of long views to far hills,
but tight boundaries,
force and sense and habit
keeping people in their place.
When militias killed a thousand blacks
out in St. Thomas back in 1865,
put on that famous vigilante pageant
that began with muskets firing
on protesters in a courthouse square,
my mother’s great-grandfather was a child.
Still, busha called him for his labor,
told him to get Nev,
made him lead on his pardy,
to the lignum vitae woods
to work with grown survivors
heaving corpses into graves.
Imagine that boy, his friend and other children
massed on the bank of a hole,
handling bodies,
lifting, passing, easing down,
the cadence like the one employed
to pack ox carts with hogsheads,
barrels of molasses. Spitting ashes.
Coughing dust.
Now, follow born-free and ex-chattel,
going home at twilight, slow marching,
dressed in rag calico, burlap, osnaburg,
using footbeat to hold a rhythm,
no talking, passing burnt houses,
cottages hit down, then seeing up ahead
odd statues
cast in shadow, set in bush—
no, folks grief struck,
heads down.
Now to this moment add rain.
II.
It’s a detail Lea included
when he told the tale
to Phyllis Fay,
his great-grandchild, my mum,
who asked about a photo
framed in pewter on a bureau
in the bungalow he lived in
on a farm in St. Ann,
way, way far from St. Thomas,
beyond a watershed,
decent acreage in Gibraltar
hamlet in low hills,
all small holdings,
good people, stone fences,
woods lush with bamboo,
and fat white cows.
It rained for days he told her,
like Bible,
and the whole place smelled of war,
and ’cause everything was broke up
they slept for days in mud
until, thanks be to God, sunshine came back slowly,
and things took time to dry out, and life—
well, it went back to normal,
to duties and habits,
same difference, old usual,
scratching dirt, doing what you do
as ’cording to what season,
planting, reaping—
if busha don’t need you—maybe little school.
That’s how it was—
you worked as you should,
kept your mind on now,
left behind whatever happened—
as they learned you
with the switch from early—
what to keep, and what to talk.
And so it was. Forgotten.
There, but as a dust of disquiet,
a fog of unease until that first Easter
after martial law when he and Neville,
same Inspector Bledsoe in the photo,
sneaked away to idle,
hunt birds and play cricket in a clearing
near some cedar woods
and corpses started poking from the ground.
From that day,
he told his great-grandchild,
he could see things, cross over and come back,
and that’s how he earned a shilling—
selling conference with the dead,
finding well water,
susu-ing what to seed in what season,
when drought would come.
For those he loved
he drew tonics, brewed infusions,
stood as surety for loans,
sat on his porch in Gibraltar,
gave advice in his hat and jacket,
healed with tea and words,
patient with the lines,
sloe eyes blankish,
then
