chiaroscuro

St. George is the middle parish, the Jam in the Dodger. Houses perch on grey drives amidst seas of flushing equatorial green within which chirp alien green monkeys, hang alien green avocados, swim lucid green dreams. But the shape came from the sugar fields, not the gully. It was Akeem. And it was time to fly kites.

Akeem was from a small group of chattel houses outside the gate, down a lane that skirted the cane fields. Those living in the western world would see it as a squalor of sorts - not squalled due to laziness but poverty, or a humble kind of normality, hidden from the white sand jungle of the bajan coastline. In the dirt, chickens scratched and foolishly jerked their heads (I knew a white boy called Kirk who used to catch chickens at school and hide them in his shirt). There were kittens, and scruffy dogs. We had a cat, Molly, a stray from St. Thomas, found during a game of cricket at the Australian Ambassador's house that we’d snuck inside. She’d pooed in a bathtub. I’d eventually gotten to keep her. Akeem brought her three kittens his second visit, but Molly was ungenerous with her new home. (Back then kittens were interchangeable with dolls, a hideous reality I try to block from memory.)

The dirt area adjacent the houses was perfect for flying our beautiful, bold coloured bird kites (there were too many trees in our own yard). I remember well the view of the world with my back to the houses, the sky... not our failure or success. Time passed, then dusk fell, settling in our throats, and Akeem took us inside for water.

A chattel house is not usually big, though many are very brightly painted and non uniform. Akeem's was brown, and not much bigger than the two shared bedrooms (one for the parents, one for the four kids), and a small kitchen, filled by a table covered in a plastic cloth of a type that, if I came across it again, I would push my finger into and stretch across the surface to hear that nostalgic, stuttering fart. His mum stood at the sink, tall and slight. She spoke to us, gave us water; had the same gentle generosity of her son, whose lips spilled perfect cubes of sugar, always smiling; who brought us our first taste of sugar cane, played our games. Not many of my friend’s mums were actually brown-skinned like our mum. I remember I liked her. After, Akeem walked us back up the lane, back to the iron gate so easily opened. Then he was gone.