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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Set in the village of Cousins Cove, Jamaica, One People plunges us into a small community where everyone knows everyone's business, poverty is a way of life and dreams of escape trickle through fingers. Guy Kennaway's comic novel – sparkling with irreverent wit and written partly in Patwa – is cherished in Jamaica for its humour and humanity. It celebrates the essence of the island, where 'culture is something that comes from the ground up and good times do not require a whole heap o' money'. First published in 1997, the book grew out of the tales that Kennaway listened to on the island during his first ten years as an idle expatriate.
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Praise for One People
‘If you’ve ever seen the universe in an ear of corn, you should read One People, and if you haven’t, don’t worry, you will.’
Damien Hirst
‘Within the brilliant, witty and entertaining fiction, lies the most accurate account and explanation of today’s Jamaica.’
Howard Marks
‘Any vignette out of the gorgeous thousands which lope and bustle through [One People] might suffice to give an image of Jamaican spirituality, humanity and fecklessness … a great book.’
Glasgow Herald
‘An Englishman had cast the eye on us, not disparaging or critical of Jamaica but skilfully, sensitively capturing the essence of real Jamaican human beings.’
Trevor Rhone, The Gleaner
‘Kennaway has succeeded in following in the footsteps of his acknowledged models – Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days and Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City – to create a fantastical yet believable microcosm of life.’
GQ
‘[a] superbly funny account … Wryly observed – with yarns spun as languidly as the Caribbean lifestyle.’
Maxim2
‘One People is an extremely funny and warm account of a world where culture is something that comes from the ground up and good times do not require a whole heap o’ money.’
Weekly Journal
‘… an affable diverting read … fluent in the rhythms of patois and capably evincing the languor of the community … The mood is so laid back it is practically horizontal.’
Sunday Times
‘… an extremely well-written, highly entertaining and often very funny read … Guy Kennaway has a deft way with a tale.’
Echoes
‘Kennaway has a superb eye for lower-case eccentrics, the strangeness of familiar rituals and the intimacies of the seemingly trivial. Like Garrison Keillor, but with stronger material, this book basks in its own warmth, relishing the sensuality of a place with “no prablam”.’
Arena
‘gently satirical, affectionate and funny.’
The Bookseller
‘… like Trainspotting with dreadlocks … an affectionate portrait of modern life in Jamaica.’
Select
‘As a gentle insight into a neglected corner of the world, ya kiant beat it.’
Uncut
‘… a brilliant and funny evocation … This wonderfully gentle, humorous novel will make you want to book your flight there instantly.’
Sainsbury’s Magazine
‘Follow my advice: take One People, mix with a bottle of wine and some “herbal cigarettes”, find a tree, sit down and enjoy. Unbeatable.’
Iain S. Bruce, The Big Issue
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One People
GUY KENNAWAY
Author’s Note
One People was written in 1996 and is a work of fiction. It was set in the real villages of west Jamaica, but the people in the stories sprang from my imagination. If you travel to the parishes of St James, Hanover and Westmoreland, you will not find the characters in these pages, but will find their joy, friendliness, strength and defiance in the people who live there now.
Acknowledgements
While writing One People I drew on the following books: Acts of Identity: Creole based approaches to language and ethnicity by R. B. LePage and A. Tabouret-Keller (Cambridge University Press 1985), Jamaica Talk by F. G. Cassidy (Macmillan 1961), and all of the incomparable works of Louise Bennett. Anyone interested in the Jamaican language will enjoy these books. In 2020 I started with some friends a campaign called Speak Properly: Chat Patwa which aims to raise the status of the Jamaican language in politics and education. You can find it on FB.
I would like to thank my agent Mark Stainton, and publishers Barnaby Rogerson and Rose Baring for bringing One People back into the world. My thanks also go to Sheniel Brown for transcribing and editing the manuscript.
