Bay Rum, Vicks Vapour Rub, Phensic - My Mother: Her Scents & Secrets

Mom
No, Mama
is the woman lying there
beneath that unrepentant earth


Her boned knuckles clutched around 
the off-white King James Version Bible
we buried with her with
because it was her favourite book.

Although it had pages that were falling out;
it had many verses underlined 
and I felt the words that she read to comfort her
during hard times, ALIVE,
might aid her as she ventured into the unknown.

It was that same Bible that fed her Faith
and prayers which she tried to leave with us
as she died without leaving a will,
What would have been the point?
There was nothing to be divided up
or shared anyway!

She lived and farmed on 'family plots'
of land
handed down
from generation to generation
unerringly

We also buried her with her glasses
'Cause she could never read properly without them
And to this day I am still aghast
That her best friend,
Aunt Dor [Doris] insisted that we gave HER
the glasses
As where 'Amy was going she naah go need dem!'

I barely held my peace
When some years later,
My brother Dave
told me that Aunt Dor
who was older than my mother
is now blind
But refuses to die.

MOMS make the world seem a better place
Less frightening somehow
They are tangible.. visible confirmation
of the 'medium' via which we entered this world
Ceremonial goddesses 
whose 'templed' bodies 
'hosts' our second most important rite of passage.

I remember clearly 
that my mom's bosom always held icy mint sweeties
Unless they were in her black bag 
hung on a nail behind her bedroom door


And she ALWAYS had a safety pin or two 
in the folds of her clothes somewhere
In case something needed mending 
and no needle and thread were nearby
And a hair pin pan that also held hairnets


And a bed head that was her personal pharmacy
Her main remedies: Bay Rum and Phensic and Vicks Vapour Rub


She used to make Cornmeal pudding:
"Fire a top, Fire a Bottom, Hallelujah inna middle"
And Plaintain porridge
ANd blue draws also called tie-a-leaf.
Remembering and Missing my mom: Amy Downer. 
CONTINUE TO REST IN PEACE
_____________________________________________________
P.S. My mother died with secrets But I DIDN"T tell them here as promised.
When writing about the dead and especially some one as your mother
One wants to be careful what secrets you tell.


I have been struggling for months with HOW to write about my mother
I am getting there
I hope to write that blog post by the end of this week.

My Big Sis Precious at My Mom's Grave in Belfont, St. James
Jamaica in March 2012.

EVERYBODY HAS A STORY TO TELL, All You Need To Do is: ((( Listen )))

14 year old Jermaine and his 10
year old brother, Rahem at
Alpha Boys Home
in 2006, four years after being
placed there by authorities for
their safety. Their mother had
repeatedly endangered them
by sending and taking them on
the streets with her to beg to feed
their family. They  had been their
family's only source of income
and were not attending school.

In 2003, one (1) year after entering journalism full time, I won the Press Association of Jamaica's Investigative Journalist/Reporter of the Year Award for a series of articles I had written the year before. The reports, published in the Sunday Herald Newspaper where I worked at the time, looked at a spate of cold-blooded murders which had occurred in Kingston that included the murder of defenceless women and children in late 2002 and early 2003.

Those killed included, two twin sisters nicknamed SILK & SATIN in the PNP garrison community of  Rema (which was Omar Davies' constituency at the time) and their 8-month pregnant 15 year old sister and her unborn child.

The morning of the triple murder when the photographer and I arrived Rema, the mangled bodies of the two young girls (about 3 years old) were lying on a blood soaked mattress in a one room board house in a tenement yard overflowing with gawking onlookers.

