Читать книгу A Tall History of Sugar - Curdella Forbes - Страница 10

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One more last thing. (Forgive: I am losing brain cells, and moreover I am afflicted with the affliction of the people who come from where I was born, the habit of everlasting and divaricate endings, whether in bearing record or saying goodbye. It is the fear of departure, the final line. A fear that belongs only to people whose history began in death.)

So. This last last is about Tumela Gut, the district where Moshe was grown. To get there you traveled west five miles on foot from Ora-on-Sea, passing through another district named Jericho. Veering east at Fus Stick (First Stick—Elgin Town on the map, which was the first place where a freed slave planted his boundary line, sticking the center pole in the ground), and cutting through bushes at Mosquito Cove on the Montego Bay Road, you could shorten your journey by half. This was the route Tumela people took to catch the Morning Star bus or the Years of Jubilee bus to Montego Bay, or the Blue Danube to Kingston. (Yes, buses were named like that, for faraway places in the east of Europe, or Palestine, or even the heavens, though most of the people had never traveled beyond the circumference of their dreams, and those who had, had gone no farther than England or Panama or North America, not so very far away at all.)

Tumela, a place that was frightening to people in other districts far and near. Sometimes, especially at night, it was frightening to Moshe and me.

Tumela was then one of five districts that bordered each other. The others were Jericho that I told you of, Mount Peace, Georgia, and Cascade. To a stranger looking on from the outside, especially one who was not from our part of the world, the five districts were uniformly beautiful, the kinds of places that are called paradise. Lush hills stretched in every direction, and if you stood on any of them, you saw the deep blue sweep of the Caribbean Sea, which changed colors like a chameleon in certain lights and times of day.

A few people in these districts lived in wall houses (that is to say, houses built from concrete and steel). One or two had houses two stories high. Most, however, lived in small board houses (that is to say, houses of one or two or three or four rooms, and dressed or undressed wood) with fretwork eaves made by the skilled carpenters of Tumela and Mount Peace. Regardless of the size or modesty of the house, the eaves were always extravagant and beautiful.

Yet there were still some people, the desperate poor, who lived in houses made of bamboo wattles fortified with marl or papered inside with pages torn from magazines that had come in parcels of clothes from relatives in England or North America. Sometimes these houses had no floors. That kind of house has died out now, and it seems strange to imagine that such a house could have existed so long into the twentieth century, but that was the way it was, long ago, when we were growing up, Moshe and me. I suppose, in a way, such houses were beautiful, meaning picturesque.

If you, a stranger, were searching for a word to describe these five districts, picturesque would easily come to mind. All the districts were picturesque, like places drawn in a book to entice children to read; green, bright, and lush with their tiny hillside farms, sun-drenched valleys, and sugarcane fields. Paradise, you would think, arriving in these districts which were so bright and green that your eyes hurt, if you were a stranger coming fresh to these parts from somewhere that was not our part of the world. And your eyes, blinded by their brightness, would fool you into thinking that this beauty was all that there was and you wouldn't know that each district was, in its different way, a place of terrors, which you could escape or endure only if you knew its spells and counterspells for redemption or retaliate.

If an outside person threatened to fight or work obeah on a Tumela person, the counterspell was easy as pie. "You know where I come from? I come from Tumela Gut, where pot boil up without fire." That was enough to make the challenger run away, hurrying slow on his dignity until he was out of sight, then taking to his heels like the wind.

This is because it was true. There was a place in Tumela where pots boiled without any fire beneath. The longheaded grandmother, Mama Mai, described how many years ago a colony from the days of slavery had taken up residence near the center of the village, at the end of the long grassy slope below the elementary school, just behind the ceiba cotton tree above the red river. This river was called Raiding. (There was another river, Foster-Reach, where women went to wash clothes.) Was there a raiding that took place there? A hunt for runaway slaves? I do not know. I have wondered if that river was meant to be called Riding, perhaps Tumela Riding, after the West Riding and the East Riding in Yorkshire, England, since so many places were named after other places in England, until the people pronounced them in their own language, and then they became something else again—but I do not truly know.

The duppies were a known nuisance. They spent their days, but especially their nights, quarreling in thin voices and cooking insatiable meals in three-footed Dutch pots that roiled and bubbled on unseen fires, disturbing the peace. The meals, we knew, were meant to be seductive. The aromas they emitted were not so much inhaled as insidiously imbibed, through the mind and the pores of the skin, so that anyone who was unlucky enough to pass by while the colony was cooking was haunted by dreams of a feast in paradise, and bright red pustules rose on the surface of their skin and broke to release a liquid that ran down sometimes like boiling sugar and sometimes with a vague presentiment of crab soup.

As children, we (not just Moshe and me but the collective children of Tumela Gut) were afraid of this place, and if our mothers sent us to the shop in the twilight, we wept and begged not to go. Running past, we heard the wind in our clothes, sometimes the ghosts laughing or singing, but to us it was all one: we heard only the sound of terror.

I often wondered if they ever ate their own meals, or cooked only to entice us. It seemed to me that they were love-starved, and hungered for something more than memory—this kind of aggressive solicitation through food could only mean a desire for the attention of living hearts, above bare remembrance. But children avoided them like the plague. Though Moshe and I were twins, and identical, we had this difference, that I never reconciled to their dwelling among us, but Moshe had a natural affinity with ghosts. He thought they had a right to live, and if they chose to do it among us, right there, then why not?

