MAA TIN TIN Pt 1

MAA TINTIN  

By Nzinga Nzinga

Part 1

This Short Story is written in Jamaican patois (patwa).

When I heard, my belly trembled; my lips quivered at the voice: rottenness entered into my bones, and I trembled in myself, that I might rest in the day of trouble…

Habakkuk 3 v 16.

“Maa Tintin, Maa Tintin, Ranny ded!”

“What yu sey Cudjoe? Yu doan hear mi sey yu to call im Maas Ran? Juss a raw up raw up di chile name. What yu sey happen to Maas Ran? Wey im is?What happen to im?”

“Maa Tintin, Ranny ded!”

“Sey Maas Ran ded? Sey Maas Ran ded? Yu joking. How Maas Ran fi ded? Maas Ran too trang an helty an full a life fi ded. Yu come offa dat.”

“Maa Tintin, yu haffi believe mi. Ranny ded, ded, ded!”

“Yu no hear mi sey yu to call im Maas Ran? Because im play wid yu no mean sey yu an im is equal. Wey yu a sey now bout Maas Ran ded? How yu luv mek joke so, Cudjoe? Mi too ole fi dat kine a game. Wey Ranny deh bwoy? Is im tell yu fi come pull mi leg, no true? Im hidin behine yu as usual. Im playin hide-an-seek wid im ole granny cause ar sight not so good dese days.”

“Maa Tintin, Ranny ded!”

“Yu really mean it, Cudjoe? Yu cryin so it muss be true. Is not lie yu a tell? My Maas Ran ded? All di same, tell mi sey is lie, Cudjoe. Tell mi sey is tumble dung im tumble dung. Tell mi sey is faint im faint wey an soon get up back. Tell mi sey is talk yu talkin in mi sleep. Tell mi sey is nightmare. Sey Maas Ran ded? Come closer, Cudjoe. Come closer, bwoy, mek mi si if im hidin roun yu. Maybe im hidin in dat big clump a bush. Maybe im deh behine dat big breadfruit tree, or dat ackee tree, or im clime up to di top a di big robin mango tree, or im could well be back a dat big rockstone ovah deh so.”

She whimpers, eyes wild, wringing her hands, “Cudjoe, Cudjoe bwoy, Ranny ded fi true?”

Cudjoe still crying, “Yes, Maa Tintin, im ded. Yu doan waan fi noa how im ded?”

“Of course. No, wait. Doan tell mi yet. Dat too final. Mek mi guess an draw it out. Maybe by dat time mi wi si im come up faas like breeze or buss tru di bush like wen fire get wey eena canepiece or hear his sweet likkle vice callin, ’Maa Tintin, where are you? I am coming with the speed of lightning! Woah, woah!”

“Maa Tintin, is Bredda Buck an Pasta Miller sen mi fi tell yu before yu reach a yard.”

“Hush, chile, doan sey anadda wud. Ah noa it. Ah believe yu now for ah feel it wey dung eena mi belly bottam. Di likkle man ded or im wudda come up an calm mi fears aready…oh Gawd. Oh Gawd. Oh Gawd. Oh Gawd Almightay, have mercy!”

She is gesticulating and pointing an accusing finger heavenwards. “My Gawd in heaven, yu notice how ah nebber call pon yu all dis time dat Cudjoe bin tellin mi dis terrible ting? Massa Jesus, yu notice how ah nebber call to yu all dis time? But Lawd Gaad, Massa Jesus, oh my Gawd, oh my Saviour Gawd, is time fi yu to come to mi rescue in dis dreadful tribulation!"

Spinning round and round as if searching for someone, she cries, "Jesus Gawd, where is yu? Don’t yu si ah is in trouble? Ah in worsa trouble dan wen mi fuss baan Gawdy loss fi tree days an tree nite an wi nebber fine im til di baddy swell up an naw up naw up an float out to Macca Pen wey it hitch up eena seaweed. Why my Maas Ran? Why? Why? Why?"

"Come, Maa Tin Tin", Cudjoe pleads.

"Cudjoe bwoy, Ah doan hab time fi yu now. Is only Jesus can help mi now."

Turning her back on him, she turns to Jesus, "Jesus, mi Lawd, why yu neber tek ole Jabez who caan si, caan talk, caan move eben im likkle finger, caan eat an caan hear eben if yu blow trumpet clear up eena im earsole an im lie dung deh like ded eena coma fi months? Lawd, why yu didden tek Miss Dorcas mad bwoy who no do nutten but bring dung shame an disgrace pon dat family?"

