“Somehow, the arrangement was made for Lucas and me to walk to school together in the morning.” In a new Personal History, the poet Ishion Hutchinson reflects on an unexpected childhood friend.
When I was twelve, and in my final year of primary school, a boy I’ll call Lucas and I became an unlikely pair of morning birds. My mother engineered the union. It began on the second morning of the first term, in September, 1995.
To me, though, the phrase had been just a phrase, something purely rhetorical, a warning I’d heard and obeyed so as not to provoke a whipping from my mother, until a year before, when she had a nervous breakdown. Catatonic for days, she would suddenly erupt in fury, breaking objects and seeming to want to break me. I was eleven, and I had to tie her down. It hurt. Two Black obeah men—spiritualists—got the credit for curing her.
So we did, taking the bend around Jane Ash Corner that led out to the town’s square. From there, we would climb a hill and cross a field to school. Neither of us spoke. I glanced over at him; his head was now raised, and his eyes dead straight ahead. I registered more: he had a light coppery fuzz of baby hair on his cheek, and tiny brown spots were sprayed across the side of his face that I could see. I didn’t know then that these were called freckles.
But I felt as though the stinging stare of his eyes remained on me. I had never seen eyes like those before. They had not only blinded my own eyes, as per my suggestion, but had done away with my tongue as well. As soon as we got through the school gate, he went his way without ceremony. Just as I had never seen him on the school grounds in my previous four years at the school, I didn’t see him a single time that day.
I hadn’t formulated the right question. I don’t remember if it was the next evening, or the evening after that, or over the weekend—after I’d tolerated Lucas’s silence on the walk to school for the whole first week, his head obstinately tilted forward and eyes averted—that I, finally, figured out what to ask my mother.She considered this a while. Her words came out slowly: “Well, they is me friend, you know. From small days, me friend and her man flexing.
“Your mumma a watchman, too?” He drew closer to me; his innumerable freckles seemed to have spoken. “Stop follow, follow me, you hear? Me not Jesus, me don’t want no followers.” I actually found his last statement funny, but he had also provoked my ire. A beat or two passed before he said, “No, it all right.” Then, with what could be best described as a hen’s cackle, he laughed and said, “Me know you love to follow me!” Laughing still, he continued, “Just don’t ask me a bag of questions, like you is the district constable.”“That soon come, man. Two twos and your waist will have no line.” We were beside ourselves with laughter. Over the next few weeks, this evolved into a private language between us.
People in general began to fade away in the mornings when I walked with Lucas. We existed out of reach of the ever-prying village eyes, surveilling from the doorways and yards of fenced and fenceless shanties, out of reach of the imbecilic chatter and judgment that kept the old, cold comfort of plantation suspicion alive. From the time that Lucas came out of his gate, and until we were through the gates of the school a half hour later, I seemed unable to recognize anybody but him.
Bewildered as she was, she casually unwound my turban. And, just as casually, picking up the biggest pair of scissors I had ever seen, she snipped twice at my head. Several strands of dreads, lifeless like dried vines, fell to the floor. The sight of my own hair numbed me. She then told me to pick the dreads up, dismissing me home with this clear instruction for my mother: “Tell your mother, ‘Finish the job,’ or don’t come back.” I was giving Lucas a rough version of what took place.
It was out of this mood—this strange guilt—that some days later I asked him about the shiny scar on his forehead. He traced two fingers on it and said, “This? You don’t think me born with it?” I was half ready to believe him. But he gave his cackle laugh and said, “This from long, long time, man.” His finger was still on the gash, smoothing it out, like. He wasn’t going to say more, and I wasn’t sure what other question to ask. Instead, I said, “Lemme see it.
We had just crossed into a brushy track of tall trees, which led out to the last stretch toward school. No one else was on the track. He pulled over to one side and sat on the ground, hanging his head. He let out a single loud squeal, which quickly became an almost noiseless whimper. His body convulsed in spasms. With one hand on his shoulder, I used the other to try to lift his head. I asked, “Wha’mphen, wha’mphen?” His head was unyielding, but he didn’t push my hands away.
I went off, to be at the mercy of the principal. I didn’t look back for Lucas. Whether he entered those gates or not that morning, I never found out. Manual labor made up the income basis of every second person living in St. Thomas. My mother, when young, escaped that fate by moving to my father’s parish, Portland. There, constrictions existed, but less so, or in less debasing ways, than in St. Thomas. My mother drummed into me daily that neither chop nor pick would be my destiny. “By hook or crook,” she would say, “you going to high school.” That was that.
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