tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43201234134452171202024-03-09T15:39:45.547-08:00 The Long Way Home THE LONG WAY HOME ..........
A recollection of my MOST poignant memories growing up in rural Jamaica, not in any particular order, but shared as the memories arrive....Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-40658044321236327992020-10-04T20:10:00.002-07:002021-09-23T01:06:45.508-07:00The Wailers Wings of A Dove <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="344" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hHj3q-NdqW0" width="459"></iframe><br />
<br /><br />"...3 little birds pitch on my door steps... singing sweet songs..."<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHm8giztBR_1GAgZd7HcysPypDH9f2eJuToZFaL2Ezl-pmUs_g_SHo4B_C9Ylh8a4kc99J6OZsjno2zjRZUfDmo12pFOAaVngNxqZUzkM6i5z4_pB4FYiN3eaOp7neohi1ygOnImgf0TM/s600/A+MOTHER+PROVIDES+-+FEEDS+HER+YOUNG+-+%2528Aunt+Sue+%2529.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHm8giztBR_1GAgZd7HcysPypDH9f2eJuToZFaL2Ezl-pmUs_g_SHo4B_C9Ylh8a4kc99J6OZsjno2zjRZUfDmo12pFOAaVngNxqZUzkM6i5z4_pB4FYiN3eaOp7neohi1ygOnImgf0TM/s320/A+MOTHER+PROVIDES+-+FEEDS+HER+YOUNG+-+%2528Aunt+Sue+%2529.png" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-88534006224492401772020-09-24T03:49:00.009-07:002021-05-24T18:07:17.325-07:00HAPPILY EVER AFTER ..... The FUTURE is NOW... <div class="separator"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtL2pcpIGCelBnokFzjFkQpfcPlW8kaRJFhX4W2m9OVARdG5iMhyCAt0CKyYNPP4f_xCSQ4_-f-3fJL07-txiV1yxiqDtgAYdxnY0K1vnEBdCvfghWbM8rxK4QktnlUCpYu3rWwo-3EVE/s1920/Screenshot_20200203-015004.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1920" data-original-width="1080" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtL2pcpIGCelBnokFzjFkQpfcPlW8kaRJFhX4W2m9OVARdG5iMhyCAt0CKyYNPP4f_xCSQ4_-f-3fJL07-txiV1yxiqDtgAYdxnY0K1vnEBdCvfghWbM8rxK4QktnlUCpYu3rWwo-3EVE/s320/Screenshot_20200203-015004.png" /></a></div>✎📑📖📚<br />
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I listen to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oic9PHwnOgQ" target="_blank">Motown </a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM_UJbTMY0M" target="_blank">classics,</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRxWYJuq5Y0" target="_blank">gospel</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRxWYJuq5Y0" target="_blank">music </a>and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCLzuTPJk4Q" target="_blank">pulsating</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzmzKtOaVf4" target="_blank">reggae</a>, he unwinds to raw Hip Hop and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8gVlItbG-s" target="_blank">Youtube</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKfdP6Ki0sE" target="_blank">Reality</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKfdP6Ki0sE" target="_blank">vids</a> (without headphones no matter how I insist! )<div><br /></div><div>Thirteen years of living (age difference) separates us but an island living experience weaves a binding thread that keeps us connected in myriad ways. </div><div><br /></div><div>When he looks at me he sees a younger version of his Grandmother who raised him and a mother who was often times physically absent but who loves him regardless. </div><div><br /></div><div>And quite often, the aroma of my cooking pulls him back to the house in Bellefield, Manchester, where he grew up before he left for Canada at the age of 15.<br />
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<br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ_ZZ2nrmcXeNTpJeDCcBkJ6qDDyuqNjtnWxJHnzHgYj0XqN7xZ2K46PZi69XYLVQYegsRaIDEDFI1ECC27xSEUFHvc5kwOIu1c2dkxKWSvATSZbh3V5etXdM1chOuvPP6cOtI72fy318/s1600/20150610_160140-1-1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1055" data-original-width="1600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ_ZZ2nrmcXeNTpJeDCcBkJ6qDDyuqNjtnWxJHnzHgYj0XqN7xZ2K46PZi69XYLVQYegsRaIDEDFI1ECC27xSEUFHvc5kwOIu1c2dkxKWSvATSZbh3V5etXdM1chOuvPP6cOtI72fy318/s320/20150610_160140-1-1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-54678395545970222302020-09-24T03:45:00.014-07:002021-09-23T01:11:49.439-07:00COVID'S GIFT - DREAMS TO REMEMBER<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ooqqj6q1MeU" width="634" youtube-src-id="Ooqqj6q1MeU"></iframe></div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> <span> </span></div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-family: "times new roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 16px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_yZ9M1AIiUXyL40FYBeGi5DBqRQFhbDaVYFCu4NhT_STBjKBgeZdAHpeX0vSxAeojDJHNZHFrwJj94NQTaTQJHDDx-L2atGo1BTFLuryG0hazjqVw9489BVnOt9RxsxGiBcMSCBoBavE/s800/Writing-on-the-wall.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_yZ9M1AIiUXyL40FYBeGi5DBqRQFhbDaVYFCu4NhT_STBjKBgeZdAHpeX0vSxAeojDJHNZHFrwJj94NQTaTQJHDDx-L2atGo1BTFLuryG0hazjqVw9489BVnOt9RxsxGiBcMSCBoBavE/s320/Writing-on-the-wall.jpg" width="320" /></a></div></span><span style="font-size: medium;">Nine (9) years ago, when I was clutched in the harried throes of <b>surviving</b>, a faculty support staff at York University in Toronto, Canada, where I was a student, looked me dead in my eyes and uttered words that would alternatively haunt and inspire me for years to come; "<i><b>remember who you are</b></i>!" </span></div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-family: "times new roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-family: "times new roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I guess that was her way of encouraging me to continue to keep trying to land elusive jobs in my career field in non-profit program management and </span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">implementation. </span></div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-family: "times new roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-family: "times new roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">At the time, her words rang hollow to me, who was a single mother, and mature student, who had recently relocated to Canada from Jamaica with the determination to carve out a better life for myself and my daughter. </span></div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-family: "times new roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><font size="4" style="background-color: white;"><br /></font></div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-family: "times new roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I remember having to balance the near impossible task of single motherhood with my role as a full time <b>international </b>student at YorkU, in fulfillment of the strict requirements of my then student visa. Initially, I did not qualify for a work permit, so I had to find legal and ethical ways to earn in order to financially provide for myself and my daughter including keeping a roof over our heads, all without a work permit. </span></div><div style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; clear: both; color: black; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; clear: both; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/t7owFiihXgg" width="320" youtube-src-id="t7owFiihXgg"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; clear: both; font-family: "times new roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; clear: both; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large; text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; clear: both; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large; text-align: left;">Despite the overwhelming odds stacked against me; by a combination of </span><b style="font-size: large; text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeZvzX218qk" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">+Divine Favour+</span></a></b><span style="font-size: large; text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeZvzX218qk" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">,</span></a> strategic planning and determination, I managed to successfully complete my first semester at YorkU with qualifying grades that allowed me to apply for an off campus work permit. This meant I could then widen my search for jobs, which up to that point, had been restricted to on campus jobs, none of which I was able to get, despite the many times I applied for different positions.</span></div></div><div class="separator" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; clear: both; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; clear: both; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><div style="text-align: justify;">In reflection, somehow, no matter what I did, the doors I tried to push open remained firmly closed despite the myriad ways I tried to advocate for myself. Self-advocacy was a honed skill which stemmed from my innate ability to lobby for improved circumstances for others and which, through frequent, applied use and proven results, had become a default setting. As I navigated during my early days as a new immigrant in Canada, self-advocacy was an instinctive and proactive mode which I switched to automatically, when faced with challenging situations My ability to effectively self advocate is <span style="text-align: left;">influenced by the many years I worked as a journalist and development advocate in media and non profit in Jamaica, the Caribbean and other parts of the world.</span></div></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; clear: both; font-family: "times new roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: center; text-decoration-line: none; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; clear: both; font-family: "times new roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">To help provide some background for context; I began attending York University in September 2012, but did not secure a job on York University's campus until April the following year (2013), one full year after I moved to Canada. </span></div><div class="separator" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; clear: both; font-family: "times new roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; clear: both; font-family: "times new roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">How did I survive that first year?!!</span></div><ol style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;"><li><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;">>> By NOT listening to my childhood friend who I had attended high school with and who, when she became aware of the difficulties I was facing finding suitable work in Canada, candidly advised me to "</span><i style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-decoration-line: none; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">dumb down</i><span style="font-family: times new roman;">" my resume by excluding some of the work experience and academic qualifications from my two page resume which I had already reduced from a five page </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curriculum_vitae" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-decoration-line: none; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" target="_blank">CV</a>! </span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: medium;">In retrospect, I feel fortunate that I did </span><b style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">not</b><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: medium;"> listen to her, because it was the remnants of my 5-page CV (which I kept at two pages despite her advise to shorten/curate it even more), which ended up impressing an employer who visited a job agency where I had registered shortly after arriving in Canada. And that not only landed me the up to then elusive job I had been seeking, but would prove to be the beginning of doors previously closed swinging wide open to let me in. Doors which I had been desperately pounding on, even while I +PRAYED+, anxious to be let in, anxious and sometimes impatient for job opportunities that would take me back onto a path that was more towards the accomplished, professional self who I was, before I migrated to Canada and morphed primarily an International Student; which unfortunately, made little provision for the other aspects of myself I needed to be to survive in a full sense. I was able to successfully juggle the role of being a mother to my daughter and my other responsibilities, because I am a Jamaican woman with a history of hardships and pain which I had learned how to successfully navigate in order to remain sane, viable and functioning from day today. This new experience of having to reinvent myself, from the very outset, seemed destined to simply add to my already lived personal traumas during a 50% lived life. I migrated to Canada when I was just past 40 years old, and was headed towards the BIG FIVE O = 50. So believe me when I tell you, that when I arrived in Canada in April 2011, I had LIVED!! I had LIVED and LOVED and GIVEN birth and MOTHERED and ENAMCIPATED so many persons from social and economic EXCLUSION in a Jamaica which struggled with the challenges of the remnants of a colonial past tied to slavery and the myriad social and other maladies that accompany that. Yet when I arrived at the Pearson Airport with my carryon luggage and a single suitcase as I had deliberately </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqN0jsSeqPo" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: large;">packed 'light' </a><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: medium;">and my very precious daughter in tow, I had to mentally and psychological dial back all I had been and had become, and allowed myself to be morphed and moulded into something else. I had to be so pliable that there were times when I was simultaneously everything and nothing all at once. The immigrant experience is so complex, that it defies exact narrative or written explanation. Like they say: It id better FELT than TELT; meaning, it is more adequately experienced than explained / told.</span></div></li><li><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;">ALSO, through +DIVINE INTERVENTION+, when another Jamaican student whom I had met in the tutorial for a course we took together at York University, forwarded an email to me with a call or invitation to submit an essay of 100 words. The essay should focus on poverty as an environmental issue in keeping with the focus of my then Environmental Studies Undergraduate degree program in the </span><span style="color: #cc0000; font-family: "times new roman"; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-decoration-line: none; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><a href="https://futurestudents.yorku.ca/program/environmental-studies#details" target="_blank">Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University</a> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">As Providence would have it, my friend sent the email to me after the deadline for the International Student writing competition had been extended. It appears that they either had not received any submissions or were not satisficed with the calibre of any essays they might have received by the initial deadline. It has been my experience that whenever God has gifts for those who HONOUR him, he usually sends #DIVINE opportunities via specific channels and often, in the beginning, those persons who are God's emissaries, bearing beacons of #HOPE camouflaged as opportunities, usually realize that they have been given a DIVINE assignment which will last way beyond an initial contact. To make a long story short, I wrote and submitted an essay in the Writing Contest and was contacted directly by thecsenior Faculty member from <a href="https://futurestudents.yorku.ca/faculty/environmental-studies" target="_blank">The Faculty of Environmental Studies</a> who had coordinated the writing contest, and advised that I had been selected as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P9odR9_FQ4" target="_blank">the Winner. </a> That #WiN sparked an AVALANCHE of opportunities that effectively took me from the desperate place where I had been existing, towards job opportunities that the Senior Professor referred me to as well as other job opportunities off campus which included a 6 month stint at my first ever job in a call centre working with a third party company on a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/BellCanada" target="_blank">Bell Mobility</a> campaign for <a href="https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=bell%20let%27s%20talk" target="_blank">Bell Canada</a>. That job qualified me sufficiently to land a job in a similar but expanded role at one of Canada's top five (5) banks working on an internal campaign for the <a href="https://pilot.pcfinancial.ca/en/digital-banking" target="_blank">bank's client </a>. I worked in that position for close to two years. Before that, I landed two (2) part time jobs on the York University campus as a Research Assistant to one of my Professors who was working on a Canada-wide community research project and I also held a <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/groups/5007539/" target="_blank">Knowledge Mobilization and Online Content Coordination Role</a> with Th<a href="https://crs.info.yorku.ca/" target="_blank">e Centre for Refugee Studies</a> at <a href="https://www.yorku.ca/" target="_blank">York University</a> for one (1) year (2013-2014).</span></span></div></li></ol><div><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: medium;">The Bible says "A man's gift will make room for him." If anyone reading this is going through difficult times, keep going! Keep praying and believing God for miracles and rescues. God will come through for you in the end. 📿🙏📿</span></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="241" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8tE0GjSQpes" width="393" youtube-src-id="8tE0GjSQpes"></iframe> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="289" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0P9odR9_FQ4" width="418" youtube-src-id="0P9odR9_FQ4"></iframe></div></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;">📿🙏🙏🙏🙏📿</div><div><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="407" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gI2_yS6K9GE" width="488" youtube-src-id="gI2_yS6K9GE"></iframe></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; clear: both; color: black; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></div>Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-55299129571228675632018-01-13T10:44:00.001-08:002018-05-24T17:55:35.134-07:00#GENESIS' FURY: I AM MY MOTHER's DAUGHTER <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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MAMA<br />
is MORE<br />
than just a word...<br />
<br />
It is<br />
the woman lying there<br />
beneath<br />
that UNREPENTANT earth<br />
<br />
Her now boned knuckles<br />
clutched around<br />
the off-white King James Version (KJV) Bible <br />
we buried her with<br />
<br />
Because it was her favourite book<br />
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<br />
Even though it had leaves<br />
that were falling out;<br />
it had many verses underlined<br />
and I felt the words she read<br />
to comfort her<br />
during hard times alive<br />
might help her<br />
in her +CROSSING+<br />
<br />
<a href="https://thelongwayhome-andreadowner.blogspot.ca/2013/03/post-scripts-to-my-mother.html" target="_blank">It was that same Bible that fed her Faith,</a><br />
<a href="https://thelongwayhome-andreadowner.blogspot.ca/2013/03/post-scripts-to-my-mother.html" target="_blank">fueled her +PRAYERS+</a><br />
<a href="https://thelongwayhome-andreadowner.blogspot.ca/2013/03/post-scripts-to-my-mother.html" target="_blank">and kept us FED</a><br />
<br />
Her Faith; the most<br />
enduring legacy she left us with<br />
as she died without leaving a will<br />
<br />
as, what would be the point?<br />
There was nothing to be divided up or shared anyways!<br />
My mother lived and farmed on ‘family plots’of land<br />
handed down<br />
from generation<br />
to generation<br />
unerringly.<br />
<br />
I also insisted that we bury her with her glasses<br />
'Cause she could never see without them<br />
and I figured<br />
she might need them in the After Life<br />
to read the Bible resting on her bosom<br />
<br />
the same bosom which held icy mint sweeties<br />
unless they were in her black bag hung on a nail behind her bedroom door.<br />
<br />
Miss Amy dispensed<br />
icy mint, Vicks, Vaseline cerrasee and ginger tea<br />
as the cure for every ailment;<br />
belly, head aches and other various cuts and bruises.<br />
<br />
For a while I was very dismayed<br />
that her best friend; Aunt Dor <br />
insisted that we give her the glasses<br />
as where ‘Amy was going she naah go need dem!’<br />
<br />
I barely held my peace<br />
when some years later,<br />
my brother Dave told me that Aunt Dor had gone blind<br />
<br />
Mothers make the world seem a better place.<br />
Less frightening somehow.<br />
She is tangible, VISIBLE confirmation<br />
of the portal through which we entered this world.<br />
<br />
The ceremonial goddess whose templed body<br />
hosted our second most important rite of passage.<br />
<br />
#Remembering and Missing my Mom: Miss Amy Downer. RIP. <br />
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<b>I </b><b> </b><br />
<b>AM </b><br />
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<b>My Mother's </b><br />
<b>Daughter</b><br />
<b>Flesh of Her Flesh</b><br />
<b>Bone of her Bone</b><br />
<b>Cut from the navel string of her belly</b><br />