She pauses to blow her nose and wipe her eyes before admonishing the Almighty again. Going down on her knees and casting her eyes up to Heaven, she asks, "What a goin to do now, Lawd? Yu tell mi, Lawd, for Maa Tintin doan noa. How yu to tek away Maas Ran? An yet, maybe is not too late an yu can still blow back life in mi bwoy. Im is jus a likkle bit a pickney bwoy. Im is not even two hanful ole an im is all I have to comfort mi in mi ole age. Oh Gawd, oh Gawd!"

She is weeping too much to continue pleading. However, as if infused with new pain, she stretches her hands unto God hollering, "Member Lawd, it mek two years now yu tek mi husban, Alvin, an mi nebber fuss for im was well advance in years an was gettin tired a life for im nebber have no sweetness lef eena im. But Ranny no eben tap wet im bed yet. Why him, Lawd? Why him, Puppa Jesus? Please Gawd, if yu not goin to give mi back Maas Ran, at leese give mi di strent to bear disya trouble. Ah need it, Lawd. Have mercy pon poor me, Albertina Mabel Johnson. Help me, Lawd from whence cometh my help. Help me to bear this pain."  

In great distress, she gets up from her knees and wringing her hands and hugging herself tight, she looks in the direction of home and turns to Cudjoe, “Cudjoe, Cudjoe, yu come an mek wi go look fi Maas Ran eben if im ded. Wey im is? Mi figet fi ask yu? Wey dem put im? Doan tell mi how it happen. Jus tek mi dere. No, tell mi, tell mi. Mi may as well hear it now.”

“Im in di house, Maa Tintin. Dem carry im dere from school.”

“So is at school im ded?”

“Is dere an is nat dere, Maa Tintin.”

“Bwoy, tap yu nonsense. How im to ded in more dan wan place? Nebber mine. Mi no mean to be so ruff wid yu an yu cryin so much but mi not misself an dese are ruff times. Come now, wey im ded? At school or at the house?”

“Im drop dung a school an dem carry im home. Is in di house im ded. Dactah Callender come an sey im ded.”

“Ah! Di bwoy do well fi die eena im own house. Too much ded in mi house. The house come een like ded house now. Fuss, Gawdy, den Alvin, an now Ranny in di space a two years! Lawd, have mercy pon mi. Come on, bwoy, hurry up.”

She turns to Cudjoe, “Yu si, Cudjoe, Gaad well an noa dat is Maas Ran mi invess ebriting in. Is im was to bi di wan to put us back wey wi really belong. So much promise! Ranny could be teacher, lawyer or eben dactah. Yu no si dat if Maas Ran ded now ebriting crash? Dat all mi effut gone dung a sinkhole? How Maas Ran die, Cudjoe? Wait. Doan tell mi.”

She hops about agitatedly, listening intently.

“Lissen, ah hear a vice like Maas Ran. Lissen. Lissen good.” 

‘Tintin’ is faintly heard in the distance.

“Cudjoe, lissen. Is Maas Ran. Laad a Gaad is Mass Ran fi true.”

An expression of joy lights up her face.

“Maa Tintin, mi sey Ranny ded. Mi si im lay dung deh ded in yu bed wid mi owna eye.”

Ignoring Cudjoe, she cocks her head and with a finger on her lips, pleads silence.

“Lissen. Den is wat dat mi hearing. Lissen if yu doan hear im good-good.”

She cups her hands about her mouth, shouting, “Maas Ran, wey yu is? Maas Ran, hurry up an come. Yu granny heartstring gwuine pop if yu doan come an show yuself quick, quick. Run come, Maas Ran mi luv, before yu granny heartstring buss!”

‘Tintin, Tintin’. The sound is audible again, barely audible.

Gesticulating wildly, “Maas Ran is dat you? Hush, Cudjoe, doan bawl so loud.”

The tiny figure keeps jumping about, her head cocked in this and that and every direction. She calls softly, ever so softly, ever so gently, “Maas Ran, Maas Ran.”

Desperately, ’Maas Ranne-e-e, Ranny! My Maas Ran!”

The sound ‘tintin, tintin’ is louder now. She calls pleadingly, “Is dat you, chile, calling ‘Tintin’? Where is you? Come home to Granny. Come fi cake, Maas Ran! Is di kine yu like.”

The sound is closer. It’s a little black bird. She sees it. She hears it. Cudjoe has no need to point to it as he is doing. She sees it in flight chirping ‘Tintin’. Away from her.

A great sob bursts out of her like a shot from a cannon, “Ranny, Maas Ran. Lawd mi Gawd, Jesus Christ in heaven have mercy pon poh ole Maa Tintin.”

She weeps. A poor old woman weeps for her child and cannot be comforted. She bawls disconsolately. She falls to her knees on the ground. She makes awful noises. She uses her head to beat the ground. Cudjoe tries to lift her up. Dreadful sounds of grief, pain and hopelessness are issuing from them both. 

