I'll Never Write My Memoirs

1.

Spanish Town

I was born.

It happened one day, when I least expected it, on an island measuring only 4,411 square miles, a teeming mountainous land of wood and water among a chain of islands in the center of the Caribbean Sea at the western edge of the Atlantic Ocean. That wondrous isle in the western seas.

I came out of my mother feetfirst. I arrived kicking and pissed off, sticky with fury, soaked to the skin. I was what’s known as a stargazing fetus as well, my neck fully extended. From the very beginning I was going against the grain and making trouble. Perhaps I was holding on to my mother for dear life, somehow knowing what was about to happen next. I didn’t want to leave the one place I had felt at home, where I had been floating for so long, and enter the darkness. Inside, there was light. Outside, instantly, the unknown. The cord was cut. Startled by a strange newness, I didn’t immediately make much of a noise, so I was slapped and slapped, to prove that I was normal. I cried out. I’ll show you noise. I’ll show you normal. I shrieked. In my own uprooted newborn way, I probably cursed.

Here I am.

Grace Beverly Jones. As was the custom, I would be known by my second name. Beverly. Bev. Later, when I was four or five, my skin was so charcoal black I would be engulfed when the warm, sultry night fell, throbbing with nature and a slithering hint of the supernatural. My nickname then was Firefly. You could only make out my eyes and teeth, sparkling in the dark.

My new home outside my mother was Spanish Town, the oldest continually habituated town in Jamaica. Five hundred and fifty years of history, starting a few years after the island of Jamaica was first found—discovered—by a Christopher Columbus of Italy in charge of exploring and marauding Spaniards. As St. Jago de la Vega, the town on the plains, at the edge of wetlands in the south of the island, it became the capital when the Spanish settled. They gave it a distinct Spanish Colonial layout, with lots of internal courtyards and walled gardens and a Renaissance-influenced checkerboard of streets placed around a dramatic central plaza. Spanish interest in Jamaica waned when it became clear there was no gold, and it became a backwater of the Spanish Empire. It became Spanish Town in 1655 when the British conquered the island. They kept it as the administrative capital and introduced grand Georgian buildings, reflecting the growing empire’s wealth and importance.

Spanish Town was the Jamaican capital until the port of Kingston—better placed on the coast thirteen miles away, with more natural vitality—replaced it in 1872. The town’s cathedral, built in the early sixteenth century, rebuilt in 1725 as an Anglican church, was the first such building in this part of the world and remains the oldest ecclesiastical structure from the British Empire still standing outside the UK. When I was born, Spanish Town had traces of grandeur but was showing signs of neglect after centuries of colonial rule and the Great Depression in the 1930s; imposed signs of methodical Spanish life, elegant town planning, and aristocratic British influences peeling back to reveal the undimmed Jamaica underneath. It had a faded glory, a shabby gentility, many parts of it cast aside as useless, and was beginning to meet up with the rough, tumbling edges of the capital city as Kingston’s population grew.

They say I’m a lot older than I actually am. In the press, on the Internet, they add about four years to my actual age. I’m often asked how old I am—the world likes to know a person’s age for some reason, as if that number explains everything. I don’t care at all. I like to keep the mystery. I get onstage and tell everyone I am ten years older than they think, and then I hula-hoop for twenty minutes. That’s my age—that’s how I measure it. I wasn’t born wearing a watch, and I never got used to wearing one, and when I was born I didn’t know if it was Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, and I never really know the days of the week now. Days are days, hours come and go, in whatever order, and I keep up with it, in my own way. It’s hard to remember things in the right order, but I will try.

Time for me is an energy. I’m another energy, and the two energies wrap around each other. The present can seem as distant as the past, which can seem as close as the present. The most exciting thing is what happens next, even if it has already happened.

Because I never say my age, and rarely have to write it down, I roughly work it out by basing my life on an historic landmark. I mark time by what was happening in the world rather than how old I was. I remember moving to America around the time that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Before then, I was living in Jamaica, caged inside a certain goddamned darkness, even though there was so much sun and life. After Kennedy died, I was moving around like a gypsy, looking for the light, for what happens next.

