SYNOPSIS OF 'SUNDAY'S CHILD'

Sunday’s Child is a true story set in Guyana, a former British Colony in South America, and is written in the language of a young child whose life it is about. It tells of the harrowing and systematic abuse of this little girl by her grandmother while giving the reader a glimpse of the political and cultural climate of the country at the time.
Guyana is in a desperate economic crisis, which leads to food and energy rationing. This story picks up on the humorous aspects the child experiences while forced to spend hours in the food lines but it also unfolds the sadness and desperation, which is this young girl’s life.
Her uncle was a soldier in Jonestown, where more than nine hundred people committed a mass suicide, and even when he tells of the dead bodies he’s seen, she doesn’t mention the one she has. When she loses the one person in her life who cares for her and ‘saves her’ she knows in her heart that her life is about to end.

THE EVICTION: Excerpt 2 - Sunday's Child

After this horrible day at school, I got to the top of our street, and noticed that something huge was blocking it towards the other end. There were bulky things laid out in the middle of the street. As I got nearer, I noticed that some of the items on public display looked quite familiar, very familiar in fact. As familiar as the mirror Aunty Meena gave us, and the bed I slept in.
Those were our things!
But how did they get there? Why were they there?
When I got closer, I realised in horror and confusion that there were men emptying our entire house and slowly putting the contents in the middle of the tiny street.

I hurried into what used to be our yard, but before I could get in the gate, one of the boys who worked at the mechanic shop opposite our house came up to meet me.
“Y’all being evicted, girl,” he said.
“Why?” I asked him, but I already knew the reason.
“The man want he house,” he answered. So he knew too.
“Yuh grandmother say to tell you that she gone to get a moving cart.”
I nodded and pushed past him, but there were men coming down the stairs, bringing out clothes, shoes, pots and pans, dishes. They walked past me, and I turned around and watched as some of Mammy’s bras fell to the ground, but the men still kept dumping item after item of our belongings in the middle of the street.

The doll I wasn’t allowed to play with, that came out next, the man was holding her upside down, showing her pants to everyone. As he came down the stairs she fell out of his hand, and into the dirt at the bottom of the stairs. So even the doll could not escape the humiliation.

“Them went to get yuh grandmother from school because the new owner brought a bailiff with he,” the apprentice said knowingly from behind me.
I didn’t answer.
I didn’t look back.
I stood in my spot at the bottom of the stairs.
Nothing was packed in boxes, everything was being brought out and stacked.
I noticed them bringing out some glasses, they put them on the mattress that was already lying in the street. At least they weren’t going to get broken. Next, came the desk I did my homework on, one drawer escaped as they brought it down the steps. Lots of books and papers fell out, some flew away into the dirt in the backyard. I went to get them but the man wearing the white shirt and black trousers, who was carrying the note book, said we weren’t “allowed to step on the premises.”
But I was on the premises, wasn’t I?
At last they said they were finished, but we weren’t allowed to go back in the house to see if everything was removed.

What are we going to do? Where’re we going to go?

Mammy came back with Edwards, dragging Franc behind her. I walked out to meet them. Mammy said she had met Edwards in the street while on her way to get the cart. Edwards leaned her big, black Raleigh bicycle against the mechanic’s fence, put her arm on my shoulder and told me not to worry.
“I inherited an old house from a relative,” she said. “It’s unsound and broken but it’s somewhere to stay. You can’t live on the street.”
It was then that I started to cry all the tears that had been piling up in my eyes. I cry a lot in secret usually, but not like this. My eyes seemed to be made of heavy grey clouds that just had to break loose.

Edwards wasn’t joking about the house. It was literally in pieces. The front steps were broken down, but were still surprisingly hanging unto the house like a very loose front tooth. Some of the window panes were gone and the toilet wasn’t useable. Thank God there was an outside latrine in the neighbours’ yard that they kindly let us use. We were all thankful, this wasn’t a dream house, but it was shelter. And, best of all in was in New Amsterdam, this meant that my journey to and from school was cut down by more than two thirds.


My Dear God
You know how Mammy says that you’re punishing her by making her take care of us? Well I know that is not fair. I know you do take care of us. When that man threw us out, you provided this place for us. I dread to think what would’ve happened if Edwards didn’t have this house, or even if she wasn’t on the road at that very time Mammy was. I know you always take care of me and Franc and keep us safe. Every day, I read the plaques Mammy keeps on wall. They say; “In all thy ways, acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy path.” And “God is thy refuge and strength a very present help in trouble.” I feel like they talk to me and will never forget them, no matter where I go.
I promise.
Don’t ever let me not believe this, because if I do that I will surely die.
Amen.

I REMEMBER JONESTOWN

I was only ten in November of 1978, but the feeling that gripped my tiny malnourished throat when I heard of the mass suicide, will stay with me until my hair turns grey.


Not many people in the West knew where Guyana was. In fact, not many Westerners knew that there was even such a place. Whereas, on the other side of the Atlantic, just above the equator in the north of the South American continent, not many Guyanese people had heard of Jim Jones. No one knew, without being told that is, where Jonestown was. But this is a different story with countless political implications.


