They were three simple words.
But with them came a complex of emotions and an overwhelming realization that we had been violated.
My mother shouted up the stairs in a tone I had never heard her use before that Saturday night in December. That was two years ago.
I can hear her shrieking now.
Her words – they shot Lenny – shook us and our world upside down; for life as we knew it changed.
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My cousin Lenny, who lives in De Village, celebrates his birthday on June 14; mine comes three days later.
I have never written about this. I hardly ever verbalize it.
But when I read two stories that appeared in SKNVibes on June 12 and 13 titled respectively “Gunmen shift target to St. Johnston Village” and “St. Johnston Village remains gunmen’s target,” I had unsettling flashbacks.
Compounding things was the fact that the shooting on June 9 of 68-year-old Courtland Carter, the owner of Carter’s Shop – during an attempted robbery of his business in De Village – was similar to the violent attack on Lenny, a quiet, hardworking businessman in his early 40s.
Some of you reading this don’t know that I was born and raised in De Village. One of my neighbours was an ambitious boy named Cameron Wilkinson who is now Chief of Staff at Joseph N. France General Hospital, where Lenny had his surgery.
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By my 12th birthday, I had moved to Cayon with my family. Before Cayon, we lived at College Housing Site for two or three years.
For two decades, Cayon has been my home but the place I have real emotional ties to is De Village.
I knew it like the back of my hand. De Village comprises a number of villages, including Buckley’s Site, Haynes Smith Village, La Guerite Village, Russell Village, and St. Johnston Village.
At two or three years old, I enrolled in Teacher Elsie’s School next to St. Johnston’s Methodist Church, before going to St. Theresa’s Convent High School at age four.
Up to 1995, I attended St. Johnston Methodist Church regularly. I went to Sunday school and sang in the youth choir.
The church at De Village is an Institution. Generations of the community’s children have passed through its doors to get christened and confirmed, including “King Konris” and other young role models.
I remember seeing Sir Probyn Inniss at practically every Sunday service along with other upstanding citizens, such as Donald Cable, who chose to worship there although other Methodist churches were closer to where they lived.
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Growing up, I was extremely close with my mother’s family. I remember hanging out in my aunt’s store, helping out but mainly playing with my cousins – including Lenny – and, as years passed, with their children. I slept over a lot. I also visited and went to church with my maternal grandmother, who had a shop on the same road as my aunt’s business.
My grandmother, my aunt and my mother are exceptionally strong women who taught me the value of hard work. They signify so much of what so many of their fellow villagers stand for: a flinty work ethic.
It’s no coincidence that De Village has produced many entrepreneurs. It’s no coincidence, too, that the idea for the Miss Caribbean Talented Teen Pageant – which held its debut in December 1980 – originated out of De Village and the Haynes Smith Youth Club.
In recent years, I visited my mother’s family in De Village more and more infrequently. This was partly because I became consumed by my work and partly because I took it for granted that nothing bad would happen to them in the idyllic neighbourhood I remembered.
Understandably, the news of what happened to Lenny made me feel guilty, angry, and fearful that he would die. I still feel angry and somewhat guilty.
…
So I write this partly for emotional release.
Another reason for writing this is to affirm how much De Village and its villagers have going for them. They are not just “those people there where all that shooting takes place.” They are good people; strong people…people who can overcome adversity and have been doing so for years.
It’s important for them to remember this, no matter how trying things may seem.
I was touched by T.C. Phipps-Benjamin’s commentary titled “A Doctor’s plea,” which SKNVibes published in February.
Phipps-Benjamin wrote: “It was extremely disheartening to read about the deflated and emotionally drained spirit of the Federation’s Chief-of-Staff at the JNF Hospital, Dr. Cameron Wilkinson. On Tuesday night, February 25, 2009, he tended the bullet-ridden body of one of our nation’s teenagers, whose life met a brutal end.
“The esteemed doctor had been in life saving mode before, flanked by a supporting cast of doctors and nurses with life saving medical devices within reach. Why was Tuesday night so different for Dr. Wilkinson? He is an accomplished doctor who has cared for victims of violence while residing and working in the U.S. But in his words, ‘When you see persons here who you know from a kid, some of them you remember when they were born, and you see them being gunned down just before they reach their prime, it’s very, very distressing.’”
It is very distressing, and it hurts.
I do the math and think back to when I was 15 and singing “El Shaddai” in front of the congregation. I’m 32 now, so some of the people wielding these guns and a lot of their victims would have been around two years old. As a teenager, I held so many of the congregation’s babies in my arms, cooing over and cuddling them. I can’t help but wonder what kind of people they are right now, if everything is right with their souls, and if all of them are still alive.
I’ve been chastised for writing too much about these things; for sensationalizing the gun and gang issue. An educated guy who is my age recently told me that he doesn’t care to read about “them.” He thinks of them as “just another dead mother@$#^,” he said, chuckling.
We need to get past this in order to move forward.
Obviously, I need to get past certain things too, and perhaps this is why I write.
I know full well how simple words can change everything.
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