Every birthday party I had after my teens, I always said I was twenty-something. I would know I was thirty-something, maybe forty-something, but never really the exact age.

I didn’t grow older. I grew wiser. The world likes to know the age of someone, so I would be often asked. I am honestly never sure, so when it comes to working it out, to work out how old I am, I take something important, like my son’s age, and if he is thirty-three, and I was, say, twenty-nine when I had him, then I do the math. So if you ask me now how old I am, nothing comes to mind straightaway. To some extent, it could be any number. Even then I am not entirely sure; it’s not because I am hiding my age, embarrassed or annoyed by it, but because it is not something I keep to hand. It’s not the most important thing about me. There are more important things about me than my age that will give you a better idea of who and what I am. I was born. Let’s take it from there.

I know just by knowing that the first decade of my life in Jamaica was during the 1950s. The Second World War had finished. It was a few years before Jamaica would win its independence from the British. Many Jamaicans were traveling to the mother country, Britain, to find a new life. To find new opportunities, my parents were preparing to move north, along the East Coast of North America.

My mother was Marjorie, born in 1930; my father was Robert Winston, born six years earlier. They already had two young children when I was born. My mother was extremely fertile and there was no contraception at the time. Five of the children were born in very quick succession; one year, two were born. Lots of juices were flowing. The children kept coming. Robert Patrick was the first boy; later he would change his name to Christian, Chris. Then there Norman Noel, known as Noel. Then, back to front, me, Grace Beverly. After me, George Maxwell, Max. Another girl followed, Yvonne Pamela, and then another girl, Janet Marie. Eventually, there was a fourth son, Randy, born in America, not Jamaican at all, the baby of the family. When she married my dad, my mother was sixteen. By twenty-two, she had six kids. She was a Walters; her grandmother’s maiden name, my great-grandmother, was Powell, and some in our family think the first African-American to serve as secretary of state, Colin Powell, might be a relation.

They went to America to get away from her family as much as anything. My mom was definitely stifled by the world she grew up in. She was from a very religious family, among the first to open a Pentecostal church on the island. The very first Pentecostal church was opened in Spanish Town in 1933, three years after the first Pentecostal convention was held in Kingston. This was a missionary venture, a spreading of the word to those who felt estranged from standard religion, because they were too poor, or too otherwise troubled. There was a zeal among the converts based on a determination to be heard and followed; their evangelism was vigorous.

Her uncle was a bishop in this church, Bishop Walters, tight-lipped, with a barren gaze. He was a dominating figure who made the church and its unforgiving belief system the center of the family’s life. So I had a bishop grand-uncle whom I thought of growing up as the bishop of Jamaica.

To some extent, his title was self-designated; his was a new untested religion, based on personal calling, its members making up its own rules, following other churches and their categories, so that the leaders became bishops, because that gave them the authority they craved. The Anglicans had bishops; so too would the Pentecostalists. This was one of the attractions of this new religion, that ordinary working people and the lower middle class, who felt snubbed by British and Europe-based churches and their elitism, could claim for themselves a superior religious standing. There were new opportunities for lay and ministerial leadership, which was very attractive. To climb to the top of other religions from a lowly position would take a miracle. Here was a chance to form small communities that could be organized from within, often from within families, instead of having to look to other countries and governments for leadership. There was a whole dynasty of bishops in my family; we are the bishop royal family of Jamaica. I am not sure where I fit into this, although to some extent I have about as much right to call myself a bishop as my grand-uncle Bishop Walters did.

Religion was a way for many Jamaicans to challenge the white-maintained status quo, from eighteenth-century slaves to twentieth-century Rastafarians. It was also a way for those less motivated to resist accepting things as they were. They have every church you can imagine in Jamaica. It’s said that there are the largest number of churches per square mile there than in any other country in the world; it seems like there is a church on every street corner. And some religions are more religious than others.

How successful a church is depends how charismatic your pastor is. It’s all about aura. It’s about conviction. How deeply you believe. My grand-uncle Bishop Walters was an obsessive believer, made religion his whole world and the world of everyone around him. He was in his own way a brilliant performer, and performing is at the heart of the Pentecostal appeal. Jamaicans could identify with that; it is a society of physical performance.

