Pao by Kerry Young Read Free Book Online

Niggers. We are Jamaicans. We are brothers.’
    When Zhang hear ’bout it him send for me. Him listen to me tell what happen then him say to me, ‘When I was a young boy in China the country was run by warlords. These men made very high demands on the people in terms of taxes and provisions and suchlike. They were unjust and cruel men. One day the warlord came to our village to collect his due but the peasants could not pay him. So he selected a man at random from the crowd and he beheaded him. And then he urinated on the decapitated body. And got on his horse and left. I learned two things from this. The first thing I learned is that the masses have the right to live without the fear of being robbed or exploited or abused, especially by the authorities. The second thing I learned is that one man can do only so much. I could have thrown myself at the warlord and battered him with my child’s fists. Or you can beat one white man in the middle of a Kingston street. But this does not change the way things are. And it will not make him behave any better in the future. To change things the masses must rise up. They must seize their ideal and take back their land. For it is the masses who will shake off the yoke of oppression, not individual men like you and me. That is what your papa died for, the right of the ordinary woman and man to live a decent life free from the tyranny of warlords and the domination of foreigners.’

5
    Appreciation of the Situation
    After they arrest Bustamante for the mayhem up in North Parade they keep him in jail for four days and then them let him go. A month after that him set up a trade union, the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union. And three months after that, in September 1938, his cousin Norman Manley, a barrister educated at Oxford University in England, who represented the strikers, set up the first national political party in Jamaica, the People’s National Party.
    Manley was interested in people getting the vote and Jamaican self-government. Bustamante wanted higher wages for workers. But to me, neither of them mean much. Sure enough Manley was a true gentleman and I believe he was right that we should all see Jamaica as our country; and see the life and destiny of Jamaica as being bound to our own lives and our own destiny. But it seem to me like him think freedom was something to debate over rather than something to fight for. So maybe he was too much of a gentleman.
    Busta had spirit, I give him that. And he could command a crowd. But there was always something ’bout that man I never did like. He had a kind of smugness about him. A kind of arrogance that come from him believing that he alone control the masses. Maybe it was that same thing Zhang warn me against when him say to me, ‘Don’t think more of yourself than a decent man ought to.’
    When war break out in Europe, being a British colony Jamaica get placed under the Defence of the Realm Act, so there was all sorts of regulations and controls over the price of goods and foreign exchange, and censorship of the press, mail and telegraph.
    Then in 1940 Britain tell the Americans they can come set up military and naval bases in Jamaica. Next thing we know there was US sailors all over the place, parading up and down Harbour Street and King Street as bold as you like all clean and sharp in them navy whites. It turn out the women like bees to a honey pot, because the honey they could smell was some crisp US dollar bills and that was surely worth the time of day. And they didn’t feel no shame ’bout it neither.
    There was girls from Spanish Town and May Pen, Kingston and Linstead, and Bull Bay, all in them favourite colour. Red dress. Red shoes. Red fingernails. Red lips. Red hibiscus in them hair. And there was boys from New York and Baltimore, Washington and Detroit and Milwaukee. All of them laughing and dancing, and smooching and drinking right there in the street. Right there in the doorways of bars that got their