<br />
<b>Sometimes I hear her voice in my head </b><br />
<b>and spilling from my lips </b><br />
<b>When I borrow HER #Praise </b><br />
<b>In the Hallelujah choruses</b><br />
<b>She used to sing</b><br />
<br />
<b>I smell her in the aroma of my kitchen</b><br />
<b>And on the THUNDER I ((( ROAR))) from DEEP within my Belly</b><br />
<br />
<b> </b><b>I </b><br />
<b> AM </b><br />
<b>My Mother's daughter</b><br />
<b>#GENESIS... </b><br />
<b>Where SHE #ENDS </b><br />
<b>I #BEGIN </b><br />
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Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-37041250012308828222016-03-06T09:33:00.000-08:002016-03-06T09:33:43.942-08:00Death: The Eternal Silence: Of DEATH .... DYING & COUSINS <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiG-ZIN6lEqkQsJZ-5u5I8V4lmczrxTBwIZGSU4dbf14E08RvLMKSwtEabUb3rwD3XF5uaIuY0MG-rn2gzwA7gnL9iOvFShXd7plJX7-H2EFNimA75XNC30r3HPVJ8k_9HV3E_qLRo2lU/s1600/Screenshot_2016-01-30-23-19-27-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiG-ZIN6lEqkQsJZ-5u5I8V4lmczrxTBwIZGSU4dbf14E08RvLMKSwtEabUb3rwD3XF5uaIuY0MG-rn2gzwA7gnL9iOvFShXd7plJX7-H2EFNimA75XNC30r3HPVJ8k_9HV3E_qLRo2lU/s200/Screenshot_2016-01-30-23-19-27-1.png" width="195" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Jeffery McIntyre </b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b><i>When </i></b>the people who used to beat you if you misbehaved on your way home (including your mother), starts dying, it bothers you.<br />
<br />
However, when the ones who you grew up with begin to die, you become incredibly alarmed, saddened and reflective. It reminds you of your own mortality when someone your age who you share memories with, die. In an unnerving and sobering way it reminds you that it could have been you and it becomes hard to separate the fact that you are still living with the fact that they are dead.<br />
<br />
My cousin<b> <i>Jeff</i></b> died a few weeks ago and was buried yesterday in <i>Lapland, Catadupa, St. James.</i> I grew up in<i> Belfont, </i>one of many neigbouring districts to Lapland that all shared the same post office, Public Works Department, Clinic and Basic and All Age Schools. Those essential public domains connected us and were the reason we met many times a week when we went to collect letters, go for a check-up or to dress a cut or get a baby vaccinated and to learn. But my cousins and I who lived many districts away, were even more closely connected by My mother (<i>Ms. Amy</i>) and their father; (<i>Mass Hubert</i> .. who we called <i>Uncle</i> <i>Ubert</i>) as they were both VERY close. They attended the same church Pastored by <i>Elder Davis</i> (Now deceased) and they shared the same mother: <i>Miss Harry</i>, a woman I have never met but who is as real to me as my mother.<i> Miss Harry</i>, our maternal grandmother, was always there like a hanging shadow, especially because my eldest brother,<i> Phillip</i> always spoke about her. He is extremely nostalgic and the truth be told, he is the one who keeps us connected with the parts of our familial history that happened before we were born or from a time we were too young then to remember.<br />
<br />
I have often wondered why she came to be named after a man and what her other names were. Next time I speak to <i>Phillip</i> I must remember to ask him. (*Note to self*)<br />
<br />
But my mother and<i> <b>Jeff's</b></i><b> </b>dad were very close and<i> Uncle Ubert </i>would come to<i> Belfont </i>maybe once a month or so to help my mother in her grung (especially to dig yam banks) which was a pretty strenuous undertaking and more suited to men with more muscle power than women. He would arrive early in the morning, (usually Saturdays) with most if not all of his many children in tow (he and his wife, <i>Miss Merline </i>had between 9 & 10 children from my recollection) and our yard would erupt into a bevvy of activity and laughter and fun and <i><b>'cousiness'</b></i> that is hard to describe. It just felt happy and crowded and nice. In those days, large families were the norm. My mother gave birth to 13 children.<br />
<br />
My bigger cousins like<i> Samson, Patrick, Bunny </i>and <i style="font-weight: bold;">Jeff</i> as well as my bigger brothers who still lived at home;<i> Earl, Winston, Pete </i>and <i>Paul,</i> would follow <i>Mama </i>and <i>Uncle Ubert </i>to bush (which is what we called the place where the grung was) and as you can imagine, is pure bush over or round there which is why it was referred to as such. Bush and mud and ticks and cow doo doo and mud and just.... eeewww!<br />
<br />
Anyways it is where most of the food we ate was planted and reaped so I'm not going to stay here and act all stoosh. My mother's grung is what helped sustain us.<br />
<br />
So while they went to bush to work, My mother and <i>Miss Merline </i>would get busy in the kitchen cooking lunch and us, the younger children, Me, <i>Garfield, Dave and Donnette </i>would mostly run each other around the house and make each other miserable anyway we could and sometimes we would go down to the river to bathe and catch crayfish but for the most part our activities were confined to the yard while we waited impatiently for lunch to finish cooking and share out. The two bigger girls from either family,<b> </b><i>Precious</i> and <i>Joy</i><b>;</b> I am not sure what they did with themselves during this period of grung planting and waiting for lunch. As I was younger, I didn't really pay them much mind, nor was I encouraged to try to find out what they were up to but I suppose they kept themselves busy as well.<br />
<br />
The younger children from each family, <i>Kevin</i> from ours, and <i>Karen and her twin brother Owen, </i>were not born until years later I believe, long after the informal monthly family get togethers had stopped.<br />
<br />
Mass Ubert was one of a few people in those parts that went away to America on Farm Work every year and whenever he came back he would always send and call us to come for things he brought back for us. I loved that man and still remember the hats he wore and his booming bass as part of the Sunday morning choir at church. His eyes were piercing and kind and always held a twinkle. In a world where my mom and dad were separated because he was an insufferable drunk and she was in church, <i>Uncle Ubert </i>for me represents for me, my earliest memories of a text book dad. He died before all his kids were grown when he feel off the back of a pick up driven by <i>Desrick</i> while on his way from someone's funeral in another Parish. His death was unexpected and made no sense. I still miss him.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://thelongwayhome-andreadowner.blogspot.ca/2011/03/how-summady-fi-juss-dead-so-if-only.html#more" target="_blank">Read more about my Dad and his strange death <b>here</b></a><br />
<br />
<b><i>Jeff </i></b>is the first of his siblings to die but I guess his dad now has some company up in the skies or wherever dead people go. He has been alone a long, long, time. But that is no comfort to me for having lost one of my best cousins whom I loved dearly and I cannot begin to imagine how his brothers and sisters feel. He died leaving children, all of whom are grown and none of whom I have met yet. And it reminds me how fragmented we have become generally as a society within which families exist as we move away from our rural communities to seek opportunities in <i>Montego Bay</i> or <i>Kingston </i>and then further away to various foreign countries to pursue our personal and professional goals. If any of Jeff's children ever read this I would like to wish you heartfelt condolences on the passing of your dad and hope I get to meet you all soon my second cousins. I hear one of his daughters worked at CVM; a Jamaican television station, (pursuing an early career in journalism which was my main career path) and is now studying law at the UWI. That is awesome news.<br />
<br />
I would also like to send deepest sympathies to <i>Miss Merline</i>,<b><i> Jeff's</i></b> mom, I am a mother and I cannot begin to imagine what it would feel like to lose a child. Only God can give you the comfort you need in this very difficult time. To <i>Denise</i>, the mother of <i><b>Jeff's</b></i> children, (I remember her as a dark beautiful, petite girl with a shy smile and the sister of my very good friend <i>Sharon Smith</i>). To <i>Denise</i>, I also offer condolences. It is hard to lose someone you share memories with and made babies with even if you were no longer together. When certain life experiences are shared with someone, they become intricately linked with who you are. Interwoven into your personal history and emotions.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>My favourite cousin: Garfield McIntyre and my mother on the verandah of the house in Belfont that I grew up in. He had traveled several miles from Montego Bay and braved the really bad roads in Belfont to come and give my mother a lift to church as she usually had to walk many miles, mostly uphill, on arthritic feet to get to and from Church on Sundays. A journey that took minimum 1 and a half to 2 hours minimum each way.<br />The person beaming at them both from the doorway is my brother Dave, who always accompanied my mother to church. He still attends the same church and tells me whenever we speak that he has been praying for me. His prayers work! :)</b></td></tr>
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To his brothers and sisters, especially <i>Garfield,</i> who is my favourite cousin of all is siblings; I am truly sorry you lost your brother. I have lost two of my brothers so far, both to tragic circumstances and I know it must be a difficult time for you all. Life continues as I know you all already know and time heals.<br />
<br />
Last night when I saw my niece <i><b>Trish-Ann</b></i> posted pics from the funeral, I wondered how it felt for him to be out there there under the earth in the dark and cold night all by himself and I mourned for him. Death is still the unconquerable divide that separates two worlds only one of which we know. I always get sad when I have to watch a loved one get covered by heavy dirt while encased in a wooden box and then further encased in concrete and left all alone to the elements while everyone turn and walk away after the burial headed back to the business of living until it's their turn to be left alone like that while others leave. It is sobering and jolting and a bit scary to say the least.<b><i> Death: The Eternal Silence</i></b> from which no one emerges except in dreams.<br />
<br />
Makes me think that an idea I saw circulating on<i> Facebook</i> last week via a video post of planting our loved ones in pods that would then morph into trees might not be a bad idea. So much better to imagine your loved one as a thriving, vibrant tree then a silent presence encased in so much and buried underground. Makes it even hard to breathe when I visit my relative's graves.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Jeff</b></i>, you have made the transition, you have moved on to where we all are headed inevitably. Rest in Peace my cousin and hopefully, we will one day meet. I hand't seen you in years before you died but I remember everything about you and I still hold you dear.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>The house I grew up in in Belfont, St. James and where my cousins and I would meet once every month when their dad came to help my mother with her grung. This pic was taken by the driver who took my 2 nephews and niece up to the country sometime last year (I believe) when they went to Jamaica to bury their maternal Aunt (Miss Beryl) who had died. These 3 are My brother, Phillip's (Whom I mentioned in this post) children.<br />Pictured here are: Desmond, Audrey and Little Phillip or (Phillip Jnr.)<br /><br />Somehow the house seemed bigger then. Everything seemed bigger when you were little. LOL</b></td></tr>
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<br />Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-19845316158094821842013-03-09T06:39:00.000-08:002013-03-09T23:19:07.540-08:00POST SCRIPTS TO MY MOTHERP.S.<br />
<br />
My mother never hugged me much<br />
or not at all<br />
<br />
I cannot ever remember<br />
being enveloped in my mother's ample bosom<br />
and held there for a while<br />
<br />
Among my carefully kept memories of her<br />
is not one solitary recall of a time<br />
I felt the soft folds<br />
of her flesh against mine<br />
as I huddled in her lap<br />
<br />
My mother wasn't one of those 'lovey dovey' mommies<br />
that gave out hugs willy nilly<br />
We learnt to look for love from her<br />
in other things<br />
<br />
Like how she would smile indulgently<br />
or laugh uproariously<br />
when something one of<br />
of us said or did<br />
amused her<br />
<br />
or how she would always manage<br />
to give us dinner<br />
to ease the hunger pangs in our bellies<br />
Although she never earned a wage<br />
in the 60 years she lived<br />
<br />
My mother was a woman of God<br />
and prayed often<br />
especially at nights<br />
So we learnt to look for love<br />
in her nightly supplications to God<br />
on our behalf<br />
<br />
And the many letters she wrote<br />
by the light of the kerosene lamp<br />
and the letters that would arrive in response<br />
through the post office<br />
with money in them<br />
For sending us to school<br />
For buying groceries<br />
For doctor bills<br />
For medicine<br />
<br />
and when she would tiptoe like a hanging shadow<br />
among us to make sure<br />
that those of us that slept bad<br />
weren't squeezing the living daylights out of each other<br />
And that who ever had a tendency to wet the bed<br />
was shaken awake and made to urinate<br />
at intervals<br />
We felt her love<br />
And were grateful<br />
when we all woke up dry in the morning<br />
<br />
and if it was a Sunday,<br />
to the rich aroma<br />
of her creamy chocolate tea<br />
made from cocoa pods she had picked herself<br />
from the cocoa walk below our house<br />
beside the tumbled down building<br />
that was the old Sunday School<br />
and cut and put out to dry in the hot sun<br />
on half sheets of zinc for days<br />
then roasted in the dutch pot<br />
over a fire with acrid smoke that brought tears<br />
to her eyes when she bent over it<br />
to make sure the beans<br />
weren't being burnt too much<br />
and then pounded in the mortar<br />
she kept in the corner of the kitchen<br />
which doubled as a seat turned upside down<br />
When it wasn't being mercilessly pounded<br />
by her arthritic hands<br />
<br />
My mother never hugged me<br />
But I felt her love<br />
in how<br />
as she walked with me<br />
to the bus stop<br />
and on the long ride<br />
to Montego Bay<br />
to hand me over to the old couple<br />
that I lived with in Goodwill for several years<br />
she explained why she had to do it<br />
<br />
So that I could have a chance to learn<br />
As she didn't have the money<br />
to send me to school<br />
And how I was very bright<br />
and would amount to something one day<br />
<br />
All my life<br />
I have felt the need to prove her right<br />
In the lonely months and years that followed<br />
I read every book in sight<br />
And grew attached to words<br />
<br />
I filled my days, nights<br />
and the yawning emptyness<br />
within my heart<br />
for my mother<br />
my brothers<br />
sister<br />
cousins and friends<br />
with words and books<br />
and thought of faraway places<br />
including Belfont<br />
the place I still called home<br />
even though I only returned some holidays<br />
for short visits<br />
<br />
Her letters that came often<br />
through the post office<br />
consoled me<br />
made me know that I was loved<br />
and remembered<br />
and missed<br />
<br />
My mother never hugged us<br />
Never hugged me<br />
much<br />
But I felt her love<br />
Every night during mango season<br />
When I would come home from work<br />
To find a pot of freshly washed and very ripe mangoes<br />
Under the cupboard in the kitchen<br />
instead of my plate of dinner<br />
because she knew I loved mangoes more than food<br />
<br />
My mother never hugged me much<br />
<br />
But every day<br />
when I am not too busy<br />
with making sure that I 'amount to something'<br />
I wish she were STILL here <br />
so I could love her back in the<br />
ways that she loved me THEN<br />
<br />
And NOW<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkHxhF74T2asbdRtkpQ6RI-WuEJQbMyGja5lzqySVfEwq3Zuf_hteFqzC1mZtNBrXGzcRj_if9MBtnMtjL9DcJGBvDbxZfgTVbInSdTq0L7zG5Hl-oZC_5dcfXqmwzh2cfHDuKmuToJsQ/s1600/LANA+MOMMY+HUG.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkHxhF74T2asbdRtkpQ6RI-WuEJQbMyGja5lzqySVfEwq3Zuf_hteFqzC1mZtNBrXGzcRj_if9MBtnMtjL9DcJGBvDbxZfgTVbInSdTq0L7zG5Hl-oZC_5dcfXqmwzh2cfHDuKmuToJsQ/s200/LANA+MOMMY+HUG.jpg" width="172" /></a>Every night<br />
I walk through my daughter's room<br />
and make sure she is still in bed and breathing<br />
and kiss her cheek<br />
and when she is awake,<br />
I hug her<br />
until she is sick of it<br />
<br />
Maybe<br />
the hugs<br />
I am giving her so freely NOW<br />
are the hugs I<br />
I wish I had received<br />
from my mother<br />
THEN.Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-12666135681499691232013-03-08T05:48:00.000-08:002013-03-08T16:46:30.565-08:00TAPESTRIES of WOMANHOOD of PAIN of KNOWING....<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Yesterday<br />
I met a sister<br />
and we shared the common pain<br />
of having both lost our mothers to<br />
death<br />
<br />
But not just death<br />
to Cancer<br />
That silent killer<br />
which burrows insidiously<br />
into our softest tissues<br />
and hide<br />
only to painfully announce itself<br />
often when it is too late to do anything about it<br />
<br />
Across a desk<br />
with a hallway backdrop<br />
teeming with people<br />
We bonded over exchanges<br />
of what it meant to be WOMEN<br />
<br />
That unique experience of womanhood<br />
assigned to us at gestation<br />
and we had no say in it<br />
<br />
but we concluded<br />
that we were happy<br />
we were born as women<br />
and not men<br />
<br />
We mulled over the eternity<br />
of death<br />
of NEVER being able to pull our mothers back<br />
even for one shining moment<br />
to compare notes of womanhood<br />
notes of KNOWING<br />
<br />
When truth and wisdom arrive<br />
finally, gradually<br />
sometimes carried<br />
in our own daughters'<br />
eyes<br />
actions<br />
bodies<br />
language<br />
presence<br />
<br />
We were silent sometimes<br />
as we pondered this<br />
<br />
I had seen her often<br />
through her open door<br />
As I hurried down the hallway<br />
on my way to somewhere else<br />
and I had wondered briefly who she was<br />
<br />
Yesterday I found out<br />
That she is a woman<br />
just like myself<br />
With Canadian and Jamaican experiences<br />
And a mother only months dead<br />
Though mine had been dead for years<br />
<br />
We bonded over PAIN<br />
And the unique experiences of<br />
WOMANHOOD. -<b> ANDREA DOWNER</b><br />
_____________________________<br />
<b>TODAY, March 8th is recognized by the United Nations as WOMEN'S DAY, But for women, there is NEVER a day when we are NOT ourselves. However, we are grateful for the annual, global day of recognition.</b><br />
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<b>BLACK WOMAN - JUDY MOWATT</b></div>
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<b><br /></b>Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-5896078576813650732012-12-08T10:49:00.000-08:002013-03-09T04:57:34.587-08:00JOHN CROW, BRER ANANCY, BRER TOCUMA, ABNA DUPPY (JAMAICAN ORAL & FOLK TRADITIONS)<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">JOHN CROWS</td></tr>
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<b>Instead of writing this,</b> I should have my nose buried in copious notes feverishly attempting to brand certain key points that had been covered over the past semester in a course I am taking at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/York-University/12922531419?fref=ts" target="_blank">York University</a> in preparation for a mid-term exam that is to be held tomorrow afternoon! On a Sunday!!! In Jamaica where I grew up, Sundays are hallowed days! Even for people who are NOT regular church goers! Even the most dedicated farmer or low-life lay-a-about in the district would take the occasional bath and put on some decent clothes and look respectable on Sundays.<br />
<br />
In Belfont where I am from, I don't even think anybody even got drunk on a Sunday! In fact, I don't even think any rum bars were opened on a Sunday. Even the shops that were grocery shops and bars combined shut down the bar part of the business even if they did open half day to sell pounds of chicken, rice, sugar and other things necessary to make the traditional rice and peas and carrot drinks Sunday dinners that were the highlight of every week in those days. As a matter of fact, on Sundays, the shops never used to really open of such, just a one window where the shopkeeper would sell the few items that would be purchased on Sundays.<br />
<br />
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Cheese Trix , suck suck and sweety (most times purchased with part or all of we collection money). And Serve-mi-Long and sandwich biscuit on the way back to bolster our waning strength for the long treks that it usually required to get us to church and back in clothes that looked and felt good when we did put them on in the morning. But by the time church over and every body had seen you in you pretty dan dan and you were on your way home, you couldn't wait to come outta the scorching sun fi go teck dem off and put on yuh judging clothes, eat yuh Sunday dinner and wait pon the fudge man fi come chug chugging up the road pon him bike.<br />
