Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings

— I didn’t know Marcus Garvey real name is Burgess? Or is our real name Garvey?

— This is exactly what T say. This is exactly what him say people like you would say.

— People like me.

— Then no mus’ people like you. People in darkness. Come out of the dark and come into the light, sistren.

I could try to shut her up, but like Ras Trent, Kimmy’s not really talking to you. She only needs a witness, not an audience.

— And why call me, since I’m sure I’m not the only person you know who’s in darkness. Call one of your Immaculate High School friends or something.

— Sistren, if the revolution ever going to happen, it must, you hear me, it must begin in the home first.

— Trent’s home free already?

— Everything is not about T, Nina. I have my own life too.

— Of course. Everything is about Marcus Garvey.

— Where you think you life going? All you black people running around like headless chicken and don’t even know why you direction-less. You read Soul On Ice ? How much I can bet that you never read Soledad Brother? How Europe Underdeveloped Africa ?

— You were always the bookish one.

— Well, book is for wisdom. Also for foolishness.

— The problem with a book is that you never know what it’s planning to do to you until you’re too far into it. I really need to take a shower.

— For why? You don’t have nowhere a go.

And why you don’t go fuck yourself, Miss, I couldn’t fuck and breed for Che Guevara so I going take whatever revolution I can ride with my vagina ? It reaches the very tip of my tongue and vanishes, like a little sugar pill. I tell myself that I tolerate Kimmy because she could never survive me even once talking to her the way she talks to me. I hate people like that, people you have to protect while they keep hurting you. Deep down she’s still the same girl who wants more than anything for people to like her, the only thing she wants more than that is to go back and be born poor and struggling so she can feel entitled to hate everybody who lives in Norbrook. But one day she is going to push me either too far or not far enough. I keep telling myself I don’t have time for her, but I went with her to one of those twelve tribes’ Rasta gatherings, can’t remember when, might be the same week we went to the party at the Singer’s house.

The whole trip on the way there she’s talking loud, shouting over the engine of a Volkswagen about what I’m supposed to do and what I’m not supposed to do and how I better not embarrass her with any Babylon fuckery. She shouted about how when I reach I going get swallowed by the positive vibration and livicate myself to the struggle for black liberation, the struggle for Africa and the struggle for His Imperial Majesty. Or maybe me already too trapped in iniquity to get swallowed by anything positive, because Rastafari must first begin with a fire, a fire deep down inside you that you can’t quench with a glass of water, and you can’t wait till it seep out your pores like sweat, you have to tear your mind open and let it rage out.

— That might be heartburn, I say, the last joke of the night. She gave me that I-expected-just-a-little-more-from-you look that she either inherited or studied from Mummy.

— Is a good thing you dress like a righteous woman at least, she said at the most boring outfit I could find, a long purple skirt that brushed against my ankles when I walk and a white shirt that I tucked in. Slippers because I can’t imagine Rastafarians liking their women to be in high heels. I couldn’t even remember why I agreed to go, far as I know I didn’t, but Kimmy was acting as if she had a quota to fill, like those church cult boys on the University campus who act as if they’re going to get whipped if they don’t get X number of converts a day. But people funny, boy. When we get to this gathering, on Hope Road in a house that looked like slaves used to get whipped right outside, two floors, all wood, French windows and a verandah, Kimmy is quiet.

The whole ride over she couldn’t stop yapping, and once she was there she turn into a nun with a silence vow. Ras Trent was already there talking to a woman, excuse me, dawta, and smiling more than he was talking, stroking his beard and tilting his head left then right while the girl, white but with a Rasta cap, clasps her hands and look like she’s saying a heavy American version of I’m SO happy to be here. Me? I’m SO happy to watch Kimmy make sense of it all, to watch her fidget and lean on one leg, then the next, then the first as if she doesn’t know if she should walk over there, or leave, or wait for him to notice her. All the time she’s silent. All the women were silent except the white one talking to Trent. If it wasn’t for the red, green and gold and that the skirts are often denim, I’d think I was surrounded by Muslim women.

Far off in the corner three women are lit up by the bonfire they have going, cooking some ital food whatever. I’m stiff, a lighthouse with only my head moving, sweeping left to right and back. I couldn’t help it, I’m already looking for boys and especially girls from my high school, who found the true light of Rasta, but are really here just to give their uptown parents grief. There’s just so much sex you can have with a man who doesn’t use deodorant or a woman who doesn’t shave her armpits or legs. Maybe to be a real Rasta you have to be into man musk and woman fish. A lot of women but they are all moving. It takes me a while to see that they are all getting something to give to the men, food, a stool, water, matches for their weed, more food, juice from big Igloos. Livication and liberation my ass, if I wanted to live in a Victorian novel I at least want men who know how to get a decent haircut.

Kimmy was still beside me, still fidgeting, a different woman from the one who just spent an entire car ride talking like she’s better than me. Sorta like what she’s doing with this phone call, but I haven’t heard anything she’s said for the past seven minutes. I know, I glanced at the clock above my door.

— Channeling emotional energies towards constructive racial interests. Mass sacrificial work. Through education in science and industry and character building, stress mass education, and, and, you listening to a word that I saying?

— Huh? What? Sorry, trying to swat a fly.

— A fly? What kind of nastiness swirling inside your bed?

— I’m not in bed, Kimmy. Should I even be calling you that? Thought Ras Trent would have given you something other than your slave name by now.

— Him, him call me Mariama. But this is just between him, me and whoever free.

— Oh.

— That don’t mean you until you choose to be free, sistren.

— So now that you’re free you going back to Africa?

— Typical. Same thing T said. Back to Africa is not even the chief aspect of the Garvey Philosophy.

Kimmy would never use words like chief aspect. Come to think of it, neither would Ras Trent, who probably spells daughter “dawta” in order to use fewer letters. Amazing that she brings such a bitch out of me, but it always reaches right above my skin or inside my mouth and never comes out. The more Kimmy dances around an issue, the more it must be truly bugging her.

— You call me for some reason other than the history, Kimmy?

— What you talking about? I tell you revolution have to start in the home first.

— Not the bed?

— Same thing.

I want to tell her that I’m sick of being the one person she feels she can talk down to. I really do. And then she says,

— You is a dutty little hypocrite.

Finally.

— Pardon?

— You, you fuck him?

— What are you talking about?

— You think nobody wasn’t going see you? Lay-lay ’round him house like some groupie?