Their sister lay spread-eagled on the bed. Robbed of final dignity in death, her once swollen belly was a mass of twisted, bloodied flesh where her unborn baby had been. The gun men had turned their high powered weapons directly on her belly and emptied it into her after kicking off the flimsy door that she shared with their two baby sisters and her mother. The bullets aimed at the young mother must have also killed her two sisters as well as it appeared the gunmen sprayed the bullets in a careless arc, killing everyone in sight. Their mother, managed to dive escape though a back door as the front door caved in. The gunmen had come to settle a score but no one knew for sure or would say what the grouse was, but for years, a spate of violence and gun murders had haunt the family as explained by Gleaner Reporter at the time, Claude Mills. Read his chilling and detailed report here on The Gleaner's website. (The Sunday Herald, which is a small, weekly newspaper, did not publish online then, so my article is only available from their physical archives.) Claude Mills went to the community the day after the killings and interviewed the grieving mother of the three girls who was also mourning the untimely death of her unborn grand child.

A grieving Sharon Thomas, mother
of the three young girls who were
murdered in Rema in 2002.

As the community teemed with people who had come to try to get a glimpse of the three bodies, I spied men with high powered weapons restlessly pacing on the high-rise apartment buildings. The head of some were barely visible above sand bags they had piled in front of them as protection as they poked their rifles over and between them.

These were the GHETTO SOLDIERS who had NO permits for those guns but who patrolled in BROAD daylight, in FULL VIEW of the heavy contingent of soldiers and police officers who were out in large numbers due to the morning's triple murder +1 and the fact that a curfew was in effect in the volatile community which had been experiencing sporadic outbreaks of violence.

As the Sunday Herald photographer, Ricardo Makyn and I concluded our information gathering and made our way through the throng of people who kept streaming into the community, having; I kept scanning the faces around me. As I made wide visual sweeps I said to him: 'What if the killers are here among us? I would love to know what could cause a gunman to kill children and a pregnant lady like that!"

A framed photo of  one of  Sharon
Thomas' twin daughters, one of three
gunned down together as the sleep
in Rema in 2002.

 In my mind, I had moved beyond the WHO, WHAT, WHERE & WHEN of route reporting to the ((( WHY ))) which embodies INVESTIGATIVE journalism. Yes, the murders had occurred and would continue, but I wanted to know ((( WHY!??)))

Poor Ricardo, anxious to get out of the very tense community with his life and limbs intact, begged me to be quiet and "come on!" LOL.

He looked at me as if I had lost reason and asked incredulously: "Andrea you really believe say a gunman ago talk to you 'bout him deeds? You madd!!" I did keep quiet, but my mind would not shut down.

As we got into the car to leave I said reflectively: "You know, too often journalists assume that they WON'T get certain information if they ask, My job is to ASK! Let them tell me no or don't answer. Did you know that some of these killers are dying for someone to ask them why they do these things? But because everyone feel they WON'T answer, they NEVER get a chance to say.!"

So, I went back to The Sunday Herald, where I was working at the time, filed my 'who killed who' story, but my mind kept searching for more.

A few weeks later, I was back in that area, just a few few roads down, talking to relatives of a grandmother whose weeks old grand baby had been shot and killed while he was in her arms, (I think she survived). That killing was reprisal for the Satin & Silk's and their sister's and her unborn child's death. So yuh know say di ting get ((( TUN tha f..ck UpPPP!))

Within a few weeks, the area war had extended across King Street to the fringes of Fletcher's Land when a 12-year old boy was shot and killed while he sat getting a hair cut in a barber chair. A single bullet went through the back of his head and exited through his forehead. Click this link to read a Letter to the Editor of the Sunday Gleaner about that murder and of the murder of a baby that I mentioned a few lines above this.

It was theorised that his was a random killing; a stray bullet fired by feuding gunmen from the neighbouring communities. If the inner city 'war' did (( tun uppPP before, that latest incident BUCK IT!!)) Now Fletchers Land, a tightly packed hand middle of a community, squeezed between North and King Streets in Down Town Kingston, had been yanked into the the war. It was 'hot head' season.

In just days, the war ballooned even further to include Gold Smith Villa in August Town, as men from the by now EXTREMELY tense communities near down town Kingston, had tried to seek refuge in the hills behind the University of the West Indies in Mona. But their rivals found them and early one morning while three of them slept, three men, members of one family, a son, his father and uncle I believe, were all shot to death in their two-room board house.

