The Blacka (2002)

In Georgetown, Guyana, there is a canal, an arterial network of waterways that runs through, and feeds the entire city: the Lamaha Canal.

Throughout my own lifetime, I have seen, with the growth of the city, the Canal, at different points along its course, mean different things to different times. Up until a few years ago, in the hot dry months when a five minute walk down Regent Street on a Saturday (market day) morning would send an invariable number of rich fat ladies of all hues and shades, sweating, dizzy, panting, and fanning with that day’s edition of Stabroek News into a bank, or electronics store or mini-mart, in short any place of business with enough air conditioning, little street children, the ones not yet into drugs or guns or selling their innocence, could be seen doing back-flips and somersaults into the stretch of the canal that divided South Road and Croal Street. On its run paralleling Home Stretch Avenue and the southern boundary of the Botanical Gardens, on the Garden’s side, opposite the Cliff Anderson Sports Hall, there can be seen a mud- caked entity that no Georgetown resident, who has seen it, can ever remember as not being there. I say “entity” because, truth be told, this creature that lives in a make-shift tent of old clothes and fallen branches, sitting hunched-backed on the grass, an improvised fishing pole and line linking it to the life under the water of that part of the Canal, this creature’s sole identity has been it’s presence there: Its face, over the years and under the mud, has changed constantly, with an almost Protean dexterity; it has stood, sat or lain there, a living monument of the plight of the poor, passing through a range of different avatars; black, indian, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Man ,Boy, and, on rare occasions Woman.

These stories of the Canal, some of happiness, some of horror, are too many to mention off the top of my head. How I came to write about the Canal is this; I bought my first car a few weeks ago. I took it for an afternoon drive along South Road, past lewdly gesticulating Cuffy, unto Home Stretch, then to Mandela, heading towards La Penitence and the old neighbourhood, which I didn’t quite reach. For some reason or the other I ended up on the Back Road and a few hours later I was home, with a book of poems idly in front of me.

Then begins one poem, “Begun with it’s own impulse of destruction,

    This elegy that chokes it’s canals. . . .”,

A poem about the city, the city I have grown up in, seen change slowly and never quite understood what each change has truly meant. The Canal I begin to “see”, has had its role, however varying the size, on every true citizen of this Garden by the sea.

So I decided to think back, reflect on what these water have meant to me, in my own life; why, on my drive along South Road, I had seen this one urchin at the sides if the Canal and had mentally urged him to somersault in; why I had looked a few seconds longer at the old mud-caked man in the garden to my left than at the admiring young net-ball players in their skimpy shorts on the Cliff Anderson Sports Hall net-ball court on my right.

Perhaps I myself had a story, no, have a story, my own about the Canal. I have never really had the need to tell it before, either to myself or to anyone else. In fact, I have never really seen it as a “story” as such, as a tale to be told. What has happened in my recent life has, however, forced me, as such things tend to, into a bit of “retrospective introspection” (Damn psychiatrist!); I think, perhaps in my life there has been the making of a fable, a tale that has to have some deeply personal meaning, one that can only be explored, nay, discovered, in the telling; so here I sit, the glare of my laptop on my face in the dark bedroom, in the silence of this Georgetown night, and begin my own story, recall to mind my own taste of the Canal. I shall call my story “The Blacka.”            

The Blacka

“‘We’re none of the same!’ the boys reply.”

                                                                                                                              – Siegfried Sasoon

There is a stretch of the Lamaha Canal that runs east, paralleling the North boundaries of three communities; Tucville Terrace (a low cost housing project that was set up by the government sometime around the mid-seventies), Guyhoc Park, and Lamaha Park, the last as should be obvious, being named after the Canal. This part of the Canal has a name that used to be a sort of an urban legend in itself: it is called “the Blacka”.