I was at my friend’s house having lunch before heading back to school. I was a primary school pupil, in what is called fourth standard in that part of the world. My friend’s mother had the radio tuned to the lunch-time Calypso programme when there was a sudden break in the steel drum rhythm and the news reader came on. “Breaking news,” he had said. And then told of the peculiar story of how more than nine hundred people lined up and willingly drank Kool-aid which they knew was laced with deadly poison.


Of course, as a little child - a sensible one - I thought that it was most absurd. Why would any one stand in a queue to volunteer to be killed? My life as a physically and emotionally abused child was enveloped with misery and pain so it was odd for me to feel such terror at the idea of death.


I told myself that surely, it was a mistake and that the people were unaware of the Kool-aid’s deadly ingredient. But I was wrong, there were pictures in the newspapers the next day, and the next, and the next after that. They showed hundreds of murdered people lying like mere piles of dirty laundry on the ground. In my child’s mind the pictures made dozens of photocopies and filed them neatly away under ‘long term’ memory.


There were images of families bunched together, face down in the grass, almost giving an impression of a sinister scrum. I saw pictures of dead mothers still holding equally dead babies tightly to their hearts. Some of the newspapers printed pictures of the boundless piles of shoes collected at the site after the bodies were moved. And still more on their front pages, showed little knitted booties of babies whose mothers had spoon-fed the tainted drink to their unwitting infants before swallowing a cupful themselves.


Until attempts were made to match earlier photographs to one of the dead bodies found apart from the masses, there were speculations that Jim Jones had escaped, because only very few people had even a fleeting recollection of what he looked like.


Some Guyanese people still like to say that he didn’t die. What is certain though, is that this American preacher had, after allegedly fathering dozens of babies by various women, somehow managed to brain wash his devotees not only to give up their homes in America and follow him to a third world former British colony, but to kill themselves and their children, submitting to a whim of his putrid, devilish mind.



It was later revealed that not all of Jim Jones’ followers met their deaths by drinking the Kool-aid. Some were found shot at a nearby airstrip, apparently trying to escape the afternoon drink on offer at the People’s Temple of doom.



I followed this story with the rapt attention of a middle-aged reporter in need of a better twist to a macabre story. It naturally, didn’t help me with my personal abuse problems as they got worse and I lived every day in the hell Jim Jones might have created if he had any power at all.

Because of its use of death as an escape, this story did discover for me a bizarre outlet which - apart from in my nightmarish dreams – I never really even considered using. And though I didn’t understand it clearly at the time, it brought to my attention the fact that unlike those people whose pictures I had studied, I did not choose to be victimised.

I was only a child, and like in the case of those children whose little booties made the front page of the national paper, grown ups are the ones who make the decision to either protect or violate the lives of little angels.


When President Carter mourned for the dead, it was for the shot Congressman Ryan, the NBC news reporters and the other Americans who lost their lives at the hands of his own citizen. Our dead and that little twisted piece of history that should not have been ours, will live in multimillion pixels in my mind forever. After all, my late uncle was one of the soldiers sent into Jonestown for a frenzied clean up right after the massacre.

SURVIVING THE BREAK-IN: Excerpt 1 - Sunday's Child

Loud, crashing, splintering sound, then broken glass on my face!
Oh Gawd! What’s happening to us!
Franc is crying. Mammy is screaming, “GET UP! GET UP!”
I’m still half asleep. Theresa is shaking my kite-like, little frame, “ANN! ANN! They breakin’ in! Run!”
Franc starts to scream. She is now in spasms, I know her mouth’s open, but ah can’t hear anything but a hissing “whoop.” I wait for the next burst of scream. It comes, and with it I am lifted out of my bed and rushed out of the room. The last thing I see in the shadow of the street lamp as I’m dragged from the bedroom, is a dark boot stepping through the now-broken window pane, into the bedroom, and unto my bed. The owner of the boot is holding a cutlass in his hand. Mammy won’t like that. No shoes allowed in the house!

* * *
In the safety of the living room:
“Ah think he went back out, he only want to scare us,” Theresa whispered, grasping the baby, as we all stood trembling together in the living room.
“It’s the two of them!” Mammy shouted. “Derek wid him!”
I knew who Derek was straight off, he was our Land Lady’s crazy-hair son who’d run away from the prison. I supposed that the other one was his sister’s equally fugitive husband. Mammy always said, “Them’s dangerous people to get mixed-up with.”

One time Theresa had asked her, “Why you say that?”
Mammy had a very long answer to that. I can’t remember all that she said, but one thing that stood out in my mind was when she explained that the Land Lady was a dark spirits’ worker, and that people went to her when they wanted to put bad spells on someone.

“Ann, you go out the back door and call fuh help,” Mammy instructed me, jerking me back into the terror before us.
“No, doan send her out,” Theresa pleaded. “They still in front there shouting. One of them can easily run under the house and find her on the back steps.”
“No!” Mammy said, “They won’t hurt a child. Go, shout for help, Mr. Barry will come.”
“But yuh said that Derek is a murderer. She can’t . . . I’ll . . . I’ll go,” Theresa told her.
“You make the baby keep quiet!” Mammy shouted. “Go!” she said, and she and I crept through the dark kitchen to the back door.
She shoved me out.
Then I heard the bolt click.

