A Brief History of Seven Killings

Maybe it was a good thing, because as soon as the taxi dropped me off, the part of me that I like to shut off after morning coffee said, What do you think you’re doing here, skinny-legged fool? The great thing about a bus is another one is right behind it, ready to sweep you away as soon as you realize you’ve made a mistake. A taxi just drops you off and it’s gone. I would start walking at least, but damn if I could think of a better idea.

Havendale is not no Irish Town, but it’s still uptown and if we didn’t think it was safe we still didn’t think it was sorry. I mean, this is not the ghetto. Babies aren’t crying in the street and women aren’t getting raped pregnant as what happens every day in the ghetto. I’ve seen the ghetto, been there with my father. Everybody lives in their own Jamaica and damn if that was ever going to be mine. Last week, somewhere between eleven p.m. and three a.m., three men broke into my father’s house. My mother is always looking for signs and wonders and for her the fact that the newspaper last week said gunmen crossed the Half Way Tree line and have started picking off targets uptown was a very bad sign. The curfew was still on and even decent uptown people had to be indoors by a certain hour, six, eight, who knows, or they would be up for grabs. Last month Mr. Jacobs from four houses down was coming home from night service and the police stopped him, threw him in the back of the van and sent him to the Gun Court lockup. He would still be there if Daddy didn’t find a judge to tell him that this was straight foolishness when we start to lock up even proper law-abiding people. Neither man mentioned that Mr. Jacobs was too dark-skinned for police to assume he was proper people, even in a gabardine suit. Then gunmen broke into our house. They took my parents’ wedding rings, all my mother’s figurines from Holland, three hundred dollars, all her costume earrings even though she told them they’re worth nothing, and his watch. They punched my father a couple times, and slapped my mother when she asked one of them if his mother knew that he was sinning. I asked her if any of the men had their way with her but said the rosebush was growing wild like a leggo beast, and I pretended I was talking to somebody else. The policeman didn’t come until the morning even though they called the station all night. Nine-thirty in the morning, long after I got there (they didn’t call me until six), and he took a statement on a yellow pad with a red pen. He had to say perpetrator to himself three times just to figure out how to spell it. When he said wuz h’any h’aggressive weapon brawt into play? I burst out laughing and my mother said I should excuse myself.

This country, this goddamn island, is going to kill us. Since the robbery Daddy don’t talk. A man likes to think he can protect what’s his, but then somebody else comes and takes it and he’s not much of a man anymore. I don’t think less of him, but Mummy always talks about how at one time he could have bought a house in Norbrook and he turned it down because he already had a safe and sound home with no more mortgage to pay. I’m not calling him a coward. I’m not saying he’s stingy. But sometimes when you’re too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness. It’s not that either. He’s from a generation that never even expected to get midway up the ladder so when he got there he was too stunned to dare climb higher. That’s the problem with midway. Up is everything and down just means all the white people want to party on your street on Sunday night to feel realness. Midway is nowhere.

Back in high school I used to have him stop at the bus stop or pray for the light to go red so that I could get out before he dropped me off at school. Kimmy, who has yet to visit her parents even after they’ve been robbed and her mother possibly raped, never caught the drift and always cussed when he said you get out too. Fact is Daddy was not a fourteen-year-old girl at the Immaculate Conception High School for girls, trying to act as if she had as much money and as much right to stick her head out and walk like an air hostess as anybody else who showed up in a Volvo. You couldn’t just drive up in a Ford Escort in front of those little bitches who were always lying in ambush at the gate just to see who drove up in what. Did you see Lisa’s father drop her off in some jalopy? My boyfriend says it’s a Cortina. That’s what Daddy have the maid use. What really boil me blood is that it’s not that Daddy didn’t have money, but he never could think of a single good reason to spend it. Which is why, in a way, it makes sense that he would be robbed, but it also makes sense that the robber didn’t get away with anything much. That’s the only thing he would talk about, that the sons of mangy bitches only got three hundred dollars.