My father died on a hot day in the cold season, a heavy day in February. He died on a Saturday when flocks of North American tourists beach their bodies, bloated from beer on the white sand, and in the clear, shallow waters of Jamaica. His death seemed an expression of divine transcendence, if you believe these things.
I believe.
My father woke one morning in 2015 after a year bedridden. He was afflicted by an illness he never accepted. Once diagnosed, he took to bed, upset by the treachery of his body. The early morning light shone on my father. He woke with an appetite. Before, he had struggled to consume the food given to him. He couldn’t get his small mouth to open wide enough. Eating was akin to lifting a ton of concrete with his teeth. The ceiling fan whirled overhead, trying to muffle the sounds of the street and the stray goats bleating in hunger. Unable to see because of old age and his condition, my father felt the curtains of skin on his belly, his muscles and vanity gone. His body reduced to dregs while his bones wore his skin as a threadbare suit. My father had spent his life as a dapper and fit man; now his cotton pajamas swallowed him whole.
His third wife tells us he yelled at her to get him breakfast. I trust how she described his last day because none of us, his children, were there. We are abroad, living American and European lives. In my mind’s eye, I envisioned everything her mouth couldn’t say. I see her tugging at her pallu, so it drapes over the shoulder to show off her saree’s gold embellishments. I see her walk to the humble kitchen while the dance of fabric hides her disdain. She fulfils his request out of dutiful respect. Jamaican women, regardless of class, are taught to be polite to their husbands even when their marriage stinks.
Someone ran to the back yard and sliced stalks of callaloo from the garden. His wife prepared it in the usual way Indian women do: peppery, with long slivers of softened onions and tomatoes mixed among the wilted leaves. It was the perfect style to go with the boiled green bananas on the plate. Faster than Bredda Anancy tricking Sistah Mongoose into giving up her best mango, my father was presented with his favorite dish. Father licked his lips. He ate the spicy callaloo mashed into the bananas with gusto.
My father was talkative on his last morning alive. I wondered if he made his pronouncements thinking he was Jesus centered among lambs and children, teaching them about love, duty, and forgiveness. Or was it an opportunity for my father to clean up his act before final judgement? “Without salt fish in the callaloo,” my father mused out loud, “this meal isn’t as nice as what Aunt Gertie used to make. Rest in peace, my dear. We will meet soon.” He was experiencing a memory lapse. His aunt was alive and had 104 years to my father’s eighty-one. She would outlive him, as she had outlived his mother.
A small framed picture of a Jesus—with pale hands clasped in quiet prayer, his blond hair cascading past his shoulders—hung high above my father’s bed on the wall. Jesus’s blue eyes were set to always look away from the viewer. There are many versions of this on walls throughout the island. Sometimes Jesus stretches his hand out to the clean-faced, anonymous children who look up at him. Others show a lamb draped over Jesus’s shoulders. Sometimes Jesus is nailed to a wooden cross looking betrayed, carrion birds flying overhead in the sky. My father’s version of Jesus sat high on the wall, indifferent to my father’s ailment. The picture was close to the ceiling out of deference to Jesus and because my father was terrible at manual labor.
I have limited memories of my father because I never lived with him or stayed in his house. As a child, I saw him when his van came to the city to pick up shipments from the wharf that he could take back to his store on the other side of Jamaica. My father was a short, stout man who boasted of his many women. There were whispers they were desperate women. People he coerced into giving their flower with the promise of trinkets. Women he refused to acknowledge if he saw them on the street.
I remember, though, his plastic rosary swinging from his neck as he would reach into the van to give me a little treat. I can see his mouth open, the gaps of missing teeth showcasing his tongue as he called me Princess Anne. I don’t remember his carousing or his attempts to “civilize” my mother, as my brother says. I don’t remember the arguments about my mother’s backward beliefs or how she was the worst kind of Jamaican: A biracial woman who wanted to be Black. Memories of him are secondhand, passed to me like the cast-off clothes Mother accepted from friends for me to wear.
One year in the nineties, my father brought me Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 vinyl record. Her music was all I talked about. Happy to have his attention, I emptied my thoughts to him. I was in the middle of explaining some choreography, when unsolicited, my father confided in me about his and my mother’s relationship.
“Your mother is an ignoramus. Do you know what it means?” he asked.
“Stupid and superstitious,” I answered in my twelve-year-old voice, at once ashamed he called my mother this but intrigued an adult was confiding in me.
I often felt this about my mother. Her insistence to burn any hair I took from a comb seemed more ridiculous and less about keeping ghosts from harming me. “That’s why you call Ghostbuster,” I told her in all seriousness.
