Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings

GREATER KINGSTON from 1959

Sir Arthur Jennings, former politician, deceased

The Singer, reggae superstar of the world

Peter Nasser, politician, strategist

Nina Burgess, former receptionist, presently unemployed

Kim-Marie Burgess, her sister

Ras Trent, Kim-Marie’s lover

Doctor Love / Luis Hernán Rodrigo de las Casas, CIA consultant

Barry Diflorio, CIA station chief, Jamaica

Claire Diflorio, his wife

William Adler, former field officer, CIA, now rogue

Alex Pierce, journalist, Rolling Stone

Mark Lansing, filmmaker, son of Richard Lansing, former CIA director

Louis Johnson, field officer, CIA

Mr. Clark, field officer, CIA

Bill Bilson, journalist, the Jamaica Gleaner

Sally Q, fixer, informant

Tony McFerson, politician

Officer Watson, police

Officer Nevis, police

Officer Grant, police

Copenhagen City

Papa-Lo / Raymond Clarke, don of Copenhagen City, 1960–1979

Josey Wales, head enforcer, don of Copenhagen City, 1979–1991, leader of the Storm Posse

Weeper, gang enforcer, Storm Posse head enforcer, Manhattan/Brooklyn

Demus, gang member

Heckle, gang member

Bam-Bam, gang member

Funky Chicken, gang member

Renton, gang member

Leggo Beast, gang member

Tony Pavarotti, enforcer, sniper

Priest, messenger, informer

Junior Soul, informer/rumored Eight Lanes spy

The Wang Gang, gang based in Wang Sang Lands, affiliated with Copenhagen City

Copper, gang enforcer

Chinaman, gang leader near Copenhagen City

Treetop, gang member

Bullman, enforcer

The Eight Lanes

Shotta Sherrif / Roland Palmer, don of the Eight Lanes, 1975–1980

Funnyboy, gang enforcer and second-in-command

Buntin-Banton, coleader and don of the Eight Lanes, 1972–1975

Dishrag, coleader and don of the Eight Lanes, 1972–1975

Outside Jamaica, 1976–1979

Donald Casserley, drug trafficker, president, Jamaica Freedom League

Richard Lansing, CIA director, 1973–1976

Lindon Wolfsbricker, American ambassador to Yugoslavia

Admiral Warren Tunney, CIA director, 1977–1981

Roger Theroux, field officer, CIA

Miles Copeland, CIA station chief, Cairo

Edgar Anatolyevich Cheporov, reporter, Novosti News Agency

Freddy Lugo, operative, Alpha 66, United Revolutionary Organizations, AMBLOOD

Hernán Ricardo Lozano, operative, Alpha 66, United Revolutionary Organizations, AMBLOOD

Orlando Bosch, operative Omega 7, United Revolutionary Organizations, AMBLOOD

Gael and Freddy, operatives, Omega 7, United Revolutionary Organizations, AMBLOOD

Sal Resnick, journalist, New York Times

Montego Bay, 1979

Kim Clarke, unemployed

Charles/Chuck, engineer, Alcorp Bauxite

Miami and New York, 1985–1991

Storm Posse, Jamaican drug syndicate

Ranking Dons, rival Jamaican drug syndicate

Eubie, head enforcer, Storm Posse, Queens/Bronx

A-Plus, associate of Tristan Phillips

Pig Tails, enforcer, Storm Posse, Queens/Bronx

Ren-Dog, enforcer, Storm Posse, Queens/Bronx

Omar, enforcer, Storm Posse, Manhattan/Brooklyn

Romeo, drug dealer, Storm Posse, Brooklyn

Tristan Phillips, inmate, Rikers, member of Ranking Dons

John-John K, hit man, carjacker

Paco, carjacker

Griselda Blanco, drug lord, Medellín cartel Miami operations

Baxter, enforcer for Griselda Blanco

The Hawaiian Shirts, enforcers for Griselda Blanco

Kenneth Colthirst, New York resident, 5th Avenue

Gaston Colthirst, his son

Gail Colthirst, his daughter-in-law

Dorcas Palmer, caregiver

Millicent Segree, student nurse

Miss Betsy, manager, God Bless Employment Agency

Monifah Thibodeaux, drug addict

Listen.

Dead people never stop talking. Maybe because death is not death at all, just a detention after school. You know where you’re coming from and you’re always returning from it. You know where you’re going though you never seem to get there and you’re just dead. Dead. It sounds final but it’s a word missing an ing . You come across men longer dead than you, walking all the time though heading nowhere, and you listen to them howl and hiss because we’re all spirits or we think we are all spirits but we’re all just dead. Spirits that slip inside other spirits. Sometimes a woman slips inside a man and wails like the memory of making love. They moan and keen loud but it comes through the window like a whistle or a whisper under the bed, and little children think there’s a monster. The dead love lying under the living for three reasons. (1) We’re lying most of the time. (2) Under the bed looks like the top of a coffin, but (3) There is weight, human weight on top that you can slip into and make heavier, and you listen to the heart beat while you watch it pump and hear the nostrils hiss when their lungs press air and envy even the shortest breath. I have no memory of coffins.

But the dead never stop talking and sometimes the living hear. This is what I wanted to say. When you’re dead speech is nothing but tangents and detours and there’s nothing to do but stray and wander awhile. Well, that’s at least what the others do. My point being that the expired learn from the expired, but that’s tricky. I could listen to myself, still claiming to anybody that would hear that I didn’t fall, I was pushed over the ba lcony at the Sunset Beach Hotel in Montego Bay. And I can’t say shut your trap, Artie Jennings, because every morning I wake up having to put my pumpkin-smashed head back together. And even as I talk now I can hear how I sounded then, can you dig it, dingledoodies? meaning that the afterlife is just not a happening scene, not a groovy shindig, Daddy-O, see those cool cats on the mat? They could never dig it, and there’s nothing to do but wait for the man that killed me, but he won’t die, he only gets older and older and trades out wives for younger and younger and breeding a whole brood of slow-witted boys and running the country down into the ground.

Dead people never stop talking and sometimes the living hear. Sometimes he talks back if I catch him right as his eyes start to flicker in his sleep, talks until his wife slaps him. But I’d rather listen to the longer dead. I see men in split breeches and bloody longcoats and they talk, but blood comes out of their mouths and good heavens that slave rebellion was such ghastly business and that queen has of course been of bloody awful use ever since the West India Company began their rather shoddy decline compared to the East and why are there so many negroes taking to sleeping so unsoundly wherever they see fit and confound it all I seem to have misplaced the left half of my face. To be dead is to understand that dead is not gone, you’re in the flatness of the deadlands. Time doesn’t stop. You watch it move but you are still, like a painting with a Mona Lisa smile. In this space a three-hundred-year-old slit throat and two-minute-old crib death is the same.