tell and I can
I can I can I can,
the sounds called forth from their slumber, sparkling, clear-eyed into the world:
And I can tell it
And I can can can tell it
And I can tell it
And I can tell it all
About . . .
And everybody waiting for those notes, like a family waiting for a relative they had never seen but would recognize when she came:
And I can tell it all about
that Jesus died for me
When I get over yonder
In the happy paradise,
When I get over yonder in the fields.
And Sonnyboy hear the notes flying out like flocks of birds from the nest of the pan, like a sprinkling of shillings thrown in the air, like a choir of infants reciting a prayer. He hear them again, like a rush of butterflies in a swarming dance, angular and precise like sharpened steel knives, soft like rain falling on a galvanized roof, like dragonflies dipping their tails into the water of a pond, the first steelpan notes in creation. And his mother grip his hand and stand up there, looking on as if this man, his father, was a stranger she was seeing for the first time and he knew, Sonnyboy knew, without a word from her that she wasn’t going to ask his father for the taxi fare to Maraval. After he play that tune, people lift him up off the stone into the air and when they set him down, they put the pan in his hands. And like the congregation was waiting for this occasion, fellars pick up their own drums, some of them bring out pieces of iron, some dustbin covers and anything that could sound, could ring, and they went out on the street and down the hill, everybody following, Sonnyboy and his mother standing there on the same spot; until, with the crowd gone, she hold him round his shoulders and he put a hand round her waist and the two of them set out to walk back home to Zigili Trace, the two of them so wrapped up in each other that they didn’t see Miss Catherine at her window looking down at them in the quiet street, until Miss Catherine called out to his mother, to them, with the gentleness of a blessing, Lystra and her big son, the words remaining long seconds in the air, Sonnyboy hearing them too, huge and gentle, fulling up his head, his heart, his belly: Lystra and her big son. And his mother answering, yes, in that moment hugging him with all her fear and fragility and her wanting and her love, “Yes, me and my big son.”
And they didn’t good reach home when they hear down the hill the police siren wail and the sound of scuffling and the metallic clang of pans hitting the ground and after a while screams and grunts and the animal panting of men running, and, coming up the hill, a relay of voices shouting the story in the one word: “Police!”
A little later Sonnyboy’s father came to the house to ask his mother if they were all right. He was barebacked. His head was bandaged with the jersey he had been wearing. He was smiling as he tell them how he get away from the police by pushing the pan under a house and crawling in beside it. He was lucky. Sonnyboy felt his head grow big and his eyes begin to burn. He was waiting to hear the rest of the story. But that was it.
The day of creation was the day of humiliation. His father was angry, but nobody was outraged. Nobody. Sonnyboy felt his heart drop into his belly. And that was when the words that would pass his lips many times in his lifetime entered his heart, unfurled like a banner, “I not fucking taking that.” Next day he carried them with him as he walked to school with the awkward elegance of a king sailor dancing on a stage by himself alone. Later that day as he discussed with Blackboy, Redman and Ancil and George the events of the night before, he said the words that in repeating he was claiming, “I not fucking taking that,” only to be overheard by the headmaster Mr. Mitchell, who called him up to be punished. Asked to stretch out his hand to receive six lashes from the strap, Sonnyboy put his hands behind his back, shook his head and made his announcement to the astonished schoolmaster that was his declaration to the world, “I not taking fucking that,” and he walked out of the school never to return.
Two weeks later his mother get the letter that she had been waiting on from her aunt from the States. On a Saturday afternoon she take him and Alvin and walk with them up past the savannah by the Botanic Gardens and the zoo. She buy each of them a snowball and sit down between them, on a bench and read for them the letter that she had just received from her aunt in the States. Her aunt was sending for her. She had to go. She would leave Alvin with her mother and send Sonnyboy to stay with his grandmother in Cascadu.
Remember the Singing
Rooplal and the Cascadu Years
In Cascadu, Sonnyboy would get a work first on the Carabon cocoa estate, where he would do some cutlassing and weeding, addressing his tasks with a sullen labored care, slower than nearly every other worker, but twice as neat, the grass he cut piled in different-sized artistically shaped heaps, the hedges trimmed neat, the tools washed clean after use, his mouth pushed out, his face severe, his manner abrupt, as if he needed a mask of grumpiness to compensate for the extraordinary diligence of his work. He would carry his slow spiteful thoroughness to the variety of odd jobs that fell to him thereafter, as a yard boy at Choy’s grocery, as a helper at Tarzan’s tire shop, as a laborer at the building sites, where he mixed cement and sand under the impatient supervision of his uncle McBurnie who found his thoroughness commendable Yes, but, Jesus, man, at the rate you working you will put me out of business. Sonnyboy happy to leave that job for one in the sawmill where he could take whole day to clean the machinery, tidy up around the building and bag sawdust for sale. Later as he grew in strength and years he would take his ceremonial thoroughness to the grappling of logs, and canting them, mora, crappo and tapana, onto the platform to be cut into boards or scantlings, as dictated by the owner. On a Saturday afternoon he would head for the river that flowed through a lullaby of bamboos, where with the same labored care he would wash the sawdust out his hair, excavate the sawdust out the cup of his ears and from underneath his fingernails, and fresh and clean set out for the Junction with the tiptoeing walk of a king sailor, muscles rippling, his chest outlined in the new jersey he had bought from what remained after he give his grandmother money from his pay, arriving at the corner to stand and watch cars pass and to smoke a cigarette and drink a beer with Gilda and Terry and Dog, and if he still had money left, cross the road and join the fellars gambling under the Health Office building. And when – not if – he lost, return to the consolation of the Junction to listen to Dog talk about the exploits of badjohns from the city, Gilda tell again the story of To Hell and Back and Shane, Gilda demonstrating the action and whistling the soundtrack to Shane, becoming Audie Murphy crawling on his belly through a hail of bullets, or Jack Palance, with the smooth stutter of a footballer taking a penalty kick, getting off his horse in Shane. He would draw closer to the circle of fellars listening to hear Terry, with subdued laughter, his hand over his mouth at the choicest parts, tell of his adventures with the women he had encountered in the hot dimly lit gateways of the city, detailing the time he and Ralphie meet this woman in a gateway and after haggling with her over the price of her company, following her on tiptoe up some rotting stairs into a dingy room on George Street where, with a lighted cigarette burning in her mouth, she lifted her dress and perched herself open-legged on a stool, blowing out smoke leisurely from the cigarette between her lips while Ralphie did his furious business between her thighs. When it was Terry’s turn and she saw the equipment he was toting, her eyes opened wide and her voice rose in rebuke, “Where you going with that?” And, in a sterner voice, “You not putting that here, you know,” closing her legs, getting off the stool, fixing her dress, I better get out of here, clattering down the steps, grumbling with an intimidating fierceness about their inconsiderateness, their money tucked away in her brassiere.
With nothing sensational to contribute to the evening’s entertainment – he did not have the gift of retelling movies, and the intimate experience he had with women was almost nil and so not something he wanted to reveal – Sonnyboy found himself telling of the first time his father went on the road with the steelpan he had tuned and was attacked by the police, of his own astonishment and outrage as he watched the people unable or unwilling or afraid to retaliate, establishing that episode as the basis of his own resolve, I not fucking taking that, a declaration that even