Controlling the Silver

O Priates Yes They Rob I

35 O Pirates Yes They Rob I Capturer cousins in a great land grab have claimed the ancestral Harvey house and levelled it. A rickety banana walk crowds the tombs. On a lean wash line garments washed with the envy-stain of green bananas, flap like dingy ghosts. A stranger woman, capturer cousin’s wife, has tied up a ram goat where grandmother Margaret cultivated prize roses she watered with green tea. We are disinherited children, you and I, who stand in the road and weep. Wife of the capturer never reveals herself but sends from behind the stained scrim of the knock-knee clothesline a small boy in a khaki costume, addressing us directly. He speaks, “she say to ask you, who you be?” And we be the great-granddaughters of the founders of Harvey River, village and river, where once was a kind of Eden, with captured Africa retained on small hillside plots. Where our grandfather David gave freely of his own inheritance to raise up a branch of the Church of England, and our aunts in Montreal dispatched by Royal Mail candlesticks, 36 patten and chalice of brass, French lace, altar cloths, censor and thurifying frankincense to ascend each Sunday as prayers over this village; even while the goatskins of Ogun hammered the bassline and homesick Africans moaned. The gods of England and Africa worshipped cheek by jowl. Who we be? Fertile some of us; but some have loins hard as the black rock behind what was our house, which is now just shellevidence of an era when our people owned a village and welcomed visiting cricket teams, and hosted those pleasant Sunday evenings, and were village scribes and lawyers who wrote letters, read newspapers and defended the defenseless against the savage laws of the land. On St. Patrick’s day it was great-grandfather George O’Brian Wilson who crooned Irish airs that fell and took root as casuarinas beneath which he caused our great-grandmother Leanna to fall, wanting as he did then to ingest her Guinea essence as it rose in a light ellipse from her griot throat. But she swallowed hard and retained her story which I was brought here to tell. Who we be? Long-lived as a rule, except once every fifty years one of us has to die young, so the rest of us can live long, and all we want is to sit down in peace upon our people’s gravestones. ...