When I was twelve, and in my final year of primary school, a boy I’ll call Lucas and I became an unlikely pair of morning birds. My mother engineered the union. It began on the second morning of the first term, in September, 1995. I had got ready for school in the usual ways, washing in a plastic basin in the back yard, eating a breakfast of plantain and eggs, and drinking a cup of insipid “gross-stake” tea—the leaves of which came from a fence tree in the yard—then dressing in my khaki uniform, still crisp after the previous day’s wear, though it now bore a distinct funk that I prayed only I could smell. My mother and I walked downhill toward the school, which was about half an hour away by foot.
That day, there was one break in the morning routine. After we had gone down the hill and passed the first enormous sugarcane field, which stretched right up to the edge of the asphalt road dusted with old ash from burned harvests—the place was called Jane Ash Corner—we stopped in front of a high corrugated-iron fence, columned by maka trees. By stopping, we had violated the natural order of things as I knew them. Adding to that disturbance, my mother called out a woman’s name, then said, “We here outside.” A voice boomed back, “Him soon ready.” I waited for the earth to open up and swallow us.
The compound of dishevelled wooden barrack houses behind the fence where we had stopped was referred to, in a coded but barefaced phrase, as “the coolie them place.” This term was used for any number of yards, scattered across the vast, largely Black ex-slave region of St. Thomas Parish, where people of East Indian descent lived. To my child’s mind, these yards seemed always hidden, like this one, behind thorn-like trees and corrugated-iron fences or cinder-block walls. They appeared fortified, places apart that, in our small, impoverished districts, stood out for reasons I didn’t entirely understand. The term “the coolie them place” acknowledged this separateness. Perhaps it had come about because Blacks and Indians met in the wake of the 1838 Slave Emancipation. (The Indian families in St. Thomas, like most Indians in Jamaica, had first come as indentured laborers, beginning in 1845.) Perhaps the encounter between the two groups at that time had created rivalries, for status and for work, that were never overcome. Perhaps we were both overprotective of our remnant cultures, and defensiveness became a way to cope. I didn’t know. All I knew was that we mostly lived at odds, an unbridgeable distance between us.
The term “the coolie them place” also served as a warning, a caution to avoid such places. Avoid them, if you were a kid, and be spared a whipping. Not from the people who lived in those yards but from one of your parents or another relative, once it was discovered that you had gone into such a yard. Even standing in front of one, as my mother and I were now doing, was usually enough to guarantee, for a child, a whipping. For an adult, the risk was that you could be ostracized or “go off your head” or suffer “body-come-downness”—in other words, be severely stricken by spirits in the body or the mind. Because the East Indian population in Jamaica was much smaller than its Black counterpart, these yards were few. But there were enough of them to make a deep mark on the psychogeography of slavery’s aftermath, an aftermath in which superstition and social discrimination touched every aspect of ordinary life. The phrase bore this shattered history into our shattered present.
To me, though, the phrase had been just a phrase, something purely rhetorical, a warning I’d heard and obeyed so as not to provoke a whipping from my mother, until a year before, when she had a nervous breakdown. Catatonic for days, she would suddenly erupt in fury, breaking objects and seeming to want to break me. I was eleven, and I had to tie her down. It hurt. Two Black obeah men—spiritualists—got the credit for curing her. They confirmed the family’s suspicion that her illness had come from “the coolie them place” next door to us. She had been possessed, they said, by a “coolie duppy,” or a spirit. She barely survived. When she did, the obeah men gave her a strict order: “Leave this sick house.” That was how we had come to live in the house on the hill above Jane Ash Corner. No wonder, standing now outside the gate of one of these yards, I was confused. I was scared.
The two parts of the gate in the fence were held together by a piece of blue fishing net. I fixed my eyes on that bolt of blue, unable to look up at my mother’s face. I didn’t know if she was speaking, perhaps explaining to me why we were there. All I could hear was my blood thrumming in my ears. Then, when the fishing net started to move, slithering like a snake, I almost fainted. Panicked, I stepped back; the blue disappeared, and the gates fell open. There stood a boy, in uniform, slim, about my height. I didn’t notice, until she spoke, that his mother was standing beside him.
