6 April 2020. Baobab at Alpha Boys
It's the old baobab tree at Alpha Boys School. Sister Ignatius remembers the tree being large even when she first arrived, in 1939--and by the early 1980s some of the heaviest branches had grown over the school's roof--threatening the print shop and the structure itself. They were cut back, but this damaged the tree, which never recovered. (Sister Ignatius also tells that he baobab provided shade, and after it was gone, the print shop became unbearably hot...)
In the back of my mind here is Ford Maddox Ford--his novel, Parade's End, written just after the First World War. Tietjens, the youngest son in a family of the English aristocracy--we follow his life as that world is coming to an end. Ford's image for this, Groby Great Tree, the tallest tree on the family estate. Groby Great Tree is down. (We used to chant it sometimes, here in Berkeley, around the house... Groby Great Tree is down.)
The Alpha tree was planted in recognition of Jamaica's "African heritage." I balk at the overt poshlust', of course--given the weight of the memory of slavery bestowed on those same Africans. However, a tree is alive, and the baobab was an important part of the school--he boys climbed it for the fruit (pulp and seeds), and even invented a game with its flowers, which they called Keep Up. But one senses that it was the tree's presence, more than anything, that spoke to them. Told them what they might begin to know...
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The second figure is Don Drummond, a Jamaican musical legend. He'd been a student at Alpha, mastered the trombone, playing jazz at the outset, but soon drawn to spending time with Count Ossie and his Nyabinghi drummers at their camp in the Wareika Hills. (Count Ossie, a magnetic figure, and another Jamaican musical legend.) Out of this--the jazz horns and the African drums--came Ska. In the first open-ended days of Jamaican independence... You hear Don Drummond's trombone on the early Skatalites records--his genius. (Sarah Vaghan called him one of the world's best. "Don’s playing was so mournful, you could cry inside.")
Don Drummond's great love was Marguerita Mahfoud, a dancer--the "rumba queen." (It was Marguerita' popularity--and her lighter complexion--that made it possible for her to bring Count Ossie's drums into her uptown shows. The club owner tried to hide the group in a corner at the back of the stage, but the crowd loved the new sound, which opened the door for Count Ossie beyond beyond the Rastafari world. Don Drummond being part of this.)
Marguerita loved him deeply, even wrote a song for him, recorded by the Skatalites in 1963--Woman a Come. A cryptic love letter, written from those same imagined/invented African sources. Here are some of the lyrics: Ungu maluyngu man... Iata Jah dawta from Penchurian border...woman a come... If you see him before I do, Please give him my heart message so true, tell him I don't want to live without him, he is my life my love my all,... Ungu maluyngu man...
However, Don Drummond was also greatly troubled. Was it his genius? His longing to pull together two such disparate worlds? (Jazz, the stream of now--or the Nyabinghi drums from an imaginedAfrican past.) In any event, in a fit of madness, he murdered Marguerita--spent the rest of his life in a Kingston mental asylum.
We can't know these things, what actually happened inside on that final visit. But we do have Marguerita's plaintive love song--and some of that same Africa in Don Drummond's songs as well...
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The story here is (obviously) complex--I've touched on just parts of it. But the weaving together of this longing for a source--even an unknown source--an unknown Africa--runs through it all...
Runs through the baobab as well...
