Is Just a Movie. Earl Lovelace
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support of their company.
“What they paying you to do?” they ask.
“They paying me to die,” I said loudly, my whole head on fire, the crowd spurring me on: “I will die how he say to die. Yes,” I say aloud. “It . . . it . . . it . . . It is . . . it is . . . It is just . . . It is just . . . It is just . . . It is just . . .”
“Yee-es!” they encourage, relieved that I had fallen in line.
“Yes,” they cry. “Yes. It is just a movie.”
“It is just . . . it is just a movie.” And I join them in the laughter, “Heh heh heh!”
But I still uneasy.
Then in the next scene, we had to die again. In the bush this time, obscured by plants and vines, part of the foliage. I am just a blur in the background. Just ahead of me is Sonnyboy. And the shooter, a native from another tribe, release bullets to his heart, to his head, the shots so intense that he start jumping and dancing and walking in that electric break-dance spasm like you see those fellars perform in gangster movies when shots slam into their body, and the inevitable death is delayed by this frenetic dance in salute of life. And in the middle of his ballet, the director calls:
“Hey, you. Cut! Cut! That is not what we want.”
Sonnyboy does not move. He stand up there, his body coiled in an inexpressible anger and outrage and surprise and grief. I thought he was going to speak. Sonnyboy is calm. He lifts both hands, palm open. Like in surrender.
The cameraman stop filming. They turn off the lights.
The men look at each other.
And right there Sonnyboy take off the feathered headpiece of the costume, unhook the rings from his nose. From his waist, he unbelts the band of the grass skirt they had given him to wear and he drops them with his spear – his spear – right there. And for a moment he stand-up there in his shorts, slightly comic, looking bemused, as if he had surprised himself, and now didn’t know what other move to make. It was as if the spontaneity of his action had faced him with the self hidden in himself. It was a self that he was thrilled with and alarmed by, and almost in a daze, as if he now had no choice but to be the fella he had unclothed, he made one step, then another, and with that fella’s legs, he walked away.
I could see the others, the crowd of them, their grass skirts below their bellies, gathered together like the members of a choir of penguins in a helpless flutter of alarm. Sensing what might have been his bewilderment, they gather the courage to laugh at Sonnyboy, at the fool he had made of himself: “Heh heh heh!” Until I begin to take off my headpiece too and my nose rings and my amulets and my leggings and my grass skirt. We stand facing each other, me and they, as in a pantomime in which they are portraying the righteous members of a tribal council and I am the dissident member they are ordering into exile. In a pantomime, I would leave the stage for this number and would return for the next one. But I am not going to return. This is not a pantomime. I am not playing. As I walk off, I could hear them serious, then outraged, as if I had assaulted them, the laughter dying in their throats. I hear Errol’s voice, frustrated, angry, insistently pleading what he believes to be a truth I had not grasped:
“It is just a movie, King! It is just a movie!” screaming the words at me, tears in his voice. “King, it is just a movie.” As if he is pleading for his life.
I felt quite sad. I didn’t say anything. I hated to leave Errol like that; but I had to. Because I had my point too. How to say it: Yes. Yes, because if . . . if indeed it was just a movie, did he, did they not consider that I was . . . we were just actor? But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t look back.
I was outside the building when I heard my name called. When I look around, it was Sonnyboy. He was leaving as well.
“King!”
“Listen, pardner,” I tell him. “You don’t have to leave your job because of me. You’re working. I don’t want you to jeopardize your employment just for me.”
He didn’t respond immediately. He just looked at me with what I suppose was patience. I had totally misread the man. “Sorry! Sorry!” I said. “Sorry,” I said again.
“Yes,” he said, talking to himself. “You hardly know me.”
Rouff Street
Before he came to stay by his grandmother in Cascadu, Sonnyboy lived with his mother at Rouff Street in Port of Spain, up the hill, behind the bridge, between the sounds of the goatskin drums from the Shango Yard by Ma
Trotman, the shouts and pleas breathed from Mother Olga’s Shouters church, the staccato of cussing, the grumble of anger, and the screams of grief that would lodge in his brain and give him his ear for rhythm, so that later, when he started to beat iron in the steelband, what he produced was not the insistent percussive sound to keep the band on the beat, but the discordant chiming clanging clataclanging that opened up the belly of the music to make woman start to wine, young fellars square off to fight and big men put their two hands on their head and weep.
Childhood polio had made one of his legs shorter
than the other, and had given him a slight hop-and-drop walk that was in tune with the music in his belly; and he balanced himself with the awkward elegance of a king sailor on the unsteady deck of the world, out of time with its rhythm, wondering, as he walked through Rouff Street, what disaster had brought him to this place where his ears always ringing, his head always hot, his mind thinking to
get a penknife to cut, a stone to pelt, a bottle to break, trying to understand how he was to be Christian and human in
this mess.
At Escallier RC, where he went to elementary school, his surliness brought him to the attention of the headmaster Mr. Mitchell, who called his mother in to complain about his inattention, the hostility inside him that set him fighting, that make him one afternoon take up the school bell while classes going on and start to ring it, balang! balang! like he summoning a set of dangerous and rebellious spirits. After Mr. Mitchell call her in for the third time, she put Sonnyboy to sit down and explained to him what Mr. Mitchell in his way had tried to tell him but didn’t have the language to get across:
“They put you here in this boiling heat to live, not because this is some wonderful cleansing fire out of which they expect you to emerge productive and restrained. They put you here to kill you. For you to dead. To give you so much pressure that you will turn their brutality against your own brother so that their prophecies would be fulfilled. And the reason why you must listen to what Mr. Mitchell tell you is not because your obedience will bring down blessings from The Most High, either in this life or in the one to come. And not because the mighty will unleash their harshest punishment on you if you break their commandments. They doing that already, and you have done them no wrong. The reason you must stay Christian and human in this place is because, for all the sermons they fling in your direction and the tears they shed in your name, they so expect you to fail, they have a cell and a number waiting for you in the prison and a place to bury you when you dead. Yes, they counting on you to turn up in their jail and on their gallows. Your mission, if you decide to take it, is to disappoint them. Let them claim their victory somewhere else. Leave them with their money and their baubles and their Babel. Leave them with what they have. Don’t give them the pleasure of seeing you inhabit their prison or their hospital or their grave. Do not let them see you vagrant in the road begging them for the crumbs of their pennies. Stay up, so you could watch the surprise in their eyes when they see you still here, when they see they ain’t kill you, when they see that you not dead. Let them marvel, ‘I wonder how this one escape?’ The world is a more than beautiful place. It doesn’t belong to them more than it belongs to you. Yes, to you. Wickedness can flourish, it cannot reign. Things can change. And if all you have to fight with is yourself, don’t do their work for them. Stay strong. Don’t drag down yourself with foolishness.”
She put her arms around Sonnyboy and hugged him to her bosom and he put his arms around her neck and he stay there, hearing her heart beat, feeling her body heave, tasting the tears dripping down from her eyes onto his face before