A Daily Walk to Friendship

“Mind your eye them drop out.” He said it quietly, his head still pointed directly in front of him. I hadn’t realized that my glance had turned into a stare. I wondered whether to apologize, but found myself hissing through my teeth as I said, “Is my eye them, come jook them out.”

He turned full face to me—more freckles and a pebble-size, scabbed-over gash on his forehead—and I saw his eyes for the first time. They were amber-colored, gold. He assessed my challenge, then decided I was too petty to be taken seriously and turned his face back to the road.

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.

And, for the rest of that year, I never saw him around school—neither on the playground during break times, nor at the concrete water troughs, which were always crowded, nor at any of the shade spots where lunch was eaten and scandals were stirred. Nor did I see him in the evening when school was out and little gangs were formed to raid mango groves or go off to find sweetshops somewhere behind God’s back or simply to play-fight in the field before rushing home. Lucas was nowhere to be seen. I saw him only in the mornings, when I arrived at his gate, without my mother, who accompanied me just that first time.

In the evening of that first day, when I got home from school, I asked my mother a barrage of questions. I sought desperately to know two things: who were those people, and why was I to go with Lucas to school? My mother’s answers were less than extraordinary. Those people, she told me, were people from down the hill; the mother she knew from “back in the days.” Yesterday, she’d run into her and found out that she had lived in Jane Ash Corner for “donkey years now” and had a “wash-belly” boy my age, who attended the same school as me.

Out of this last tidbit, somehow, the arrangement was made for Lucas and me to walk to school together in the morning. After all, we were both in sixth grade, our last year of primary school, and “it would be nice.” The mothers had also talked about us walking home together in the evenings, but after school Lucas went with his father and older brothers “far, far clear over Holland Bay,” where his father had a farm and set fish pots to catch “tom tom”—river mullets. Lucas’s mother sold the farm produce, along with the fish, at big markets like the one in Morant Bay, a principal town about fourteen miles outside the district. This farm-going in the evenings explained why I never saw Lucas when school was out. It did not explain why I never saw a peep of him during school hours. That, and so much else, was left unanswered.

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.

“How them different from who sick you?”

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. Their people—them couldn’t change that and them did have to accept them. That is how love strong. Look see, they live years on top of years with them pickney them in the same yard. I didn’t even know that, since me did move away. Is plenty generations over there in that yard, you know.”

From this, I guessed that Lucas’s father was Indian, which would have made Lucas “coolie royal,” a designation reserved for someone of Indian and Black heritage. The matter should’ve ended there. But, within the blurred and shifting boundaries of my surroundings, I was still confused. Lucas didn’t seem to fit into the “coolie royal” category. According to my understanding at the time, to be “coolie royal,” Lucas would have had to have mahogany skin and silken, loosely curly black hair. Many of the students with Indian blood at our school fell into that category. Thinking about this now, from my writing desk in upstate New York in 2022, it occurs to me that “coolie royal” was another of those cynical colonial concepts—like “high-brown,” which Lucas, though his skin was literally brown, was not. How much energy is wasted on defining visible distinctions within the fluid spectrum of Creole identities?

I began to wonder. If Lucas was not Indian, or “coolie royal,” like some of our schoolmates, or “red,” like his mother, how was he to be classified? It wasn’t classification in and of itself that I was curious about but something for which I wasn’t sure language existed. Curiosity was hard to kill, and Lucas didn’t make it easy.

The following Monday morning, I arrived at his gate and announced myself. His mother shouted his name from in the yard, followed by her variation of “What a boy fi titivate!” He exited—quickly drawing and tying the gates shut—with his head hung low. I smiled and gave him a friendly greeting. He walked past me, saying nothing. Taken aback, I stood a while, long enough that I had to trot to catch up with him. As he had on the mornings of the previous week, he held his head forward, eyes averted, in a world of his own. Still, I played it cool and said, “Wha’gwaan?” I rushed to add, “You going Holland Bay this evening?”

He stopped abruptly, turned to me with a screw face, and spat out, “You a watchman?”

“Watch you? No, is me mother say. . . .”

“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.

“Eh, eh, look here, Christ”—I couldn’t resist—“you are nobody for anybody to watch, worse to go follow, so settle your nerves.” Still a hair’s breadth away from me, his face glowered. At any moment, I expected him to strike me. But, just like he had done the first morning, when he had decided I was too petty to be taken seriously, he turned his face back to the road and started walking. Sure enough, I followed him.

I returned the next morning. The routine began afresh: my call, his mother’s response, his exit through the gates, the silent walk to school. The same routine the morning after that. Every morning, when I woke, the first image in my head was the face of that surly boy with whom, locked in a spiky quiet, I walked to school. This was my life now. I hated it.

Thursday morning came. Just as we had rounded the bend of Jane Ash Corner, I said to him, “We not have to walk together to school at all, you know. There is plenty way to get there. You take one, me take one.” I said it, half looking at the ground and half looking at the side of his implacable face. The humiliation made me furious.

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.”

“You see me with big rum belly like constable?” I said, chuckling.

“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. So that we were, for a good half hour of every morning, on our walks to school, oddly birds of one feather.

There were other little groups of students walking to school, some with parents or other grownups. They would stare at us—at him, really—but they never interacted with us. Lucas was unfazed. He kept his focus on me, if we were talking, or else in front of him or on the roadside bushes, his head held high. This made him seem aloof, a posture so different from the dejected, low-hanging-face boy who exited his gate every morning, the posture he maintained for the first few minutes of our walk.

In rare moments, somebody from one of these little groups, as if sent on reconnaissance, would draw near to us. He—it was always a boy—would scuttle back to his group after getting a version of the stinging stare that Lucas had given me on our first morning. One day, someone threw a taunt, an arsenal of taunts, actually, at Lucas. Like my guesses at his nickname, these taunts were food-based:

“Yow, yellow-heart roast breadfruit boy!”

“Hey, bruised jackfruit, hear me a call to you?”

“Oy there, turned cornmeal face!”