                  While I was growing up, the Blacka was always a bad place: it was a great serpentine monster that swallowed up truant school boys by the dozens; it  was where the ever increasing Rasta population plotted their obscure deeds; it was there where Miss Sheilah and her obeah chu’ch sometimes offered their gruesome libations (eye of toad, spleen of dog, heart of some sad, murdered child) to a great and incomprehensibly angry African god; anyone said to pick up and open any of the corked medicine bottles that were to be found among the pink, orange or white flowers that were rumoured to be seen floating down from the Blacka into the less dangerous, not-so-mysterious-wrapped parts of the Canal, was sure to release some evil spirit, some belligerent Baccoo that was sure to haunt their family for generations to come.

It was always the extremely ominous, however, that lures little boys of a certain age, moths to a flame, moths to a flame.

It was little after my seventh birthday. Tired of playing ‘war break’ (spoken “war brik’ in the Tucville accent) or ‘ketcha’, someone, I forgot quite who, though I tend to think it was Chappy, just up and said, “Le’ we go to de Blacka, nuh.” Were some who slunk one way, were some who slunk another way, but in the end all that remained of the dozen plus boys, all from Tucville Terrace, were myself, Cack-eye Kojo, big strong, unnaturally healthy Chappy, mellow Felix, and Vaughn, the saint. That day we vowed to be pioneers, the first five explorers of the Dark Region that was the Blacka. We didn’t find It that day, nor the next, nor the week after that. In fact, I can’t remember exactly when we found It; who first saw the little bridge that lay half hidden in the bushes that lined the dusty orange-brick road that bordered Guyhoc Park; who first stepped on to it to cross the shallow, stagnant, weed-filled little trench that was on the other side of the south bank of the Blacka; who was the first to ascend, triumphant, to the top of the embankment and look down at the cool, black water that lay calm and still before him. I remember though all five of us standing there, brave enough to have ventured, to have made it. We had found the clearing. And it was by the Blacka, the forbidden zone of our childhood. I suppose it was for most, if not for all of us, a small but significant rite of passage.

But before, I go on (please bear in mind that this is my first attempt at ‘story-telling’ and be patient), let me put in this story something I learned about the Blacka. The reason the Blacka got its name is this: the banks of the Canal were mainly composed of a rich, yellow-brown clay soil from which sprung the most bountiful flora. From time immemorial, the leaves of the different bushes and trees have fallen into the water; in the hot tropical sun, the water slowly draws the chemical compounds from the decaying vegetation and becomes a very dark-brown. The Blacka was, in essence, a sort of gigantic, perpetually brewing teapot.

Now back to the story proper. I remember, even now as I write, my first, my only, vision of Paradise; a Paradise, it seems, that was made, created in expectation of us. We went there mostly in the afternoons. There in the clearing, we were transported.  Time stood still, but with a beautiful, natural vibrancy. Brown bodies bronzed by the golden sunlight of the afternoon, we reclined on the carpet of soft, green grass that grew on the south bank of the Blacka, devouring plums and ‘Antie Desmon’, a tiny purple fruit that grew in large clusters, by the handful. In this Bacchanalian scene, we were tiny river gods, caring nothing about the present in this small universe of plenty and simple pleasure. We frolicked about, playing ketcha in the warm black water and, when you dove, it enclosed you in its soft darkness, like a womb, for as long as you could hold your breath. Underwater, you forgot all escapes, and all pursuits; those of the game being played above you in the upper air; and those of the world that waited across the old bridge. You resurfaced reborn, cleansed, into a golden world of flying liquid jewels, flailing brown limbs and friendship. The trips to the clearing, over the three years that we went there, never once got old for us. I was always the first to shoot across the old bridge, to scramble up the bank, strip of my patchy clothes and into the water. It was always the same scene but it never once got too familiar. It became our Never Never Land.

Then “The Exams” came. The Exams was to me, to all five of us who, between trips to the clearing, had to visit a place called Tucville Primary School, a time of great mayhem: mothers fussed over us, siblings avoided us like we were plague-ridden beasts, there were extra lessons after school. There was, in the words of my dear friend, Mr. Lucas, ” a great disturbance in the Force.”