The ((( WHYYY!!??))) I was carrying around in my head, by that time had reached deafening decibels.

After partially viewing the bodies that lay scattered in morbid abandon on the dirty board flooring in the house and talking to weeping relatives, I did what had become customary for me at those crime scenes; I started looking around, mapping out the place. My eyes and curiosity, hungry for more, searched for some sign of something that would help me make sense of all the recent senseless killings, ALL within a ONE MONTH time frame.

That day, my inner instinct nudged me to walk to the top of a small incline a little away from the house. I stopped at a Y junction in front of a wiry black youth who was sitting on some concrete building blocks, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep and God knows what else.

I hailed him kornazz style: "Wha gwaan my yout!? Everything kriss?" and kick-started a disarming conversation which led to the most chilling confessions I have ever heard as a crime reporter.  He told me his name was Fidel and that he got the name after he was sent to Cuba in the 1970s by the then, Michael Manley-led PNP government to be trained in guerilla warfare.

By then, I had begged him to move over on the concrete building blocks a little and kotched on the blocks  right beside him. I didn't want to miss a word!! Story did a pap! And as ole time people say: 'Yuh can't stay far fling salt inna pot! You feel me!?

Not wanting to distract him or draw attention to us, as the place was still swarming with police and curios onlookers, I didn't even bother with my note book. My selective memory that has served me well, kicked into high gear! As the words began to flow unchecked from Fidel's lips, I almost couldn't believe my ears! He seemed hungry to share what he knew and had experienced, as if he NEEDED to unburden himself to someone, and me?!! Nope! I had NOWHERE else to be! The Sunday Herald is ONLY published on Sundays and my story about who got killed and wondering who had killed them was in no particular hurry to be written! Trust me, it could wait! Here was a tortured self-confessed guerilla NEEDING  TO TALK! Mann!! I GREW ABOUT THREE MORE EARS! And I am not even kiddiing!!

So, like too long time bredren and sistren, we sat there in the nook of the fork in the road and reasoned for quite a bit.  And God is soo good that no one disturbed us or came close to us during the entire exchange. All activities and focus were centred around the death/crime scene several yards down the road.

Fidal talked and talked and talked. And I listened and listened and listened. I can't really tell you how long it lasted, because Lord knows, I wasn't checking the time!

He told me about how he was recruited and sent to Cuba, and how he came back and started utilising his improved killing skills when required. He spoke about an underground cocaine industry in Jamaica where police men use innercity youths as drug runners, coming to collect agreed sums of as much as JA$30,000 per month to pay mortgages and loan payments for high end motor vehicles.

"All when we no make so much money on the streets we have to find it to give them," Fidel told me, his voice weary, his eyes vacant. "And you can't tell them nuttin! Dem naah teck no talk! Is either them money or you life! And when dem kill you fi dem coke, dem plant the coke they gave you to sell and the gun they also gave as protection on you! And say you are an illegal drug runner killed in a shoot out with police!"

Sounding trapped, Fidel lamented: "Mi have a brand new queen size bed inna mi house and you know how long mi no sleep een deh!? Mi haffi a keep watch a night time and move from one yaad to the next."

He eased up his shirt and showed me and angry scar in his side where he said a policeman's bullet was still lodged. He said he still walks with a limp after her fractured his leg when he jumped a high wall in a bid to escape cops pursuing him.

It appeared that with the deaths of the three men in his community who still lay prostrate just a few short steps away and the deaths of others in similar manner in recent months, Fidel felt his days were numbered and he NEEDED to tell all or MOST of what he knew.

Secrets can become a heavy burden to a man who feels he is headed to his grave. They can slow him down, especially if he is anxious for the misery that has become his life to end as soon as possible.