I look back and think I should have told him her beliefs weren’t any different from his priests. But I agreed with my father. This, I thought, was true of my mother.
“No, no.” my father shook his head. “It’s from the Latin for ignorare, a legal term. What juries used to say: ‘We don’t notice.’”
Consternation twisted my face.
“Your mother claims she didn’t know a lot of things, but Anne, she should have known more than anyone who I am.”
Their breakup began a few months before my birth. Perhaps March. Maybe April. My mother was heavy with me in her belly, which is around the time my father started seeing his second wife, who is carrying my half-sister. Mother did not know this yet.
Mother said she sensed the presence of a powerful enemy. Two vultures perched themselves on a wall nearby as she pinned the nappies on the clothesline. This is the point in the story where I would roll my eyes in disbelief. My mother would tut-tut at my incredulity, happy to punctuate my childhood with the morbid details of her life.
The energy, she continued, was stronger than any protection offered by the talisman she had wrapped in scarves at the bottom of a drawer. She held the clothespins in her mouth and looked at the birds in their hunched-over stance. One hand was in her dress pocket. The other held the nappies in place on the line. The birds were the size of wild turkeys, about two feet tall with heads and necks devoid of feathers. My mother, of course, knew vultures only appeared for dead things. She feared Death had marked her baby and the birds were sent to collect my soul. She kept asking the birds who they came for, as if they were out for a stroll and stopped by for tea. They stayed silent. Their black feathers and beady, cold, telescopic eyes never moved from her exposed hand.
A sharp pain struck my mother on her side. She clutched her belly as the pain moved to her navel. She called for my brother, Rich, who was around fifteen at the time. The pain couldn’t be explained. It wasn’t the normal labor pangs. She doubled over as if making herself small would trick the avian spectators into taking the pain back. My brother found her this way when he arrived. Years later, when I ask him about this moment, he will tell me it never happened, or he can’t remember the details, or he will choose silence as his response.
My mother says my brother screamed at the vultures, “Move! You blasted devils!”
The creatures were still and as calm as palm trees in the eye of a hurricane. They watched my brother pick up rocks, take aim at the birds, and hurl the stones towards them. They hit the wall, missing the birds. Aware of the threat my brother presented, the vultures spread their wings wide ready to defend their perch. My mother screamed in pain to Yemoja, protector of pregnant women. The birds left as if someone had yanked imaginary chains to call them away.
My brother helped my mother to the house where she rushed to the washroom and undressed. She doused her body with Kananga water. She muttered prayers of protection to her ancestors. She set tasks in motion, believing it would make me safe. She opened a Bible to Psalms 91 and read aloud what she had long ago memorized. I’ve heard her hum it many times when she shined our wooden floors with a dried coconut brush.
“He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler…He shall cover thee with his feathers and under his wings shalt thou trust…Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror…that flieth by day…nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.”
She did everything to return the message of pain to the unknown sender. She cracked an egg into an enamel cup before placing it on the roof. This was an Easter fortune-telling ritual, but my mother was grasping at salvation the way drowning people grab hold onto the sea, breathing water instead of air. All she needed was for the egg to take the shape of a baby to assure her the one inside her belly would be fine.
My mother attributes my safe and healthy birth to her quick thinking, but it came at a cost. Once obeah is put in motion, only a personal sacrifice can avert its power. Her hand, the one exposed to the stare of the birds the longest, would curl and atrophy as I grew older. My mother would launch into some version of this story if she caught me wincing in disgust at the sight of her hand, the bulging knuckles, and stiff digits. Regardless of how she tells the story—sometimes the vultures circle overhead; sometimes more appear; sometimes she yells, and the vultures burst into a thousand tiny pieces of flesh—one thing remains the same: my parents stop being together.
My father tried to woo her back, even after he remarried. My mother never spoke to my father again. He is no longer her Wellington. When he died, she did not attend his funeral and sat on her verandah shelling peas pulled from her garden and humming the psalm.
I am a prisoner of my mother’s many fables and my father’s promiscuous lies. Growing up in the wake of their shattered relationship, I found myself entangled in conflicting beliefs. Loyalty pulled me in opposite directions. My father’s betrayal manifested in the form of a new family, complete with two sons and a daughter. They mirrored what he left behind with my mother. And we reflected the family he abandoned before us.
Steadfast in her convictions of the old way of life, my mother clung to her beliefs, which wrapped me in a cloak of shame. Her zealous adherence to folklore and the mysticism of the spiritual realm was the undercurrent of my everyday life. I wanted ordinariness. Something grounded. An escape. Caught as a prisoner between the competing beliefs of my parents and my father’s too-keen interest in young women, I struggled to forge my own identity. I sought physical, cultural, and emotional distance. As soon as I could, I moved away from Jamaica. By disconnecting, I was allowing my true self to flourish. Liberation allowed my shame to diminish.
