the pressure placed on people who he called the underdog in society, about how it was only one set of people the police arrested. He spoke about the difficulties his mother had to mind him and his brother and of her having to go away to get a better life. He told again of what happened with his father the day he put the notes on the steelpan and how Blackpeople didn’t raise a hand in his protection. All that, Big Ancil came on to say, was what the National Party was going to change. The reason they were voting was to get that better life here. So between he and Big Ancil there developed a dialogue in which Sonnyboy outlined the problems and Big Ancil came on to say what the National Party was going to do about them. Big Ancil was finding driving the van too exhausting and he encouraged Sonnyboy to get his driving permit so he could take over the driving. It was while on his way to have his birth certificate reissued to him at the Red House that Sonnyboy, walking through Woodford Square, came upon the arguments and discussions on religion and politics and race relations that men were having in little groups all over the Square.
With the experience of speaking on the microphone announcing meetings behind him, and with the freedom to speak with authority that he had developed in his association with Rooplal over the years, Sonnyboy entered the discussions confidently. He discovered that there were people saying the same thing he had been saying for years: I not fucking taking that. And he marveled that they didn’t have to tiptoe around the issues. They spoke out bold: I not accepting the world as you have laid it out. These fellars had better words and more history, but the sentiment was the same.
And he told again the story of his father and the inaction of the people and set off a big argument in the Square about whether Blackpeople were to be blamed for their own bad situation. There were those who agreed with him, but others were astonished at his ignorance of a history that had also made Blackpeople their own worst enemy. Blackpeople needed to see the world through eyes of their own.
After that day, Sonnyboy returned to the conversations in the Square, and over the months he began to see the world through eyes of his own and to join in the idea that they had to take power to take back themselves from that terrible history. He was there to see the numbers grow at the meetings and the Black Power movement begin. Sonnyboy joined the Black Power marches to Woodbrook, St. James, Diego Martin, there in the Carnival of claiming. Space and self and voice, history beginning to belong to him. Sonnyboy felt himself coming alive, felt that his arms were now more his own, that there were things to be done. He explained to Big Ancil that he had to say goodbye to the announcing, he had to move on. And since in his own mind he was a soldier, he began thinking of the struggle as something that would pit muscle against muscle. He convinced the Black Power people of his ability as a fighter. They appointed him bodyguard of one of the leaders. They equipped him with a pair of binoculars for him to bring faraway objects near, and he walked around with his king sailor walk, his arms folded across his chest, and a face more serious than anybody’s own, one of the most conspicuous fellars there. But, he didn’t care; he was part of an invincible army, part of the making of a new history. He watched the police vans trailing behind them as they marched to San Juan, Maraval, Cascadu, Couva. He watched the soldiers nodding their heads at the thunder of the speeches. And he with his arms folded, or with the binoculars glued to his eyes as he searched the crowd, for what, he wasn’t clear. And, how quickly things turn around.
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