Fear of stones by Kei Miller

(if not available at Amazon, try http://www.interlinkbooks.com)

Included on this page: Biography; About Kei Miller;Arson and Parachutes (poem); Literature from Where I Stand, or Rather Sit, No – Make that Stand, No… Sit: An Introduction to My Schizophrenia (speech); Read Out Sinday (story from Fear of Stones; This Dance (story)

Biography

Kei Miller was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1978. He read English at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies and obtained an MA from Manchester Metropolitan University.

He has taught Prose Fiction at the University of the West Indies, and is now teaching Creative Writing at Glasgow University.

His stories and poems have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, and he has won a number of Jamaican literary awards. His first poetry collection, KINGDOM OF EMPTY BELLIES (Heaventree Press), was published in 2006, and his second collection, THERE IS AN ANGER THAT MOVES (Carcanet Press), came out in October 2007.

His story collection, FEAR OF STONES (Macmillan Caribbean), was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2007.

His first novel, THE SAME EARTH, will be published in March 2008 by Orion, and has been selected for the Waterstones 'New Voices' campaign.

About Kei Miller University of Iowa News Release

Jamaican writer Kei Miller aims for the 'goose-pimply moment'

Kei Miller, the 28-year-old Jamaican poet, fiction writer and essayist who is in residence this fall at the University of Iowa International Writing Program, calls his homeland "a remarkably religious country." And although he no longer actively practices religion, he views the power of religious ritual, scripture and ecstatic experience is an enduring model for what he hopes to achieve in his writing.

"It's the one trope that comes up again and again in all of my work -- modeling things off of religious experience," he says. "I think I have a relationship with the church from growing up, even if I walked a little bit far from that place. Writing is always ritual, and scripture teaches you how to make work powerful. I think religion is also destructive and awful and sometimes I like to talk about it, and use the language of religion to critique it.

"When writers are asked who are their models, we often list other writers, and it's true, but I'm equally aware of pastors who have influenced me. They are equally parts of my literary heritage and it is equally their voice I'm trying to capture."

Miller describes the predominant religious practices of Jamaica as a unique evangelical synthesis of high-church Anglican ritual with intense, expressive African traditions. Preachers, with their stirring oratory, are the most popular figures; services include speaking in tongues; and women prophets buy full-page ads in the newspapers to express their revelations in language reminiscent of the King James Bible.

"I go back and draw on my own experience," he says. "It's what I want literature to do. I've had those experiences in church, of hearing a sermon -- and probably sermons that I wouldn't listen to now -- but of sermons that just hit you.

"And you can divorce yourself from it and say, 'What is it that makes my hair stand on end. What is it that causes that goose-pimply moment?' You stand outside of the experience and ask, 'What is the art of this? What is the mechanism of art working in these spiritual experiences?' You can actually think, 'How can I create that goose-pimply moment?'

"I've always wanted work to operate on that level -- that it's not just good but that it causes a physical reaction in you."

One of the ways that Miller conceives of achieving that power is through symbols -- not merely using the conventional implications of symbols, but also enhancing, manipulating and deepening those meanings -- a common device in preaching.

"I love symbology," he says. "I am always looking for symbols. I'm always trying to invest new meanings in them. One of the ways writing can become powerful is by finding a symbol, using something and invoking all kinds of meaning in it, and layering it each time it is invoked.

"I've never been interested in being simply a 'good' writer, because good simply meant that you got down the craft right, but if you are a powerful writer it meant that you not only got down the craft down, but you also had something to say as well, and you got both right."

Miller won the Jamaica Observer Literary Prizes for both fiction and poetry in 2002. His first collection of poetry, "Kingdom of Empty Bellies," came out in 2005, the same year he attended the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Another volume, "There Is An Anger That Moves," will appear later this year.

His 2006 short story collection, "The Fear of Stones and Other Stories," was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize. Miller is also the editor of "New Caribbean Poetry," published this year.

