The Last Warner Woman (16 page)

Shhhhhhhhh

Bishopess used to say, when fowl drink water him say thank God, but when man drink water him don’t say nothing. But the lickle boy’s mama did know to give proper thanks. Her name was Doreen, and she did grow in a higher society than I was used to. She did go to a Methodist church, and although she know bout Revival, she don’t ever jump it. Still, she make her way to the Band of the Seventh Fire, and she pay for a thanksgiving table so big it did make all goat for miles tremble. Three days straight we was giving praises, and neither the curry goat nor the rum did run out once in that time. The trumping and the drumming take us to regions of Heaven we never venture in before. Doreen dance with the band for the three days, and she lift her hands unto God Almighty, and tears was pouring down her face, and she say thank you for sending your servant, and giving life abundant back unto my son.

Shhhhhhhhh

I think that was the last I would ever see her. After all, she live in a whole nother community, far up on a higher branch, she custom to eating a sweeter fruit. But one day I reach home and there she was, outside the gate, waiting with the patience of Job, she and her lickle boy, Jevon. She stand up when she see me coming and she say,
Miss, I think you are like our guardian angel, and God knows in these days we need all the angels we can get. I don’t want us to lose touch.
Some nights if Doreen had somewhere to go, she take Jevon over and make him sleep in the same room with me and Bishopess Herbert. I would sit him down and learn him many things. Sometime he ask me,
why they call your church Revival?
And I would tell him what he was never tired of hearing,
it is because we is a people who can shake off grave dirt. We is a people who can come back from the dead. And you is one of us too because you yourself did come back from a deep and awful sleep. I found you dead, Jevon. But guess what? You revive.
Me and Doreen become combolo, the bestest of friends. She get to know me as Ada, and not as no Warner Woman. I talk to her like an ordinary woman will talk to her ordinary woman friend. Plenty evenings we just sit there together, simple with each other, and years pass by like that. The evening come when she say to me,
Ada, nothing in this country for we. I leaving. I taking Jevon and we leaving.
I was ready for that one. I nod and say to her,
come then, my sister, I will light a candle and pray for you.
And I make sure the eye-water don’t spill from my eyes, and that my voice hold steady and strong. I pray that Father God in Heaven would hold my friend Doreen by the hand, and that He would continue to grow up Jevon who He did love enough to revive. I pray that they would journey well.

Shhhhhhhhh

My last friend was Lucas Gilles. Everybody in the band call him Captain, but I call him Lucas. Just like after a time everybody in the band call me Mother, but he call me Ada. We understand that we was ongly special people when we in the band, when we wearing our robes, and when he have our head in wraps. Without that we was the same people who Babylon trample down like grass. Lucas, mighty Captain, he work his days as a simple yardboy. He say the mister of the house was not so bad. The mister talk to him kindly and come Christmas time him was even known to share a quart of rum with Lucas. There was even one time when the mister and his friends ongly make three, and dominoes need four, so he call Lucas unto the veranda and ask him to play a hand with them. Lucas say he feel like he was somebody that night, more than just the fellow who cut the hedges and wash the cars and nail up what needed nailing up. But Lucas say the Mrs. was as bad as the Mister was good. She call out to Lucas like how you might call after a mawga dog. When the Mrs. see the helper serve Lucas him lunch on a plate, she bawl down the helper and say she can’t be wasting her good good china like that. From then on Lucas get his lunch in an old ice cream dish. The Mrs. try to crush him dignity and I wonder how any woman could look on a man like Lucas, with his blue-black skin, and not see that he was somebody mighty, that he was somebody deserving of respect. I wonder that she couldn’t see what a powerful man he was, or maybe she see it, and that is why she try to rub it out. Some nights Lucas come to my bed and he just want to be inside me, both of us just man and woman together. And when our bodies rub up gainst each other, I learn to be quiet even when it feel sweet. One time he touch me and say,
you can make noise. I sorry I hit you that time. It was wrong of me.
Sometimes when we done our man and woman business, he hold me to him chest and start to talk. You would never expect the Captain to talk those things that he did talk, but he wasn’t talking as Captain. He was talking as Lucas. He say to me,
Ada, we is abandoned people. Some days I feel we is abandoned by God.
And some nights I did tell him what I was feeling too. Like one night when my fingers was wrinkled up from washing so much clothes the whole livelong day, I tell him,
Lucas, this island don’t have nothing for me. Sometimes I want to leave.
And him say to me,
I know you would say this one day.
He hold me close to his chest then and I feel sad cause his chest don’t feel so strong as it normally do. He say to me,
I think I know a man that can help you get over there and settle.
That time my chest fall like how him own did fall before, and at the same time it did swell up with the future. And I telling you this long testimony so that you know how I come to England. Not because God did send me. Not because Lucas did send me. It was something in my own heart. It was something I did want to do. I did forget the song we did always sing
—Any-anywhere that the army go, Satan follow.