She was a very large woman. Her thin black satin wrap, sacklike and knotted on one shoulder, creased under her armpits. She used her body—I thought—to block a good portion of the gateway. She turned and pulled the two sides of the gate back toward her, speaking in a flurry as she tied them with the blue net. I picked out of what she was saying that she was chastising the boy, who kept his head lowered. Then she boxed the back of his head and said a word I would henceforth hear repeated every morning for a year: “What a boy fi titivate!” What a boy for primping!
Two other things struck me: the mother and son didn’t look like each other; nor, despite the yard they came from, did they look Indian. Their noses and lips were like mine and my mother’s. His skin was coppery, and his hair was black, like mine, but with matching copper highlights. His mother was near-white with a pink undertone, what Jamaicans dismissively called “red.” I had never seen that color in our district. Where was she from?
“See Lucas here,” his mother said, as if presenting an item for appraisal. He gave the merest lift of his head, then dropped it. He stepped over to the asphalt side of the road, where my mother and I stood. My mother did not appraise him at all, this boy now standing shoulder to shoulder with me. She only said, with an unchallenged finality, “All right, go ’head to school.”
So we did, taking the bend around Jane Ash Corner that led out to the town’s square. From there, we would climb a hill and cross a field to school. Neither of us spoke. I glanced over at him; his head was now raised, and his eyes dead straight ahead. I registered more: he had a light coppery fuzz of baby hair on his cheek, and tiny brown spots were sprayed across the side of his face that I could see. I didn’t know then that these were called freckles. I thought of an overripe banana, and I wondered if he had a nickname, some variation on the word “speckled.” Maybe he was just called Banana.
But I kept returning to the fact that he didn’t look Indian, not like the Indians I’d occasionally seen entering or leaving the yard next door to where my mother and I used to live. Perhaps he didn’t belong to the yard that he and his mother had emerged from; maybe the two of them just happened to have been there that morning. Could be he was . . . well, maybe he was Indian after all. India was a big, big country, I’d heard. Maybe there were Indian people who looked like him, and I just hadn’t seen any yet. My thoughts were racing every which way.
“Mind your eye them drop out.” He said it quietly, his head still pointed directly in front of him. I hadn’t realized that my glance had turned into a stare. I wondered whether to apologize, but found myself hissing through my teeth as I said, “Is my eye them, come jook them out.”
He turned full face to me—more freckles and a pebble-size, scabbed-over gash on his forehead—and I saw his eyes for the first time. They were amber-colored, gold. He assessed my challenge, then decided I was too petty to be taken seriously and turned his face back to the road.
But I felt as though the stinging stare of his eyes remained on me. I had never seen eyes like those before. They had not only blinded my own eyes, as per my suggestion, but had done away with my tongue as well. As soon as we got through the school gate, he went his way without ceremony. Just as I had never seen him on the school grounds in my previous four years at the school, I didn’t see him a single time that day.
And, for the rest of that year, I never saw him around school—neither on the playground during break times, nor at the concrete water troughs, which were always crowded, nor at any of the shade spots where lunch was eaten and scandals were stirred. Nor did I see him in the evening when school was out and little gangs were formed to raid mango groves or go off to find sweetshops somewhere behind God’s back or simply to play-fight in the field before rushing home. Lucas was nowhere to be seen. I saw him only in the mornings, when I arrived at his gate, without my mother, who accompanied me just that first time.
In the evening of that first day, when I got home from school, I asked my mother a barrage of questions. I sought desperately to know two things: who were those people, and why was I to go with Lucas to school? My mother’s answers were less than extraordinary. Those people, she told me, were people from down the hill; the mother she knew from “back in the days.” Yesterday, she’d run into her and found out that she had lived in Jane Ash Corner for “donkey years now” and had a “wash-belly” boy my age, who attended the same school as me.
