Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Neighborhood Watch

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/07990537-3139274

0799-0537

Nova Gordon-Bell,

Caribbean history, culture, and politics

Saturday morning breathes out the walkers and the joggers. As I do my early morning walk-about in the garden, my machete in one hand and coffee mug in the other, I hear their footsteps and see only their heads above the hand-laid stone wall that secures my house from the street. My wife, Tressa, hates the wall. She says it cut us off and locks us in from the beauty of our avenue. I disagree.We need the wall for privacy and security. Vagrants, men with mud-caked soles and shreds for clothes, frequently wander along our avenue and hold loud conversations with themselves. They will not interfere with us if you leave them alone, my new neighbors assured me when we moved into the neighborhood a year ago. If you make eye contact, they will beg for money or food, but if you pretend not to see them, they go on their way.Tressa had argued for a fence or at least a wall that wasn't so high. She wanted the wall low enough for security patrols to observe our premises. It is important, she feels, to see your neighbors and for them to see you. This is Jamaica, I tell her. In Jamaica you have to think about security, and, besides, the wall doesn't cut us off from our neighbors. The wall conceals us from the street.Between us and our neighbors on either side, decorative wrought iron fences mark off the boundaries and still allow us a glimpse of passersby as they make their way up or down the avenue. The palms and bougainvillea provide ornamental cover for our inspection of passersby without compromising our privacy. Certainly our neighbors can see us when we are out and about in our gardens.“Morning, Michael,” Allan Wallis shouts, emerging from his French windows to retrieve his morning paper. “I hope you know how to use that machete. I wouldn't want to rush you to the hospital this morning.” His green-blue eyes light up with mischief. The weak remains of his Scottish accent has given way to a mocking Jamaican drawl.“Learn to turn on a computer, Allan,” I shout back, tucking the machete under my arm. “By the time the papers arrive, it's not news anymore.”“I need my comics, youngster. You can keep your gadgets. When you finish with your yard, come on over and do mine,” Allan laughs, disappearing through his French windows.The silver mane of the retired cardiologist from Number 2 is the first to go past my wall. The Doc is soon striding past Allan's fence on his daily circuit of fitness, his black walking sandals scraping the pavement. The investment banker from Number 6 goes by next. I recognize his yellow-and-black bicycle helmet. Bicycles are a neighborhood's best friends. Bicycles are quiet and far friendlier than the boisterous dirt bikes with which some of my younger neighbors punish the neighborhood.Tressa has plans to plant ivy along the wall. The ivy will make it look less severe. She capitulated, however, to my mother who, in one of her whirlwind visits, planted rows of periwinkles along the wall. My mother does not understand that in my neighborhood, we need to have an exceptional garden. There is nothing outstanding about her ram goat roses. Having no experience with Jamaican flora, my Canadian wife is prone to giving my mother free rein in the yard. Tressa does not know that my mother's expertise in gardening is limited to pilfering plants from other people's yards and replanting them in old paint cans and rubber tires, in leaking metal wash pans and plastic soda bottles cut in half. My mother's world is the world of zinc fences and barbed wire.Left to my mother, I would never have gone to university, and especially not to graduate school. University, she said, was for rich people's children. My mother thought that I should have become a meter reader for the water company. A man whose laundry she did twice a week had said, “These meter readers are damned thieves.” My mother thought meter reading had to be a lucrative career if the readers were “damned thieves.”Children's voices pass by my wall. In a few seconds they are heading up the avenue and I can see their pale ankles and pink sneakers through the wrought iron railings of the fence next door. Girls. They laugh and talk all at once, none really listening to the other. As they continue up the avenue, I glimpse swinging pony tails. Peering through the palm fronds and between the tufts of bougainvillea blooms, I can see that two of the girls look Chinese. Two others run slightly ahead, jostling each other playfully. One is black—dark-skinned—with thick long braids. The other is very pale and looks blonde. Yes, she is blonde.I smile. One day my daughter will be strolling up the avenue with friends just like these. The doctors are positive about the fertility treatments. Tressa and I are still young. We still have time for something to happen. There is no cause to worry.When Tressa and I met in Toronto and married the year after we finished graduate school, we had talked about the challenges of raising biracial children. I assured her that if we lived in Jamaica, we wouldn't have a problem.Jamaica doesn't have a race problem.The girls' laughter is a reminder that here, on this little piece of rock, people are people, black, white, red, or blue.I stick my machete into the ground, and, finishing my coffee, I think about my daughter. Her hair will probably be long and black and straight, or, then, it could be long and brown and curly. Maybe it will be long and thick and straight and blonde like Tressa's. It will be the luck of the draw. I smile. And then there will be the problem of beating away all the eager little Jamaican boys from my door.I call to Tressa to come on out and join me for our Saturday morning walkabout in the garden. She replies wearily that she's brewing her tea. I am distracted by the red kerchief around the thick dreadlocks moving swiftly past my wall. The bright gold merino and the red basketball shorts appear now, going up the avenue past the neighbor's fence. Thick, black bare feet move quickly, too quickly and deliberately up the avenue.The children.