* * *
No longer in the safety of the living room:
I am screaming before I can hear my own voice. I am wailing and crying, I am spewing like a volcano – a lava of tears running down my face.
“Help! Help! Somebody please help us!” The louder I scream the harder I weep. My body wants to do this so much. I don’t know why I’m weeping, my voice is breaking, but it’s not because of the shouting. It’s because I’m crying so hard now, I can barely say ‘Elp.’ I am exposed and only have moments before the two men walk under the house and come to deal with me.

I almost imagine footsteps getting nearer and nearer, closing in on me. I think of all the things they could do to me, and I see my half-grown body chopped up into tiny pieces, with the cutlass the person who stepped into the bedroom was holding. A bizarre voice in my head which was shouting louder than I ever could, ask, “But would that be so bad?”

I am shivering in the hot night air, feeling the not so foreign hand of fear take hold of my heart and squeeze and squeeze. I know my heart’s going to spurge its contents all over the hand in seconds. That’ll teach it.
I look for the men through my tears, while I reason with that voice, ‘But see, I am only little.’
‘Is that why I catch yuh thinking of dying?’
‘I doan want to die, please, I doan want to die. I’m really only little.’

Heavy tears stream down my face, and it’s then I hear him. I hear him blowing his whistle through the curtain of the night. It’s got to be Mr. Barry! By the time he reaches our house still dressed in his pyjamas, he has most of the street behind him.

* * *

Later:The two men had run away, leaving us with a bedroom full of glass and a lifetime’s worth of fear.
We survived the night of terror with the mad men from the prison. We all packed a little bag, Theresa packed two, one for herself and another bigger one for the baby. We slept the rest of the night in Mr. Barry and his wife Shirley’s living room. I couldn’t go to school the next day because the police wanted to question everyone who lived in the house.

“So we start from the top and tell me what happened,” said the big puffy policeman. I thought of him chasing after criminals and wondered how hard he would puff after 5 minutes of hard running.
Mammy began, and told them how the Land Lady’s son and son-in-law smashed our window with their cutlasses, but the police wanted to know how we were so sure it was them. Of course Mammy saw them clearly and they didn’t hide who they were either.

“So what did they say to you?” the big one asked again.
“They shouted down the house and cursed us about our so and sos, and then said we’d better move soon or else.”
“Or else?” he asked again.
“Or else they will do worse than break a window,” Mammy answered.
“Did they enter the house at any time?” the smaller policeman asked but his voice must’ve been very loud, because even Theresa heard him.
She said, “One of them stepped into the bedroom but ah think he went back out because he never come through the bedroom door. Ah think their voices were coming from outside all the time they were here, even when Ann was outside.”


“Who’s Ann?” Big puffy said, and my heart leaped into the wall of the visibly bony chest which held it inside my body.
“Me niece here,” she said, pointing at me.

‘Please don’t ask me, please don’t ask me, I not allowed to talk when grown-ups speaking. Besides I don’t know nothing.’ I screamed in my stupid head like I always do, too afraid to say anything out loud.
“What were you doing outside child, you obviously saw their cutlasses, you . . .”
“Well,” Mammy cut in. “She rushed out shouting for help, and then Mr. Barry come ‘round and they run away.”
“Mr. Barry? . . . Oh the P.N.C. Neighbourhood-Watch chap from up the street,” he answered his own question.
“So,” the little, loud-voice policeman said, turning to Mammy. “At which point did you call the police?”
“We doan have a phone, you see,” Mammy answered. “Mr. Barry went back home when he was sure they were gone and called you.”
“I think we have enough to charge these men with aggravated assault with a dangerous weapon, breaking and entering, and disturbing the peace, maybe more. Just one more thing, do you know why they want you to move?” the bigger policeman asked at last.

“They doing it for their mother, they just come out of jail and she send them,” Mammy said. A tiny ball of spit appeared on her bottom lip, and when she said, ‘them’ it transferred unto the upper lip. “She got someone else she want to rent the house to, and she want us out. I pay her rent, and when she tek me to court, the magistrate said she got no grounds for throwing me out, that she got to wait until I find somewhere else to live. She threatened to get me out in the court yard.” Her ball of spit – which I named ‘blit’ - rested finally on her top lip.
“As the magistrate said, she can’t throw you out.”
“But ah can’t stay here now, can I? And she know that, she show me what they can do. I got a young lady daughter, and if anything happen, you know how fast gossip will travel ‘round this place about what shame happen to me.”

“We are very sorry,” said the bigger policeman. “We will do what we can. Do you have anywhere to stay?”
“No, but Mr. Barry say that we can sleep in his living room until the end ‘a the week.”
“Then what?” he continued.
She shrugged, dejected like. Even I could see that she knew this was far from the end. I found that I wasn’t scared. I had buried worse than this inside the soft bits of own body. After all, I didn’t even get beaten today.
“Strange,” said the smaller policeman, “How people will destroy their own property.”