<br />
Sundays were sacred! Trust mi! I could never imagine writing an exam or doing anything strenuous pon a Sunday back home. But here, having voluntarily transferred myself to a foreign land, I must confront the glaring differences in culture, lifestyle, grammar, syntax and practices and while it is a process I am learning and growing from, it takes much getting used to.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
I remember doing a double take a few days ago when I walked into the lobby of my building and saw a very nicely decorated Christmas tree. I was like... go Jetta! (the name of the Superintendent of the apartment building in which I live) as I was impressed with the obvious effort to make the common area festive and warm and welcoming. (It is obviously my first Christmas in the people dem building or I would have known that Jetta does these things for the holidays! LOL So don;t judge meee! LOL) I might have taken a clue from the fact that around Halloween mimi-ghouls made from cotton peeked through the glass of her office which sits in a corner of the lobby and that miniature orange pumpkins and other rubber creepy, crawly things were also added to create a kind of Halloween theme but to be honest, the Christmas tree threw me. But most importantly, the next evening when I arrived home, I did a double take when I saw a festive sign stuck on the glass partition of her office that wished everyone 'Happy Hanukkah' HUH? In my head, I had been carrying around Merry Christmas and had associated the holiday decorations with Christmas! But like I said, different cultures and I live in a Jewish neighbourhood. So there you go.<br />
<br />
Now back to Belfont. This morning as I posted on my Facebook status my dismay at having to sit an exam on Sunday, it evoked memories of a well known Jamaican folk song that decreed that John Crow, the bird (Carrion) that in rural Jamaica where no official, municipal waste disposal was in place, nature took care of dead animals. In our case, John Crows; some very large birds of prey that looks as if they are from the eagle family swoops down and feast on any animal carcass that was big enough for it's aroma to be carried on the wind to their nostrils. Smaller rodents and such, ants tool care of those and natural deterioration into the soil.<br />
<br />
And as I was doing dishes and singing the song with my daughter, I remembered the <span id="goog_521302681"></span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_music" target="_blank">oral tradition<span id="goog_521302682"></span> </a>from which such a song evolved. I also recalled that that particular song had originated from the African slaves that had been uprooted and taken to Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean in sub-human conditions to be raped, exploited and robbed of their human dignity and cultural clingings. I believe the song might have come about due to the slave's defiance at being compelled to work seven days a week and they insisted on at least one rest day: the aforementioned hallowed Sunday.<br />
<br />
In my very next chapter, I will talk about Brer 'Nancy, Brer Tucoma and Apnea (Abna duppies) as well as a touching email I received a few weeks ago from a man and his wife who have early ties to Belfont and who now live in the UK and found my blog online while they were doing research into their shared background. They said my blog resonated with them and was a kind of HOMECOMING. But I do have an exam tomorrow (Sunday) and do have to go study. But this, I just had to get off my chest immediately. Thanks for listening.<br />
<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>"John Crow say him naah wuk pan Sunday!</i></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Naah wuk! Him naah wuk pan Sunday!</i></div>
<i><div style="text-align: center;">
<i>John Crow say him naah wuk pan Sunday!</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Naah wuk! Him naah wuk pan Sunday!</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Tink a lie mi tell!</i></div>
</i><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Kill yuh Mawga Cow!</i></div>
<i><div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Naah wuk! Him naah wuk pan Sunday!</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>John Crow say him a study fi teacha!!</i></div>
</i><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Naah wuk! Him naah wuk pan Sunday!</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><br /></i>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>John Crow say him a study fi lawya!!</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Naah wuk! Him naah wuk pan Sunday!</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><br /></i>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>John Crow say him a study fi parson!!</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Naah wuk! Him naah wuk pan Sunday!</i></div>
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<i><br /></i>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>John Crow say him a dry lan' touris'!!</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Naah wuk! Him naah wuk pan Sunday!</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i></i></div>
<div style="display: inline !important;">
<i><i>Tink a lie mi tell!</i></i></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Kill yuh Mawga Cow!</i></div>
<i><div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Naah wuk! Him naah wuk pan Sunday!</i></div>
</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
THE REGGAE VERSION</div>
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Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-3415358731542798132012-07-31T04:52:00.000-07:002013-03-09T04:54:23.631-08:00"USING KIN TEET TO KIBBA HEART BUN" - MY MOTHER Laughed & CRIED at the Same Time<div style="text-align: left;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcb626HncN4mRvw1olbSiledLgaB1EGHh38i1pQI45hgZZB9QtObCmCAWg0K4wPE3z5m6Z0fXqjeYWAzkHiCRDd4x_xI3uaa6whomIo0WJsHFHRIjtTjd_V3BCt1LE9iWa5X4KFFClsoc/s1600/LEADING+PIC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcb626HncN4mRvw1olbSiledLgaB1EGHh38i1pQI45hgZZB9QtObCmCAWg0K4wPE3z5m6Z0fXqjeYWAzkHiCRDd4x_xI3uaa6whomIo0WJsHFHRIjtTjd_V3BCt1LE9iWa5X4KFFClsoc/s200/LEADING+PIC.jpg" width="200" /></a>My mother had a BIG laugh... A BELLY laugh. Growing up, I both loved and feared my mother, because given that I was NEVER afraid to speak my mind, her fists and my mouth would connect in the most painful ways..OFTEN!!<br />
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I was a NUFF.. facety (feisty) child, given to back chatting others even those older than me, and a Christian, holy-roller-tongue-talking Jamaican woman <b>will</b> talk to her child until she becomes hoarse but will <b>not</b> hesitate to discipline her with some proper beatings when necessary.<br />
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Yep! I got plenty licks growing up, both from my brother <b><a href="http://thelongwayhome-andreadowner.blogspot.ca/2011/03/winstons-two-dollars-missing-bus-and.html" target="_blank">Winston, who I mentioned in THIS blog post</a> </b>and my no no-nonsense mother; <b>Miss Amy.</b><br />
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For a lady with arthritis in her wrists and knee cups and who was <b>not </b>very slim, she was very adept at running me down and tackling me to the ground and ensuring I had her <b>FULL</b> attention!<br />
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I remember one such murderation with acute and painful clarity. I think that may have been the last time she really beat me like that, because all of us have natural self-preservation instincts and I <b>did</b> want to live to grow up; so I learned to mind my mouth and mumble the most grievous things under my breath. Sigh...<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 17.600000381469727px; text-align: left;"><b>My Brother Winston and my big sis, Precious. He is probably my Fav brother. He always act so PROTECTIVE of EVERYBODY. He is the brother who used to kill mi wid rhatid licks when mi used to give trouble growing up and he gave me the CRUCIAL two dollars that made me the woman I am today.</b></span></td></tr>
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But more than the beatings, I remember my mother's laugh. She <b>didn't</b> laugh quite often; because what is there to really laugh about when you are single handedly raising 12 children <b>on your own</b>, with no fixed salary and nothing but your faith in God, your nightly prayers and the little money that the fathers of the nieces and nephews and grand children you were keeping until they could send for them in foreign managed to send you through the post office?<br />
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What is there to really laugh about when the man who fathered nine of the twelve children you bore came home stinking of rum every night and especially on the Friday of every fort night when he got paid, with <b>empty</b> pockets and the sorry looking pieces of meat from the butcher shop he helped out at? <b><a href="http://thelongwayhome-andreadowner.blogspot.ca/2011/03/how-summady-fi-juss-dead-so-if-only.html" target="_blank">READ ABOUT EUSTACE, nicknamed BLOOD, Miss Amy's husband and MY father HERE</a></b><br />
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I remember that my mother only laughed when one of us children gave her a really good joke! And she laughed and laughed and laughed. And I remember that she would playfully berate us for making her laugh by stating, with apologetic mirth in her eyes "Unno no easy enno pickney!" LOL As if she <b>had to apologize</b> to her misery for having forgotten it for a while.<br />
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I remembered my mother's laugh a day ago when my daughter, Alana said to me, her eyes spilling over with mirth from one of my dead pan declarations; "Mommy! you know you are funny! Right!??" LOL I paused for a heart beat, then responded... Oh My God! You are right I am! I did tell you that I got that tendency to give jokes from my mother, right? and she said: YES! YOU DID!! And now you have taught me how to make people laugh, because I am always giving jokes too.. right?? I nodded my head in affirmation and turned back to my desk; I had been about to do something on the computer.<br />
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For many years after my mother's death, I lived in fear that the cancer that invaded her body and lay dormant, but active for 17 years before it reared fully awake and devoured her in less than one year would also kill me. I rationalised my crippling fear with the Freudian mind talk that daughters view their mothers as mirrors of themselves. And my daughter, even though she doesn't know it, or maybe she does, is helping me make peace with the memories of my mother.<br />
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This is the second instalment of the series of chapters in this my personal blog titled: <b>THE LONG WAY HOME</b> A gradual recollection of my most poignant life moments. I have shared recollections of my mother, at least two of my nine brothers and other significant people in my life. My mother, Miss Amy will be REMEMBERED in a SERIES of CHAPTERS titled: <b>MY MOTHER, The Memories, The Moments. </b>The series of chapters on my mother have been the most DIFFICULT to write so far. <b>It has taken me a year to write the first instalment about her.</b> I did that on Mother's Day in May this year (2012) And it is a VERY painful journey that I continue to sift my way through as I write my way to MY PERSONAL HEALING.<br />
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<b><a href="http://thelongwayhome-andreadowner.blogspot.ca/p/about-me.html" target="_blank">Read the mission of this blog here</a></b><br />
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Thanks to all those of my friends who are taking the journey with me. Twenty-three (23) of them have registered in the middle right hand side of this blog. You can too! Just click the <b>FOLLOW this BLOG button </b>and get on the train with ME back to CATADUPA or STONEHENGE and then walk with me as I jump from polleen to polleen,<b> </b>as<b> my legs were too short back then to make the BIG stride needed to span the gap between them.</b> Then down through the short cut, at Mango Walk and past Miss Christie & Mass Gerald's house, Pass Aunt Dor and Miss Tin Tin house. Hear as I yell good evening to Miss Mama who live on one of the TWO patches of red dirts in Belfont, as I weave my way past Miss Pet and Mass Minocal's house then down Fletcher's Hill, past Miss Nen Nen dem house and bawl out fi <b>Peggy</b> (My best friend & cousin in Belfont growing up) Pass Mass Maxi's shop where Gracie and her pickney AND grand pickney dem now live, pass the open spot where Miss Hilda (Fyaaw Fyaaw Hilda) used to live and where my mother found her dead beside her house in some bushes one day) <b><span id="goog_473470568"></span><span id="goog_1096729791"></span><a href="http://thelongwayhome-andreadowner.blogspot.ca/2011/03/borrowed-dream.html" target="_blank">READ THAT BLOG POST HERE.</a><span id="goog_1096729792"></span> <span id="goog_473470569"></span></b>And then bend the corner before I reach my house.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>The House in Belfont where I grew up. ALL PHOTOS in THIS blog POST TAKEN BY MY NIECE: SHINIQUA, Thanks Shin! :) <3</b></td></tr>
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<b>I am going home, one blog post at a time.. BELFONT farrr is a shame!! When you are walking a long journey, company helps! :)</b><br />
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<b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150694630415536.413834.576410535&type=3" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO VIEW BELFONT.. A PICTORIAL HIGHLIGHT.</a></b><br />
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__Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-1167421613943444702012-05-13T15:39:00.000-07:002012-05-13T15:46:35.532-07:00Bay Rum, Vicks Vapour Rub, Phensic - My Mother: Her Scents & Secrets<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp3QA5Hau7_wodu2Ak_v9YZZXGUMkgk1uOHlz7mEBdk71XxbwCSNRKL7TSjHJLXxDlIlMHC5Qy2h7TnvcGT_SHzr2aQwJANCoqMmmEohFelbg_Snzbe3zkbgrYNmfBeOIZDHECfkJrX4Q/s1600/GRAVE+-+AMY+D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp3QA5Hau7_wodu2Ak_v9YZZXGUMkgk1uOHlz7mEBdk71XxbwCSNRKL7TSjHJLXxDlIlMHC5Qy2h7TnvcGT_SHzr2aQwJANCoqMmmEohFelbg_Snzbe3zkbgrYNmfBeOIZDHECfkJrX4Q/s320/GRAVE+-+AMY+D.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<b><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Mom</span></b><br />
<b><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">No, Mama</span></b><br />
<b><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">is the woman lying there</span></b><br />
<b><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">beneath that unrepentant earth</span></b><br />
<b><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /></b><br />
<b><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Her boned knuckles clutched around </span></b><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b>the off-white King James Version Bible<br />we buried with her with</b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b>because it was her favourite book.</b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b><br />Although it had pages that were falling out;<br />it had many verses underlined </b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b>and I felt the words that she read to comfort her<br />during hard times, ALIVE,<br />might aid her as she ventured into the unknown.<br /><br />It was that same Bible that fed her Faith<br />and prayers which she tried to leave with us<br />as she died without leaving a will,<br />What would have been the point?<br />There was nothing to be divided up<br />or shared anyway!<br /><br />She lived and farmed on 'family plots'<br />of land<br />handed down<br />from generation to generation<br />unerringly<br /><br />We also buried her with her glasses<br />'Cause she could never read properly without them<br />And to this day I am still aghast<br />That her best friend,<br />Aunt Dor [Doris] insisted that we gave HER<br />the glasses<br />As where 'Amy was going she naah go need dem!'<br /><br />I barely held my peace<br />When some years later,<br />My brother Dave<br />told me that Aunt Dor<br />who was older than my mother<br />is now blind<br />But refuses to die.</b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b><br />MOMS make the world seem a better place<br />Less frightening somehow<br />They are tangible.. visible confirmation<br />of the 'medium' via which we entered this world<br />Ceremonial goddesses </b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b>whose 'templed' bodies </b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b>'hosts' our second most important rite of passage.<br /><br />I remember clearly </b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b>that my mom's bosom always held icy mint sweeties<br />Unless they were in her black bag </b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b>hung on a nail behind her bedroom door</b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b>And she ALWAYS had a safety pin or two </b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b>in the folds of her clothes somewhere<br />In case something needed mending </b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b>and no needle and thread were nearby</b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b>And a hair pin pan that also held hairnets</b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b>And a bed head that was her personal pharmacy</b></span><br />
<b><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Her main remedies: </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Bay Rum and Phensic and Vicks Vapour Rub</span></b><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b>She used to make Cornmeal pudding:</b></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b>"Fire a top, Fire a Bottom, Hallelujah inna middle"</b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b>And Plaintain porridge</b></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b>ANd blue draws also called tie-a-leaf.</b></span><br />
<b style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Remembering and Missing my mom: Amy Downer. </b><br />
<b style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">CONTINUE TO REST IN PEACE</b><br />
<b style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">_____________________________________________________</b><br />
<b style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><u>P.S. </u>My mother died with secrets But I DIDN"T tell them here as promised.<br />When writing about the dead and especially some one as your mother</b><br />
<b style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">One wants to be careful what secrets you tell.</b><br />
<b style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><br /></b><br />
<b style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">I have been struggling for months with HOW to write about my mother</b><br />
<b style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">I am getting there</b><br />
<b style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">I hope to write that blog post by the end of this week.</b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>My Big Sis Precious at My Mom's Grave in Belfont, St. James <br />Jamaica in March 2012.</b></td></tr>
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<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></span>Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-13356311430100047212012-03-03T08:31:00.006-08:002012-08-05T01:00:11.829-07:00EVERYBODY HAS A STORY TO TELL, All You Need To Do is: ((( Listen )))<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYs2IFxT5AAFieYA1nXtKwKFxL_xtk2YCvRv5d3nTsSq06nbBB4chmzTJONckOv2y9LcwiNLGwrBtV-l4XboVK-r3vk_SijppAJkUql3Nim-Qs7WTa7L4hUTH3fvT-XHvnLlyQkpJ_o2w/s1600/RAHIM+AND+JERMAINE.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYs2IFxT5AAFieYA1nXtKwKFxL_xtk2YCvRv5d3nTsSq06nbBB4chmzTJONckOv2y9LcwiNLGwrBtV-l4XboVK-r3vk_SijppAJkUql3Nim-Qs7WTa7L4hUTH3fvT-XHvnLlyQkpJ_o2w/s320/RAHIM+AND+JERMAINE.JPG" width="190" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>14 year old Jermaine and his 10</b><br />
<b>year old brother, Rahem at</b><br />
<b>Alpha Boys Home</b><br />
<b>in 2006, four years after being</b><br />
<b>placed there by authorities for</b><br />
<b>their safety. Their mother had</b><br />
<b>repeatedly endangered them</b><br />
<b>by sending and taking them on</b><br />
<b>the streets with her to beg to feed</b><br />
<b>their family. They had been their</b><br />
<b>family's only source of income</b><br />
<b>and were not attending school.</b></td></tr>
