Red Jacket by Pamela; Mordecai Read Free Book Online Page A

a long-time member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, how she meet the great Marcus Garvey as a little girl and how she go with her mother to the plays and parades in Jamaica that he organize. Miss Carmen born in St. Chris, but she go to Jamaica as a child, and grow up there, returning to St. Chris as a young woman. Gramps long time tell Grace about Marcus Garvey, but Gramps was not so lucky as to meet Mr. Garvey.
    â€œI love these clothes,” Miss Carmen say at the end of her story. “They are very comfortable, and they make me feel queenly.” She smile. “But,” she go on, “I also wear them so people will take notice. I want folks to learn about our heritage, about where our ancestors came from, and I want them to understand the struggles we’ve faced.”
    Miss Carmen always talking about heritage: mostly African heritage, but also English heritage, which some Christophians have in their blood, but all have in their head. The English run St. Chris from they capture it in the seventeenth century till the island get Independence nine years ago. “Well expressed in our children’s rhyme,” Miss Carmen say, “We talk English/we walk English/we run English/can’t done English!” Now she is also studying her Asian heritage for she just discover her mother’s grandpa was a indentured labourer, come from India to work in the cane fields of St. Chris.
    Grace think a lot about that word, “heritage.” She wonder if a person’s heritage could get into their blood. And Miss Carmen is not even as black as Pa or Gramps or Ma. She is brown, though her hair is kinky. Maybe one day she can talk to Miss Carmen about where her red skin and puss eyes come from.
25 March 1972
    Dearest daughter,
    Well, congratulations my teenager! You are now beginning your thirteenth year! The next thing I’ll hear is you are a big married lady! I know you are growing up into a fine person and I pray that you are happy. Today I’m asking God to give you three gifts. I’m asking him to make you glad to be the person you are. I’m also praying you will always be assured that many people love you: God loves you, everybody in the Carpenter family loves you, Granny Vads and Granny Daphne love you, and I love you. Thirdly, I pray you find the reason for your life. The priest at Mass this morning said that there are two important days of your life, the day you were born and the day you know why.
    For myself, I pray one day I’ll get to see you and tell you how much I love you. I think you were the reason why I was born, and I long to see My Reason!
    I am sorry I have not been so good at the news in my last letters. It’s always the same thing over and over, and most of it is bad. The one good thing is that black people seem to be making some progress in getting their rights at last. I don’t want to talk too soon, but we are all hoping and praying.
    I’m sorry to leave you, but I have to hurry, as I want to post this on my way to work. God bless you, my daughter.
    Your mother,
    Phyllis
    Grace is walking home from school, looking at the people around her and thinking that some of these town people look so mix up, she can’t pick out any one heritage. She is thinking that life in Queenstown is very mix up too. For one thing, day and night collide, with people always on the street, cursing, laughing, shouting, dancing to sound system music. It so noisy Grace have to sleep with a pillow over her head and descend into a deep underground of sleep from which she wake drugged and headachy, instead of refreshed like in Wentley Park.
    Mansfield Avenue is one long stretch of bar and dance hall. There is never room enough, so people dance in covered yards on dry hard-packed earth or on cement that they pour over dirt, so it break up and they have to patch it over and over. The bumpy floors of poor people ballrooms don’t stop them, though. As night descend,