From Reggaemuffin to Reggaenomics.
His mother left him back on the island when she came up to the States. He'd left
school a wild youth; flirting with Rastafarianism, indulging a passion for soccer; until one day she sent for him. "I came up here a young man, twenty five, twenty six years old; had two outstanding skills going for me," he explained, raising two fingers for emphasis. "Mathematics
and cooking. No college degree. No previous experience. I was a genius at maths, wizard with the numbers, even though me never get far in the school system."
His maths skills apparently impressed his first employer who was in fact his mother's employer. She cleaned his house on Long Island. They were nice people; the man found an office help job for Sammy D. at his Manhattan brokerage firm.
There he astounded them with his ability to perform mathematical calculations in his head. "Simple addition and subtraction, them couldn't believe I could do it, just like that, without calculator."
That plus the suspicion he was truly an out of wedlock child of the American entertainer, plus exotic stories he spun at the water cooler about marijuana as herbal food, and a special dish called ackee and saltfish that could poison you if not carefully prepared – all of this endeared him to the office staff; made him something of a character, but basically a nice guy.
At the stroke of five in the afternoon he fled the brokerage and dashed for the subway or a bus en route to Kennedy airport where he did a stint, his second job, until midnight. No, not outside the airport as a baggage helper. He changed jackets and worked inside the building wheeling passengers off the planes in wheel chairs; helping foreigners fresh off the Concorde or Mexicana or Lufthansa and feeling lost in the airport's byzantine corridors.
In between flights he poured diligently over tiny books of conversational Spanish, German, French. It gave him an edge on the other employees. Foreigners coming off the plane were surprised and relieved when he guided them this way, pointed them that way, all the while chatting in their native tongue.
After three years of quick dashing and changing, relentlessly working and saving, he saved enough to urge his mother into retirement.
She went back to Jamaica; she bought a house. She never stopped talking about her son in America, and how strange life is; how one time she was over there and he was back here and now she was here and Sammy D. was over there, working hard in all that New York cold.
(from Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel! by N.D.Williams, 2001)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 