Anaya Wins -- Work In Progress

I'm so happy you're here! Welcome to Anaya's World...

Chapter One

The friends who Anaya shared her walk home from school all skittled away to their colorful brick houses but as usual, she dilly-dallied the rest of the way.  She stooped down to watch some of the area boys play barefoot-football on the street, but when one player rammed the ball into the makeshift goal of two broken stones, it zipped through then continued on toward her face. She sprung up and scampered away. 

The street teemed with neighbors either slapping dominoes against wooden tables, guzzling bottles after bottles of Red Stripe Beer or gossiping while shelling peas, sweeping porch steps or braiding hair.  Reggae music blasted from the parked pushcart of a vendor selling sugar cane and boiled crabs. Anaya spotted a friend who waved her over.  

Deborah Hemlock, whose dad owned and managed a huge garage across the street from her home, waited outside while her father prepared to lock up for the evening.  His employees were already trickling out through a narrow gate carved out in the middle of the chain link fence that secured the broken cars waiting on the lot for repairs. He was still in his office rifling through invoices and counting money, so Anaya dashed across the street, which made her schoolbag bounce “thump, thump, thump” against her side.

“Wha’ ‘appen?” Anaya greeted the girl.

“Girl, you almost got your head knocked off your body!” Deborah giggled.

“No sah, mi too swift fi di ball ketch mi,” Anaya bragged. “Mi jus use up mi dandy-shandy skills and dodge it.”

The Hemlocks’ car business was one of the many commercial properties that littered Anaya’s street. Actually, Deborah’s family owned a sprawling two-story home nestled in the belly of Stony Hills, St. Andrew, one of Jamaica’s most affluent neighborhoods.  According to the girl, they had their very own swimming pool, a swing set, and she didn’t even have to share rooms with her two older sisters who were already in high school.

Deborah attended the prestigious Omega Preparatory and was shuttled to and from school by her dad. The older siblings were also chauffeured but by the family’s paid driver who also worked at the garage part-time. There was also a live-in helper and a yardman.  Her house was so high in the hills, Deborah gushed one day, she could see the entire city of Kingston kneeling at her feet from her balcony, and at night the city lights blazed so brightly, it looked like the nation’s capital was on fire.  

Anaya shuddered.  

Because of ongoing political unrest, she had witnessed storefronts running along the corporate corridor close to her neighborhood being torched.  The "blum-blum-blum" of gunshots being fired were as normal now as fire clappers going off on New Year’s Eve night. Despite the fact it’s been a little more than a year since the violent 1980 general elections, the politically stirred urban nightmare continued among the poor.

People she knew and loved had already moved out of their homes for fear of being punished for supporting the opposition party and everyone else who was left behind did all they could to stay out the way. So, the idea that from the hills her entire city appeared to be burning, gave her an overwhelming feeling of dread. When she shared this fear with her pal, the other girl chuckled nervously. 

“I was speaking figuratively!” Deborah tried reassuring her.  “I was just trying to say how magical down here looks from my house when the electricity comes on at night.”

“A-a magic yuh call it?" Anaya sputtered, eyes widening.. "What if what yuh been seeing is people place burning down fi real?"

“But it’s not!” Deborah said. “Even my mummy and her friends sit out there all the time when we have parties, and they say it’s beautiful.”

“Mi know my mada would neva say some chupidness like dat,” Anaya said. “Nutten nuh pretty.”

“Well, first of all, you better not be calling my mummy stupid,” Deborah shot back, raising her eyebrows until they almost touched tendrils of her precisely drawn baby hair. “Secondly, if it’s so bad down here why don’t your family move?”

Anaya wanted to point out that she would never disrespect an adult and that it was Mrs. Hemlock’s views that were being criticized, but she was more concerned about the unsettling implication in Deborah’s question. If it was that simple for her family to live outside the ghetto, why hadn’t her mama move? The truth is that she didn’t know how much of a choice her mama had to move the family into a nicer neighborhood, but at almost 13 years old, she knew that there was a social and geographical division between the rich and the poor. Not to mention daily reports of the entrepreneurs who closed down their businesses to migrate to countries like England and America. The families who stayed behind, stayed away and with their kind. In her neighborhood this was dubbed “politricks”.

It was quite obvious that both political parties had improved ways for their respective downtown constituents to overdose on poverty.  And, it certainly didn’t seem like residents from the other 13 parishes were courted as intensely as the ghetto people.  In exchange for loyalty, politicians dangled low-paying government jobs in the faces of hard-working residents. They shook hands and passed out free beer to some of the youngest and brightest.  Yet, at nights, neighbors were the ones who had to take turns “bleaching” to make sure no harm entered the community. 

Some nights, it’s the enemy that lived within the community that showed up in its various forms of terror.

About a year ago, it was after 2 am when houses from the tenement yard next door to Anaya’s home fell into a clattering heap of badly charred brick, wood and memories. That night, she watched in horror as her neighbors’ faces flickered in the eery-bright orange of a fire that gutted their homes and threw the inhabitants out on the streets.

A child had accidentally knocked over a lit candle after the light company turned off his family’s electricity because of non-payment. It took the fire fighters quite some time to remove the barricades that residents had erected to keep the community safe at nights from villains who lived outside the area.

Even before the first responders left a smoking rubble behind, the homeless had already secured shelter, food and clothes from other poor families. The one thing nobody knew how to fix was the ugly blemish of another badly scarred and barren open lot that popped up like a pimple on the face of the neighborhood.

Anaya watched how rapidly her community became as secure as a bug taking shelter underneath a shoe.