I'll Never Write My Memoirs by Grace Jones

Author:Grace Jones [Jones, Grace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6.

Discovery

When we left Jamaica, all the Jones children scarred by the force of Mas P and Bishop Walters swore we would never go back. We wanted to get as far away from Jamaica as we could. The church had ruined Jamaica for us. Burned it down. I was the first one to go back, after about seven or eight years never going near it. I crept back in, feeling more Paris than Jamaica, with a French accent that was American, a model and singer, not a teacher or a preacher’s wife. I thought I had put enough distance and trips and enough experience between me and the Bible to deal with the church, but I still thought the followers of Bishop Walters were going to burn me at the stake when I came back.

I did feel that the island tried to kill me. I had near-death experiences. I put that down to the fact that my religious family didn’t want me back, and strange things would happen, like they wanted to keep me away because I had brought such shame. There were three very close shaves with death in Jamaica. A boat almost struck me while I was swimming in the ocean, and a car nearly hit me while I was filming in Ferngully, a few miles outside where I now live part-time in Ocho Rios. Ferngully is on the way to Kingston, where the road slowly curls upward, deeper into the green world, and is named for the different varieties of giant fern there reaching to the sky, competing with each other for light and almost joining in the middle, blocking out the sun and cooling the air.

On the two-lane roads that wind around and through Jamaica, a lot of drivers will try to make what we call a third lane. They will overtake on a corner at sixty miles an hour without caring that a car might be coming the other way. I got out of a car; nothing seemed to be coming, and then suddenly, a car sped out of nowhere and grazed along the side of me, metal scraping along my skin.

Thirdly, at some point, I swear someone planned to murder me. Certain forces on the island seemed very interested in wiping me out of existence because, they figured, I had gotten above myself. There’s a whole other book in that story, and there were a few other minor near-death experiences as well. There was a definite sense that took a long time to fade away that certain people wanted me taken off the island in a wooden box, either because they thought I was the devil, or because they though I didn’t belong there. I thought, I’m going to be killed here. If I had a choice, yes, sure I would like to die on the island, but not yet, and not suddenly, out of the blue, chased into the grave by fate or hate.

It wasn’t the island threatening my life. It wasn’t the church, really.

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