Out of this last tidbit, somehow, the arrangement was made for Lucas and me to walk to school together in the morning. After all, we were both in sixth grade, our last year of primary school, and “it would be nice.” The mothers had also talked about us walking home together in the evenings, but after school Lucas went with his father and older brothers “far, far clear over Holland Bay,” where his father had a farm and set fish pots to catch “tom tom”—river mullets. Lucas’s mother sold the farm produce, along with the fish, at big markets like the one in Morant Bay, a principal town about fourteen miles outside the district. This farm-going in the evenings explained why I never saw Lucas when school was out. It did not explain why I never saw a peep of him during school hours. That, and so much else, was left unanswered.
I hadn’t formulated the right question. I don’t remember if it was the next evening, or the evening after that, or over the weekend—after I’d tolerated Lucas’s silence on the walk to school for the whole first week, his head obstinately tilted forward and eyes averted—that I, finally, figured out what to ask my mother.
“How them different from who sick you?”
She considered this a while. Her words came out slowly: “Well, they is me friend, you know. From small days, me friend and her man flexing. Their people—them couldn’t change that and them did have to accept them. That is how love strong. Look see, they live years on top of years with them pickney them in the same yard. I didn’t even know that, since me did move away. Is plenty generations over there in that yard, you know.”
From this, I guessed that Lucas’s father was Indian, which would have made Lucas “coolie royal,” a designation reserved for someone of Indian and Black heritage. The matter should’ve ended there. But, within the blurred and shifting boundaries of my surroundings, I was still confused. Lucas didn’t seem to fit into the “coolie royal” category. According to my understanding at the time, to be “coolie royal,” Lucas would have had to have mahogany skin and silken, loosely curly black hair. Many of the students with Indian blood at our school fell into that category. Thinking about this now, from my writing desk in upstate New York in 2022, it occurs to me that “coolie royal” was another of those cynical colonial concepts—like “high-brown,” which Lucas, though his skin was literally brown, was not. How much energy is wasted on defining visible distinctions within the fluid spectrum of Creole identities?
I began to wonder. If Lucas was not Indian, or “coolie royal,” like some of our schoolmates, or “red,” like his mother, how was he to be classified? It wasn’t classification in and of itself that I was curious about but something for which I wasn’t sure language existed. Curiosity was hard to kill, and Lucas didn’t make it easy.
The following Monday morning, I arrived at his gate and announced myself. His mother shouted his name from in the yard, followed by her variation of “What a boy fi titivate!” He exited—quickly drawing and tying the gates shut—with his head hung low. I smiled and gave him a friendly greeting. He walked past me, saying nothing. Taken aback, I stood a while, long enough that I had to trot to catch up with him. As he had on the mornings of the previous week, he held his head forward, eyes averted, in a world of his own. Still, I played it cool and said, “Wha’gwaan?” I rushed to add, “You going Holland Bay this evening?”
He stopped abruptly, turned to me with a screw face, and spat out, “You a watchman?”
“Watch you? No, is me mother say. . . .”
“Your mumma a watchman, too?” He drew closer to me; his innumerable freckles seemed to have spoken. “Stop follow, follow me, you hear? Me not Jesus, me don’t want no followers.” I actually found his last statement funny, but he had also provoked my ire.
“Eh, eh, look here, Christ”—I couldn’t resist—“you are nobody for anybody to watch, worse to go follow, so settle your nerves.” Still a hair’s breadth away from me, his face glowered. At any moment, I expected him to strike me. But, just like he had done the first morning, when he had decided I was too petty to be taken seriously, he turned his face back to the road and started walking. Sure enough, I followed him.
I returned the next morning. The routine began afresh: my call, his mother’s response, his exit through the gates, the silent walk to school. The same routine the morning after that. Every morning, when I woke, the first image in my head was the face of that surly boy with whom, locked in a spiky quiet, I walked to school. This was my life now. I hated it.
Thursday morning came. Just as we had rounded the bend of Jane Ash Corner, I said to him, “We not have to walk together to school at all, you know. There is plenty way to get there. You take one, me take one.” I said it, half looking at the ground and half looking at the side of his implacable face. The humiliation made me furious.
