Free The Origin of Waves by Austin Clarke

anywhere. I pass stores. I know that. I pass the same stores in winter as I pass in the summer, the spring, the fall. All the time. I see people …”
    “Smiling and saying hello,” John says, trying to remember. “Watching people passing by? Why won’t it come back, this goddamn song? I know a song with words like these.”
    “Not always the same people. But people just the same. I see faces that I do not know, and I see people who are not related to me, except that, like me, they are people too, and nobody that I pass as I walk day in and day out knows me or recognizes me and I don’t recognize anybody or know anybody …”
    “Goddamn!”
    “…  there is nothing, nothing that I see that has any bearing, any relation, any connection to me. Did you know that not
one
street in this city has a similar name to
any
street back home? So, I don’t even see
that
connection.”
    “You’re nothing but a walking ghost.”
    “I look in store windows and in stores, and I see my reflection in the glass, and a funny thing, just a few minutes before I bounced-into you, it crossed my mind to consider going back home.”
    “Back home? Man, there ain’t no goddamn home back home!”
    “Perhaps. But just to sit on the beach and spend my time looking out into the sea, at the tourist ships and the cruise-liners and the inter-island schooners, if they still have schooners, and the fishing boats. Perhaps buy-back and recondition
Galilee
and do a little fishing myself.”
    “But you can’t even goddamn swim, fella! What kind o’ fisherman you would make?”
    “Most fishermen can’t swim. That’s why so many drown.”
    “That’s for goddamn sure! Like your uncle!”
    “True. There’s nowhere to go for me. In this city, or back home.”
    “Take me, for an instance. Now, I am a man who live in the goddamn States, after knocking-’bout for years in Europe, France, Croatia, Belgium, Italy,
Deutschlanduber-alles
, Wess Germany and East Germany, now just-plain-Germany. But after a while, I got goddamn fed-up with European cultures and civilization, ‘specially their goddamn
hot-cuisine
, where you hardly have enough food on your goddamn plate to fill a’ ant! But the Germans? Gimme the goddamn Germans, the Nazzis, anytime! They like a lotta food and bittle that’s heavy. Not this
hot-cuisine
like the French and the
parlez-vous
woman. So, I leave Brooklyn in New York where all of us settle at first, and I head straight for the goddamn South, in the heart of Dixie, y’all! Got my ass outta Brooklyn quick! Too many Barbadians and Jamakians living there now. I can’t stomach any more reggae andBarbadians with their spooge-songs and all that goddamn noise! All that noise. So, I high-tail my ass down South, y’all, to face the
real
thing! The real McCoy. And that’s where I learn to make a man of myself. In the goddamn South. As a goddamn black Dixiecrack! I am a black Dixiecrack. If you see what I mean. In the South, they say a man is not a man if he be black, but I found myself as a man in the goddamn South, and made something of myself as a
black
man. I make sure I behave
and
talk as a Wessindian-black and
not
as an Amurcan-black. If you see what I am saying. Right there in the heart o’ Dixie, I live a more better life than any black man or Wessindian in Brooklyn, than I did when I was hustling in Brooklyn-New York. I’ll tell you something. I’ll tell you what I mean. After I leff Europe, divorce three times, from three different wives, and with them behind me, I tried to practise the profession of a psychiatrist in the States. The States is a big place that likes big people, big ideas, and that take big risks. I am a big man. I live big. A man could hide in the South. And that is exactly what I did. I couldn’t as a black man, playing around with therapy and psychiatry, hide in Brooklyn-New York. Tummuch goddamn Barbadians and Jamakians willing to report my arse to the Man! And since I did not have my three wives