With eyes as menacing as those of a predator, the Detective brought his face down towards mine and said, in a surprisingly gentle voice, “right, dread, tell us about the driver’s licence scam.”
I was aware of the presence of other detectives in the interrogation room. I was also aware of a desperate need to take a leak. My heart raced, a rabbit surrounded by rabid jackals. I stared back at the Detective – he was the only one not in police uniform – it seemed logical to think of him as the sole detective. The other three were a constable and two community relations officers. Whatever their ranks and titles, it all amounted to the same thing; I was a Rastafarian in a police station. A chicken in a den of foxes.
They were all going to do the same thing to me. Difference was that Detective here was going to use his fists and open palm, while his friends were going to introduce me to their batons.
“I don’t know anything, officer! I was just sitting there, and that guy started chatting to me, and next thing I know you guys descend on us and I am bundled in to the back of a Santana, and here I am!”
My chest was heaving and my breath loud as I finished.
The look on the Detective’s face, the snorts of disdain from one of his companions behind him, were lucid enough; whatever I was going to say was as likely to help my case as a pair of Wellington boots in the Kalahari Desert.
I did not make so much as a peep when the first slap landed on my face with such force that I literally flew off the chair and landed on my side. My scalp was suddenly on fire, as he had come round and yanked my head up by the locks.
“You bloody bastard!” he snarled. “You think I’m joking, huh?”
His shoe found my ribs, I groaned. Then it found my mouth, and the blood welled with a sickly warm saltiness. I spat bobs of it, mixed with saliva and mucus.
As the stars danced before my eyes, I sensed the other cops closing in, batons raised. This time, I squealed like a pig. I raised my upper body, backing away, arms raised as if that would save me. It was the arm that received the first blows. I was screaming, my entire being focused on getting those lungs working that I did not feel the baton. But I saw those black rods rise and fall, I heard the men that held them grunt with the effort. I saw them take a step back, exhausted. I was vaguely aware that I had stopped screaming.
They were watching me, a routine assessment of a hopeless lunatic by asylum staff. I was sobbing now.
“Please don’t hit me anymore,” I whimpered. “I don’t know anything at all”.
“Shut up!” the constable barked. “Who do you think you are, Lucky Dube?”
“He looks like Lucky Dube!” someone growled behind him. “Not so lucky today, though, is he?”
They all burst into laughter, and it seemed that layers of the malevolence that had hung in the interrogation room like a miasma were now peeling off.
“Can you sing, dread?” the Detective demanded.
“They can all sing,” said the constable. “And do poetry!”
He edged forward. “Sing, Rasta! Sing Prisoner! That is what you are, isn’t it? A prisoner!”
I tried to sit up; there was a sharp pain in my ribs. And another in my face, accompanied by a blinding, searing flash of light as the constable’s boot made contact. In that brief moment, I tasted hard leather, smelt the odour of unwashed feet, and my own blood.
“Sing, Rasta!” he screamed, like an exorcist at a very potent manifestation on whom the crucifix and holy water were having no effect.
“I am a prisoner, a prisoner,” I moaned hoarsely.
“That’s the worst performance I have ever heard!” declared the Detective. “What kind of a Rasta are you who can’t sing?”
He looked around. “This one’s a fake Rasta; he doesn’t deserve those locks. Let’s remove them!”
My spirit rose like a ballistic missile through the swirling clouds of agony and humiliation as I tried to sit up. “Don’t you dare touch my hair!” I gibbered through a broken mouth. “Don’t you dare!”
Even as my swollen mandible struggled to form these words, those of my tormentors in front were stepping aside as another cop approached with the scissors. The others shouted encouragement, I saw him kneel and peer into my battered and broken face as a mukwasha would into that of a dying goat at Christmas. I tried raising my arm to ward him off, and screamed as sheer pain lanced up my shoulder. I realised then that my arm was broken.
My head was jerked back. I felt a grip on my scalp. Through a half-closed eye, I saw the cop grin at me; I smelt his breath – he reeked of stale cigarettes and alcohol.
At that moment, I thought that it was not so bad, what was being done to me. They could have made me drink beer, or forced morsels of pork down my throat, as they had done to Minty and Fatso the other day.
The tears were streaming down my face, stinging the wounds. I heard that snip! Then a soft rustle, like the sound of discarded clothing as it touches the floor.
I felt a coolness touch my head. And I felt the final madness crawl in.
“How about you then? Tell us about this business with the drivers’ licences!”