A beat or two passed before he said, “No, it all right.” Then, with what could be best described as a hen’s cackle, he laughed and said, “Me know you love to follow me!” Laughing still, he continued, “Just don’t ask me a bag of questions, like you is the district constable.”
“You see me with big rum belly like constable?” I said, chuckling.
“That soon come, man. Two twos and your waist will have no line.” We were beside ourselves with laughter. Over the next few weeks, this evolved into a private language between us. So that we were, for a good half hour of every morning, on our walks to school, oddly birds of one feather.
There were other little groups of students walking to school, some with parents or other grownups. They would stare at us—at him, really—but they never interacted with us. Lucas was unfazed. He kept his focus on me, if we were talking, or else in front of him or on the roadside bushes, his head held high. This made him seem aloof, a posture so different from the dejected, low-hanging-face boy who exited his gate every morning, the posture he maintained for the first few minutes of our walk.
In rare moments, somebody from one of these little groups, as if sent on reconnaissance, would draw near to us. He—it was always a boy—would scuttle back to his group after getting a version of the stinging stare that Lucas had given me on our first morning. One day, someone threw a taunt, an arsenal of taunts, actually, at Lucas. Like my guesses at his nickname, these taunts were food-based:
“Yow, yellow-heart roast breadfruit boy!”
“Hey, bruised jackfruit, hear me a call to you?”
“Oy there, turned cornmeal face!”
Lucas made no response, and I noted no change in his demeanor. It wasn’t simply that the boy doing the taunting was ignored. He didn’t exist.
People in general began to fade away in the mornings when I walked with Lucas. We existed out of reach of the ever-prying village eyes, surveilling from the doorways and yards of fenced and fenceless shanties, out of reach of the imbecilic chatter and judgment that kept the old, cold comfort of plantation suspicion alive. From the time that Lucas came out of his gate, and until we were through the gates of the school a half hour later, I seemed unable to recognize anybody but him.
One morning, there was a surprise. Out of the blue, as we were nearing the town’s square, Lucas asked, “Is true say principal cut off your locks when you did come a we school?”
The question was so unexpected, it took me a moment to realize that it was related to me. When I did, I wondered how Lucas could’ve possibly known about that incident. Well, he could’ve heard about it any number of ways since what had happened wasn’t exactly private. The way he asked, however, suggested that he hadn’t really heard about it, or had heard about it in a fragmented manner. The question spoke to his detachment; it risked exposing something that was less about me and more about him.
“True” was the answer to his question. Years ago, when my mother enrolled me in the school, I believe I was the only student there with dreadlocks. At my previous school, situated in my father’s parish, Portland, where I was born, there were many other boys and girls with dreads. During the morning devotion of the first day at my new school, the principal noticed me—my hair was wrapped in a khaki turban—and summoned me to her office. She was in a state. She couldn’t understand how I’d got registered to her school in the first place with that “abomination” on my head.
Bewildered as she was, she casually unwound my turban. And, just as casually, picking up the biggest pair of scissors I had ever seen, she snipped twice at my head. Several strands of dreads, lifeless like dried vines, fell to the floor. The sight of my own hair numbed me. She then told me to pick the dreads up, dismissing me home with this clear instruction for my mother: “Tell your mother, ‘Finish the job,’ or don’t come back.” I was giving Lucas a rough version of what took place.
“So what your mumma do when you go home?” he asked me.
I’d never spoken with anyone about it before, other than with my mother, who raged whenever the incident was brought up. When it had happened, and for months after, I’d thought about nothing else. Then, with time, it began to feel like a fairy tale. In my mind, it became something that had happened to someone else.
“What me mother do?” I repeated, staring back into his intense gaze. “Oh. Jesus, me don’t even done talk before me mother wheel out of the yard and right over to school and into principal’s office without even a ‘Howdy do, Miss.’ Then me mother start to slap slap up principal, slap her so hard you don’t know if principal black or if principal blue!”
Standing outside the office, my dreads still in my hand, I didn’t see my mother slapping the principal, but I heard when the principal began to scream bloody murder. A crowd gathered in no time. Next thing, before I could make sense of what was happening, I saw my mother being taken out of the principal’s office by two paunch-belly district constables. Cursing and kicking, she was hauled into the back of a police jeep. When the jeep drove off, some people from the crowd running behind it, I moved from sobbing to wailing, believing my mother was being taken away for good. But she was home soon enough.
