Rion Scott - Insurrections

I charged toward the man, barely looking at him, swinging in a fantastic arc, punching him in his thick chest. My blows made a flat slapping noise. He roared and slammed his big fists into my face one by one, bursting my lip. He struck my face again and again, eventually knocking a tooth loose. I became dazed, swinging my hands, not knowing where to strike. My fists hit air, and when I toppled over, they scraped the concrete, tearing skin from my knuckles. The rubber sole of his boot slammed into my face. A mixture of blood and thick snot gushed from my nose. He grasped my dreadlocks and tossed me around. I could feel newly twisted locks unraveling. Pulling hair, I thought, is such a feminine thing to do. I had too much dignity to fight that way. I climbed to my feet, wanting to run, but men don’t do that. Do they? No. Again I charged the man, and we clung together in a strange embrace, like weary boxers, though sometimes I wonder if we actually looked like lovers.

Hands pried us apart, and I spit and yelled. My blood stained his tank top. I tried — or pretended to try, I can’t be certain which — to charge the man again. What snapped me back into lucidity was a voice from the crowd:

Y’all clowns need to get out of here. I called the police.

The man who spoke was a shop owner, I believe. He came from the deli across the street. I raced to my car, and the man I fought cursed me and called me a coward. People cried out to me, asking if I was all right, but I paid them no mind. I turned my car on and sped off, heading in the direction of my house.

So, was the man I fought really L’Ouverture, the Black Atlas, the Black Nietzsche, the Black Messiah? Of that I can’t be certain, and I can’t say that I don’t care, though I would like to be able to say that I don’t care, but the truth is that I still do wonder.

I knew for sure, though, that there was a knurled knot by my right eye and that it would swell. I thought of how angry my wife would be. My lip was torn. There were bruises and cuts along my cheeks and a bleeding space to the right of my front teeth. My hand bled. The skin at my knuckles and my fingers was scraped raw and would later be scarred. The white collared shirt I wore for work was shredded and stained with blood. And I didn’t notice it as we fought, didn’t at all feel it when it happened, perhaps it was the adrenaline, but I now sported a bald patch at the side of my head. The man had ripped out a handful from its roots. I had lost my soft feminine shine.

I went deep into the Wildlands one day, and when they found me, I was near death. My flesh generated enough heat to keep a power plant going for a month, probably. I burned at 107 as if my heart had been replaced by a tiny sun. The doctor tells me brain death begins at 106. He says this ashen-faced, surprised I’m sitting up, conscious, bleary and dazed, but alive.

My parents sit across from my bed in Cross River Hospital Center, the place I was born. Here too I watched my son, Djassi, push himself into the world. I’m hoping the universe is not angling for some sort of sad symmetry, making my place of birth also my place of death.

Monique & Neville Samson, two human beings yet one person. My father reminds me of when I was four and I hit my older brother, Blair. Daddy asked me why I did it and I said, Dad, you know I’m brain damaged.

Now you are, he says, cackling, leaning into my mother as she taps his arm and tells him to hush.

This is serious, Mr. Samson, the doctor says.

He tells me it’s probably malaria or Chik-V, or dengue fever or something else you can’t get in America. Don’t believe any of that, please. I just went into the forest; I didn’t leave the country. Though it’s true that mosquitos have never been my friend, what’s really going on is that Cross River is trying to kill me. The doctor talks and I can feel my heart beating at a rapid speed and the heat from my skin is burning my sheets but not really, that’s just the delirium. I think of the times I visited my godmother and cousins with my grandmother — my mother’s mother — in Trinidad back when I was young and Granny was still living. The trucks driving by at night spraying white smoke into the air. Smoke seeping through the tightly drawn jalousies. The fleeing mosquitos seeking refuge in the house in East Dry River that my mother grew up in, the same house her mother grew up in. The bugs hide for a while but then all die away. For a week, no mosquitos drink from me, and all my old welts stop itching and fade from my skin. In due time the bugs return, swarming me late into the night. Maybe, I think sitting in that hospital bed, they put something deep inside me that’s only coming to life now.

Mr. Samson! the doctor says.

Kin! my father calls.

I look up.

The doctor says: What were you doing so deep in the Wildlands anyway?

I tell the doctor I was looking for myself.

(I don’t tell my father when he asks.

Nor my mother.

Nor my wife, Peace.

I whisper it to my son later because he’s a baby and thus unable to speak it.

I’m not here to tell you about my time in the Wildlands either, so if you’ve come for that, then I’m sorry, but you’ll be disappointed. Remind me later, though, and I might tell you.)

My father breaks the silence. Only two types of people does go so deep in the Wildlands, you know: fools and madmen.

You forgetting the wolfers, my mother replies.

What you think they are?

What about Blair? I ask. He think he a wolf hunter.

My father schupses.

A set of chupdiness, he mumbles. He a fool too. We only have one sensible child, Monique. Laina would never have go so deep in the Wildlands. Your brother and sister call yet, Kin?

Of course not.

My father sighs.

My father talks, but he never talks, you know. When we get silent and it’s just hospital sounds around us, and I ask him to tell me about his father, he pauses and says, What’s there to say, boy? Then he becomes quiet and offers to watch Djassi so Peace can visit. Peace is the last person I want to see.

Like, Pop, I say, you tell me the funny stuff, like when that white guy beat up the ref at that soccer game—

Never see a cutass like that.

But what about the other stuff, huh, Dad?

My mother says she’ll go to my apartment to watch Djassi. Before either my father or I can object, she’s out the door. It’s just me and Neville Samson.

What’s there to say? he asks again. What you want to know, huh?

Like tell me Dad — (I feel the fever bubbling through me like steam, burning my brain; I imagine it rising from the top of my skull on a bed of hot, white smoke) — tell me how we got to Cross River.

The pipe and the book. Is the book first. And when I forget the book, is the pipe that tell me go Cross River.

Is like history put its hands on my back and shove me from the sidewalk into the street, Kin. I always an athlete, so my mind does go back to that often. Stay on your feet. That’s what I keep thinking. Like I’m on the football pitch and some guy’s running toward me. I had a coach used to say, The most persistent rewards go to those who stay on their feet . But this, this is nothing like I ever seen, you know. These people out there rocking and flipping a car. We like bees, Kin. All of us. Thousands upon thousands of bees waking to find our queen get she head chop off.

You see you, all delirious and half crazy? That’s how everybody was on that day. I’ll never forget April fifth, 1968. The fourth was like a dream. Fuzzy, confusing. But the fifth was real. Martin Luther King dead.

I couldn’t tell you why I was out there, in truth, Kin. Some people want to take a piece of whitey and call that justice. An even trade, you know. Some want the things they can’t get on a regular day: television sets, jackets, scarves, food, all that. And then some just out there craving the fire, the burn. I don’t know, boy. Maybe I wanted some of all of that. Too much to name, I guess. All I know is that I’m angry like everyone else. Whatever burn in them burn in me. I feel that buzzing like bee wings inside me. Wasn’t no, I a Trini and you a Yankee. I a Trini and you a negro. Naw. Before I open my mouth they treat us all like niggers. That’s it. Ain’t take long to figure that out.