The Rhythm of the August Rain (21 page)

He brought the computer to the bar counter and jabbed at the power button, half-hoping it wouldn't turn on. A few lights on the machine flickered, then glowed steadily, and he wiggled around on the barstool to get comfortable. After a few wrong clicks, he logged on to the Internet. He had letters in his in-box from people and companies he'd never heard of. He dug around in the bar's drawer, the one with the invoices and receipts. After pulling out a business card, he entered the email address. In the blank space below he wrote:

Dear Simone, I'm sending you an email. I just wrote Danny Caines too, which shows it's never too late to teach an old dog new tricks. Ha ha

The bulldozer has been making a racket next door and work has started on the land. Lambert tells me that the construction might start a couple weeks late because of some building certificate he still has to get. Anyway we're going to do the groundbreaking as planned. Jennifer is arranging it. I thought we'd just need shovels and hard hats, but it sounds a little more than that. I guess you'll see for yourself.

My daughter is still here and has me playing Scrabble and writing emails. She is really good on the computer too with her own website and everything. No brakes on her mouth, though, like all these modern kids. In the old days, they would have taken out the belt. I'm trying to be patient. I may not be the best father in the world, but I can try, right?

Tomorrow night Shad is having a party in the bar to make some money to buy Beth her engagement and wedding rings. He's real excited about it (the party, not the rings).

That's about it. I'm going to check back and see if you answer this letter. Ha ha ha

Eric

He pressed
SEND,
pressed it the way Eve had shown him—and everything disappeared. A blank screen stared back at him, ignoring his curses.

A
rat's maze
, Shannon kept thinking, as Carlton wove his way through the back roads of downtown Kingston, trying to stay away from the clogged main arteries. It was the journalist's first time in the capital, although she knew the North Coast well, and she'd looked forward to meeting the university professor and seeing Kingston.

She'd assumed that a large Caribbean town—a city, really, with a million people—would have some semblance of history, gracious old homes, sidewalks shaded by overhanging trees, wide boulevards, even a downtown with cobblestones, maybe sailboats in the harbor. Instead, she was looking at lanes that reminded her of bazaars in Old Delhi with its clutter of small shops and sidewalk vendors. The hawking and spitting of the coconut vendor pushing the cart next to the car, the loud jumble of angry, laughing, questioning voices, made her pull back from the door as the car squeezed its way through.

“Kingston just alive, you don't find?” Hortense said from the back, her words smiling. Carlton's new girlfriend had asked to come along for the ride into the city.

He'd apologized in advance to Shannon with the woman by his side. “She going to Matches Lane. I not charging you extra, don't worry.”

Hortense, short and round, too young for Carlton, had added that she wanted her cousin to do her hair and nails. “Is for the wedding. Carlton invite me and I want to look nice.”

The trip to Matthews Lane, according to the sign, near Kingston Harbour, meant plunging into the liveliest and loudest thicket of the city. Glimpses of a harbor without sailboats were squeezed between the vendors' electric-blue tarpaulin awnings. At the entrance to the lane, a policeman in a bulletproof vest stood with legs apart, swinging his baton.

“Move along,” he told Carlton.

“Just dropping off, Officer.” Carlton pulled over to let Hortense out, and Shannon said she'd like to get out and stretch her legs.

“Three hours is about all I can take in a car,” she said, rubbing her back, stiff from the drive from Largo.

“You want to get your hair done?” Hortense inquired, suddenly brittle. “They don't do white people hair.”

“I'd like to take some photographs.”

“They don't want no photographs neither.”

“Leave her,” Carlton said. “She a photographer.”

Hortense got out of the car and slammed the door. “Follow me, then—and don't take no pictures unless you ask people first.”

Ambling behind Hortense, Shannon gazed at the open-air beauty salons lining the pedestrian lane. Women and a few men were painting nails and braiding hair on each side, the smell of chemicals high in the air. She took a couple shots—after asking permission—of a woman painting a swirling, abstract design in lime green and blue for one customer, each stroke of the brush landing perfectly on the acrylic nail. Ignoring the chaos around her, the manicurist was bent over her work with a focused frown like any artist.

