Chapter 34
Tunde had relocated to Birmingham after university, working in community development, and he and Marcus maintained their friendship across the distance with the ease of people whose connection does not require constant maintenance calls when there was something to say, letters when the something was complicated, the knowledge on both sides that the other one was there.
Priya had returned to her family in Birmingham and was teaching at a primary school. They spoke on the phone most Sundays, comparing notes on the realities of the classroom against what they had been taught to expect.
'Nobody tells you about the tiredness,' Priya said one Sunday.
'Or the specific joy,' Marcus said.
'That too,' she agreed. 'The tiredness and the joy are the same thing, basically.'
In Kingston, Marcus found himself part of a community he had not been looking for. There was a loose gathering of writers and thinkers and artists who met on the second Friday of every month in a yard in New Kingston not a formal group, no membership, just people who showed up to share work and argue about ideas and eat well and talk too late into the night.
He was brought by a colleague at Pemberton, a History teacher named Marcia who had been going for years. He arrived expecting to listen and found himself talking within an hour, pulled in by a debate about Caribbean literary canon and what it owed to the yard, to the informal, to the vernacular.
He came back the following month. And the next.
He began sharing his own work not the academic writing, but the personal essays he had been writing in his journal for years, pulling them out and sharpening them and reading them to a room of people who had the generosity of genuine attention.
The group included a poet named Claudette who was in her sixties and wrote with a precision that astonished him; a young journalist named Patrick who was covering social affairs for a Kingston newspaper and who asked the most uncomfortable questions of anyone in the room; a documentary filmmaker named Joy who had grown up in Barbados and who saw everything as narrative; and a retired headteacher named George who mostly listened but when he spoke, the room fell quiet.
These people became, over the months that followed, part of the texture of Marcus's life in Kingston the intellectual community that fed the part of him that the classroom and the yard and the Sunday visits with his mother, for all their richness, could not quite reach.
He wrote in his journal after one Friday gathering: 'I have found my people here. Not one group, not one place, but a constellation. Leroy and Mama and the yard on one side, the classroom in the middle, this group on the other. All of it together is the life.