At the Crossroads Where Jamaica’s History and Fictions Meet

I would not have written this story if I had not walked by the clocktower with the incorrect time each day; and the clock would not have been telling wrong time if there had not been a croaking lizard—or so I imagined—caught in its mechanism; and the croaking lizard would not have been caught in its mechanism if Hurricane Carmen had not been riding a reggae bass line at just the right moment; and there would not have been a hurricane in the first place, if

–Marcia Douglas

*

Be careful of what stories you tell—I met one of my characters once. That is, I met him after I wrote his story. I had written him a homeless boy in Kingston, sleeping in Half Way Tree Park, among frogs. I gave him a make-believe guitar and a gun he named, Lloyd. He slept in a crocus bag with Lloyd under his head, and dreamed of a far-off Zion place where he strummed two-chord riffs on the pretend guitar. I named the boy, Delroy, and imagined the year, 1981—the year Bob Marley died; and the last year that I was a schoolgirl in Jamaica.

In 2014, a few years after completing his narrative, I am in Half Way Tree, standing at a bus stop, observing the Victorian era clock tower in the square and contemplating its metal door, when a man calls, “You need a bus?” Then, “You look like a teacher or something.” I smile, wondering what to make of the “or something” part. We chat about this and that; he is a conductor and his job is to hustle and get people to board the waiting bus, but he seems to need a break right now. We talk about the traffic and the Tastee’s patty shop and how a long time ago there used to be a department store across the way called, “Miami.”

His passengers board another bus, but still he talks. He is slender with a little goatee; his hand gestures puncture the air as he speaks. We share remembrance of the long-time ago Aquarius Recording Studio that used to be on the opposite side, and recall the Rasta breddren who would hang out in front, bass riddim filling the street. The studio had been started by the Chin Loy brothers, launching reggae greats such as Dennis Brown and Augustus Pablo. And too, my sudden friend wants to tell me about his life. When he was a boy, he says, he was homeless and would sleep in the area behind us—now Mandela Park.

That’s when I realize, I am speaking with Delroy—the character in my novel. He says he used to beg money from the school girls, and it occurs to me that I could have been one of them. He says there were frogs in the park then, but that now there are rats. I leave Delroy and cross the street, a little dazed. I stand on the other side and watch for a while, almost expecting him to strum guitar. Maybe it was just coincidence, right? But for a fiction writer, such moments rupture the veil between truth and imagination. I watch the buses come and go; breathe in the humid air; buy some guineps from a lady sitting under the Tastee shop piazza, and then go home.

Wheel forward now to August, 2016; my novel is completed and impatient for publication. I’ve peopled it with folks come back from the dead—including Bob Marley, who secretly lives in the clock tower. In the world of this novel, bass riddim has the power to call back the departed—perhaps this is what coming of age in Half Way Tree does to the imagination. Growing up, I remember the clock always in disrepair. For years, the hands were stuck—a post-colonial malaise.

Some sites on earth mark a faultline between real and unreal, wake and dream, life and death. Some sites know too much. Half Way Tree is one of those places. It was once the site of an old silk cotton tree. Some reports date the tree as early as the 1600’s. It was there during Spanish occupation of the island, and later saw the coming of the British. It’s huge branches were a shady resting place for soldiers and travelers, and later, market women—a crossroads between north and south, east and west.

After the tree, a clocktower was erected in 1913—to commemorate King Edward VII. This became the new landmark. Today, it marks the middle space between uptown and downtown; it is where politicians come to speak, where Jamaica watches Usain Bolt win on big screen. It is where The Marvellous Equations of the Dread imagines a slave boy was hanged in 1766, his feet dancing to a one-drop beat coming from a far away future, and it is also where Bob Marley returns in guise of a homeless man, taking up residence in the tower.

But be careful of what stories you tell.

I’m ready to release this novel into the world and move onto another project, when I learn of a news story in Jamaica—the clock tower at Half Way Tree has caught fire. Photos show dark smoke erupting from the top. One news source reports that it is started by “a man of unsound mind who occupies the structure.” There are photos of his garbage taken from the base, and I find myself curious about the sound in his unsound—there at this Kingston crossroads where the very soil is soaked with history’s din. Bits of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Reggae Sounds,” stream through my mindscape: Riddim of a tropical, electrical storm…/ Bass history is a moving/ is a hurting black story…

The Taino, first people of Jamaica, understood silk cotton trees, or ceiba, to be sacred. The ceiba was associated with the spirit world and it is from this wood that zemi gods were carved. The African slaves also associated the silk cotton with spirit. In Jamaica, some people will tell you that such trees are the dwelling place of duppies; I imagine that spirits gather there, beat their drums and sing.