He had an illegitimate son before he joined the church, and he kicked him out, because he didn’t fit into his new life. The son grew up in England. We were good friends and I used to see him, but to the family it was as though he never existed. You could easily be cut out and cut off. They take religion to an insane, intimidating extreme, using the Bible, and God, to create a world that they can run in their own image.

Pentecostalism became my religion, as it had been for my mother, because that’s what I grew up with. I had no choice. In our religion, according to my bishop grand-uncle, if you strayed, you would be thrown out, into a terrible, hellish exile. They took the Bible literally, all those revamped Babylonian folktales. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. If your right hand offends thee, cut it off. If members of your family do wrong, shun them. Kick them out. Ignore them. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16.). The leaders of the religion—the bishops, the pastors—ruled with fear, with a rod of iron. Perhaps they justified it to themselves because in the Bible it says that you have to use the rod to correct a child. We had to read that passage out a lot, as though the fact we were saying it in our child voices made it definitive.

My father’s side of the family, the Joneses, were politicians and administrators. They brought the first books to Jamaica and started the library system on the island. His sister, my aunt Sybil, became the head librarian of the National Library of Jamaica in Kingston.

My father was a very good-looking man, and was very strong, mentally and physically. He was a keen amateur boxer and studied at Dint Hill Agricultural College. Farming was a major source of employment in the area; domestic and commercial crops included bananas, coconuts, pumpkins, peppers, and coffee, and there had been sugar plantations since the Spanish arrived bringing sugarcane with them from Haiti. After the British arrived, the island was turned into one big sugar plantation. The world craved sugar. There was a lack of local labor, and new workers were desperately needed. Africans were found to be excellent workers, experienced with the land, and used to laboring in a tropical climate. Thousands of them were shipped in against their will. To keep the world sweet, Britain took sugar-producing Jamaica as another jewel in its crown, becoming the largest slave-trading country in the world. The cultivation of sugar and the organization of slavery were intimately tangled up.

My father’s family were strict in different ways from the religious way—theirs was an army way. My grandfather on his side, his father, Arthur Patrick, born at the end of the nineteenth century, was a sergeant in the army during the First World War. When Britain entered the war, thousands of colonial men were enlisted in the British West Indies Regiment.

They gave land in Jamaica to anyone who volunteered for the Great War. His land was in the cool, isolated, shamrock-green hills that seem to hover under misty clouds, up above Sligoville, a humble, laid-back village steeped in its own gentle rhythms. It was the first free village in Jamaica, divided in 1835, after the Emancipation Act started to free slaves, into small, hilly lots for ex-slaves to live in.

Before then, the area had been a haven for escaping slaves, who had been stolen from the mountains in one land and now found sanctuary in the mountains of another. It was very near Pinnacle in St. Jago, the home of the first self-sustaining Rastafarian settlement organized by the founding father of the movement, Leonard P. Howell. Landless Rastafarians would leave the spread-eagled concrete jungle of Kingston and head for the hills. It was a place that yielded rich crops, including, of course, ganja. It’s the spiritual home of the Rastas, seen by them as a sacred site, and you could say what became reggae, and Bob Marley, and the whole idea of one love began on that secluded rocky hilltop.

There is something in the air up there, and in the earth, and it remained mostly untouched by the Spanish and the British. It was too remote and hilly to build there. Even the Native American Tainos who occupied the land at the time of the Spanish arrival were situated near the coastline and adjacent to life-giving lowland rivers.

My grandfather had a house in Sligoville among a few other houses strewn about that, from a distance, seemed to be abandoned. There are plenty of dirt tracks that lead nowhere, there are acres of gentle sloping land, and the views to Kingston across the hills and the plains of St. Catherine are spectacular. The island beckons in all directions. It’s a less familiar Jamaica for many, away from the heavenly shorelines and the overexposed and protected tourist attractions. The Jones family still has some land there, quietly waiting for us, as if this serene, magical place between the rolling mountains and the wide, wide sky is our destiny. Maybe one day I will think of this place as home. I’ll walk barefoot in the grass alongside a river unmoved by time, letting things flow forward in whatever way they like.