We all passed – in a sense. Cack-eye and Felix got Dolphin Secondary and a pair of Voights and a pair of passed-on Clarks respectively; Chappy got North Ruimveldt Multilateral and a brand new pair of Bata kickers; Vaughn got what we called B.T.T, back to Tucville (Primary), which had a secondary division, (despite the name), and also got a new pair of shoes: they were his father’s and were delivered directly to Vaughn’s posterior the day he brought home his Common Entrance results. I came home from a Royal Rangers camping trip to find a new pair of lower-echelon Adidas sneakers at the door. Inside the sparse living of our apartment I found one eerily beaming parent with a thin slip of paper in his hand and another, standing, with a 4-pint bowl of ice-cream in her one hand and a box of Demico House chicken balanced in the other.

The September of that year found me at President’s College. The next few years of my life were essentially a whirlwind of short weekends home, tests, school tours, girls, tests, graduations, assignments and tests. The Blacka gang was slowly, efficiently, evicted out of my life. Also I had a new world, more dazzling, more delicious, more real than the one that the clearing at the Blacka had offered. Escape was never necessary in the homes of my new rich friends with their private pools, lounge chairs and cans of imported fruit; around me were the real things that dirty, black trench water, itchy grass, and teeth staining Antie Desmon’ were meagre, incomparable simulations of.

Then the whirlwind stopped. The August after A-levels found me a loner; an exile from the posh houses that I had so much access to during the past seven years. It was okay to have a poor friend when you lived, ate, slept and studied with that person: it didn’t hurt either if that person was a tad bit academically gifted than you. But if you are from Bel Air or Prashad Nagar or Nandy Park or “Daddy” owned a few thousand acres of rice-land in the Corentyne, to continue any sort of close friendship with anyone from Tucville after the necessary time was past was, and perhaps still is, considered an unspeakable social sin.

And I was now seeing the truth in that old saying, “You can never go home again.” The old neighbourhood had changed. Considerably. Miss Sheila’s cumfa drums no longer thundered every night; instead, boom boxes blasted blasted hip hop every hour of the day, so hard that our glass window-panes used to rattle and you could feel the vibrations by lightly pressing your palms against the concrete wall. Little one-room shacks, that vaguely reminded me of Eeyore’s house in those Winnie the Pooh and Friends cartoons, sprung in what used to be the bushy warbrik battlegrounds of my primary school days.

One day, during the August holiday after my A-levels, I decided to take a walk, retracing my steps the better part of a decade before. On reaching the dusty brick road that stretched along the northern boundary of Guyhoc Park, like a long and rusty ribbon, I heard a voice call out.

“Where you goin, Scholar?” It was Cack-eye Kojo. Next to him stood Felix and Chappy. On the dusty road, a dustier child, on his hands and knees, chased a tattered old cricket ball.

“Fo’ a walk up suh…”

“Le’ we go to the Blacka nuh… fo’ some plums…an’ fo’ swim.”

We set off as we first did a decade earlier, Vaughn seemingly replaced by the dirty child who tagged along always a little behind us, throwing the cricket ball ahead of him then running up to catch it.

Everyone wanted to know what my school-life had been like: how was the food; did the boys and girls use to sleep in the same room up at P.C.; how you spend so long there; you did fail?  I half answered them, my eyes searching for and then fixing on a tall clump bushes a good distance ahead on the left.

Felix was telling me how he sure somebody did tell he that the boys and girls used to sleep in the same rooms or dorms or whatever I called them up at P.C., when, like a madman I bounded away from them. I was seven again, speeding along the old road ahead of the pack; the clump of bushes got close, closer. I crashed wildly through them to jump on the rickety old… nothing! Below me flowed the dirty old Styx, the ugly little trench across which floated the old bridge. In mid-air, I blindly shot my right arm, the arm that had won me seven years straight of inter-house shot-put competition, backward and caught a jutting limb from one the bushes. I imagine myself now, how I must looked that day, arrested in mid-leap, like a monkey trying to jump at a bunch of fruit and realising just in time that it lay just a bit too far out of his reach. I landed back almost on the same spot from where I launched myself, my left foot just skimming the top of the stagnant water. Crawling, breathlessly, back onto the road, I could hear the sound of running feet then raucous, hearty laughter. Chappy and Kojo reached me just as I was straightening up; each was out of breath, but still laughing.

                  “You, ha ha ha, been away too long, Scholar.”