Fidel confessed that he was only one of several persons sent to Cuba by the Manley administration as a move to equip an informal, deadly, ghetto army and implied that these guerillas, those who were still alive, were all a part of the mix that was creating the cauldron of seemingly senseless murders.The Manley administration had vehemently denied the allegations of the clandestine Cuban guerilla training project at the time, but on the streets it was an open secret; 'man and man' know say suppm go so fi real!

I still remember that years ago, while I was a student at Kingston Technical School in down town Kingston and boarded with a family on Spanish Town Road, the lady I was boarding with had a daughter who was dating one of those Cuban trained hit men. She confided the dreadful secret to me in hushed tones in one of our rare girlie confidante sessions as she was much older than me, (in her early twenties). The guy lived in the Denham Town community of the volatile West Kingston and always wore army style combat boots with his pants tucked in and a perpetually serious look on his face although he was not in the Jamaican army.

I have never forgotten him or how sinister his presence appeared whenever I would run into him when he came by to visit or pick her up.

But Fidel was now telling me about when he committed his first murder as a teenager living on the streets of Kingston. He said he had hidden his good clothes and shoes and gone to hustle on the streets in his regular clothes when another street boy stole them. Explaining that the street boys of Kingston are really organised gangs, he said, out of principle, he stabbed the boy who stole his clothes to death one night while he lay.

"I couldn't let him steal my things and nuttin no come out of it," he explained. "If I did that, then I would become an easy target and others would want to do the same thing. But after mi dun him, mi ratings get high and I was promoted to gang leader," he continued.

He explained how he ended up in Gold Smith Villa in August Town after growing up in Denham Town in Western Kingston.

"One day mi see police murder mi bredda inna mi yaad after dem come ketch him a 'lock' a gun inna one hole inna di yaad. The police dem no ask no question, dem just tun it onn pan him. They knew I had seen them kill my brother so I had to run and keep running as they would come back for me," he explained

After unburdening himself, Fidel told me that while the gunmen where currently wreaking havoc in Kingston, in a few months to years the violence would get even worst!

"Trust me! Unno no see nuttin yet!" He warned ominously. "Me a tell you say dem man yah have some gun whey no touch road yet whey ago meck the police gun dem look like foolishness!" He stated convincingly. "If you no believe me, mi can carry you go show you them enno!" he offered. Telling me he couldn't let anyone else know he was showing them to me and that I couldn't take anyone with me.

We agreed to meet on the grounds of the University of the West Indies (I felt that was a safe place) the coming Saturday and exchanged telephone numbers and promised to keep in touch. He would take me to where the guns were stashed.

However, when I got back to the news room, my usually fearless, bully of an editor, Desmond Richards, asked mi if mi mad!

"Downer," he thundered as he fixed me with a piercing gaze. "Yuh tink dem man deh a people fi ramp wid!?? I would not advise you to meet him for him to show you any guns as we may not see you again," he advised. "This information you have is enough!"

So how soon mi can get mi story!?" He queried. Having displayed uncharacteristically 'human' traits, he was back to being his story-hungry, editor self.

Sigh. On his insistence, I threw away Fidel's phone number and never spoke to him or saw him again. I wrote his story, which was titled: "The Making of a Murderer" and was published by The Sunday Herald the following Sunday, but I have carried Fidel with me all these years.  Sometimes in my subconsciousness, sometimes in the fore front of my mind. I wonder how he fared. Is he dead yet and if not, how is he doing? How is he coping with his demons? Ever the journalist, I have often wondered if I had gone with him to see his fearsome guns if I would have gotten a bigger story or, would I, like my editor feared, be long dead??

I guess I will never know. But I do know that I managed to prove my theory that is you ask the RIGHT questions and assume NOTHING, you will surprise yourself and others with the answers you receive. I also know that my instincts led me to meet a young man who just needed some one who he deemed important, to listen to him.

I am glad I was there that day.

The PAJ's Press Association of Jamaica
Award - 2003

So the following year I won the Press Association of Jamaica's Investigative Journalist/Reporter of the Year Award for the body of work I submitted on the killings and the self-confessed recollections of a killer - Fidel.