Contents
Out of Many, One People
(Jamaican national motto)
The Birth of Jamaica
One moonless night a whole ’eap a year ago, the vast equatorial ocean stirred, and boiling black volcanic lava bubbled from its depths to explode onto the surface. Relatively quickly, within ten thousand years, the molten rock cooled and solidified. Over the next couple ondred tousan year, it was reshaped by earthquakes, and sculpted by wind and sea. The island was a terrible place: tempests blew for fifty years, bolts of lightning cratered the earth, and peals of thunder sent massive boulders hurtling into the sea, crushing everything in their path. A drought lasted eighty years, and was only broken by downpours of sulphurous rain. Earthquakes shook the ground for weeks, and rent great fissures in the hills that opened and then closed like abominable mouths. From one bottomless chasm, a scalding geyser shot steam hundreds of feet into the air, while another devoured with a gulp a river which flowed into its throat and was never seen again. Twice, the island dropped out of view entirely, once for over a century, before being catapulted up through the depths to break the surface again.
Millions of years later the storms ease back, the ocean cool out, aftershocks grew infrequent, the land finally settled, and the sun, one bright day, rose on the newly born island of Jamaica. Compared to what was to come, it was an uneventful and easy birth.
One hundred and fifty miles from west to east, and fifty miles from north to south, its silhouette on the map was amorphous, though at either end of the island the shape of two heads was clearly discernible, each pointing purposefully in a different direction.
***
10The north coast was a necklace of sheltered bays, little inlets and pale talcum beaches. Reflected in the clear turquoise water were the hills that rose a little inland. From the rock, mysteriously, came plant life: lichens and strange mosses, quite extinct today, that thrived in the tropical heat and humidity. Seasons carved themselves out of the year: a dry winter, a cool wet spring, a hot and rainy summer and a windy, stormy autumn. Not long behind came leafed plants, flowers, trees, and animal life. A jungle grew up, covering the highest misty hill and the deepest shady valley, but conditions were so fertile that a second jungle soon grew on top of the first: whole gardens, including large bushes and trees, took seed and thrived on the upper branches of big trees, and plants which entwined themselves around others were themselves soon covered in a third growth. In places the forest collapsed under its own weight before picking itself off its knees and forcing its way once more through the suffocating blanket of broken branches, wist and creeper. Off the coast, in the warm, sunny shallows, microscopic life patiently weaved pink and green reefs that kept the deep sea predators out of the sandy bays, making a sanctuary for the striped and spotted fish which dwelt there.
***
The only scientific fact known about early human beings on Jamaica is that they were created fully formed by Jah and one day walked out of a cave to begin life on the island. Everything else was disputed. Some people said the first Jamaicans were descendants of monkeys and apes through an unlikely process known as evolution, and others that they were Mesticans who arrived by canoe from Guatemala and Belize, but these two theories were considered farfetched because they presupposed Jamaicans to be in some way the same as other people, which of course stretched credibility too far.
However humans got there, Jamaica proved to be so beautiful and bountiful that they thrived, and soon after the first people appeared, there were settlements dotted around the coast of the 11island, many of which are still in existence today. An interesting example of this is the ancient community of Lances Bay, in the parish of Hanover.
LANCES BAY
Lances Bay was the prettiest village on the north coast of Jamaica, with the exception of Negril, whose picture postcard beauty was to damn it. It had the benefit of a sheltered beach, a breezy promontory, a fresh-water river, fertile, easily turned soil, and productive fishing grounds. But it was the people of Lances Bay who were really remarkable. A tight knit, determined community from the very beginning, they passed the desire for their village to prosper and grow from one generation to another. For this laudable ambition they suffered the derision of other less progressive villages on the coast, like their immediate neighbours, Cousins Cove, but were never deflected from their purpose by the criticism of the unenlightened.
In Lances Bay they learnt early the art of enjoying themselves with moderation. They could meet in the wooden bar by the bend in the road, enjoy a few drinks, put the cork back in the rum, and go to bed sober. In other places, like Cousins Cove, when a cork was removed from a bottle it was flung into the sea. But the next night, when the improvident drunks of Cousins Cove had nottin fi drink, the men of Lances Bay still had nearly three quarters of their bottle of rum. And not only were they clever in Lances Bay, but they were kind. If one of them began to lose more than he could afford to, playing dominoes, his friends refused to play any more with him, and more often than not escorted him to his yard to prevent him finding anyone else to whom to lose money. That was the behaviour of a community that really cared. In Cousins Cove, if a man hit a losing streak at Ludo, word quickly got round, and friends would get out of bed and hurry to the game so they could strip him of his money.