The name Tumela Gut still disturbs my head. A lot of places in those days were surnamed Gut, and you will still find most of them on the map. Stony Gut in St. Thomas, where Paul Bogle rebelled against the British in 1865, Starve Gut Bay in St. Elizabeth, where people must have suffered unbelievable hunger, and Running Gut, another name for running belly, or diarrhea, that might have been caused from hunger, or from eating too much too fast after a period of starvation, or from eating food that was spoiled, or even, in babies, drinking, instead of milk, sugar water. This Running Gut was in the parish of St. James, Gut River was to be found in Manchester, which was said to have no rivers, and Tumela Gut in Hanover parish, near to Oracabessa-on-Sea.

Most of these are names of hardship, except for Gut River, which some foreigner on the Internet has written was a name given to the river by a German (was he a visiting German or a German from German Town, Westmoreland, which we pronounce Jahman?—he does not say; he probably does not know). According to this foreigner, who might himself be a German, "Gut" means "good" in German and the man who named the river gave it this name because he thought it was a good river, but I think that is not true, I think it is a place where people were gutted, impaled on iron, just as there are rivers all over the Caribbean named Massacre, because people were massacred in slavery there.

I guess at these names, how they came about, and I think my guess about most of them is probably the truth. But I still wonder what or who Tumela was. I suspect she was a woman of strong and secret powers. For years I tried to find out more, but could discover nothing in the archives in Kingston, and not even the longheaded grandmother remembers. Through many searches I came upon a book that mentioned a Tswana word, "Tumelo," meaning "faith," and I did wonder if Tumela was Tumelo and people had come to Jamaica from southern Africa—Botswana or Lesotho, not just West Africa after all, because Tswana is a language spoken in the south. I rather like the thought of a woman named Tumela. A dangerous, unfathomable woman, our very own Nanny of the Maroons, one who belonged altogether to us, we one. Miss Tumela Riding, in tall black boots and her skirts hitched up to ford a red river, her hair the same wild hemp as her riding crop. Skuy! Hiya! Di image seduce mi.

And Rachel had said no, the revenants' cooking is not a cry for love, not a sign of lack but a declaration that their God Is. The real God, 1 Kings 18:39, not the god of the ones who kill them with hot rod and old wuk, who done dead himself, can't see, speak, nor hear, nor stop from pursuing—check verse 10 plus 2 verses back, 10 fi perfection and 2 fi di two gods inna contest, si who win; the old duppy dem tallawah, that is all. And I was ready to believe her, even though she is the same one who would cuss them dutty raw and exorcize them rapid if they come into her house. Miss Tumela Riding, I decided early, was a woman whose God could see and speak and hear and stop Lucifer himself from pursuing, if she had a mind to it.

Tumela Gut was a different kind of place from Ora, which was a town and the parish capital. Ora had a cinema, a regatta, a country club, a hotel, a high school (where we went), a high church (meaning Church of England), bustling narrow streets, cars, blaring bus horns, the chakka-chakka noise of a thriving market town, a cache of white people (meaning people straight from England, not backra, not homegrown), and a tiny middle class with pretensions. Ora also had the sea, not as a distant shimmer but right there, beating low against the seawall that was almost level with the street along which we walked to school.

Yet some would say Ora wasn't all that different from Tumela, not that far from the canepiece or the bush, both running equally on rumor and gossip and a long history under the sway of King Sugar.

In one of his earliest drawings, when he was nine years old, just after we started going to the high school in Ora, Moshe drew the two of us standing with split faces, like moons on wane, half turned right, the other half left, at a signpost on a road saying This way to Oracabessa-on-Sea on the right, This way to Five Districts on the left. We belonged to both places, as far as it was possible for either of us to belong anywhere (which was not very far), though he less than I.

Not until much later did it bother me that he had drawn our faces opposite to each other—where the right side of his face looked toward Ora, the left side of mine looked in the same direction; where the left side of his was toward the five districts, mine was toward Ora. Like images in a mirror, where you cannot get over to the other side where your reflection is.

But we were children of both places, Moshe and I, and like Ora and Tumela, completely opposite and yet like twins.

You can imagine it was hard growing up between this district and this town where every day he was mocked and admired for his skin—not so much skin but the absence of it (for his color was really because he was born before his skin was finished making); not so much admired if you are thinking of admired in the way that is meant by the twenty-two categories of words of approval that substitute for it in Mr. Roget's thesaurus, words like adore, appreciate, cherish, commemorate, delight in, distinguish, dote upon, honor, idolize, love, laud, venerate, worship, praise; not admired as in the four columns of ten synonyms under each of the twenty-two categories—but admired as in their antonyms: review, surveil, gaze, observe (keenly, as in pinning to the wall), eat up, size up, get down on, get high on, get off on, gaze, gawk, survey, put down as, price, put away. Assess, estimate, take the measure of, behold. Tag, typecast, inspect, peer at (but not see), wonder, look fixedly at in wonder.

Growing up under the crushing weight of this negative admiration, which sometimes became pity and even sometimes acclamation, almost like he was being hugged (as in "after all is said and done, him is one a wi"), he might have been able to bear all this—for cruelty and ambiguity were never an exception in our part of the world, but a rule—and even the daily surveyance, the intense look under the microscope, the two-faced giving of succor for the wounds so cruelly inflicted, he might have accepted as in their own way a kind of love.

But in the end, when he went away, it was not because of any of this but because of another trouble altogether, which made us inseparable and kept us apart. Yet I think the two things—his lack of skin and this other trouble—were one and the same, sides of the same basic coin. Judas silver.

It is only left to say that my part in all of this—to tell you what happened to us, in the way it happened—was always fated, though when we began, it was not only Moshe, but both of us, who could not speak.

It is totally fitting that we met and fell in love on our first day of school.