After a third full week had passed without Samantha being able to raise enough money to buy what her son needed to start the new school year she had begun to wonder whether it was worth persisting. She was beginning to think that Jamal would soon be eighteen and that he had not really made any serious academic headway in school. It was time, she had surmised, to cut her losses.
Over the years, her communication with the school had had to do mostly with complaints that he was a habitual trouble – maker, allegedly the head of a gang of boys who had taken to bullying the weaker students and taking their lunch money.
He had moved from one class to the next on the basis of what the Ministry of Education termed no child left behind and the upshot of not having ever earned a promotion to a higher class had left him altogether unprepared for the CXC examination.
Long before his father had been sent to prison for armed robbery less than a year ago Samantha had already lost control of Jamal. After his father’s imprisonment had become the talk of the neighborhood she sensed that the boy had gotten it into his head that he had found a role model that he could emulate.
The changes in his disposition that had followed his father’s imprisonment had included an indifference to attending school and a preference for ‘hanging out’ with boys in the village who were about his age but who had already built juvenile reputations for various forms of petty crime including stealing bicycles and snatching chains and purses.
At one point Jamal appeared to have lost his appetite for ‘hanging out’ after he had been part of group of boys picked up by the police following the Flower Shop robbery. Two days in the lockups had taught him a lesson, albeit a temporary one.
At the start of the Christmas term he had stopped attending school. He told Samantha that he had secured an ill-defined ‘hold on’ in town and that he had decided that he wanted to earn some money ‘for Christmas.’ She conceded, not because she felt he was telling the truth but because she was convinced that her objection was unlikely to change his mind anyway. Two weeks later he was arrested by the police again, this time because he had been caught stealing a chisel from a hardware store. Samantha had begged the owner of the store to ‘give him a chance’ the matter did not reach the courts.
After that she lost her job as a Bag Bay Attendant at a Robb Street store and had spent the next month living on handouts before starting a new job as a security guard. The hours were long and the pay was wholly inadequate and at the start of the January term she had found herself unable to afford the clothing for him to return to school. She had raised the matter with the company owner’s brother who functioned as a supervisor and he had made the offer to help which she had declined after his ‘terms and conditions’ had been spelt out to her.
Towards the end of her son’s third week of the new term away from school Samantha had decided to put her problem to the school’s Head Teacher and it was decided that she would be given a loan from the school’s contingency fund to outfit her son for school.
News that a solution to the problem of school clothing had been found was not exactly music to Jamal’s ears. He had concluded that after three weeks on non-attendance Samantha had given up on the idea of him returning to school. In fact, he had already given an undertaking to some of the other neighborhood teenagers that he would shortly be joining them on their daily ‘hustle’ in the city the details of which they declined to share with him until he became a bona fide member of the group.
The weekend search for school clothing went badly. It began with a prolonged disagreement between Samantha and Jamal over her choice of footwear. He had told her that a pair of inexpensive ‘no name brand’ sneakers would make him the laughing stock among boys his age at school. She had retorted that the ‘no name brand’ was what she could afford and that – at least for the time being – was that.
On Sunday morning Jamal broke the news to his friends that school had gotten into the way of his promised involvement in the downtown ‘hustle.’ He spent the rest of the day ‘hanging out’ on the corner, eventually going home only after his mother, on her way to start her night shift, had seen him standing there having a loud conversation with about five other boys and insisted that he go home.
Monday came all too quickly and dark thoughts entered his head as he sat on the edge of his folding cot in the cramped space that passed for a living room lacing up his ‘no name brand’ sneakers. Samantha had left him a tennis roll and a small piece of cheese which he ate for breakfast. Lying on the table next to his breakfast were half a dozen exercise books, a pen, two pencils and two hundred dollars. He knew that the money was a sort of first day ‘sendoff.’ There would be several other days on which he would be required to go without lunch.
Once she caught sight of Jamal sitting in the back row of her class, Mrs. Assanah begun to silently remonstrate with God for not answering her prayer. The boy had been the bane of her existence during his presence in her class two academic years earlier. When she had discovered at the end of the previous term that she would have to tutor him again her heart had sunk. After the first few weeks of school had passed and he hadn’t shown up, however, she had gotten it into her head that his mother had decided that she couldn’t afford to keep him in school any longer. Mrs. Assanah wasn’t the sort of woman who would ‘wish bad’ for children but when it came to Jamal it was a matter of self-preservation.
She recalled that once, in an earlier class, he had attempted to strangle a classmate with the strap of a haversack, releasing his grip only after two male teachers had been compelled to exert considerable force. There had been other offences too. Most of them had to do with bullying other children and on one occasion it had been suspected that he was one of a clique of boys who sold drugs in the schoolyard. The Headmaster had wanted to expel him but in the absence of what the Education Officer called “hard evidence” he had gotten away with a two-week suspension.
On the Friday after Jamal had returned to school, Samantha turned up to start the 3pm shift to be told by the guard that she was relieving that Jamal’s school had called. Her colleague had told her that the male teacher who had made the call had said that it was important. She called Jamal’s cell phone and it rang out. Since there was no question of leaving her post to go to the school she decided that she simply had to wait it out until she got home the next morning.