“Them take your mumma for that?”
“Yes.”
“Kiss me rass,” he said. He added, “You know it have people in India, too, like Rasta dread people, who don’t deal with cutting their hair.” This was utterly new to me. Who were these Indian people like Rastas? Did any of those people, relatives of his, live in his yard? But we had arrived at the school gate, and Lucas, without ceremony as usual, took his leave of me.
Later in the day, thinking about the morning, I felt a strange sense of guilt. I realized that, had our conversation continued, I would not have been able to draw on any past stories about him. I had heard nothing, and how would I? Whom would I have asked if they had heard anything about a boy living in an Indian yard in Jane Ash Corner? I could ask only the boy himself.
It was out of this mood—this strange guilt—that some days later I asked him about the shiny scar on his forehead. He traced two fingers on it and said, “This? You don’t think me born with it?” I was half ready to believe him. But he gave his cackle laugh and said, “This from long, long time, man.” His finger was still on the gash, smoothing it out, like. He wasn’t going to say more, and I wasn’t sure what other question to ask. Instead, I said, “Lemme see it.”
The last thing I expected was for him to push his head under my eyes, tilting down his forehead. Up close, I could see infinitesimal freckles, finer than the ones on his cheeks and nose bridge, covering his forehead and disappearing into his hairline. Only where the gash was—shiny like two conjoined thumbnails—there were no freckles. The gash had a slight depression. I pressed my finger on it, and he flinched; it felt glass smooth. I pressed again; this time he didn’t flinch. I was wondering if freckles could ever grow back there. He pulled away, glancing up with his eyes opened wide. Their unnatural gold tint had a coronet pattern, softer in glow around the iris. “See?” he said. Had I, and what? “Yes,” I said.
For the first couple of minutes of our walk, Lucas was always silent. It took me a while to realize that his silence was not due to shyness or to some reservation that he had about me. It was because a deep sadness accompanied him. Usually, when we were some distance from his yard, his mood would alter, and he’d abruptly break the silence. This became our pattern of talking, which I accepted, much as it irritated me to have to wait for him to say the first words.
On one of the last mornings of the first term, as soon as he came through the gate, I could see that an extra sullenness weighed him down. He literally looked smaller, his head bowed, and his shoulders rolled into a curve. Even when we were some distance away from his place, there was no customary silence-breaking. I said something about school. He said nothing but continued his hunched walk, examining the cracked macadam under his feet. I tried again, and again silence. I let him alone, looking around to distract myself. I had been doing this for some time when I heard sniffles. I turned and saw his shoulders jerking and his palms over his face.
We had just crossed into a brushy track of tall trees, which led out to the last stretch toward school. No one else was on the track. He pulled over to one side and sat on the ground, hanging his head. He let out a single loud squeal, which quickly became an almost noiseless whimper. His body convulsed in spasms. With one hand on his shoulder, I used the other to try to lift his head. I asked, “Wha’mphen, wha’mphen?” His head was unyielding, but he didn’t push my hands away. I began to pat his shoulder and said, “Everything all right.”
He grew calm after a short while. Then he raised his head, his face a flushed reddish color burning with freckles. “Me all right,” he said, adding meekly, “Is nothing.” He didn’t get up, so I sat next to him—worried as hell that the morning school bell would ring and we would be locked out of school or face a despicable punishment from the principal for being late. His breathing was calmer, his normal color creeping back into his face. I sensed that he wanted to talk.
“Is what wrong?” I asked.
He hesitated a moment, then said, “Them burn me again.” I shook my head. He sighed and touched the gash on his forehead. “You see this? Is them burn me. For nothing them burn me. If me sit, is problem. If me stand up, is problem. If me rest a little rest, is pure licks. Them wake me anytime a night—go wash the plate, go this, go that—that’s why me tired so a morning. Before cock crow, broom clap me in me head—go sweep the veranda, boy!—why veranda to sweep and sun not even light yet? Me catch little sleep back ’cause me tired.”
