Overture THE QUEEN DESIGNED MY BRAIN I The Queen designed my brain. Almost everyone I knew as a child was born at a time when Trinidad was her property. With no right to vote or make their own laws, they were all perfect British subjects in training. This meant Anglican hymns, little schoolboy uniforms, and the single greatest sanitizer of our savagery: the King James Bible. I learned how to read by studying the King James Bible. My grandmother taught me on a veranda in the jungle when I was four. Her eyes were bad, but she still needed her salvation. She still needed her proverbs and her psalms. "The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?" I learned how to read so I could become her eyes. In this way, Her Majesty the Queen designed the framework of my very first thoughts. As a scrawny Trini-child, I wore khaki short pants and carried a cloth satchel full of books. In my bookbag was a red Nelson's West Indian Reader --the colonialist's handbook. Into my studies, I poured all the devotion I had for my grandmother, whose dark vibrant eyes and cunning smile were my whole universe. I learned the Queen's lessons a little too well. And the greatest lesson was this: if you could name a thing--commonwealth, colony, savages, subjects--it could become real. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." In 1986, I landed in Canada, a shiny-faced black boy thrust into the tiny northwestern Ontario town of Wabigoon, near Dryden. From a jungle to a blizzard within a few head-spinning days. Wolf packs howled in the trees and black bears rummaged at the trash dump. My beloved grandma was dead, and eleven-year-old me stared, perplexed, into the wilderness. This was my first encounter with transformation: the art of letting go and becoming something new. It was an art I would become all too familiar with in the coming decades. Throughout the years, I would give myself many names. They called me Tony in Trinidad, Michael in the gleaming boardrooms of corporate Canada, Mic Dainjah when I toured England with my rock 'n' roll heroes, Molasses when I crooned soul songs, and Mike D. when I plucked the banjo at folk festivals. Finally, I became John or J.O. or John Orpheus, my boldest, baddest self. So this is a memoir, but a memoir of whom? I want to tell you that it is about John Orpheus, but it's not. I want to say it's about inventing John, being John, killing John, and then watching him rise again from the ashes of the fire that destroyed all I owned. But that too would fall short. This is a story about unbelonging, about placelessness, about leaving everything behind. This is about metamorphoses: death and rebirth. About being shattered over and over and reassembling yourself across continents and calamities. This is a story about family and forgiveness. About becoming what you always were. Like a tree shedding its cone on the mountainside, fertilized by cold rain and deer shit, somehow growing up bold and strong, it is about creativity: that desperate act of survival. Nature's only lesson. This book is about the manure we call art and the abyss that heals us. These are the stories that wrote me. Oh, and it's about all that other stuff too. II There was a woman in the front they said was my mother. She too had told me this, the few times we'd met. Her name was Gloria, and I was watching her carefully as my grandmother ascended the steps of Fifth Company Baptist Church in her casket. Gloria was fidgeting with her handbag, in a grey dress, frowning sadness as if it were raining, but the skies were clear. The wet season in Trinidad's tropical jungle usually meant seething black clouds and rain that made the bush ripe with mango, cocoa, and pommecythere (or "pomcetay," as we called it) and that washed fat snakes into the road. But on that October day, the sun was streaming bright glory into our heavy hearts. Among the mourners was the woman, Gloria; my older brother, Junior, who was fourteen; and my two aunties, Joan and Agnes, who had come from overseas for the funeral. Miss Excelly's death had brought us together in a way nothing could when she was alive. Where had this mother been all this time? What had she been busy doing? Gloria said, "If I had known Mama was sick, I would've come!" She scrunched up her mouth and cheeks and half talked, half shouted to Auntie Joan: "Why nobody ever tell me nothing?" Auntie Joan was walking just behind the pallbearers. She was a tall, erect, handsome woman who lived in Canada, a place where everyone was rich. Next to her was her sister Agnes. Agnes was as small as a bird, flimsy as a breeze, elegant orchid-pink purse to match the hat to complement the dress. She lived in America. Both sisters had faces slick with tears--raw, puffy pools of grief. "What will become of these two boys?" asked Auntie Agnes, nodding towards my brother and me. "Leave it to the Lord--he will provide a way," Joan answered. Junior was walking behind us a bit, in a powder-blue suit just like mine, his brow crumpled into a knot. They used to think we were twins because we were always together, but now he was fourteen, while I was eleven. He was hanging out in Princes Town, taking maxi taxis and kissing girls. He was going places that I couldn't follow. Junior's first memory was of Gloria leaning through our darkened door, handing a bundle of baby me to Miss Excelly, then rushing back to a waiting car and driving away. "The young one like me better," our grandmother used to say. This wasn't fair; Junior remembered his mother. I didn't. Yet as far back as anyone could recall, I clung to Grandma's skirts always, even when she was in her sickbed, with that metallic taste of death, the smell of her chamberpot, the way her silver bracelets turned black from her clammy skin. Even then, they had to make me get out of her deathbed. When Joan and Agnes arrived, everyone asked, "Is yuh brutha comin?" Al, their wayward younger brother--Gloria's ex-husband and my father--was a ghost, a wisp of legend that draped itself across my childhood. Miss Excelly's tongue, stiff from stroke, almost useless, groaned into Joan's ear, "Whwwwwaaaaaaaaaal." Auntie Joan leaned in to try to make out what she was saying, and her mother gripped her arm. "Whaeeeeeeal," she droned again, and wouldn't let go. "What do mean, Mama?" "Wheeeaarrre Al?" And Auntie Joan was crying again. It was a question: "Where is Al?" Al was not coming, but how could she break this to his dying mother? Back at Fifth Company Baptist Church, Excelly Theodora Downing's body lay like a monarch in her pomp. They wedding-marched her coffin through the pews and laid her down before the altar. As the mourners shuffled in, light danced off the metal rings on the pine box, the bronze wood of the organ, and the timepieces of the deacons who were watching sagely. We took our seats at the front, and the air filled with the perfume of warm bodies, starched shirts, boot polish, and lilies of the valley. Sombrely, the reverend made his entrance. The murmuring hushed. The choir members, in their cherub robes, rose to meet him. He gestured, his arms wide as if to hold us all in one embrace, as if hugging the Holy Spirit, as if inhaling the gusts of sun pouring through the stained glass. Then, signalling to the musicians with a wink, he raised his eyes to the heavens and the choir began to sing. Excerpted from Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming by Antonio Michael Downing All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.