Is Just a Movie. Earl Lovelace
Читать онлайн книгу.
hear. One day when he was with his congregation in the yard across the road, she take Sonnyboy and his brother Alvin with her and go by her mother further up the hill in Zigili Trace to stay, making, after she cool down a little, the occasional visit back to him with a bowl of pigeon peas and rice or dumplings and saltfish, offerings of her goodwill and also to see if it had left him, this pan jumbie, this spirit that had claimed him; and when she discovered that it had not, she pick up the rest of her clothes and go back up by her mother, this time to remain. And it would be there eventually he would come to see her, at first with a promise to change, but, later – as someone surrendered to a more urgent calling than seeing after the welfare of she and his children – to bring little gifts for the children, a toy on a birthday, two-three copybooks at the opening of the school term. Once he brought them each a pair of gym boots into which he had placed a dollar bill, the magnificence of this gift lighting up Sonnyboy’s face and bringing tears to her eyes, because she was glad to see Lance trying, for by then he had made himself not the principal individual responsible for the well-being of his children, but one of many contributors to their welfare. Sonnyboy watched as the hill wrapped itself around his father, feeling at first resentful of the community for taking his father away from him. But, later, as he realized that in giving himself to the community, his father had given the community to him, Sonnyboy began to feel a sense of belonging. He began to hold himself a little more upright, to set down his feet with more careful steps that carried up his shoulders and crafted his limp into the delicate rocking, crawling dance of the king sailor navigating the perilous tightrope of the hill, his mother knowing the trouble such a dance attracted, watching, proud and frightened, speaking to him with a calming gentleness, asking “How school going? How your shoes fitting?” Her gentleness deepening, as she felt the weight of her children’s upbringing falling more and more on her single shoulders, taking him up the hill to the Shango yard by Mother Olga where she begged Shango and Obatala to intercede for him, and the better to cover all options, she tied her head and mounted the hill with him to the Shouters church for Mother Olga and Mr. Trim to put their hands on his head and pray for him. But things didn’t change. At home she began to hum the hymns of resolve to keep off despair, as a declaration that for all her burdens she had not surrendered:
Jesus on the main line, tell him what you want, tell him what you want right now.
But even that would not sustain her, and she had her eyes open now out of necessity for another man, not as pretty. Fellars start to come around, and she find herself accepting favors from a fella she would have rejected a few years earlier as too tame, too surrendered, but was glad he was a little more stable, less inclined to roam, would care for her, didn’t have no steeldrum beating in his belly, wasn’t carrying no lost note in his stones, accepting this change as part of the life she was born into, having discovered some time ago that it was useless to complain, not only about him, the man, Sonnyboy’s father, but about anything around her, the roads, the houses, the area, the schools, the violence, the hard times, each article of frustration linked to the chain of strangulation that was this hill. Everything was on her shoulders, and when things didn’t work out with the fella, she sang to Jesus, wishing for the miracle of winning a lottery, for her aunt in the States to send for her. In a rush of optimism, counting the money she would make working over there in the States, dreaming with the children the things she would buy for them, the butter to put on their bread, the leather shoes, the shirts, the pants. And all this time making miracle after miracle to create the magic of a meal from the scraps she could afford in the market, until one day after the market, she put down her basket, she sit down on her front steps and when she go to get up she feel the whole town pressing down on her. Yes, it was too much and she came to the realization that really, yes, she really was not able. This thing that she find herself having to face was bigger, more monumental and rooted than she had imagined. It was not just a challenge, not just a test of endurance and strength that could be overcome by work alone, or by faith or by fortitude. This place? This place was something that was set up and maintained by the great spite and wickedness and – let me give her a word – cynicism of a pitiless Power. It was not something she could change by herself alone. This was a place she had to leave. Sonnyboy noticed her change of rhythm.
He recognized that she had replaced the cheer with which she lifted up herself and the neighborhood with a new triumphant resolve to escape this place, to leave it and go.
Every other day she was at the Post Office sending a letter to her aunt in the States or inquiring about one she was expecting as she sang:
Jesus on the main line tell him what you want,
tell him what you want,
with a kind of upbeat defiant joy in order to coax good fortune into her life, making dance steps while she washed the clothes or cooked so as not to be forsaken by joy, while three streets away his father pounded and tuned the instrument they called the pan, working for the day when the new notes would fly out from the nest of metal, slip off the face of the bowl of steel and rise into flames of sound, the first steelpan notes in creation. Sonnyboy listening for the sound too, for the note, beginning to rush home from school to go to the yard in Zigili Trace, to be there when at last his father would play the notes that he had carved on the face of the steelpan and music would fly out and angels would rejoice and his father would come home, bringing food for the table and a ham for Christmas and his mother wouldn’t have to leave and go away to America.
Mammie
And then, that evening, Sonnyboy going home from school, walking up the hill that branched into Rouff Street when he hear his name called. When he look around, it was his mother, behind him, returning home, hurrying up the hill to catch up to him. She had left that morning to go to Maraval to check out the possibility of a work with a woman who wanted a housekeeper to live in. She had gone, expecting to convince the woman who wanted the housekeeper that she could do the job without living in, since she had children of her own to mind. She had walked to go and walked to come back the four-five miles since she didn’t even have money for car fare (buses did not run there). The woman was sympathetic, but she really had to have someone to live in. However she had a friend, she said, higher up the Maraval road, who wanted somebody. The woman give his mother the address. It wasn’t very far, she tell her. If she catch a taxi at the corner, she will get there in five minutes.
Taxi?
“Yes,” his mother tell her. “Thanks. Thank you.”
But she didn’t have money for taxi, so she had to walk back home and it was there she was heading when she see Sonnyboy. She would go and see about the work next day by taxi, but, the taxi fare? The only person she could think of getting it from was his father. So, she had steered Sonnyboy in the direction of Rouff Street.
“All I want from your father is taxi fare to Maraval. Nothing else,” speaking out loud as if she wanted to make it clear to herself as well as to him that she wasn’t doing this to try to get back with him. “And if he don’t have, for him to go and get it borrow from his brother or one of his friends.”
When they reached Rouff Street, Sonnyboy see in the yard his father, sitting on a big stone underneath the mango tree and around him the congregation from the neighborhood, all of them hushed and waiting.
He watched his father take up the pan and set it on one knee and with a stick in his hand begin beating the pan, coaxing out the notes,
pam pam pam paddam pam
Pam pam pam pam
that when he hear them is the melody of the hymn that for years had been sounding in the ears of the hill from the church of Mother Olga and Mr. Trim:
I am a warrior out in the fields,
and I can sing. And I can shout . . .
And everybody waiting for the absent sounds to enter the world, to enter life. And his father, hitting each note to establish its presence searching for the sequence of notes that would produce the melody of the song.
And I can
And I can
And I can tell
And I can tell it tell it tell it,
And I can tell it