![]() Out here, I spent my early childhood in a wild state of happiness, stretched out under the almond trees fed by brine, relishing every fish eye like precious candy, my toes dipped in the sea’s milky lapping. My parents washed outside in a communal shower hastily built with thrown-away plywood, while my siblings and I bathed in basins set down close by, next to a standpipe in the yard. Children were not allowed to use the latrine, since we were in danger of falling in, so we were each tasked to keep a plastic chimmy in the house, emptying it into the sea every morning. Instead, all the villagers shared a pit-latrine, about 300 yards away from the farthest house. With the windblown houses and ramshackle beach, indoor plumbing was a luxury, so none of the houses in the village had bathrooms. Out here, I spent my early childhood in a wild state of happiness Somewhere in this house, or the next, is where my mother keened her first cry, and my grandmother keened her last. My aunts Sandra and Audrey shared a room with my cousin, while my grandfather and his girlfriend slept with their three young daughters in their own room. ![]() I shared one room with my parents and my brother, Lij, who was two years younger than me, all four of us sleeping on the same bed, while my newborn sister, Ife, who was four years younger, slept in a hand-me-down playpen next to us. Under a zinc roof held together with sandy planks and sea-rusted nails, we lived in the shrinking three-bedroom house my grandfather had built with his own hands. My family lived in close quarters and knew the subtle dialect of each other’s dreams. Here, time moved slowly, cautiously, and a weatherworn fisherman, grandfather or uncle, may or may not lift a straw hat from his eyes to greet you. Here there was no slick advert of a “No Problem” paradise, no welcome daiquiris, no smiling Black butler. Hidden just beyond the margins of the postcard idea of Jamaica was our little community, a modest hamlet shrouded behind a wall of wind-gnarled trees and haphazard cinder blocks, a half mile of hot sand browned from our daily living and sifting between bare toes, glittering 300 yards in every direction to the sea. We lived by the seaside until I was five years old, in our tiny fishing village called White House, which belonged to the fishermen of my mother’s family, her father and grandfather.
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