The Last Warner Woman (10 page)

Shhhhhhhhh

He don’t guess how Captain Lucas could sometimes take his long stick and beat the daylights out of you if he get a vision that you have sin in your life. And when Captain beat you, you can’t say nothing. I get my first beating within the first month of joining the band. I did wake up one night and Captain Lucas was standing tall, tall in the doorway. He don’t have on his headtie or his robe or his shirt or his trousers or nothing at all. His man-parts was standing tall and straight like him own self. Bishopess Herbert who did usually sleep beside me was nowhere. I don’t know where she gone all on a sudden. And truth be told, it make me excited that I am about to do big-woman things and that my childhood was now far behind me. When he put his man-parts up inside my body I bear the pain and try to move in a way that would please him. I try to make sounds that I imagine is big-woman sounds. But maybe I should have been quiet. Maybe he think I was taking too much joy from it. He never say nothing then, but when we was gathered at church the next night, waiting for him to deliver his sermon, I ongly feel when his rod bust open my head. He shout out
Jezebel.
He say God give him a vision that I was a Jezebel woman with Jezebel thoughts and Jezebel ways. I take the beating, meek as a lamb, and later that night I rub aloe on the places where the rod did break my skin. But Mr. Writer Man don’t know none of that. He think Revival is something simple, something beautiful to look at from afar. But Revival was pain and joy mix up together like flour and water. This painting real pretty for true. But when time I look on it, I don’t see myself. I don’t see any kind of life I ever live. I cannot put my nose against it and smell the night, or the almonds, or the sweat of eighty-five men and women. I cannot run my fingers along it and feel the small stones we did fall upon. I don’t even see the colors of the frocks we did wear. Our frocks did have to wash and wear, wash and wear, a hundred times and more, till they was a shade as dull as dusk, duller than any color that in this painting.

I
T IS A WELL-KNOWN FACT IN JAMAICA THAT SEVERAL
men and women born between 1920 and 1960 were saddled with names their parents never intended them to have. In almost every instance this was the postmistress’s mistake. For if a child was born at home, the parents could simply go to the post office and fill out a form. If they were illiterate, or just could not be bothered, they would have the postmistress fill it out for them. This led to all kinds of misnamings. Sometimes the postmistress simply heard wrong. At other times, out of spite or boredom, she decided to spell the name exactly as the parents had pronounced it. There is, for this reason, a whole generation of people in Jamaica who have
H
’s in their names where there should have been no
H.
Handrew, Hanthia, Hantoinette, Hemily, Harnold. But the mistake made in the case of Adamine Bustmante was not that the postmistress did not hear the right name but rather that she wrote it down in the wrong place. The mother’s name, Pearline Portious, was entered in the box that clearly said, Child’s Name. And because, after being registered at the post office, a child might not need to see the birth certificate for years, many people went around not knowing what their actual names were. Adamine only found out hers when she was thirty years old and needed her birth certificate because she was about to come to England. She went to the Registrar’s Office at midday. The sky was full of the sun, and a line of over three hundred people was slowly inching toward the counter. Most had stood there for many hours, the sun beating down on them and causing rivers of perspiration to pour from their bodies. When Adamine reached the line, however, someone whispered, “Warner Woman.” The crowd parted with a murmur and allowed her immediate access to the counter. A supervisor was overheard saying to a young clerk, “You go deal with that one there. And deal with her good. I don’t want she to call down no flood and storm on this office today!”

The young man approached Adamine with a slight tremble. “Good morning, Mother.”

“I come here for my birth paper. I name Adamine Bustamante.”

“Yes, Mother,” the man said genuflecting and then disappeared. For the better part of an hour he searched and searched in vain. When at first he didn’t find “Adamine Bustmante” he suspected she might have been registered as Hadamine, but he didn’t find that name either. He then suspected what was another common mistake, that her first name might have been entered as her surname, and her surname as her first. But that too produced no results. Finally he returned to the counter.

