"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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So back to the crayfish soup.