He attended the University of the West Indies and received a master's degree in creative writing from Manchester Metropolitan University in England. After leaving the UI he will begin a teaching post in Scotland.

Arson and Parachutes

The day after Charlie left
Aunt Valda sat in the blackened shell
of her house, smoke rising
like a benediction to God. Her statement
to police was: I did love him.

At family dinners she was the one who danced
always in a new red dress
and hugging her, the sharp smell
of kerosene would rise as a ghost
from behind her ears.

One Valentine's when I was too young
and too old to say I love you, straight-faced -
I gave her, instead, a balloon.
She laughed then let it go,
watched it settle against the ceiling.

Today, twenty years later, two men
are gliding up over Jack's Hill, soft
against the midday: their parachutes
red and beaming as if the sky
now owns a heart.

I watch them and remember Aunt Valda.
Theirs is the gift I never had to give her:
the ability to rise; the way to fill lungs
up with grief, hold it,
and never burst.

Literature from Where I Stand, or Rather Sit, No – Make that Stand, No… Sit:

An Introduction to My Schizophrenia

Kei Miller

 

Probably most of us – writers here at the IWP – have won some literary award that we’re rather pleased about, that were you to ask about it, we would tell you the story of our accomplishment with that strange mix of pride and dismissal, like the woman complimented on her newly bought outfit -- oh, she says, this old thing? Today however, I want to tell you about a prize that I am actually not so proud of – a triumphant win whose triumph eroded quickly, because I wished the cameras hadn’t flashed, and that my picture hadn’t appeared in the papers the next day. It is an accomplishment that does not appear in any bio or on any of my constructed CVs. And yet, in what it did, it was probably the noblest literary prize I’ve ever won, because it paid for heat in a week when it was cold, and it provided food in a week when I was hungry.

 

About 3 years ago I had recently arrived in Manchester, England. I arrived the way most students arrive – poor, and in my case without a scholarship or grant and as yet without the money from the sale of my car in Jamaica. Listen now to the mechanics of a miracle: in that first penniless fortnight. I saw posters put up around the city advertising its upcoming poetry festival. A £100 prize was going to be given out one Wednesday night to a lucky poet who went on stage and captured the judges’ hearts. I called immediately to book a spot but was disappointed to find out that several people already had their greedy eyes on my £100; all the official spots were gone. I could only give them my name. They would put it in a box from which they would randomly pick and call names on the night. So only if I was lucky…

 

There was yet another complication. The event started at 7:00. My class on Wednesdays also started at 7:00. I would have to rush, arrive late, and see if I was STILL lucky. At best, it seemed, I would get to see the Manchester poetry scene. At 8:30 I took a bus into the city centre, consulted a map and found my way finally to the club. Things were already wrapping up. Three of the four finalists had already been chosen. The box was empty but for one name, and as I walked in they were pulling out this last name and trying desperately to pronounce it with each vowel sound:  Kay?  Key?  Kei? Kei Miller. My own name. My own name had waited for me. It had dodged every finger dipping into that box. It had sat at the bottom, clung to the cardboard, and waited until the body whose presence it spoke for had arrived. I went on stage and won the competition. Cameras flashed; the next morning it was all about – Kei Miller, freshly arrived from Jamaica, had become the 2004 Manchester Slam Poetry Champion.


A Slam Poetry Champion! O Christ. If an avalanche could only bury me then. When my professor, one of the UK’s most respected critics, congratulated me with, “Well done, Kei, I read that you won some slam thing or the other,” I knew that it wasn’t a real compliment – it was a realist painter saying bravo to a child’s crayon drawings. It was a concert organist smiling benevolently at some idiot who has learnt to pick out “Mary Had A Little Lamb” on the piano. I wanted to explain – Please, sir. You misunderstand. I’m not a slam poet. I don’t do slam. I swear. I only did it for the money. I’m a real poet.

