Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings

— Not from around here?

— Huh?

— You’re not from around here.

— Uh. No.

— Looking?

— Ah… no…

— Then how you’re gonna know when you found it?

I see you just give me the look, Alex Pierce. No, not the look you giving me now, not that owl staring into a flashlight look, the one you give me fifteen seconds ago. I know that look. You been carefully studying me for a while now, how much months, six? Seven maybe? You know how prison is, everybody lose count of days even with a calendar right over the toilet. Or maybe you don’t know. Honestly from what I hear from Jimmy the Vietnam vet, prison is just like boot camp. Boring more than anything else. Nothing to do but see and wait. You don’t have nothing to wait on, but you realise you don’t need to, you just in the middle of wait and once you forget the what for, there’s nothing but the wait. You should try it.

Right now I count down days by how long before I going have to shit a crack vial out of my ass and slip into some guard pocket so it will buy me one more month of keeping my locks. A boy said to me only last week, But dready, how you manage to keep your locks in prison so long? They must think you have fifteen shank hiding in there. I tell him, sorry, told him — I keep forgetting you’re taping this — that it take me years to convince the powers that be that if a Muslim brother can keep his cap and dye his beard red, then I have the right to keep my dread. When that didn’t work I tell them what they want to hear; with so many lice and ticks in there, to even touch it might give them Lyme disease. There, you did it again, you and your look. The “if only” look. The “maybe if I had all the breaks”—no, “the opportunities,” then I could have been something else, maybe even you. The problem, of course, is if I were you, I’d be waiting all my life to talk to a man like me. No, don’t ask me about life in the fucking ghetto, I forget those days long time. You couldn’t last two days in Rikers if you didn’t learn to forget. Hell, in here you forget you’re not supposed to suck dick. So no, I’m the wrong person to ask what it was like in the ghetto. Is not like I was born there.

Nineteen sixty-six? You really goin’ ask me ’bout 1966, brethren? No star, me nah talk ’bout no 1966. Nor ’67 neither.

But seriously, Alex, prison library serious to fuck. Me go to plenty library in Jamaica and not one have book like the number of books me see in Rikers. One of them is this book Middle Passage . Some coolie write it, V. S. Naipaul. Brethren, the man say West Kingston is a place so fucking bad that you can’t even take a picture of it, because the beauty of the photographic process lies to you as to just how ugly it really is. Oh you read it? Trust me, even him have it wrong. The beauty of how him write that sentence still lie to you as to how ugly it is. It so ugly it shouldn’t produce no pretty sentence, ever.

But how you going know about peace if you don’t learn what start the war in the first place? What kind of journalist you be if you don’t want to know the backstory? Or maybe you know it already. Either way, you can’t know about peace or war or even how Copenhagen City come about the first place unless you learn ’bout a place called Balaclava.

Picture it, white boy. Two standpipe. Two bathroom. Five thousand people. No toilet. No running water. House that hurricane rip apart only for it to come back together like magnet was the thing holding it in place. And then look at what surrounding it. The largest dump at Bumper Hall, the Garbagelands where they now have a high school. The slaughterhouse draining blood down the streets right to the gully. The largest sewage treatment plant so uptown can flush they shit straight down to we. The largest public cemetery in the West Indies. The morgue and two largest maternity hospitals in the West Indies. Coronation Market, the largest market in the Caribbean, almost all of the funeral parlours, the oil, the railway and the bus depot. And… but why you come here, Alex Pierce? What you really want to know and why you wasting me time with question that the Jamaica Information Service can answer? Oh. I see. I see your method. When last you go back to Jamaica? No real reason, you just look like somebody who either never been or can’t go back. What that look like? Honestly I didn’t know until I just said it to see what you would do. Now I know what it look like. All the way to Rikers, how many strings you just pull, eh, Pierce? You know what, don’t tell me. I going find out the same way I just find out about you and Jamaica. Ask your question them.

Brethren, you know me come from the Rastafari area, so why you ask a question like that? You really think the JLP was going help the Rasta part or the PNP of Balaclava? You still so dense? Anyway, Uncle Ben’s rice tough like fuck anyway. But that day, man. Shit.

You know something though? Balaclava never did so bad depending on where you lived or who you live with. It’s not like every day some baby dead or some people get their face eaten off by rats or anything. I mean, things wasn’t good. Wasn’t good at all. But still me can remember certain morning just going out and laying down in the grass, just pure green grass, and watch hummingbird and butterfly dance over me. Nineteen forty-nine me born. I always feel that when my mother give birth she was already on her way to England and just throw me off the ship. Don’t care so much that both Daddy and Mummy check out, but why them have to leave me with this half-coolie face? Even my Rasta brethren laugh ’bout it, saying when the Black Star Liner finally come to take us to Africa, they going have to chop me in half. Man, what you know about the Jamaica runnings? Sometimes I think being a half coolie worse than being a battyman. This brown skin girl look ’pon me one time and say how it sad that after all God go through to give me pretty hair him curse me with that skin. The bitch say to me all my dark skin do is remind her that me forefather was a slave. So me say me have pity for you too. Because all your light skin do is remind me that your great-great-grandmother get rape. Anyway, Balaclava.

Sunday. My little mattress was a hospital bed they throw out. Me was already awake, but it was like the rumble wake me. Don’t ask me if I feel it or hear it first. Is like one second there was nothing, then the next second there was the rumble. Then me cup fall off the stool. The rumbling just getting louder and louder, and noise now, like a plane flying really low. It shake all four wall. Me sit up in the bed and as I look to the window the wall just crunch flat. This big iron jaw just chomp ’pon me wall and rip it away. The jaw just rip into the wall and bite it off. I scream like a girl. Me jump off the bed just before the jaws burst through more zinc and chomp down dirt in the ground, me bed, me stool and part of the roof me build with me own hand. Now that the roof lose two wall to support it start to fall apart. Me run out before the whole thing collapse and still the jaws keep coming back.

No, me don’t want to talk about Wareika Hill neither. Where the fuck you get these questions?

Man, what you really care about, ’66 or ’85? Make up your mind and stop asking question when damn well already know the answer. You come here to talk about Josey Wales. That’s all everybody want to talk about after last May. Oh wait, you don’t know? Me in Rikers and me know everything and you one of them news-man and you don’t know?

I hear me and Wales used to live near each other but it would be another ten years before I meet him. But him was JLP, and after JLP drive me out of Balaclava me never have nothing to do with those people until the peace treaty. Anyway, thanks for Selassie I Jah Rastafari or I don’t know what me would a do. Anyway, little after the fall of Balaclava, haha, get it? Anyway, after the fall, Babylon lock me up. Can’t even remember which club? Turntable? Neptune Bar? People who know better do better, they always say. The damn thing is all me pocket was five dollars and a bottle of Johnnie Walker. I guess it was a year for each dollar, eh?