Unfortunately, Lances Bay people got a reputation for being priggish and self-important. When a Royal Tour of the West Indies was made in 1984, the foolish people of Cousins Cove joked that Mrs 12Queen was only coming to the Caribbean to see Lances Bay. Lances Bay easily rose above the criticism; they knew Cousins Cove people to be lazy, irresponsible and incapable of taking the important things in life, like being a little mindful of what others thought of you, at all seriously. It is the lazy and irresponsible men, women and pickney dem of Cousins Cove whose stories are told in this book.
***
Cousins Cove stood around a sandy inlet twenty miles east of the western tip of Jamaica, under some forested hills which had the outline against the sky of a pregnant woman asleep on her side. The sun rose behind her knees, and set on the sea in front of her. The moon travelled the same felicitous arc, burning as it came up through the trees and throbbing directly overhead at midnight when it was full, so bright that one night half the village got up at two in the morning thinking the day had started. A river flowed from the woman’s belly into the cove, duning the sand as it crossed the beach, and mixed in a filmy way with the warm water of the sea. The ocean, held in the cove by overhanging jungle, was invariably as flat as a pond, and always warm. It wasn’t dangerous or frightening, like on the point at Lances Bay where it boomed onto rocks, but comforting and reassuring as if, like the sun and moon, it had singled out Cousins Cove to be its friend. It made the village seem a blessed place, a little Eden made more interesting by the Fall.
The first people to dwell in Cousins Cove were the Arawaks over 5000 years ago, but little remains of their occupation because of the corrosive effects of heat, humidity and tropical rain, not to mention the devastation of rare but regular hurricanes. What few historical sites there are in Jamaica are suspect; Rose Hall, a slave plantation Great House, and one of the nation’s premier tourist attractions, was built in 1975. The Arawaks were not the kind to build large monuments, mainly because cutting and hauling stone in that heat was punishing work, something the Arawak was careful to avoid. Their legacy can be found in the language and character 13of the modern resident of Cousins Cove. Words they coined which are still in use evoke the Arawaks’ easy life: tobacco, hammock and barbecue. From time to time they fished from canoes dug out from the abundance of towering cotton trees, but otherwise, at least in Cousins Cove, they did pretty well nothing but lie about. Up at dawn, have a smoke, put your feet up and wait for some barbecued snapper – that about summed up their life. They were way ahead of the field in refining the art of leisure, and it was only the fifth century, when European life was nasty, brutish and short. The Arawak Heaven (they had no Hell) comprised intermittent feasting and sleeping, with sex thrown in whenever they wanted it. It was the sort of place Christians went to Hell for, for even thinking about.
Jamaica has always been the most fertile island on earth. If you snap a twig off a tree and ram it into the ground, a couple of weeks later leaves shoot from its top. Centuries after the Arawaks, when the first fence posts were hammered into the land, they regularly sprouted into crooked lines of trees. The forest was full of fruit; in Cove the Arawaks didn’t have to plant a thing, they probably didn’t even go to the trouble of picking it, but waited in their hammocks for it to drop fully ripe into their open palms. Most of all, the Arawaks loved harmony, and rarely fought amongst themselves. Disputes were settled by one side (the weaker) backing down just before they were beaten up. Nowadays, you can tell a Cove man by the way, when he has a ratchet knife pulled on him, he’ll reach quickly into his own pocket, pull out a pack of Craven A and offer the assailant one. The Arawaks were good carpenters, fishermen and cooks, but they were most highly skilled in chat, which unfortunately was a talent not in demand when the man-eating Caribs turned up at the island.
***
In all military history, there cannot have been an easier race to surprise than the Arawaks, and the cannibals made swift work of them. Big meat-eaters, the Caribs moved up from South America through the Leeward and Antilles. After a one hundred and fifty 14mile row from Cuba, they arrived, famished, at Lances Bay and devoured the first eight people they saw, who happened to be the village’s official reception committee. They were still laughing about this a few days later in Cousins Cove, when Carib canoes rounded the rocky promontory and headed into the calm inlet, where the village huts stood on the beach. The Caribs splashed ashore, raped and killed a number of women and children, and chased the men into the bush as far as they could be bothered to. They argued that people so cowardly couldn’t possibly put up a decent fight, and anyway, after years of carnage, a feeling was growing amongst the middle-class Caribs that they should eat more vegetables, and hunt only for the pot, and the plump Cousins Cove pickney were quite sufficient for a good light meal.
