Monique & Neville Samson, two human beings yet one person. My father reminds me of when I was four and I hit my older brother, Blair. Daddy asked me why I did it and I said, Dad, you know I’m brain damaged.
Now you are, he says, cackling, leaning into my mother as she taps his arm and tells him to hush.
This is serious, Mr. Samson, the doctor says.
He tells me it’s probably malaria or Chik-V, or dengue fever or something else you can’t get in America. Don’t believe any of that, please. I just went into the forest; I didn’t leave the country. Though it’s true that mosquitos have never been my friend, what’s really going on is that Cross River is trying to kill me. The doctor talks and I can feel my heart beating at a rapid speed and the heat from my skin is burning my sheets but not really, that’s just the delirium. I think of the times I visited my godmother and cousins with my grandmother — my mother’s mother — in Trinidad back when I was young and Granny was still living. The trucks driving by at night spraying white smoke into the air. Smoke seeping through the tightly drawn jalousies. The fleeing mosquitos seeking refuge in the house in East Dry River that my mother grew up in, the same house her mother grew up in. The bugs hide for a while but then all die away. For a week, no mosquitos drink from me, and all my old welts stop itching and fade from my skin. In due time the bugs return, swarming me late into the night. Maybe, I think sitting in that hospital bed, they put something deep inside me that’s only coming to life now.
Mr. Samson! the doctor says.
Kin! my father calls.
I look up.
The doctor says: What were you doing so deep in the Wildlands anyway?
I tell the doctor I was looking for myself.
(I don’t tell my father when he asks.
Nor my mother.
Nor my wife, Peace.
I whisper it to my son later because he’s a baby and thus unable to speak it.
I’m not here to tell you about my time in the Wildlands either, so if you’ve come for that, then I’m sorry, but you’ll be disappointed. Remind me later, though, and I might tell you.)
My father breaks the silence. Only two types of people does go so deep in the Wildlands, you know: fools and madmen.
You forgetting the wolfers, my mother replies.
What you think they are?
What about Blair? I ask. He think he a wolf hunter.
My father schupses.
A set of chupdiness, he mumbles. He a fool too. We only have one sensible child, Monique. Laina would never have go so deep in the Wildlands. Your brother and sister call yet, Kin?
Of course not.
My father sighs.
My father talks, but he never talks, you know. When we get silent and it’s just hospital sounds around us, and I ask him to tell me about his father, he pauses and says, What’s there to say, boy? Then he becomes quiet and offers to watch Djassi so Peace can visit. Peace is the last person I want to see.
Like, Pop, I say, you tell me the funny stuff, like when that white guy beat up the ref at that soccer game—
Never see a cutass like that.
But what about the other stuff, huh, Dad?
My mother says she’ll go to my apartment to watch Djassi. Before either my father or I can object, she’s out the door. It’s just me and Neville Samson.
What’s there to say? he asks again. What you want to know, huh?
Like tell me Dad — (I feel the fever bubbling through me like steam, burning my brain; I imagine it rising from the top of my skull on a bed of hot, white smoke) — tell me how we got to Cross River.
The pipe and the book. Is the book first. And when I forget the book, is the pipe that tell me go Cross River.
Is like history put its hands on my back and shove me from the sidewalk into the street, Kin. I always an athlete, so my mind does go back to that often. Stay on your feet. That’s what I keep thinking. Like I’m on the football pitch and some guy’s running toward me. I had a coach used to say, The most persistent rewards go to those who stay on their feet. But this, this is nothing like I ever seen, you know. These people out there rocking and flipping a car. We like bees, Kin. All of us. Thousands upon thousands of bees waking to find our queen get she head chop off.
You see you, all delirious and half crazy? That’s how everybody was on that day. I’ll never forget April fifth, 1968. The fourth was like a dream. Fuzzy, confusing. But the fifth was real. Martin Luther King dead.
I couldn’t tell you why I was out there, in truth, Kin. Some people want to take a piece of whitey and call that justice. An even trade, you know. Some want the things they can’t get on a regular day: television sets, jackets, scarves, food, all that. And then some just out there craving the fire, the burn. I don’t know, boy. Maybe I wanted some of all of that. Too much to name, I guess. All I know is that I’m angry like everyone else. Whatever burn in them burn in me. I feel that buzzing like bee wings inside me. Wasn’t no, I a Trini and you a Yankee. I a Trini and you a negro. Naw. Before I open my mouth they treat us all like niggers. That’s it. Ain’t take long to figure that out.
Wait, I go get to the pipe in a minute.
So, Kin, you wouldn’t believe the amount of smoke they have rising up above D.C. Smoke for so. People burn cars. They burn stores. They burn apartment buildings. They burn everything. I tell you I ain’t never see nothing like it. People running around, in and out the broken windows of stores. Ain’t no police nowhere. I stand over there near Florida and Rhode Island, just watching, boy. I live on R Street, so it not too much of a walk. People screaming and waving they arms. I just watch. Taking it all in. Telling myself to stay on my feet.
The fires, though, remind me of the book. The cover self like it on fire. Sure did set fire in my mind when I was in teacher’s college back home. Three Insurrections. It flit through my head at that moment. I ain’t see that cover in about fifty years now, but it like I can see it right there in front me face. I ain’t see that book for maybe two, three years when I out there walking in that riot, but it’s in my mind’s eye clear, clear. I know what I see, Kin; those exact flames from the riot is the same flames on the cover of that book. What they describe on all those pages is what I see in that city. I wish I could go back to that moment in the library at the teacher’s college when I holding that book, drinking those pages, yes.
Before I could take in all of the riot, fully appreciate the moment, I feel a bump at my shoulder and is stumble I stumble.
Something in my heart start to flutter as I fall, like I go die right there in that strange city in this strange country. I say to myself, Neville, boy, what kind of mistake you make coming here? Like it’s a football match and I make the play that lose the game, that’s how I feel, but this is serious. I feel a hand grab my arm. Pull me up.
It’s Charles. Now, Charles live on my block. He don’t say much. Quiet eyes always searching. He sit outside on his stoop most of the time and he sit still, nearly a gargoyle. I bet he out there now. When I see him, we exchange two or three words, but the words got whole worlds inside them. Me and he born oceans apart, but we understand each other, oui.
He hand the only thing stopping me from hitting my head on the concrete.
Neville, what you doing out in all this?
I pull myself to my feet.
The man only talk peace and they shoot him. But what is that?
So you see how they do us? They kill a man of peace. What you think they do to regular negroes, huh? Neville, go home, brother. This all gon’ blow over. They’ll build the buildings back and then they gon’ be stomping us again. Go to class and get your degree and let us handle the shit, man.