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  You had to do what Bishop Walters said. He represented total authority. And he was my mother’s uncle, protecting her from lusty, wayward Jamaicans. Determined to win the bet, and being very enterprising, my father actually changed religions so that he could get inside the new church and its prayer meetings and services, in order to get to my mother.

  My dad diligently courted my mom. She wasn’t his usual type. She was too skinny for him, but because of this stupid bet he persevered. As a rule, Jamaican men do not like skinny women; they like them plump, full of health, of life, juicy, and therefore very social and lively. We say mauger, meaning meager and weak and lacking the required level of power. I am considered mauger—dry and brittle, prone to sickness, a hollow shell—and my mother was seen as very mauger. Five foot ten, a supermodel-type body, size zero—by Jamaican standards, almost a skeleton. But nothing stopped my father because of this bloody bet. It became a matter of pride to rescue this girl who seemed so beyond the reach of anyone.

  My mom found the Joneses, my father’s family, to be very smug and superior. They were condescending to those they considered uneducated, or even if they were educated but didn’t live up to his fastidious standards. My father’s father thought no one was good enough for his sons or his daughters. My mom and dad therefore had something in common; my mom thinking, Oh, well, they think I’m not good enough for him, and no one could get to her because of the church. The relationship was based on this kind of attraction. They each considered the other out of their league. It became like a Romeo-and-Juliet thing. My mom was not good enough for my dad, according to his father, and they were kept apart by the family. That was the start of the attraction.

  My mom and her aloof, unconvinced father-in-law became very close in the end. She was the only one who could soften him. My mom could soften anyone. Some guys tried to rob us once. We had arrived at my aunt Sybil’s house in a more peaceful part of Kingston to have dinner. We all sat around in her immaculate front room. I had brought Richard Bernstein, who did the Interview covers for Andy Warhol and designed my first album sleeves; we were doing some filming for a documentary. All of a sudden some Jamaican guy sauntered into the house. He didn’t have a gun. He said, “Give me all your jewelry,” and held his hand in his pocket like he had a gun. He obviously didn’t; it was a piece of wood. It was still pretty shocking, though, and most of us froze.

  My mom walked over to him and said, “Oh, sweetheart,” and she put her soothing charms on him, flinging softness in his face. Before he knew it the guy was out the door. “Oh,” he said, “I better get some of my guys, and I’ll come back.” Yeah, yeah, right. They never came back. My father slept through the whole thing in the back room.

  The would-be thief had a real cocaine face. Jamaican people shouldn’t do cocaine. They should stick to marijuana. Certain things grow in certain places for a reason. Cocaine makes a Jamaican crazy. Crazee beyond belief. The Jamaicans should stay laid-back, have a joint, and chill. That’s why God lets marijuana grow so freely there. He put the poppy seeds in one place and the coca plant somewhere else. Jamaica had the ganja, grown as a weed, introduced to the island by East Indian laborers in the mid-nineteenth century, immediately taking root as a beneficial substance. It belongs on the island, like it’s been brought back to where it first appeared, and grows abundantly among the native grasses, plants, and weeds. It suits the locals’ temperaments, as something that seemed imbued with spiritual, medicinal, and religious properties. Leave everything in its place. Don’t mix it up. Especially when people can’t control it.

  * * *

  My dad tricked his way into getting the girl whom nobody could get because she was inside Bishop Walters’s force field, and everyone was intimidated by the bishop. In Jamaica then, you married as soon as you got your period, so sixteen was a bit late for my mom. If you weren’t married by sixteen you were seen as an old maid. It seemed as though Bishop Walters was going to keep her for the church like a nun. The women in the church were called Sister. My father reached in, and he actually got Sister Marjorie, and she became his type.

  My mom was a natural and very keen athlete, tall and lithe enough to be excellent at running and jumping. She was good enough to be in the running to represent Jamaica in the 1948 London Olympics in the long jump. There was a photograph in the newspaper of her ready for action wearing gym bloomers, and when the church members saw that, she was pulled out of competition. In the church according to Bishop Walters, wearing shorts was not allowed. They were called batty riders, for the way they slipped up the crack of your arse. And that was too much for the family. There was an Islamic level of intolerance, an Amish severity.

  There was this other man who wanted to marry my mom. He was called Cecil Rowbotham and was from a big family. Later on, the Rowbothams became very close to the Joneses—one of my brothers dated one of the Rowbotham girls—so we stayed lifelong friends. Rowbotham was in love with my mom, but my mom said she didn’t go for him because she thought his fingers were too short. Her father was a professional pianist, a leading figure in the performing of mento music, the jaunty, abrasive Jamaican and Trinidadian folk music mixed with swing jazz and storytelling blues that was the precursor of ska and reggae, and long fingers on a man became very important for my mom. Her father had very long fingers.

