PHOTOS BY MICHAEL SLOLEY/Freelance Photographer
Icilda Treasure, mother of three children killed along the Prospect main road in St. Thomas last Monday. From left to right, Anna-Kay Roberts, Carlton Carty, and Devonte Carty
Glenda Anderson, Staff Reporter
TWO TATTERED exercise books were tucked into 12-year-old Anna-Kay Roberts's school bag alongside her regular classroom stuff last Monday.
On the covers was a warning: 'Private - Don't look in it, Don't open' penned in a girlish scrawl. Inside were poems describing herself, her mother, even details of a tiff with her younger brother. Still the note began: 'I love my brother very much'.
Some pages were simply filled with childhood questions like "what does a kiss taste like?"
Her fears, her loves and especially her plans for the future, were all jotted down... as if she knew. She even recorded her Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) choice St. Hugh's High School in Kingston.
But the spunky little girl who wanted to be an 'air hostess' died clutching her two younger brothers last Monday in a motor vehicle accident along the Prospect main road in St. Thomas. The same day that GSAT results were released to confirm that she was indeed successful for the school of her choice.
SHE DIDN'T GET TO KNOW
"What hurts too is that she didn't even get a chance to hear it. She didn't get to know that she had passed for the school she wanted. She didn't get a chance to hear it, she doesn't know the school, she never even got to see it." Icilda Treasure, mother of the three children spoke slowly, her calm voice belying the pain which showed in her red-rimmed eyes.
"Sometimes I want to cry and it can't come out. I want to scream and I just can't. I just don't know what to do; it's really hard..." Her voice trails off, there's a pause then, "I'm scared of the day of the funeral, I don't know if I can sit in the church and look at the three caskets knowing that all three are mine, my kids, none is left. I don't even know if I can attend the funeral, I don't know if I can cope. All now I don't look at the bodies, I just can't. I don't want to see them like that. That's not how I want to remember them. I want to remember them the way they left for school."
She smiles as she describes Devonte, the 'baby' of the group at six years old. "Chimma... we call him Chimma. He was the most popular of the children, he was the joker of the family. He was very friendly, you'll be here now and he comes on and he doesn't have to know you to come and do something for you to see him and talk with him. Even people that I don't know, he knows and they know him."
Carlton, nicknamed "Jovaun" was the loner. "He was very disciplined and reserved. He and 'Chimma' were like twins. They always wear the same clothes, people would even think they were twins. The other day I was thinking of changing his younger brother from the school he was going and he said to me 'No Mommy because he's gonna come there and give trouble and then the principal is going to have to send him home and then I'm going to be embarrassed' ... he was like that."
There is a pause in her recollection, as Ms. Treasure looks to my notebook, another smile comes to her face as she says.
"Anna-Kay was always writing things down. We used to joke and say, 'Anna-Kay, stop the writing, you going turn journalist or what?' If she going to church it's her Bible, book and a pencil, if she sits in front of the television it's with a book and a pen or pencil.
"It could be anything, a few months ago she sat down in front of the television and like an idea came to her and she wrote something for her class that later on TVJ showed for Black History Month. She was in the Spelling Bee, and she wrote in her book that if she was a teacher she wanted her students to be better speller than she was."
ONE WISH
One undated wish, however, will stand out as a memorial to her mother.
"I love my family very much but most of all I can't do without my mother. If it wasn't for God, I wouldn't have a pretty mother like her. I hope that God will guide her through the rest of her life." That was written in one of her exercise books.
"All four of us live together, everybody has been very supportive and I want to thank them, but the after-effects are going to be hard, I know it. We have always been very close. Their father was filing for them and Carlton said to me 'Mommy if Daddy not filing for you too, I'm not going.'
"My mother died when I was very young, eight or nine years old and I'm not a Christian or anything but I asked the Lord, 'Lord don't take me from them when they are this small, give me time to see them reach somewhere and help them grow.' Then again I say it could have been me and what would happen to them then. One time I remember Carlton said to me 'Mommy, if you dead, me a go dead too for me would a kill meself' and I tell him 'No baby, don't say that'. If they come in and see me crying they would hold my hand, wipe my hair or even begin to cry too, that's how emotional they were."
For now grief is the only thing which occupies her mind, not even anger clouds the vision.
"I don't even want to hear about the court, whatever happens it doesn't matter to me."
As for the future, that holds its own dark cloud.
"I don't know about having other children... what if I have another child will he live to be six or seven or eight, will he pass 12 years old? That's my fear."