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<b>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</b> for a series of articles I had written the year before. The reports, published in the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sunday-Herald-Jamaica/149133255181373?sk=info" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Sunday Herald Newspaper</span></a> 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.<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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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. <a href="http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20021026/life/life1.html"><span style="color: red;">Read his chilling and detailed report here on The Gleaner's website</span></a>.<b> (The Sunday Herald, which is a small, weekly newspaper, did not publish online then, so my article is only available from their physical archives.) </b>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.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFdyXXzDRQzK5yqkm13SrMFO8F8r_AWXSFsSTxFbwkBoSOPS5l_qgZZrTre-1jpcRu2lCecYq8qKl7oN1b22xHHfvjC3xHLrExfoN1xjIyQWLVIsatitbDkZDDcN7RifuBJeZWCGO4o_I/s1600/SHARON+THOMAS+-+MOTHER+OF+THE+THREE+SLAIN+GIRLS.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFdyXXzDRQzK5yqkm13SrMFO8F8r_AWXSFsSTxFbwkBoSOPS5l_qgZZrTre-1jpcRu2lCecYq8qKl7oN1b22xHHfvjC3xHLrExfoN1xjIyQWLVIsatitbDkZDDcN7RifuBJeZWCGO4o_I/s1600/SHARON+THOMAS+-+MOTHER+OF+THE+THREE+SLAIN+GIRLS.JPG" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>A grieving Sharon Thomas, mother</b><br />
<b>of the three young girls who were</b><br />
<b>murdered in Rema in 2002.</b></td></tr>
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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!"<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy23LkGDtHVvTqEK59R0XzwWAjDGlQOatGCyTWEp_IqwNrH9etKjMqFYhyf096R3kkp0Y15dZGtks3QX0MRX8Q7maeckB5jvjykPEkAm3O_omGiXIOBfOCWQMdHDOd-PnqXJEnPWkz88U/s1600/A+FRAMED+PHOTO+OF+ONE+OF+HER+TWIN+DAUGHTERS+WHO+WAS+MURDERED.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy23LkGDtHVvTqEK59R0XzwWAjDGlQOatGCyTWEp_IqwNrH9etKjMqFYhyf096R3kkp0Y15dZGtks3QX0MRX8Q7maeckB5jvjykPEkAm3O_omGiXIOBfOCWQMdHDOd-PnqXJEnPWkz88U/s200/A+FRAMED+PHOTO+OF+ONE+OF+HER+TWIN+DAUGHTERS+WHO+WAS+MURDERED.JPG" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>A framed photo of one of Sharon</b><br />
<b>Thomas' twin daughters, one of three</b><br />
<b>gunned down together as the sleep</b><br />
<b>in Rema in 2002.</b></td></tr>
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In my mind, I had moved beyond the <b>WHO, WHAT, WHERE & WHEN</b> of route reporting to the <b>((( WHY ))) </b>which embodies <b>INVESTIGATIVE </b>journalism. Yes, the murders had occurred and would continue, but I wanted to know <b>((( WHY!??)))</b><br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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As we got into the car to leave I said reflectively: "You know, too often journalists assume that they <b>WON'T </b>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.!"<br />
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So, I went back to The Sunday Herald, where I was working at the time, filed my <b>'who killed who' </b>story, but my mind kept searching for more.<br />
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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!))<br />
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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.<span style="color: red;"> <a href="http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20021214/letters/letters4.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">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.</span></a></span><br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
The <b>((( WHYYY!!??)))</b> I was carrying around in my head, by that time had reached deafening decibels.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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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!?<br />
<br />
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!!<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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!<br />
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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.<br />
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"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!"<br />
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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."<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<b>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.</b><br />
<br />
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!<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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"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.<br />
<br />
He explained how he ended up in Gold Smith Villa in August Town after growing up in Denham Town in Western Kingston.<br />
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"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<br />
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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!<br />
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"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.<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
However, when I got back to the news room, my usually fearless, bully of an editor, Desmond Richards, asked mi if mi mad!<br />
<br />
"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!"<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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: <b>"The Making of a Murderer" </b>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??<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
I am glad I was there that day.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>The PAJ's Press Association of Jamaica<br />
Award - 2003</b></td></tr>
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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. <a href="http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20060319/news/news3.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">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.</span></a> But this, and the other stories are for another time. I promise, I will tell them! :)<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>((( LISTEN !! ))) AND YOU WILL BE SURPRISED WHAT YOU WILL ((( HEAR ))) </b><br />
<b>>>Click Play<<</b></div>
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<b><br />
</b>Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-76117474286851006372011-07-22T02:08:00.001-07:002018-03-01T22:00:45.917-08:00'Clothed in Truth, I Stand Before You NAKED.' - Pain.... and A Peek into the Past -<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8KbTJFHD4Y9DpkvH_73X2po1tSmnnDj3BfLJQTIouZNMfebM86_biow0KlfCnBzn7ZJP4tdRCwq0UJ1Qi2weYKTB_lLasAR6_SXmLlnAETAN4AQj6Ic9bYjZTn-zXSa6cLw-4YkQJ1rc/s1600/TRUTH.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8KbTJFHD4Y9DpkvH_73X2po1tSmnnDj3BfLJQTIouZNMfebM86_biow0KlfCnBzn7ZJP4tdRCwq0UJ1Qi2weYKTB_lLasAR6_SXmLlnAETAN4AQj6Ic9bYjZTn-zXSa6cLw-4YkQJ1rc/s400/TRUTH.jpg" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'Clothe in Truth, I Stand Before You NAKED.' </td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>I know pain.</b> 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">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.<b><i> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;">"For each ecstatic instant, we MUST an anguish pay in keen and quivering ratio to the ecstasy."</span> - ED </i></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; line-height: 16px;"><b>(December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)</b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">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. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">"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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">One day when I came in, a young lady in her early twenties was sitting in the Gleaner lobby in tears. She appeared frantic with a desolation in her eyes that implied that she had been grappling with her situation without aid for a long time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I invited her upstairs to one of the editorial interview rooms and listened as she poured out her frustration; as she unpacked her pain. Her five children had been taken from her and placed in children's homes and her children's father was serving a three year sentence at the Horizon Park maximum security prison on Spanish Town Road. Unemployed and confused, she explained that she divided her time between visiting him in prison and her children at the state home on Maxfield Avenue in Kingston. She explained that she had no money to make those trips and the last time she visited her children one of them had a gash on her forehead and she feared for their safety and well being as there had been well documented horror stories of abuse of children in state-run homes in Jamaica</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The article that I wrote and which was published in the Star the next day screamed:<a href="http://jamaica-star.com/thestar/20040427/news/news1.html"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;"><b>I WANT MY KIDS BACK!</b></span></a><a href="http://jamaica-star.com/thestar/20040427/news/news1.html"> </a></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red; font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://jamaica-star.com/thestar/20040427/news/news1.html">Read the first article I wrote about the issue in April 2004 by CLICKING THIS LINK</a>.</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">It was the Star's front page lead story and grabbed public attention and sympathy. However, her situation was not addressed until after I wrote several other follow up articles and her member of Parliament gave her a house in a new development in Albion, St. Thomas and her children were returned to her. In that same year, I placed 2nd in the Press Association of Jamaica and the <a href="http://www.jamaicabroilersgroup.com/jabroilers.dti?section=corporatedata&page=pastwinnersofawards"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red;"><b>Jamaica Broilers' FairPlay media awards</b></span></a> for the series of articles written about the young mother's plight.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">But it wasn't until a few months later while I was a student at the University of the West Indies that one of my classmates identified what I had been doing all those years. How I had been dealing with my own pain by becoming immersed in the pain and suffering of others.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Darron Murray appeared to have been drawn to me the minute I walked into the narrow, cramped room that housed the mock radio studio where the Radio Journalism students were confined for an entire afternoon of five long hours once per week honing our craft. It wasn't long before he and I became inseparable and it didn't take long for rumours to start that he and I were an item, but nothing was farther from the truth,</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Darron, with his tall, athletic build and the bearing of a cricketer, walked with a purposeful stride and had a steady gaze. He also had a comforting presence. He was very popular at UWI and was up to his teeth in hall activities including sports but he always made time for me and a few of his other bonafide sistrens in the class.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">He didn't mind me bending his ear to listen to my occasional woes about my then boyfriend and often provided a shoulder to cry on. The relationship evolved into a brother/sister camaraderie with some latent sexual chemistry which I did my best to ignore and discourage. Apparently, the many occasions I hung out in Darron's dorm room after classes or during free periods or while working on assignments together gave him enough insight into who I was for him to have been able to put the pieces of the puzzle together one day in class.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">We had a practical assignment for our radio broadcast class taught jointly by Alma Mock Yen and Fae Ellington which was 30 percent of our final grade. It was a half hour radio documentary which had to be based on actual news events that had occurred in the past. I was one of maybe two practicing journalists in the class at the time with any newsroom experience. The rest of my class mates had enrolled in university straight out of high school so I and my other media colleague, Rohan Powell, were being 'bomb rushed' for story ideas that the rest of the class could base their documentaries on.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I recommended some of the articles I had written or events I had covered and Darron chose the Lead Mother story or the Tennesha Rankin story as I sometimes refer to it. After he read a couple of the articles I had written and visited Tennesha, Darron came back to me and with a piercing look, commented incredulously:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">"Pickney meck you can write bout pain and suffering so!? I have gone through all of your articles and there is one common feature in all of them: PAIN. Don't get me wrong! You do a damned good job of describing people's pain, but teck this from me, you fi write bout some happy things to! It can't be good for you to be so immersed in pain man!"</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;">I felt like some one had sucker punched me in the gut! He was being so insightful and it was so unexpected but so unerringly accurate! </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"><b>The greatest gift anyone can give me is DEEPER insight into myself... into who I am at the CORE and why I am 'wired' the way I am; why I react certain ways to particular things.</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I absorbed what Darron had said but as usual, immediately tucked it away somewhere and continued to mainstream life. But over the years, I would take out what my friend Darron had said and examine it, ponder on the key he had so disarmingly handed me to help unlock the enigma that was myself. Someone who I had lived with all my life but was too busy reaching out to and comforting others to ever be a friend to myself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I did begin telling 'happy' stories but I am still drawn to stories that bleed and to people who are suffering. Many of whom I still carry around with me... ghosts, spectres, now buried in the Gleaner's graveyard of archived newspaper files; micro fiche tombs. But, some are still my living, breathing children, birth from storytelling process. Plucked from the lips of those desperate or brave enough to share their pain.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Every time I sit down to listen or type, I am in the throes of child birth, breathing LIFE into words; helping people tell THEIR stories and there is something very empowering about that.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large; line-height: 16px;">Here, via this blog, I am FINALLY telling MY story and it is has been Cathartic. </span><br />
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<span style="color: red;">P.</span><b><span style="color: red;">S.</span> Please accept my apologies.. it appears most of the links in the article leads to website pages that no longer exist. I will see if I can locate the linked articles elsewhere and re-link them. Until I am able to.. please bear with me. Thanks. *ADDED March 2, 2018*</b><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-size: 17px; font-weight: bold;">A Black Woman’s Smile</span><br />
by Ty Gray-EL<br />
Do you know how strong you have to be to make a black woman smile?<br />
Do you have any idea what an accomplishment that is?<br />
She has borne the weight of this country on her back for 400 years.<br />
She has suffered the agony of unassisted, husband-less childrearing since the 1600’s.<br />
Have you any idea how much strength it takes to put a smile on her face?<br />
You need the strength of Sampson, </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">T</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">he nerve of Joshua and the courage of David facing Goliath.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Cause she has cultivated in her womb the marvel of the universe, </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">O</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">nly to have her hopes and dreams aborted and her aspirations show up dead on arrival.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">She has given birth to kings and queens and delivered on her majestic promise </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Only to have her children kidnapped and sold to a criminal with no respect for her royalty.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">If you can make a black woman smile, you are a miracle worker!<br />
Imagine breastfeeding your child in Virginia and having snatched from your arms, branded; </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">And hijacked to Louisiana and publicly fondled on a New Orleans auction block!<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">If the memory of that pain was locked-bound in your DNA, would you be smiling?<br />
If you breast-fed someone else’s child only to watch her grow old enough to call you Darky, </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Pickaninny and Nappy-headed Jigaboo, you wouldn’t be smiling either!</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">If you can make a black woman smile you have DONE something!<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">If you can make her smile you are stronger than Atlas, cause God knows she has been.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">She’s been raped and ravaged and scorned and nearly annihilated.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">She’s been pimped and pummeled and stoned and deliberately depreciated.<br />
She has cooked and cleaned and sewn...and NEVER been compensated!<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">She’s been forced to watch the offspring of her loins mangled and maligned across centuries.<br />
Her character has been continuously smeared, assassinated over and over and over; again and again and again.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">You ever thought about how strong you have to be, just to BE a black woman?<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">She’s had to make brick without straw after being stripped of all her customs, stripped of all her culture, stripped of all her traditions.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">No other woman in the history of the civilized world has gone what she has gone through.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">No other beings on the planet have endured what she has endured.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">She’s been chastised, criticized, demonized and terrorized.<br />
She’s had to stand when her man was bull-whipped for trying to stand.<br />
She’s had to stand when her man was castrated for trying to stand.<br />
She’s had to stand when her man was hung by his neck for trying to stand.<br />
She’s had to carry her man, cause every time he tried to carry himself, he was murdered for trying to do so.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Ask Betty Shabazz about Malcolm; ask Corretta Scott King about Martin; ask Emmett Till’s mother.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">If you can make a black woman smile you have achieved something.<br />
Since 1619 when we came in chains, the entire world’s been messing with her brain, disrespecting her, calling her out of her name, and she’s tired, just plain Fanny-Lou-Hamer-tired!<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Tired of being called B-words, and H-words and N-words and other-words and everything except the child of God that she is.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">But the one thing in this world that will make a black woman smile is her man.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">A real man!<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">If you’re doing what you’re supposed to do she will smile she will smile regularly and gladly.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">And recognize this:</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">So, man up my brother!<br />
Man up and make your woman smile.<br />
Treat her like the Queen that she is.<br />
She deserves it.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">In all of God’s Creation there is <b>nothing</b> more alluring, more appealing, or attractive; <b>nothing </b>more beautiful, more charismatic, more charming or captivating; nothing more delightful, more elegant, or exquisite; nothing more fascinating, more gorgeous, more inspiring, or intoxicating; nothing more magnificent or lovely than a Black Woman’s Smile.</span></div>
Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-49568321929765440162011-07-04T14:16:00.000-07:002011-07-22T02:21:57.381-07:00My Brother Paul - Brought Back to Life<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7iuiCto9e3pzZg2bUyPNC8FRZM7dm_KdeGyHTf1nOEmAj7ss5QkHvn8p2Jq0GyhjRY3HcJbgr8AfIaBRYSZ-ST2V6cE_oBdqGDxE-HfDCqSBgxqo4yjfIB0jiLxt4CPNEQfvLBfZI9PM/s1600/IPA-Trumpet-Tree-CloseUp-500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7iuiCto9e3pzZg2bUyPNC8FRZM7dm_KdeGyHTf1nOEmAj7ss5QkHvn8p2Jq0GyhjRY3HcJbgr8AfIaBRYSZ-ST2V6cE_oBdqGDxE-HfDCqSBgxqo4yjfIB0jiLxt4CPNEQfvLBfZI9PM/s200/IPA-Trumpet-Tree-CloseUp-500.jpg" width="167" /></a></div>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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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So when he brought home his meat, be it pork or beef, him no expect say nobody should be talking bout how dem no want it!<br />
