After returning home for Christmas, I have discovered that I have lost one home, but gained another. At least O’Neil is back in town. O’Neil is one of Accompong’s more colorful residents that I like to think of as the town minstrel: one of those guys from the sword slinging days who used to roam around towns strumming medieval chordophones back when music was considered about as bad of a habit as picking your nose. O’Neil doesn’t pluck any strings, but he does chant his dance hall style poetry wherever he goes in the town. O’Neil has been in Portmore for a long time, but he recently returned to Accompong a few weeks ago. As I made my way past the square today, I heard him call to me from down the road. Sometime during my stint O’Neil started referring to me as white menace, a label which from anyone else would be a little discouraging, but from O’Neil would warrant the return of an equally racist insult, so I started calling him el Diablo negro, assuming that he didn’t know Spanish. Thing about Jamaicans is, even when they’re joking they sound serious, and seeing that there is no nice way to call someone a white menace, I appreciate O’Neil’s confidence in my tolerance. It’s actually a term of endearment coming from him, an example of how comfortable he is around me.
At the square I turned right and headed down to Middle Ground, to take a look at how Daniel’s Food for the Poor house is coming along. Daniel is Accompong’s token blind man. In addition, and as if being blind wasn’t sufficient, he also has 12 fingers and 12 toes. Maybe God was trying to compensate for his depravity of sight. Daniel was one of the first residents of Accompong I met. When I first came to town I stayed with Pastor Robin Dixon and his wife Ileen who live a mere 30 feet or so from Daniel’s little one room plywood shack. When I was trying to figure out what my job was, and everyone was asking me what I had in store for them, “Daniel made it very clear that my job was to get him a new house, a request which I discovered to be well worth the effort after inviting myself over one afternoon to find his floor collapsed and his roof leaking. Now, nearly two years later Daniel is getting his house and I’m thankful for that in more ways than one. Daniel reminded me of my job every time I passed him by since the day of my arrival. I tried to avoid him most of the time that I passed him on the road. It’s pretty easy to avoid a blind person if you just keep quiet, but sometimes some other passerby would yell, “hey Zeb” and disclose my presence. Then Daniel will turn around and, facing some random direction, say, “Zeb. Yu not mek nuttin agwaan…yu treat mi bad,” which isn’t the kind of conversation that I would like to have, so I would just tip toe away until eventually Daniel would realize that the person he was scorning was no longer present. Some people say that Daniel is ungrateful, but I knew that this wasn’t true whenever he paused for a few seconds and took in my presence before asking me to cut a back door in the house.
I walked up to the school and headed down the hill where I found Maggi tending her shop. Maggi is Zan’s wife, a meager woman who was bearing a child for the first few months that I knew her. I first met Zan when he was drunk and supervising the building of this shop where I was now eating a spice bun and drinking a Ginger Beer. It was after teaching music class in the school and I was passing by Zan and some others who were sitting in the middle of the road sharing a mixture of over-proof rum and Pepsi, when Zan invited me to join them.
Maggi is one of the many women in Accompong that has brought a baby into the world since I have been here, something that Jamaican women do very well. In the time that I have been here, many of these babies have grown about 2 feet tall and two of them are named Zeb. I remember when Zan and Maggi’s baby was merely a huge belly, now he sits on the other side of the bar giving me a look with eyes of consternation, eyes that seem to be asking me when I’m going to be a father.
