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Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

This is Femi’s third trip to Jamaica this year and July has not come yet. I think he is coming to cheer me up, but all we end up doing is drinking. Well, he drinks, but I must be a downer for him since I can’t find the strength to laugh. Ambassador work suits him just fine. He gets to see his women, and he really loves Jamaica. It is funny, sometimes being with him can really play tricks with you. The jokes, the Shakespearean quotes, the gossip about conspiracies and the memory of that summer we spent traveling across the Soviet Union—he is amazingly good at transporting you until you start to feel younger. But this is Jamaica. We have just come out of a bloody season and everything has changed, utterly changed, and the shadows are thick with desperate people who will kill you for reasons that you will never anticipate. He left yesterday for Rio. I might see him in December, he said. Funny, because when he called to say he was coming, he had me convinced that he was traveling with a contract for me to take up a post at a university in Liberia. He kept asking me if I was ready to go. I said I was. I am. I am ready to go anywhere. He has said nothing of Liberia since he has been here. I am too embarrassed for him to mention it.

Last night we ran into Gregory. He looks quite greasy these days—he sweats a lot, now, which is such a cliché for someone growing fat on power. But I do not begrudge him the extra flesh. At school his lean and hungry look was quite sad; made him hard to trust—and he did suffer a great deal in the seventies. We met at the Sheraton, in the bar. I have not been there in a while, and I really did not want to go for fear that I would run into people like him. But Femi insisted, said I needed distraction.

“My God, George, I thought you was dead, man. You were not on the list?” Gregory shouted this across the room, waving. This is how they talk in Parliament, I suppose. He was red-faced with rum, and, like I said, quite fat. And then there was that big laugh. So I laughed. What I should have said was, “They did kill Appleton on Stony Hill Road. He was on the list too, wasn’t he? And we suppressed that well in the paper.” But I didn’t. I just laughed.

How many people read the paper for news, anyway? “Listening Post” is probably the most popular section of the paper among supporters of the party that forms the government (it was equally popular among them when that party was in opposition). Why? The paper is anti-PDP and the majority of people working here or writing for the paper are, however concealed (at the columnist level) or confused (at the worker level), rabid anti-communists. How anybody of intelligence can take such a stand is beyond me. I similarly cannot follow an anti-Christian attitude. Being against communism or Christianity in terms of debate is quite rational. But to be caught in this inflexible system of animosity is an incredible waste of energy.