Redemption Ground by Lorna Goodison

Author:Lorna Goodison [Lorna Goodison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912408146
Publisher: Myriad Editions
Published: 2018-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

14

Hurricanes

June too soon,

July stand by,

August look out you must,

September remember,

October all over.

I WAS ONLY four years old, but I remember that my mother put my one-week-old baby brother Nigel in the bottom drawer of the bureau. She said it was to protect him in case we lost our roof.

I remember my whole family – my mother and father and my eight siblings Barbara, Howard, Carmen, Bunny, Kingsley and Karl the twins, Keith, Nigel and me all huddled together in our house, which under normal circumstances would have been described as ‘cramped’, but with a hurricane raging outside felt safe, warm and cosy.

It was August 1951 and Hurricane Charlie was about to prove what we all believed at the time to be true: that a man hurricane – that is, a hurricane named after a man – was badder than one named for a woman.

Charlie proceeded to rain hard and heavy blows on the island of Jamaica. It had made landfall during the night of August 17th and quickly moved across the island, beating down everything in its path as it went. Some time during the morning of August 18th, the wicked winds and torrential rain suddenly stopped. ‘This is just the eye of the hurricane,’ my father explained, as the curious stillness descended, ‘Charlie will be coming back.’ Then he opened the front door and allowed my older siblings out into the yard to splash about in the deep rainwater pool that had collected outside.

Just as suddenly as it had stopped, the wind started up again, announcing its return through weird whistling noises and a frantic stirring of the waters of what had become a big wading pool in which tree branches and fallen fruit bobbed about. Soaked to the skin and deliriously happy, my siblings dashed inside and changed out of their wet clothes while my father bolted the front door shut with a wide heavy plank of wood dropped into two iron hooks set on either of the doorframe. During the calm of the eye, my mother had managed to brew up a big pot of Fry’s cocoa, which we drank as we ate big thick slices of hard dough bread with butter and bully beef. We settled in again, bellies full, just in time. Charlie, it seemed, had rested enough and was returning with more brute force and power than before. By the time he left, there were 152 people dead and 2,000 homeless.

‘June too soon, July stand by, August look out you must, September remember, October all over’ is what they taught us in primary school about hurricane season. We believed this, and come September we expected to look back and remember, and when October came around, the people of the Caribbean would all breathe a sigh of relief, expecting to feel safe for another year because hurricane season was all over. And then came Gilbert. ‘Wild Gilbert’, as one of our finest lyricists, Lloyd Lovindeer, christened the hurricane that battered down Jamaica in September 1988.

In between Charlie and Gilbert, Jamaica had experienced a number of storms, including Hurricane Hazel.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.