By the time Shannon caught up with Hortense, the young woman was already seated on a stool under a tarp, a plastic bib around her neck. The hairdresser-cousin was introduced, a stocky woman with long, straight hair who requested that her photo be taken. Shannon took a few shots of the smiling woman as she started undoing Hortense's braids without looking.

“You come?” a nasal voice said behind them. A young man, blue jeans low around his hips, sauntered toward Hortense and put a possessive hand on her arm. “I think you was going to get here earlier.”

“I couldn't come earlier. I come with this lady.” Hortense looked at Shannon nervously.

The youth glanced at Shannon and turned back to Hortense. “How long you staying this time? You staying for the party tonight?”

The girl dropped her eyes. “I not staying.”

“I don't know why you have to go and leave Kingston.”

“I tell you, I can't find no work here.” Hortense sucked her teeth.

Shannon put the cap on her lens. “I better be going. Do you want us to call before we pick you up?”

“Yes, thank you,” Hortense answered with sudden politeness.

When Shannon got back to the corner of the lane, both Carlton and the policeman had disappeared. Clutching her Canon camera to her chest, feeling conspicuous all of a sudden, the journalist looked up and down the crowded street, willing the taxi to appear.

“You looking for action?” someone said in her ear, making her jump. A man in his early twenties grinned at her, two gold teeth shining in the top row. “Me can help you, you know.” He brushed back shiny dreads.

“I don't need any help, thank you.” She raised her camera. “Unless you're a real Rastafarian. Then I'd take your picture.”

“Yeah, man, I the real deal.”

“What community do you belong to?”

“I do my own thing, man. You looking”—at which point the American accent started—“like you could do with some company. Where you coming from?”

Carlton's taxi screeched to a halt beside her. Shannon shrugged apologetically and jumped into the car.

“Pshaw,” Carlton said as he pulled away, “all them kind of people—”

“He said he was a Rasta.”

“He not no Rasta. He just a
rent-a-dread
, a prostitute trying to look like a Rasta.” Carlton sucked his teeth. “The tourist women like to sleep with Rasta, so they say.”

The drive uptown to the university went through the Parade and Cross Roads neighborhoods, Carlton giving the names of the intersections they passed through. With Shad absent, he seemed to have jumped into the role of talkative guide. “I'm a Kingston man. I learn to drive taxi here.”

“Why'd you leave the city, then?”

“Some of these town criminals get into your taxi and don't want to pay the fare. When you ask them for it, they pop you off. Or they come into the taxi to rob you and they kill you so you can't identify them. A friend of mine die that way, I don't want to follow him.”

In the north of the city, the houses and buildings got larger, the spaces between them wider. Shannon had been expecting the press of small Japanese cars to thin out, the winner-take-all style to soften with the high-rises of upper Kingston. But the traffic got worse, if anything, and she wasn't prepared for the pall of smog visible against the mountains.

“This is Hope Road,” Carlton said, swerving to avoid a taxi as he emerged onto a busy four-lane road.

“If we can survive it.”

“This part good, man. People have more manners up here.”

“Who's that?” She pointed to a man on the sidewalk. His long, white gown was sashed at the waist, and he was holding brooms over his shoulder, his turbaned head held high.

“That's a Bongo. They come from St. Thomas.”

“Ras Walker was a Bongo.” Shannon looked back at the man. “I guess that's why he gave his son the name.”

The University of the West Indies was nestled in the foothills east of the city. Uniformed guards at the front gate gave them directions to the professor's office in the social sciences building—a square, white structure with cedar louvers—one of many scattered between large trees.

The professor wasn't in yet, the office secretary said. “We have an appointment,” Shannon replied.

“Jamaica time,” Carlton said, and retreated to the car.