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As my brothers told it; and based on my fuzzy recollection, (I was probably still in nappies then, Paul was the second child for my parents and I was third to last) That Sunday morning when Paul smelled the pork being cooked on the wood fire in the kitchen, Paul gave out: "Yow! Fire bun pon Arnold! A pork unno a cook fi dinner! Mi no want none!" I don't quite recall how my father managed to catch Paul to start putting on the licks, but I imagine as my father was a very docile man who rarely talked and never beat anybody more than so, Paul might have even seen him coming and saw no threat.<br />
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My father caught up with him under a huge trumpet tree that used to be in the front of the yard, but which had to be cut down when they started to build the 'new' house which we eventually occupied in front of the unpainted three-room board house my mother's mother had died and left and in which all my mother's children were born with the aid of a midwife named Miss Matty.<br />
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It was years after, as a grown woman when I visited a river in Ocho Rios that emptied into the sea and stopped to pick up the huge leaves of the trumpet trees that formed a comforting canopy over the pasture through which we gained access to the river; that I realised just how huge those threes could grow to. <br />
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They seemed to have an active ambition to touch the sky and whereas, their broad, star-like leaves were wide opened like worshiping palms; when they shriveled and fell to the ground, they were curled like tight, giant fists, the kind of cruel fists that pummeled my brother Paul until he submitted to my Father's wish for him to eat pork. <br />
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Well, I don't remember if he actually ate the pork after the baxiding, but at the height of the beating. Paul gave out: "Mi see blinky, mi Pa mi see blinky! Mi wi eat the pork mi pa, mi wi eat it! No beat mi no more!" <br />
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Which my brothers made into a catchy ditty and repeated ever so often in sing song voices when they wanted to tease Paul who rarely spoke but had a kind, warm spirit and two eyes that refused to look in the same direction at the same time. He had one gold tooth in the front of his mouth and when he smiled which was usually rare and unexpectedly, the blinding glint of his gold tooth and his crossed eyes would give him a certain look that earned him the name Cyclops from my other brothers who seemed to have far too much time on their hands.<br />
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Paul was also nicknamed BIG FOOT by the same set of brothers as his feet were unusually large and a few of his toes appeared to be climbing over each other instead of behaving themselves and laying beside each other as most people's toes did.<br />
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On reflection, it appeared that he only gave in verbally to end the beating and he did not experience a change of conviction per say.<br />
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What ever Paul's vices, he could cook!!! Of all my mother's children, when we were growing up, Paul could cook the best. But he didn't really cook for all of us. Paul planted and smoked a lot of weed and he would cook an entire pot of food and eat it all off without giving any of us any and mix and drink one whole jug of drinks in one go. We were for the most part, in awe of him. He was one of two people in our district we knew who would eat succumber or duppy beans as they were also called; a green beanlike berry that grew wild and was very bitter. Paul is who you would call artical. He listened mainly Gregory Isaacs and Franky Paul tunes and loved cowboy movies.<br />
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He was tall and dark and shiny and had a deep gruff laugh and seemed not to mind being likened to mythical, lumbering creatures like Cyclops and Big Foot. Due to his size, we knew when he was in the house as the entire board structure would vibrate when ever he stepped into the house. As my mother would say: 'Him no teck time walk."<br />
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Paul has one daughter, Shawn, but he never lived to see her grow up. Like our father, Paul died in mysterious circumstances just five months before my father was found face down in Belfont River with fish feasting on his upper lip. See blog post #2: <a href="http://thelongwayhome-andreadowner.blogspot.com/2011/03/river-runs-through-it.html">A River Runs Through It</a> & Blog post #3: <a href="http://thelongwayhome-andreadowner.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-summady-fi-juss-dead-so-if-only.html">Sombody Can Juss Dead SO?!</a><br />
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Paul died in a way that no one should die. For years after his death I tried to imagine his final moments with anguish and shortly after his death, I picked up my Bible and with tears streaming down my face, read a Psalms for all those who were responsible for his death. I was therefore not surprised to hear on the news on the radio maybe a year or less after, that an entire family had perished in a fire in the district in Westmoreland where he had been chopped to death, while he slept.<br />
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I knew in my heart that they were some how connected to the incident. It is very small district. And shortly after that, almost every year since then when ever its the rainy season, the district would become so flooded, people had to be picked up off their rooftops by JDF soldiers in helicopters. It could be that after my brother's murder, I paid more attention to news about the district, but I somehow felt appeased that some sorta judgement did a reach dem. Serve dem right!<br />
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Based on police reports, Paul was found outside the hut in the ganja field where he was killed. They surmised that the chops woke him up and he tried to run for his life, but wasn't able to make it far before his machete wielding attackers finished the blood thirsty task they had started.<br />
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It was the second time I had lost one of my siblings. Duke, one of my three older brothers on my mother's side had been killed by the police in Kingston years before. But I had not been as close to Duke as I was to Paul. I was still a little girl when he left Belfont for Kingston.<br />
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Paul's death hit hard and started a string of deaths in the family which people said usually happen: "death comes in threes'<br />
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We never fully found out the exact circumstances surrounding Paul's death, Westmoreland people no ramp! And just as how dem chop up Paul, dem woulda probably harm anyone who went in to try to find out what happened or collect whatever meagre possessions he had in the hut. So we buried Paul and even though I couldnt bring myself to look at him in the coffin which sat on mama's almost brand new dining table chairs in front of Cow Son and Miss Clemmie's house and which my brother Pete occupied every since they both died years before.<br />
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When Miss Pet, who loved Paul to no end for he gave no trouble and was a quiet youth who kept pretty much to himself, she became overcome with grief, bawled out: "Laad God! Wha meck dem haffi do him so?!" when she looked into the coffin. <br />
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His neck had been almost severed from his body and nothing the undertakers did was able to mask the huge, angry gash he had running from his shoulder to his neck.<br />
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My mother had paid some one to make the dining table with the four new chairs shortly before Paul died and had made it known that the chairs were for her coffin to be placed on when she died as I think in those days you had to pay extra for the contraption that the undertakers placed the coffins on.<br />
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Now my mother was a devote Christian and attended Elder Davis' church in Catadupa, therefore we were puzzled, as her funeral service would be held in the church in Catadupa even if she was buried in Belfont and we could not carry the dining table chairs that far. Chairs like those would only be used mainly for funerals that were kept at home when whoever died was not a church goer and a pastor could be found who would accept a 'contribution' to perform the last rites but would not agree for the funeral to be held in their church.<br />
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They say sometimes people have goat mouth or maybe my mother, who rarely slept in the last years before her death, might have had some premonition that one of her children would die before she did and that she would bury her cantankerous husband just a year before she too would go to her final rest.<br />
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Whatever the reason, the blinking chairs held the coffins of my brother Paul and my father Eustace (Blood) but my mother's coffin never touched them. My two eldest brothers, (One from America and one from Canada) made sure my mother's funeral was done the right way and with help from other members of the family such as my uncles and aunts, gave my mother a proper funeral.<br />
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Paul being the ganja smoker that he was and my father being the drunkard bad word cussing sinner that he was, would not have been churched at Elder Davis' church as Paul handn't been to church since he was a baby and I doubt my father had ever been at all, maybe only to get married to my mother. When he was drunk enough, he often cursed my mother for going to Elder Davis church.<br />
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From what I heard, Paul's bredren, Doozier, who had been in Westmoreland with him, had something to do with his death. It goes without saying that Doozier is not one of my favourite persons either.Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-4803148583944875512011-03-20T11:28:00.000-07:002011-07-22T02:24:08.034-07:00Winston's Two Dollars, Missing the Bus and Getting Some Rhatid Licks!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivChdv1KWcjC7NsTena941ZozeYiJYd2eifYIhDtNoILUCjP_tQR-o9Qcm91cNyhUAlmqNoxGuXzAHc7VpCUclgWtrzV_gG3BkuIFMOa2Z3UOuomw2bh-RyZ_vopr8w7KM4DKUrHKiPro/s1600/SCHOOL+KIDS+-+LEAD+PIC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivChdv1KWcjC7NsTena941ZozeYiJYd2eifYIhDtNoILUCjP_tQR-o9Qcm91cNyhUAlmqNoxGuXzAHc7VpCUclgWtrzV_gG3BkuIFMOa2Z3UOuomw2bh-RyZ_vopr8w7KM4DKUrHKiPro/s320/SCHOOL+KIDS+-+LEAD+PIC.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><b>My brother Winston and I were close for a lot of different reasons. </b>He was short, I was short, he had a bad temper and I am known to lose mine at the drop of a hat.<br />
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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).<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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!<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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!!<br />
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<b>School Yard Bullying</b><br />
I dearly loved my brother Winston despite the licks he would run me dung or sneak up on me and give me regularly (and that bwoy's hand was heavy!) because if it weren't for him, I would not have been able to take the Grade Nine Achievement Test and become the only one of my mother's 13 children to attend high school as well as university. A distinction that saddened me even as I felt pride.<br />
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I had missed taking the Common Entrance Examination, (which is what it was called then before it became GSAT) because I was never enrolled in one All Age or Primary School long enough to be signed up for the exam. In fact, I don't recall any knowledge of Common Entrance until years later, when I was in high school and heard my friends talking about it.<br />
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For a likkle pickney who was being shunted from aunt, to two perfect strangers whose children were grown and wanted a little girl to keep them company, I guess the emphasis was more on surviving the bewildering changes and trying to adjust to different lifestyles and different households rather than on life after all age school.<br />
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My mother's church sister, Miss Daphne (God rest her soul) worked with a lady in the JAMAL office in Montego Bay named Miss Wilson. Apparently, Miss Wilson and her husband lived alone as their four children were grown. Three lived in the United States and one in Montego Bay. According to Ms. Daphne who was my mother's distant cousin, Mister and Mrs. Wilson wanted a little girl to keep them company.<br />
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After church one Sunday, she convinced my mother to give me away to the people who I had never even met!<br />
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My mother, concerned that I she wasn't able to send me to school as often as she would have wanted to, tried to make me see the wisdom of going to live with two strangers.<br />
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"Christine, at least you will get to go to school," she reasoned.<br />
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At 11 years old I mustered all the courage I could, put on a brave face, gave my mother a brilliant smile and agreed. I loved school and looked forward to going to school more, hopefully with lunch money.<br />
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To be honest, there were rough periods of adjustment, of missing my over crowded but loving home in Belfont, of missing my brothers and sister and cousins.<br />
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For the three and a half years I lived with the Wilsons; I missed Belfont and the sound of the river and my mother, father, brothers and sisters and cousins, every single day. I even missed Boy, a mad man who lived in a cave near Uncle Hugh's house and used to run us down almost every evening on the way from school when we used to aim stones at his pot pon fire.<br />
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But overall, living with Mr. and Mrs. Wilson it wasn't all that bad.<br />
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I survived it. I learned a lot. I saw and used flush toilet for the first time and got to read an entire library of books at the Goodwill All Age School in two years. I also read every single book in the Miss Wilson's book case including a Tale of Two Cities, that her children, all of whom had attended high schools, had left behind.<br />
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My mother kept up a steady stream of letters via the post office and visited me a few times. I also went back home during some holidays, but leaving my family to go back to the couple and their big empty house was always hard.<br />
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When Mrs. Wilson sent me home to my mother for good in January smack in the middle of grade nine at Goodwill All Age School and resumed attending Catadupa All Age for the umpteeth time, the principal at the time, smart man that he was, realised that I was close to graduating from school with no options of continuing my education.<br />
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By then, I had become a celebrity of sorts at Catadupa All Age School. My friends got used to me disappearing and reappearing without warning in the middle of school terms.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8jLisOPw5T0rEN-Vp0v1xQqoQD2kPMt3xEtYp1qlpRZrqzkTT5Gh-O57bcUOh_kCd-wSTMW1gEbZnBDN8Jri67o1-Re7E94SjQM4feH6Wl15Inf0QTlNRhGFYmi7u9LLMvxZxn9WsDao/s1600/ja+sch+kids+on+play+ground.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8jLisOPw5T0rEN-Vp0v1xQqoQD2kPMt3xEtYp1qlpRZrqzkTT5Gh-O57bcUOh_kCd-wSTMW1gEbZnBDN8Jri67o1-Re7E94SjQM4feH6Wl15Inf0QTlNRhGFYmi7u9LLMvxZxn9WsDao/s320/ja+sch+kids+on+play+ground.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>They would just gather round to hear my latest stories of where last I had been, as they had lived in Catadupa all there lives, while I had been to Kingston to live and come back about two or three times and Montego Bay once. (well really Chatham, near Goodwill, a few miles out of Montego Bay, but why complicate the story telling with all those little details? Right?)<br />
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Of course, it was All Age School! Not everyone was going to love me, and I had my fair share of bad mind, grudgeful pickneys, who just could not stand me!<br />
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The fact that I used to speaky spokey and with a twang or two added, (speak proper English and with an accent sometimes) did not help matters much! And to this day I thank my best friend Monica Coates, or Buggu as she was called (not sure how she got that name, but please feel free to speculate! ewwww! lol) for cushioning a lot of the verbal blows, some of which lead to furious fist fights and grab ups down by the ball grung (school play field).<br />
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Monica and I are still friends, although she curses me regularly for not keeping in touch as much as she would like me to.<br />
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So Monica, who was tall and big for her age, for some reason took a liking to me and would always have her friendship ready and waiting whenever I would turn back up at Catadupa All Age unannounced. Is it any wonder that at break and lunch time I would make sure I was in her company?<br />
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"Unno lef di pickney alone man!" she would yell to bad mind Novelette Blythe and my cousin Joy when they would start to tease me and call me stooshie. "So what is she talk good and brite? Di wholla unno just bad mind man! Cho!" she would continue dismissively. "Come yaah Andrea, no pay dem no mine!" she would comfort me. Yep! Monica Coates was my hero! (heroine)<br />
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<b>Missing the Bus</b><br />
So the school principal, Mister Barton, (who used to lick hot u see!) realised that I had not taken the Common Entrance Exam in Grade five or six as I should have and sent to tell my mother that he would be signing me up for the Grade Nine Achievement Test.<br />
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The test was similar to the Common Entrance Exam and gave all age or primary school children in Jamaica who had either not sit the Common Entrance exam, or had sat it but failed, the opportunity to move on to High School to continue their education.<br />
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As luck would have it, I had arrived back at Catadupa All Age a few weeks before the deadline for submission of names for the exam and Mr. Barton knowing that I was very bright, took it upon himself to register me to sit it. (The exam has been discontinued by the Ministry of Education).<br />
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Well, like I explained in my first blog post, <a href="http://thelongwayhome-andreadowner.blogspot.com/2011/03/borrowed-dream.html"><b>"A Borrowed Dream"</b></a><b> </b>We lived far from school, So far, that when we spoke about it, we would say we lived<b> furrrr. </b>That means well far!<br />
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Mister Barton had chartered Desrick's bus to take those grade nine students who had been selected to sit the Grade Nine Achievement Test to Montego Bay to the exam centre.<br />
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My mother had already sent to tell Teacher Barton as we used to call him, that she had no money to pay my fare and he had agreed to allow me to travel on the bus anyway.<br />
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Only the names of the brightest grade nine students who the Principal and teachers felt had a good chance of passing the exam were sent to the Ministry of Education. The school did not want to be shamed by excessively low exam grades and took pride in academic achievement. As poor people with very few means of self actualization, education and academic achievement were the hallmarks for distinction and recognition int those days.<br />
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My mother had made it clear that she had no money to give me for lunch, but that did not deter me. Armed with the two yellow pencils she had truss (buy on credit) from Mass Maxie's shop and with the two fried dumplins and tea she had given me for breakfast in my belly, I headed up the road to catch the bus.<br />