Finally she stumbles up weeping and muttering, “Maas Ran tun bird! Im always wanted was to fly. Said im was goin to tun airplane pilot. But not yet, oh Lawd, not yet. Im is too young. Im is just a likkle baby bird. Im is just a likkle saplin, a likkle seedlin. Im not ready to fly yet. Im too young to die. At leese, eben if im ready, mi no ready for im to die yet. Betta mi dan im.”

She is about to throw herself down again. Cudjoe keeps her afloat and drags her along with the greatest difficulty. He cajoles her, “Come on, Maa Tintin. Come mek wi go a yard. Everybody is dere waitin fi yu.”

She shakes her head often or holds it tight between her hands, still bawling loudly and unashamedly. She is beside herself with grief. 

To be continued

 All the images were taken from the Internet and I claim no copyright. 

Friendship Pt 2

FRIENDSHIP

By Nzinga Nzinga

  

For Makini Nzinga Crosskill

Cedet amor rebus; res age, tutus eris:…Ovid.

You who seek an end of love, love yields to business. Be busy and you will be safe... Ovid

PART 2

There I go again criticizing her. I believed her only to find out too late that I was the one to suffer from the break brought about by her. I wanted to hear her say in her positive assured way that it was finished. To bring it out into the open and discuss it the way we used to sit around and discuss everything under the sun any time, any place.

How I had loved her! I noticed that it was now love in a past pluperfect time.

Slowly and heavily I went back to the kitchen and the stack of dirty dishes which confronted me. I attacked them with desperation, a humiliation and an extreme distress born out of the revelation. It reminded me that after the war, the veteran has to get on with or rather adjust to the daily routine of peacetime. After the honeymoon, the bride and groom have to be transformed into wife and husband and settle into the ups and downs of marriage.

The present she brought me leered drunkenly at me from the bookcase where it “kotched” dangerously at an angle too close to the edge. It was one of those expensive bottles in the shape of a potbellied man containing a drop of whiskey.

“We were up all night discussing and discussing. That’s why I’m late. We got high on this stuff but I had to save you some.”

She had travelled so far from me that she had already forgotten that I hated the smell much less the taste of whiskey. We, she and I, used to stay up all night too, discussing and discussing and getting mildly high on homemade wine, never whiskey. Those were the times best forgot! I drained her whiskey down the sink and put away the bottle beside the bin to be thrown out.

Did she ask herself why this break was necessary? No, she probably never saw it as a break but just as a way of getting on with another phase of her life that could no longer accommodate so binding a friendship as ours. So it was only I left to wonder. To ponder. Could it not have withstood the pressure of time? It was more defined than that. It was clearly a case of economics, expediency of the social will. She was moving on. I was stuck in the same groove dubbing the same old tune, an uncertain solo.

It occurred to me that I had no one with whom to discuss my problem. How could I? We were so safe in our private world, so committed to each other that we had no need of others, not even my ex-husband. I felt ashamed. It is never enjoyable to eat crow. I ate crow in the presence of my ‘ex’ whom I had shut out because this friendship was so fulfilling. He was right. There is a difference between the love of a woman for her man and that of a woman for her best friend, who was also her bridesmaid.

My eldest brother, who I thought would be triumphant, looked pained, almost shy. “I had hoped you two girls would have carried it, yeah, pulled it off,” he said.

“We tried.” I conceded victory with an unpalatable taste of crow in my mouth.

“You are too intense. You tried too hard. Don’t worry. I don’t have one single friend and I survive. You will survive. Have your memories but your regrets let them be.” He actually hugged me tighter than he had ever done since our mama died years ago. As if he was hugging me for mama too. He was right. I would survive.

My listless spirits took me for a walk. They turned my steps into the public library. It was fitting that the librarian asked, “Where’s your friend? Haven’t seen her since last two weeks. Like twins you are.” I could have mouthed something but this was England where no one seems to mind if you don’t respond. I smiled weakly and browsed about for exactly fifteen minutes. We used to spend an inordinate amount of time among books, in libraries, in bookshops, anywhere books abound. I was being hounded by memories. I couldn't separate the memories from the regrets. I hurried out of the place back to the house that I shared with my eldest brother.

How I had loved her!

My brother was lying on the carpet in our large library.

“So you are back. Good. Fix a grown man something substantial to eat. And while you’re at it, fix yourself something too.”

