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Cyar
(Cuh-yar: Accent on “yar.” Jamaican Patwah/Patois for Car)
I will begin on September 11th 2001, in the New York City suburb of New Rochelle, NY. I was starting my first week of classes at a new Catholic school. I was short and chubby and very brown. I sat in my assigned seat, the second from the left, positioned squarely in the front row. This would be my seat for the next 9 months (how was I to know then that this would be my same seat for the next 7 years?). There we sat in our rows, sharply paying attention. A nun once told us, “The only difference between a girl who chews gum and a grazing cow, is the look of intelligence on the face of the cow.” We chattered and chirped before falling to attention. First we prayed, then we pledged, then we listened for announcements. Swinging my fat legs beneath my newly starched unfamiliar skirt I gazed longingly at the clock. I do not remember now what time it was then.
Time passes. The loudspeaker comes crackling back to life. Our principal announces that there was a plane crash in New York City, an accident. All the girls who had to return home would be called down to the office one by one. The speaker goes silent. For the next few hours we hear the names of girls being called like an endless litany of the dead. Each one moves resignedly to the front office, wondering if they were heading for detention. As they disappear we continue working. My legs, still swinging, make hapless contact with the corners of my desk, my nearest neighbors, and the edges of my chair. I scratch my thick tights against the chair legs, my newly forming hair making my skin hot and itchy. Third loudspeaker announcement of the day. We are all going home. I do not remember what time it was then. The doors were all locked, teachers leading us one by one through the glass breezeway to the front entrance of the building. We filed onto buses and into cars.
I do not see my parents until much later that night. My mother ran from Manhattan, her office in the shadow of the Empire State Building, squeezing her body onto the last train willing to leave for Westchester County. My father returns much later from his hospital in the Bronx. He lies on his back in his bedroom, away from the rest of our family. I creep into his room and silently perch on the edge of his bed. As a child I was fascinated by the world of adults. I longed to linger in the kitchen and hear stories about the men that my aunties and mother would share. I wanted to press myself through the thick smoke that hovered around my godmother’s basement, to taste the strong rum and weak beer the men drank behind the bar, and hear the secrets that grown bodies knew. So frequently was I shooed away from underfoot that I barely dared to try any more. Accusations of being a “faisty gyal” and an “inquisitive pickney” were mostly lobbed my way with love, and so I came to answer to them like my own name. This moment with my father was a rarely permitted intrusion and I savored it. We sat watching the news, infamous images of planes moving into and back out of the towers again and again. I felt suddenly older, being allowed to sit here watching this violence, watching panicked bloodied faces scrambling through rubble, hands grasping emptily at dusty air.
We finish the first news hour and the footage loops back, beginning to repeat. Still my father watches, remaining silent. My back is aching and I am tired, unaccustomed to staying up this late. From my position on the corner of the king size mattress my shoulders begin to curl forward towards my stomach as I rest my elbows on the tips of my knees. I use my feet to peel back the corners of the throw rug, feeling the fine grain of the wood floors beneath my toes. I didn’t understand. This was the same footage that we’d already seen. Why would we watch this again? I was also immaturely dissatisfied: why wasn’t my father speaking? Couldn’t he tell me something about what I was supposed to see? After more expanses of silence I finally gathered my courage to speak. “Why are we still watching this?” Without breaking the connection between his gaze and the screen he explained to me that this moment would change the rest of my life and so I had to watch. It was in this moment that I realized I was no longer a girl, that I would now be resigned to a life of watchfulness and anticipation. That the choice was now mine: I must decide what it is I was seeing and what exactly I was watching for. It would take years of prying and asking to hear the whole of what he would have said to me that night. I will not go further than that now for it is my father’s story to tell in its entirety.
