Valley Avenue and the watson family

Valley Avenue is a small cul de sac in an already small community of Spanish Town, Jamaica. The Watsons, a family of ten, live in the house at the top of the road. Valeria Watson is a Puerto Rican immigrant married to Ronald Watson, a man born and raised in Westmoreland, Jamaica. When Valeria left San Juan, she knew no English and told no one where she was going. Upon arriving in Jamaica, she met Ronald, who taught her English and gave her her first child at 19. When he met Valeria, Ronald told his friends that he had “finally found the bright side of the moon”, he was a romantic back in those days, before life hardened him and his hands. They have been together ever since. Valeria had been grateful to Ronald for teaching her English and putting a roof over her head; where she’s from, that is the most romantic thing a man can do for you. To her that love was security. It’s the seventies now, and time is especially slow in the summers for the Watson children.

Douglas Watson, the second child and second boy, watched his younger sisters, Marisol and Bonnie, play outside almost every day that year. He stayed in his room and watched his family through the cracks of doors and windows for most of that year, actually. He perpetually resented his mother for having more children after him and harboured a grudge against his father for never looking him in the eye. In some recent years, she started calling him “Robert two” as a joke because of their striking resemblance. Robert was a tall, elegant creature that seemed to have glided through every stage of life, untouched by trauma, puberty or guilt. Other distant family members started calling him “Robert two” at a dinner the previous March, so much so that he left the dining table to shave his head in the bathroom. When he came out, he didn’t say anything. His curls were in pieces on his shoulders. He went back to his seat and resumed eating. That evening Ronald sent him to the barber down the road to get his hair neatened up. He also told him if he embarrassed the family like that again, he’d be sent away to live with his grandmother. Douglas’ grandmother was a devoted Rastafarian woman with Alzimerhs. The Watson children found it funny when she would forget to put on pants or forget the water running for her bath. It was less funny when she forgot how to breathe in the summer of 1986. Valeria stopped calling him ‘Robert two” to his face after that, no one knew it was bothering him because he didn’t tell anyone to stop.

Douglas shared a room with Robert when they both started attending the same high school; St. John's Cathedral. That’s how the children were divided in their rooms; by school. Bonnie and Marisol attended the fancy catholic girls’ school in town, where they’d have to take a 7 AM bus every morning just to make it in time for the 8:30 morning bell. Later in life, Bonnie admitted to having never said a word to her younger brother Mathew until he was seven because their morning schedules didn’t match up. The younger girls, Dawn and Sonia went to the local primary school and only had to leave home at 8 AM to get to school on time. The younger boys, Matthew and Evrad, took a similar route to school but left the house at 7:45 to meet with their friends two bus stops further up the road. Every morning was like a conveyor belt of motherhood for Valeria, she woke up at 6 AM every day for about 20 years and she never complained once; she didn’t know how to complain in English. Ronald spent his entire life building houses for other people, sanding down mahogany doors and constructing roofs for the poor. He never stopped working until the day he died in 2000, not even when he lost his leg that September morning.

It had been a slow summer, but now the rumbling of September morning was upon the Watson family as they prepared to head back into their school routine. Valeria had already starched the khaki for the boys and the white linen tunics for the girls. The sewing machine had been in use for weeks prior, adjusting uniforms for their individual growing bodies. Valeria wished they all grew at the same pace so the load would be lighter or sometimes she wished they were all the same age and had numbers for names instead.

There were many things Valeria wished for her life; she wished she finished high school, she wished she learned how to drive and she wished she was a better wife. She was not a soft woman because she didn’t have the space or time to become one. In reality, she was a girl who ran away from one home right into another one, except this time it was her own doing. Sometimes she looked at her English-speaking children and envied them, envied how easy it was for them to pick up a book and read or hop on a bus or eat an ice cream cone on the veranda. She envied her husband for having friends and family around him, she envied him most of all because all her children looked like him. It was as if her body was just a vessel for his likeness, for his Jamaicaness. She had no time to teach her children Spanish because she was too busy trying to keep up with their English. It was a lonely existence but it was a necessary one and a truly silent one. No one ever asked her about where she came from, not her neighbours, not any of the countless workmen who came through her home and not even her children. It’s strange to think about how ten people could live under the same roof and be so detached for so many years. It’s even stranger how they all felt lonely within four bedrooms and three bathrooms.

The first day of school eventually stumbled into the present. Douglas and his siblings went about their usual morning routines; smearing petroleum grease into their scalps and the girls willing their thick locks into braids. Robert always walked ahead of Douglas to the bus stop and never told anyone at school that they were related even though they practically shared the same face. Douglas' lips were darker from the cigarettes he stole and smoked. His eyes were darker from all the nights he stayed up. It wasn’t clear to Douglas why he treated him this way. Was it because he was ashamed to carry around his little brother like a weaker version of his own shadow? Douglas felt like a scar on the complexion of his family, a sentiment he would never be able to shake even as he went on to have his own children. He didn’t know it back then, but something was brewing in his mind; his longingness to escape his own family. He dreamt of leaving them behind the way Robert had left him behind at the bus stop; so effortlessly.