“Mother, I can’t find the birth paper. Can you give me your date of birth and the parish where you was born?” Adamine gave him the information and he went off again, emerging at long last with the certificate in his hand.

“Mother,” he said, “I think I find your papers, but I have to inform you. Your name is Pearline Portious.”

The Warner Woman would tell you however, that although man might have registered her name in one book as one thing, God had registered her name as another. And the name he knew her by was Adamine Bustamante. She knew this because this is the name she heard being called one night after Mother Lazarus had died, when she woke up suddenly, stepped out of the gate of the leper colony, and into another life. She had climbed the hill and trekked four and a quarter miles, arriving at a church that met under the broad sky, and where she started singing a song that actually had no words.

The group of eighty-four Revivalists—mainly women—who met every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights in Wariboka Vale, St. Catherine, under the leadership of Captain Lucas Gilles and Bishopess Cynthia Herbert, and who called themselves the Band of the Seventh Fire, did not mean to have their meetings in secret. And yet, their meeting place was so far out of the way, across so many fields and stones and trees, it was generally accepted that anyone who managed to make it there safely, and in the middle of the night, and without a guide or an invitation or a moon to light the way, could only have been called and led by the Spirit. So on the night fifteen-year-old Adamine walked out of her childhood, and stepped from the trees into that clearing, and began walking toward this band of Revivalists, not one of them stopped dancing or singing or even looked on her too closely. They simply made room for her to join the circle.

Adamine arrived when the service had reached fever pitch, but it had begun hours earlier, as the final orange of evening faded and coconut and breadfruit trees lost their substance, becoming only silhouettes. The band members stepped into the clearing one by one, with a long, elegant walk that did not even know it was long and elegant, a song tumbling from their lips into the open space.

Two brothers carried a bare table to the center of the circle, holding it gently as if it were the Ark of the Covenant. Once it was put down, a sister spread the table with a fold of lace, and everyone placed what they had brought onto it: oranges, star apples, bread, cakes, cream soda, candles. Then they laid out basins of water. Everyone bowed deeply before the basins, then bowed deeply before each other, and said how good and how pleasant it was to gather together in the name of the Lord. This greeting and bowing went on for quite some time until the three junior Mothers—women with pencils stuck behind their ears, scissors swinging from ropes tied around their waists, and rulers tucked inside their belts—took up their stations. If you have been to Jamaica and seen such a woman, this whole attire may have appeared to be nothing but a curious display of stationery, but then you might not have understood the use of the pencil to write down prophecies, the use of the pair of scissors to cut away bad spirits, and the use of the ruler to measure out the days allotted unto man.

Captain Lucas Gilles, a tall gentleman with a pointy white beard and skin as blue-black as the night, lifted his hands and said “Blessed.”

Everyone said “Blessed Love” back to him, and he said “Peace and Love” back to them.

Bishopess Herbert waddled up to the table. She closed her eyes and swayed a little. She tilted her head as far back as it could go and with a voice that managed to sound both like thunder and like music, she said a single word, stretching it out, holding the note and the vibration, “Yeaaaaaaaaa.”

People began to toss their heads from side to side. Others simply whispered “Sweet Lord.” and so the Bishopess made the sound again, holding the note and the vibration even longer, until a few people were jumping.

The spirit was going to come tonight. Everyone could feel it.

Bishopess Herbert half rumbled, half sang, “When the angel come Him shall trouble the water-oh-hooooooooo.”

Everyone found the last part of this note and sang it back to her in a counter harmony, “Oh Hoooooooo.”

“Hear now de word of your God. De daughter of Babylon is like a threshing-floor, is time to thresh her. De time of her harvest is come. And though Babylon hath crushed us, and made us into empty vessels, though Babylon hath swallowed us up like dragons, though Babylon hath cast us out, oh hoooooo …”

“Oh hooooooo.”