“So them burn you? Who?”
He looked at me puzzled, then his expression darkened. “You don’t know the half. Is not no one somebody—is the all of them in the yard.” I wanted to ask Lucas if “them” included his parents. But I didn’t know how to ask the question. I said, “Me sorry. Everything will be all right.”
Looking into my eyes, Lucas said, “Me can only do a little book way a night with kerosene lamp turn low when them sleeping. All me can see is me shadow on the book page.” He spoke as if that image of himself were before him now, an image of immeasurable sadness. It broke him. He began to sob again. He said, “I bet you, one night when them sleeping I going to take that lamp and burn down the place. You watch.”
I patted his shoulder, unsure what else to do. Then I wondered where on his body he got burned this time. I couldn’t bring myself to ask. “Me sorry,” I said again. He nodded. The track was still empty. I couldn’t tell what time it was, but I had a feeling the school bell had rung some while ago.
“Bell must be ring already. We should go.”
He stared in the direction of school, blocked by trees and bushes. “Yes, bell must a ring by now. You go in first, and then me come after.”
I went off, to be at the mercy of the principal. I didn’t look back for Lucas. Whether he entered those gates or not that morning, I never found out.
The term ended. Christmas came, the kite season, then the New Year. Whenever I happened to encounter other sixth graders, they chanted, “Free paper burn!” Meaning, the holidays will be over and soon school will reopen. (The expression came from slavery days; “free paper” was an enslaved person’s pass when leaving the plantation.)
I knew the chant well. But now it was more loaded: after this term, primary school was over for good. If you were lucky in the Common Entrance Exams, you might move on to a high school. Most kids I knew who were older than me didn’t have that luck; many didn’t want that luck. For some, going to high school was just delaying the inevitable. Following the chants of “Free paper burn,” that inevitable was summed up in a gnomic, brutal question: “Chop or pick?”
Chop was to become a cane cutter for a place like the Golden Grove Sugar Factory. Pick was to become a banana harvester for Eastern Banana Estates.
“Chop, of course,” one boy might answer.
“Pick, a must that,” another answered.
There might be a play quarrel about which was better—“Pick ’cause you use machete like sword!”; “Chop ’cause billhook cut and draw same time!”—but whatever was said was said without rancor. Life was leading one way or the other—why be bitter?
Manual labor made up the income basis of every second person living in St. Thomas. My mother, when young, escaped that fate by moving to my father’s parish, Portland. There, constrictions existed, but less so, or in less debasing ways, than in St. Thomas. My mother drummed into me daily that neither chop nor pick would be my destiny. “By hook or crook,” she would say, “you going to high school.” That was that.
As far as I can guess, Lucas’s mother, like my mother, had escaped the fate of chop or pick, thanks to her position at the big market in Morant Bay, selling river mullets and the produce from her husband’s farm. Was it Lucas’s destiny to be a farmer like his father and brothers? I thought of how I never, ever saw him at school, not even once, after we parted at the school gates in the morning. Yet he set out every morning, just like I did. I thought of the months of walking together, the diligence in doing so, and something greater than diligence that we both were in search of.
It was the first school morning of January, 1996. Lucas’s mother had just shouted, “What a boy fi titivate!” Shortly after, Lucas pulled the piece of blue fishing net and emerged from the gate. Except for a buzz cut, he was the same sullen boy I had seen two or so weeks earlier. It was the longest I had gone without seeing him since my mother had formed the strange alliance of our morning walk last September. We strolled off quietly.
“You go beach over so?” he asked as soon as we were some distance from his house. The question surprised me. I knew what he was asking—whether I had gone to a beach in Portland. But how he had known that I spent some of the school break in Portland puzzled me. I was certain I had never mentioned Portland to him in any context. Where was he getting his information from? Perhaps from my mother through his mother, but I doubted that was the case.