As a teenager my father would have to climb up the hill from Spanish Town to his dad’s house, ten miles there and ten miles back along a steep, winding road, by foot or on horseback. He would ride up with the horse and walk back, or the other way, walk up and ride the horse back. Once, running an errand, he was late, and to make up time, he rode his horse very hard, so as not to be punished. He made it on time, but the horse dropped dead. His father was absolutely furious with him, and gave him a look that was so angry he said it stayed with him for the rest of his life.

I only saw Grandfather Jones on Sundays after church—we weren’t allowed to be exposed to his way of thinking, which was far too free, according to the bishop, and therefore nefarious. We would have dinner with him, but it was always awkward. His stoicism and reserve were frightening to a young child, he very rarely smiled, and was probably incredibly uncomfortable with the circumstances he found himself in, with his grandchildren released for a few hours a week from God knew what. He was very disciplined, focused, stern, and incredibly determined, but was confounded by the rules and regulations of the Pentecostal church. It turned out I am a lot like him. I even look like him, especially when I stare in a fierce, unforgiving way. Eventually, I became very good friends with him.

Years later, when my father himself had become a bishop, with his own church and followers, he would react whenever I looked at him in a certain way that indicated I didn’t agree with him about something. Stop looking at me like my father, he would say, only half kidding. He could see my father’s disapproval of his choices and his lifestyle in my face. He could see so much of his dad in me, and that fury when the horse died, it unnerved him.

My grandfather never stepped into his son’s church until he was in his late eighties, and he died in his late nineties. He was very against my father becoming a pastor. After he converted, they didn’t speak for a long time. My dad did it anyway because he wanted out of his family—even if that meant joining the Pentecostal Church.

The Joneses’ strictness was not religious like the Walters’; it was about being the best that you could be. The best politician, the best banker, the best governor, the best professional. It was about making society a better, or at least a better-run, place, rather than planning for otherworldly perfection using the Bible as a grotesque blueprint. My grandfather was very disappointed, to say the least, to see my father go into religion. He was as tough on all of his children, demanding respect, and you can feel how they all hated him for it, for being so inflexible and demanding. One of his daughters never married. She was in love with someone, but her father chased him away. He was never satisfied with any of his children’s choices, with whom they married. My dad was as stubborn as him, though, and a fighter, and he got his own way.

Religion as my mom experienced it growing up was not what the Joneses wanted for my father. To such an educated, liberal family, the Pentecostal Church as it evolved in Jamaica from its extroverted America Southern roots—its urgency and lack of decorum appealing especially to slaves—seemed a superstitious kind of religion. It came across more as a cultlike organization than as a traditional religion. It was very much an influence on Jamaica from North America, not from Britain, which meant it broke away from the overbearing colonial influence. But it had its own Jamaican take that was even a little informal compared to the American way—when it arrived on the island, if someone came to a local Pentecostal church barefoot, they would be taken in, and the congregation would praise the Lord. By the time Bishop Walters was establishing rules, no one would be allowed in his church unless they were very formally dressed. The sinners were barefoot; the saints were in their very best clothes, buttoned to the neck. To my dad’s father, though—despite, or because of, the dress code—it was an unstable even unruly religion, and opposed to the kind of enlightenment he favored, found in books and via learning.

It did not seem traditional, conservative Christianity, definitely not in the hands of Bishop Walters, but it was a way of establishing an alternative community for people who felt ignored. Established churches in Jamaica dismissed this new arrival as a clap-happy church, and my dad’s dad would definitely have agreed with that. Shamans, clapping to the beat, believing in divine healing.

My father developed an adventurous, rebellious tendency, because he felt oppressed by the Joneses’ stubborn need for order and learning. He found it all too orthodox and authoritarian, and, perversely, he had enough space within a relatively liberal upbringing to rebel against his father. The most hurtful rejection of his father he could think of was to head toward this alternative religion, this new, fundamentalist but flamboyant church that had arrived from noisy, unrelenting America.

