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11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Lick Holden was christened Fortis James. His momma Kayenne called him that because he was her eighth child and it was a strong-sounding name. Damn! He was going to have to be strong, all right.

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There wasn't much in the way of celebration surrounding Lick's birth. This was partly because he was Kayenne's eighth; partly because he was a breech birth and he almost killed his momma; and partly because his papa had bunked six months before. Mostly, though, it was because Fortis James 'Lick' Holden was born in the Cooltown district of Mount Marter just as the twentieth century was coming up for air; and a new birth was a blessing to no one, least of all the child.

Some ten years later, when Lick first blew his horn in the funeral parades that snaked their way down Canal Street through Cooltown, he watched the way the sombre mood of such events soon evaporated into a festival of dancing and ragtime or jass (as the music was called back then - or 'jasm', both shortenings of 'orgasm'). Lick loved to watch the fine ladies swing their hips and stomp to those African beats. But he couldn't help but wonder if the whole scenario was somehow disrespectful. He asked Momma Lucy (his grandmother) about this and she told him, 'Fortis! You gots to celebrate a life somehow!' But Lick didn't buy Momma Lucy's explanation any. The way he saw it, the funeral parades were not celebrating a life so much as its passing. And that was the truth of life and death for a negro in Cooltown.

Momma Lucy was there when Lick was born. She held her daughter's hands and stuffed her mouth with rags to bite on. She knotted the umbilicus and slapped the life into Lick until he screamed loud enough to make the wooden walls shake.

'The boy sho' got some lungs, Kayenne,' Momma Lucy said and she held Lick under the armpits and examined his features, wiping the mucus from his nose and eyes.

Black babies are born in a variety of shades from pink to tan. But Lick was born dark with full lips, a spread nose and a proud African forehead.

'The poor boy's been born a six-out-seven negro!' Momma Lucy exclaimed and she cackled like a witch.

Momma Lucy popped a bottle of dime hooch and swigged deep. Then she poured some down her daughter's throat until it spilled over her chin. Then she emptied the remainder over Kayenne's rupture and Kayenne dug her nails into her mother's arm until she drew blood. So Lick was born to the sound of screaming: his own, Kayenne's and Momma Lucy's. But Lick screamed the loudest.

In later years the first sound Lick could remember was not screaming but singing. Kayenne sat him on the outside staircase of their ramshackle apartment when she aired the two rooms, and he looked out over Canal Street as his six older sisters did the laundry in the gutter bowl below. They scrubbed the clothes until their nails bled, with bit soap collected by a neighbour from the white folk she worked for. And they sang away their troubles with voices as sweet as molasses.

'When the devil comes to take me to hell,
Make sure you cry to Gabriel,
Don't let the devil take my sister down,
She been in hell in old Cooltown.'

Lick loved to hear his sisters sing. Because he knew nothing of the devil or hell or Gabriel and Cooltown was his world.One time when Lick was around nine months old and he'd just learned the use of his limbs, he crawled to the edge of the staircase and looked down on his sisters at work. He liked the way their picky heads bobbed and their necks dipped as they scrubbed and sang. They reminded him of the scrawny chickens that pecked the dust out back. But the sounds they made were a whole lot prettier. Lick leaned out from the staircase to try and get a better look but his little body wasn't up to much balancing. With a sudden scared shriek, he fell from the staircase the full four yards to the street below and landed head first in the gutter bowl with a splash.

Kayenne heard the shriek and she came whooping from the apartment like a banshee, two-timing the stairs with her skirt hitched at the waist. But she reached the street to find her second daughter, Tomasina, clutching Lick to her chest. Lick sneezed a couple of times and he certainly caught a little chill but he wasn't hurt bad. That didn't stop Kayenne giving all her daughters a wupping like the accident was somehow their fault.

When they heard the commotion, a lot of the Canal Street neighbours gathered round to watch the free entertainment. The men laughed at the thought of little Fortis Holden being an expert diver like the white good-time boys who leaped from the steamers into the depths of the Mississippi and they retold the story to passers-by and they nudged each other with their elbows and sucked on their cigarettes like they were scared they might escape. The women pulled their shawls tight around their shoulders and muttered to one another. Some said that it was 'surely a blessing'. Others looked at Kayenne and whispered that such fortune had the smell of witchcraft. But Big Annie - acknowledged as the expert on all matters of religion and juju by virtue of her husband's working for the white minister - soon set matters straight.

'T'ain't no hoodoo,' she said. An' t'ain't no religion neider. Jus' good luck, plain an' simple. Kayenne, that boy of yours sho' lucky to be alive.'

When Big Annie said this, the other women nodded in agreement and Kayenne nodded too. But she looked at her sniffling son with his rack of ribs and bloated hungry belly and she couldn't be sure how lucky he really was.

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