Suddenly, I was snapped to reality. The Detective had turned to the fellow they had brought me with. I realised that I was still seated at the desk, with the affidavit and pen before me. The violence that I had just experienced had happened in my head – a sort of mad play back of the stories I had been told by other Rastafarians who had entered a police station. Whether they had actually been guilty of a crime or not, it had been enough that they wore dreadlocks. That had been enough reason for the police to get medieval on them. As soon as the police had picked me up, it had been foregone in my mind that I was riding first class to Hurtville. I could not help feeling, now, as the Detective repeated his question to the other fellow, that I had missed something.
I had met the other fellow at Africa Unity Square about half an hour earlier. I had been sitting alone on a bench facing what was supposed to be a fountain. I had first sat facing the green, but had found myself the subject of a hastily revised and spirited sermon by the lunch time preachers. I had moved, eyes averted from the gauntlet of disproving stares of the born-again, and taken the corner of the bench.
The girls sitting at the other end upped and left in a flurry of lingering perfume, swaying hips and pert, ducktail posteriors and hair extensions. I unfolded my newspaper. I only had the next ten minutes to read it, before I had to return to the office for the meeting with the consultants.
In the background, the preacher was now ranting about the sign of the cross.
“Did you know that when you make the sign of the cross, like the Roman Catholics do, you are actually putting Jesus back on the cross?” he screamed.
I shut him out of my mind with a sharp effort of will. A shadow fell on me briefly, then I felt someone ponderously plant themselves next to me. I looked up, and saw a portly, bald-headed man of my age – late 20s –wriggle into a more comfortable sitting position. This entailed spreading his abundant hams like an inflatable paddling pool till they encroached on my space. I edged away.
He seemed to only then notice me. His stuffed features relaxed in a smile.
“What’s up, dread?” he said.
I nodded absently.
“How long have had them?”
There must be a book somewhere; a best-seller entitled How To Make Conversation With Rastas. Everything that strangers invariably say to me by way of a chat was so cliché.
“Well, about six years now,” I replied. I got the same reaction I got when I had had them for a month, a year, two years.
“Really?” Tiny piglet eyes dilating. “So, you are a true Rastaman, then?”
Of course, a fake Rastaman wouldn’t be a Rastaman at all. But I guess the book with the aforementioned title does not carry such painfully obvious data.
“So, you don’t eat meat?” he asked incredulously. “Oh, I would love to live with you. I could have all the meat to myself then!”
His great hulk quivered as he laughed. The laugh said, I am allowed to laugh at you – you should feel honoured that I am even deigning to talk to you. Next, he was going to tell me that he liked true Rastas. Then he was going to say we were alright, except for the one or two who gave us a bad image. He was going to smile as he said this, as per the instructions of the book. Of course, the book was only about making conversation. It said nothing about, for example, how to react if you saw your sister with a Rastaman, or if one came for an interview at your firm. Perhaps it did, because the reaction I have experienced is the same every time.
What was clear though was that the book said nothing about patronising a Rastaman in your own home or workplace, because you never had one of those people in your home or workplace. You could meet them on the street, do them a favour by starting a conversation and pronouncing them “alright”, and you could then tell yourself that you were not prejudiced. Just to make sure, you could try the same thing with albinos, disabled people and all other “people like that.”
“So, you like reggae, then?” he asked. “I bet you have hundreds of records, even classics that you can’t get anymore in the shops.” Again that laugh.
I nodded. Telling him about my Irish folk collection would have only taken the conversation in another direction, one that I did not care to take with him.
I glanced at the time. I had little of it left, and this chap was annoying me asking stuff that he must have asked every dreadlocked person he had met before.
Another shadow fell on me. I looked up, confronting the stony stare of the Detective. Of course, at the time I did not know he was the Detective. I became aware that there were uniformed police behind him.
“You guys are under arrest!” he snapped. “Come with us to the station”.
My companion moved to rise, but two uniformed cops grabbed his arms. He struggled, demanding they let go. They spun him round, and planted him against the bench. He wriggled and squirmed as they put the cuffs on him.
“Look, officers,” I said, “I don’t know what is going on.”
“Come with us to the station!” the Detective snapped. “Or would you rather be taken?”
My companion’s struggles and threats were attracting attention. As we passed the born-agains, I knew that by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, I had contrived to lend substance to their misconceptions about my people. A Rastaman being escorted to a waiting police vehicle.