The Joneses were very British-Jamaican Anglican, very sensible and more accepting of the colonial system, whereas the Pentecostal faith was full of the Holy Ghost, much more mystical and obsessive and consciously or not sympathetic to a rejection of distant British control and superior colonial order where foreign whites were in managerial control. This was their way of dealing with the damage done to the Jamaican psyche by the indifferent British.

I think it became successful quickly in Jamaica because it was a lively mix of two things that had become part of religious convention in a country split between the imported Protestant discipline and an inherited African sense of performance and emotional expression. It was Christian, using biblical symbolism, but it was also spiritual, inheriting traditional ancestral cults. There had been the very Jamaican revival religion that flourished in the nineteenth century, in which African rituals and Jamaican folk traditions were mixed with Christian belief, and many revivalists easily took to Pentecostalism because of its vibrant energy and faith in the power of healing. Pentecostalism incorporated rituals, spirits, and visions, but without seeming unchristian or unbiblical.

The Jamaicans were very open to the idea of spirits and spirit possession, with their African and indigenous Indian ancestors—they didn’t have to travel far from the spirit-filled world many of them already lived in to accept this Pentecostal Holy Spirit. They also gave this more American revivalist religion a little local strictness introduced by the British, but compared to the formal Anglican Church, their style of worship still seemed quite rowdy. They didn’t shout like in America or play crazy music and leap around; they still sang hymns, much more traditional and familiar, but in its merciless pursuit of an idea of saintly perfection, Pentecostalism did have a very emotional and exuberant side. The basic premise of the religion was that it intended to turn the sinner into a saint. You achieved atonement and salvation through rigorous ethical piety. To those used to an entrenched, relatively undemonstrative and prim British-style religion, this was very off-putting. It did not interest the Joneses, part of a confident new middle class.

It became apparent that there was a young girl in Bishop Walters’s house and no one could get her out of the world of the church, which was very enclosed and withdrawn from the outside. The church needed to establish power over its flock and did its best to limit the number of temptations leaking in from the debased outside world.

My mom became a kind of trophy to local men because she was hard to reach. My dad, always looking for a challenge, made a bet with his buddies that he could get her out of Bishop Walters’s sheltered house. Bishop Walters in Spanish Town resembled one of those cult leaders, where if he said to everyone in his orbit Kill yourself, they all would. He was very powerful and scary, possibly because he was extremely defensive in the face of orthodox religion, rejecting Pentecostalism as a diluted form of Christianity. He compensated with extra fanaticism, convinced he had discovered the purest, most spiritually transformative form of worship, a serious, relevant alternative to sterile established churches.

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 grandmother, 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 seemed 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.

Whatever we did, however innocuous it seemed to us, or whatever other children were doing, there was this huge accusing eye hanging in the sky watching us and reporting back to our stepfather and the church. They always seemed to know where and how we were up to no good. Perhaps they assumed without ever knowing for sure. Or they didn’t care if we were doing something wrong or not. Punishment was their way of keeping us in line.

After all, we got beaten a lot. Serious abuse.

There were tough leather belts on the wall with our names on them that were used to beat us. We would be beaten for what we were going to do even if we hadn’t yet done it—beaten in anticipation of insubordination. Each belt was a different weight for who we were and how old we were, but sometimes you’d get struck with a belt above your years—the worse the perceived sin, the heavier the belt. If it got particularly bad you had to climb a tree and choose your own switch, which would then be used to whip you. Mother and Father had no idea of the ferocity of Mas P, and we were afraid to say anything to anyone, because that would have made things worse. He would read letters, whichever direction they went in. Everything was intercepted. It was like living in a prison camp, one where your guardian—your step-grandfather—was your guard.

There was one level of chastisement for playing after school, one for turning the corner of the pages over in the Bible to keep your place, another because you were on the verge of doing something wrong, not sure what it was, but you might as well be punished already, and then there was the beating you knew you were going to get at the end of the day. You’d be at school all day knowing that at the end of the day you were going to get a whipping.

My grandmother was a gentle soul, and she was totally dominated by Mas P. I remember sometimes she would try and get in the way when he was going to hit us and stand in between us, but he was so much stronger. She was afraid to stand up to him. He would brush