The Ice Migration E-Book

Jacqueline Crooks

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 179

Beschreibung

The stories in this collection move around in time and place, but linked by the experiences of the descendants of a Jamaican family of mixed Indian and African heritage. From Roaring River in rural Jamaica in 1908 where the descendants of African slaves make connections with new arrivals from Calcutta to work in the sugar cane fields, to Southall in 2013, where the Millers live alongside newer migrants from India, The Ice Migration is a poetic exploration of movement as central to the human condition, from the ancestors of the vanished Tainos in Jamaica who crossed the Behring Straits 40,000 years ago, who linger in spirit, to Tutus who is driven to separation from her family, to the constancy of moving on and ultimately return to Roaring River. The people of Jacqueline Crooks' stories are deeply enmeshed in their African/Indian Jamaican world of dreams, visions, duppies and spiritual presences that connect them across time and place. What they discover beyond the strangeness of change of place and the hostilities they encounter is that life remains defined by its common crises – of birth, the complications of sexuality, sickness, old age, and death – and the comforts of food, stories and memory.

Leseprobe

JACQUELINE CROOKS

THE ICE MIGRATION

First published in Great Britain in 2018

Peepal Tree Press Ltd

17 King’s Avenue

Leeds LS6 1QS

UK

www.peepaltreepress.com

© Jacqueline Crooks, 2018

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission

Epub ISBN 13: 978-1-84523-430-0

Mobi ISBN 13: 978-1-84523-431-7

www.peepaltreepress.com

https://www.facebook.com/peepaltreepress

https://twitter.com/peepaltreepress

For my sister, Michelle Anita Kaye Wright.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost I would like to thank my writing mentor and editor, Jacob Ross. Jacob was the first person to look at these stories, almost 15 years ago as part of a Spread the Word start to write workshop. Thank you for believing in me.

I am grateful for the subsequent support of various writers during the eighteen years that I have been developing this shape-shifting collection. Special thanks to Joan Anim-Addo and Richard Skinner, my tutors at Goldsmiths University. I am indebted to Richard for his unstinting support, encouragement and unfailing generosity.

Carol Bird, Hannah Davis, Karen Fielding, Lorraine Mullaney and Leila Segal who supported me with the early drafts and have provided a circle of valuable friendship.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Bernardine Evaristo, Maggie Gee, and Alex Wheatle for their guidance and encouragement. They set the bar high and this has kept me striving to improve my craft.

Special thanks to Spread the Word. Their accessible and high-quality workshops have helped me to develop these stories throughout the years.

It has been a pleasure working with Gemma Berenguer of Monostereo – thank you for the wonderful design work for the book cover.

Thank you to Peepal Tree Press for bringing these stories to light and for providing a valuable platform for Caribbean writers.

Finally, I would like to thank my family, Agatha, Ruby, Michelle, Wayne, Tyrone, Joseph, and Mia for the family stories that have helped to shape this collection.

CONTENTS

The Ice Migration Route

Family Tree

Chigoe

Black Cowboys

Breaking Stones

The Ice Migration

Backra

The Lamp

Walk Good

Cornmeal Dumplings

Talking Bad

Swinging Low

Survival of the Fittest

Roaring River Pickney

In the Spirit

Gwaan

Old Time People

The Old Goat

The Offering

Orchids and Bones

Soft to the Touch

Skinning Up

Bu’n Up

Hard Ears

The Crypt

Cool Burn

Chigoe

Roaring River, 1912

Fever-hot afternoon. Sweet-sour air of sweat and cane. Mr Lulla wiped his brow with his facecloth. Watched the black musical notes of cane cutters rising and falling on waves of heat. He hummed a river raga. It distracted him for a while, but he was disturbed again by the itching. He looked down at his feet – coral scabs, turquoise bruises and white mounds studded like pearls beneath his skin. His feet were decorated like those of Bani, the dancer from Manipuri who carried his music in her jewelled feet.

He crouched, grabbed the big toe of his right foot; squeezed a pearl.

Nothing.