 

I am ashamed to have won that prize, and truth be told, I am also ashamed that I am ashamed.

 

The debate I’m trying to re-invoke here – literature from where I stand or sit, or stand or sit – is a new one that has quickly becoming old: a debate of the craft of poetry as it exists in rowdy performance halls versus the craft as it still exists in solitude; a fight between the poet who does his best work standing up, who finds his greatest eloquence on stage, or the poet who does his best work sitting down, who finds his greatest eloquence on the page.

 

A description of the successful “page” or “sit-down” poet is, perhaps, someone who has typically published poems in a few major journals, who has a couple books published by a well-respected press, who preferably knows how to hob-nob with the best of them, and is invited to give readings by the National Poetry Society of America. In all likelihood he is, like most sit-down poets, a bitch, and probably, as a day job, holds a faculty position at some stuffy 500 year-old university. In other words – me.

 

The “stage” or “stand-up” poet, on the other hand, has probably won a couple slams and is invited to give performances on BET. He is youngish—not yet thirty—and has funky hair. He would ideally like hip-hop and reggae and fit into that strange demographic America has invented to describe all things non-middle-class and non-white: in other words, he would be “urban.” He is completely social – gregarious even. If he went to university at all, he didn’t finish; he dropped out at the same time the university asked him to leave, and decided then he would become a poet, ranting against the system and all kinds of oppression. In other words – me.

 

That these two descriptions should inhabit one body is perhaps the source of my schizophrenia, because typically I’ve learnt only to embrace the first. So consider this: although I almost never need to look at a book or a printed page to recite any of my poems, I have begun to take blank sheets of paper up with me to podiums, to shuffle through and glance down occasionally at their emptiness, all to give the illusion that I am reading – to remind the audience that I am not performing, or slamming, and that literature is coming, only inconveniently at that moment, from where I stand. Really, at my essence (I’m trying to declare) I am a sit-down poet.

 

Knowing then my diagnosis, will you forgive my strange (albeit completely internal) reaction when a student right here in Iowa came up to me and said – “Oh my god! You’re awesome! And what I love about you is that you perform your work. It makes it so interesting!” Oh no no no no, I wanted to say. You didn’t! You didn’t just call me interesting! Heeeellllllll no! You just caught me on a bad day. You caught me on an off-morning. But see -- I’m a real poet, and honey, when I’m ready, I will bore the socks right off of you. I can be your ten hour lecture. I can be a drone. I can be that voice at the open mike who insists that every poem is different from the other but oh the relentless monotone that has you slipping off to sleep every few seconds makes his sonnets sound the same as his villanelles as his haikus – makes his iambic meter sound the self same as his anapestic skipping. Oh child – I’m no performer. I am a poet. Get it right! And don’t you ever call me interesting again!

 

Isn’t it silly? Isn’t it absolutely silly the clubs we try to be a part of, and the clubs we try to be apart from? This odd way we relish the privilege of sitting at the most boring tables, negotiating carefully between the cake fork, the salad fork and the dinner fork, pretending that the real fun isn’t happening behind us in the kitchen? Isn’t it silly this insistence that we belong to certain prestigious groups – that we be ‘sit down’ poets, Oxford poets, Iowa poets, published-in-the-New-Yorker poets, published by Knopf or Faber poets? Isn’t it silly, the way I flatly refused that performance on BET? Stupid, the way, only last week, I politely declined reading a poem on a slam stage in front of 500 people, but relished in performing the next night to a more distinguished audience of 30? And in refusing to be put into one box, do I not cling desperately to the inside of another? Isn’t it sad, this refusal to belong to a world that has always accepted me, that has always wanted me, and that, truth be told, I didn’t always hate? And yet now when they walk towards me with open arms, instead of just standing up and accepting the embrace, I sit down and fold my arms.