“Tressa, call security,” I shout, retrieving my machete from the ground, “and call Alan. Intruder on the avenue. Some children are in trouble.”I make good time up the avenue. I see the children, standing, together, silent now.The man has caught up to them. The children face him with wide, frightened eyes. I feel their terror.“Hey, bwoy!” I hear myself shout, “Hey, bwoy …”That voice has not come out of me in many years.The man in the red kerchief turns to face me. The whites of his eyes are a pasty yellow. His dark-brown irises harden and the pupils are like pin holes.Hell. I know those eyes. They are pumped up on hard drugs and sheer evil. In a split second, his long black fingers slide to his waist, shifting the gold merino, and I think I see black metal at his waistband.Hell …“Neighborhood patrol! Don't move!”I see the flashing blue lights.“Drop the machete!”I freeze.“Drop the rahtid machete, bwoy!”My fingers still clutch the machete.“Drop the rahtid machete, bwoy!”They cannot be talking to me.“You want me put a hole in you, bwoy? Drop di machete …”I feel the soft sticky puddle form in my briefs. The machete slides from my fingers to the ground.Black uniforms seem to be moving around me on all sides. The children are talking, squeaking all at once like terrified mice.“He just came up here with the machete and started threatening us. He just came up here with the machete and started threatening us and threatening Rolly.”They are all saying the same thing. “We thought he was the gardener down the road, at Number 10, the place with the stone wall. We didn't know he was a thief.”The dread pulls the children to him. They cluster around him like chicks around a mother hen. The children stare at me in horror, at me, as though I am the Bogey Man of their childhood nightmares.The dread speaks to one of the black uniforms. Another black uniform stands behind me, a large, looming presence. I know if I speak, if I say something, they will understand their mistake. Once they hear my voice, hear that I can speak well, they will know who I am, but my lips won't move. My voice won't come.“The whole a unnu walk too fas,” the dread in the red kerchief chided the children. “Unnu always a walk weh fram mi. Mi tell unnu seh, some mad people deh bout di place. Unnu mustn't walk weh from mi. Suppose someting did appen to unnu? Wah mi woulda tell unnu people dem?”“Sorry, Rolly,” one of the girls whispers, and then they all echo, “Sorry, Rolly.”“Is awrite,” the man in the red kerchief sighs. “Come …” And he leads them away, past me, far to the right of me, like he fears I will reach out and grab one of them. As they pass, one of the little girls, the blonde, raises her middle finger at me, and the man in the red kerchief shouts, “Kimberley, stop dat!”“Weh you name?” One of the uniforms is talking to me.I blink back tears. Tears? My voice won't come, but tears?“Officers! Officers, what's the problem?”Allan. That remnant of a Scottish brogue makes me breathe. Allan, in his walking shorts and sandals, swinging his cricket bat, comes up alongside me and says, “Gentlemen, he's a householder. He lives at Number 10. He thought the children were in trouble, so he came up to make sure everything was okay. His wife called me. He is Mr. Michael Johnson from Number 10.”“Michael Johnson. Michael Johnson from Number 10?” The security officer repeats my name with contemptuous disbelief, his eyes scanning me from foot to head. Only now can I let myself really look at him, this short, bow-legged black man in boots and bulletproof vest.“It's all just a terrible misunderstanding,” Allan says cheerfully, shaking each man's hand in turn. “Thanks for being alert and quick to respond, guys.”The short, bow-legged officer still studies me, but there is no remorse in his eyes. He still isn't sure about me. I can see that. I never get to see the figure that had stood behind me, casting his huge shadow over me. By the time I can move, can turn around, the car with the flashing blue lights has disappeared down the avenue.“One day you will laugh at this,” Allan chuckles, resting his cricket bat on one shoulder.“They c-could have sh-shot me …” I stutter.“No, these are well-trained guys,” Allan quips. “They're good guys.”I look at Allan, his smooth-shaven pale face, his bald head, and his amused green-blue eyes. I hate him for insisting that these men, these men who made me soil my briefs, were “good guys.”“You're a one-man neighborhood watch,” Allan jests, throwing his free arm around my shoulder. “I feel so much safer having you around.”Allan's laughter echoes down the avenue. Then he says, “I was gonna offer you breakfast, some ackee and saltfish and Blue Mountain coffee, but you better go home and have a shower first. You stink, neighbor.”