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Well, by the time I hurried over Fletcher's hill, pass Miss Christie's house, tell Aunt Dor and Aunt Nenen morning and stopped to listen the words of encouragement from them, hurried through the pass to the train line, walked over the bridge and then back on to the road beside the church in front of Miss Gracie's house, pass Miss Doris and Uncle Hugh's house, pass Miss Daphne shop then down into the sink where the river ran under the road and up to Nasty Lane and finally reach the school yard, I was told that the bus had just left!<br />
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Imagine my disappointment!<br />
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I could not turn around and go back home! Everybody I had just passed who knew I was going to take the exam that day would wonder where I was going so quick! And I did not want to disappoint my mother who had been amazed but proud of my determination to go sit the exam all the way in Montego Bay without lunch money!<br />
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Well they said the bus had 'just' left and since Desrick lived in the square just below the school, I hoped he might have stopped at home for a minute before heading to Montego Bay. I didn't stop to think further, I took off running. When I rounded the corner after I passed the infant school, the square in front of Desrick's shop was empty! I figured I might as well keep going and hopefully I just might catch up with the bus.<br />
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I ran and walked the more than 6 miles to Marchmont road via Catadupa, which was the opposite direction I had came, taking the few shortcuts I could but I did not catch up with the bus.<br />
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When I arrived in Marchmont Road square huffing and puffing and sweating, my heart pounding in my chest, my throat and mouth parched and disappointment flooding my chest, I remembered that just as I was passing the roses tree on my way out the yard, my brother Winston had said to me:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqjVDPYcrLQdbUBmbf14vT7IB1M9eWwT9AsgdCG6EE3oaAdYW3fz0iWweapTZhRP7FfD0Jgu_hOISFcJkstIK3g8bng5OdrfMvT2Z9SUFcQvDTxwlPd5yzCs1SfOd3V85tEsyt1XyWG80/s1600/jamaican-two-dollar-bill+-+BACK+AND+FRONT.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="188" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqjVDPYcrLQdbUBmbf14vT7IB1M9eWwT9AsgdCG6EE3oaAdYW3fz0iWweapTZhRP7FfD0Jgu_hOISFcJkstIK3g8bng5OdrfMvT2Z9SUFcQvDTxwlPd5yzCs1SfOd3V85tEsyt1XyWG80/s200/jamaican-two-dollar-bill+-+BACK+AND+FRONT.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>"Whey u a go? Exam? Then you have money?" When I shook my head, no, he had dipped into his pants pocket and handed me a crumpled two dollar bill which I had stuffed into the pocket of my uniform.<br />
<br />
I had forgotten the two dollars until then. I took it out of my pocket and stared at it with grateful reverence and joy.<br />
<br />
Bus fare!! Hallelujah! I screamed in my mind.<br />
<br />
Never mind that the times I had gone to Montego Bay on my way to and from Ms. Wilson's house in Chatham had been with my mother and I had trudged beside and behind her blindly, too overwhelmed by the big city sights to note and retain any landmarks; I had bus fare, I was at the bus stop, now all I needed was a bus.<br />
<br />
Soon one came and I hopped on board, making sure to tell the driver and conductor my plight. All I knew was that the exam was being held at Senior High School (Now St. James High). They tried to tell me where it was.<br />
<br />
"Ohh! that a near Jarrett Park man! Easy fi fine!" they assured me.<br />
<br />
Oh yeah!? I thought dubiously, we will see.<br />
<br />
I sat with my heart in my throat the entire journey to Montego Bay, anxious for the bus to get there. The exam would start at 9:30am. It was a little past 8:00am when I got into the bus. I made it to Montego Bay a little past nine and with plenty instructions from everyone I saw, I managed to find the school.<br />
<br />
When I hurried into the school yard, my friends and some other students were standing around talking. The exam began shortly after I arrived. I had spent $1.50 for my bus fare and used the remaining fifty cents to buy some icy mints and a pack of sandwich biscuit at lunch time.<br />
<br />
I passed the exam for Garvey Maceo Comprehensive High School in Clarendon, but due to the indignation of my Aunt Effie, who I had lived with for a few years when I was growing up, I ended up at Kingston Technical High School instead.<br />
<br />
When my mother sent her the book list asking her to assist with buying some of the itemes which included a machete and water boots (the school had a strong agricultural component) she declared:<br />
<br />
"My niece too bright fi put on water boot and go chop bush! Dem mad? I am not buying anything on that list! Send her come to me, I will get her into a good school before September." And she did.<br />
<br />
When I got back home and told my mother and my brothers how the bus had left me and how I found my own way to Montego Bay and took the exam, my mother was incredulous but proud. Winston on the other hand, simply gloated.<br />
<br />
"You seet doah! You can't stand me and talk bout how you no like me cause mi love beat you, and if it wasn't for my two dollars, you couldn't teck the exam! A mi save you! Yuh fi tank mi!"<br />
<br />
I had to agree, but that didn't prevent me from telling him my mind whenever he would annoy me. By then he had stopped beating me as I had gotten big, but would always try to win me in our frequent arguments.<br />
<br />
It was Winston's eternal meddling that also ensured that when my father died so suddenly, he and I were on speaking terms.<br />
<br />
When my father was found dead, face down in Belfont river with crayfish feasting on his upper lip, (<a href="http://thelongwayhome-andreadowner.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-summady-fi-juss-dead-so-if-only.html">Please refer to Blog Post #3: "Somebody Can Just Dead So?!"</a>) I was in the middle of my adolescence life crisis. I wanted to do what I wanted to do, and my father who by that time was miraculously sober sometimes, (things had gotten tough, he was no longer helping Mass Campbell to butcher cows, as the business had closed down) so he had less money to spend on rum.<br />
<br />
Alas! He was sober enough to noticed that I was doing a lot of running around on the streets at nights with my cousin Karen and a clique of girls, Eloreen and her two cousins, who most people thought were not the best company for anyone to keep.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit5iZKVG7yTAT4foplUPIA_8WY7hvkY4JSlXxMmZHOEEkx1E16FUWpNdfIliCyEPzet25VU-pJflwRiO8Ds1KsVGFTeNQwfR-MqvISXgNYHw5DfnJnsftOVU7JKVajpC5p8R88XWiuB5U/s1600/jacan+street+dances.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit5iZKVG7yTAT4foplUPIA_8WY7hvkY4JSlXxMmZHOEEkx1E16FUWpNdfIliCyEPzet25VU-pJflwRiO8Ds1KsVGFTeNQwfR-MqvISXgNYHw5DfnJnsftOVU7JKVajpC5p8R88XWiuB5U/s320/jacan+street+dances.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Elo and her cousins seemed alright to me and the most we would do was walk far, far to street dances in neigbouring communities, buss the latest dances, give some trouble and make up whole heap of noise pon road a night time to make the journey back home seem shorter.<br />
<br />
My Father, mother and brothers (especially Winston) constantly reminded me that I had gone all the way to Kingston to attend high school, then come back to Belfont and attended community college in Montego Bay, had gotten a 'nice, nice, job at Water Commission while holding down a big job on weekends at the Airport.'<br />
<br />
Elo and her cousins on the other hand, had not been further than St. Leonard's All Age and Cambridge High School and had not worked a day in their lives. My mother and father and brothers were concerned that they would help 'turn me wutless'.<br />
<br />
Things came to a head with my father, (who had never reprimanded me before a day in his life!) told me to stop keeping company with the girls and stop walking so late at night on the dark roads as a young girl had been recently raped in another district. I felt invincible and besides, we always walked together, which boy inna dem right mind woulda try rape we? Afta dem no mad!<br />
<br />
But my father was concerned about my safety and well-being. A bar above Marchmont Road had been held up by gunmen while he was in there playing dominoes and drinking a few months before as well. The bartender and owner had been robbed and shot in her side. These two incidents in the usually quiet districts shook everybody up.<br />
<br />
One evening when me and Eloreen them were dressed to the nines and trying to figure out which direction to head in, my father called me away from my friends in big, big Marchie square one evening and repeated his demands quite loudly and angrily, trowing in a few derogatory words aimed at my girlfriends right in front of everybody.<br />
<br />
I was embarassed and incredibly ashamed.<br />
<br />
"Christine!! Christine!" he bellowed, sufficiently sober for his voice to carry far, "How much time mi fi talk to you 'bout the same thing? Mi no tell you say you fi stop walk up and down pon street with them careless girl deh!?"<br />
<br />
Shocked that my father had dared talk to me like that, and so publicly, (he was usually an exceptionally quiet man) I promptly stopped talking to him. In fact, I had only started talking back to him on my visit to Belfont for the week end, during my one month orientation for my new job with the Jamaica Telephone company.<br />
<br />
Thus, I owed Winston debt number two for being the one to convince me to talk back to my father. Never being one to keep his opinions to himself, he reminded me that Eustace was my father and while he had his wutless ways, I should respect him and his opinions.<br />
<br />
He suggested that I mend fences with him and for once in my life, I listened. My father and I sat under the mango tree in front of my brother's Earl shop the day before I was to take the train to return to Kingston and had a nice enough talk. He asked me how the new work was going, I told him it was going fine, he told me about his cows and so we 'mended fences'.<br />
<br />
The next morning he carried some soft yams to give to me to take to Kingston with me. I gave him some money, rubbed his head (we were not a family that hugged,) and I never saw him alive again.<br />
<br />
So when everybody in Belfont was casting around for clues as to who could have killed my father, I was one of the most vehement among them.<br />
<br />
My father's sudden unexplained death was painful, very painful, and it didn't help that it appeared that some one with whom I had grown up, might have killed him.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiGEiaNVOWyNf7zvLok3ufn4YKWOCnRVDDR0f_X7ceg5VnlxJMFvV0P8BPVbmaAvZUiu9OeyzS73dM31WlPcS-st3l8aX2KrPTsrKiQzZFvs31O2X3if1G9fUs-nQ_VTo_GqyYINjtKIQ/s1600/old+woman+in+yard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiGEiaNVOWyNf7zvLok3ufn4YKWOCnRVDDR0f_X7ceg5VnlxJMFvV0P8BPVbmaAvZUiu9OeyzS73dM31WlPcS-st3l8aX2KrPTsrKiQzZFvs31O2X3if1G9fUs-nQ_VTo_GqyYINjtKIQ/s400/old+woman+in+yard.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-16008837705681283892011-03-18T11:19:00.000-07:002011-03-20T15:19:15.695-07:00Somebody Can Just Dead So? - If Only Fish Could Talk!<div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizGMyO0w0JrQ5RoF1SzzRCEgPKHBquGtfmSmBBfjT_6FFMPgsqnHmyq07kQJlx2bCDXQoBtM20okcNhceOo6fvoKRrgv0juWLt3uvcn_yaDEhC0-8HmEo4zMnW9SfA3Xc-fTpJjVpUMVo/s1600/YAM+BASKET+-+FAR.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizGMyO0w0JrQ5RoF1SzzRCEgPKHBquGtfmSmBBfjT_6FFMPgsqnHmyq07kQJlx2bCDXQoBtM20okcNhceOo6fvoKRrgv0juWLt3uvcn_yaDEhC0-8HmEo4zMnW9SfA3Xc-fTpJjVpUMVo/s320/YAM+BASKET+-+FAR.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><b>There is a Jamaican saying,</b> or maybe it's Caribbean, <i>"If fish come from riva battam and tell you say dung deh deep, believe him!"</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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!<br />
<br />
<b>Catching Crayfish in the River</b><br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
So back to the crayfish soup.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Dem days the only seasoning was salt. The crayfish and any little green bananas we could find were the only other ingredients. If we cut off any of the bananas from the bunch my mother had leaning against the fire side, we made sure we took the smaller, baby ones near the top of the bunch that she would not miss.<br />
<br />
The soups were cooked in either condensed cans (the empty tins that condensed milk comes in), when we only managed to catch a few fish, or cheese pans when we had caught a whole heap of fish that day.<br />
<br />
The baskets we used to catch the crayfish were made from thin bamboo strips. They were the pride and joy of the owners and belonged to anybody in Belfont careless enough to leave them outside after returning from grung with them. The baskets were used to carry ground provisions from the farms and also to carry anything to be planted to the farms which in Belfont and many Jamaican rural districts, were called grungs, the Jamaican word for ground which makes perfect sense when you stop to think about it!<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbe_x67nTn81TxSaWgM75rhASIEWI5XQH4cg-R-2eWeZkorK9-C72TeM2Ln1rM82D5Y5mNMtFfeoZFxJzbM7Djqd5gpcmAEyy-_4gKWf7ccRixZKQeD0dAH3QE3NLSh-mNNVOH4oC5sss/s1600/basket+with+fiah.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="144" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbe_x67nTn81TxSaWgM75rhASIEWI5XQH4cg-R-2eWeZkorK9-C72TeM2Ln1rM82D5Y5mNMtFfeoZFxJzbM7Djqd5gpcmAEyy-_4gKWf7ccRixZKQeD0dAH3QE3NLSh-mNNVOH4oC5sss/s200/basket+with+fiah.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br />
Now, no adult liked when we used their grung baskets to catch fish as the water from the river would weaken the bamboo strips making them mash up quick! The price for a grung basket was plenty money in those days and for people who only farmed to feed themselves, that was a whole heap of money! Their grung baskets were treasures, rivalled only by the yellow, soft or haffu yams they would place in them before hoisting them on their heads and making their way over rivers spanned by makeshift bamboo bridges, hurrying to reach home before rain to cook dinner.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKWY0aXTdE5Ji0W52phAngIyG7kb7Lq7QaxYvGMwTiKSHdpCyXB48gf8ByDzZf-QT28iBv8qBscSX5fSPF2TTH5B5bpw-xuvNDm9zyt4642TjpcztzHWDFqav-QnYIrxW9pazoIfMYnQM/s1600/WOMAN+WITH+BANANAS+ON+HEAD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="143" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKWY0aXTdE5Ji0W52phAngIyG7kb7Lq7QaxYvGMwTiKSHdpCyXB48gf8ByDzZf-QT28iBv8qBscSX5fSPF2TTH5B5bpw-xuvNDm9zyt4642TjpcztzHWDFqav-QnYIrxW9pazoIfMYnQM/s200/WOMAN+WITH+BANANAS+ON+HEAD.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>Yams were the main things carried in the baskets, as they bruised easily. Other ground provisions like sweet potatoes, pumpkin and ockras were carried home in crocus bags slung over shoulders. Bananas were simply hoisted onto heads on kattas made from banana bush or leaves and carried by the bunch.<br />
<br />
"A hope a no mi basket unno carry go a riva go ketch fish enno!" my mother would yell when she spied us huddled around the fire in the outside kitchen making crayfish soup.<br />
<br />
Our unisoned "No mama!" if even not convincing, would be confirmed by the sight of her grung basket dry as chip, still leaning against the roses tree in front of the kitchen where she had left it. Now Cow Son or Dada would have different stories! They had no children, so could not run dung anybody to beat when they found their grung baskets soaking wet and sometimes with gaping holes in the sides where the force of the water rushing out had burst them when we hoisted the baskets out the riva fast, fast, to prevent the small crayfish dem from escaping.<br />
<br />
By the time they made the rounds of parents to complain and got to our mothers when they bucked them up at Mass Maxie shop or over Miss Fan's house or down a river, we eat dem deh cray fish long time and was busy hunting guava in bushes to full we belly until the whole basket argument cool down and we could risk 'borrowing' another one to go round up some more crayfish.<br />
<br />
"Well, I haven't eaten crayfish since my father's death and now that I stop to think of it, maybe them schwims (shrimps) that I bought on King Street in Kingston when I was in first form at Kingston Technical High School which gave me the worst colic I have ever had in my life was a premonition of my father's death and the horrible injustice done to his upper lip by Belfont Riva crayfish them!<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLWSnJw1PiBJAa9nWRQojjSxurYzPFhz9nW-TPfI9HdhO_KwO_I4JtqeYJSSjcKRB5ZQmC-IkyZ7HIyzCbh2UoTdBvVJGRD4oVTbbm3lOew-j-DJjNxyjZV-TQK4s04_sWZFxDbMQx6i8/s1600/SHRIMP+SELLERS.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLWSnJw1PiBJAa9nWRQojjSxurYzPFhz9nW-TPfI9HdhO_KwO_I4JtqeYJSSjcKRB5ZQmC-IkyZ7HIyzCbh2UoTdBvVJGRD4oVTbbm3lOew-j-DJjNxyjZV-TQK4s04_sWZFxDbMQx6i8/s320/SHRIMP+SELLERS.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jamaican Shrimp Vendors</td></tr>
</tbody></table>I never bought schwims from those vendors again, I suspected the lady probably had the schwims dem for days as sales was slow and sold me stale schimps to almost kill me off. I swore off schimps from then after spending an entire night on the toilet seat and retching into a chimmy at the same time. Colic is the most terrible affliction, ask anybody who has ever had colic!<br />
<br />
Colic I believe is the body's violent reaction to stale or spoiled food ingested. The simultaneous, repeated vomiting and bowel movement is the body's frenzied attempt to expel the offending matter.<br />
<br />
So when the crayfish dem do mi fadda so bad, mi already neva like dem from mawnin!<br />
<br />
My final memories of my father were of him lying under the cruel glare of a bright strobe light, his teeth grinning obscenely to the sky or rather, the hospital room ceiling. After the first horrified look, I made sure not to look again, but felt confident in telling the doctor that it was indeed my father, from the bright green shirt and faded jeans pants he was wearing. I also recognised the soles of his feet, which were encrusted and hard. As far as I can recall, my father rarely, if ever, wore shoes.<br />
<br />
I hurried out of the room before the doctor could cut my father open and she, the kind lady that she appeared to be, allowed me to stumble to the door, my eyes blinded by hot tears, before she made her incision.<br />
<br />
I finally found the door, yanked it open and stood, staring with unseeing eyes in the direction of the houses over by Cornwall Gardens beside the hospital. As I fought back the tears, bitter thoughts flooded my mind and an awful feeling of loss and a yawning emptiness settled in my stomach.<br />
<br />
I think it was then that it finally hit me; my father was well and truly dead.<br />
<br />
No way was he going to ever come back now! Certainly not after the doctor used the short, very sharp looking knife she had positioned below his neck, just above his chest to cut him open down the middle.<br />
<br />
<b>Three Jobs at The Same Time at 22 years old</b><br />
I had been away in Kingston when my father died. On the final leg of my required orientation period after getting a job at Telephone Company of Jamaica just a few months before. It was my second full time job after leaving the Montego Bay Community College where I had gone to study for one year after I graduated from Kingston Technical High School (KT) and returned home to Belfont.<br />
<br />
I had worked at the Water Commission's (NWC) office at Bogue in Montego Bay after I left Comm. College and while there, I applied for and got two part time jobs. One working as a customer service representative on week ends at a ground handlers airline, Ajas Ltd. Ajas handled check in and operations for mainly chartered flights into Montego Bay and a few private planes.<br />
<br />
The airline also had a cargo service which was a huge part of its operations and which generated a significant part of it's income. A lot of stories circulated about clandestine drug running opportunities and activities especially at Ajas' cargo, but poor innocent me from Belfont had no clue about the sinister implications of those rumours at the time.<br />
<br />
While I was holding down those two jobs, Irie FM, Jamaica's first radio station to have 24 hour broadcasting of only reggae music, was just taking off.<br />
<br />
In an island where reggae was the cultural voice of the grass roots people, Irie FM was like water to parched tongues.<br />
<br />
I remember in the days when I would walk down Church Street in Montego Bay's town centre which was and still is small like mi hand miggle, small bad! (where you would run into the same person 10 times in half an hour), I would hear Irie FM blasting from every taxi window, the multiplying effect making it seem like one giant radio was blasting reggae music nonstop!<br />
<br />
The radio station capitalised on its early mass appeal and popularity and spun people's reactions to its refreshing programming approach and content into humourous, catchy jingles that helped to establish the station's brand presence.<br />
<br />
Irie FM emerged at the top of the all island media survey with the most listernership after only a few years.<br />
<br />
