Dem Lucky Leesa Fenderson (bio) What I knew of them then was very little. They lived in Mountain View, Jamaica. He was a police officer and she a nurse. He was darkly coated in confidence. She was slim and brown. In America she would be called “light skinned,” in Jamaica she was a “browning.” She owned any room she walked into with her height, the pride of her maiden name, and the privilege that her lighter complexion afforded her. He claimed the attention of those in his presence with the square of his shoulders, his father’s dark complexion, his police corporal title, and his prowess. From verbal accounts, and pictures of the waterfall giving misty color to the force of energy between them, they were in love. The Jamaica in those photos—the vivacious plant life, blades of sun cutting through the descent of water, and the prismatic, candy-hued flowers—lost its light, Jamaica lost its light, bowing to the energy of love between them. They had Marshea in 1977 and me in 1980. It was sometime around then that my parents decided to migrate our family. I felt the world tilt, the sun dim and the middle child in me would say that that was the moment I began to feel invisible. The fat bundle of baby, with mini versions of my big hands and skinny ankles, wrapped in my father’s dark complexion, knew things. My dark brown coating grew weary and ashy, the cells of skin preparing for less love—the sun couldn’t love me appropriately in New York. I knew in my deepest layers that our world would tilt and be forever askew. My earliest concept of Jamaica, the island, was connected to a huge, mysterious, cylindrical cardboard receptacle with a matching circular top that fit tightly onto the container sealing it with a metal latch. It appeared in the corner of our one bedroom apartment one year near the end of the summer. It met my dad just below his chest. And standing, Marshea and I and one other kid could fit comfortably inside. Our apartment building sat at the top of a hill off Hillside Avenue in Jamaica, Queens proper. So proper, that Hillside Avenue, appropriately on a hillside, ran parallel to Jamaica Avenue. On any given day Jamaica Avenue would be flooded with Caribbean expats in search of school uniforms, an African braiding shop, or beef patties sold out of a window front operation that also sold the latest dancehall or reggae cassettes. The smell of the flaky golden crust and juicy beef or veggie patties, for the ital1 among us, would mingle in an indelicate but pleasant [End Page 108] and pungent conflation. This was the first place my family called home after our arrival to the States. From our first floor window I would stare intently at every Crowne Victoria that drove by because I thought it may be one of the ones my dad drove for my parents’ first entrepreneurial endeavor. Years later Mummy would tell us about the time she kept my dad company on a night of running robot. They had reached a passenger’s destination. The street was a dark cul-de-sac. The passenger pulled out a handgun and put it to my dad’s head. I always picture my dad’s 1980s afro and handlebar mustache during the retelling of this story. My mother said she had screamed and begged and cried for the gunman not to shoot her husband. My dad on the other hand had spoken calmly. While appearing to look for his stashed billfold, his left hand had stretched down and under on his seat, his fingers searching quickly for his cutlass. His fingers never found the cutlass. Mummy maintains that his not being able to find that knife saved them. Yet my mother’s greatest agony that night in their taxi wasn’t their brush with death. It was the loss of the money they were saving to buy a house. A house with the upstairs I had requested. Jamaica may not have been mentioned by name. It may have just loomed as an enigmatic other place...