Читать книгу Is Just a Movie - Earl Lovelace - Страница 8

Starring Sonnyboy

When Sonnyboy Apparicio hear the government had declared a state of emergency and was arresting leaders of the Black Power demonstrations that our most illustrious historian had christened the February Revolution, his first instinct was to run. He exchanged his dashiki for a long-sleeved white shirt, patted down his halo of hair to fit under a bebop cap, left Rouff Street where he stayed by his brother Alvin when he was in Port of Spain and dodged his way to the village sleeping on top Hololo mountain to hide out by Daniel, an Indian pardner, where he felt sure the police wouldn’t look for him, there to wait for word of the resistance that the Black Power leader warned would follow, as faithfully as night follows day, if the government take God out their thoughts and try to stop the onward march of Blackpeople.

Throughout that day Sonnyboy listened to the radio give details of leaders captured, of leaders surrendered, of leaders on the run, and he spent a sleepless night on the canvas cot in Daniel’s front room, agonizing over the likelihood that the Black Power rebellion, after months of roaring, was whimpering to its end. But when next morning he see in the newspapers the compelling poetry of his leaders’ surrender, their clenched fists in the air, their bodies bristling with the authority of their outrage, the very policemen that had arrested them gazing at them with awe, it became clear to Sonnyboy that the Brothers, as he now called these men, had not crumbled, but, like the Flounce dancers in the Guyana masquerade, had leapt from their humbling to a more invincible height. Wanting to take his place beside them, Sonnyboy take off his bebop cap, pushed it into his pocket, teased out his hair to the previous halo of its fullness, said goodbye to his pardner on Hololo and rushed back to Rouff Street to wait there for the police to come to arrest him. But, at Rouff Street, the fellars usually congregated on the corner had melted and the few gathered there were not all that familiar with him. Not wanting to be arrested on a street where people didn’t know him, Sonnyboy take a taxi to the town of Cascadu, where he had lived in the house of his grandmother since he was fourteen, where he was sure he would find a multitude appreciative of an event as important as his arrest. In Cascadu, people who saw him out in public were alarmed at what they thought to be his foolhardiness, and his good friend Gilda grabbed him by the collar with an excess of force he expected to be excused because of his good intentions:

“You crazy or what? The police looking for Black Power people, why the arse you not in hiding?”

Sonnyboy portrayed himself as smiling and saying to Gilda and the people with him: “Don’t worry. They could kill me, but they can’t kill the revolution,” words of courage that so moved Gilda and the people with him that, at the risk of themselves being arrested for what was now unlawful assembly, since the state of emergency was in effect, they shepherded him into his grandmother’s yard and crowded around him with a sense of awed and prideful jubilation to wait for the police to come to arrest him.

His grandmother, whose pride in him had ballooned almost to bursting over the months of his involvement

with Black Power, thrilled that he was going to be arrested for championing a cause more noble than the personal misdeeds that usually landed him in trouble, cooked

for him a pot of rice and pigeon peas with ochro and saltfish, enough to offer the crowd that had gathered in

her yard to witness the occasion of Sonnyboy’s arrest,

to eat.

No police came that day, or the next, and the cheerful faces of Sonnyboy’s waiting supporters began to droop. They began to speculate that the authorities doing the arresting had him lower on the list for martyrdom than he had led them to believe he merited. They began to drop words for him:

“Like they forget you, boy?”

“How come you ain’t get hold yet?”

Faced by the prospect of being marooned in the freedom of oblivion, Sonnyboy decide to take matters into his own hands. On a brilliant Sunday afternoon when most of the villagers were heading to the parched savannah to see the cricket match between Cascadu and Dades Trace, and others were on their way to the blue sunshine of the beach, he laced up his boots, put on his black headband, his red dashiki, his green dark shades, and, with the halo of his hair like an open umbrella over his face, set out for the police station, behind him his grandmother, his good friend Gilda, another pardner Dog and in the back of them a group that was making the journey to see him brought low.

“I hear all-you looking for me,” he said to the single policeman on duty.

And to avoid the indignity of being asked who me was (since, at his words, Constable Stephen Aguillera, the policeman on duty had raised his eyebrows in puzzlement) he added his name: Sonnyboy Apparicio. Without a word, the policeman opened the huge station diary in front of him and began turning its pages. Sonnyboy held his breath. And he only exhaled when Constable Aguillera raised his eyes to his.

