She steps deeper into the den, overflowing with paint tubs, buckets, brushes, sponges, rags, and dirty Styrofoam cups. Another room full of decorated poles and standards, bracing the walls. A moon and a man’s face top the poles, strips of lamé, chiffon, and crêpe, hang from them. Spray-painted calabashes of all sizes lie on the floor or dangle by leather thongs from nails in the walls. Year of Gold Callaloo. The end of Slinger’s brilliant trilogy of masquerade bands transforming myths and legends. Four thousand people had joined that year — fifty-seven sections each in different costume. Meaning four thousand accessorized costumes paid for, to be finished by hook or crook.
“Just two weeks to go and I don’t know how the fuck we go finish!” Francisco bursts through the back door laughing his nasty laugh and strikes a Hindu-dancer pose for Ata. “You like it?”
His T-shirt, cut into shreds, and short dhoti stick onto his short chubbiness, completely covered in wet green paint. His head, shaved and painted gold, is well disguised as a calabash, but the hairy legs and whitish patches of skin shining through show him up as Po’tagee.
“Fellas”—he turns to them huddled in the back room over a joint—“this girl is my good-good friend. Yes, is a girl, you see?” He whisks off her cap. “And, I will pussonally kill any one of you who touch her or trouble her. You hear?”
The fellas laugh and take in Ata’s short, curly hair, boyish features, and shy eyes. Laughing at Francisco’s empty threat.
“Yes, laugh! Allyou know I fucking crazy, when I ready. Come, girl.” He leads her out into the yard full of tables of fabric waiting to be painted. Miles of spinach-green wet cotton hung drying on fence, lines, bits of lumber, and propped-up zinc sheets. The smell of the fabric paint was the bad breath. But it’s not toxic, Francisco reassures her, that’s why he could put it on his skin.
* * *
Ata dips her hands into the green paint and squeezes the sponge a couple times. The cold sliminess feels good. Splattering it freely over the fresh white fabric feels even better. Liberation and new-found creativity fill her young heart. Dreams and visions miles long. Cotton realms of rainbow gauze, like Francisco’s “floaty dhotis.” She imagines more than beauty. Clothing long brown fashion-model limbs, draping homes. A business built on the patterns of tropical flowers, shadows of leaves, textures and tones of earth, skin, and the rippling Caribbean Sea. She daubs and streaks, brushes and splatters, the black, the gold, the green, working her way under the skin and into the churn of Camp Swampy.
Catching a few hours’ sleep under a table, she tries to figure out the rules, the hierarchy and upper echelons of this kingdom. Or fiefdom. The kings and queens of the band are not leaders, only puppets. There is a God of Design and he is King of Mas. An impetuous genius out of the wrong color and class, in this world of black independence. Slinger, the “real artist,” came home with all his London classical-actor training, all his appreciation of the cultural fabric that he grew up with in Trinidad, bringing overstretched intellect and endless vision to transform the masquerade. This God of Design set about changing up everything in the arts — doing away with the commercialization of mas, not worrying about profit or loss — determined to re-create a costumed identity and the way ordinary people celebrate their body, their freedom and ancestral genes. The struggle nearly killed off God of Design. But “as he going off — is so he getting better.” According to Francisco.
Flood, the first year of the trilogy with the thirty-foot puppet, Tantie the Washerwoman, and her charming Sugar Boy. Streets of white fabric rippled a river over revelers, shuddering to the stampede of socalypso and thousands of feet. Full flounced skirts, headties, loose shirts, and wide pants — more pure white cotton than was worn in petticoat days, or dreamt of as costumes in this age. Blinding in the sun. Then Fire Crab scattered sci-fi smoke on the Savannah stage and drew pyrotechnic blood as the awed nation watched. Buckets and floods of paint burst onto white. Rainbow colors washed the river like one big coolie Phagwa festival. The crowds went mad, the island shook, and mas changed forever. The next year he floored them again with a band called Cascadoo, named for the armored fish that will bring you back to the island if you eat it. “But they didn’t give him Band of the Year then,” Francisco said. “Because he white. But you just in time now, for the cooking up of Gold Callaloo. And with all these calabashes … this might be the golden egg!”
Despite the prejudice, this prolific creativity fashioned devotees, Slingerites — loyal followers who would never play with another band. These made up the masses. Visiting royal guests came from far and wide and blessed elite performers had direct contact with the King of Mas. Ata wonders if it is His profile stamped into the plastic discs crowning the poles, to be carried as staffs. Francisco watches her eyeing the work suspiciously. “I call them bobolees, these pole things,” he declares.
“Bobolees?”
“Yes, a bobolee — a stupidy, a joker. And every band member has to have one. Pure boboleeism. We still have two thousand to finish. So … I am the Bobolee King.” Francisco looks at Ata, gauging. “And you are a gofer. Yes, you now start — so is go for this, go for that — a gofer.”
Not the cute little animal that came to her mind. She stares at Francisco’s googly eyes behind thick glasses and his crooked, stumpy-teeth grin, and has to laugh. He is as mad as this crazy Carnival kingdom. And what does that make her?
The Port of Spain traffic behind the wall continues its stinking rumbling and she shouts over it, “What flicking hellhole is this?”
“Whaaat?” Francisco stops stacking the painted bobolees in the yard. “You cussing now?”
“What the fuck you think I have to do?” she shouts back. “Think I can survive if I don’t? Nastiness flying around here like paint.”
“Yes, Lord. Hallelujah, yuh baptize!”
* * *
Ata stumbles through the squalor after a week deep in Camp Swampy. Slimy, painty nights without sleep. Living on curry roti, channa doubles, and soft drinks. The dank house steams and sweats, continuously. Fueled with fire rum, crack, weed, whatever it needs to feed on. Vomiting green rejects to the putrid yard and batches of bobolees, calabashes, and wads of fabric to the master mas camp, two doors away. Women would visit the front yard, bringing money, food, whatever the men needed. Sometimes demanding money for child support. Once a fight broke out between two women arriving for the same man — clothes ripping, thumping and tumbling on broken beer bottles and cigarette stubs, while the men cheered. Francisco broke up the fight and was left standing there trembling as the women cussed his “faggot hands” for touching their bare flesh. They disappeared then, covering their shame with a shield of foul language.
Now early evening feels like eternal damnation to Ata. She can barely focus on balancing down the front stairs, to the gate. She steps carefully, trying to hold something in her heart from bursting. A violent grunting, a man and woman jerking together, stop her dead. Right there, against the concrete steps. The woman’s head, bowed, bumps on the cutter man’s shoulder as he pounds himself into her. His snarl and red eyes roll to meet Ata’s shock. “Walk, girl, don’t fucking watch!” He continues pumping.
She bolts out of the yard straight onto the nightstreet. Her thumping heart pushes her feet fast round the corner pub, past the cars and limers outside. She stops at the door of the mas camp showroom suddenly, gazing blindly at the Gold Callaloo emblem on the plain glass door. Staring right through it for a moment. Floating, like the delicate Carnival-costume drawings framed and titled in there, all along the air-conditioned white walls. A middle-class couple step past her into the showroom, chattering with anticipation. Cool, neutered air wafts out onto Ata’s face and she wraps her frail arms around herself. The pounding is still there.