Geoffrey Philp

THE CAPTAIN

It had finally happened. Finally. I was so happy and the day seemed just right. Sunlight bounced off the zinc roofs and windows, and the sea-wind came over the docks, making kites of the gulls soaring over the shops. I ran towards the restaurant at the edge of the docks, past the rhyming D.J.'s playing for the crowds in the middle of cane trash and coconut husks, eager with my news to tell the Captain. I spotted him working on his boat.

"Captain, Captain. Good news!"
He didn't answer. I decided to call him by his first name. I was the only one on the waterfront who could do so. I was the only one he told all his secrets.

"Victor, Victor, I have something to tell you, man."
Still no answer. He worked on as if he didn't hear me. He took a bottle of milk of magnesia from his pocket and swallowed a mouthful. His stomach was acting up again. It had been bothering him for the past few months, and he probably didn't eat breakfast again this morning. Nothing to worry about.

I moved closer to where he was working. He had his shirt off. His body was drawn from all the weight he'd lost. He didn't have an old, old body, although he was in his early fifties, but his body was old from working from too young, too hard, too long. He hardly seemed changed from the man I had met five years ago, who had taken me in from the streets and given me somewhere to stay. He had taken off his shirt because it was a present given to him by a passenger on one of the tourist ships, and he didn't want to tear it on a nail or stain it with turpentine.

"Pure English cotton," he would say proudly. "Quality stuff."
His curry stained pants, "local garbage," as he called them, were soaked with sweat which dripped from his chin onto his shoes which were given to him by an American sailor.

I shouted to him again. Here I was, eager with good news to tell him and he wasn't even listening to me, just beating those little nails into that boat he'd been building for as long as I'd known him. The only difference was he seemed to be working harder at it now for the past few months. I used to tease him,

"You still working on that boat, Captain?"
"Yes, me boy."
"So what you going do when you finish?"
"I hear that old people in England go rowing on the Thames every Sunday. I old too, don't it? So, I going rowing too."
"But we don't have no river round here, Captain?"
"Don't worry, the sea is always there. Is the last pleasure of an old man."
I always laughed when he talked like this, calling himself an old man, when he was probably the strongest man on the dock. But he would always complain about his hernia when he had to lift anything heavy, and of late he seemed to be slowing in his step. But he would lift it anyway. And there were always his stories of how he had traveled here and there, how he'd done this or that, and how if it wasn't for that damn American woman who had said that he'd raped her, he would still be a captain today. It was all a bunch of lies though; he'd never left the island. He'd never even been a captain. Back in the fifties, he won a captain's hat in a domino game, and when he wore the cap the next day, people started to called him "Captain." The name stuck with him. All the children around the docks grew up listening to his stories and calling him "Captain." They believed everything he said.

Sometimes when the Captain heard that one of the little boys around the neighbourhood was misbehaving, he would sneak up on the boy as he was playing and repeat his story about when he was a policeman. He said he "toned" all the criminals and rude boys that he caught. By “toning" he meant castration.

"You want to talk like this for the rest of your life?" as his voice changed from a deep bass to falsetto, and he grabbed the boy by the waist.

"No, no, no Captain."
"Well, if I ever hear you getting into anymore trouble. I going make sure you on the toning list."
He would then say to the trembling child, "Promise me you going start behave yourself." To which the child would probably reply,

"Yes, Captain. I going behave meself."
The child usually kept out of trouble for at least two weeks and never repeated whatever it was that caused the Captain to grab him. At first, I was in terror for months, and slept with my pillow tucked between my legs. One night he came into my room to see if I was safe, but I was so afraid that I screamed,

"I promise. I promise. I won't steal anymore Paradise Plums from Mr. Chin store."
The old man just roared with laughter, barely able to stand. He just kept laughing until he was on the floor, rolling over and over. Just laughing. I couldn't believe it.

Oh, how I loved this old man with that little bald spot in the middle of his head. It was this little old man who after I had left Mount Airy when I was thirteen, tired of seeing my mother drop one child after another, one Chinese, one Indian, one German, one black as a spider, took me in and sent me to school to learn a trade. He kept me in trade school until I knew all I needed to know about welding and he made sure I learned English good.