 

And so what, if after reading your most technically ambitious poem they come up and tell you – wow, you were awesome. And you feel momentarily thrilled by this compliment, until a 15 year-old screams a histrionic rant or a sentimental poem that rhymes love with above and then dove, and they all stand and applaud and say to her, with even more enthusiasm than they did to you – oh my god! You rock! You’re brilliant! So what. In that place, on that night – literature is about how we stand up and give an account of who we are and where we are in our own voices. And at another time, in another place, isn’t it enough that you know that literature is about sitting – is about more than the abundant overflow of emotions, but also its recollection in moments of tranquility.

 

The two things can coexist. Just as it is coexisting right now, in a strange way. Because hasn’t every road suddenly led us to that wonderful duality? If you decide that this humble offering is at all literature, then it is happening from where I stand, and from where you sit. For there you are, sitting, reading the text right along with me – and here I am, standing, giving it voice. Literature. From where you sit, from where I stand – it is happening. Or rather… it was.


Story by Jei Miller   Read Out Sunday


This is how Sue gave her life to God and got back her virginity.

That Sunday was church as usual. The same women as always in Jesus hats, their hands raised and their eyes squeezed so tightly shut as if by sheer willpower they were going to transfigure themselves out of Satan’s clutches and into the arms of the Saviour. These were the kinds of women whose lives were in constant peril—always having to spin themselves out of the reach of demons, always walking with a bottle of olive oil ready to sprinkle it on the heads of imaginary serpents. But when Pastor Desmond climbed up on the pulpit, it was not the ever present danger of hell he preached, nor the vigilance one must practice to fight Lucifer and his cohorts each day. Pastor Desmond instead spoke on the miracle of forgiveness. He told them God had a great memory, but an even greater forgetter. And after God forgave, you were a sinner no more. So bad man could be made meek. And t’ief could be made honest. And for those who had fallen by the wayside (Fallen pastor! Fallen!), they could be made like virgins again. And so it was that Sue Moses sprang up out of her seat, bawling living eye water, ran to the altar and flung herself down. She carried on and she carried on, such a cowbawling they had never seen before at Mount Sinai Church of God. Even Sister Mabel—Sister Mabel who once called Sue the whore of Babylon (Yu got a Jezebel spirit in yu, girl!)—even she was moved to go up and hug Sue and lead her in prayer to the Lord.

But some people just too wretched and cannot be saved no matter what. Either that, or they too simpleminded. Because now that Sue found out sinners could be forgiven, and virginity could be restored, she proceeded to lose hers every Saturday night and restore it every Sunday morning. After all, the things Sue enjoyed most in life were church and sex, but until now she had felt she could never really have them both. Well, now she could and did, screaming in pleasure one night, and bawling in repentance the next morning.

Well, old people say every tree must bear its fruit, and what is to is must is. In fact, it was a wonder what happened next hadn’t happened sooner: Sue, a perfectly healthy seventeen-year-old girl, got pregnant. Poor Sue. Simpleminded Sue. She could not understand it—how could she be a virgin and pregnant? Wasn’t God supposed to restore her, erase the past, make things new? Wasn’t that what Pastor promised? And even though Sue wasn’t the most brilliant girl, she knew she had never heard of any virgin being pregnant...

. . . and that’s when it came to her. Mary, the mother of Jesus! Immaculate conceptions. Sue fell down on her knees in astonishment and whispered a prayer, “Thank you, Lord. Thank you fi choosing me.”

Well, Sister Mabel, who was not as unfamiliar with sin as she would have had people believe, was the first to notice the very slight rise in Sue’s stomach and that motherly change in her countenance. So the older woman held back the girl one Sunday and told her, “Look, girl. Get rid of it. Drink some Pepsi with a rusty nail in it. Rub green pawpaw seed ‘pon yu belly. Whatever you do, get rid of it. Don’t bring down shame ‘pon youself.”