“Yeah, man, plenty, plenty time. Bryan’s Bay, Frenchman’s Cove and thing.” I thought what to ask him. Should I ask where he had spent his school break? That would’ve sounded trite. If I knew a little more of his background, the way he knew something of mine, apparently, I could’ve formed a question. I thought of asking about the farm in Holland Bay, but before I came up with anything, he said, “You can swim good? All the Black fisherman me know round Holland Bay side can’t swim. Bestest fisherman them, and most of them can only splash water!” He was laughing hard. I laughed with him.
“So, wait, you a good swimmer?” I asked.
“Tops, man. Champion in the water!” I don’t believe I had ever heard his voice raised so high before. He made a gliding motion with his hand—fishlike—to display his conviction.
I hissed through my teeth and said, “You all talk. Splash in river water is not swimming.”
“But you see me dying trial this morning,” he said, opening his mouth with mock astonishment. He added, “You must not hear what top-class fisherman call me when we take boat go places like Mackerel Bank or Pedro Bank—what you know ’bout Pedro Bank?—and clear near Cuba side”—he waved a hand in one direction—“when engine cut and me dive off boat at sea; you must not hear what them call me.”
He spoke with such excitement. Everything he said was utterly new to me. I was seeing a new person, new with an added layer, a secret skein of something special, a nickname, he was about to reveal to me.
I tried to quell my enthusiasm when I asked, “What so them call you?”
“Goldfish.”
Not “Speckled,” not “Banana,” but “Goldfish” was his shibboleth.
“Goldfish,” I said.
“Yes, that’s me name on water,” he said. I knew right then I was never going to be calling him that. It was a name reserved for—given by—a sect who knew what they were talking about, and who knew him in that light of excitement out at sea.
Probably his sharing was a leftover of the holiday fervor, for he never again shared anything of the sort about himself with me. I nudged, making tall claims about my swimming abilities (which were nil to zero); he laughed them off, saying nothing. He never again spoke about his family, either, or about being burned. Nor did he speak again of his dream of burning down the house one night while his tormentors were asleep. I didn’t nudge or try to get him to talk about it, but I thought a lot about the prism of Lucas. On one side was the champion-swimmer boy with the nickname that flashed with bright radiance. The other side was dark, the tormented boy, longing to enact a revenge of fire. The dark side was also radiant, I thought, but without shine. His many other sides were blank to me; and these two, opposing forces of water and fire, were mere outlines.
One morning, sometime after the beginning of March, I asked, “You declare school already?” Long I had been waiting to ask him that question.
It was the question of the moment. For the students who were not going to “chop” or “pick,” “declaring” a high school was the real sacrament marking the end of childhood. You declared by ranking a few of the half dozen or so schools in and around St. Thomas, from highest to lowest in preference. The only choice I made outside of St. Thomas was Happy Grove High, a school built on a cliff on the Portland side of the border. Because I was from Portland, Happy Grove was my top choice. I felt I had a special claim on it, as if going there would be my homecoming. Later in the month, you sat for the Common Entrance Exam, the results of which would then determine the high school you were placed in. So much for ranking preference. The results were released in June. The waiting period was abominable. When I was in lower grades, I had seen sixth graders waiting, stricken by jangled nerves. One morning in June, during the devotion gathering, the Common Entrance Exams results were read out loud by the principal, the results having been printed in the Jamaica Gleaner that morning. The large-format paper, with columns of names of students who had made it, gave the morning a frightening gravity. In the evening, a copy of the Gleaner was passed from yard to yard. To see printed in black-and-white the name of some known person, or even an unknown person who lived somewhere close by, was like witnessing magic.
We were at the school gates when I asked Lucas the question, “You declare school already?”
Fear had made me wait until that moment to ask. The bell started ringing, which meant that he didn’t need to answer. But there was still a sliver of time. He could, if he wanted, blurt out an answer before heading off. There would be time tomorrow, anyway, and the next day and weeks ahead after that in which I could ask him the same question. But I knew that this moment was the only one. If he didn’t answer now, I would never ask again. The term would be over by the beginning of July, and I would never see him again. I felt that in my bones. Still, I was hoping—the last bell had struck—that his answer would alter what I felt. As usual, we parted. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
