Back in Sherwood

In a world of obnoxious and officious people, there are a few shining stars. One such, on our arrival in Kingston airport, was the young official who grabbed my phone and found the confirmation email that said I had filled out the customs forms and didn’t have to stand, tottering in front of a computer terminal and fill the damn thing out again. The second was the immigration person. I explained that we were going to spend the following day in Kingston going to the immigration office to get my permanent residence stamp transferred to my new passport. “Don’t do that,” he told me. “You really don’t have to bother. Just go home.” Blessings on you, kind people!

We got a nice taxi driver, too. A young “yoot” who drives for a boss. He was kind, he had lovely manners, and he was from Porti. He and Bobo spent time asking each other, do you know this or that person?

We had booked a room at the little hotel we always stay at. It is a bit of a dump but cheap. Alas, one of that category of officious people was at the desk. There is no air conditioning and no internet, she told us. She had “called and called” JPS to no avail! When we groaned in distress, she got all snippy. By then the nice driver had left but we called him back. When I said something about “customer service” he said, “Customer service, we don’t have that in Jamaica!” Although he was providing rather excellent customer service himself. He stayed with us until we finally found a place. It was expensive, but who cared anymore! The security lady took us up in the elevator and then was unable to unlock the fancy, newfangled lock. It took twenty minutes and several calls to the landlady but finally we got in and could lay down our weary heads. Lucky we didn’t have to go out anywhere because this lock closed on its own as though it was controlled by a ghost. It also said things to us. Something about the door not being locked. Ha ha!

The next day we got the same taxi driver back and he drove us to Porti. We stopped at Castleton gardens and had soup. The road from Porti to Fairy Hill is now fixed. No more driving 20 miles over a construction site.

The big news at home was the Robert had died of cancer. Robert was the village “cabinet man.” Everyone is mourning Bobo told me. And it is true. I think about him a lot. My house if full of his work.

When a person dies you only remember the good things. You forget that he took your money up front and then made you wait three months for your doors. You remember, instead, how beautiful he was physically. You remember how skillful he was. Sometimes we would go to his workshop of an evening to encourage him to work on our stuff and not somebody else’s. We would drink a beer and hang out with him and watch him work. The place was full of unfinished tropical hardwood: mohur, Spanish elm, mahogany. He handled the measuring and the cutting and all so effortlessly! He was like a dancer with the ease and control!

Friday night his family put on the “ninenight” or sendoff party to honor him. He was from a big family…thirteen siblings. All of Fairy Hill showed up, it seems and of course all of Sherwood. Half of Sherwood is just his family!

The family had rented a good sound system and were playing that soulful artist, Buju Banton. Every little bar and business had a lot of commerce going on and there were pop up bars in the road too. Each small place had a different vibe to it and that is what is cool about a big ninenight.

We spent a lot of time at Roger’s youngest sister’s shop. She is a strong, tough looking young woman, long extensions that blend to yellow at the ends and fancy nails, with a little girl on one hip counting change with her free hand. Early in the evening the place is an ice cream shop and all the little kids in town were there getting ice cream: a whole family scene. Later in the evening, the ice cream business pauses in favor of rum and beer.

A weathered and wiry, tough old gent turned out to be Robert’s father. He introduced himself to me, “I am Kennedy!” Bobo explained to me that all thirteen kids are from the same mother who died in her sixties a couple of years ago. There were several different fathers, apparently, as is common in Jamaican society. This does not mean that men do not care or contribute to their children’s lives. I saw several men that evening holding and cuddling babies and little children. But there appear to be distinct men and women’s societies. And who says that is worse than what we have in our culture with everybody getting married and living together then getting divorced a bit later.

This is a prosperous town. The men are tough and muscular and hardworking tradespeople: carpenters and masons and so forth. I often wondered if the reason Robert seemed so perennially short of cash was because he was such a good-looking man with such a lucrative profession. Perhaps he had more than one household to contribute to.

People are still talking about him and how they miss him. He was born here, grew up with everybody else, went to the little elementary school in town. This is an intact, family based, town. May it live long and prosper!

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Since I wrote this, the next day after the ninenight party, tragedy struck Sherwood again. A local father, one of the young men I saw that night with a child on his lap, crashed his car in Fairy Hill. He was with the two kids. Only the little girl survived.

Mr. Fenton, the farmer who kept cows in the pasture in front of our place died, too, of a stroke. He was a deliberate and slow moving sort of person. I miss seeing him stepping over the fence to the field with his gum boots and machete. And some young person up the lane died as well. So, we are in the midst of many “candlelights” and “grave diggings” and “nine nights.” People are particularly mourning Bates who was a building contractor and a serious provider. Blessings on his poor “baby mother” who is suffering so much right now.