But Sue followed her own program, because what could be shameful in being the mother of God? Her belly grew and grew and people began to frown. It was the way Sue acted so proud that most rattled them—this girl who had never learned how to study her feet in the presence of older people, how to bite her lips and wring her hands appropriately. Sue would look you straight in the eyes and talk and laugh like nothing was wrong. The members at Mount Sinai tried, they really tried. One sister gave this testimony, “You have some girls who spread them legs for any man!” and everybody look sideways at Sue who only lift up her hands and shout “Amen!” Pastor preached about the woman at the well, but Sue remained shameless.

Nothing left to do but to read her out. On that Sunday it was church as usual. The same women as always in Jesus hats, their hands raised and their eyes squeezed shut. Pastor Desmond climbed up to the pulpit and a collective shiver ran across the congregation. He started, “Brethren and sistren, there is an animal in this world, that I don’t like.”

The church responded, “Mmm!”

“I like every other animal except this one. I just don’t like goats. No Sah!”

“No, Pastor!”

“Goats are the most stubbornest creatures you ever come across. You tell them to go this way, they go that way. You tell them to move and they don’t budge. No brethren, I can’t take them!”

“Oh no!”

“But I am here to tell you today, that we have some goats sitting amongst us . . .”

“Preach it!”

“Some of us too stubborn. God tell us to do things and we don’t do them. Him tell us not to do other things and those are the things we do! Him tell us, ‘Go and sin no more,’ and we don’t listen!”

“Amen!”

“Some of you in here is living in sin! But can I tell you brethren and sistren,” his voice dipping, “the Lord says he shall separate the sheep from the goats. Somebody say Se-Pa-Rate!”

“Se-Pa-Rate!”

“He don’t want the goats mixing up with the sheep! He wants them to Se-Pa-Rate!”

And to the church’s astonishment, Sue rose up out of her seat, six months’ worth of belly and all, and shouted in her squeaky voice, “Hallelujah! Tell it, Preacher! Tell it!” O what a brazen girl! What an unconscionable wretch! Pastor Desmond could think of nothing else but to shout back, “Sue Moses, you is the goat amongst us!”

The church was suddenly silent. No one responded, and the pastor shouted again, the words which were lingering in the silence, “Sue Moses, I say that you is a goat!” and Sister Mabel cleared her throat, “Tell it, Preacher. Tell it like it is.”

“Sue, you is a goat living in sin, and we don’t want to mix up with you no more. We want you out!”

“Out, Preacher. Out!”

“We want you ouuuttttt!”

Poor Sue. Simpleminded Sue. No room in the inn for her. But still, she had the glory of the Lord inside her and all over her face. The pastor screaming at her, telling her to leave, the whole church amen-ing behind him, and all she could think was Forgive them Lord. They knows not what they do.

Look, if Sue was guilty of any sin, it was the sin of enjoying a man’s chest too much. Also the sin of indulging in that pleasure that starts at a woman’s wet center then spreads, eventually shooting through her entire body like a shock, causing her to sweat and gasp. And perhaps the sin of loving bun and condensed milk, and definitely the sin of being fool-fool. But Sue Moses was not disobedient, and when she got up out of her seat that Sunday and walked toward the pulpit instead of toward the door, it was not an act of rebellion, not in her head. She only wanted to prove that she would hold no one in malice, that she forgave them. She only wanted to extend her hand to Pastor Desmond, possibly kiss him on the forehead, and then leave.

But the pastor trembled behind the pulpit watching her approach. “I said out! Out!” She did not stop. “Out I say!” Now jumping, “Out!” Poor Sue. If only he would understand. Instead there he was shouting, close to tears, as if afraid. “Please girl! Leave the people of God!” But now Sue was right before him. She reached out her hand of forgiveness and Pastor Desmond could only see fingers pointing at him accusingly. He cried out sorrowfully, “All right! All right! Yes! Is me is the father. She tempted me, church! She tempted me and I was weak.” He fell down and oh, such a cowbawling Mount Sinai Church of God had never seen or heard before.