I read once that moving between parallel universes is like turning the pages of a book. Half Way Tree square is such a page. On one side there is the world most people see of traffic jams and pedestrians and Kingston chaos; and on the other, this scene too exists, but also, ancestor spirits, pea doves (which are not really pea doves), bass riddim vibrating underground roots, and the longdead—collaborating on our behalf.

I am fascinated by the nation in imagination, and the cane in hurricane—a word which would not be with us had it not been for the sweet-tooth English, and the Spanish before them who took the Taino word, “hurakán” and made it huracan; but then too, there would have been no hurakán in the first place had not the goddess Guabancex, driven to fury, twirled her arms anti-clockwise—like the minute hand gathering speed during Hurricane Carmen. Was Guabancex’s zemi made from an ancestor of the silk cotton that once stood at Half Way Tree? And if I stand in Half Way Tree long enough, feeling the riddim, will Guabancex arrive too, like Delroy?

Wheel and turn to 2014: I see a woman standing in front of the clocktower, a kitchen knife clutched in her hand. She stands there quietly; no one pays her much attention. In Kingston, such sights do not necessarily invite surprise, just another day in Babylon. The woman watches the base of the door. She wears a long skirt and her head is wrapped in a piece of blue cloth; she is perfectly still—I think she hears far away music, a one-drop riff ricocheted across centuries. She reminds of another woman I used to see in Half Way Tree—naked and wrapped in clear cellophane, pacing across the street from Victoria Mutual. This was back when I was a teenager standing at the VM bus stop after school; she entertained us school kids while we waited on the always-late bus.

I think she too heard a far music—a humming, and moaning, and baby-cry. These two women are of one she-lineage; in my book of bass riddim, I name them: “Our Mad Lady of Half Way Tree.” Our Mad Lady would have things to say about this Victoria turned Mutual—

For Victoria Mutual, illustrious financial institution that it is, would not be in Half Way Tree had the Reverent G.W. Downer not founded a bank for the “deserving thrifty” in 1878; and Reverent G.W. Downer would not have been thrifty had his ancestor William Downer not settled in Snow Hill, Portland in 1760; and raised slaves, and cane—

One hears humming in such cane fields—an alto carried by tribulation breeze. How this Half Way Tree makes a story digress. And how our fictions echo and reverb. Relentlessly. Where do stories come from? I am reminded of sounds carried in a dub tune. Dub music as a form evolved in the 1960s when the vocals were accidentally left out of a vinyl reggae track, leaving only the instrumental. The “accident” was played at a Kingston dancehall and became an instant hit—a new genre was born.

Call it serendipity, or something—innovation from the mistakes we make. Later, the instrumental tracks were subject to further experiment by musicians and sound engineers such as King Tubby, Errol Thompson and Lee “Scratch” Perry, layering the instrumental with DJ talk-over, snippets of found sound—thunder, scratch-scratch and goat bleat—that travelled and echoed across the dub plate, like the stories we are compelled to tell and retell, member and remember; version and re/versioning into infinity—

AFRICARICARICARICARICARICARICA

This is all to say that I would not have written this story had I not seen a woman wrapped in cellophane, dressed to the nines, across from Victoria Mutual; and she would not have been dressed to the nines had she not been there to have her say and cuss-and-trace the bad-minded people who stole her money to rah, and; she would not have had the courage to cuss-and-trace in the first place had someone’s long-ago zion-train hum not dubbed itself over the bass riddim coming from the Aquarius Recording Studio down the way, filling her with deliverance; and filling me too, a girl at a bus stop; the clock telling the wrong time; the youth-man Delroy, begging “a money,” for he was not “deserving thrifty”—

And years later, on the reverb—the two of us in front of Mandela Park; him, all longmemory; me, a storyteller, or something.

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This piece was originally published in Blank Forms journal, vol. 4: Intelligent Life. Find out more about Blank Forms at blankforms.org