It was around midday that a screaming woman approached the house on Valley Ave and interrupted Valeria’s hour of solo bachata dancing. Her screams had everyone on the block peering over their barbed wire gates to see what had happened, but it was at the Watson’s house that this screaming woman stopped. The woman’s name was Anne, she was a helper in the neighbourhood and her husband usually worked with Ronald on some construction sites. Anne frequently visited Valeria to sit on her veranda and gossip about the other inhabitants of the community. When Valeria first moved to Jamaica, Anne taught her Jamaican swear words like “bomboclaat”, “rahtid” and “rass”. She also taught Valeria how to catch a man in a lie, a skill she seemed to always be leaning on. This time, however, it was clear that Anne was not at her gate to discuss Mrs. Downey’s undercooked yams, this was something different.

Anne didn’t get many words out, but Valeria read everything she needed to know in her eyes. Her husband had been in a terrible accident, an accident that would permanently disable him and thus permanently disable their family. Fifteen minutes prior, Ronald was operating a tractor when he lost control and ended up wedged between the tractor and a wall. He lost his left leg that day. Men on the scene described the shock they felt seeing Ronald in two pieces in the dirt. They thought he was dead, surely.

The two women borrowed a neighbour's car even though neither of them ever learned how to drive. Valeria did not cry on her way to the hospital, she assumed he would be dead when she got there. Instead, she tried to remember what Ronald looked like that morning before he went to work. She thought about the raw egg he swallowed every morning with a side of whole milk and the mop she left leaning up against the couch. She thought about what her children would feel when she told them, would Douglas be sad, how about Robert? She thought about how large the tractor was and how small his body must’ve looked lying beside it and then for just a brief moment she thought about her own father. How did he die? He must’ve been dead by now.

At the hospital, Anne cried some more. Valeria was bombarded by well-wishers and doctors shouting numbers and prices at her; it was all very confusing. Ronald wasn’t dead, his heart was still beating at least. She wished she could talk to him though, so he could tell her what to do, or maybe tell her about some money hidden away for a time like this, but the reality was that there was no secret money. She didn’t know how the banks worked; how to convert slips of paper into cash. She cried for about 3 minutes and then prayed for about 5 hours. She said a prayer her mother taught her.

In twos, the Watson children began to arrive home from school to a half-cleaned house and fading bachata music. Valeria was already cooking and going over the script Anne had given her to recite to them. They all sat in the living room, spilling over the couches and lace pillows to hear their mother address them. She began by telling them that their father was not dead, immediately Bonnie burst into tears and Robert rushed to comfort her so Valeria could continue speaking. She told them everything would be fine and that life would soon go back to normal; she lied to them. None of them believed her, but they were willing to pretend. This was something the Watson children knew all too well; pretending to be okay for the “greater good”. They could never really explain what the “greater good” was, maybe it was the sanity of their mother or maybe the reputation of their father. They all gave up pieces of themselves to make Valeria’s load lighter whether consciously or unconsciously. She slept alone for the first time in her life that night. Back in Puerto Rico, she was always sharing a room with her siblings, cousins or anyone really.

Weeks went by and then so did the months, and like many Jamaican families, poverty was nipping at the heels of Valeria and Ronald Watson.

Douglas had been secretly selling weed in the community just so his sisters would have enough bus fare to come home in the evenings. Robert took up a job at the local wholesale but often complained about robberies and low wages. The others did what they could, selling mangoes at school and candy on the bus. Valeria would occasionally cook and clean for her neighbours for some extra money. She even sent a letter to her family back in Puerto Rico but got no reply. The hospital promised Ronald a wooden leg when the next shipment came in from the US; in the meantime, he had to hop from room to room. Eventually, he just stayed put in his room.

Ronald stayed in bed for months, hiding from his own disability. Every morning he woke up and was reminded that he was not whole and neither was his family. He stopped speaking to the children three months into bed rest, even though sometimes Douglas would come around. Douglas would read to him or just listen to the radio with him if he ran out of newspaper articles to recite. The truth was, that Douglas was angry with his father. For so long Ronald had ignored and overlooked him, so much so that a callous grew around Douglas’ feelings toward him. He wanted to relate to his father or at least feel like he noticed when he was sad or happy. He never knew how his relationship with Ronald became this hollow and indifferent. Sometimes he’d spend hours trying to pinpoint the moment when he went from “Douglas” to “Robert two”.

He thought about what he might have done in his early childhood. He didn’t say a word until he was seven and he wasn’t really interested in much. He didn’t have many friends at school, at church or even in the neighbourhood, he didn’t know it but he would spend his entire life trying to make up for his early inadequacy. He later lost his virginity as a grown man in Michigan to a woman named Rose he had met earlier that day, he would pay her extra to spend the night just so his bed wasn’t empty. He would abandon his children and they would never forgive him. He would cause a lot of pain that he eventually hid his from as well.