He poked the tip of his machete at the dark pod in the centre of the pearl. Split skin oozed coiled-dead chigoe. ‘Where is my God to take me?’ he called out.

He must not report sick. Must not run again. Running away that one night had brought shame to his wife. He bit down on his lip, raised his machete high and brought it down with a crack against the sugarcane. He looked across at Ram Baram, Bani’s partner, who was grunting and slashing a little way ahead of him.

‘Get on with it, old man,’ Ram Baram shouted. ‘Too much drumming at night. No energy for work. No energy for your little wife.’

Mr Lulla did not reply. You did not reply to a man like Ram Baram.

The bell rang at midday and the overseer, Mr Thomas, rode the black plantation horse around, calling out to them in sing-song:

Come everybody

Mek haste

Mek haste

The massah wan’ to

See oonuh face

Come everybody

Mek haste

Fling machete down

Run come along

A deh usual place

Mr Thomas was as black and silky smooth-skinned as the horse, his voice deep and rumbling as Roaring River in the rainy season.

Mr Lulla went with the other men to the accounting barracks. His wife and the other women were already there, motionless in the heat.

Massah Sleifer stood under the shade of the verandah smoking a cigar. He exhaled words and smoke. ‘You like the sweet water. Sweetness from the sugar. You want more? Some of you came on the SS Ganges. Well, your contracts end just before next year’s harvest.’

The Indians waved their hands in the air, shouting. Mr Lulla’s river raga came back to him. He hummed it as he listened to the dialects and languages become one hot wavering note.

Massah Sleifer shouted over them. ‘The world needs sugar! Give it to them and you’ll get land. Sweetness, sweet things. Five more years, that’s all.’ He puffed more smoke shapes. They floated in the air like white flower-offerings. He turned his back on them and went into the cool darkness of the accounting barracks.

Mr Lulla’s wife came to him, her small feet rising and falling quickly, like needles stitching-up the earth. She poked her finger into his arm. ‘Land!’ she said, and pointed to the mountains.

She was a beautiful woman, her black eyes never showed signs of weariness. Every day he gathered up the dry twigs of his body and burnt himself out on the plantation. But she moved quickly from morning until night – here, there, everywhere – working, talking, scheming. Her black-flitting eyes had wrong-footed them to this place, and he could no longer touch her without losing his sense of rhythm; could not touch his beloved drums for days after.

Bani was shouting, ‘If they had told us everything in Calcutta, I would never have come here to this!’ Bani was no beauty. Her brown face was long, her nostrils flared. She had the silent, stoic look of a mule. But, oh! when she coiled her plaited hair on her head and danced in the evenings, holding the poses of goddesses – Maya, Shakti, Ganga – perfectly balanced; neck, eyebrows, lips miming a story – every movement a word, words he played on his drums, faster and faster…

Mr Lulla saw Ram Baram go up the steps of the barracks, following Massah Sleifer into the darkness. He did not like the way Ram Baram was moving, his arms tensed a little way from his sides, his hands curved like knife handles.

Bani slid her head from side to side as if she were loosening it from her shoulders. ‘I will go home,’ she said. ‘I will be free. Why would I do it all again? Am I a slave to work like this?’

‘What freedom can you have?’ Mrs Lulla shouted at Bani. She moved towards Bani with the tiny, sure-footed speed of a chicken. ‘You have nothing in Calcutta now. A dishonoured woman, your family would pass you in the street.’

Mr Lulla took hold of his wife’s arm. He did not like what she was saying. Bani had been with another man, but she had chosen Ram Baram when the other man left for Kingston, when his contract ended. Ram Baram was a Madrasi. Pockmarked and proud. His heavy brows jutted like a ledge across his sunken eyes. The thin strap of his mouth compressed with curses. A good choice, if protection was all that Bani needed.

The workers crowded around the women.

‘A dishonoured woman?’ Bani shouted back at Mrs Lulla. ‘In this place? Where nobody remembers what castes they belong to? Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Chamars, Dhobis and Doms – everyone working in shit!’ She walked away.

