Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
THE 2006 Calabash International Literary Festival got off to a dramatic short story start on Friday night, with actor Delroy Lindo reading from the Iron Balloons collection.
Seated on a stool facing the huge audience which filled the space under the large tents set up beside the sea at Jakes in Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth, spilling mostly to the land side, Lindo read Colin Channer's How To Beat a Child The Right and Proper Way.
Iron Balloons, edited by Channer who is artistic director of Calabash, contains stories written by students and tutors in the festival's fiction writing workshop and is published by the New York-based Askashic Books.
READING
Sitting with his right ankle on his left knee for most of the story Lindo read the tale of an elderly Jamaican woman Ciselyn Thompson, whose experience with a confused mother under the thumb of her teenaged daughter in New York brought her back to an incident involving her daughter Karen in Jamaica. This was the incident she related to her class as How To Beat a Child The Right and Proper Way, instead of How To Make a Budget and Stick To It as had been planned.
There was laughter as Lindo read of Thompson worrying her two boys could "tun Rasta, start smoke ganja, tun wutless", as well as the surefire signs (among them plucking eyebrows and especially singing in the shower) "that girl going to be a prostitute. She have a whoring nature".
There was relative silence, though, for many of the parts about race, such as Ciselyn's observation about people as light-skinned as Karen's friend Claudia DeMercado: "They don't like people who black like me, especially when they think they white."
The showdown between mother and daughter comes when Karen is not around to be picked up after school one afternoon and is rude to her dark mother in front of her fellow fair-skinned students. (The drunkard father had at least given the children "a fair complexion to make things a little easier for them in life").
UNREPENTANT, AGGRESSIVE
Karen is unrepentant and aggressive about her disappearance with Claudia DeMarcado on the way home, even after Ciselyn comes home early from her second job and calls to her a few times. The mother goes outside and starts to cry. The crying stops and real rage begins as Karen makes the mistake of singing in the shower, Born Free at that.
Lindo's voice picked up in pace as he read of Thompson coming back to the house, considering and discarding implements of corporal punishment, finally settling on an old extension cord. He stood, right hand swishing and voice emphasising the 'whap!' as the cord was applied to a soaped up Karen ("you are a child - whap!; yu think yu is woman in this place - whap, pap, pap, pap, pi!), laughter rising from the audience.
But there was silence as Lindo's voice fell to describe how that fateful day Karen and DeMercado had gone to an older man's house, where Claudia had taken cocaine and something else hard.
After that there wasn't major trouble with Karen, as when it got close to a certain level of confrontation the advice was "go and take a shower nuh".
"Yes, the story did happen," Channer said after Lindo had finished.
