Chapter 107
He had written four books and contributed to dozens of others, He had taught for over forty years in various forms he had run a community programme for thirty years and built it into something that would last, He was eighty-four years old and the work had not stopped Thomas became head of English at his school at twenty-eight, He called Marcus to tell him Marcus listened to his voice on the phone the voice of a man who had found his work and was doing it well and felt the specific continuation of it. Mr. Okafor, Marcus, Thomas, The line going forward.
The school Elise had designed in East Kingston won a national architecture award when she was sixty-two. Marcus attended the ceremony and watched his daughter receive recognition for a building that would hold children for decades.
His four grandchildren were growing into themselves with the particular quality he had tried to give them and that their parents had given them: the conviction that their experience was worth examining, their voices worth using, their full capacity worth occupying.
He turned eighty-five at home, in the garden, which Nia had replanted that spring with things that came back year after year. The perennials, she called them. Things that returned.
The mango tree was twenty-five years old and fully itself a proper tree now, giving substantial shade, the branches high and numerous. Thomas was thirty and could still climb it.
He ran Hope Gardens for what he knew might be the last time at eighty-five. The body had made its positions clear. He ran slowly, deliberately, with attention.
He finished the run and stood at the entrance to the garden in the morning gold and breathed and felt the city around him the sounds, the warmth, the specific quality of Kingston's morning air. He had been breathing this air for sixty-five years.
Nia at seventy-five had the air of someone who had done what they came to do and was engaged now in the pleasures of continuation the grandchildren, the garden, the occasional design consultation that interested her, the evenings with Marcus.
The Book That Found Janelle the student who had read the poem about her neighbourhood at the first Kingston Voices public showcase, thirty years before had published five novels the most recent had won a Caribbean literary prize.