BAMBOO AND FERN

By Ava Eagle Brown

In this courageous story of growing up in one of the poorest areas of Jamaica, Ava Brown learned the life lessons of perseverance and survival. From a young age, Ava's self-taught belief that she was destined for more then the community's recreational activities of sex, raising babies and going to the far

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dr Ava Eagle Brown
• Release date: Apr 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9780993144288

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Birth is a special time for any mother; she forgets all her struggles and latches unto the bundle of joy she is gifted with.

To understand the woman I am today, you’ll have to first learn the story of my beginnings. I was born in an old post office in a poor district near Georges Valley, Jamaica. My mother, who was only fifteen or sixteen at the time and far too young to be a mum, was almost as much of a stranger in this district as I was, having been put out by her parents with ‘good riddance’ for the trouble she (and I) represented. I’ve been told that she had chosen this district, which adjoined her own, because this is where she thought my father was from. Of course, she had gone straight to his parent’s home, which was one of the community’s largest and most impressive, hoping to find shelter. Yet, when she turned up on their doorstep to say that she was pregnant with their son’s child, his mother furiously chased my mum away, answering her request for support and food by mockingly suggesting that she start collecting dirt to make the Milo (a chocolaty drink that all children loved) for her bastard spawn. Shortly thereafter, the young man who was supposed to be my dad absconded. In my childish mind, I imagined him as a scared young man, fleeing the massive responsibility that was to come with a child, hoping to live out the rest of his youth in the carefree manner that all young men seem to crave. It was only as an adult, however, that I began to understand the implications of the rumours that had always circulated around me, whispers that my father’s parent’s response could be based on the fact that he felt I wasn’t his child.

Alone and pregnant in this new town, my mother switched her efforts to finding a new boyfriend to be her breadwinner. She quickly found Jack who was employed at the nearby rice factory, and this was the familial situation into which I was born. Despite Jack making scarcely enough to feed himself, I don’t remember my mother ever having a proper job. Yet, it was painfully clear to me, even as a young child, that our family was poor; by seven years-old the hunger in my belly had already ignited the flame that that was to propel me out of our one-room house, which was by then bursting at its seams to hold my step-father, mother and three siblings as well as myself. Though I had no idea of how I would escape the misery within its walls, I had a fire in my blood that would have burned that little shack down.

Inside the house, a sheet was used to separate us – the adults on one side and us four children on the other. There was never enough bed space, and someone would always wet the bed, so we often slept soaked in urine. We awoke with the sun and the daily chores awaiting us were many. There were the goats to take care of, fetching the water from the only pipe that served our entire community and carrying it home, collecting wood for the fire, and washing clothes. Sometimes, we even had to cook. Babysitting was something I was expected to do from an early age. We were expected to clean the floor of our room every day, using a red dye called ‘red oak’, which made the concrete floor a deep red, then to polish it to a high shine. We weren’t allowed to stop until my mother could see her reflection glaring up at her from below.

It always seemed to be my duty to clean our side of the room, but I had to let my frustrations at this unfairness bubble inside of me in silence, as if I didn’t, a stone, machete or any solid item within my mum’s reach would come towards me, flung from my mother’s strong arm. I must have been born with a streak of rebellion and mother was keenly aware of this and was always ready to squash it out of me. I recall one night when I refused to complete all my chores and my mother showed me who was boss by ensuring I stayed outside for a good few hours in the pitch dark. I had been overly tired from the day when I had refused to finish my chores, instead moving my weary feet along with my siblings headed inside. But, this rebellion had not escaped my mother’s attention, and she had already come up with her own plans that were unbeknownst to me – but not for long! I was at the end of the line filing in the door. When everyone else had made it inside, my mother rapidly slammed the door shut in my face and locked it. She answered my surprised cries by jerking it open again and saying, You want to come in? Then come in nuh. Of course, I thought she was serious and I immediately moved into the doorway. Her strong grip, as she grabbed me and gave me a good hiding left me in such shock that I was more startled to find myself being pushed right back outside and the sound of the lock shutting me out being her final punishment. This had been my first taste of my mother’s penalty meted on those who dared to disobey her. The darkness around me seemed darker than ever; my only light was the inconsistent flickering of the Peanie Wallies. The realisation that I was alone, left to the elements, filled my heart with a wild fear. All the ghost stories we had just told came rushing back. I could feel each dead person we had spoken about now floating around me. I crouched into a tight ball, the night’s silence nearly smothering me. It was over two hours later that my brother opened the door to let me in. This was no heroic or chivalrous effort on my brother’s part; my mum had allowed this kindness, I guess because she knew I had learnt my lesson. My mum told me a story of when she taught me a lesson as a child; she stated that I refused to hold one of my siblings so that she could perform in a concert. She said she got mad and tore off all my clothes from the concert venue to our house. She had a very volatile temper which scarred one of my sisters for life. My sister had gone to the shop on an errand for my mom, when she didn’t come back on time mum went in search of her; upon finding her in a boy’s home, she bit flesh from my sister’s shoulder, scarring her for life.