Shhhhhhhhh

What I come to find out is this: God never love me. For it is written, which man would give unto his son a stone if the son did ask for bread? And which man would give unto his son a snake if the son did ask for fish? And so if we who so evilous and wicked know how to give good things, then how much more will Father God give unto us? But I ask God for something better than Spanish Town, Jamaica, and he give me this country where I have tilled a hard ground.

E
VERY BOOK MUST BEGIN SOMEWHERE, BUT IT BEGINS IN
different places for different people. If you are the reader, then things get going at chapter one, the first sentence—
Once upon a time there was a leper colony in Jamaica.
But for the writer, the book would have begun somewhere else altogether.

Maybe you have already seen the beginnings of a book; maybe you have been in a café and you were just about to pay for your coffee and your croissant when a man muscled his way to the counter and asked for a napkin and a pen, please, please, quick! He would have grabbed the items and ran back to his seat. And you would have understood: a thought had just perched itself on the tip of this man’s imagination, singing its teasing song,
Catch me if you can.
The man would have known the song and the bird; he would have met them before, and would have lost them before, as we are all known to occasionally lose feathery bits of inspiration. For this reason, people are known to walk around with a variety of traps—cameras, video recorders, sound recorders, notepads, sketchpads, scissors.

The reader begins the journey at Chapter One, but the writer will have begun somewhere else, on something like a napkin, where the bird was first caught. Every book starts like this, from something small. But when it has all been written down, when the story has stretched to its full size, then the writer will step back, and he will find to his surprise that the small bird has been swallowed and is now in the belly of a larger beast. That is to say, the beginning of the story is now somewhere in the middle. And this is where you have finally arrived, at that place in the middle of the story, which is really to say, you have finally come to the beginning.

At last you have found your way to the three pink slips of paper from which the present story has sprung. These three papers are official. The British government has dubbed them: a Form 12; a subjoined Statement of Particulars to the Form 12; and finally, a Form 2.

When I received these three forms they smelled of dust and, I imagined, of the metal drawer in which they had been filed for so long. They were old and thin and ready to disintegrate, as if I could have held them up to a bright light and watch them become dust, watch them float away through my fingers. I wondered whether that would be a good thing, whether the story suddenly become part of the air, something we could breathe in and breathe out. I had to handle these documents carefully. A week went by and I didn’t want to risk even looking at them. I took them everywhere, mind you—they were that precious. But at last I managed to get them laminated.

Safe now between barriers of plastic, I finally laid the pages out and looked at them properly. This book could finally begin. These three forms were heavily stamped; boxes and circles of green and red ink, and signatures everywhere. In a certain light they might have even appeared festive; by any other light they looked as official and unfriendly as the job they were meant to do. These forms were produced in order to secure the taking away and locking up of people—the sectioning of men who have fallen into the habit of pulling out their members in public parks or on buses, happily masturbating, oblivious to their audience; of women who babbled to themselves and kept on asking for Harold, or Jimmy, or Michael, long-dead husbands, as if they were just sitting in the room next door; of the girl whose eyes have suddenly begun to dance in terror around her sockets, and who had woken up believing the world was in danger from an invasion of giant, blue ants; of the boy who had to be kept far away from his mother’s migraine tablets, and also from knives, because he shook her awake one night to show her a crudely slashed wrist and giggled as he told her, “Dying is sweet, Mam, I wish I could die every day.”

It took some time to secure these specific forms, being government records. I had to get help from a friend who wrote a letter that sounded very threatening, and who then signed it as my attorney. At first I hadn’t even been thinking of a book, but when I finally received them, and had them laminated, and arranged them before me, something like the evidence from a trial—let’s call them
Exhibits 1
,
2
, and
3
—I could see that a story was emerging.

This first form is duly signed by Sergeant V. C. Mitchells. His signature is a looping flourish, not exactly what I would have expected of a police officer annoyed with paperwork, who just wants to be done with it. The form is dated the fourteenth day of November, 1972, and is addressed to the Superintendent of the Mental Hospital for the County of Warwickshire at Saint Osmund. I put it aside and move on to the next form.

I know immediately that I will come back to this form again and again, reading it for what it says and also what it doesn’t say. Already two things strike me as peculiar. Religious Persuasion … none. It made me think of Christopher Columbus, who by complete accident having sailed his way into the Caribbean, wrote back to his king and queen to say no form of religion was to be found in the Caribbean or among its people. I have always thought that a strange blindness, not to see what was so magnificently apparent. But I have been to Jamaica and heard a story: a Jamaican young man who had lived in England for years went back to visit. He sees some crabs walking about and in an affected way asks his father, “Oh Father, what are those?” But when the crab bit his finger he hollered, “Pupa, de crab a bite me!” In the same way, when Columbus experienced a Caribbean storm he would call out to God by the name he was commonly called in those islands,
Hurican!