It was he, whose hands had now grown to old man old, who had warned me about the whores on Beeston Street, especially Pearl Harbour. Every time she came up to the shop, she rubbed her hands over the front of my pants and said, "You growing up to be a fine young man. Keep it up."

He always told me, "Watch yourself. These Kingston girl different from them country girl you used to fool with."
Pearl Harbour always did this sort of thing with me, but she really never meant any harm, and the Captain knew this. In fact, as time passed, when the old man couldn't go to some of the P.T.A. meetings, it was Pearl Harbour who went with me. Once she even came to my rescue.

My math teacher, Mr. Lindo, who always made fun of me in front of the class, began criticizing me for my "lack of initiative." Pearl Harbour didn't know what the words meant, but she didn't his tone. She told him that I was a bright boy, but a "Little pissin-tail boy like him was so busy playing with himself him could teach a bird to fly." Mr. Lindo never bothered me again. But that same night, as we walked through the school gates, she grabbed me by the neck and said, "Boy, you better start working. For if you don't start working, I going come here and drop your pants in front of your friends."

It was Pearl Harbour who also introduced me to Rosie who worked at the Azar's Shoe Bazaar on Orange Street. I liked Rosie. I wanted to send for her as soon as I got to America. I had gotten my visa today. After so many mornings of getting up at four o'clock in the morning, waiting in line for six hours, sometimes only to be turned away, I finally had a chance. I was ready to leave the island. But Rosie didn't want to leave. She said she had to take care of her mother. I told her that her sisters could do the job, it was also their responsibility. But she said she couldn't leave if she had the slightest doubt that her mother would be unhappy. She would never leave the island. She would become one of those women you pass on Sunday afternoons, coming home from church, walking down silent lanes, and they have such brightness in their face, you wonder what keeps them going.

I wanted a change. I longed for a new horizon and seasons, seasons that changed. For when you are born on that island, you know only one landscape, one climate. You know the sore of the island's poverty too well. You see it in the mongrels roaming the streets, in the children's faces, in the eyes of the girls, like my mother once was who are pregnant at thirteen, who are old, too young. It was the island's story played over and over again, like the D.J.'s blaring scream as the needle slips off the side of the scratched record, "False start, false start, hope I didn't break your heart?" I had seen too much of it and each year that passed promised the same thing as the last year, each day offered the same stale promise of yesterday.

I had grown tired of Kingston, of its festering streets and lies. The girl from Miami that I'd met six months ago at a reggae concert had sent for me. She said I could work in her father's restaurant on Miami Beach. I'd paid her a thousand American dollars, all the dollars I'd saved from tips, and whatever amounts I could buy from tourists. Americans always tipped good, the English never drop a dime. Or if they do, it's to see the children dive for their dead coins at the bottom of the pier. I hated it when they came to the restaurant. But the captain always lost himself in their company.

"Why you do it?" I always asked him "They never give you anything. Not even a penny, but you always bowing and scraping before them. What wrong with you?"

And he’d always answer, "Me boy, is one thing the Englishman give we, is civilization. Manners. We should always be thankful for that. Your generation don't know nothing about manners. All your generation know is how to mash up things, how to tear up things. That's why I send you to school to learn English and a trade. That is why I wanted you to learn to work with your hands. When you can do that, you is a man."

"But them don't respect you. Them is not like the Americans who drink with we and tell we about the places them come from and everything."

"So what if people don't respect you. You must respect yourself. And if a man still don't respect you, then that is him problem. Them missing out on a chance to meet with a man like themself. I will drink with the American and him can be my friend. But I show every man respect. That is how the world turn."

He always had a look of authority in his eyes when he said things like this. How did he know what made the world turn? He had never traveled; he had never left the island with its petty lives and events. He had never seen the world, and here he was talking about the things that made the world turn! What did he know? All he knew was what he had heard from the radio and what I had read for him from books and newspapers. Every Sunday evening, I would read for him as he sat on the porch and smoked his cigars.

"Havana, the best," he would say. One day I asked him to let me smoke and he said, "No, me son, I don't want to see you smoke."