At a time when radio programming was very traditional and predictable, Irie FM's emergence truly reflected '<i><b>the heart beat of the people,'</b></i> (another tag line). The radio station appealed to a mainly grass roots audience, including ghetto and country youths who were musically talented but were not being given many opportunities in the very competitive local music industry.<br />
<br />
Irie FM changed all that and gave young artistes a chance fi buss. <b>'</b><i><b>Revolutionizing radio</b>.'</i> (Another tag line)<br />
<br />
Poor people began to hear themselves on radio instead of Allan Magnus, Dorraine Samuels or Marie Garth with the Colgate Cavity Fighters Club. When they turned on their radio,they were able to hear their own voices or that of their relatives or friends, blasting on a riddim over airwaves.<br />
<br />
Irie FM basically took off like a rocket!<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNQAD7CQuWADFq412ULrlGswewfCAGohUD0FNcU1gCOfbxTbf-5PwpUu6CVLwKQy0X6ilr6yDVBFaYaeMrHLQ13oKCgPNxUKVkr3016aiz2pYQA1n0kY8tGRdr5Mr5yEW9CYtvBgZHg2w/s1600/PINEAPPLE+FARMER.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNQAD7CQuWADFq412ULrlGswewfCAGohUD0FNcU1gCOfbxTbf-5PwpUu6CVLwKQy0X6ilr6yDVBFaYaeMrHLQ13oKCgPNxUKVkr3016aiz2pYQA1n0kY8tGRdr5Mr5yEW9CYtvBgZHg2w/s200/PINEAPPLE+FARMER.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>While doing the one year business course at the Montego Bay Community College, I had done my compulsory internship at The Gleaner's Western Bureau<b>.</b><br />
<br />
My first article was published in the Gleaner then. (A short story I had written while I was in high school, was published in the Sunday Gleaner while I was in first form, but that's a whole different story for another blog post.)<br />
<br />
My internship at the Gleaner had fueled my love of writing.<br />
<br />
Having decided at 14 that I wanted to become a journalist, I was still alert for any possibilities to work in media although I was employed at Telephone Company as a Clerk/Typist and had performed the same duties at my first job at National Water Commission and was doing something entirely different at the airport.<br />
<br />
While working at Telephone Company in 1993 on my way to buy patty and coco bread in the patty shop in front of Home Town Supermarket one day for lunch, I spied the Irie FM sign above a door to the side of the super market building and resolutely mounted the stairs to make my job pitch.<br />
<br />
The lady who was branch manager at the time, listened to me, but told me that all the news correspondents positions were filled but they were hunting for sales reps. Well, if it meant I would be working for the hippest radio station at the time, of course! So I took the part time advertising sales position.<br />
<br />
That is how, at about 22 years old, I had three jobs at one time.<br />
<br />
Well, when my father died the year before in 1992, I had only one job at the time and was in Kingston being trained to take up my position in Montego Bay. So I wasn't even in Belfont when he was found dead.<br />
<br />
I was <b>not</b> among the crowd that gathered incredulously to peer over the high bridge/culvert to where he lay wedged, face down, between two rock stones.<br />
<br />
I did <b>not</b> get to see who from the district walked through the bushes to that unused part of the river to turn him over and helped to lift and take his body out of the river and place it on the roadside on a sheet of zinc.<br />
<br />
<b>Watching the Dead, An All Night Vigil</b><br />
I <b>wasn't</b> there to keep my mother's and my brother Earl's company when as night wore on, the people in the district moved away one by one to go home, leaving them alone to watch over my father's body.<br />
<br />
My mother was fearful that if it was left alone, dogs would feast on it, finishing the task the dreadful crayfish had started.<br />
<br />
I wasn't there, but when I did get home two days after on the week end; I listened in silent horror and disbelief as Earl, the talker that he was, bitterly confided that Miss Roada, whose verandah light was the only one near enough to where my father's body was, had turned off the light when she went to bed, plunging the entire area into pitch black darkness. She had said no when she was asked if my father's body could be placed on her verandah until morning.<br />
<br />
The bulb from Miss Roada's verandah had beamed on my brother and my mother and made the night seem less scary, especially after everyone else went home and the two of them waited for morning to arrive.<br />
<br />
Those days and even now, no piped water or street lights were in Belfont. Electricity had arrived in the district but only some people had light.<br />
<br />
I don't remember if I passed and told Miss Roada howdy from that day! She is dead now so I can pass her house and hold my head straight with a clear conscience. But knowing how I hold on tight to a grudge, I don't think she got any more howdy dos from me before she died!<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Our house was too far up the road to carry my father's body to. Besides, the road was very bad and if people weren't willing to stay and help watch his body, you think them would help to lift it up and carry it so far? Then there would be problems again to carry it back down when transportation came to take it to the morgue. Because, right where my father was found dead is exactly where almost every car that came to Belfont reach and stop as the road was too bad for any driver with any sense to try to go any further. Everybody walked from there.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">As the evening turned to night, (Miss Bibby Joy had found my father's body after four o'clock the Thursday evening) everybody began to realise that the vehicle wasn't coming to take Blood anywhere that night.</div><br />
My brother eventually convinced my mother to go home long past midnight to try to get some rest. She later told me that she did not sleep a wink that night, but lay awake looking at the ceiling. Her husband and father to nine of her 13 children had just been found dead in the river. I imagine she had a lot to think about that night. They hadn't lived together for a long time before his death, but he was still her husband and she was responsible for burying him.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNqRRaYZsMmC5MCrVPkQD3m74h9h2JD1ko9aUKpJLFmjc4s0Ya2pr8s0GXO3xplu4_yDeXEkbS3xL4Cwsbsqoqk6VjISIAzR0kYDaygJ6SuQY2yQbwrgwMc0umubQHlBBHzh088yeMZI0/s1600/banana%257Es600x600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNqRRaYZsMmC5MCrVPkQD3m74h9h2JD1ko9aUKpJLFmjc4s0Ya2pr8s0GXO3xplu4_yDeXEkbS3xL4Cwsbsqoqk6VjISIAzR0kYDaygJ6SuQY2yQbwrgwMc0umubQHlBBHzh088yeMZI0/s320/banana%257Es600x600.jpg" width="270" /></a>Earl told me that after my mother left, he sat on the concrete wall that ran along side of the river, right across from where my father had fallen to his death and tried to hurry the night along by just wishing day would light out quick, quick, quick!<br />
<br />
Earl was a brave soul, because he was sitting with the body of my father right across from the pass that led to Mass Wedderburn's house. I guess just a few hours after my father's body had been found, Mass Wedderburn's duppy may not have been the prime suspect yet, people were just frightened and puzzled.<br />
<br />
But the duppy had been discussed, as my father had only buried Mass Wedderburn the day before and since nobody could figure out how my father had died, it wasn't hard for the rural people to put two and two together.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>I am not sure if Mass Wedderburn was on Earl's mind as he prayed for day to light out, but I imagine that a freshly dead duppy could perform only so many murders for the week and as far as we knew, Mass Wedderburn and Earl never had anything between them. Mass Wedderburn would go to Earl's shop to buy things from time to time, Earl would sell him, give him back his change and that was that.<br />
<br />
Earl made it through the dark night without incident. The hearse driven by a man known only as G, did not arrive to collect my father's body until after 10 o'clock the next morning after many messages were sent to Cambridge to him. He had a contract to collect bodies for Madden's Funeral Parlour for people who died in Belfont and some other nearby districts.<br />
<br />
I was incensed when I heard what he said when the first message reached him about my father's death.<br />
<br />
"Well him done dead aready! Him naah go no whey! Blood affi wait until mawnin before me go fi him!"<br />
<br />
<b>The Autopsy - More Questions Than Answers</b><br />
So there I was a few weeks after my father's death seeing him for the first time since I had given him some money and left for Kingston (I had come home for the weekend); his upper lip missing and his lifeless body about to be cut open by a lady doctor at the Cornwall Regional Hospital morgue.<br />
<br />
However, the autopsy didn't help solve the mystery of my father's death as we expected. The doctor sat me down after she was finished and she and I had a frank discussion.<br />
<br />
She appeared very puzzled about what could have killed my father, but she did rule out drowning.<br />
<br />
"There was a some liquid present in his lungs, but not enough to drown him," she stated. " However, he did get a hit in his forehead with enough force that his forehead caved in and almost touched his brain," she continued.<br />
<br />
No police was present at the autopsy. It never became an official murder investigation.<br />
<br />
I was the only person at the autopsy. I guess this was my penance for having been absent for the gruesome find and the subsequent all night vigil to watch his body from the district dogs. I had no problem doing it alone. It felt good to be alone with my grief and I felt that my brothers, especially Earl and my mother had been through enough.<br />
<br />
Everybody knew that I had gone to witness my father's autopsy so the questions started as soon as I alighted from the minibus in Marchmont Road square. The answers the doctor gave me and which I shared were not very helpful. The death certificate cited cause of death as 'Death due to blunt trauma to the forehead'.<br />
<br />
The people in Belfont were not buying it.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqMoEpxaXhRKEjqBF1m5hXi3XvNa3crIRns0DZavn5COAfhi47hRomN3ox31VsProSq8hvNgM_3JEuCTm_qsbIW8n2dkMKl3vtBIvPGfJip4QiTfXfb8-bGYAc86-zuoAQt77XIXZe_Ow/s1600/FIRE+SIDE.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="304" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqMoEpxaXhRKEjqBF1m5hXi3XvNa3crIRns0DZavn5COAfhi47hRomN3ox31VsProSq8hvNgM_3JEuCTm_qsbIW8n2dkMKl3vtBIvPGfJip4QiTfXfb8-bGYAc86-zuoAQt77XIXZe_Ow/s320/FIRE+SIDE.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>The fireside of an outside kitchen. Note the condense cans<br />
on the ready to boil eggs or a draw a cup of tea or cook some </b><br />
<b>crayfish soup. </b><b> A cheese tin is also beside one of the milk tins </b><br />
<b>near the pudding pan. </b><b>You have to look closely to see it! :)</b></td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<b>More Suspicions</b><br />
"Look here! If somebody did lick Blood inna him forehead, the man would have died with him hand dem raise up so!" one person offered, gesticulating furiously to drive home his point.<br />
<br />
"And pon top of that, (furthermore,) the half a bread that Earl did sell him did still under him arm! That means him neva did a try defen' himself!! Wish man ago see a man a go lick dem inna dem face and no raise up dem han' or try to fi do nuttin fi defen' himself?!," someone else asked incredulously with a lot of aggrieved teeth kissing.<br />
<br />
I was just as puzzled and so the mystery surrounding my father's death deepened.<br />
<br />
Even if I had gone back to Belfont and borrowed<br />
somebody's grung basket and go down a riva go start turn over rock stones fi meck fish run out, fish cannot talk. So although they may have been the only witnesses and apparent accessory to my father's death, they could provide no answers at the time.<br />
<br />
Besides Mass Wedderburn's duppy, <b><a href="http://thelongwayhome-andreadowner.blogspot.com/2011/03/river-runs-through-it.html">(Please refer to blog post below for more details or click THIS link.)</a> </b>two other convincing, if not as popular theories of what or who killed my father, were also explored by the district 'jury'.<br />
<br />
Belfont was is a very quiet place, where nothing much out of the ordinary happened. Life in Belfont followed a daily, predictable routine. People either died in their beds at home after a long illness and many trips to the doctor or at the Cornwall Regional Hospital.<br />
<br />
The quietness was only broken by the roar or soft hiss of the river (depending on what nature induced mood she was in), the occasional train horn and accompanying clattering as it lumbered through the bushes in the hills high above my house either on its way to Montego Bay (going down the line) or headed to Kingston (up Stonehenge way) and the occasional sound of thunder when it was about to rain.<br />
<br />
Miss Hilda had also been found dead, but in bushes near her home a few years before <b><a href="http://thelongwayhome-andreadowner.blogspot.com/2011/03/borrowed-dream.html">(See first blog post: <i>A Borrowed Dream</i> or click THIS link)</a>,</b> but I was younger then, Miss Hilda and I were not related and people were not nearly as disturbed about her death as they were about my father's. She had been wandering around mad for quite a while before my mother found her dead at the side of her house.<br />
<br />
My father, on the other hand, had been a hearty man who was only drunk that night and as far as we knew, rum no kill nobody! And as some helpfully pointed out: "If rum did fi kill Eustace, him woulda dead long time!"<br />
<br />
In addition, he was a very popular if controversial person in the district. Everybody knew him and had been entertained by his drunken antics and other exploits at some time or other.<br />
<br />
Armed with new knowledge from the autopsy, the district 'jury' began to cast around for possible suspects other than Mass Wedderburn's duppy. Besides, Mass Wedderburn was already dead so there was little satisfaction to be had by convicting him as the killer. So in the process of ensuring that satisfactory justice could be served, the district court explored other possible avenues.<br />
<br />
Busta, a Rastaman who lived in an old shop on the edge of the river, just a stone's throw from where my father's body was found, emerged as murder suspect number two. In the ensuing discussions, it was also decided that he had an accomplice.<br />
<br />
As we made preparations to bury my father, the murder investigation being carried out by the entire district, continued.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFZoUgPIV_6enaJY7DYBJlkZCN-CRNwSTKT7uZNLAqq4CIm5ttmMp3Temlg2eZ4n9WnMa5OmT9e1xroYneKcZcYycVkHex9HKisu9bmzDsYMZsTKR3e1VSZegqSLQImKOIThmbz9f_p54/s1600/MAN+ON+FARM.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFZoUgPIV_6enaJY7DYBJlkZCN-CRNwSTKT7uZNLAqq4CIm5ttmMp3Temlg2eZ4n9WnMa5OmT9e1xroYneKcZcYycVkHex9HKisu9bmzDsYMZsTKR3e1VSZegqSLQImKOIThmbz9f_p54/s1600/MAN+ON+FARM.JPG" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">If anybody had bothered to take a photo <br />
of my father, he would look a lot like this</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><br />
</b></div>Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-9067687022838442472011-03-16T19:46:00.000-07:002019-07-01T00:50:35.498-07:00A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIc_PGSGusRw33PL1Mvk7-GkZuNB9XKKlKLMWG5WwoPdiBeUgP0hk_7nPmgg3I8Lkjr5z4aZbfhbEGVsAYRzBMuLixsmoNGGf-7HPnSftdG24sOFY-Xwiq1JmcqW4h6axsMT1x-DfLDpk/s1600/SNAKING+RIVER.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIc_PGSGusRw33PL1Mvk7-GkZuNB9XKKlKLMWG5WwoPdiBeUgP0hk_7nPmgg3I8Lkjr5z4aZbfhbEGVsAYRzBMuLixsmoNGGf-7HPnSftdG24sOFY-Xwiq1JmcqW4h6axsMT1x-DfLDpk/s320/SNAKING+RIVER.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<b>I grew up in a little district in St. James, Jamaica called Belfont. </b></div>
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<b>A place where to this day, people still catch water to drink and wash clothes in the same river, sometimes at the same time. </b></div>
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">A river that we bathed in bare chested. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">A</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> river that holds many secrets. </span></b></div>
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">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 </span>teetering<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> carefully on its edge; expertly performed a provisional cleansing routine we called 'tidying ourselves'.</span></b></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>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. </b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>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.</b></span></div>
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The river used to chatter and clamber merrily over stones on its way to be </span>emptied<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> into the Great River and when I was little it seemed like a pretty big river at the time. </span></b></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>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. </b></span><br />
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Where once it used to appear lively and even </span>menacing,<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> especially when it rained and it 'came' down, red and and angry; then, it looked like a toothless old lady, haggard and worn. </span></b></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>It didn't roar as loud, but barely whispered as it dragged itself over stones, many of which seemed too big for the now tiny looking river bed. </b></span></div>
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Killed by a Duppy? - </span>My Father's Death </b></div>
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<b>Who knows, maybe the river is now feeling guilty for having drowned my father in 1992, one day before my April 24th birthday.</b><br />
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<b>Some people said he could have fallen into the river after he sat on the concrete culvert to rest and as drunk as he was that night, he might have toppled in. </b></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>Still, others felt he had been boxed by a duppy and not just any ordinary duppy, but Mass Wedderburn's duppy. </b></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>My father had 'planted' and buried Mass Wedderburn just hours before at dusk by the light of a bottle lamp with only the man's wife, Ms Lammie, as witness and company. </b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>Now there is a mighty good reason that in a small, rural district with a river connecting us, no one except my father and Miss Lammie went to Mass Wedderburn's burial. </b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>I heard that not even a pastor would agree to bury him and that my father and Miss Lammie simply put him in the hole and covered him up shortly before nightfall.</b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>The rumour was the man was wicked and had moved come to Belfont from a district in Westmoreland only a few years before he was found dead in his old wooden house which was shrouded in bushes. </b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>For the short time he lived in Belfont, he kept pretty much to himself. </b></span></div>
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">A small man with a wiry frame, he was fair complexioned and did not really look wicked to me. </span>But he wasn't very friendly and none of us children went to his yard to shelter rain. </b></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>It really wouldn't make sense anyway, as no matter how we craned our necks, we could never even catch a glimpse of his house in the thick bushes beyond the pass that wrapped it self around several corners.</b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>He seemed to live so far, rain would probably drench us before we got to his house anyways. Better to run fast and try make it to Ms. Hortense house around the corner.</b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>Heck! We didn't even know for sure if Mass Wedderburn had a house as none of us children went further than Miss Fan's house. Miss Fan lived the closest to Mass Wedderburn but we still couldn't catch even a glimpse of his house through the bushes even when we were perched on her verandah railing.</b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>Miss Fan had some really bad dogs who guarded her orange trees viciously so we only visited her house when we were sent there by our mothers. </b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>When she was expecting us someone would chain up the dogs before we got there, but for the most part we would arrive unannounced to pick up a dress or some other garment she had sewn for our mother. Then we had to call loudly and the barking and running dogs would announce our arrival, but we came prepared. </b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>We would hold off the dogs with a few well placed stones until some one held them back. The most ferocious of them I remember was called Blackie. </b></span></div>