 

This Dance

This dance, this dance, this dance is a war dance’
- Sunday School song

“See it here. This is the house!”

This is the house.

This is really the house.

This is him, Jeremy Howell, parked up by the sidewalk, behind a long line of cars leading up to the house. Sitting behind the steering wheel, dressed-to-puss-backfoot, almost ready to dance. But it not so easy. Him thinking bout the law. The law which just two semesters ago him start to study. And him thinking about long time heroes like Quashie. Him have a drawing of Quashie in his bedroom, cause he been studying that hero from he was young. Quashie stand up to Buckra and break the law. And Jeremy thinking, tonight more than any night, him need to summon that kind of courage. But things is not so easy.

First him have to take in the shock. Breathe in, breathe out. Him not even on the inside of the house yet, but coming just this far could make anyone piss themself. Raaas! Is only a year ago him find out this place even exist, and look on him now. Him is really here. At the house.

Years ago, him used to go to every Saturday night dance in August Town. In a yard surrounded by galvanize, the speaker boxes so loud that the zinc sheets fencing the property would pulse, as if each one had its own lungs and heart and blood vessels. And the zinc would hold on to the riddim - that doop-doop dooop-du-dooooop! A sound that is almost like a heartbeat but not quite. A modified heartbeat - a suped-up heartbeat with spoiler and rims and speakers in the trunk. Almost a heartbeat but not quite - but enough so it can get inside you.

In August Town, Jeremy would find a girl to hold on to. Always the one with the strong back, the wire waist, the foot movements, he could hold on, and wine down low low low low. Take the woman to the ground with him. And people used to say, “Lawwd - that yute can dance eeeeh.”

But that wasn’t his dance.

Wasn’t it.

Almost his dance, but not quite.

The first time he ever paid attention to this house was a year ago when Kevin drove him up here. It was midday on a Saturday and nothing was going on - just a big quiet house surrounded by a concrete wall and tall black gates. Kevin stopped the car, smiled and said, “This is where them things happen. See it here. This is the house.”

Tonight, a year later, Jeremy is almost ready, but it not so easy.Him thinking bout the law. Him thinking about Quashie. Him thinking about this thing his Aunt Patsy keep on telling him, “I not afraid to dance….” But then him also think about his mother. What would his mother say if she knew he was at a place like this? She would hold her head and say “JesasSaviourPilotMe! Is what happen to you bwoy? Is what really happen to you?”

His mother sat him down one day, and told him serious, serious, that he was born with riddim in his bones. It ran in the family - sickle cell, hypertension and riddim in the bones, deep in the marrow where scientists say blood cells are formed. Hereditary. Riddim. Bones. As if by playing the right tune in the centre of the family graveyard, all hell would break loose - generations of skeletons rising up from out of the earth to dance and to shake their fleshless legs.

Well, sickle cell can kill you. Hypertension can kill you. Riddim in the bones can kill as bad as the worst of them. So he tries to be careful. Afraid of dancing in a way that would make him lose himself. It happen before… his Aunt Patsy lose herself dancing. “Lose herself completely! Clean out of her mind she gone. Give up her good good job,” was what his mother said, which was not really fair because Aunt Patsy had a good enough job and even helped his mother out when things were tight. “Mad mad mad! That woman mad. Lef’ her good life a foreign, come kotch up back in Jamaica!” In truth, Patsy wasn’t kotching nowhere. She had her own house. But the real thing about it, as far as his mother saw things, was her return. That she came down to visit, and ended up staying. Mad! Mad as shad.

His mother and Aunt Patsy never really knew each other growing up. Half-sisters. Patsy - the product of a married man’s gallivanting. They grew in different houses, each mother hating the other, and before Patsy was even a teenager, she was packed up and carried off to the States.