"Then how come you smoke?"
"Some things you start when you young, but it was best you never start. For as you grow older, you realize the very thing you like, is it killing you. Now you can go behind the corner and smoke all you want, I can't stop you, but is the only thing in this life I going beg you not to do."

I never smoked a cigarette from that day on. It was also on one of those Sundays while I cleaned his shoes, I asked him, "Captain, how come you don't have no children?"

He said to me, "I only have one son, but him living in Panama with him mother. Him don't even write to me. But I don't blame him, is my fault. Everybody tell me him was a jacket and I believe them. I never even give him mother any money to take care of him. I never look for him while him was growing up. But when you young, you foolish, you make a whole heap of mistake. I never should believe them people; I should have take care of the boy. Him was mine. And even if it wasn't so, if you train a boy right, him is yours, always yours. Is as simple as that, me son.”

I used to hate it when he called me his son. Yet, I knew more about him than my own real father. All my mother ever told me was that he was a land surveyor from Kingston. That was all she knew, and all that she cared. It never mattered who she slept with. All she needed was a flask of white rum and a jukebox playing Sam Cooke in the background and I would have a new brother or sister.

But as the years went by, I grew more kindly towards the old man. He confided in me more and more, telling me all his secrets, usually after we had closed the bar and had a few drinks between us. But it wasn't until I was sixteen that he allowed me to drink liquor.

Then one Christmas, he said to me, "You is a man now, here, drink this," and he gave me a glass of white rum with orange juice. I got drunk that night and he cleaned me up and put me to bed. The next morning he said to me, "You sure you want to go on with this man-business?" I groaned and he left the room.

"Don't worry, me son. You will grow up in time."
He soon came back carrying some herb-tea mixed with goat's milk.
"Drink this," he said, "it will make you feel better."
He always had remedies for everything. Bush teas for constipation, diarrhea, stomach aches, anything. One time, he heard that I was skulling school; he warned me that if he heard that I was still not going to class, he put some Oil of Mus Love Me, in my soup and that would make me fall in love with one toothed, three hundred pound albino, Matilda, who never bathed. What was I to do? I went to school.

And here he was, my old friend struggling on a boat he'd built with his hands, built with wood left by passing ships. He looked up at me, the corners of his mouth still white from gulping down the milk of magnesia.

"You come back early today. You get the wintergreen from Miss Gwenny."
"Yes, Captain. She say she hope you soon feel better."
"Next time you see her, tell her 'Howdy doo' for me. But I have something to tell you."
"And I have something to tell you. Good news."
"I have to tell you mine first though, mine not too good."
"What wrong?"
"Nothing. Just wait till we get back to the restaurant."
He put on his shirt and packed his tools into his box, pieces of curled wood still clinging to the blade of his plane.
"If you going do a job, do it right."
"You learning though. You learning."
We walked through the pitch and slabs of cedar ready to be packed on the next ship. Empty oil barrels were everywhere. The place smelled like a gas station.

At the restaurant, he gave me the keys to open the door. I opened the door and he walked towards the window.
"You want something to drink, water?”
"No, just sit down, me son. Let me talk with you."
I sat down near the window and looked out. The waves crashed noiselessly against the shore.
"I went to the doctor yesterday. Him say me have 'terminal cancer.' I going to dead."
I couldn't say anything, and when I did, I mumbled, "And they can't do nothing?"
"No, not a thing. Is too late. The whole of me stomach gone, and it soon spread to me liver. I have only a few months."
"And nothing can help you. They can't do nothing? You can't do nothing. Not even your herb tea?"
I started to cry.
"Nothing can help me, not even my herb tea."
He laughed as he said this, tears running down his face. How a man could laugh at a time like that, I don't know.
The next few months went by too quickly. I never told him about my visa, I never told him anything. But I kept waiting for him to tell me something lasting, something of value, the truth for a change. He never did. Always the same stories with a different ending. I buried him four months later and left for America to make a new life.