I share the distinction of having received that award with Cliff Hughes of Nation Wide News Network who won it the year before I did, Dionne Jackson-Miller of Beyond the Headlines fame and Garfield Burford who now heads the CVM newsroom. I have not kept up with the annual awards so I have no clue who else have won it.

I had made winning that top prize my personal goal as I told myself that I wanted to win a major journalism  award before I attend university to be formally trained in Media and Communications.  In 2004, the year after I won that award, I applied to and was accepted by the University of the West Indies. By then, I had left The Sunday Herald and had been working at The Gleaner for six months.

In all, I spent five years in main stream journalism and won more than15 awards over that period, including nine from the United Nations between 2008 and 2009 and Fidel is not the only person I carry with me. There were several other award winning stories that I pursued and wrote and which haunt me to this day. But I have learnt to make my peace with them, even though some people's lives were severely impacted because of some of the issues that I highlighted.

One mother had her two young children, six and two years old taken from her and placed in children's homes after I saw her with them begging at a traffic light in Kingston and I wrote a series about how she repeatedly endangered her children even after she had been warned by me and police officers to discontinue. She was pregnant with her fourth child at the time and would huddle in a corner while she sent the six year old to beg at the windows of cars that stopped at the traffic lights at the intersection of Balmoral and Maxfield Avenues.

In order to appease and assure myself that I had done the right thing, I would visit the two boys at the Alpha Boys home at South Camp Road where they had been placed on several occasions and talk with them. Read a re-cap of their story here which I wrote several years after I had left The Sunday Herald and was writing for The Gleaner. But this, and the other stories are for another time. I promise, I will tell them! :)

((( LISTEN !! ))) AND YOU WILL BE SURPRISED WHAT YOU WILL ((( HEAR ))) 
>>Click Play<<

'Clothed in Truth, I Stand Before You NAKED.' - Pain.... and A Peek into the Past -

'Clothe in Truth, I Stand Before You NAKED.' 

I know pain. Pain is something I carry around with me, buried DEEP because that is the only way I knew how to survive all that I have been through. I have carried pain with me for so long that pain is now as much a part of me as the brilliant smile I brandish.... sometimes.

Pain has become a part of  the protective shell I have wrapped around my heart in the hope that the kind of experience that teaches wisdom will be enough to prevent new pain from seeping in.

But I have learnt that pain is consistent, an ever present companion that has existed side by side with happiness from time immemorial. Eighteenth century poet Emily Dickinson wrote about the irony of pain's insistence on showing up with happiness and waiting in the wings for its turn. "For each ecstatic instant, we MUST an anguish pay in keen and quivering ratio to the ecstasy." - ED (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)


Pain became part of my emotional DNA so much that for years as a young journalist I was subconsciously drawn to situations that involved the deep suffering of others. It's as if by telling their stories and providing solutions to their problems I think I got some measure of satisfaction and relief from the personal anguish I had deliberately buried.

At the Gleaner newspaper where I worked for three years, I quickly became friends with people who some of my colleagues at that lofty 7 North Street establishment would regard as 'common' folk.  I somehow felt more comfortable with them than with my colleagues who were supposed to be my counterparts. Life was simpler with those ordinary, down to earth people. When they smiled they meant it and they spoke their mind with candour and I, with my sharp tongue and nimble wit, didn't have to mince my words with them. I didn't have to search for possible double meanings in their interactions with me as their actions were not cloaked  in diplomacy and all those cumbersome things.

The cleaners and I were also very good friends and many mornings they and I were the only ones at the office  exchanging good-natured banter sometimes quite loudly when I would arrive before 5am for my early morning round up shifts during the six months I wrote for the Star newspaper before being transferred to the Gleaner's Features Desk.