***
I stand on the periphery of my paternal great grandfather’s land in Saint Catherine, Jamaica, Christmas time 2011. The father of my paternal grandmother, I knew him only from stories, and only then in passing as “Mass K”, shorthand for Caleb. A few districts over from my mother’s familial homestead, this plot represents the final country outpost of my Kingston, Jamaica relatives. My father and his brother Lovell spent their summers here, alternating between work and mischief. We return here once every few years to hear stories, and stand watch over the faded graves of my great grandfather and great grandmother. At the time of my last visit in 2011 Miss Cynthia (my great grandfather’s common law wife) was the official owner of the land title, watched over by my great Uncle Herbie. Although he is my great uncle, he functions more like my father’s unofficial brother since he is the child Mass K had much later in life by a woman who is not Miss Cynthia.
When we arrived that day we found Miss Cynthia, family historian, lover of children, masterful cook on her little outdoor kitchen stove, in the final throws of debilitating dementia. Her feet swollen to the size of cooked hams, her dress tattered and soaked with urine. I looked in her face, the woman who watched me scatter across her front steps in glee, who had cooked me good food, who knew my birthday and remembered the years we were all born, who told me not to be afraid of her outhouse when I was a child, who fed me til I was fat and kissed me with her one toothed mouth, and who always took care to overfeed me and tell me I was a “nice girl.” She sat there numb, sometimes mumbling. For a brief moment she recognized my mother, asking her when she had gained so much weight, in the usual brisk manner of old Jamaicans. She turned the same question to my father. I realized then that she remembered nothing past my parents’ wedding in 1986. I was born in 1990. So I resigned myself to silence, listening to her softly babbling until it was time to take our leave.
My Uncle Herbie leads us through the thickets and I stop every once in a while to take photographs. Of the trees, of my brother walking through the canopy of the sugar cane, of my mother ruefully contemplating the landscape that raised her, of my father laughing at the brown spotted cows grazing on the hillside. I take pictures of myself scrambling up rockfaces and tripping through tall grass and shuffling past the places where Mass K and the first of his children’s mothers are buried. I take pictures of these graves but not of the car wreck. I do not think it is wise, although I spend many minutes lingering here and creating a memory from heart. I am fearful that a picture will trap this thing to me, will make us indelibly tied. I do not want to go back through my vacation photos later and have to explain this to the others. I don’t want to explain why I took a picture of something so unrelated to me and so grotesque. But I want to remember, even though I am unsure of what I am seeing. I stand and I watch.
When we reached the car it was entirely by accident. Herbie points to it and explains that a murder had taken place here several years ago. The community believed that the men in the car were first forced to crash, then set on fire as an act of political retaliation. I do not know these men’s names or whether the story is true. My uncle is known in the family as one who isn’t wonderful with detailed retellings. A quick search online reveals dozens of similar stories. The words “murder, Jamaica, politics, car crash” yield a seemingly endless stream of stories and faces, not all of them dead. I only know that the car stood there, blackened and hollowed like a burnt shell, clinging so precariously to the ledge, that it seemed apparent to me that the murderers thought whoever was inside was surely not meant to live at all, let alone to survive such a tragedy. How can a body suffer so? I pulled up short near the driver’s side entrance. My father cautions me to stay back, my feet unsteady on the sloping muddy ridge beside the hard gravely road. My legs feel coltish and unfamiliar as I look at it. I am not wearing tall work boots like my uncle, my white gym sneakers proving woefully inadequate in the rugged landscape, my mother joking that they have probably never walked across real mud before. Now they are caked in bright red dirt.
Inching closer and closer, I stop. How would we even begin to fix this car? It seemed to me that many of the parts had been taken after the crash. I imagine that even charred they must have fetched a small sum of money as scrap metal. I want to touch the car’s exterior but I do not. When we leave at nightfall, hoping to avoid dangerous driving conditions back to Montego Bay, my uncle touches my father’s hand in a warm handshake. Two men that grew as boys together, they now live worlds apart: my father in an American suburb and my uncle in the Jamaican countryside. Yet together, in this place, they are like boys again. It seems they are in secret agreement. They whisper hushed words not meant for Miss Cynthia’s ears, as I am sure they have done many times in the past. When we load into the car my uncle stands back from the wheels of the vehicle to wave at us. Rapping twice on my mother’ s passenger side window he tells us to be careful on the road, that it’s election time. With that, we wave and depart.