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">So when my father was found dead </span>face down in the river with fish feasting on his upper lip, Mass Wedderburn's duppy became the prime murder suspect for a number of very valid reasons.</b></div>
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The muddy pass that led to Mass Wedderburn's house </span>was right in front of the culvert that my father fell over and into the river. That helped to make the duppy look pretty guilty if you ask me! Everybody else in Belfont felt the same way.</b></div>
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<b>In addition, a few people confessed that they had overheard Mass Wedderburn say he did not want my father to prepare him for burial. A request my father ignored.</b></div>
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<b>"Listen mi no man! A Blood gi whey him life! Mi hear say when the man teck sick and realise say him ago dead, the man (Mass Wedderburn) say if him live him no want Eustace a him yaad and if him dead, him no want him come look after him! A bad him tink say him bad so?!" My brother Earl exclaimed bitterly on one of the many occasions we sat and discussed the mystery of my father's death.</b></div>
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<span style="color: red;"><b>My Father the Butcher - My Father, the District Mortician</b></span></div>
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<b>My father, whose real name was Eustace, was a butcher, which earned him the nickname Blood. He worked with Mass Campbell in Bruce Hall near Retrieve to butcher cows for sale. My mother used to always tell him to look a better job as Mass Campbell hardly paid him anything and the few pieces of meat he got to take home to make up for his meagre pay did nothing to appease her. </b></div>
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<b>She had twelve children to feed, plus some of my cousins who she helped raised until their parents got settled in the United States and sent for them.</b></div>
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<b>From ever since I could remember, my father was the self-appointed undertaker for the poor people in Belfont. Those people who didn't have the money to send their dead to Madden's Funeral Parlour in Montego Bay. </b></div>
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<b>As far as we knew, my father, who could neither read nor write, had never been formally trained as a mortician. But I grew up with people being in awe of his mortician skills and he wasn't particularly modest about them either! It was something he bragged about whenever he could.</b></div>
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<b>I guess he equated butchering cows and preparing them for sale with preparing dead people to be buried. </b></div>
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<b>Whatever the 'logic'; my father proudly practiced his mortician services up to hours before he died. </b></div>
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<b>Mind you, my mother was even more disgruntled about this occupation, as my father was hardly ever paid a cent for those services. </b></div>
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<b>The dead people he looked after were often those who lived alone and died with few or no close relatives to bury them; or those persons, who knowing his expertise, would ask him to perform their last rites before they died. </b></div>
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<b>White rum is the closest thing my father got as compensation for his mortician services, much to my mother's disgust. </b></div>
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<b>She was a devout Christian and couldn't stand the smell of stale rum and death on him nor how he behaved when he was well and truly drunk.</b></div>
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<b>My father, his bravado reinforced by white rum, which always made the usually quiet man talk very loudly and nonstop, would become annoyingly affectionate after consuming at least a few glasses of the potent alcohol.</b></div>
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<b>I loved my father dearly and I was his favourite child. But many evenings when I would get off the bus in Marchmont Road square, I would dodge behind my friends as I tried to escape his loud mouthed, drunken displays of affection. His booming voice would alert me that he was on the loose long before I saw him, but whereas the rum made his gait unsteady, it must have overcompensated by sharpening his eyesight and hearing.</b></div>
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<b>"A who dat? A Christine?! Come here mi Queen!" he would yell loudly while peering out of bloodshot eyes. (Christine is my pet name).</b></div>
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<b>"A my Queen this enno! She bright like morning star! This little girl going to be something sprrecial,' he would slur to everyone and no one in particular as my friends and everyone else would look on with amused smiles. This happened a whole lot while I was growing up.</b></div>
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<b>But my father became popular as a mortician for more than just the fact that people were short of funds and he could be paid with a few bottles of rum. </b></div>
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<b><span style="color: red;">Planting the Dead</span></b></div>
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<b>He was in demand in many other districts for his services and he was especially sought after to 'plant' the dead. Now that I stop to think about it, I suspect he was probably paid a tidy sum for those services, but we never knew for sure as half of whatever he might have been paid was spent on alcohol. </b></div>
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<b>He would stop at every bar he passed on his way back to Belfont while returning from his 'planting' assignments. </b></div>
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<b>In those days, people who were particularly troublesome while alive, were planted when they died. It was believed that planting them would prevent them from haunting their loved ones or anyone who they had held a grudge against before they died. </b></div>
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<b>There are a variety of ways to do plantings. The method chosen would depend on who was being planted and how 'bad' they were perceived to be. Men were planted differently from women. I know of two of the many types of planting and have some vague recollection of a third from snippets of whispered conversations I overheard during one impossibly long night my father spent 'planting' an old lady named 'Aunt' Sue. One of the maybe two times I can recall being present while he worked. (Planting will be dealt with more extensively in another post).</b></div>
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<b>So those assignments were crucial enough to lend credence to my suspicion that some money traded hands in order for those to be done. We also suspected that whatever money our father didn't manage to spend on drinks was probably stolen from him when he became too drink to care.</b></div>
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<b>I still remember one Saturday morning I woke up to see my father sheepishly coming around the side of the house, one side of his face ballooned and shiny, the eye on that side swollen shut and his lip painfully protruding at a weird angle.</b></div>
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<b>He remained stoic and unresponsive to my mother's frantic then incredulous questions as to what happened to his face. </b></div>
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<b>We eventually concluded that he had gone drinking the night before after receiving his first wages for a short stint to watch the tractor and other equipment that was being used to repair the main road which Belfont Road emptied into. </b></div>
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<b>He had been on the job only two weeks and had received his fortnightly pay the day before but went drinking before taking up his position in the tractor he was being paid to watch. </b></div>
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<b>With no confirmation from my father, everyone in the district concluded that he must have fallen asleep while sitting in the tractor. Due to its giant wheels, we assumed my drunk father fell asleep and then fell several feet to the hard, freshly asphalted road below.</b></div>
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<b>Well! The fall must have woken him up in a hurry and knocked him sober! As he was very sullen and quiet the morning after though he still smelled like stale rum.</b></div>
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<b>That story got told and re-told many times when my father died, and we all agreed that if that fall from the tractor did not kill him; surely, a man who was by then a seasoned drunkard could not have been killed by simply falling into the river!</b></div>
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<b>"If anything, the water woulda sober him up," the district 'jury' reasoned. "No man! Something not right!" was the general consensus.</b></div>
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<b>And so it was theorized that because my father had gone to plant Mass Wedderburn despite Mass Wedderburn's death bed wish that he leave him alone, Mass Wedderburn's freshly risen duppy lay wait for my father and give him a rahtid box, knocking him over the bridge and into the river below where he lay dead for an entire day until Miss Bibby's daughter, Joy, who had gone to catch drinking water, spied him face down in the river. </b></div>
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<b>Joy's frightened screams brought everyone close by running, thinking something bad had happened to her.</b></div>
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<b>They told me that the half of bread my father had purchased from my brother Earl at the small grocery shop he operated down the road from our house was still under his arm when he was taken from the river. That also puzzled everybody and sparked a few more theories that pointed fingers even more steadily at Mass Wedderburn's duppy.</b></div>
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<b><span style="color: red;">However, at least two other theories emerged that were just as convincing, if not as popular.</span></b></div>
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<span style="color: red;">The Day My Father Died</span></h3>
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<b>The day my father died</b></div>
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<b>I could not cry;</b></div>
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<b>My mother cried,</b></div>
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<b>Not I.</b></div>
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<b>His face on the pillow</b></div>
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<b>In the dim light</b></div>
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<b>Wrote mourning to me,</b></div>
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<b>Black and white.</b></div>
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<b>We saw him struggle,</b></div>
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<b>Stiffen, relax;</b></div>
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<b>The face fell empty,</b></div>
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<b>Dead as wax.</b></div>
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<b>I'd read of death</b></div>
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<b>But never seen.</b></div>
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<b>My father's face, I swear,</b></div>
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<b>Was not serene;</b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>Topple that lie,</b></div>
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<b>However appealing:</b></div>
<b style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: small;">That face was </b><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>absence</b></span><br />
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<b>Of all feeling.</b></div>
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<b>My mother's tears were my tears,</b></div>
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<b>Each sob shook me:</b></div>
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<b>The pain of death is living,</b></div>
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<b>The dead are free.</b></div>
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<b>For me my father's death</b></div>
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<b>Was my mother's sorrow;</b></div>
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<b>That day was her day,</b></div>
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<b>Loss was tomorrow.</b></div>
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<b><span style="color: red;">Mervyn Morris, 1973</span></b></div>
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Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4320123413445217120.post-44045343946216875002011-03-14T03:10:00.000-07:002018-03-01T20:27:48.896-08:00A Borrowed Dream<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">When I was about 15 years old I overheard one of my cousins saying she wanted to become a journalist. I borrowed her idea and never gave it back.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">She is still studying to become a doctor. I write for a living.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Mind you, I had imagined myself as a writer from I was knee high, and would write dubious poems in a burgundy courderoy book someone had given me to use as a diary and which I kept among my treasures in an old dulcimena grip under the house. I had my doubts about the poems and would keep the book buried under the tons of this and that that I used to play dolly house with.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I only truly believed I could become a writer when my mother, God rest her soul, found the book one day, read the poems and acted so proud, I had no other choice but t</span><span style="font-size: large;">o take the whole thing seriously.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I can still recall her beaming face the day I put three dirty Jamaican one dollar bills in an envelope with a form I had torn from an old magazine and marched all the way to the post office in Catadupa to post the letter ordering a book on how to become a writer.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The book never came.</span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: large;">It dawned on me at some point that since I had mailed the letter to the United States, maybe they meant three US dollars! And at some point it also occurred to me that the crumpled magazine that I found under the house bottom must have been years old when I saw it and so the offer might not have been valid at the time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I waited a long time for that book to come and harboured very unkind thoughts about the people in the USA who lied and stole dollar bills from children! If they ever knew how many sweeties or suck suck I could have bought with that three dollars!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">So when my cousin said the magic word, she gave my skeleton of an idea; life. Journalists wrote for newspapers and came on the radio and the TV. I had no clue what writers did in Jamaica or if there were any at that time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I was a precocious child that had a command of the English Language well beyond my years. I was always curious, no; make that inquisitive; and hungry for knowledge.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I grew up very poor in the countryside in Jamaica and walked to school without shoes until I was 14 years old in my final year of primary/elementary school. It was during those long walks in the hot sun, sometimes with the prospect of lunch, sometimes with empty pockets, that my imagination thrived. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The long journey gave my mind time to wander; taking me far beyond the train line on which I had to walk for about a quarter of the journey before walking through a makeshift path beside a church, back onto a road that, on reflection was a really a very ambitious label, as deep ruts on its surface made it difficult to walk on and the few vehicles there were at the time, had as hard a time negotiating over its uneven surface.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The narrow eave of the church was a haven for me and my friends when rain threatened or the afternoon sun was too punishing on our way back home. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I remember the train line now and how quiet it used to be as I walked and jumped in an unsteady gait trying my best to get to school on time before the morning bell rang or face a terrible beating from my teacher. The train tracks had bushes and tall trees on either side broken by the occasional, unpainted wooden house whose occupants floated through my mind as I neared each one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">With my small legs, sometimes I had to leap to reach to the spaced out wooden steeples that spanned the distance between the two iron rails that we would bend our small ears to listen to determine if a train was near so we could dart to the side of the tracks to avoid being killed by the hurtling train which would lumber past at regular intervals.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Whenever a train would pass me, my imagination would clamber on board and go as far as my childish attention span would allow to the place many train stops up the line where ladies with shiny round stainless steel pudding pans (giant baking tins) on their heads, made me dizzy with the sweet smell of fried fish and bammy which my mother would buy for me whenever we took the train to Kingston.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I would sometimes 'get off' at Porus, known for its bright yellow juicy Ortanique oranges which the vendors would hoist to the train windows in plastic bags to be plucked from hands and money exchanged for the sweet fruits that were packaged by the dozen.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I grew up knowing poverty, and suffering and what it meant to not have enough.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">My first article that was published in the Gleaner, one of Jamaica’s two daily newspapers, was about an old lady named Miss Hilda, who my mother had found dead in bushes beside her house. Miss Hilda lived alone and had gradually become a recluse, going mad before she died.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">At 18, I felt awful that she had died like that.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Before she went mad and made us afraid of her, I would play with her ‘grand niece Pauline and sheltered rain on her rickety verandah. I even ate food she cooked, although many of the children in the district were afraid of her as she was terribly stooped and spoke in a nasal voice which earned her the nickname; ‘Faa, Faa Hilda.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">When Ms. Hilda died in that undignified way, I wanted people to read about her. I wanted her to matter.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">As luck or fate would have it, I was an intern at the Gleaner Western Bureau at the time as part of completing a Business Diploma program at the Montego Bay Community College. I mentioned to my then Editor, Sharon Earle that my mother had found Miss Hilda dead at the side of her house and she suggested that I write an article that she would send to the Kingston office to be published in the Gleaner. I did..</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I took the article home to show my mother and brothers, and I can remember that my smallest brother in particular was very proud. The eternal jester, he grinned and gave out, “Go deh Miss Hilda! U dead, but you inna Gleaner doah!”</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I did feel some measure of personal satisfaction for my achievement as the writer of the article, but more than anything, felt good for Ms. Hilda.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Anyone, if they bothered to read the small article stuck in a corner in the obituaries section of the Wednesday Gleaner, could see Ms. Hilda’s name big and bold. She had died alone, but the entire Jamaica could read about her now, if they wanted to.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>PS... Years later I would again work at the Gleaner. This time at its North Street office in Kingston which was just steps away from the Kingston Technical High School on </b><b>Hanover Street </b><b>that I attended before moving back to St. James and enrolling at Mobay Community College or Com C as it was popularly called back then. Our lives sometimes have a way of intersecting and overlapping at intervals especially when there is a GREATER force at work ordering our steps. Let God be Praised. - *ADDED March 1, 2018*</b></span></div>
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Andrea Downerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00074371887148675149noreply@blogger.com8