Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:49 AM
Feb 10, 2020 News
– Harold Bascom rewriting novel based on 1959 manhunt for desperado Clement Cuffy
Guyanese novelist-playwright, Harold A. Bascom, is in the process of rewriting his first novel, “Apata: The Story of a Reluctant Criminal,” first published by Heinemann Educational books of London in 1986, some thirty-four years ago.
When asked, why? He said, “People continued telling me it’s still a good novel and I ought to republish it for a new generation of Guyanese readers. So, I thought, why not? It has long been out of print and Heinemann returned the full copyrights back to me, years ago. Right now, if someone wants a copy, they must go on Amazon and buy used copies from resellers who dig them up from God knows where. So, why not?”
Bascom has chosen to rewrite “Apata” under a new title: “Black Stay Back.”
But how different will this be from the original?
“Plot-wise, it will be the same; but since I’ve grown as a writer, I now read “Apata” and see crafting flaws in the writing—things like the sentence structures; the way I’ve used the passive voice too often—things like that. In short, right now I don’t think the writing is good enough. The new version will be tighter and better.”
“APATA: The Story of a Reluctant Criminal,” was fashioned around the 1959 manhunt for Guyanese desperado Clement Cuffy, personified by the novel’s anti-hero, Michael Apata.
The following is an excerpt from the new version in progress:
CHAPTER THREE
Young Michael Apata, still filled with the calm elation of his victory at the regatta yesterday, meditates on the water washing back from the Lady Northcut’s bow. The muted rumblings of the steamer’s engines come to him in hypnotic weaves that have sent many to sleep even though it is only after ten o’clock. Teenage Apata’s eyes, however, are clear and alert. He drops a banana skin into the water; the backwash along the ship’s side whips it astern and out of sight. He looks up from the river’s face and makes out a house between the bamboos. An Amerindian house? He reasons that would be. But it could well be a Black man’s house or, for that matter, an East Indian’s.
The shoreline breaks back into flat country past the house. A forest is seen in the background. Just behind the building, there is a solitary tree, from which hangs large, teardrop-shaped yellow-tail birds’ nests.
Water hisses from the crest of the waves formed by the thrusting bow. Even though the section of the shore with the house is now falling behind, Apata cranes his head around and manages to see a flight of yellow-tailed birds burst from the variegated greenery of the bushes. They mill around the tall tree. He turns his head away and looks up. The clouds seem to stand still and to him there’s one that’s shaped like a Seagull outboard engine.
He thinks of his girlfriend in Georgetown City. If my picture gets in the papers, he muses, Beverley will feel like a Queen, boy. Maybe when I get home. … But home is behind me. No, I have two homes: one where my grandparents are, and one where Bevy is.When I get home to her. I’ll kiss her forthwith if there’s a chance. Apata smiles to himself. The word “forthwith”, complete with tongue between teeth, always makes him smile. The verbal precision of his language teacher, Miss Frazier, who hates vulgar calypsonians; and she never says “vulgar” but “vulgerrr.”
“But,” he whispers to himself, “I love Beverley Bailey, I love Beverley Bailey, I love Beverley Bailey, I love Beverley Bailey….” And he is happy in the freedom of the privacy of his being.
Apata feels a need to turn and does. The huge woman with the caged parrot, nearby, stares at him. Is it because he’s been smiling to himself? In his discomfort, he re-opens the book he has been reading and finds that the sun makes the page too white to look at. So, he seats himself under the forecastle to be in the shade and flips back to the title page. Then he decides that he has had enough of Silas Marner. He rifles through his duffle bag and finds The Thirty-nine Steps.
As he opens the book his attention is diverted to the gloom under the third-class deck. A pair of mean-faced young policemen emerge flanking a pair of men with their hands handcuffed behind them; one Black, the other East Indian. One lawman carries a .303 rifle, the other a single-barreled shotgun. The prisoners shuffle onto the grimy deck.
