The Dead made a visit - True Story

Fowl cock crowed as the sun rise one Saturday morning. It was my turn to scrub the dirty wooden stairs. With a bucket of water on my head, a hard brush, a metal scrapper and salt soap in my hand, I promptly attended my chore of the day. An early start guaranteed me more time to enjoy playing hop- scotch and “ketcha” with my sister and cousins. Granny made sure breakfast was ready – some fry bakes and butter with daisy bush tea. I look back at those days when we could not afford fancy foods but our bodies were lean with muscular definition without a gym membership. Our little hands were callused to perfection, enabling us to handle the cutlass like a grown man would. The slippers on my feet had seen its fair share of flooded streets, broken bottles and muddy lane ways. No complaints and nothing that a good piece of bicycle tire tube with a needle and thin poly twine couldn’t patch. For fun, we would disobey Granny and stand in the muddy trenches to catch “kakabelly” [gutter tiny fishes] with our hands. I was often sporting a patch of ring-worm due to this adventure. At some point, I was immune to all the dirty bacteria that infested the dark muddy water decorated with a splash of colorful garbage. In North America, there are urban myths such as, “Chocolates will cause Acne”. In my South American country, I was told, “snakes do not bite in water” as we swam in the brown back dam rivers. Let me be one to confess – snakes do bite in water but I survived. Chocolate makes you happy without acne but you may gain a few pounds. Either way, experience is the master of an individual’s truths. It was experiences such as these that made me realize that life is complex... the older I grew, the deeper my views became. Granny would tell us stories of Old Higues, Jumbies and Bahcoo [Guyanese forms of Ghosts]. After relishing in the excitement of the stories, we would blow out the kerosene lamp to sleep in the dark. It was not a comfortable atmosphere, especially after her closing line remained, “Is de truth yuh know?!” It was hard to disagree with a woman who placed food out for the dead on "Old years night" aka New years eve. In our eyes, she knew they would come for the food. It took some years before we realized the missing food was not eaten by the lost souls, but by Foxy, the "rice eater" yard Dog we kept as a pet.
Bed-wetting occurred on these nights on the flimsy sponge mattresses because none of us dared to take a piss in the black out. If I had a beharry bullet aka Chico aka chewing gum in my mouth, fear caused it to settle in my stomach. One particular night stood out like Granny’s bottom lip when she is brewing in anger. Ms Grace decided to pop by for some brown sugar because her son forgot to buy a cup full before the store closed. Granny, being the kind woman she always was, offered the little bit she had with Ms Grace. Before leaving our house, she smiled at us and said, “Oh gosh, yuh have some beautiful granddaughters muss tek care ah dem”. Seconds after, my Uncle arrived, riding in on his old beaten-up bicycle. We use to call him the “beat-man” as in, when we behaved badly, he did the beatings. Lining us up one by one as he shared “licks” aka lashes with the leather belt. Besides his drunken temper and strict hands, he knew how to diffuse the scary nights with jokes. Uncle would have us laughing until we cried when he started to tell stories about the misfortunes of others. He was a devil – his skin was always red, he had a left brown eye and a right grey eye. They never taught us of this in biology class at that age so we automatically believed the devil possessed this man.

The day after, as I attended to my chore of scrubbing the stairs, my next door neighbor started screaming at her sister who was catching fish in the dirty trench. She repeatedly yelled, “oh gawd, ah cyan believe it, oh gawd, Aunty dead”. Remember the story of “Uncle Desmond”? I stated - anybody older than we and close to we family is “Auntie” or “Uncle.” I was waiting to hear whom she was referring to since it can be the entire neighborhood of women.
Granny stuck her head out the window to see what the hustle was about. Story broke out and gossip spread like wild fires in the street before the fowl cock can finish crowing that morning.
My little heart started to race. I can see the scared look on my cousin and sister’s faces as our eyes danced across each other. It wasn’t because of the news so much but more so for how the news came about. I knew it wasn’t me but I was hoping one of the other two did not carry out our 007 plan to eliminate Uncle with rat poison in his tea. I was praying internally that the devil did not cause one of them to take God out of their thoughts to place the rat poison in the sugar prior to Uncle’s arrival – the same sugar Granny kindly handed Ms Grace last night... I held the stair scrapper tightly in my right hand to defend myself against the monster amongst us. Just when I was about to question my partners in a planned crime, my Granny said, “deh say she get hit by a minibus yesterday morning while going to buy sugah but duh cyan [cannot] be true man... she did come hey lass night fah sugah – is spirit visit we or wuh?!.”
My little sister, the smart ass replied, “but Granny, how yuh say all dem Jumbie stories ah true and now yuh cyan [cannot] believe it – yuh does lie to we and mek Uncle beat we fuh lying?”

We witnessed it, we lived it...

Life is an amazing journey... even those who stopped short of walking the path will grace your life, just to say or wave good bye as you live on.






Amazing Grace

Grace dressed in black, stood cold and stiff, over a fresh muddy grave
Tears soak her face, pupils enlarged, lost in an inconsolable gaze
She hears voices through the wind of mourns and laughter
Of good and bad times shared between funeral members
Her heart weakens by the minute of every hour
As she slowly counts each flower
They adorn a handmade basket, made to match the casket
The cold wind blows as her black gown flows,
Old trees wave to-and-fro
An innocent child offers her a smile
She tries to reciprocate the same, but that would be an emotional lie
Family and friends shiver in pain to kiss the dead goodbye
Some fell to the floor, others held their heads and hands to the sky
Pastor prays, ‘Amen’ they all say
Rest in peace as ashes turn to dust
She sings along with the choir, echoing the last chorus
Amazing Grace how sweet the sound
Of a name once lost, now found
Was blinded by sorrow, now she sees
Her name engraved on a tombstone.

Written by Yolanda T. Marshall