Is Just a Movie. Earl Lovelace
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eat your food. Hold up your head. Look at me. Look!”
Sonnyboy had looked at her live these lessons, herself scrubbing and washing and wrestling the two rooms they lived in into a home, with red lavender in buckets of water, with gully root and sweet broom and blue soap, the four corners of the house smoked with incense, the floors brightened with linoleum, the windows with curtains, the furniture with varnish and the walls with paint, the troughs of earth in the little space in front the house planted with aloes and ginger lilies and wonder of the world, with marigold and zinnias and croton and Jacob’s coat, the plants at her front door flowering with a joy as fertile as the faith she expressed in her singing and her contagious laughter: the scandal of her jokes doubling over the women fetching water or washing or bathing at the single standpipe on the street, lifting them in these magical moments above the mud and the rubbish gathered in the drains, to a height from which to look squarely at the world that looked down on them, the women holding their bellies with two hands to keep from bursting with the sweetness of the pain of the dotishness that flowed from human beings, all of them joined now to a sense of community. Among them the wonderful simplicity of human exchange, plants for their front gardens, remedies for illnesses, consolation for the mother of the girl who get catch with a belly, compassion for the mother of the boy gone off to jail, the exchange and generosity: a dress, a pair of shoes, exchanged, one keeping the children for her neighbor so she could go and release the pressure, dancing to the music of Fitz Vaughn or Sel Duncan; his mother waiting her turn, returning fortified from the standpipe by which she had to bathe, with a bucket of water, her petticoat dripping, the form of her body outlined underneath it, without apology to anyone except perhaps Sonnyboy’s father, the man she had enlisted to help her save herself and him. From her own strength, doing her all to prevent the place from weighing him down, seeing that his shirt was ironed without a crease, that his food was secure, protected from flies underneath the wire netting of the safe, giving him the last of the cocoa or coffee and she and the children drinking teas from shrubs in the yard, vervine, carpenter grass, and Sonnyboy’s favorite, fever grass, consoling him when the fella he was working with as a mattress maker and upholsterer of chairs wouldn’t pay him the money he work for, agreeing with him that “Lance, man, you not cut out for this shit. You have too much talent. You too good-looking to take this set of pressure. And, boy, you have a good voice, you could sing.”
She watched other women watching him when they went to a dance, her mother babysitting the children. He and she in the same color and styled shirt and pants, dancing, her two hands round his neck and the comfort of her bosom against his chest. She watched him move among people with his movie-star smile and relaxed stance, confirming her thinking that no, this cell and prison of Rouff Street is no place for you, expecting him to take off and go away and get out of this place and praying for him to stay, no family to help them, the four brothers of his, each with his own battle to fight, the one older than him who fancied himself a singer, setting out every morning, decked in his white ruffle-fronted shirt with the puff sleeves red, his guitar round his neck, to the Botanic Gardens or the Lady Young Lookout to find tourists to sing them verses of popular calypso or made-up ones of his own on the beauty of the tourist woman, the cleverness of her husband, the loveliness of the island. After they give him some change, going back in time to clip tickets for the 12:30 show at the Pyramid cinema where he held down a job as a checker; another brother, George, the saga-boy, dapper, pants seam cutting, shirt collar upturned, gold chain on his neck, gold teeth in his mouth, every time you see him is with a new woman holding on to him as if she fraid he will fly away if she let go; Calvin, the sportsman, good at cricket and football, going every day to the savannah to play one of the games, sometimes with a bat in his hands, always his wrists bandaged, a knee band or ankle band on, walking with a limp to draw attention to his dedication to sports as well as to his heroic survival; Bruce who coulda been a heavyweight boxer find himself in prison for beating, one by one, seven fellars who sampat him after a dance; and Lance, he, Lance, the one with such good looks and talent and all the promise, stay anchored here making mattresses and upholstering chairs, not, as she thought at first, because of her and the children. Because of a steelpan.
Pan
Lance have this pan, a carbide pan, big enough to sound, big enough so it could play two notes, then three, Borborpee dorp! Boborpee dorp!
Every Monday and Tuesday midday he would go to the empty train carriage at the railway station to jam with the fellars from the abattoir, each man beating out the rhythm on his own pan or calling out the ringing rejoicing spirit from his own piece of iron.
One day Lance forget his pan in the train carriage. When he get it back two days later he discovered from its face and sound that someone had beaten it out of shape and out of tune so that it didn’t give him the usual sound when he struck it. He was ready to kill. Thank God Lance didn’t find the man who commit this brutality on his pan.
“Thank you, Jesus!”
She had watched Lance come home with this bruised and wounded pan and begin to pound it to get it back into shape so he could get the lost notes of the rhythm. After days of hearing him pounding and pounding, she tell him, “What you doing? You not going to get it to sound the same way again, you know.”
“I know.”
“You know? So what you doing then?”
And is then, before he could answer, it hit her: somewhere in pounding to find the lost note, Lance had begun to hear a note that as yet hadn’t made a sound. And what he was doing now was trying to get not the note he had lost but the note behind that note, a note unsounded and sacred and surprising and potential – to get that note to sound.
Now Lance in a trance. Lance is a sculptor of iron. Lance coming home early from work to work on the pan. Afraid it would burst from his pounding, Lance build a fire and he heat the pan and when the metal hot and soft he push out the note, not the note yet, a little bump on the face of the pan, making the bump bigger little by little by little and then another bump, each bump a note, a sound, she and Sonnyboy watching the whole operation, Lance hammering again, pounding and pushing out the metal, shaping the notes to fit on the face of this pan, tightening the space or widening it, flattening it or deepening it to get the note to correspond to the sound in his head, in his heart, in his belly, in his stones, Lance envisioning a whole new world of sound, taking the music of the drum to another pitch, another plane, Lance going over the whole process again and again to get this new and audacious music out of his drum. And all this time, her mother and those neighbors, who know the trouble she seeing, looking from Lance and his patient tenderness with the pan to her to see what she doing with this man, and she could hear them thinking, if he had with you the patience he have with that pan, if he had with his children, with work the patience he have with that pan . . . She tried her best to be supportive. She wanted to assist. But, they were right. She couldn’t help but observe his patient tenderness with the pan, and she find the same words leaving her head and finding her voice: “If you had with me the patience you have with that pan . . . If you had with work, with your children, the resolve you have with that pan . . . If you had . . . if you . . . if you . . . if if if . . . if . . .” And although in her belly she could feel the value of what Lance was doing, in her mind she wanted from him an explanation to help her mother and the world understand what a woman like she was doing with that man; but, Lance didn’t have the words to answer, and instead of sitting down feeling guilty and small, or struggling to find the words to console her, anytime she start up, started to talk, he would get up and leave and go to the empty lot across the road and sit down on the boulder underneath the mango tree where a growing congregation of idlers were cheering him on as he journeyed into the heart of the pan. When she look at him, the man she see in front her was not the man she know. That Lance was gone, this man was spirit, Ogun.
But the world don’t stop demanding money for things. The children have to eat. They have to get uniform and shoes to go to school, she tell him, not just to reproach him about his neglect of her and the children, more to get him to appreciate the role she was playing to free him from the death and defeat of this place; not, as she said with the undertones of jubilation and triumph and frustration at being put into this situation, not to do all this for you to spend your time reshaping a steelpan, but to be a man to make a dent in the iron of this beast of a world. She wanted him to say something, to