The Caribs liked to fight, and they liked to party. They made noise all night, and torched vast tracts of forest for a laugh. Their songs were not noted for their melodies, harmonies or lyrics, but for their volume. Arawaks hiding miles into the jungle heard them and said, ‘Mi cyah believe dem a listen dis fawt.’ Carib heritage has given the modern villager the skill to sleep soundly inches from booming boxes. Caribs were always fighting, and the men carried knives in their belts, causing a number of accidental suicides when they tripped over rocks in the dark.
***
The Caribs were just beginning to feel happily settled in Cove when the white man turned up. There was nothing superhuman about the white man, but when it came to fighting (which it always did with the Caribs), they had the edge because of things called muskets. The Arawaks came down the hill specially to watch the Spaniards slaughtering Caribs. Then the Spaniards turned their attention to the Arawaks, who gave themselves away by laughing too loudly.
A common enemy drove the Caribs and Arawaks into each other’s arms. The Caribs swore they were really sorry for everything, and the Arawaks, in their usual way, forgave them, and introduced 15them to the delights of eating things that didn’t walk around on two legs or talk. They lived deep inna de bush, coming occasionally to the top of the hill to gaze longingly down on the creek that cupped the calm sea at their beloved Cove. Their grandchildren saw the Spaniards replaced by the British, and, finally, their grandchildren got to live back down in the village, though in somewhat less than desirable conditions, for by then slavery days had begun.
In the autumn of 1690 two hundred and ten black Africans, the property of an English adventurer called Edwin Fairfax, arrived at Cousins Cove after a one hundred and eighty mile march manacled at the neck, blinking with confusion, fear and loneliness. It had not been their year: captured in battle, taken from their lands, tribes and families, imprisoned under purgatorial conditions in boats which left a trail of corpses floating on the Atlantic, they were split into new groups, stripped of their language, religion and remaining friends, and sold to a man who genuinely believed he was doing them a favour feeding and sheltering them in return for a brief life of back-breaking toil.
Once in Cousins Cove they were quick to notice how fertile the red soil looked, how sweet the water in the river tasted, and how plump and plentiful were the fish in the transparent sea. In many ways it was a better land than the one they had left – but that only made them hate it more. On the first night one proud man escaped, and waded into the moonlit water to commit suicide.
They were set to work under a ginger-haired overseer called Swing, the offspring of a brief but sweet union between a Carib woman and a Scotsman, to build a sugar mill and slave accommodation. By the time the task was completed forty-eight had died from disease or accident.
Within twelve months the estate was milling sugar worth £25,000, though that of course was a gross figure from which annual running costs of £26 had to be deducted. Edwin’s son, Thomas (Eton College and Oxford), visited his plantation for the first time aged twenty-one, and was shocked by the conditions his slaves endured. He immediately put some proposals for reforms 16to old Swing concerning diet, sanitation and hours of work, but when Swing explained how they would eat into profits (which were by then £128,000 per annum, £1.8 million in today’s money), Thomas saw that the issue was more complex than he first realised. The problem was that his income was fully committed on a new ornamental lake, grotto and classical ruin on his Gloucestershire estate, so there was nothing for it but to put off the reforms until he could afford them.
There were many courageous attempts to throw off the yoke of slavery, but none emanated from Cousins Cove, where they directed their energy to skiving work and minor acts of sabotage like peeing in the sugar mill and adulterating Swing’s flour with salt.
Priding themselves on their bravery, the men and women of Cousins Cove responded enthusiastically when a Coramantee slave called Tiger Taylor in Orange Bay, a village ten miles to the west, asked them to join a revolt he was going to start. For a few days they talked excitedly in whispers of butchering old Swing and Fairfax’s agent, Knibb the attorney, simultaneously thinking that if the revolt looked shaky they could always not come out to support Taylor.