“Excuse me miss lady,” Apata says to the woman with the parrot’s cage. “Who are those two men—the prisoners?”
“Who are them jail buds?”
The policeman with the rifle fishes a packet of cigarettes from his tunic pocket below his nickel-plated serial number. He lights a pair and offers them to the handcuffed men. The Indian prisoner sticks out his neck and accepts one of the cigarettes between his lips. The other prisoner shakes his head then asks another favour. The policeman with the rifle nods and the prisoner sits meekly on a salt beef barrel which lies on its side, prevented from rolling by wooden chocks. Blankly he gazes at the undulating shoreline. He breathes deeply and evenly and Apata notes that the prisoner’s wide, flaring nostrils on his burnt-brown face open and close slightly in the process. His eyes are hooded, his lips pressed tightly together. Something about the man’s massive head reminds Apata of a picture he once saw of the American boxer Joe Louis.
“Who them?” the woman with the parrot cage asks Apata who continues to watch the man sitting on the barrel. The prisoner looks as if he might be thinking regretfully of his freedom and of days when maybe he shone his shoes in preparation for the Easter Monday dance at some public school or parish hall. To Apata, every district on the coast seems to have a Parish Hall and he thinks the prisoner he contemplates must be a coast man, for if he came from the interior, he, Apata, would have heard of him from his grandfather.
“Who is them two, you asking, nuh? Aye-yagga! Who them two?”
Now there is a little ring of curious by-standers gaping at the pair of prisoners. Apata reasons that the seated one cannot be more than thirty-nine despite his weathered appearance.
“Who’s them?” the woman with the parrot cage continues. “Well, you wouldn’t know ‘cause you was probably small when Chingarus, de coolie one, take a hatchet and chop up he wife and two chirren like the beef he uses to sell at Mackenzie. When he finish, he chop them up, stuff the parts in a rice bag and throw it in a creek at Wismar. …” She nods. “Chingarus! Yes! That is the one smokin’ the cigarette!”
The cigarette burns low and the glow stands less than half an inch from his thin lips. A bit of his hair has fallen over one of his eyes in natural hollows under a high forehead and thick black brows. He lets the stub drop and jerks his head around to correct the fallen wisp of hair. The movement makes a timid woman jump; the man she clings to laughs in her face. “You frighten, noh?” he says loudly, “Chingarus not going bite you!”
“Who’s the other one?” asks Apata.
“The other one …” She looks keenly now at Apata. “Wait, boy! Me know you face. … You not Josh Smith grandson?”
Apata smiles; nods.
“Boy? You don’t know me?”
“No. …”
“All the same you won’t remember me. Is good to see how big you grow though.”
Apata scratches his head in mild impatience.
“But let me continue. Well the other one sitting there?” She points to the pensive, dark-skinned, black prisoner. “Is passion have him where he is. He story lil different from Chingarus story ‘cause Chingarus story was a case o’ blow, you know? He wife had a Black man with he and … well, Chingarus find out about it. But that black-skin one sitting there? He name Parkinson but they’s call he “Nosegay Parkinson” ‘cause he nose-hole big as you can see. …
“They say he kill a man in front of a White man office. They say that he went to get a job with some White people and was plenty o’ them there, and the White man had a black stooge who uses to pick out who and who the white man should give work to. Is like the White man tell he-self that since he don’t know plenty about Black people—who bad and who good—was best he get a black man to tell him who he should employ, you know, who is the lazy kind and who is the boderation kind — you know?”
Apata nods.
“But what the White man didn’t” realize was, that once any Black man get that position, he would turn big-ass and would want to show off on he mattyblack man.”
