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Callaloo 23.4 (2000) 1207-1226



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Thomas Glave
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The Pit

Thomas Glave


The killing of children in our town has become quite common now, ordinary as the bread we yet bake each day. We've lived here since, it seems, time immemorial, but little since that time, in our memory, has changed. Our town, like those neighboring, has running water now, and even electricity, but still a dryness and darkness prevail. The killings, like the dryness, are as regular as the daily beatings of our grandmothers in the streets, and the slaughters of those who, between summer locusts and hurricanes, attempt to save them; as our daughters, before they disappear from our sight forever, are raped (in the cane fields, in the mountains) after being pulled from our arms, from our shacks, in those hours when the roads are dark again, and no one except those very few, in their boots, may walk. We don't speak of these things now as much as we once did, having learned that speech, like the persistence of memory, here serves little purpose; or rather, here in particular, on hillsides no longer strategically important to the north (the last of the Marines are already gone), serves a purpose many of us would rather avoid. Thus our memories, like what we'd rend in different circumstances, have gradually congealed on our tongues. Better that way for us all, finally, some think, for already precious few of us from the early days remain here; in that way, especially during the darkened hours when faces and other parts disappear, we're not so different from the many others along here and beyond, except for what we now know, have known for so long, to be the presence of the pit.

To reach the pit, you must walk three hours' way out of our town, on a dusty road, rock-strewn, that borders and, at varied points, rises sharply above the sea. That in itself isn't unusual in a place such as this where the sea, surrounding us and our lives as it always has, forms an integral part of our history. Those who fled, or were forced, to the shores on those distant nights, we thought, were surely ultimately better off than those who wound up at the pit; for the sea, caressing and forgetful as it has always been, leaves behind no trace to which the spirit might return on some troubled night, to wander. Wander. If you've heard those sounds coming from the pit on nights of the clear moon, wafting on the perpetual star-apple breeze, you'll know what we mean.

Why, then, were they there on that day, those two, and how, exactly, did they wind up there? None of us even now can really say, having learned never to raise questions like that, although--as always--our imaginations can tell us plenty. Don't believe [End Page 1207] that, like the family down the road and those three others up on the hill, they were marched there blindfolded, bound, and gagged, a rifle's mouth to their back, for--this we did know--they had hidden long and well. In their case, forget what you've heard about all the murdered journalists uncovered in pathetic rural hideaways (like our town), and the news clips regarding throat-slitted clerics, tortured nuns, revoked amnesties, and the disemboweled, tree-scorched human rights workers who, even unto the bone and ash piles they became, wept over earth sacred and profaned. As was generally agreed by those who claimed to know, they weren't that important. They weren't part of any urban insurrections or upland revolts; weren't, like many of the canecutters in the last general strike, hunted down, caught by the scruff of the neck, and rifle-butted by people we'd in some cases known, who, even as mercenaries, still resembled us; nor, as later happened to some of those farther down the shore, were they burnt out of a shack after the others, sleeping within, had succumbed to the smoke and flames. No...

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