The rule in our house was that children rose out of bed in the morning, were set to work and then rushed outside, forbidden to go back into the house until the sun was setting and we were ready to sleep. If we lingered in the morning, we would be awakened by a face full of cold water. However, this was rare as the bed was normally so full of people that we were already being jostled awake or pushed out by the smell and feel of urine. Before we came in the evenings, we would have to fill up pans with water for the next morning and was ourselves. Our house didn’t have a bathroom, so everyone bathed outside – boys and girls alike. It wasn’t until I started ‘feathering’ (growing pubic hair) that the adults decided it was time grant some privacy to this routine and they built a washroom out of some salvaged corrugated zinc sheets.

On the evenings that my mother cooked dinner, we would all gather in a jostling mass around the old makeshift kitchen outside, which stood near to where we would bathe. After we had collected our dinner, we would each find a somewhat comfortable stone to sit on and eat. There were always dogs around, so our mealtime was filled with as much dog’s breath as food. As soon as we got our meal, we would try to eat as quickly as possible, with the hope that someone else would ‘buss’ (be full) so that we could help them finish their meal. There was no TV to watch after dinner, so we stayed outside, sitting on the stones and making jokes with one another or taking turns to make up ghost stories. Since we had no electricity, we bottled up the dancing fireflies we called ‘Peanie Wallie’ to chase the blackness away from around us. Finally, when we were too tired to stay up any longer, we would retreat to the dank and cramped bed. I was always among the last to stay up, simply because I despised the sleeping arrangements.

We had a sparse wardrobe and the few pieces we had were all hand-me-downs. Each of us had one pair of good shoes, and this was the pair we would wear only to church - school was attended bare-footed. There was also only one uniform for each of us, which was the required outfit for primary school attendance, so we had to wash the white blouse every day. We attended the local public school, where our classrooms were always overcrowded. I can remember attending my fourth grade studies alongside more than fifty other pupils crammed into the overly boisterous room. I’m sure the teachers did their best in this situation, but they always moved the lessons along according to the brightest students’ progress, meaning the slower students (like me) were often left behind. Even so, I did my best to keep up. We walked to school like every other child in the district; it was only the ones who went to school outside of our area that were driven. For us, lunch usually consisted of fried egg and bread, which had been placed in a brown paper bag along with a mixture of sugar water and lime as our drink. Unfortunately, by the time lunchtime rolled around at mid-day the egg would have begun to smell really unpleasant. Sometimes, I would hide my lunch in the bushes near the school and use an object to mark its spot so that I could find it at lunchtime. I never realised the prevalency at that time of mongoose or rats in the bushes; if I knew then what I know now about all the viciously hungry creatures living around us, I would never have done such a thing!

There were times when there was no food in our house to pack for lunch at school and I was left with two choices, go without or stay home. I always chose the go-without option, trying instead to ward off the eventual hunger by eating as hefty a breakfast as possible – although this strategy was a challenge and sometimes completely infeasible. Occasionally, we could come home for a lunch of overnight-roasted dumpling. These dumplings are traditional simple food in Jamaica, made from a paste of flour, water and salt that has been rolled into a spherical shape and then fried or boiled. The ones we ate had been boiled and then left overnight and cooked on a coal fire; the end result was a roasted dumpling that had absorbed most of the charcoal it had been cooked upon. My mother would serve these roasted dumplings with mint tea. We would rush through the meal, drink some water and run back to school so that we wouldn’t miss the afternoon classes.

Truth be told, though, by the time I would reach the school I was already hungry again. This was one of those little life lessons that no matter how much effort I put in, very little of my hunger for a better life would be satisfied while I remained reliant on someone else. At the end of each school, day we would rush home, not because we were excited to play evening games with one another, but because we had a pile of chores waiting for us. We did, however, entertain ourselves along the walk home, usually by playing cricket or catch with sour oranges. Sometimes, we would steal some precious minutes to play this game called ‘stuck’, in which two of us would stand at opposite ends, facing each other, with a third one of us in the middle and trying to ‘site’ (dodge) a ball (or whatever object we could find for throwing) that was thrown between the first two. We always played these games in the middle of a road, the passing cars blowing their horns to send us scattering out of their way. Thankfully, none of us were ever hurt!