Mr Lulla looked on, knowing that his wife would have the last word. Sure enough, she stood where she was – hands on her small hips, elbows jutting like wings – and shouted, ‘In this place, a dishonoured woman is like Roaring River when it overflows. No control! It goes where it wants; does what it wants; brings destruction.’ Then she turned to him. ‘My intuition is never wrong,’

He knew all his wife’s sayings: ‘It is the hand of God;’ ‘My intuition tells me such and such...’ He wanted to ask how her intuition had brought them to this slavery, but he held his mouth. He wished he could be more like the Madrasis; they were slack and surly. They spoke their minds, fought each other in the hot nights – wrestling oily bodies, bared teeth, stabbing, gouging, scarring. Ram Baram was the worse. Even the overseers were afraid of him.

The men from Calcutta were different. In India, they had worked on flood plains, ploughing, harrowing and smoothing the water-logged rice fields; soaking and beating the indigo leaves until the blue dye released itself into their bodies.

The wind had been stirring up from the north and there was a fiery crack in the air that sent clouds spinning towards them. Rain fell. Quick and hard. Mr Lulla stood in the downpour watching the labourers running, their clothes wrinkled around their bodies like ageing skin.

He ran from his wife, through the darkening rain, remembering the night he tried to escape the plantation.

A crescent moon night. Owls unscrewing the darkness with their eyes. His flat fleet slapping the earth as he hurried through the trail-less bush, away from the plantation bell, the overseer’s shouts, and the grinding-teeth sleep of his wife. He turned once, saw the retreating pastures of Guinea grass and pangola. He smelt darkness – the juices of the bush seeping into the night. He felt darkness – soft air on his neck, stirring the small hairs on his nape. He imagined Bani naked, lying on the Guinea grass; getting on top of her, entering the wet darkness between her legs. He felt an explosion of power. Ran harder than he had ever run before.

He reached the shelter of the barracks where his son, Baba-Lulla, was asleep with the other children. Rain fell like stones against the zinc roof. The men stuffed rags into rum bottles filled with kerosene and lit them. The women lit the chulah and prepared rice and eggplant. They passed bowls of food around. Two men, potters from Bihar, said the storm was a sign and they would return to India. Some said they would move to the Indian settlements in Kingston, Bachan Pen and Hindu Town, sell black sugar and bhajji.

Mr Lulla thought that he would have settled for that but his wife snorted, ‘Those tin towns! Filled with beggars and crows.’

Others said they had nothing in India now and they would stay on to get land.

Mrs Lulla went over to their sleeping child and pulled the white sheet from his body. ‘Look, our son. What do our lives matter? We must get land for him.’

Mr Lulla pushed away his bowl and sat, stroking the globe of his bloated paunch.

Bani stood up. Mr Lulla watched as she pulled her udhni over her head and shoulders. He remembered the journey on the steamship from Calcutta. Bani persuaded him to play his tabla for the dancing girls from Manipuri. As he played he watched their decorated feet sliding and pounding the deck. And Bani – her rounded body balanced on one supple foot, the other foot crossed against her thigh, arms waving above like a strong, rooted tree.

Mr Lulla wondered what Ram Baram would say. He was bound to the plantation for three more years and would have no woman if Bani left. He hobbled away and lay down in his bed. He smelt the rot of cane trash seeping from his feet. The itching had stopped, he poked out more chiggoe from his feet, noticed dark marks pooling beneath his skin.

During the humid night he shivered and burned, dreamed of naked men, faces tattooed in black, throwing sugarcane spears at him, their sharp feathery spikelets stabbing his feet, pinning him to the ground.

He awoke a few hours before dawn. His right leg was hot and pulsing. He thought of Roaring River, the cool water coasting through the darkness, sloughing the edge off the simmering heat. He got up, walked into the indigo night. He saw red specks of lights in the mountains; heard a horse whinnying a long way away.

He came to the river. Sat on a rock and rested his feet in the cool water. His river raga melody came back to him. He hummed and hummed as daylight began to push through. He stared at the river buried between darkened earth and silver sky.

