Perhaps it had come about because Blacks and Indians met in the wake of the 1838 Slave Emancipation. The term “the coolie them place” acknowledged this separateness. They appeared fortified, places apart that, in our small, impoverished districts, stood out for reasons I didn’t entirely understand. To my child’s mind, these yards seemed always hidden, like this one, behind thorn-like trees and corrugated-iron fences or cinder-block walls. Thomas Parish, where people of East Indian descent lived. The compound of dishevelled wooden barrack houses behind the fence where we had stopped was referred to, in a coded but barefaced phrase, as “the coolie them place.” This term was used for any number of yards, scattered across the vast, largely Black ex-slave region of St. Adding to that disturbance, my mother called out a woman’s name, then said, “We here outside.” A voice boomed back, “Him soon ready.” I waited for the earth to open up and swallow us. By stopping, we had violated the natural order of things as I knew them. After we had gone down the hill and passed the first enormous sugarcane field, which stretched right up to the edge of the asphalt road dusted with old ash from burned harvests-the place was called Jane Ash Corner-we stopped in front of a high corrugated-iron fence, columned by maka trees. That day, there was one break in the morning routine. ![]() My mother and I walked downhill toward the school, which was about half an hour away by foot. ![]() I had got ready for school in the usual ways, washing in a plastic basin in the back yard, eating a breakfast of plantain and eggs, and drinking a cup of insipid “gross-stake” tea-the leaves of which came from a fence tree in the yard-then dressing in my khaki uniform, still crisp after the previous day’s wear, though it now bore a distinct funk that I prayed only I could smell. It began on the second morning of the first term, in September, 1995. When I was twelve, and in my final year of primary school, a boy I’ll call Lucas and I became an unlikely pair of morning birds.
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