TAPESTRIES of WOMANHOOD of PAIN of KNOWING....

Yesterday
I met a sister
and we shared the common pain
of having both lost our mothers to
death

But not just death
to Cancer
That silent killer
which burrows insidiously
into our softest tissues
and hide
only to painfully announce itself
often when it is too late to do anything about it

Across a desk
with a hallway backdrop
teeming with people
We bonded over exchanges
of what it meant to be WOMEN

That unique experience of womanhood
assigned to us at gestation
and we had no say in it

but we concluded
that we were happy
we were born as women
and not men

We mulled over the eternity
of death
of NEVER being able to pull our mothers back
even for one shining moment
to compare notes of womanhood
notes of KNOWING

When truth and wisdom arrive
finally, gradually
sometimes carried
in our own daughters'
eyes
actions
bodies
language
presence

We were silent sometimes
as we pondered this

I had seen her often
through her open door
As I hurried down the hallway
on my way to somewhere else
and I had wondered briefly who she was

Yesterday I found out
That she is a woman
just like myself
With Canadian and Jamaican experiences
And a mother only months dead
Though mine had been dead for years

We bonded over PAIN
And the unique experiences of
WOMANHOOD.  - ANDREA DOWNER
_____________________________
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.

BLACK WOMAN - JUDY MOWATT

JOHN CROW, BRER ANANCY, BRER TOCUMA, ABNA DUPPY (JAMAICAN ORAL & FOLK TRADITIONS)

JOHN CROWS

Instead of writing this, 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 York University 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.

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.

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.

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.

"USING KIN TEET TO KIBBA HEART BUN" - MY MOTHER Laughed & CRIED at the Same Time

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!!

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 will talk to her child until she becomes hoarse but will not hesitate to discipline her with some proper beatings when necessary.

Yep! I got plenty licks growing up, both from my brother Winston, who I mentioned in THIS blog post and my no no-nonsense mother; Miss Amy.

For a lady with arthritis in her wrists and knee cups and who was not very slim, she was very adept at running me down and tackling me to the ground and ensuring I had her FULL attention!

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 did want to live to grow up; so I learned to mind my mouth and mumble the most grievous things under my breath. Sigh...

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.

But more than the beatings, I remember my mother's laugh. She didn't laugh quite often; because what is there to really laugh about when you are single handedly raising 12 children on your own, 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?

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 empty pockets and the sorry looking pieces of meat from the butcher shop he helped out at? READ ABOUT EUSTACE, nicknamed BLOOD, Miss Amy's husband and MY father HERE

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 had to apologize to her misery for having forgotten it for a while.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

My Brother Paul - Brought Back to Life

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

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

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

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