The Lady Northcut changes course slightly and now takes to the river’s centre. The parrot beats its wings; they smash into the water in its drinking cup. Apata shies away slightly. The narrating woman nudges the bird’s cage “Behave yourself, Lora!” she snaps then turns back to Michael. “Yes, as I was telling you boy. …
“The Black stooge uses to come out from the White man office; he uses to look around … he uses to take a good look around at the men hoping to be hired on two long wood bench in the front office.” The woman nods … nods. “He uses to look around good! And according to who is a fellow villager, he’d send that person into the white man’s office. …
“So, this day, Parkinson was sitting with others on the long bench, when the white man stooge come out. He start looking at the men, and then when he eyes fall on Parkinson, men say that the stooge start to act like he stifling for breath—as though he was suffocating for air. Then he start to look around wild-wild as if he wasn’ sure who to look at, and then suddenly he look at Parkinson and shout, “Get out of here! Your big nose sucking up all the atmosphere!
“They say the rest o’ the men waiting had a good laugh.”
Baffled, Michael Apata asks, “So, why he did that?”
“People who know both of them, say that the stooge knew Parkinson well, because even though Parkinson not so good looking, he give the stooge stiff competition in a lil’ rivalry they had over a certain brown-skin girl in the village where both o’ them did come from. In the end Parkinson win the girl and marry she. So, in the White man office this chap Parris—yes that was he name—was only making insult to he old rival.” She takes a deep breath.
“So … Nosegay Parkinson didn’ get a job. … Men say after that story Nosegay Parkinson left and stand up by a lumber yard in Lombard Street and burst cry. They say he stand up there for a long time until all the other men hoping to get jobs pick themselves up and gone home. They say that Nosegay Parkinson wait round the employment office until was time for the White man and he stooge to leave. …
“Man? They say that just as Parris step out the door with the white man following close behind, Parkinson fly up to Parris, and without one Gawd word of warning—deliver one lash in that blackman head with a piece o’ soft iron!”
“Dead?” Apata asks in a hoarse whisper, then as if not sure it has come out, asks the question once more, “Dead?”
“You askin’? Dead like a nit!”
“Where they taking them now?” said Michael Apata.
“They taking them down to break they neck! The problem for a little time was that since the last hangman dead, say ten months back, they didn’t have any other until last week—and he had to come from Trinidad.”
“We didn’t have a hangman?”
“Boy, you don’t get we men to do that work!” “Why?”
The woman laughs. “Woman don’t accept man who does do them kind work!” She continues laughing good naturedly but stops suddenly to prevent her dentures falling out.
Apata smiles, but it is a strained expression. He has borrowed the apparent misery he suspects emanates from the man called Nosegay Parkinson. Apata tells himself that Parkinson’s wife must be to Parkinson what Beverley is to him. If someone locks me away from Beverley, thinks Apata, what am I going to do? Die? I don’t know if I’m going to die. I don’t think so. No! I won’t die! But, at the same time, I won’t be alive either.
Apata looks at Parkinson, dark as he, Michael, is dark; looks at the wretched figure hunched on the salt beef barrel, and fantasizes: If I were God, I would snap my fingers and Parkinson’s trip to death row would be a terrible dream he wakes from to find his young wife lying close to his dark nakedness.”
“Whatkind of man Parris was?”
“A red man!”
“A’right boys! Enough fresh air!” announces the policeman with the rifle.
“Ow officer, sah!” begs an old man from the ring of people severely inspecting the criminals, “Ow man! Have a heart, nuh? You taking them two man to hang them; let them get a good, long look at life for last, nuh? Ow man. Let them look at water an’ sky an’ bush lil’ bit more, nuh?”
There is a murmur of agreement from the by-standers. The shotgun-toting policeman laughs. The one with the rifle stares down the old man who stares back.
“Offisah! Me not frighten you, sah!” he snaps. “Me is one black man who not frighten gun, ‘cause me handle gun in nineteen-fourteen war!” The badly shaved jutting chin and the knotted brows tell the old man will not be intimidated. “Me no frighten police one backside! You hear me?”
The rifle-toting policeman now smiles. “Alright, old warrior. I’ll let them watch at life little more, as you say.” The young policeman salutes the old man, mockingly. To the crowd’s amusement, the geezer returns the salute as a proper English soldier should: Longest way up, shortest way down.
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