Father gripped the edges of his bed to sit upright. Success! His short legs peeked out from underneath the sheet. He pressed the last remaining kinky curls across his bald pate and smoothed the wrinkles in his shirt. Spittle accumulated at the corners of his mouth. He wiped it clean with his thumb and index finger, and it pulled his bottom lip slack. The effects of the spices were too much to bear. A wildfire ignited his mouth, scorching the roof with the intensity of a thousand pepper seeds. He fumbled for an enamel mug on the nightstand. He found nothing, not even a cup of mint tea sweetened with the honey from his hives.
He barked, “Get me a drink.”
The alacrity with which people moved—I am certain there were other people in the house—indicated Death must have tired from swinging in the hammock outside and entered the room. Its presence is known. The people in the house start humming the same tune. They start singing, “It’ll soon be done, these troubles and trials.” They chant the course for the crossover, telling Olodumare my father was ready. Father was the only one with silent lips.
The singing continued. The room brightened. Hotter. Father slurped juice and laid in bed. A burp escaped his lips—and always vain, even to the end, he apologized. His third request came after.
“Read something to me. Anything.”
Someone called for younger eyes. The Bible was opened. Ecclesiastes. My father knew the message by heart. Happiness is meaningless without something true to believe in. The heat in the room intensified. The singing stopped.
Father saw his mother and firstborn, a baby who died a few days old. Oshun appeared next to them. She didn’t ask him as she does of other elders if he wanted his spirit to return to the family in a different body. She told him he’d lost any chance at redemption. He’d hurt too many. Death gently tapped his head. I believe he bargained with Oshun to return as a guide and she said, “Yes, because your children do love you.” Many years later, I would see him in my dreams.
Someone said, “Last rites. Hurry, go get the priest.”
My father went to sleep and never woke up.
My mother says you sense Death deep within. It penetrates the guts of the living and will leaden the feet of the dying.
“Ma je nku kin to ku [if people had their way, they would never die],” she would say.
Death slows people down so they can enjoy life. Death is the one who can make a place for the living to come. Death is sent to escort people to the peaceful realm, while Life releases them to the chaos of ours.
“Tell me who is a more wicked friend? Life or Death?” my mother would quiz me.
“Life,” I said, knowing this was a wrong answer.
“Stupid girl,” she said to me. “Jack mandora, me nuh wah nun [I have told it the way I received it]. Life can only bring problem and botheration. Death is relief; Death is friend.”
My mother has been seeding the spiritual practice of obeah and knowledge of the old gods of Yoruba since I was born. This was what she knew and had been forbidden by my father to practice when they were together. She believed if she had been able to talk to the spirits then, they would have told her he was bad to women.
“Bad how?” I would ask.
She ignored me. Instead, she would say I was marked to carry on the practice and to always listen to the ancestors. By telling me the stories her Coromantee grandmother told her, my mother hoped her way of life wouldn’t perish, forgotten and burnt-up, resembling the cane fields after a harvest.
Belief kills and belief cures. Obeah practice is clandestine by nature in Jamaica. A private pursuit often deemed black magic operated in a conspiracy of secrets where everyone does it, but no one admits to it. But my mother is not ashamed of her òrìsàs and relies on their guidance and protection. She poured all she knew into me because she believed I was a vulnerable target for the women my father wronged.
As proof, my mother would offer up a list of illnesses from my childhood. Whooping cough. Headaches. The mumps. A clew of parasitic tapeworms escaping my body in front of the entire preschool class made up of the scions of Jamaica’s ruling class. She cured what she could with herbs and bush medicine. Goethe leaves pressed to the temples relieved the pressure in my head. Rat soup from the cane fields ceased the whooping cough. The mumps I contracted, though I was vaccinated, disappeared after a spiritual doctor suggested wrapping my head in cotton with tobacco leaves under my chin. Turmeric cured everything else. For added measure, my mother went and placed conch shells beside my pillow to ward off evil spirits. It seemed I owed my life to a series of never-ending herbal elixirs or purification baths.
My father was a casual Catholic who adopted Catholicism when he realized my mother would never forgive him. I never believed my father embraced the faith or turned his back on us until the day he called my mother ignorant. I guess if his ancestors couldn’t help him win my mother back, then perhaps the Virgin Mary could help him atone for the wrongs he did to women.
To her.