Prelude

Watching these pelicans
in a moment change from their aerial
grace into killers, chasing
fish that dart in and out of coral
ships, inert on the ocean bed
recovering from the night's hangover
when the fog drifted above the sea's slate
writing her name over and over
like a teenage girl's first love--
the way we write our life
into the lives of those whom we've loved
and those who have loved us,
lapping and overlapping like a net
of dreams, or the way our bodies hold
themselves, pressing each moment
until space collapses into a pinpoint
of light, like the passage of the soul,
from which we emerge, whole
untouched by the darkness

Moon Shadow
A transparent moon hovered over my dashboard
while Al Green crooned, "Let's Stay Together"--
the same moon that raked by back

in St Thomas, and sent pelicans into the gap
between Charlotte Amelia and bald peaks
of Gallows Bay--the same moon that hounded

me in Georgia when I was lost in a field,
running deeper and deeper into the South,
the wild grass clinging to my legs,

their small hairs staining my knees and cuffs.
But I refuse to be ruled by her face
anymore, by her tantrums, turning the clouds

crimson, her sudden shifts in mood, crashing
the tides against the rocks. I see her for what she is,
nothing more. And all that I've known

about her is what I've created. So I can ride
this morning and enjoy the scenery, the silent
sawgrass, singing along with the harmony.

Laureate Blues

For so long, Quincy and Amiri have led the attack
No one could accuse them of being literary hacks
So I’m stepping forward, brothers, I’ve got your back.

They said Quincy lied like it was a cardinal sin.
The brother saw a chance and wanted to cash in,
And what’s more American than lying about your origin?

They accuse Amiri of conspiracy in his verse.
They said Amiri had some crazy, wack ideas in his verse.
Believe me, Milton and Blake, did much much worse

Poets are supposed to be wild and live outside the law,
Their lines are supposed to burn , chafe and leave us raw,
They live, breathe and write all of our flaws.

Besides, Quincy and Amery haven’t broken public trust
With insider trading, S&L looting or exposed their private lusts?
Judge them by their verse, if judge them you must.

And all of you who would blame, curse or deride
These poets of hubris, of overweening pride
Be careful what you do, be careful what you decide
Remember, poets have time on their side

Lamentations II

Tell me, my countryman,
how many of my idrens
are now dead, shot by security
guards, dons, and the police
just because them get catch
sleeping in the wrong place?

How many of my idrens
are now crackheads,
started with weed on the corner,
for they couldn’t see a way out
with only their talent,
so they smoked away the music
wrap up in their chest?

Tell me, please,
how many of my idrens
are now rumheads, the best minds
of my generation, soon to be pensioned
government clerks, dulled by ledgers,
stewed in Appleton?

And now you scold me
for leaving the island? When long ago
I saw there wasn’t enough
room at the trough?
When you worship mediocrity,
instead of good honest work?

No, I going stay here
away from the jeers and the noise.
I prefer to dead at the hand of my enemies,
than to be poisoned by your lies.
So which is the greater love?
You tell me, my countryman.

A Poem for Winsome

Batter my heart, O, three-person’d God,
open my eyes to the bounty of your creation.
Let me become, weak as I am, wine
poured out at the table of my companions, bread
consecrated and broken for my children.
Bind my wounds with your compassion,
gird up my loins with your word.
For you alone are my salvation, Lord.
You have taken me away from my own land
over a sea filled with bitter crossings.
And when I’ve fallen, you’ve never turned your face
away. So forgive me, Lord, when I can’t see your hand
in my life or fail to count even my blows as blessings.
Lead me gently, Lord, to accept your grace.

Another Year, Another Storm

Pine needles spiked the earth
and we retreated to the sanctuary
of the furthest bedroom of the house
away from the wind that scratched the face
of shutters, climbed over our neighbor’s roof;
tore at the tiles, then picked up garbage
cans and hurled them against the power lines—
the neighborhood went dead.

We lit a our hurricane lamp,
while our trembling shadows danced
and the wind pried open the front door,
overturned sofas, tables with unpaid bills,
put out the light and rain slowly erased our names.

Through the darkness, we bowed our heads
and waited for the storm to pass—knowing
that the storm’s winds would soon cease--
knowing without knowing we were safe
and that this storm, too, would pass

Cover Design: Joseph McNair