It was the custom of the children from our school to gather in little groups to walk home together. I yearned to find that perfect group to which I fit in, but I was always on the periphery of anyone that I tried to join. Mostly, I was pushed aside by a teasing remark about how I was always getting good grades at school. That was just the start, though. At times, some of the harsher girls would lay wait for me to inflict some type of physical torment; it was an easy escape if they were only intending to pull my hair or spit on me, but things got more challenging when they decided to wallop me as a gang with their punching fists and kicking feet. The times that they beat me up, I never tattled. I would just hobble home and pretend to my mother that I had a hard fall or something else clumsy; I gave these selfdeprecating excuses for my dirty uniform because I didn’t want her to get into any more quarrels with anyone in the district. These types of raucous spats between neighbours were common, and boy did I hate them! Since I never was a tattletale, though, the bullying went on for a few years, becoming worse when I reached grade five and became more serious about my schoolwork.

As kids, we would roam the entire district and no place was out of bounds for us. We would go searching for fruits, like mangoes, and climb any tree that promised a good view regardless of how tall it might be. I was a tomboy and held no interest in dolls. I was much more interested in all of the energetic things that the boys were doing, possibly because my closest sibling in age was a boy and we went almost everywhere together. We would often hang out with his friends, who were mainly boys. We would go fishing and hunting for birds - just about anything that was an outdoor adventure; there were no limits, as long as we stayed out of trouble.

My brother and I had daily outdoor adventures, because we had to hunt for food to snack on if we got hungry between meals. When I see children today, who are never far away from a filled refrigerator and go around laden with the latest technological gadgets, I am shocked to consider how humble our lives were. We made most of our own toys from whatever we could find. We used to collect the sour oranges that were unfit to eat to make wheels for play-trucks. We would gather empty drink boxes to serve as the people in the trucks. By attaching strings to the front of the play trucks, we could pull our ‘cars filled with people’ up and down the road. We also used to make a trap called a ‘calaban’. This was a rectangular box made out of wicker that we had woven from whatever pliable wood we could find and used to catch birds. We would prop it upside down on a stick, to hold it up, and scatter seeds leading inside it to bait the birds into it. We would hide nearby and watch the unsuspecting bird follow the trail, pecking away and steadily walking forward until it was under the calaban. Before it realised what was happening, we would pull the stick out and entrap the bird. I’m sorry to say, in most cases this bird would then become our snack. We would eat it on the spot after quickly roasting it on a wood fire.

When I was around eight years-old, my thoughts began to drift towards a curiosity of who my father was. I began to wonder why my surname was different from my siblings’, who all shared the surname of my stepdad. To make matters worse, I had my mother’s surname. This pointed discrepancy made me feel awkward, more so because I didn’t understand the reasoning behind it. In my family there was hardly any verbal communication, and without being told, I knew there were some questions that should be kept to oneself. This all came to the surface one day, though, as I was out with my brother and his group of friends playing our regular bird hunting game. One of the boys suddenly asked me if I knew that my dad was the man named Dave who lived only two minutes walking distance from my house. What was he talking about, I wondered? How could a man living so close to me who acts like such a stranger be my dad? My brother, who was protective of me, was furious with this sort of talk going on, and wound up starting a fight with the other boy. When we went home that evening, I casually mentioned this strange comment to my mum hoping to have her spill the secret as to whether this was true or not. She immediately grew enraged, throwing stones, ashes, pots, pans, and anything else at me that was in sight. I was completely confused by what I had done wrong that had triggered this outburst, but I learned that I had better kill this idea in my mind. Afterward, life continued on as usual and the subject never came up again. When I would be out and about, however, I would see this man who was supposed to be my father. I dared not approach him and he never showed any special interest in me but to say a regular ‘hello’ or ask me to run to the local shop – no different than how he treated any of the multitudes of children wandering past his house. I always complied with his request without question because we were taught to respect our elders, plus he always gave a little token for our efforts, so I wasn’t about to complain.