A rumour of the plot reached the authorities – from the goody-goodies in Lances Bay, everyone said – and on the day before the revolt a detachment of soldiers was posted to Orange Bay. When the platoon marched through Cove the sight of the muskets and bayonets made everyone’s blood run cold. A ten-year-old boy ran the ten miles from Tiger Taylor to Cove with a message: because of the soldiers, the uprising would now have to be started by Cousins Cove.
There wasn’t a coward in Cousins Cove, of course, but the idea of starting a revolt, rather than joining one that was already going well, did not have quite the same attraction. A deputation went to Maas Wellington, the obeah man, to ask for magical powers of protection against musket balls. After throwing a handful of animal teeth and chanting some ancient African incantations he gave the assurance that not a single man from Cove would die. To ensure this science would work, he went secretly to Swing and said he feared a revolt. Within three hours a second platoon of soldiers arrived in 17Cove. The brave people of Cove agreed, reluctantly of course, that this ruled them out from starting any revolt. The baton was passed again, this time to Lances Bay, who declined to grasp it, declaring that reform, not revolution, was the way to ease the burden of slavery. With some satisfaction, Cousins Cove branded Lances Bay cowards, and the whole affair has been remembered ever since as one of the many heroic episodes in the history of the village.
Edwin Fairfax’s great great grand-nephew, Sir Somerset Webb, sold the plantation in the late eighteenth century for a colossal sum. His daughter Jane inherited his money and diverted it into her pet hobbyhorse: the fight for the abolition of slavery. Her generous contributions to the cause helped bring slavery days to an end in Cousins Cove.
When news of emancipation reached Cousins Cove (some months after everywhere else), the new owner of the plantation, an uncouth Yorkshireman called Hogg, asked the slaves to continue to work for a wage. But by then they’d had enough of working for the white man, and argued that after two hundred years of slavery they were owed some time off, about forty years each man, not to mention back pay. So Hogg, like other owners, imported indentured labourers from India. In Lances Bay the Indians were resented because they took all the work, but in Cove they were loved for that, and one other reason: they brought with them the ganja plant, the leaves of which, when smoked, tasted sweet and minty, and took all your troubles and cares away. Possibly as a consequence of this development, the next one hundred and fifty years in Cousins Cove were somewhat uneventful. In an average life of sixty-five years, a Cousins Cove man spent twenty-one years dozing, a decade working on his appearance, eight years flirting, a month having sex, five years boasting about it, six years generally showing off, four years laughing, and the balance in idle chat.
To Cousins Cove the twentieth century was very much like the nineteenth and eighteenth, and for that matter the seventeenth and sixteenth too. While the rest of the world strived to invent and use cars, planes, computers and the other paraphernalia of twentieth-century 18life, Cousins Cove got by fine with the wheel, the wood saw, the hammer, the machete, and a single slightly broken screwdriver which was always left lying in the dirt where the last person used it. The village did not prosper and expand like the towns and cities of the south coast, but stayed pretty much the size it was when Hogg, the owner of the plantation, went bust in 1878, blaming the uselessness of the local workforce, and left to seek his fortune in America. The sugar mill and slave accommodation fell apart with neglect, and soon melted into the rising foliage.
For many years, the village stood on the beach and along the rocks just above the sea, but a tidal wave in the autumn of 1909 swept everyone back onto the flat pasture between the sea and the hills, where they felt out of reach of an angry ocean.
‘It dangerous fi live too close to de sea,’ they told one another.
‘Ya man, we nah guh make dat mistake two time.’
The coast road, or track as it then was, followed the curve of the bay and then climbed a little hill and left Cousins Cove for Davis Cove, Green Island, Orange Bay and the Morass, where it petered out due to lack of interest in any place further west. An even rougher track led to the symmetry, where the village dead were buried. The track then bent right into the Back Street, where about ten wooden houses, raised at each corner on rocks to avoid flooding and deter ants, stood in yards worn to dust by children’s bare feet, each about fifty yards apart in the dense foliage.
In 1939, the population of thirty-nine supported one shop, two bars, and eight churches. A year later, six men left to fight a distant war for the white man inna foreign, and the loss of business closed one of the bars. Three of them returned in 1945 with paler skins and exciting tales of life outside Cove.
