Roots in the Rain
A Novel
A story of Kingston streets, a mother's sacrifice,
and the journey of a boy who had to find himself far from home.
For every child who had to leave home before they were ready.
And for every mother who let them go, heart in hand.
The tree that survives the storm does not forget the soil that held its roots.
Jamaican Proverb
PART ONE
The Yard
Chapter 1
Born in the Blue Hills
The morning Marcus was born, the sky over Kingston turned a shade of violet that old Mama Vie said she had never seen before in all her seventy-two years on the island. She stood on the cracked concrete steps of the yard on Arnett Gardens, fanning herself with a folded newspaper, watching the light shift from copper to plum behind the Blue Mountains. She said it was a sign. She always said everything was a sign.
Inside the small room at the end of the shared yard, Diane was not thinking about the sky. She was thinking about breathing. About the sharp, insistent pressure in her lower back. About the way her body had become something foreign to her enormous and powerful and frightening all at once. The midwife, a sturdy woman named Miss Eunice, moved with quiet confidence between the cot and the bucket of water steaming in the corner.
"Push, baby," Miss Eunice said. Not urgently. Not with panic. The way you tell someone to open a door.
And Marcus came into the world at six forty-three in the morning, wailing with a voice that startled the roosters in the neighbor's yard and made the two dogs chained at the gate look up and cock their heads. He came in loud. He came in full of protest.
Diane held him against her chest and felt the world reorganize itself around this seven pounds of new life. His skin was still wet. His fingers curled like he was already reaching for something just out of sight.
What you going to name him? Miss Eunice asked, wiping her hands on a clean cloth.
Diane looked down at her son. She had been thinking about this for months. She had written names in the margins of her Bible, crossed them out, circled others. She had dreamed once of a man standing on a mountain, looking down at a valley full of gold light. She thought of that dream now.
"Marcus," she said. "Marcus Elijah Campbell."
Mama Vie came in from the steps, pushing past the thin curtain that served as a door. She looked at the baby for a long, serious moment, the way she looked at everything as though measuring it against some internal standard developed over decades. Then she smiled, just slightly.
He going to carry something, she said. This one going to carry something heavy. But he strong enough.
Nobody asked her what she meant. That was the thing about Mama Vie. You didn't ask. You just stored it away for later.
Marcus grew up in the yard the way most children in Arnett Gardens grew up in community, in noise, in the constant near-chaos of shared space. The yard held four families across six rooms arranged in a rough rectangle around a central concrete space where water was drawn from a shared tap, where women hung laundry in criss-crossing lines, where children played from morning until the street lights flickered on and someone's grandmother appeared in a doorway to call them in.
By the time Marcus was five, he knew the yard the way he knew his own hands. He knew that Miss Gloria in room two started cooking rice at exactly four o'clock because the smell of it drifting across the yard meant the afternoon was turning toward evening. He knew that Mr. Donovan, who rented the room nearest the gate, kept a small transistor radio on his windowsill and played cricket commentary every Saturday, the tinny voices of commentators narrating a distant game like a prayer. He knew that the mango tree in the corner near the back wall had three climbable branches and that the third one, if you sat just right, gave you a view all the way down to the main road.
He spent hours in that mango tree.
"Marcus! Marcus, come down from there before you break your neck!" Diane's voice would rise from somewhere below, sharp with that particular frequency she reserved for him.
He would come down eventually. But not before he had surveyed everything. The street. The blue smudge of distant mountains. The shimmer of heat rising from the zinc rooftops. He was, from very early, a boy who needed to see things from above.