The trip down the mountain road that will take us back to the main roads snaking their way to Kingston or the North Shore is one I have always hated. Barely wide enough for one car to pass, the road is wrapped around the outer extremities of the mountain. Snaking its way precariously to the top, every year the road suffers more and more erosion from all of the human traffic (both bodily and vehicular) and the rainy climate. Once it has become too narrow for vehicles, the road is carved further into the mountain’s surface to extend its width. Flying around blind corner after blind corner with only the blaring sound of a car horn to alert you to approaching drivers (that is if they remember to use their lights and horn at all) as a child I was always convinced that I would die on this road to my grandparents’ house.
It seemed to me immaterial whether my demise would be en route to Mass K’s grave or to Miss Cynthia’s outdoor kitchen or to my maternal grandfather’s knee (known affectionately as Massa Mac). The roads we took covered virtually the same route. But my cowardice around heights and my own innate sense of hyperbole couldn’t disconnect these hairpin turns and narrow shoulders from the billboards on Kingston highways announcing greater traffic regulations. Every year hundreds lose their lives in automobile accidents in Jamaica. The same is true of the US. Dying felt somehow closer on this narrow ledge, looking down into the endless expanse of thick, wooded lands imprinted with my parents’ childhood feet. It is on the shoulder of this road, the road where I always imagined I would die as a child, that the car remained stuck. Below it lay a seemingly endless expanse of vegetation, waiting for a strong wind to rock the car’s carcass over the ledge and bury it from sight. I still wonder why that car had no smell. For years it remained there, nestled into the rock face, its metal parts disintegrating before making room for the unruly vegetation peaking up through its hollow frame. It seemed nothing but the tangle of stunted shoots and flowers was keeping it fixed to the rocky face of the road. I stared at what remained of the car and knew intimately the method of its destruction, though I have never seen it burning.
In New Rochelle, miles and miles away from the odorless car, my parents tried to teach me civic duty. After completing law school when I was in elementary school, my mother especially seemed to catch the political bug. Images of me campaigning for politicians, holding signs supporting the DAs office, and proudly sitting in the back of the Black Law Students Association meetings are almost as common from this time in my life as images of me at the park. Every election day my parents would come home from work and head to our polling place at my local elementary school. Rushing through the doors, excited by the prospect of seeing the inside of my own prison after dark, I followed them to the gymnasium. We waited calmly until we were called. Then I would enter the curtained booth with one of them at my side, carefully pushing the appropriate markers to the left of a candidate’s name. After we proofread our work, I would place my hand on the big red lever and pull, logging our results. On the dark 2-minute walk back to our home my father would try to steer me from oncoming traffic, urging me back to the side of the road. When we reached our house he would look around, tell me to be thankful that I lived in a country where elections happened peacefully, where I just helped to decide the President of the United States and had not been harmed. Glancing sideways into the night, our quiet, suburban, tree lined street seemed to bear witness to his claims. As I grew older and we spoke more as equals, we found the violence that seemed so absent on those autumn nights. We understood it differently but we were each able to see it. I stood and watched the street, observed the silence in the trees, and went inside. Be careful on the road, it’s election time.
I reflect now on this odorless shell of a car digging down and down and down into the surface of a mountain because I am interested in accounting. Somewhere between the lived realities of my body and my recounting of this tale is where I locate myself to begin to use, with equal parts tremor and tenacity, my self-conscious “I”. But it was a fixation on the physical that draws me up short. I was first troubled about telling the story of this car because I do not know its smell. I do not know the color it was before the paint fell off (I feel certain it was blue). I do not know its owners, its passengers, its victims or survivors. I do not know the dozens of people who have ridden in it unharmed. This car both had and has a physical reality, a making that precedes my entry onto the scene, as does the political strife in Jamaica that my parents’ generation attempts now to redraw for me. That I attempt to redraw for myself. It would appear that my narration of the car and the car as a physical body exist in two separate spheres, touching but not necessarily overlapping.