Even in the 1960s travel was rare. Montego Bay, fifty miles to the east, was considered a long way away, and some people only got that far once in their lives. At Christmas and Easter people walked the seven miles to Lucea, the nearest town, to get drunk and find someone new to have sex with. Otherwise they stayed in the village and had sex with the same old people. In 1971 a primary school was built, where 19subjects were taught in English, a language no-one spoke, so only a handful of exceptionally gifted pupils learnt to read and write.
In the 1970s, political rivalries made metropolitan Jamaica a genuinely terrifying place, with murder many men’s preferred form of self-expression. Elections were blood baths in Kingston. In Cove, they liked to believe they too could produce political violence, but somehow no-one ever got round to it. A gun did enter the village at one stage in 1971, but only for a couple of months, while its owner, a Kingston gunman, was in the lock-up waiting for someone to buy him out. Fortunately, it had no ammunition, so the men of Cove were free to make big boasts about who they’d use it on if only they had the bullets. When the gunman returned to pick up his piece, he brought with him six bullets, loaded the gun, and let the yout of Cove feel it in their hands. Roddy Perry, a facetious twenty-year-old farmer’s boy, twirling the revolver on his forefinger, accidentally let off a shot which passed under his friend, Rushton’s arm, making two neat holes in his shirt sleeve. Rushton, thirty, quick-tempered, touchy, and strongly built, was a man who wasn’t afraid to get into a fight. Fortunately for Roddy Perry, who was a weakling with stick-like legs and tiny fists, Rushton was stone deaf, and didn’t notice the gun going off a few feet behind him, and although he asked what all the commotion in the room was about, no-one ever told him that he’d been shot by Roddy until years later, when Roddy had moved to Kingston.
It was during these years of ferocious political turmoil that the government decided tourism would play a leading role in the economy. It was a desperate plan, but there seemed nothing else left for the government to try. The country was bankrupt. Sugar cane was no longer a jackpot commodity in a world where a billion people were on low-sugar diets, and bauxite hadn’t developed into the big winner the mineral companies assured the government it would be when they demanded the compulsory purchase of large tracts of fertile land in the ’60s.
Everyone knew, even the government, that tourism in the capital was a non-starter. Kingston was, after all, the gun capital of 20the world, and proclaimed itself the baddest city on the globe, not without some pride. So in its time of need, the City of Kingston, once pre-eminent in the Caribbean, had to call upon the rural parishes for help. It was a national act of faith in the obscure towns and fishing villages of the sandy north coast, which were instructed to play host to the white man and his dollar.
Far to the west, tarmac was laid across the twenty-mile swamp called the Morass, to Negril, an isolated hamlet on a seven-mile white sand beach, whose entire population of twenty-six came out to watch when the first bulldozer crashed through the mangrove, all wondering why anyone wanted to connect them by road to Montego Bay. They soon found out.
The smugglers’ airstrip at Mo-Bay was swallowed up by the Donald Sangster International Airport, and wide-bodied jets were soon releasing, on each touchdown, enough tourists to fill four big hotels. Within a few years Negril underwent a crazy, uncontrolled expansion. Wave upon wave of tourists broke on its delicate shore. It was a village cursed by a win on the lottery. They soon had to call it a town, but it actually had all the features of a Third World city: dereliction at its centre, grotesquely opulent and heavily guarded suburbs around its middle, and a shanty town multiplying on its boundaries. It developed chronic water, power and traffic problems, and a sewage crisis so serious that when rain fell Negril was virtually marooned on a lake of ordure.
While the big people dem built hotels in Negril fast, the little people slowly erected bamboo sheds along the Main (as the coast road was called), and enthusiastically painted signs that read one stop beer joint fry fish, with a few even going as far as getting some beer and frying some fish, though these were invariably consumed by the owners of the sheds and their bredren, while they watched the tourists pass by, in air-conditioned coaches, speeding directly between the airport and the hotel lobbies. The white faces gazed back at them through the windows with varying degrees of boldness, the way they’d later gaze into the deep water under the hotel’s glass-bottomed boat. 21
Cousins Cove was no longer out on a long limb, far from the rest of the world, but near the centre of the action, on the road between the airport and Negril, and the inhabitants began to think ambitiously about expansion and prosperity. If it could happen to Negril, whose transformation everyone envied, why not to Cousins Cove? Leroy, known as Jo, a bandy-legged, diminutive dreadlock, led the way. He was the head of the Wellington family, considered, in Cousins Cove, one of the most important dynasties in Jamaica, though outside Cove no-one had heard of it.