The people who worked in the canteen and I were also on very good terms and the security guards always knew that I was the best reporter to call whenever someone came by the Gleaner lobby with a sad story appealing for help. If I was out on an assignment at the time, although I had many colleagues who would be upstairs and available, they would simply have them wait until I showed up. Many times I would arrive hot, tired and hungry to find someone waiting downstairs to talk to me.

"Siddung right dehso, the lady who mi want yuh fi talk to no deh yah now but she soon come," any one of the three female security guards would tell them and I would often delay my much anticipated lunch or even breakfast to sit and listen to them sharing their pain.

Afterwards I would write as if possessed by the teller of the tale. Transferring their pain and frustration with their situation onto my computer screen which would later be pressed into the powerful pages of the Gleaner newspaper which would get picked up and read the next day by people who could do something to help. And in almost all cases they did.

My Brother Paul - Brought Back to Life

I am convinced that my brother, Paul was a Rastaman who never grew his locks. When I was growing up I remember a story told and re-told by my other brothers with morbid glee of a propa buss arse given to Paul by my father Eustace or Blood as he was more commonly called (due to his job as a butcher when he worked in Mass Campbell's butcher shop in Retrieve, a district close to Cambridge in St. James.) According to my brothers, Paul, when he was very young, refused to eat meat and in particular, flat out refused to eat pork my father would carry home from the butcher shop and which my mother would cook for dinner.

It appeared that Paul, who all his life was very different from my parents other children, was just too renegade and different for my father to understand and the murderation in front the yard one Sunday morning over the whole meat and pork eating thing seemed to have been my father's tragic attempt to prove to Paul that he Paul, was no more man than him (my father). Or, maybe my father saw Paul's rejection of the meat or 'flenga, flenga' as my mother and brothers disparagingly referred to the pieces of meat my father used to take home as part of his wages for helping Mass Campbell to butcher mainly cows and the occasional pigs; as a rejection of him, Blood.

My father was a man who was very quiet and unassuming, only gaining bravado and finding his tongue when he was well and truly drunk. He was unable to provide adequately for all of us as was to be expected when my mother, influenced by the child birthing tendencies in those days, took it upon herself to 'have out her lot' which resulted with her giving birth to 12 children, most born a year apart.

Therefore, my father's ability to bring home the pieces of meat regardless of the condition they were in, gave him some measure of pride, as he was able to feed his family and since he couldn't buy rum with the meat, many week ends that is all he ended up coming home with as he usually drank most of his earnings and what he didn't drink probably ended up lost or stolen from his pockets when he lay in drunken stupor sometimes on the very side of the road he was attempting to walk home on. Although few vehicles ran on Marchmont Road in those days, it still is a marvel that he was never run over by one of them and killed.

Winston's Two Dollars, Missing the Bus and Getting Some Rhatid Licks!

My brother Winston and I were close for a lot of different reasons. He was short, I was short, he had a bad temper and I am known to lose mine at the drop of a hat.

He always insisted on giving me unsolicited, long winded advise on how to live my life that seemed to go on forever especially since he had a slight stammer, a speech defect which delays the utterance of words (slows speech).

We had a number of heated quarrels while I was growing up and even when I was fully grown he was always trying to meddle in my life.

But two defining incidents, well three, no, make that four, have helped to create a lasting bond between us which thrived despite how perpetually vexed I was that him used to teck it upon himself to give me some rhatid licks whenever he felt I was being too unruly.

My mother had plenty of us children to look after so sometimes she neither had the time nor energy to beat us, so if it wasn't for meddlesome Winston, who love lick, I would have gotten away with a lot!

She never worked a day in her life outside of the home, but toiled in her grung to plant and reap food to feed us, in her attempts to make up for the huge gap in support from my father whose rum drinking consumed most of his meagre earnings.

Her subsistence farming would be supplemented by the money sent from the United States and Canada, by my Uncle Gilbert; the father of my two cousins, Dionne and Grayson who my mother was keeping until Uncle Gilbert could send for them. Later, my Aunt Effie would send money to take care of her last son Dwayne who also stayed with us for a short while and then, my neice and nephew's father Cyril.

