of Kellits, thereby having her exclusive attention.

I had inherited status from my father who had been a leader in the community through his business and through politics. I had another distinction, an attribute donated by my mother, which played in my favour. I was light skinned. According to the deeply flawed system of class and colour, vestige from the era of slavery when Europeans subjugated Africans, unearned deference was shown in direct relationship to light skin colour. I was thus the beneficiary of attention beyond that which I could reasonably have expected to deserve had I been darker. On arrival in the city, I realized, too late to profit  from my privilege, that with the legacies of political status from my father and light colour from my mother I was destined to become more than the village children with whom I played.

Although fearing the novelty of the city, in Kingston, I also notice significant resemblance with my ancient days of a month ago in Kellits. One of the most persistent of this resemblance is the pervasive preoccupation with the end of the world. The early warning to the end times, to Armageddon, was embodied in the self-appointed oracle, the suddenly enlightened prophet who on the basis of a dream overnight would walk the roads of the city early in the morning, and circulating widely throughout the city on foot, would shout the vision he had dreamed the night before, admonishing the general public in the loudest of voices to repent its evil ways and prepare for the imminent second coming of Christ.

In the distance you can hear an approaching street caller, the message, at first indistinct. Street peddlers are common currency in the city selling fruit and vegetables and any thing else marketable including, of course, religious ideas. As a newcomer to the city I was intrigued by the lively commerce available on the streets, where peddlers walked the street daily with baskets of produce on their head. I was curious about the products being sold but even more about the sale’s technique which involved the clever use of the voice to vary the pitch and the volume of the sales message, as well as the sales hook and the choice of language to render the product more desirable. My curiosity had the effect of keeping me transfixed to the fence waiting to hear the offerings of every street vendor. The less imaginative of the street salespersons simply added ordinary garden variety adjectives to their product:

“Sweet mangoes!” “Sweet blackie mangoes!” “Sweet, fresh, blackie mangoes!” Sweet, fresh, nice, blackie mangoes!””Get you sweet, fresh, nice blackie mangoes!” “Come get you sweet, fresh, nice blackie mangoes!”

It was not uncommon to experience six to ten such presentations per day. Each time the wind carried a hint of a street vendor’s sales pitch I would run from wherever I was to the road to see the person pass the yard, hear the message as the peddler approached and stay long enough to hear the sales pitch as it disappeared in the distance, on the wind, a kind of doppler effect at a snail’s pace.

I never ceased to be amazed at the sense of balance evident from the peddler’s ability to keep a large basket the size of a car tire, full of fruit and vegetables on her head throughout her long daily trek around the city. The stamina displayed by these independent business people marching barefoot on the hot asphalt under the full sun of the tropical day was remarkable.

Street vendors, it must be noted, were predominantly female. One further attribute of the itinerant, independent sales woman would hold me transfixed, in sheer awe at the ability to stop her march across the city in mid stride, squat down on the road still balancing her basket of produce on her head and urinate luxuriously and abundantly on the pavement inside her skirt, the skirt providing the privacy for this necessary act, there being no public facilities in the city for this function in these times.

This morning the wind is transmitting the sound of a street vendor in the distance. I rush from the backyard to track the progress of the vendor. The message from the male voice is broken in the wind.

“– — twinkling — an eye —- —- be changed —- —— to ———– ty. —- to — —- -nointed!”

A minute more and the message becomes clearer.

“In the twinkling of an eye, man shall be changed from mortal to immortality. Hail to the Lord Anointed!”

Ascertaining as he approaches that this is not an ordinary street peddler selling mangoes, but indeed a latter day prophet forecasting the destruction of the world, relating presages of impending doom, having just recently escaped a near rapture in Kellits, I head for the cellar, the crawl space under the house, to hide from the second ending of the world in a month, to mute the sound so as to escape hearing what I am hearing.

“IN THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE MAN SHALL BE CHANGED FROM MORTAL TO IMMORTALITY! HAIL TO THE LORD ANOINTED!”

The Suddenly Enlightened One is passing the house now and the cellar space under the house has just become a resonance chamber. Far from muting the message, it has amplified it and again given rise to anxieties which will be frequently renewed. In fact, this message of the imminent end of the world and its variants reiterated weekly in our church was to be for me a continuing source of terror and apprehension.

“Ackeeee!” “Bammyyyy!” A woman street vendor is singing her sales pitch while going down the road selling her wares in the opposite direction from the prophet. From my seat in the crawl space under the house I allow myself some creative editing and mix their messages which are rendered palatable as follows:

“IN THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE MAN SHALL BE CHANGED FROM ACKEEEE TO BAMMYYYY! HAIL TO THE LORD ANOINTED.”

***