                  “Dem people get ridda the old bridge long now.”

                  I turned around and made my way cautiously through the clump of bushes that had hidden once the old bridge of my younger years.  At the edge of the polluted little trench, I stood and looked across to the other side.  On the southern bank of the Blacka, where our clearing used to be, was a little shack with the front ‘door’, a patchwork of old nylon rice bags stitched together, facing me.  In the fenced-around yard grew some lettuce, peppers, and pigeon-pea trees.  I stood there just staring until a short, dreadlocked girl, looking about seventeen or so, emerged from the house, panties alone on.  She was back inside in an instant.  I made my way back outside the bush.

                  Chappy had caught up with us and so had the little child with the cricket ball who was now perched on Cack-eye’s shoulder.

                  “Tings change, Scholar…” Cack-eye said, grinning.  It was only then that I saw the startling resemblance between Cack-eye and the boy, one of whose arms encircled his head.  The boy aimed the ball at me with his free hand and let fly.

                  “Stop it, Junior!” Cack-eye shouted, and gave the boy a sharp slap on the foot.  The boy, as if on cue, immediately let go a deluge of tears which began to wash away, in streaks, the red-orange dust from his dark-brown face.

                  “Leave the child,” Felix said, “You does beat he too much…”

                  “Is me sperms mek he…”

                  “Is alright,” I put in, “he just playin’.”

                  Felix picked up the ball and gave it back to Cack-eye’s son.  As he was pulling away his hand I noticed that his middle finger was missing the first joint.  I asked him days later about it.  A rotary saw at his workplace had shaved it off.  “Clean, clean.”

                  Chappy just grinned, thin and frail.

                  The plums were farther up the road.  I walked the remaining distance as if in a trance.  The part of the canal that we finally arrived at was nothing like the clearing by the Blacka; a solitary plum tree stood, like a lone sentinel, on the northern bank.  Cack-eye, with his son still perched on his shoulder, let out a war cry and plunged, feet-first, into the mud-swirled water.  Felix did a somersault, which Chappy feebly tried to imitate, succeeding only in landing belly-first, with a loud slap, into the water.  I climbed the plum tree while they were all swimming and just sat there looking around me: the surrounding area was sprinkled with little shacks and lean-tos.  About three hundred metres or so from where we were, an enormous, yellow Caterpillar was voraciously gnawing at the soft, green foliage…and at the lives of some new gang of Lost Boys.

                  “Masks of the lads that once were…”

– Siegfried Sassoon

So, that was my story, my fable, its telling a fait accompli.  Our family moved out of the area two years after that.  But not before I found out that Vaughn, Vaughn, the virtual epitome of innocence at the time of our visits to the  clearing was spending five to seven in the Camp Street jail on a breaking-and-entering conviction; not before Chappy succumbed to one of the thousand plagues that came with the sickness called AIDS.

I now know why I never went back, even once, to Tucville Terrace: why, that day I first bought the second-hand Corolla, when I was driving along Mandela, I didn’t just turn down the East La Penitence Police Station road and take a short drive though the old neighbourhood.  I was afraid: afraid of going back again, afraid that I would find out that I might have lost something else, some vital part of me, some piece of my soul that had gotten trapped in the branches of a mango tree that I used to climb and that someone had perhaps long since cut down; afraid that I would have to come face to face with the uglier face of time, of growth.  It was the visage that I didn’t want to see in the fresh yellow-and-mauve bloom of the morning glory that grew in your yard before we could afford to concrete the whole damn thing; the face I refused to look at when I first held Hakeem in my arms in the hospital, knowing that he was born to live only, like most beautiful things, une space du matin; it is the face I look past every morning as I shave or brush my teeth before heading out the door.

                  I have found my moral, the underlying lesson of my experience of that day by the Blacka; it is that all life, even the life of the beautiful morning glory that grew in our yard, or the life that I saw in the laughter of my son, Hakeem; or the life of the plum trees that grew in the clearing, even the life that pounds through the veins of my own strong body, all life is begun, in the words of the poet, “with its own impulse of destruction.”  It is up to us to live it the best we can.