Providential. Colin Channer
more,
I hope—
feelings don’t affect a fact.
That water has no color, what you see is an effect,
and, listen, ignore my logic if you want
for I don’t business. True is true.
Rangers. That is what they are.
We don’t have police here—we have rangers.
Employed by the landful against the landless.
Paid to shoot to kill.
So check it. This whole facking island
is a damn estate, a checkerboard
of traps and schemes. Power game.
What you can expect?
Listen, if I was black like you, Colin.
Well, not like you—you know what I mean—
I’d elect to take up guns.
Ahhhhhhh, Perry.
Revolutionary to rass.
FIRST RECRUITS
They answered when the Queen
called, wanting constables,
dependables,
regulars to keep order after riot
rumbled to rebellion back in 1865,
the year impatience with the free
we’d got came out in uprush.
Thirty years nearly after slavery
and the liberty half cooked.
They’re kin to my mother’s hill people.
Tea dark. Strong featured.
Hair that gets comb teeth caught up.
Turning on a rush mat, a coir mattress,
lighting a lamp in a tatu cotched
on land with no title,
catching water,
dabbing on a little obeah,
dressing in the fashion
of the humble decent—
careful not to rip, stretch out,
alert for wrinkles,
palming down the seams.
Their minds were rank with the killings
when they went to sign up.
They imagined a hint of burnt wood,
remembered an odour of rot
although History had been clever
with the evidence, had left the dead
outside to menace, later ganged up
scared survivors into throngs,
quick and efficient from habit,
frugal by rote. Not a single finger
more assigned than what backra
thought it ought to take
for wogs to scoop
and chuck and barrow
blood and neighbors into pits.
Of those who came,
nine hundred plus were taken.
Sharp-eyes, big hearts,
plenty meat
between the blades.
Feet with arches.
Walking proudly. Traitors
falling into place.
LEA
I.
They played coc’nut bough
cricket in the growing season,
attended school half time,
otherwise worked with grown-ups,
cutting, ratooning, drawing water
from the spring that drove the wheel.
Thirty years, a generation plus
from slavery, and Lea,
my mother’s great-grandad
and Nev, his closest friend,
were living mostly in their
great-grandparents’ world,
one of long views to far hills,
but tight boundaries,
force and sense and habit
keeping people in their place.
When militias killed a thousand blacks
out in St. Thomas back in 1865,
put on that famous vigilante pageant
that began with muskets firing
on protesters in a courthouse square,
my mother’s great-grandfather was a child.
Still, busha called him for his labor,
told him to get Nev,
made him lead on his pardy,
to the lignum vitae woods
to work with grown survivors
heaving corpses into graves.
Imagine that boy, his friend and other children
massed on the bank of a hole,
handling bodies,
lifting, passing, easing down,
the cadence like the one employed
to pack ox carts with hogsheads,
barrels of molasses. Spitting ashes.
Coughing dust.
Now, follow born-free and ex-chattel,
going home at twilight, slow marching,
dressed in rag calico, burlap, osnaburg,
using footbeat to hold a rhythm,
no talking, passing burnt houses,
cottages hit down, then seeing up ahead
odd statues
cast in shadow, set in bush—
no, folks grief struck,
heads down.
Now to this moment add rain.
II.
It’s a detail Lea included
when he told the tale
to Phyllis Fay,
his great-grandchild, my mum,
who asked about a photo
framed in pewter on a bureau
in the bungalow he lived in
on a farm in St. Ann,
way, way far from St. Thomas,
beyond a watershed,
decent acreage in Gibraltar
hamlet in low hills,
all small holdings,