happen in a girl's body before its secrets reveal even to itself or its owner, that put what Rachel call my dutty willfulness at bay, and I just follow-backa that terror instead of pushing forward and taking the lead the way I used to do in everything else with him.
They say a parent or grandparent and maybe even a far ancestor can eat sour grape or wet sugar, and as a result, pickni who come long after, their teeth set on edge.
interval
One more last thing. (Forgive: I am losing brain cells, and moreover I am afflicted with the affliction of the people who come from where I was born, the habit of everlasting and divaricate endings, whether in bearing record or saying goodbye. It is the fear of departure, the final line. A fear that belongs only to people whose history began in death.)
So. This last last is about Tumela Gut, the district where Moshe was grown. To get there you traveled west five miles on foot from Ora-on-Sea, passing through another district named Jericho. Veering east at Fus Stick (First Stick—Elgin Town on the map, which was the first place where a freed slave planted his boundary line, sticking the center pole in the ground), and cutting through bushes at Mosquito Cove on the Montego Bay Road, you could shorten your journey by half. This was the route Tumela people took to catch the Morning Star bus or the Years of Jubilee bus to Montego Bay, or the Blue Danube to Kingston. (Yes, buses were named like that, for faraway places in the east of Europe, or Palestine, or even the heavens, though most of the people had never traveled beyond the circumference of their dreams, and those who had, had gone no farther than England or Panama or North America, not so very far away at all.)
Tumela, a place that was frightening to people in other districts far and near. Sometimes, especially at night, it was frightening to Moshe and me.
Tumela was then one of five districts that bordered each other. The others were Jericho that I told you of, Mount Peace, Georgia, and Cascade. To a stranger looking on from the outside, especially one who was not from our part of the world, the five districts were uniformly beautiful, the kinds of places that are called paradise. Lush hills stretched in every direction, and if you stood on any of them, you saw the deep blue sweep of the Caribbean Sea, which changed colors like a chameleon in certain lights and times of day.
A few people in these districts lived in wall houses (that is to say, houses built from concrete and steel). One or two had houses two stories high. Most, however, lived in small board houses (that is to say, houses of one or two or three or four rooms, and dressed or undressed wood) with fretwork eaves made by the skilled carpenters of Tumela and Mount Peace. Regardless of the size or modesty of the house, the eaves were always extravagant and beautiful.
Yet there were still some people, the desperate poor, who lived in houses made of bamboo wattles fortified with marl or papered inside with pages torn from magazines that had come in parcels of clothes from relatives in England or North America. Sometimes these houses had no floors. That kind of house has died out now, and it seems strange to imagine that such a house could have existed so long into the twentieth century, but that was the way it was, long ago, when we were growing up, Moshe and me. I suppose, in a way, such houses were beautiful, meaning picturesque.
If you, a stranger, were searching for a word to describe these five districts, picturesque would easily come to mind. All the districts were picturesque, like places drawn in a book to entice children to read; green, bright, and lush with their tiny hillside farms, sun-drenched valleys, and sugarcane fields. Paradise, you would think, arriving in these districts which were so bright and green that your eyes hurt, if you were a stranger coming fresh to these parts from somewhere that was not our part of the world. And your eyes, blinded by their brightness, would fool you into thinking that this beauty was all that there was and you wouldn't know that each district was, in its different way, a place of terrors, which you could escape or endure only if you knew its spells and counterspells for redemption or retaliate.
If an outside person threatened to fight or work obeah on a Tumela person, the counterspell was easy as pie. "You know where I come from? I come from Tumela Gut, where pot boil up without fire." That was enough to make the challenger run away, hurrying slow on his dignity until he was out of sight, then taking to his heels like the wind.
This is because it was true. There was a place in Tumela where pots boiled without any fire beneath. The longheaded grandmother, Mama Mai, described how many years ago a colony from the days of slavery had taken up residence near the center of the village, at the end of the long grassy slope below the elementary school, just behind the ceiba cotton tree above the red river. This river was called Raiding. (There was another river, Foster-Reach, where women went to wash clothes.) Was there a raiding that took place there? A hunt for runaway slaves? I do not know. I have wondered if that river was meant to be called Riding, perhaps Tumela Riding, after the West Riding and the East Riding in Yorkshire, England, since so many places were named after other places in England, until the people pronounced them in their own language, and then they became something else again—but I do not truly know.
The duppies were a known nuisance. They spent their days, but especially their nights, quarreling in thin voices and cooking insatiable meals in three-footed Dutch pots that roiled and bubbled on unseen fires, disturbing the peace. The meals, we knew, were meant to be seductive. The aromas they emitted were not so much inhaled as insidiously imbibed, through the mind and the pores of the skin, so that anyone who was unlucky enough to pass by while the colony was cooking was haunted by dreams of a feast in paradise, and bright red pustules rose on the surface of their skin and broke to release a liquid that ran down sometimes like boiling sugar and sometimes with a vague presentiment of crab soup.
As children, we (not just Moshe and me but the collective children of Tumela Gut) were afraid of this place, and if our mothers sent us to the shop in the twilight, we wept and begged not to go. Running past, we heard the wind in our clothes, sometimes the ghosts laughing or singing, but to us it was all one: we heard only the sound of terror.
I often wondered if they ever ate their own meals, or cooked only to entice us. It seemed to me that they were love-starved, and hungered for something more than memory—this kind of aggressive solicitation through food could only mean a desire for the attention of living hearts, above bare remembrance. But children avoided them like the plague. Though Moshe and I were twins, and identical, we had this difference, that I never reconciled to their dwelling among us, but Moshe had a natural affinity with ghosts. He thought they had a right to live, and if they chose to do it among us, right there, then why not?
The name Tumela Gut still disturbs my head. A lot of places in those days were surnamed Gut, and you will still find most of them on the map. Stony Gut in St. Thomas, where Paul Bogle rebelled against the British in 1865, Starve Gut Bay in St. Elizabeth, where people must have suffered unbelievable hunger, and Running Gut, another name for running belly, or diarrhea, that might have been caused from hunger, or from eating too much too fast after a period of starvation, or from eating food that was spoiled, or even, in babies, drinking, instead of milk, sugar water. This Running Gut was in the parish of St. James, Gut River was to be found in Manchester, which was said to have no rivers, and Tumela Gut in Hanover parish, near to Oracabessa-on-Sea.
Most of these are names of hardship, except for Gut River, which some foreigner on the Internet has written was a name given to the river by a German (was he a visiting German or a German from German Town, Westmoreland, which we pronounce Jahman?—he does not say; he probably does not know). According to this foreigner, who might himself be a German, "Gut" means "good" in German and the man who named the river gave it this name because he thought it was a good river, but I think that is not true, I think it is a place where people were gutted, impaled on iron, just as there are rivers all over the Caribbean named Massacre, because people were massacred in slavery there.
I guess at these names, how they came about, and I think my guess about most of them is probably the