Ronald knew what Douglas was doing, they all did. He did a lazy job at hiding it, or maybe he wasn’t trying to hide it at all. Sometimes he’d deal from the house to people his father used to work with or even Anne’s children. His eyes were always red and he moved in slow motion. Robert was disappearing as well; into girls and parties, the rest of his siblings seemed to fade into the background. One day Valeria called Bonnie by Marisol’s name and didn’t even bother to correct herself. They no longer hosted dinners and threw birthday parties, instead they all just waited around for Douglas to appear with unexplained wads of cash to distribute. For the first time, Douglas was needed. In some twisted way, he became the man of the house; the fractured and bruised house.

That December, when school let out, Douglas was planning something big…or at least someone was planning something big for him. He was going to take his business international.

Some odd boys who’d hang out by the shops at the bottom of the hill approached Douglas late one evening. The plan was simple, Douglas would be a mule; carrying some pounds of marijuana and whatever else in the US through Atlanta. He would spend two days there, stay in Buckhead to distribute and then fly back home. He was the perfect candidate; unremarkable and invisible. He would tell his mother a lie to excuse his absence. The boys told him to say he was sleeping at a friend's house or that he was going into Kingston to look for jobs. He nodded at the suggestions but knew he may not even have to say anything, he could slip away at night unnoticed and come back in two days equally unnoticed. As long as he left money behind he didn’t have to explain himself.

Robert dated a woman from the embassy and was able to get a passport without anyone’s knowledge except for Douglas. Robert was the first person in their family to own a passport even though he had no plans to ever get on a plane. Douglas knew Robert hid it in the bottom drawer of his dresser, toward the back left corner, next to his journal. Years ago, Douglas had found that same journal and read a couple pages. Robert had been writing poetry about his siblings, naming some pieces after them. There was one journal entry that stood out to him:

“March 8,1976

I told Mom to stop calling Douglas “Robert two”. Sometimes I see him alone at school. I don’t even know what to say to him.”

He read the entry so many times that evening, he didn’t know what to say to him either.

Douglas left on flight DL383 at 4 AM from the Norman Manley International Airport. He took the two suitcases that he had hidden in the outhouse. He left a short note behind “Will send $ every month- D.Watson”.

Marisol was the first one who noticed her brother's absence. She had woken up early to ask him for a hundred dollars toward a sewing machine but didn’t see him lying in his bed. She jolted Robert awake.

The seven remaining Watson children stood huddled over the note in the living room. Robert confessed he’d heard a rumour about Douglas and the odd boys, but he figured his brother wouldn’t have the audacity to do something so bold.

Everyone looked at each other for a while and shared the collective feeling of forlorn. They elected Marisol to be the one to show Valeria the note, they thought it would soften the blow. She held the note like a bomb and knocked on her parents’ bedroom door.

In Jamaica, there’s a saying that goes “John Crow neva mek house til rain come.” It means that people never prepare themselves for even the hardest of times. How could you?

Valeria thought about this as she heard her daughter explain their collective theory about Douglas’ note. Ronald immediately erupted. He was now shouting at Valeria and ushering Marisol out of the room, hobbling on his new wooden leg.

Ronald insisted that Douglas was crazy and was pulling some sort of trick on them. They both knew Douglas was mischievous but none of it was a joke. Ronald shouted at himself in the mirror. Valeria felt her chest get cold like someone has smeared Vicks on her. She saw her husband respond in a way she had never seen, he snapped. She could hear Marisol crying down the hall. It’s funny how you can inherit a cry, she thought.

In a moment that felt like two weeks, she thought about what to do. She ignored Ronald who was now in the living room roaring at Robert to provide him with more details. Who are these odd boys? Odd how? How did he meet them? Where are they now? Where is he going? How did you get a passport? How much money?

How much money?!

Valeria cried as she washed her face in the bathroom sink. The coldness had now spread from her chest to her brain and the tip of her fingers. She was angry with Douglas for leaving and sad that the note he left behind was so bloodless. She knew he felt the pressure though, financially. They all did. She was shaking all over.

Ronald stormed into the bathroom and insisted he never had a son named Douglas. No son of his was a runaway drug criminal. He declared to the whole house that anyone who goes to America ends up dying within a month. He spit on the floor and hobbled out of the house onto the veranda to smoke.

Valeria left roses at her mother's bedside when she left Puerto Rico and Douglas did not even spell out his entire name.

She thought about how it felt from Douglas’ point of view. She couldn’t even remember if she had spoken to him within the last four days.

After speaking with Robert, she grabbed the keys to Ronald’s car and headed toward the front door. She was met by a screaming husband, nosey neighbours and also the morning sun.

She had to go get him, to her there was no other option or choice. It’s what her parents weren’t compassionate enough to do; go after her. She would dream of her mother begging her to stay, but no one begged. They had let her go and that stung her. She was so young that she didn’t truly understand the permanence of her actions until she was in labour with Robert. It was when she held that baby in her arms, that she became attached to Jamaica. There was no going back. Bound by womb.