Twenty-four years later, when the gallivantingfather died, it was only politeness that made Monica send a telegram to the sister she never knew. Who could have expected Patsy to come? Not even Patsy herself! Is really her husband see the telegram and insisted. “Honey,” he said to her. “You’ve never been back. It’ll be good for you. And for Pascal,” talking abouttheir mulatto child, “She should know where her mother comes from. She should know about that side of her. I insist.” That is how Patsy end up back in Jamaica - and worse than that, one Saturday evening, she ended up on a Jamaican bus.

Is like she did forget, or maybe she just never know, that a Kingston to St. Ann bus is no place for a stuck-up-somebody like her to travel, no place for someone who malice Jamaica to travel. But there she was, she and her daughter, squeezed into a seat on a country bus. All around them market women smelling of pimento and sweat, smelling of mangoes and sweat, lime and sweat, banana and sweat; all these market women on their way home, chatting. Chatting so much that Patsy closed her eyes tight. As if that would block out the sound. But she was swaying on the riddim of their talk, and after a while she really did drift off to sleep.

She woke up half hour later because a Rastaman she never noticed before had started playing his drum. Rubbing his thumb across the goat skin - woooooooooooh, beating a riddim, ka-dap, ka-dap, ka-da-da-da-da-dap! And now the whole bus felt full up of this drumbeat. It was there behind the market women’s talk, there behind the bob of their heads. It had seeped into the torn seats, into the unsold fruits, into the driver’s driving - that riddim, almost like a heartbeat. And now her daughter, Pascal - almost 5 years old and suddenly learning about ‘that’ side of her, the black side - was straining her neck, looking behind with bright eyes on the drummer, clapping her little hands to the beat. It made Patsy’s temper start to boil. She reached over, clasped Pascal’s hands and said dangerously, “Stop.”

In all fairness, the little girl did try to stop. But the riddim was all over the bus. And you can’t just ignore riddim. So now that she was keeping her hands still, her little feet, on their own accord, started to feel out the beat - swinging out then back in against the seat, ka-dap, ka-dap, ka-dap!

Something broke inside Patsy. She stood up in the bus and started one piece of shouting, Stop it! Stop it! Staaap it!! But even as she was shouting, she was shouting in time to the beat. Even as she trying to hold on to something, anything, she felt the walls inside her mashing up and the only thing she ended up holding was the riddim in her feet. Is like she did forget, or maybe she just never know.

You ever seen Revival? Real Zion 69 Hallelujah speak in tongues rabbasetiboshi Jamaican Revival? Patsy started to trump. Right leg forward, right leg back. Her fists clenched, her hands going round in a rolling motion, a digging motion. Getting into spirit. And is she same one, standing up there as if she could have ever gotten the riddim to stop, is she same one who finally raised the chorus:

I want a Revival in my soul
I want a Revival in my soul
I must apply to de blood of Jeeesus
To get a Revival in my soul

And in the back of her mind she thinking: but look at this, I come back home. Patsy. Singing Revival, dancing Revival. And that’s how she ended up staying. She sent Pascal back, but she herself never returned to the United States.

Mad! Mad as shad! Dance and lose herself. Give up her family. What a disgrace. That’s what Jeremy’s mother kept on saying. But Aunt Patsy, who had the patience of Job and bore the constant neh-neh-neh of her half sister, would lean over to her nephew and explain: “Sometimes you have to lose yourself to find yourself. Sometimes what you most scared of, is what you been needing all along. I not afraid to dance my dance again.”

And is those words exactly which bring Jeremy here. To the house, the place he is most afraid of, and the place where he most wants to be.

He remembers that Saturday a year ago when Kevin drove him up here. In the middle of the day. No whole-heap of cars parked up on the outside. No music pumping. No dancing going on on the inside. No party was keeping. Kevin only point it out to say that whenever party did keep, is here it was kept. Jeremy looking on the house with these big eyes. Him so frighten to see that what he always take as make-up story - rumour, propaganda - was really so. That there was a place in Jamaica where other kinds of people gathered. People he would call nasty. Sodomites. Abomination. Jeremy spit out on the floor and ask, “This is really where them come?”