We both laughed. My eldest brother loved to make people laugh. He was not having much success making me eat but he certainly made me laugh. We shared a delicious meal of tossed salad, pizza with everything but the kitchen sink, hot garlic bread and homemade wine to the music of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. It was a leisurely meal. My eldest brother ate a lot, I but little. Then we listened to Bob Marley while we ate homemade ice-cream and ginger bread. My eldest brother is six foot three inches long, lean and invariably hungry.

I got up from among the crumbs, dishes, tapes and my eldest brother’s long gaunt figure with a clear understanding of friendship that I didn't have before.

I understood that there is a time and a season for everything, especially when it comes to human relationships. A time to bind and a time to cut loose. A time to hold tight and a time to cut asunder. A season of passion and a season of cooling. I learnt that wisdom teaches us to recognize that the time when such a relationship is cut out or away from beneath one’s grasp, is always the right time and we should not use force to hang or hold on to it. I learnt that it is also the wise person who understands that such a recognition or revelation rarely comes to both parties at the same time.

I had spent lonesome, lonely moments of anguish reminiscing and rehashing what had been, and fantasizing what could have been between her and me. As I said, I couldn’t yet separate the memories from the regrets. Under circumstances like these, it is very tempting to become acrimonious and malicious about the departed. Our solidarity had been a source of learning together, of fun and laughter, of shared confidences and tears. Now the end has come and our friendship has expired. It has died but I am reconciled to the fact that I have to let it and her go, no matter how difficult the exercise.

I was able to appreciate more fully the following quote from Elizabeth George’s A Traitor To Memory:

“It’s odd, isn’t it,” she said to me. “One can earnestly believe one has a particular type of relationship with another person, only to discover it was never what one thought in the first place.” 

(p 595 A New English Library, Hodder & Soughton.  ISBN 0-340-76708-1)

While we were eating, my eldest brother remarked in a very serious tone, “As you know, my personal experiences with that complex involvement called friendship, leaves a lot to be desired. With me, friendship is all cerebral but I imagine that each time there is an end to any relationship, especially friendship, for which one had entertained hopes of being a lifetime bond, the dear departed takes fragments of one’s heart away with them whether they realize it or not. They depart with some essential part of one’s being but they leave one with happy lingering memories that remain indelibly printed on one’s consciousness, expanding and supplementing one’s collective treasury of experiences. If one chooses to be understanding and wise, one can use them to promote and enhance one’s own growth and development and that of others with whom one happens to form new relationships.”

After understanding comes wisdom. With wisdom comes acceptance; acceptance, that this estrangement is a part of growth and that in spite of everything, she and I had loved, even if for only a season. I consoled myself with the Yoruba proverb:

          “Twenty children cannot play together for twenty years.”

My eldest brother, a well-known bestseller novelist whose books, extolling the inestimable value of friendship, occupy a lot of space in bookshops and libraries nationally and internationally, wiped two tears from my eyes.

“Is she really gone to get married next week?” he asked.

“Gone with the wind,” I answered.

“Are you devastated?” he asked.

“Almost.” I couldn’t be totally honest. I couldn’t admit that I was the last to hear the news.

“Go, child, go and write it out. Write it out, I say. It’s therapeutic. It’s healing. I do it all the time. Learn from these wise words of Roman Ovid:

        Cedet amor rebus; res age, tutus eris.

Let me translate: You who seek an end of love, love yields to business. Be busy, and you will be safe.”

My eldest brother, a classic scholar, had a quotation for every occasion.

“Write it out on paper. Just write. Don’t worry about literary competence. Just put your feelings on paper. I’ll get my publishers to look at it”

He was replete with food, music and magnanimity. He was yawning as he left the room and would soon be fast asleep. Could I do as my eldest brother advised? Could I write? Why not? I had spent so much time working away at friendship, why not write about it? I would give it my best effort. I went swiftly to the typewriter in the far corner of the library. My eldest brother has a very large library. I inserted paper and tapped out the opening paragraph of my first real life experience in fiction intended for public consumption:

              “As I watched her walk away….”

The keys of the typewriter could scarcely keep pace with the speed of my thoughts. I was clicking away, when from a seemingly far distance came the drowsy voice of my eldest brother who has won several prizes for his books and who has been acclaimed by international literary critics as ‘one of our foremost exponents and sensitive writers with an exquisitely clear insight into the delicate interactions of human relationships’.

“Hermoine!”

“Yes?”

“Hermoine!” his voice bellowed from afar.

“What?” I yelled back

One would have thought my eldest brother would know better than to interrupt the train of thoughts of a wannabe writer-in-action.

“Don’t forget to stress that point!” His raucous voice drowned out the noise of the typewriter.

“What?” I shrieked above the din.

“Don’t forget to get the message across.”

“What message?”

“That friendship is a bitch!”

THE END

All the images were taken from the Internet and I claim no copyright.