She was a resourceful woman who made sure that one one coco full basket. We all managed to be fed, even though we really only got two square meals a day; breakfast and dinner. Lunch was our own responsibility and you better believed we learnt from our mother and made sure that one one coco or crayfish or mango or star apple or guava, fulled bellies!!

Somebody Can Just Dead So? - If Only Fish Could Talk!

There is a Jamaican saying, or maybe it's Caribbean, "If fish come from riva battam and tell you say dung deh deep, believe him!"


Well, when I stood in the autopsy room at Cornwall Regional Hospital to identify my father before the nice lady doctor could cut him open to try to find out what had killed him, I tried my best not to look at the place where his mouth used to be, where all that I could see were my father's teeth.

What an awful way to die! A man, who no one had ever bothered to take a photo of while he was alive, so horribly disfigured in death that it would not make any sense to try to take a photo of him even after they fixed him up for burial.

I could not wrap my mind around the fact that my father's missing upper lip was in the bellies of the likkle crayfish dem that me used to help turn over rockstone to catch!

Catching Crayfish in the River
While I turned the stones, my bigger cousins would hold the baskets below and the crayfish, disturbed from their hiding places, would swim frantically down stream to be trapped by the baskets.

It was a brilliant plan! Never mind that by the time we were finished we would be wet from head to toe and would either catch a fine beating or a cold if our clothes weren't dry fast enough, we were catching fish so our lunches were secure.

I can still remember the triumphant faces of my cousins as they hoisted the baskets out the water quick, quick and inspected their catch before stuffing them into their pants pockets, where devoid of oxygen, they would stifle to death.

I also remember as if it was yesterday, the tangy taste of the crayfish soup on my tongue which would sometimes be painfully scorched when I hurriedly drank the soup before it cooled properly, anxious to be off to our next adventure and not wanting to be left behind by my very nimble cousins.

By the way, almost everybody in Belfont were cousins, known and unknown. It was a small district and it wasn't hard when we put our heads to it to trace the family connections.

So I had a large pool of cousins and friends to run around with. I was the third youngest of my mother's 13 children, (one died during child birth so most times I just say she had 12). By the time I came along, at least three of my older brothers had moved to Kingston and my one sister Precious and my older brothers considered me an annoyance and would make sure I didn't see when they were leaving the yard so I wouldn't follow them.

They felt I talked too much and anything they did, when I got home, I felt the need to share. That would earn them plenty licks from my mother, as if she asked, I told. I, in turn, would get plenty licks from them when she wasn't looking, so me hanging out with my cousins instead worked out fine for all parties involved; well all except my mother, she had to figure out other ways to find out what my older siblings were up to.

So back to the crayfish soup.

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT

I grew up in a little district in St. James, Jamaica called Belfont. 

A place where to this day, people still catch water to drink and wash clothes in the same river, sometimes at the same time. 

A river that we bathed in bare chested. A river that holds many secrets. 

There were many mornings when, with buckets in hand, rags rolled up in clenched fists and a soap to share among us, we would trudge through the pass to bathe before school. But many mornings, especially when the time was really cold, all we did was glance at the river, shivered and teetering carefully on its edge; expertly performed a provisional cleansing routine we called 'tidying ourselves'.

After performing the 'necessaries', still balancing gingerly on a broad enough rock stone, we would dip our buckets in a 'clean' part of the river above where we had just 'bathe' as our mother had repeatedly instructed us to do and head back up the hill via the same pass that snaked pass Ms. Clemmy's and Cow Son's house. 

We made sure to drag our feet against the tall grass that hugged the dirt pass, confident the dewy moisture from the grass would help erase any overlooked telltale signs of our deceit.

The river used to chatter and clamber merrily over stones on its way to be emptied into the Great River and when I was little it seemed like a pretty big river at the time. 

But later, as I became older and especially when I hadn't been home in a while and I went back to Belfont to visit,  it seemed to have shrunk.