Ms. Charlmagne sucked her teeth loud drawing the attention of the other teachers. She didn’t care. They’d been eyeballing her the moment she started teaching at Priscilla Prescod Memorial School with her tight-up skirts and long weaves that she let fall down her back like a white woman or one of dem chabine girls. But she was good at math. That’s why they hired her.
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With hands clasped around his gut, my father and I cruised down the wobbly lanes of Pouyatt and Crooks Street where the zinc fences that made homes glistened in the eventide light and old women sitting outside on multicolored buckets smiled at us in between thick, hearty laughter.
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Come 5 am, I was always awakened by the smell of ‘black disinfect’ (if you know you know) the sound of water hitting the pavement just outside the door and My Grandmother humming her church songs (her favourite was “One day at a time”) as she washed away the jumbies of the night before.
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I think about my upbringing and how I was not raised in the part of Kingston where the legendary aspects of Jamaican culture were born and built. If we are being geographically specific, I am really not from Kingston at all. I can trace my upbringing to the 5-kilometre bubble in St. Andrew where language is policed, appearances are judged…
Read MoreBehold Couva’s Sam Manning,
audio farmer and Caribbean spy,
splicing honey into singers’ mouths
throughout the Americas.