An acting coach once told me that to walk with poise I should imagine a string tied to the top of my head with an invisible man at the top gently pulling me upwards. I remember in that moment on the roadside it felt as if the strings had gone slack, leaving me splay legged and buckled on the side of the road. Something had shifted beneath me and the present slipped in. I was surrounded on all sides by the reality that my life, which until that moment had existed in my mind as an endless spool of undeveloped film, was suddenly unraveled and all that I saw were the repeating images I had already known: the tire swing in my neighbor’s yard I’d always eyed with envious greed, the pink tipped white magnolias turning downwards as they drifted into the green grass of the lawn, that same lawn rushing up to meet my face the many times I fell from the magnolia tree’s higher branches, the blue benches at the park with the loose boards that I would jam my fingers into until they got stuck. And now a car: possibly blue, definitely destroyed. Faces I have never seen trapped inside (I imagine what they looked like). My pristine white sneakers rimmed with an outline of redish mud, politely pressed together. All there, all connected, all present, all pressing. I have seen those images more than some of my beloved family photos.
How do we deal with the present? It is a system of recognizing our present, a diagnostic lens through which to realize political action and also to realize when the political is acting upon us, that is the question of generational inheritances. My uncle’s rapt gaze as he inspected the outside of the car, his stillness, and his silence were meant as an instruction: these images, this version of the present, will change your life. And so, you have to watch. You have to witness. And I did. That day I learned how to stand watch. To alert my senses to a new way of seeing and understanding. That day I stood rapt in the gaze of violent action and somehow I felt that I saw it and it saw me. I had exposed my tenuous movie reel images of the future to natural light before they were ready, and under the glare of my own inspection they had all fallen away. I knew then that tomorrow would be the first of many days and it would also be the same as this day. That I would see these things again. It was then that I realized my father and my uncle’s intentions. He was giving me the last tangible thing he had, in the face of distress, in the face of uncertainty. He gave to me a way to see change as it broke like a tide at my feet. I was tied to my peers now, the ones who were my age at the time they remembered days like that one at the side of the road. And I wondered, for a long time, where would this leave me?
How could I continue to search and explore the narratives of my inheritances, if the language used by those who came before me is, in part, painfully illegible to me? How do I explicate a present that is dependent on a configuration of a stable, forward moving, linear temporality that eludes me? How do I tell the story of this odorless car as it exists in the present when so much of what it stands to tell us is dependent on a past riddled with unknowns? In that moment my parents, my uncle, my brother, and myself saw a car. Abandoned on the road, burnt out and hollow, and filled with the intrusions of blooming plants. What my parents and my uncle were able to deduce from these charred remains was outside the scope of my brother and I’s immediate understanding. To us, frequently chastised as “faisty Yankee pickney”, the contemplation that this car had landed at the roadside in anything other than an unfortunate accident was beyond the scope of our immediate imagining. It was only through the prompting of our uncle followed by the solemn exchange of looks on our parents’ faces that their suspicions assumed a sort of terrifying logic in our eyes. Although there was a temporary delay in our understanding of the hollowed car shell, we still understood it.
It is that momentary lapse, the 30 or so seconds that it took for my brother and I to say “accident” and my parents and uncle to cry “political murder” that separates our generational understandings. It is these two ways of processing the present, whether through a filtered delay or knee jerk reaction, that marked us as different in that moment. The shift here was geographical, emotional, temporal and psychological. We all stood and watched. We all bore witness. We witnessed different things. Returning home I wondered if my telling would be large enough to encapsulate a world where the bodies in the car were at once past realities and present hauntings? How would I place them? How would I place myself?
How do I go home if I must always be careful on the road?
Danielle Bainbridge is a writer of creative non-fiction, drama, and scholarly essays on 19th century black freak show performers. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012 and is currently pursuing a PhD in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University.