And so, here I was in the interrogation room, waiting to get beaten to a pulp by people who made it their life’s work to beat Rastas to a pulp. But so far, they seemed to have forgotten about me. They had just asked my companion a question.
“You losers have no right to treat me like this!” he declared, “I know my rights, OK? I know people, one phone call and you all lose your jobs!”
There was a sharp snap! A hush descended on the room. Then, as if nothing had happened, my companion began to relate how for the past year or so he supplemented his salary by fixing driver’s licences. He spoke gently, belying the fact that he had just received a mighty slap from the soft-spoken Detective.
The Detective turned to me suddenly. My heart lurched, and that terror returned.
“Hey, Rasta. We are finished with you. You can go,” he said.
For a moment, I thought it was my imagination at play again.
“Are you deaf?” he said, annoyance creeping into his tone. “Get out of here now, and carry on with whatever it was you were doing!”
I rose quickly. At the door, I paused. I had to know. I turned around. “Why did you not hit me?”
The Detective said, “What?”
My voice was tremulous as I repeated my question. One of the cops clicked his tongue. “This Rasta doesn’t know when he’s lucky!”
The Detective asked, “Why should we hit you?”
I hesitated. “Well, you hit him”.
I cocked my head towards my companion, who seemed to be taking the slap he had just received, and the prospect of further assault, very calmly.
“He gave the wrong answer to my question!” the Detective snapped. “I don’t like that, you know.”
“You asked him the same question you asked me,” I said, feeling increasingly exasperated.
“Yes, but you gave the correct answer, dread!” he returned. “He was trying to play with us”.
“But how did you know?” I persisted. “I could have been lying too.”
The Detective glared at me. Had I been too bold? But I had to know.
“This guy has been under our surveillance for some time now,” the Detective explained. “We knew he was to meet someone at Africa Unity Square this afternoon, another crook. When we saw you, we knew straight away that you were not the one we were looking for.”
I still had a perplexed look on my face. The Detective’s features relaxed.
“You Rastas think us cops beat you up for fun?” he asked.
The other cops laughed.
“Well, it does happen”, I replied.
“Yes,” he conceded. “But that is just police harassment. Happens, yeah. Nothing personal. It’s just that you guys stick out in a crowd.”
He shrugged, as if to absolve himself of any wrongdoing.
“It’s because you think Rastas are criminals!” I accused. My fear had gone.
“I am a professional!” the Detective said, eyes blazing indignantly. “I knew straight away that you are no crook, merely by looking.”
“Oh yeah?” I challenged him, “How?”
He looked at me as a patient teacher at the class dunce. “You have shoulder length dreadlocks. Never mind that the human rights people will scream murder, but if ever you are a guest in our cells, we will treat you to a free haircut.”
That surreal image of my hair being forcibly shaven off flashed before me again for a moment.
“You’ve had those locks for at least 5 years. From, I guess, your late teens. That means you are a true Rastafarian, whatever that means – I am no theologian.”
He shrugged again. “As a cop, however, it means you have never been one of our guests since the time you attained the age of majority. Which means you have been a good boy, generally, for all the time that you have been responsible for your own actions.”
He stepped closer and, with the air of a chancellor conferring an honorary degree on a visiting Head of State, added, “Young man, your dreadlocks are your criminal record.”
I winced and grimaced as he peered at my hair. He stepped back, nodding appreciatively. “And a very clean one too!”
I did not need to be told it was time to make my exit. I had been told all I needed to know. The sun had never been so glorious, so pleasant on my face as I stepped out of the station. As I made my way to the office, I had a new sense of self-esteem. For a long time now, since the day I had started to grow my locks, I had been the object of ridicule and, more often, suspicion, fear and loathing. As I went about my business in public, there were those that nudged and pointed. There is a huge percentage of the female population that believes that being in the proximity of a Rastafarian can have immediate consequences on their virtue and integrity. Older women clutch their bags tighter. Everywhere I go, I am a criminal, guilty of everything that they can imagine a person can do. And for what, for having dreadlocks!
I crossed the road, feeling at peace with the world. I wasn’t a suspect. My image did not say, Crook! On the contrary, it said, here is a man who has no criminal record.
I looked up, and locked eyes for a moment with a girl. She turned away quickly. Her man saw me, and shot a warning glance at me. The warning look turned to a puzzled frown as I smirked. He was bald headed, of course. If there was another mix up with the police, he would be in the cells for a while. He probably had been in there already.
I mentally slapped myself on the wrist for stereotyping people because of the length of their hair.
=====
Image: ChatGPT remixed