At age ten and a half, our family situation changed drastically when my stepdad lost his job at the rice factory. My mother had just recently given birth to two more babies, which meant that I was expected to switch to a more adult role as a partial breadwinner for the family. It became my responsibility to find my way to a nearby property that was privately held and pick as many of the mangoes as I could to go out and sell them throughout the day. I was anxious about the prospect because I knew that this property was where airplanes would land in the wee hours of the night to collect the illegal marijuana grown in this region. I would be entering dangerous territory to complete my new task. Until then, I had been relatively fearless, but in those inky black mornings when I had to sneak around in the mango field, fear came at me from every direction. I feared being shot because I was trespassing and I feared being taken captive if I wandered into a marijuana operation and that the police would catch me. But, this task was not an option and I had to do it to help keep our family alive, so it came to be that most mornings while the community slept I joined the other eldest children of neighbouring families who were sneaking around with torches to find mangoes in unventured territory. We collected the mangoes in baskets carried on our heads, which sat atop a ‘catah’ that we had fashioned from a piece of folded cloth, normally old clothes, to help cushion our heads against the heavy load when the basket became full with mangoes.

I hated my life at this stage. I wished that I was the baby of the family, so I could still be in bed sleeping that early in the morning. We would try and get back from the mango walk before six am, so that the mangoes could be sorted and washed, keeping only the most bruised and unpleasantly soft for ourselves to eat. As soon as that was done, I would be sent to anywhere that the mangoes might sell best that day; the location changed frequently. Most days I couldn’t make it to school because the need to sell every mango so that my family could eat outweighed my desire to sit in a classroom.

Even with my contribution, our family’s diet dwindled. We would eat rice or chicken back and turn cornmeal, a dish similar to the Nigerian ‘ebba’ or ‘gari’ or the Ghanaians ‘banku’. The only cereal we knew was plain cornflakes and someone had to have acquired a barrel sent from ‘foreign’ that we could get a small portion from. More regularly, we had oats; they were not the most flavourful food, but they were filling. My stepdad had cows, so he would milk them every morning for us. Milk was about the only consistent thing in our house; I guess that’s where my love for cornmeal porridge came from. Whatever we had for breakfast would have to last my family the whole day, until I came home with money from the mango sales. Yet, too often, I was only able to make enough to buy myself a snack for energy to continue the selling day and pay for my transportation back to our home when the market was far away. Sometimes, when the day’s sales were slow, I would have to lower the price per dozen just to get rid of them and make any money; after all, any amount I made was good since we hadn’t bought the mangoes in the first place.

As I said, myself and some others from my community would sell mangoes anywhere that I thought there might be a demand; on the train rails, in the park, inn the shopping plaza and at any temporary attractions where people were gathering. If there was a fete, fare or sports day, I tried to be right in the thick of it. There were days when we would be selling mangoes in the same region where my school was located and the kids from my class would recognise me in passing.

They rarely missed a chance to greet me with a mocking shout, saying Mango gal! You are so poor, you skull (skip) school to sell mangoes. At times, I felt like running away and abandoning my basket of mangoes, but I would force myself to just sit there and endure their chants because I knew the consequence that would meet me at home if I ever did such a thing. Around this time, I would have been in grades four or five, when the students were prepared for S.A.T’s and I didn’t want to fall behind, since I attended so irregularly. I asked my teachers for the books that were used in the class to study on my own, but was told our family couldn’t afford it.

I had heard about a man who would be my uncle if Dave was really my dad. To this date, however, no one, especially not Dave, had acknowledged me as their daughter; although by then the word was out in our entire district about this possibility. Close to Christmas that year, I boldly sent a message to my supposed ‘uncle’ to ask if he could buy me the books for the S.A.T’s, explaining that the exams were to be in summer and I needed to study. I was stunned when he sent the books – it was the first time anyone showed me any love. Imagine, a total stranger was the first to show me love, yet I saw my mum and stepdad every day, and although I knew they loved me, they never showed it. When I look back on this situation, myself a parent now, I am resolved to do everything in my power to ensure that my children know that I love them, not just by saying it (which I do often), but by showing them as well. When I was a child, I lived with the idea that my mum hated me. Every interaction left me feeling unloved and unwanted and I still carry traces of this painful emotion even now as an adult living far away from that small Jamaican village.

After I received the S.A.T. books, I was inspired to hurriedly complete my chores so that I could sit under the trees to study them. Unfortunately, upon my first glimpse of book one, I was only bewildered and I realized that this task was going to be as challenging as my daily task of gathering and selling the stolen mangoes. My eleventh birthday was approaching and I saw no end in sight to my daily routine. Little did I know that very soon my life would again take another turn of fate. Dave had begun living with a pretty woman named Sarah. Not only was she the most