Richard Ransom appeared ten minutes later with a pile of books in his arms. Following him into his office, Shannon made a mental adjustment. She'd been sure that an expert on Rastafarians would be a Rastafarian himself, one of the new professionals in the group. He would be elderly and very academic. She was wrong on all counts.

A good-looking man with a flat belly and toned limbs, he had close-cropped hair matched by an equally neat mustache and beard. Shannon could picture him in shorts, running around the campus's circular road at dawn, beads of sweat on his unlined forehead.

“Please, have a seat.” With his chin he indicated the solitary guest chair, his voice pitched lower than she would have thought. After placing the books on a shelf, the lecturer sat in the captain's chair behind his desk and leaned it backward.
“Culture,”
he said with a wry smile, “featuring Rastafarians, eh? That's impressive.”

“We try to move around the world.” Shannon rummaged in her bag for her camera and recorder. “It was Jamaica's turn.”

“How can I help you?” He spoke with the accent of the educated Jamaican, Standard English colored by the island lilt, the charm of it playing with her head. She started her tape recorder along with the questions, the answers revealing a thoughtful man who'd already done two decades of research on Rastafarians. Not that it made him an expert, he added modestly.

“Where did it originate?” Shannon asked. “I mean, the whole Rastafarian philosophy and lifestyle?”

“The philosophy came first, the way it always does with socioreligious or political groups.” His monologue told the story of a perfect storm at the turn of the twentieth century, a series of revivalist preachers, in combination with the inspirational lectures and writings of the leader from St. Ann's Bay, Marcus Garvey, all calling on the black man to have pride in Africa as the motherland.

“The most popular preacher was a man called Bedward, a fascinating man. He'd traveled to Panama to work on the Canal and come back to Jamaica. He used to draw crowds of people down by the river not far from here.” Ransom looked out the window as if he longed to witness a sermon himself. “His favorite topic was the black man's oppression. The authorities arrested him, of course, and put him in the mental hospital. But as soon as he came out, he was back to the sermons. What was particularly powerful was that he linked himself to Garvey. They were both sent, he claimed, to lead their followers out of Israel to the Promised Land, that land being Africa, of course.”

Groups of Bedwardites, as they called themselves, started to form, objectors to mainstream culture, religious in their practices of prayer, fasting, and healing. “These were some of the earliest communities of—of zealots, I guess you could call them; other people would call them mystics. After the revivalists came groups, still heavily religious, who objected to the British colonial government that controlled Jamaica. They held up Africa as a sort of utopia, and because of the Old Testament references, the country that was most looked to was Ethiopia. Its ruler, the Emperor Haile Selassie, or Ras Tafari, became an icon and eventually took on the mantle of a god to groups that started calling themselves Rastafarians, followers of Ras Tafari.

“After the 1930s, 1940s, some of these groups started ritualizing the smoking of marijuana, the growing of the hair, and so forth. These were things that were outside of the norm of the society, and it branded them as revolutionaries.” Ransom's voice rolled on with its academic cadence as if he were delivering a lecture. She had come to the font, it seemed, and he was enjoying watching her drink from his knowledge.

Lifting her camera while he talked, Shannon took a few shots of the man's ringless fingers—the nail on one pinkie longer than the others—between which he rolled a gold pen. When she zoomed in on his face and clicked, she could see that his eyelashes curled backward, almost in circles, and that his lips were outlined by a thin chocolate line.

“Is there still any prejudice against them?” Shannon asked, sliding her camera back in the bag, on her right hand the gold band her parents had given her to hide their embarrassment at having a pregnant, single daughter.

“There's been discrimination against Rastas from way back. It's been a long, hard road to this point. Beatings, arrests, they've been through it all, particularly when they first started. The British didn't know what to do with them other than make them outlaws.”

“Rather like the Maroons at first.”

“Except that the Maroons were fighters and the Rastas weren't. They believed in peace, even if their language is—strong sometimes.”