  John “Dan” Williams, my maternal grandfather, had his own dance band playing jazzy mento, and would often accompany the legendary calypso pioneer Lord Fly, Rupert Lyon, known as the Calypso King of the world, and one of the first musicians to record homegrown Jamaican music. They made a number of rip-roaring 78-rpm singles together, including a big local favorite in the 1940s called “Trinidad Carnival Song” an energetic carnival song, with an opening line that went: Jump in the line / Wag your body in time. Their songs were full of life and a subversive, madcap comedy. They recorded a song about a really bad meal called “Swine Lane Gal”: Salt lane gal can’t cook rice and peas / The bottom burn the middle raw / The gravy taste like castor oil. Their regular haunts included the Wickie Wackie club in Kingston and the Myrtle Bank Hotel, Kingston’s first hotel. My mom found a picture of him in his band, a slick-looking group of handsome musicians looking like they knew what a good time was, or at least how a good time should sound. These guys clearly knew that to perform in the Caribbean you need a certain flourish. This is a place that likes big gestures, and a sense of grandeur.

  There is music in our family that goes back a long time, but the religious element turned their back on music as any kind of pleasing show business or fun. My mom’s mother became very religious, taken with this ebullient new religion that offered her a role in life, but Dan didn’t have much time for God, so he left. That’s why they split up. She chose the church. He chose entertainment, and would split his time between Jamaica, Nassau, and America, touring with his band and backing singers, including Nat King Cole. In America, he started another family. He had three sons my mother never knew about, her half brothers, and he died at forty-seven after returning ill to Jamaica from Miami in 1958.

  At the time, I was kept in the dark about this exciting long-fingered musical maverick, because my grandmother, his ex-wife, had rewritten her life completely as though he never existed. He didn’t fit, he was everything the church rejected, so he was completely exiled. The idea of there being an extroverted, displaced entertainer in the family who made records and got up to wonderful no good in after-dark exotic nightclubs was much too sleazy a distraction from the all-important church. I, though, must have inherited his rhythmical wanderlust through the blood. His banished energy was transmitted through to me.

  * * *

  My parents left for America, my father first, and then my mother, looking to make a new home, or have some space for themselves. They’d had half a dozen kids, and then they sort of eloped, in the sense of running away together, one joining the other later when he had found a new home. We were raised by my mother’s mother and her new husband, whose first name was Peart. My grandmot
her, with her daughter’s children in her care, married a man who was twenty years younger, and he, as our step-grandfather, became our guardian. We called her Aunt Ceta, and she immediately ceased to be a grandmother in the traditional sense.

  Peart was my grandmother’s God-fearing church replacement for the wicked traveling pianist John “Dan” Williams. I don’t know if my grandmother divorced my grandfather. In Jamaica, you often simply walked out, and you remarried regardless of the paperwork. In the church, my grandmother’s brother was a bishop, and he approved or disapproved of any union. Everything had to go through him. If he says yes, it goes ahead.

  My grandmother and her sister were both cougars, marrying men much younger than they were. Up to this day I still wonder how both of them managed to marry men twenty years younger than they. How was this allowed? It seems so unconventional. Even now surely it would be frowned upon. I can’t believe they got approval from their brother the bishop. Even though their husbands were in the church, it still seems so unlikely back then. Maybe there were standards I don’t know about, which makes the church seem even more like a cult, with its own dubious morals disguised as religious law. It was all very hard-core Christian—marital monogamy was a must, sexual promiscuity a pure evil; independent thinking was curbed. In moral issues, the Bible was the authority. Somehow, though, if you knew the right people, you could slip through the cracks and do what you wanted.

  To this day, if I do such a thing, have a boyfriend twenty years younger than me, it is looked upon unfavorably. Very unfair—with men there is no limit, but for women, no way. Men get away with it; they can be ninety-eight, with their girls in their twenties. Women have no chance. But there were my grandmother and her sister back in the 1940s, part of a religion transfixed by the Bible, taking up with men half their age, their marriages sanctioned by Bishop Walters—very strange. I’ll never unlock that mystery.

  * * *

  My grandmother and new guardian didn’t have any kids and didn’t want any. A deformed, abusive atmosphere in the household was rooted in his ambition to impress Bishop Walters, and rise up in the church, or it was part of a very demanding and immature personality. He knew nothing about raising kids and was suddenly saddled with a whole squabbling brood, but he wanted to look good to my great-uncle. He looked up to him and wanted to make sure he was next in line to become a bishop. Family was important as its own community: Everyone lived within a few yards of one another, keeping themselves to themselves inside this new, very lively and persuasive church.

  He married our grandmother when she couldn’t have kids anymore, but he ended up with five of us after our parents moved away. He took us all in while my parents built a new life in America, so you could say he was a great guy, but he treated us like he owned us. Like we weren’t human, just something to have to deal with.

  Everyone in a position of male authority in the church was a mas because they were a master, and mas was short for master. Master, massa, a name rooted in the history of slavery itself, from the masters of the estate. He was Mas P because he was Peart and you used the first letter of their name. This in itself turned him into a kind of gothic monster with an ugly, stunted name. I absolutely hated him. It makes my skin crawl thinking about him even now.

