The young man on the construction site had his sneer prepared from the time he registered my appearance; he just didn’t know yet how he would apply it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him as I asked his foreman if our dogs, missing for two weeks, had been seen. The foreman was shaking his head kindly when the young man located the funnel for his contempt.
“But wait!” he said, to everyone and no one, to me and Barbados’ history. “Is cane dogs he looking for so? I say was a child was missing!”
The foreman smiled at me. “Don’t study he,” he said. “He does spend whole day taking bare shiretrite.”
“I know the type,” I replied. “Nobody would miss him if he was missing, so he can’t understand why anybody would search for anything.”
The foreman nodded.
I rode on; but the young man’s sneer stayed with me and, in a way, I couldn’t give him wrong, as they say in Trinidad.
He did not wish me or my dogs ill but for a hard-working man like himself, the mere thought of someone like me having the time to search for a cane dog was not just an insult to the hardness of his day, but a reminder of the structure of privilege in these parts, where, for most of our history, there was one rule only: the fairer your skin, the greater your advantages.
It could almost have been a Bob Marley lyric: “Dreadie have a job to do/ And he’s got to fulfil that mission/ But ah-we will survive in this world of competition/ Baldhead got to write about/ All kinda rubbish on his blogs/ Panic in The City/ Baldhead looking for his dogs”.
It hurt my heart that this hard-working young guy would take that attitude; but it hurt more that I could see why he would, and could make no answer to him except to say that he should read more and discover how flimsy all human distinctions were.
If I could, I would have given him Les Miserables and Dream On Monkey Mountain and A House For Mr Biswas and The Sound And The Fury and To Kill A Mockingbird and Catch-22 and The Red & The Black and Midnight’s Children and One Hundred Years Of Solitude and In The Castle Of My Skin.
But I knew it would be all he could do to wait for the movie, or the dancehall song version.
With a heart heavier than just two lost cane dogs I headed home, wondering if we’ll ever figure our way out of our predicament in the West Indies.
It’s a hard thing to seek to eradicate the system of unfair privilege from which you yourself benefit.
It’s an even harder thing to understand that if it isn’t changed deliberately, methodically and peacefully – in proper Bajan fashion, in other words – the whole thing will come crashing down on everyone and will destroy everything; especially things too small for anyone to bother defending, like little brown cane dogs, and the love we all recognize in Jesus Christ but not the brother only slightly different from us.