The low point in my relationship with Jamaica came fairly recently.
In 2007 I won the Crafoord Prize from the Swedish Royal Society. It was worth $500,000. When it was announced in the local Jamaican newspaper, I knew immediately that I had a brand new problem on the island. Although the paper had gotten most of the details wrong, including having me as a Jamaican who had migrated to the U.S. to study lizards, it got the sum of money I had been awarded correct.
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Suddenly I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was not alone in my bedroom.
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Then I saw that one had a machete and the other a long knife. Ah ohh, I said to myself, bending back slightly – I know what this is, this is an armed robbery. Simultaneously I drew a long straight strong encased Brazilian sixinch blade knife from the right side of my pants, blade pointed toward the right testicle. As they spotted my knife their faces went from terror-inducing to terror-expressing, and they just managed to escape my room before I could corner either. In fact, I went straight at the cutlass man since he was the more vulnerable, within two feet of him he could do no more than slap me on my back, while I could slash him to death. The other was more “problematic.”
I had never thought about this possibility in more than fifteen years living there. My house lay at the end of a long dirt driveway off of a one-way lane to the main road, some half a kilometer below. Since, as it turned out, they were both local boys, it hardly seemed credible (in retrospect) that I was meant to survive the robbery. They could not say, “Well, den, Marse Bob, see you in the square tomorrow.” Also it is a well-known fact of human psychology that the longer someone holds you under control, the crueler they become and the likelier to indulge in “the final solution.” I always tell people, especially women under sexual attack, counter-attack at once and make a big noise to attract people – do not submit, and for God’s sake do not be taken captive. Attack and scream to draw people, otherwise matters only get worse. Begging for mercy often merely excites the aggression it seeks to avert.
Once they scurried out the front door, I locked it behind them. Then the true terror began. Since I had not come running out with a gun to blast a few shots at them, they surmised correctly that I was unarmed. It also turned out that I only had the knife because someone had very foolishly locked my personal fighting machete into the tool shed out back. Now the men wanted to re-enter the house. They began with soft knocking and absurd entreaties such as, “Let us in, we are the police.”
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The last para is reminiscent of Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea-
“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
I am sorry that I killed the fish though, he thought. Now the bad time is coming and I do not even have the harpoon. The dentuso is cruel and able and strong and intelligent. But I was more intelligent than he was. Perhaps not, he thought. Perhaps I was only better armed.
“Don’t think, old man,” he said aloud. “Sail on this course and take it when it comes.”