  At the time, the practice of parents going away to earn a living and leaving their children with their grandparents was quite normal, but there was nothing normal about Mas P. His way of keeping us in line was to become a ferocious disciplinarian. I think of him as a real sadist who had an apparent excuse to be so cruel because he was our guardian. He didn’t want kids, and suddenly he had a handful to look after, so he used religion and fear—real fear—to keep us all in check.

  I presume he loved his wife, because it was an awful lot to take on, this bunch of kids all under six. I don’t know if he was beaten when he was growing up, if he was taking out his anger on us. I never knew about his family, his mother and father. We never saw them. I don’t know if he left them behind for religion. He eventually took over for my great-uncle as bishop. But once he took over he didn’t have the position for much longer, only a couple of years before he died.

  There were six of us, but only five were living in our grandmother’s house. One of us was living around the corner with our great-grandmother, known as Ma. Bishop Walters is her son—it’s like a clan, we all live near each other, we are all connected, almost confined to being inside the family. She wanted to raise Pamela, the fifth child out of the six. We were like a pack of little kitties, and my great-grandmother went into the litter and plucked out Pam—Pam was cute! Ma wanted her like a pet. My mom couldn’t do anything about it; anyway, she thought it was the best thing to do. It was part of the culture. It still is. Parents who were too young, or couldn’t look after all their children, would farm their children out to grandparents—in this case, a very formidable great-grandmother.

  “I like Pam,” she said, and you didn’t say no to the great-grandmother. She was the matriarch, and in Jamaica the matriarchs can be more powerful than the patriarchs. She was still beating the kids with a broom at eighty, and was strong for many years more. She was six feet tall, half Scottish, hard-boned, the daughter of a slave master who got left behind—the owner took the son but left the daughter, who lacked value. She looked white. You hardly saw her pale, weakened hair; she would always keep it tied, and sometimes at night when she was too weak and tired, I would have to stay with her. She passed away at ninety-eight. Pam grew up separate from all the rest—we got to see her only on church Sundays.

  We had no idea what Pam was going through. We thought she had it easy, but she probably had it worse because she had no brothers and sisters to talk quietly, secretly, with. I think in some ways she has punished us over the years for not being there with her, even though it wasn’t our fault.

  Pam missed all of our togetherness. We could hold hands when it got particularly bad. She had no one to hold hands with. It must have been very, very lonely. She doesn’t talk about it. She didn’t come to our father’s funeral. She is still as removed as she was when we were young. Pam was there, but not there.

  * * *

  We were all made to dress differently from other kids from the beginning. We had to be the example for the whole church. As children, we were brought up very much to be seen, not heard. We were examples from when we were little pickaninnies. I always thought that was too much pressure. It’s a church celebrating perfection, a cleansing of the soul, and we had to appear unwaveringly loyal. Nobody of my age at that time would dare question the absolute authority of the church or this version we were presented with.

  I had to be dressed in little dresses over the knee; I couldn’t straighten my hair, which was the fashion then. It grew thick and tangled, and was very painful to braid into the tidiness that was expected. Everything I wore had to be long-sleeved. We weren’t allowed to ride bicycles too far from our house. We weren’t allowed play after school, because that was seen as too frivolous, and allowed chaotic thoughts to enter our minds.

  The church seemed to know everything we did outside of the bubble they created. If we played in the gully after school, somehow—I never understand how to this day—someone would always go and tell on us, even if there was no one around. I always thought there was a big eye in the sky that was telling on us if we did something wrong.

  The gully was down at the bottom of a hill that gently sloped down from our house, an area of heath and bush that is now full of houses and is very different. We used to pick berries; there were cows grazing. It was like a Garden of Eden, really; a place where everything tasted and smelled good and you could feel happy. Our innocence could bloom. I could find fun in the gully, climbing trees, finding hiding places, discovering new feelings, feeling something unexplained stirring inside of me. Hiding away from the male authority and the Bible, from being banned from exposure to anything that might be considered worldly.

  It was Mr. Philpott’s land back then, a local neighbor who se
emed happy to let it run wild. In my day it was like a little forest. I would pet a little with local boys in the gully. You show me yours, I’ll show you mine. There was tall grass, above our heads, and you could hide in there and mess around with cousins. That was okay then, to a point. Cousins married then. It was very British, really. First cousins would marry. Noel was once engaged to a second cousin. Being in the church made it even more attractive, using marriage to keep everything under the same roof, inside the church.

  Being found in a barrel at nine years old with a boy, not knowing what I was doing but knowing there was something to be done and really wanting to find out, led to a two-week deliberation about how exactly I should be punished. It was like the convening of a monstrous system for an inquest into my insolence. How extensive should the beating be, how long in duration, how public the humiliation? A little natural, tingling curiosity about how I was really feeling—not how I was ordered to feel—led to a trial that implied I had broken the law and infuriated their malicious God. The blows came thick and fast.

  I was far too young, but you knew when you liked somebody, so you would hold hands, mostly with girls—it wasn’t sexual or anything. Girls in Jamaica still hold hands all the time; it’s very normal, nothing going on, walking down the street from school holding hands, safely exploring a honeyed closeness.