Five years earlier, hearing the news that Ramona Fortune, the girl he loved, would be leaving for England on the day immediately after Carnival Tuesday, Constable Aguillera, himself a youth just two years on the police force, had left the Matura Police Station unattended, released the single prisoner whom he had made promise that he would return by the midnight ending of the festivities, and had gone to look for Bucco Reef, the McWilliams Carnival band in which he was told Ramona would be playing. He spent half the day searching for the band and, when he found it, trying, without luck, to get past the guard of relatives and friends surrounding her. When he returned to Matura just after midnight, with a heart dripping with grief, it was to find the station blazing in light, and waiting for him the corporal in charge of Matura Police Station, the sergeant and inspector up from Sangre Grande, and the prisoner he had released, back in his cell, on a new charge of wounding.

Pleading guilty to Dereliction of Duty, Constable Aguillera at first accepted the penance of his exile to Cascadu as punishment that was deserved and had worked hard to make up for that single blunder by efforts to present himself as a conscientious officer. His boots, belt and buttons were always shining, his stance erect, his voice firm, his notebook in order, the language of the charges for misdemeanors clear; and in less than two years he had Cascadu straight, his presence enough to bring calm to the bedlam of Main Street on a busy payday Friday, a flash of his eyes sufficient to direct men to give over money due the mothers of their children who had come to the rum shop to intercept them before the rum shop or gambling club take it from them, and a voice with the quality of force and sternness to order the most enthusiastic troublemaker to go to the police station charge-room and sit there and wait while he made up his mind what charge to place him on.

But when Constable Aguillera observed that his good works had gone unrewarded, and officers his junior with nothing approaching his record of arrests were promoted ahead of him, a certain resentment began to eat at him. For two years and a half he went on a spree, drinking rum, gambling and enjoying the favors of women who, drawn to the neatness of his uniform, the uprightness of his stance and his overall power and good looks, were falling all over the place for him. At one time he found himself friending with a woman in nearly every village of his district and had two of them at the same time big-belly for him. He mended his ways somewhat when six months after the two babies were born, the mother of one brought the baby to the police station, put him in his hands and walked away. He gave the baby to his mother to mind, cut down on his drinking and made an effort to keep his head straight when he see a nice woman passing. However, the unfairness of the administration still rankled and he continued to refuse to arrest anyone. Fellars used obscene language within earshot of him. Taxi drivers double-parked, and numerous skirmishes took place within clear sight of him. On Main Street, two badjohns, Big Head and Marvel, had a fistfight that started in front the gambling club and ended up in front the rum shop where he was drinking, bottle and stone pelting, people dodging, the whole street in disorder for an hour and fifteen minutes. Constable Aguillera maintained his resolve not to make an arrest until justice was meted out to him.

So, on that Sunday, when he looked up from the station diary, it was with a sense of personal relief that Sonnyboy’s name was not in the book. But, hearing the disappointed grumble of Sonnyboy’s supporters, and the hum of jubilation from those behind them, he advised that if Sonnyboy wanted to be sure of his status, he should go to the savannah, where he would find the corporal in charge of the police station looking at the cricket match; or he could sit down and wait, on the chance that the inspector who was handling the Black Power business might drop in and clarify whether or not he was to be arrested. “Or, you could go home.”

Sonnyboy recalled smiling. Even the police were doing their best not to see him. He decided to wait.

I would meet him sitting on the bench in the charge-room when I was brought in with two revolutionary brethren, Ibo and Marvin, who, bad luck for us, were apprehended in a roadblock on the Toco Road as we were making our way to the hills of the remote village of Kumaca. As soon as I sit down, Sonnyboy strike up a conversation with me, affecting a familiarity that we really didn’t have, and he continued talking to me for the half-hour it took for the three army officers to come to fetch Ibo, Marvin and me to detention on Nelson Island. As they signaled for me and my two brethren to get up and follow them, Sonnyboy, still talking to me, got to his feet as if he was one of our party and calmly strode out with us to the waiting army jeep.

As we were about to enter the jeep, the newspaper photographers who had been waiting outside the police station to catch a glimpse of the Black Power detainees, as we were called, aimed their cameras at us. I was tired with worry. I turned away, to give the impression of nonchalance but really because I didn’t want my photograph appearing in the newspaper with me, a revolutionary, looking so harassed.

But Sonnyboy, not quite smiling, brought himself erect, lifted his right hand, fist clenched, above his head, and with a sense of honor, and a deserved delight, shouted, “Power to the People!” in a salute so rousing that I thrust my own right hand, fist folded, in the air and shouted: “Power!” When I looked, I saw that my comrades had done the same.

I didn’t know Sonnyboy all that well. I knew him as a badjohn, a man who had his problems with the law. I had seen him at one or two of the Black Power rallies in Port of Spain and, meeting him there in the police station, I assumed he was one of us, one of the detainees. But later, when I heard his story, I was glad that my presence there that day had enabled him to save face before his grandmother and his brethren and allow him, for the first time, to enter into the custody of the police not as a common criminal but as the freedom fighter he knew himself to be.