Oonya Kempadoo - All Decent Animals

The gaudiness gone before her had crackled and popped on-stage, and left its litter floating restlessly between the stands. Queens covered in tinsel, beads, and feathers had dragged stiff frames on wheels along to overbearing explanations by the MC. The kings to follow would include some imitation of Slinger’s massive creations, fireworks, smoke bombs, bodybuilder power, and more shine. But now, the sparkler-waving children sigh as heaven billows before them. They stay still, sticky faces and eyes glued, as the field of flowers on wings floats their candy-floss hearts up into the cooling sky.

David Rudder and Charlie’s Roots truck, the manager, the artists, performers, Slingerites, and Ata, creep apace alongside the stage. Some people sing for moments, or stop mid-clap, to sail with heaven. Freedom flighting. In the night. Into the night. In her arms, his arms. Fan and spread. Souls flutter petals taller. Tail of a kite in the clouds, tall. Fall. Womb-shrinking ovation, heart-shaking elation. Dilation … dialyzing river, coursing past organs. Washing poisoned bones and liver-bed clear.

* * *

Jab-jab devils, crawling out from homes, from ghetto holes and inky air, gather on street corners with biscuit tins. Mothers wake their young ones, teenagers out already and drunk, armed with black oil and whistles. Jouvert morning is here.

Fete-finished feet change into old sneakers. Hands pull ragged T-shirts and shorts from car trunks. Ripping. Baby oil slathering, skin greasing. Women tuck hair under caps, men fix wigs, before waves of footsteps tramp through sleeping side streets. And the bands of vagabonds, pagans, and cursed are gathering, at 4:00 a.m.

They laugh loud and share bottles of spirits. Liquor fires voices and the last few asleep wake and stare. Independence Square is the deadly magnet, pulling trucks full of steelpan, sound systems, hoarse singers, and the hordes of devils — mud, cocoa, paint-covered bodies, and lost souls. Jab Molassie. Crude-oil rhythm. A guttural, primal scream is building, coming from pavement cracks, the bellies of rats, the white-rum spittle of the madwoman, from the city itself and its demons.

* * *

Ata goes with Fraser, Vernon, and Alan to the edge of the cauldron. They park by the empty Savannah and walk through residential Woodbrook, to the Slingerite Jouvert band starting point. Ata’s same vagrant square. Ghosts of the homeless are there in the crowd now, alive like the throbbing truck, volume on the huge speakers turning up, louder.

“You should have joined,” Fraser says to her.

Ata takes a swig from the bottle Vernon hands her, coughs, and shakes her head. The metallic mixture scours her insides, opens her nostrils.

Vernon’s eyes are red as he looks at the blend of bisexuals, gays, lesbians, heteros, smearing black paint onto each other. He laughs. “Da’ is a batty-boy band.”

She chokes and shakes her head again, handing the bottle back to him.

“So, I guess it’s not for you, then, is it?” Fraser holds Vernon’s red gaze. “At least not in public,” he adds and watches Vernon check Ata quickly.

She turns away as Vernon mutters, “I gone, yuh-see.”

“I need some of that paint.” Ata looks at Fraser lighting a cigarette for Alan as Vernon slips away. She crosses the road to get daubed.

“I need one too.” Ata signals when she returns.

Fraser backs away from her stench and she tries to gauge his glittering eyes. She rubs the black slime across her bare stomach, wipes her face with it, and stamps, opening up her hip bones to the rhythm.

Her legs, like all the others’, start champing and chafing as the truck moves off, dragging them slowly down the street. Fraser’s feet shuffle him along too. Alan walks, just behind, his marijuana veil shutting him out. Like Fraser, he couldn’t take the halfways. As artists, it was their right to be extreme. Fraser couldn’t join in so he wouldn’t dance just a little, he walks. And he asks himself, why even walk and watch, when it’s just a shell of myself moving?

* * *

Vernon heads down Frederick Street to the boiling depths of Independence Square, searching for his fellas wrapped in chains, trailing the heavy lengths behind them.

In the thick of it, no skin bare of jab oil. Mouths dribbling red. Ropes cinching waists, roiling, convulsing on the slick asphalt. Hard hats and sunglasses, coiling tails and pitchforks, rods and whips. Bras squash onto glistening hard chests. Shower caps and granny’s nightie ripping and dripping Huile Diablo.

The lash of a chain on the street or a barricaded shop front, a broken chair frame dragging along, are the cruel, chinkly-metal slave sounds, clearing a path for Vernon and the jabs.

* * *

Ata chips along on the side of the band, tobacco rush giving more head. Bottle and spoon ring ting ting ting. Bram bram … Tin-lash, bat-screech echo … bram bram. Miles, yards of road, writhing snakes to the beat chip chip … to the shuffle and shrill. Unavoidable marching orders.

Ata curls back to Fraser and Alan when they stop. She stays on without them, when they insist.

* * *

Sam holds he daughter against him, sitting low on a bucket, in the yard in Belmont. The child-mother standing at the gate in she big old duster, a do-rag on she head. He could see her bam-bam rolling under the loose clothes, bumping just a little, when she flex her toes in time to the music. Face peeping, hands holding on to the gate — wouldn’t give you no sign she was dancing, otherwise. This mother, eh. Sam hold his baby closer.

Them boys on the corner had wake her up, with they warming-up and daubing-up racket. And then them jab-jabs start passing, and the drunken neighbor step out in he Bat suit. Every year since Sam small heself, this man making up he own black wings and cloaking up heself all over — coming out, well high and drunken, to play Bat for the whole Carnival. And the next neighbor, on the corner there, blasting music right through the three days. Sam know about what does go on in this street. That is why he come to hold his daughter. As a boy, same size as she, his mother used to hold him, and his grandfather would raise him, to see. This is where he bruk out as a boy too, and start to play heself. This must be what they call old now — Sam here holding he lil’ girl and worrying.

* * *

Now Ata and the rum-pickled serpents surge on, shedding, becoming insects. Afro-combs rasp graters, crickets calling dawn — day breaking. They stare at each other’s strange, muddy features. Tiny feet burning, marching still. Dry paint cracking, rattling. Morning releasing full day. Carnival Monday. And they keep chipping, jagged and colorless as a predawn sea, splashing at the foot of the hills.

* * *

Sammy baby’s lil’ heart cool back down now. And the sweet-biscuit she nibbling making her smell even more baby again. She three-year tiny foot looking so new, and fitting the pink slippers so neat. Look at this — she bumping too. Comfortable now in morning light, she bumping her little self and saying, in time, “Haw.” The damn Donkey song pound so much till she know it. “The donkey hee, the donkey haw, the donkey eat with a knife and fork. Whoa…” The mother come bumping to her child, and he see it again, the lil’ dancing. Baby leave him sitting there and she bouncing and stamping. Watch t’ing. His child. And just now she go be wining waist. And then what he go do?

* * *

A syncing crotch nestles up behind Ata’s rolling ass. She slides down and back up, and it follows sweetly. She leans back onto the wet stomach and matching thighs. Gluey with the Donkey laugh, she looks over her shoulder and the girl’s perfect teeth grin at her.

The band bunches up for their last ole-mas jump. The stands and bare stage sprawl open and wide for them, day-hot. They mount. And the hills clap. Applauding no one but their soaked-up, nasty selves, stretching a tongue, a foot in the air, stamping and prancing and dancing on that big stage. “ Gone clear .”