“… de violence done to we and to our flesh shall be upon Babylon. For our God will make de springs dry. And Babylon shall become heaps, a dwelling-place for dragons, an astonishment, and a hissing without an inhabitant. Babylon’s children shall roar together like lion, oooh hooooooo.”

“Oh hooooo.”

“Them shall yell as lions whelp. And them shall sleep a deep sleep and never shall they wake! Zion children! Zion children! Hear these words, for them is de words of your God. Ooooh hooooo.”

“Amen.”

Every eye was now turned to Captain Lucas, whose own gaze was set somewhere beyond. “Seven and seven and seven,” he whispered.

It was the smallest of sounds but it was heard by everyone, and when he nodded it was the smallest of movements, but this too was seen and noted by all. The nod meant there was to be no sermon tonight, that the words from the Bishopess had been enough. So the drums came out, as if from nowhere, as if the night had been the cupboard in which they had been stored, and the same rough farm hands that had previously held the table as if it were the Ark now began to fall like sweet rain on the goatskin drums. And whoever was still feeling uptight, the music unlocked their midsections and a gentle rocking began. The first song rose.

Any-anywhere that the army go

Any-anywhere that the army go

Any-anywhere that the army go

Satan follow

Satan follow the army band

Satan follow the army band

Satan follow the army band

Satan follow

And if a Macedonia de army go

If a Macedonia de army go

If a Macedonia de army go

Satan follow

But Adamine had not arrived all those hours before. She had not seen them set the table, or heard the word, or the first song nor the twenty that followed. She arrived only after they had exhausted all the words that could have been spoken, after they had exhausted all the lyrics which could have been sung, after the songs themselves had exhausted all the oxygen in that clearing, after the night had swallowed all its stars, and the sky had swallowed all its owls, and all that was left was an electric hollow, a magic space. Try as you might, you could not remain unmoved by it; nothing could stop the hairs on the back of your neck from rising. It was a space inside which even pigs and dogs were known to fall, slain by the Spirit. The Revivalists began to sing a song that had no words, just a heavy rhythmic breathing, a trumping, a
Hi wah hi, Hi wah hi!
a
Hm! Hm! Hm!
And it was in this moment that Adamine arrived. She was possessed immediately. She walked toward the group in a slow sideways shuffle, her head flung back and her hands dangling loosely behind her. Her chest, however, was rigid, thrust forward, and her hips gently undulated as she did her sideways movement toward the group.

No two Revivalists will describe possession in the same way. For one might call it a riding—you the horse, and the Spirit the jockey—another will call it a traveling. Another will say it is a tearing and freeing of soul from flesh. Adamine would say it wasn’t a separation at all, merely a diminishing of your own body. She would tell you that she was always in her body, but the body felt smaller, less significant, as if she could now survive without food or water, and she understood then how people could go for forty days and forty nights in a wilderness and come back exalted. She understood that her body was not her, it wasn’t even a part of her, because she would not be any less or any more if that body gained or lost weight, if it grew a tumor or lost a foot. Another Revivalist might describe possession as a kind of flying, a floating above the treetops. Adamine would not agree with this. Not completely. She would tell you it is your vision that becomes detached and can suddenly place itself anywhere. Vision, Adamine tells you, is the gift of the possessed. She says it like this: “When I fall to the Spirit, I see and I see and I don’t stop seeing.”

On the night that she became the eighty-fifth member of the Band of the Seventh Fire, this is what Adamine Bustamante saw …

Everyone was dancing in one way or another: some were rooted like chickens to a single patch of dirt, their hands clasped behind their backs, bringing one foot brought forward and then back; others were spinning, as if in the midst of their own tornadoes, their skirts fanning out like a sudden bloom of cereus; a few had fallen, and Adamine watched the three Mothers walking around to close the skirts of women who had fallen with their legs spread open; she also saw herself shuffling behind a group of twelve who had decided to march around the clearing seven times, dull machetes raised above their heads.