When he saw her, he was unable to move, unable to stop the raga.

There were river reeds coiled in Bani’s plaits and a long line of silver light running along her body. She was floating face down, the water carrying her. A dancing goddess, maintaining perfect balance and stillness.

A sama bhanga.

Black Cowboys

Roaring River, 1921

Harold stood outside the Big House scanning the Zemi-shaped mountains that were studded with sinkhole darkness.

It had been raining and the air was wet with the smell of the red earth.

The black cowboys were in the mountains somewhere, roasting wild hogs on their hidden, smokeless fires. Not like him, with his bafan legs, the pain in his calves and thighs like teeth clamped around his legs.

He walked to the river. Baba-Lulla was there as they’d planned, his white cotton trousers rolled up, wading through the shallow part of the river, kicking up black magnetic sand.

Baba-Lulla came to the shore and they sat beneath a canopy of wild banana leaves.

‘Cowboys, what do they have to hide?’ Harold asked.

‘Them more than cowboys,’ Baba-Lulla said. ‘Living on meat and mannish water. Muma says dat put one dangerous kinda heat in a man’s body.’

Harold knew the black cowboys weren’t like the riding-roping-stampeding ones he saw in the silent films that his father, Massah Sleifer, used to take him to in the open-air screenings in Kingston. The black cowboys rode the lower mountain slopes, herding cattle for his father. They kept to themselves, camping high-high, on inaccessible ridges of the mountain, beyond the bloodwood trees.

Sancho was the only one they saw close up. He came down to the river with the cattle early in the mornings, and sometimes at night if there was a full moon, like tonight.

The villagers didn’t like the cowboys or their horses – ‘bad-breed man and dem duppy horse,’ they said.

Harold and Baba-Lulla watched and waited, and some time later, Sancho and his white horse clopped across the old Spanish bridge that traversed Roaring River past the yellow limestone church onto the southern bank. Harold watched as Sancho led the horse further upstream where the water was deeper, rougher. He signalled to Baba-Lulla and they followed from a distance, crouched down in the bush.

The plantation foreman once told Harold that Sancho was descended from the Maroon, Juan Lubola, and African runaways. ‘Mix-up man.’ Harold was fascinated by the mixing of blood that had produced this strange looking man whose skin was the colour of pone – golden-brown and pitted.

‘You didn’t come last night,’ Harold said.

‘You did watch him last night as well?’ Baba-Lulla asked.

‘Twice this week. Too hot to sleep – mosquitoes and every damn thing bothering me.’ He wasn’t going to tell Baba-Lulla about his night pains, it felt like something he wasn’t supposed to talk about.

‘Your blood mus’ be sweeting them,’ Baba-Lulla said.

‘Shhh, look.’

They watched as Sancho took off his riding gloves, put his rifle on the ground, stripped himself naked.

Harold stared at the cowboy’s thin yellow body, the pattern of tightly packed muscles that covered almost every part of him like a disease.

‘What kind of thing goin’ on?’ Baba-Lulla asked.

‘Never done this before,’ Harold said.

Sancho led the horse into the river – the same part of the river where Harold and Baba-Lulla used to play with the other plantation children.

Harold was sixteen, skinny and stiff-backed awkward. In the last year or so, something had differentiated him and Baba-Lulla from the other boys, so they were often alone together, and as secretive as the black cowboys. But Harold didn’t understand what their secrets were, or where they came from within themselves. His friendship with Baba-Lulla had started at the same time as the pains in his body.

He felt foolish for his superstitious thoughts that the pains were somehow connected to the dreams he had when he caught fevers in the rainy season. Dreams where he saw his body stretched out, stone cold in a country where sky and land were one – an endless mass padded with snow and ice.

Sancho led the horse deeper into the river.

‘Him going drown the horse,’ Baba-Lulla said.

‘No, no. Look. He’s making it swim. That’s what he’s been doing these nights.’

Sancho tugged at the horse’s mane, mounted him. Rode him around and around.