The question hurt Kevin who had only been trying to help. To show him that a space existed where him could dance his own dance. The question hurt, so Kevin answered bitterly, “Yes. This is where we meet.”

Only then, Jeremy get to thinking about the word ‘Them.’ They. Those. Over There. Trying to separate himself. But tonight, a year later, he was here, at the house. This is really the house. Raaas! He. Himself. Here!

That day, a year ago, when he was looking with his big eyes on this house way up in the hills, a secret kind of a place where people come to dance their unlawful dance, he remembered the history lessons he had done in school. His mind run on every slave, every Nanny and every Quashie who ran up into the mountains -from whence does my help come from- following the ka-doooom ka-di-pa-da-da doooop, following the sound through the darkness and through the trees, following it in order to dance. So they could lose themselves. So they could find themselves.

When he was in high school, he was in the debating club and in the history club and in key club, young and full of the kind of politics that had in it more heart than brains. He used to look up on the hills, on the sudden territories of concrete, all those gigantic houses built on the hillside - and would say to himself mournfully, look how the hills losing their culture. He saw the mountains as a place where rebellions happened - where they were hatched, fought and won. Though, what kind of a rebellion is it when people only fighting to be themselves?

But here him is in the mountains, outside the gate of a house. To go inside is rebellion, and to go inside is to be himself. Him thinking of Quashie who lost four of his toes. For seventeen years Quashie was held as property - lived worse than Buckra dog on Buckra plantation; he got all of three thousand, four hundred and ninety-eight strokes from the whip, sixteen dog bites, three hundred days (when you count it all up) locked in a room without windows. Seventeen years, and all that punishment for insubordination. For uppitiness. For his refusal to speak like a good ignorant nigger, but to speak the first language him ever know. All this punishment because he was a man with his own mind.

The first time Quashie try to run away, the dogs catch him by the heels and he was flogged. The second time, they take up the cutlass and cut off two toes from each foot, and even while him wasbleeding, they leave him with a stern warning: Next time Boy, we’ll cut everything below yer knee!

That could not stop Quashie. A third time, he would try to make it to the mountains - and more than try, he would really make it. Drawn to the ka-doooom ka-di-pa-da-da dooooop! Drawn to the ka-dap, ka-dap, ka-da-da-da-da-dap. Drawn to the doop-doop doooop-du-dooooop! Quashie was a man born inside of Africa. Born with Africa inside of him. Africa in his bones, like a riddim.

This is the house. This is really the house. And inside the house, is his people. Inside is a place where him can dance the dance him did always want to dance. With the kind of people, the kind of man,he has always wanted to dance with. A true true dance this time. From the inside out. It take bravery to do that. Strength.

And right then, even before he was done making his mind up fully, Jeremy’s eyes started to water. Even before he turned on the engine and turned the car around, he had to hold his face tight so as not to make the eye-water spill. Because he knew he wasn’t yet a man like Quashie. Not tonight. Him not ready. Dressed-to-puss-backfoot, his black square shoes shined and a riddim playing in his head. He couldn’t do it.

He would drive home instead. Maybe he would go over to Tia, his girlfriend, and rest his head in her lap. And when she asked “What happen to you?” he would tell her, “nothing.”

“No, is not nothing. You always have these times when you get into this mood. Like I can’t reach you.”

“I know. I sorry. Is just…is just…” And what could he tell her? That sometimes she was all he needed, but another time she was like plantation whips and missing toes and punishment? No man can tell him girl those things, and some men in this island will never dance the way they want to dance.

So even as him driving down the hill, away from the house, away from defiance and rebellion, he had to swallow hard, him face still tight from holding the tears. A riddim playing somewhere in his head, the volume turned down low.

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