The Angels' Share by Garfield Ellis

Author:Garfield Ellis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2015-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

Father reaches down into the soil where the grass is dry. He drags a handful and rubs it between his fingers so I may see it turn to dust in his hands.

“Ah, the land, this land, this is the be-all and end-all of everything. It is this land that started it, this land that finished it, this land. You see this, this is the challenge. This! To make the crop grow on this—that is the challenge, the same way T.P. Lecky made a cow to survive our climate and be totally Jamaican. I wanted to make a way to grow crop on this land.”

“And how is that?”

“This,” he says. “This grass is the most important thing. You put the grass to cover the crop, to trap and hold the moisture. As the crop grows, the same grass deteriorates and becomes fertilizer . . . and you cover the root with more. Till rain comes . . . if it does, but even if it does not . . . the grass is hope.”

It is a hot afternoon. Hot and dry. And the shadows of the thin leaves of the mango tree do not extend far beyond its root. But they shift in a hesitant breeze to play on my father as he sits and speaks. There is a dreamlike quality to his speech now, and there is lowness to it as if he is going back to days long before me when he was but a youth whose head was filled with dreams . . . and his path a sad one.

There is love in his voice; there are sixty-seven years of dreams in there. And emerging is a father I have never seen.

“But why this land?”

“Because it is mine.”

“But you could have bought land anywhere in the country.”

“Because it is mine, because it is yours. This is our land—given from generations, through manumission, from slavery. Your great-great-grandmother was the first woman to own land of this size here. This land cost her her life and many other things. This land has struggle, this land has history.”

“Yes? This land?”

“This land. You see all of that side? The river use to run through it from where you are right up here. But when your great-great-grandmother got the land they diverted the river to dry her out. Poor woman never knew anything. But now we know. Now I know how to fix it.”

“I don’t understand. Where is all of this coming from, old man?”

“All right, you see this tree I am sitting under right now? One of your ancestors was hanged right here in this tree. Use to have a man called Vassel—all this land from the mountain here right back to the sea was called Vassel Pen. Cruel old man, that Vassel, came from England during slavery to work as overseer on a large plantation in Savanna-la-Mar. Was a poor white man who never know much about farming, buy the land because he felt he could make Alligator Pond into a

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