Up until a certain point, I believed in my mother’s spirits and obeah practices and less in my father’s saints. What stopped me from falling in step with my mother was a banal event. It was the mid-eighties. I was in grade four. I became a passionate reader of the Children’s First Illustrated Bible and the Book of Revelation. I was floored to know God was as destructive and temperamental as Anancy. I was also alarmed Death was seen as a foe and not a companion.
I was a solitary child, overshadowed by the gregariousness and athleticism of an older brother who assumed I understood social cues. Knowing most of my classmates were Christians and Hindus, I began my mission of converting them. I clambered up the stunted logwood tree at the back of the playground during lunch break and yelled to the children. I told them not to be afraid, but they were all going to die. They needed to know what my mother taught me. Death is an impossible friend who is dumb.
I screamed, “Your Mama will die. Your Papa will die. We will all die and must sing to live long and have a good death.”
When a teacher told me to stop, I answered, “They don’t know how to sing to Death, Miss, and I need to teach them.”
A letter went home with me. It told my mother obeah and whatever form of ancestor worship and backwards Coromantee beliefs she practiced were not conducive to a progressive Jamaica. My mother never read the letter. At home, I traced my index finger over the word animism. I learned the meaning. At night, after a meal of fried conch, I folded the letter and kept it between the pages in my Children’s First Illustrated Bible. I looked to the ceiling for my mother’s spirits or Anancy spinning himself into mischief, willing me to join him. For the first time, he didn’t appear.
Saturday, mid-March 2015. Our father was buried in the small graveyard of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, not far from his home. We gathered from faraway places. A brother in the U.S. military on leave from his post in the Middle East. One uncle from near the North Pole. Distant relations from India. In-laws from Ghana. Siblings from America. The sun was shining its suffocating smile on our heads as it cast its long tentacles on the rooftops, streets, cars, bodies, and the pyramids of green Scotch bonnet peppers in the marketplace down the street.
My brother Rich stood beside me. Rapids streams of sweat ran down his fat face nestling in his beard before being wiped away by his broad hands. He longed to leave, but was bound by duty to stay. He and our father had a falling-out when Rich was a teenager. They hadn’t spoken since. My brother held his teeth together while pushing out both lips towards a point and forcing air out to make a truups sound as he grabbed my attention. I followed the direction of his lips. He was looking at our father’s other children milling by the gravesite.
“I can’t believe they buried him in the church,” he said for all to hear.
The day my father was buried was the first time we met our siblings. My brother hummed “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.” We laughed. We were cordial to the others, offering shallow condolences to each other.
“Sorry for your loss,” I said to my half-siblings, and they parroted the same to me.
We were strangers united in blood and grief. Rich and I scanned the graveyard as ropes slipped the casket with our father’s cadaver into the ditch. My father’s children were watching us watch them. It was like looking in a funhouse mirror where someone else has your hair or nose or holds their hand akimbo like you, but it’s not quite you. There are many of us. Nine by wife number one. Three by my mother. Two by wife number three. In all, fourteen siblings.
My brother and I played a game. It was the one we played when I was a child. Sibling or stranger?
The turnout of the siblings would have made my father happy. His children’s middle-class occupation is testimony to his righteous influence. He emulated the culture of faraway lands enshrined in the midcentury colonial queen and country. As a young man, my father aspired to never live the life of a field rat. My father in his way could have been a revolutionary fighting against the principalities enriched by the blood of his ancestors and the destruction of Indigenous ways. He could have chosen to treat women as more than objects. Seeing my father in the casket was seeing a shadow of who he could have been.
I know the Hungarian priest was aware of my father’s history with women and secret beliefs in ancestorial guidance. Father’s tithing and generous contributions to the parish sanctified him enough to have a church funeral and burial overseen by a foreigner. The priest ended his liturgy. He told our father in the sealed casket he had received the Lord’s blessing and implored God to bless and watch over our father in the afterlife.
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” the priest said.
“Amen,” we responded in unison as we tossed handfuls of red earth onto the casket.
Regardless of belief, Death is the one god we share. I mouthed the words my mother taught me over and over until our father’s casket lowered. “Band kouyon, manjé a fini, allé pann kôt zot.”
“There is nothing here, Death, you damn fool. Go hang yourself.”
Soni Brown is a creative writing instructor and arts community creator from Kingston, Jamaica. Her writing is influenced by her time growing up near plantations where she always felt the spirit of the long dead. Her writing can be found in The Believer, AARP, Cosmopolitan, and Desert Companion. Her craft and work has been supported by Tin House Summer Scholar, PREE Caribbean Writing Studio, and the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. Soni is currently working on her debut book, a memoir about her mother’s dementia and her own cultural erasure and assimilation. You can find her on most social platforms @neonscrawl.