The horse stumbled once and Harold put his hand on Baba-Lulla’s shoulder as if to steady him, but still he couldn’t take his eyes of Sancho. The pain in his legs was heavy and insistent, and there was a feeling of anxiety in his gut that made him think of Trenchton and Gillard – some of the boys they used to play with. Those boys, with their swagger and defined groin muscles, had started bragging, in an almost menacing way, of their ‘sessions’ with women. Women with strong, square bodies hewn out of the loneliness of their isolated shacks in the middle ridges of the mountains. Women who were broken off from social taboo. Different in every way from his mother, who was small, tawny eyed and tight-lipped.

Watching Sancho and the horse made Harold feel the same way as listening to Trenchton and Gillard: excited and afraid.

The horse stumbled and fell forward into the river.

Horse and rider were underwater.

Harold held his breath.

Sancho and his white horse surfaced into the blue moon-glow and Sancho mounted the tired animal again and rode him around and around until the horse began to shake.

‘Come, mek we go,’ Baba-Lulla said. ‘The man look like him goin’ bruck something tonight and – bwoy – I don’t want it to be me.’

Harold didn’t move.

Baba-Lulla crouched down again.

Sancho led the horse out of the river. The creature was shivering and snorting, pointing its ears.

Sancho looked around, and Harold and Baba-Lulla lay further down into the bush.

The cowboy patted the horse and it stomped the ground, kicking up the grass and the bush-smell of cerasee.

‘Me just gentling you, sah, nice and easy. Gentling you cos you need to be with others,’ Sancho said.

‘Nobody wanna be lonely and wild, not in this yah valley.’

The horse cried out as it reared.

Sancho pulled the horse’s head down and put his mouth to the horse’s flattened ears. The horse bared its teeth at Sancho’s whispered words, and Sancho worked his hand along the horse’s spine, rubbing, stroking.

Harold felt the pain in his legs soothing. He thought of his mother. Why had she never come to him in the nights when he had fevers? His skin burnt red, white-gold hair soaked against his neck.

She was responsible for his pain.

Sancho tethered the horse to a tree and moved behind it, talking in a strange, tight, high-pitched voice. ‘Easy now, easy. Me just gentling yuh. Nuthin’ more, yuh hear!’

‘Come, nuh,’ said Baba-Lulla. ‘This look like trouble.’

Harold brushed his hand away. ‘Go, if you’re going.’ The pains had started again.

Sancho was still stroking the horse and moaning. The animal shuddered and then became still, its ears turned backwards.

‘Me gone,’ Baba-Lulla said. ‘This is big people business.’

Harold watched him move away, crouching low.

Harold knew that Baba-Lulla would go down-stream, back to the black magnetic sands because he, at least, was comfortable in his body. Comfortable on the island.

Harold could not leave. Some secret was about to be revealed. About Sancho, about himself, about the river, about who belonged where.

Sancho was moaning loudly, crying, the raw bawling grating on the pain in Harold’s legs. He looked away to the mountains and saw two red-eyed specks high up, parallel but far apart.

But there was still no smoke.

He realised that there would never be any smoke. He took off his clothes and lay, face downward, his limbs spread out on the cool moist soil, his silent tears mingling with the red earth.

Breaking Stones

Roaring River, 1934

Baba-Lulla saw Millie and her old grandmother sitting under the spreading branches of Guango trees. Their legs opened around a litter of stones. It was Saturday afternoon. The villagers had returned from market hours ago, and were cooking, drinking, sitting on verandas. But Millie and her grandmother worked on.

Bruck-Bruck-Bruccckk.

He heard the grandmother shout out, ‘Blisters, bu’n-up batty and bend-up back. For what? Dollar a day! Me body bruck up. It dry! Need likkle river water. Mek it tek me away. Lord! Mek it tek me away.’

Bruck-Bruck-Bruccckk.

He watched as Millie smashed her hammer against the pile of stones.

Bruck-Bruck-Bruccckk.

The grandmother hobbled towards Roaring River with her pail and Baba-Lulla went to Millie.

‘Is why yuh watching me so?’ She asked. ‘You think this yah is slave work, eh?’