Читать книгу Is Just a Movie - Earl Lovelace - Страница 15

Nelson Island

Before his detention on Nelson Island, Sonnyboy had been to prison – not for thiefing, not for chopping up people in a dispute over ownership of land, or taking part in some big racket, defrauding the treasury; he went to jail for fighting, for defending himself against the disrespect and terror of a world that was ready to starve and stifle the underdog. Yes, he went to jail for fighting – on the streets, in the gambling club where he bust Marvel head with a bottle and, yes, a couple fellars feel the taste of his razor. But, there in political detention, as he listened to the Black Power leaders exchange stories of themselves and present insights from Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Walter Rodney of the violence rooted in the colonial situation, he realized that his I not fucking taking that was no different to fellars shouting for Black Power. He began to see that his lived rebellion had given him a place not at all inferior to that we had claimed for ourselves. He saw himself as a revolutionary like the rest of us. But even there, not many of us shared his view of himself. I myself didn’t really take him on until the day he said something that made me look at him again.

He was sitting just above the beach, looking down at the sea. We had been talking about the steelband movement, about the difference between rebellion and revolution. He said, “You know this is the first real jail I make. This detention here as a political prisoner is the first time they put me in prison for doing something. The other times was stupidness. Fighting Marvel, cutting a man. Stupidness.”

I took note of it, but didn’t say anything. However, I noted that he had taken the opportunity to present himself as someone on our level. We were the revolutionaries and although we were willing to grant him a role in the revolution, his being a badjohn did not quite qualify him as a revolutionary.

When the period of incarceration came to an end, we said our goodbyes. Fellars were going back to their various jobs, some as teachers, some as civil servants, some to the university. Sonnyboy felt a sense of adventure, not as if he had come to an end, as if he was now beginning. In his last week of detention, he had received a letter from his mother. It had made him feel a softness to family and he spent that week thinking of all of them, his mother, his brother and his father.

He decided to stop first at the home of his father, who had moved out of Rouff Street. Sonnyboy found him in a new housing settlement that had already begun to grow old. It was as if the architects had decided to reproduce Rouff Street, the same narrow streets, the same tiny rooms, little concrete boxes steaming in the day and damp at night, no playground for the children, no allocation of space for business, no new vista from their surroundings, here their humbling renewed.

When his father opened the door and see Sonnyboy standing in front of him, he didn’t immediately invite him in. Finally when he did, he greeted him with what Sonnyboy believed must have been a prepared speech:

“I allow you to come through my front door because you are my son, but I want you to know that this hooligan business of burning and looting, of mashing up a place where the people is trying to build, is something I can’t uphold. I hope you will get a job now and settle down. This badjohn business not going to pay.”

Sonnyboy felt ambushed. He felt as he had done at times when he had stood before a magistrate who was convinced of his guilt even before he heard a word of evidence. He searched his mind for something to say. He pushed his hand in his pocket. His fingers touched the letter he had there. It was one he had received from his mother a week before the end of his detention.

“Ma write a letter.”

And he said the same thing again in different words: “I hear from Ma.”

And when his father didn’t say anything he said it again: “Ma write.”

His father still did not speak. Later, as if he believed he had made his own point with enough clarity and could now condescend to speak on other matters, his father said, “You hear from your mother, you say. How she?”

“She say she want to come for Carnival or Christmas.”

“Is how many years now she saying that?”

“She say if not Christmas, this Carnival for sure.”

“Lystra always saying that.”

As if those words, his own words, had the effect of softening him at a time when he didn’t want to be softened, when he didn’t want to yield, he looked at Sonnyboy, with what Sonnyboy thought was disappointment, as at a project pretty much lost, as someone who had taken a course that he was helpless to redirect, that regrettably he had to hold himself against; so when with no less sternness he said to Sonnyboy, “You want a beer?” it was not an offering of peace and conciliation; it was a gesture to fill, until Sonnyboy left, the space that had arisen between them. Sonnyboy accepted the beer as a gesture acknowledging the calm they had reached with each other and went to the doorway and drank it, commenting, because he needed something to say, on how well his father had kept the plants in the trough of earth in front the house.

“But they need some water,” he said.

“Yes, I have a little fella does come by and water them but I ain’t see him for days.”

He stood before his father, wanting to hug him, afraid to even offer him his hand to shake. And wanting to do something, to give him something as a mark of some kind of connecting. He felt in his pockets. All he had was the letter from his mother. He took it out and handed it to his father:

“Here is the letter from Ma.”

“But it is addressed to you.”

“Yes. But you keep it. She ask about you.”

He made his way down the narrow street to the main road where he got a taxi, a little sad over his father, but consoling himself that he was on his way to Cascadu and a new life. In Cascadu he went into the gambling club with the intention of making peace with Big Head and Marvel, his opponents of long standing. But that didn’t work out either.