Jo worked as a mason at Coconut Grove Hotel in Negril, and had seen tourists close up. He was particularly impressed by their behaviour in bars. In Cousins Cove the little people dem went regularly to Zapo Bar on the Back Street, sometimes hanging out there all day long, but it didn’t mean they actually had a drink. Mostly they just stared at the dusty Red Stripe and Dragon Stout bottles sitting on the shelf behind the bar.
‘De whitey go inna bar and him buy one Red Stripe or one Appleton and him drink it fast, man, fast,’ Jo reported to his friends, a damp and stained spliff resting impassively on his bottom lip. ‘Ya cyah believe how fast dem drink it. And dem always tip de barman. For sure, man. Dem just say keep de change, buddy, an’ leave maybe twelve dallar or twenty or even one US.’
On the rare occasion a bokkle o Red Stripe was bought in Cove, it was far too prestigious an object to drink swiftly. On average a bottle lasted an hour, though Vash Blidgen, the village show-off, once eked out a Red Stripe for two days, carrying it with him wherever he went fi brandish it at his friends who couldn’t afford a drink. ‘And when dem want a smoke,’ Jo continued, ‘dem nuh buy one cigarette, dem buy twenty! Ya man. Mi gonna capture a piece o land and build one shed for de tourist dem bus fi stop at.’
So Jo picked a spot beside the Main on a slither of pretty land that ran down to the sea. Capturing land was a game of grandmother’s footsteps. One sleepy afternoon when no-one seemed to be about, you surreptitiously framed up a little shed with ten pieces of wood and then laid low to see what the owner of the land did about it. If 22no-one complained you then gradually improved the structure until you had a proper house and a yard marked off around it, by which time it was too late for the landowner to get you off the land. The Police only threw people off during the first stage of squatting, before a yard was established, before the people could say, ‘Afficer, dis a fi mi yard, man. Mi live ere, mi likkle son and dawta born an’ raise ere.’
When capturing land, the trick was to do very little work on the shed each day – which suited Jo – in the hope that the landlord wouldn’t notice the house going up. Usually it was pretty easy. Most of the land was owned by middle-class people who lived miles away, because no one with money stayed in Cove any longer than they had to. Their land in Cove was pretty well worthless, and yielded nothing but problems; it certainly never produced any rent, and it was only the difficulty of getting rid of the land that made the owners keep it.
The bit of land Jo picked was owned by Mulgi, a successful Asian businessman who lived in Vancouver. Mulgi paid Maas Algy, a calm and dignified fisherman distantly related to the Wellingtons, to keep squatters off his estate. Because the land lay between the seashore where the fishermen drew up their canoes, and Maas Algy’s yard on the Back Street, Maas Algy walked past it every morning and evening. Jo therefore worked in the afternoons when he knew Algy was sleeping before his night’s fishing, and sat with his friends in the shade of a baseda tree across the road to watch him pass by on his way to his boat. Each day the same thing happened: Maas Algy walked by, his trim figure as erect as a soldier’s, his gaze fixed straight ahead of him, never even glancing at the logwood and bamboo shed which was slowly appearing beside the road.
‘Yes, Jo,’ he would say, without looking at Jo.
‘Maas Algy,’ Jo would reply.
No-one knew how much Mulgi paid Maas Algy, but the bonds of community proved stronger than the bonds of commerce, and he turned a blind eye. And out of respect for Algy, Jo worked particularly slowly so as not to seem too brazen and put him in a difficult position. 23
Three weeks after Jo started, Roddy Perry began building on another piece of Mulgi’s land. Before his second timber was nailed onto his first, Maas Algy went and found him where he was skulking in Zapo’s and told him to stop building or he’d call the Police.