Jamal never slept out. Last evening was a precedent. Samantha had arrived home early in the morning to find his bed bare and cold. She became decidedly alarmed when, before she could get her wits about her she heard a loud, assertive knock at the door. Twice before, the police had knocked on Samantha’s door. She approached it knowing what to expect.
Once she discovered that Jamal did not come home with the police Samantha was seized by an uncontrollable attack of anxiety. Two policemen had entered the room and were looking at her intently without saying anything.
The next ten minutes or so were a blur. Jamal – so the squattier, more aggressive of the two policemen had told her, had been detained at the police station after the mother of another schoolboy had reported that he had stabbed him with a pointed instrument. It turned out to be a compass from a Geometry Set. The police had gone to the school, removed Jamal and placed him in the lockups.
When Samantha arrived at the station she had discovered that the policemen had omitted one important detail. It was obvious from his physical condition that Jamal had been roughed up by the police. His face was swollen and his lip was cut. She didn’t bother to ask for an explanation.
In the month that followed Jamal was charged, placed before the courts and fined sixty thousand dollars. Samantha took an advance equal to two months salary and paid the fine. Afterwards, she went to see the Headmistress of the school who told her flatly that she was not prepared to have Jamal attend the school any longer. Something inside Samantha told her that that was as far as she could go.
By the next weekend, news that Jamal had been kicked out of school had ‘made the rounds’ in the street where he lived. A fortyish man who lived in the adjoining yard, walked with a limp and was known to all and sundry as Cripple engaged him early on the Saturday morning. Afterwards a relationship of sorts developed between them. Jamal would be seen paying visits to Cripple’s apartment, leaving with black plastic-bagged packages and returning to Cripple’s place of abode two or three hours later. His new relationship coincided with a change in his appearance. He suddenly began to wear better clothing and the ‘no name brand’ of sneakers which Samantha had bought him for school was replaced by a pair of Timberlands. Samantha had noticed too that Jamal would occasionally buy modest parcels of groceries though she never bothered to ask how he had come by the money.
The police raided Cripple’s apartment about two months after Jamal had struck up the relationship with him. The two were found counting money which Jamal had only just brought back to the apartment. A search of the premises had yielded a quantity of cocaine and both Cripple and Jamal had been handcuffed and frog-marched out of the yard and into a waiting police car.
This time around, there was no question of hiring an attorney. The amount that Samantha had borrowed from her employers following the incident in school had not yet been repaid. After the anxiety attack over seeing her son at the Police Station and watching him led off to a holding cell where she knew that he would now have to share the company of older men, some of them possibly seasoned criminals, Samantha had eventually come to terms with the reality that Jamal would have no option but to lie on the bed which, since becoming a teenager, he had painstakingly made for himself.
On the day that he was arraigned before the courts Samantha showed up, sat quietly and waited for the proceedings to begin. It had only been a few days since Jamal’s arrest but she had to look a second time to recognize him when he was brought into the Court handcuffed to the limping man who everybody in her neighborhood called ‘Cripple.’ Jamal wore a becalmed but distinctly hardened countenance; he appeared untidy and in need of a bath and a good night’s sleep. What she noted as well was that the left side of his face appeared swollen as if from a single blow rather than a sustained beating. She had to restrain herself from bursting into tears.
The trial was a blur. Cripple’s attorney, a portly East Indian man wearing an ill-fitting suit pursued the option of asserting that it was Jamal’s cocaine and that his client was unaware that his house was being used to ‘stash’ the drugs. As for the money the attorney took the position that his client was simply involved in negotiations with Jamal in the matter of the purchase of a second-hand car. Cripple, he said, was acting as a go-between for the owner of the car and at the time when the police raid occurred was simply discharging one of the responsibilities he had undertaken… counting the money for the purchase of the car which Jamal had brought to his home, before handing it over to the owner of the vehicle.
You could have determined even as the attorney was relating the particular version of events that the Magistrate, an attractive Amerindian woman who appeared barely out of her teens, wasn’t ‘buying’ it. After what seemed like a mere formality the Magistrate delivered her verdict. ‘Cripple,’ whom the Magistrate said seemed like a street smart hustler was sentenced to six years in prison for possession of cocaine with intention to traffic. After she had spent some time pronouncing on the tragedy of a teenager becoming caught up in crime rather than being in school the Magistrate, having described Jamal as ‘an unfortunate accomplice’ imposed a custodial sentence of eight months in prison.
Whilst the Magistrate was making her pre-sentence pronouncements Samantha was fixing her son with an unflinching stare. She feared the worst as far as the outcome of the case was concerned and began to think of what might become of him in prison. After three months she had stopped visiting his father in prison. Twice she had taken the risk of smuggling cigarettes in for him after which she had come to terms with the inevitability of being caught. She wondered whether she would be able to endure the pain of having to visit Jamal in prison. Whilst she was waiting to hear his fate she decided that she would always love Jamal but that she would have to ‘let go.’
He didn’t look at her after the sentence was handed down though she thought that she had caught a resigned look on his face as he was being led away by the two policemen. It was the same look that she had recognised after she had told him all those months earlier that his father had been sent to prison…as if, somehow, the inside of those walls held the key to the next, crucial phase of his life.
