No Telephone to Heaven

The second chapter opens with an explanation of the motto painted on the side of the revolutionaries’ truck: “NO TELEPHONE TO HEAVEN.” The truck’s former owner, a man who made his livelihood “transporting women to the market every Saturday and to church revivals every six months” (15), added the words. After the revolutionaries traded him a load of ganja for his vehicle, the man sold it and moved to England. The narrator illuminates how the motto—“NO TELEPHONE TO HEAVEN. No voice to God. […] No way of reaching up or out” (16)—suits the Jamaican people’s disillusionment with higher powers.

The narrator explains that many of the revolutionaries in the truck participated in Kingston political riots during the 70s, and therefore, “[g]uns were not strangers to them” (17). This chapter juxtaposes a scene from the life of a Jamaican house servant in the US—notably watching coverage of Jamaican violence on CBS and CBC—with a scene from the life of a dark-skinned Jamaican servant who warns his light-skinned employers, “[W]hen we get de power, de power fe de people, things not wan be easy fe de white shady of Jamaica dem” (20).

The narrative then transitions to a Christmas party, and the attendees include the wealthy Paul H., a non-binary queer individual who goes by the name of Harry/Harriet, and Clare. Paul returns home from the party in the early morning hours, only to discover that someone has killed his family—his father, mother, and sister—as well as the family’s servant, Mavis, and dog.

Bewildered that “the thing that happened to other people had happened to them” (24), Paul stumbles into the yard and finds the yard boy, Christopher. He asks for Christopher to assist him with the process of cleaning the house and burying the bodies.

The chapter then reveals Christopher’s backstory. As a boy, he grew up in a makeshift shack with his grandmother, living in a particularly impoverished slum of Kingston known as the Dungle. He suffered numerous symptoms of malnourishment, including a persistent cough, a rounded belly, and a hunched back. The narrative recalls a significant moment of Christopher’s childhood when a traveling preacher, Brother Josephus, came to the Dungle, telling its residents of a “Lickle Jesus” who is not white and blue-eyed, but black-skinned and poor. Brother Josephus told the young Christopher that he resembled “Lickle Jesus,” calling out a skeptical woman: “You tell me, missis, tell me where it say in de Bible Jesus white” (37).

When Christopher was 8, his grandmother died, and “government men” (40) came to remove her body from the shack. Christopher stayed on for years, living alone and fearing his grandmother’s soul was not at rest because she never received a proper burial. Master Charles—Paul’s father—eventually “rescued” Christopher from the Dungle when he was 10 years old, hiring him as a yard boy. Christopher stayed as a live-in worker for the family throughout his teenage years until Paul’s mother told him to move out, fearing the presence of a grown man in the house. When Christopher attempted to return to the Dungle, he found that the government had razed the settlement.

On the evening of Christmas—the same night Paul H. attended the party—Christopher went to a local bar and drank copious amounts of rum. He spoke with a policeman, asking if there was a way for the officer to locate the body of his grandmother (now 13 years deceased). Hoping to raise Christopher’s spirits, the policeman lied and told him that he could find his grandmother through public records downtown.

Christopher then confronted Master Charles and his wife in their bedroom during the middle of the night, demanding that they provide a bit of land for him to bury his grandmother in. Bewildered by Christopher’s transgression of his subservient yard boy status, Master Charles denied his request. Emboldened by rum and rage, Christopher then murdered Master Charles, his wife, his daughter, and the family dog with his machete. He then turned on the servant, Mavis. He was particularly brutal with Mavis, as he felt betrayed by her loyalty to the family (rather than her own people). With this story thus revealed to the reader, Christopher kills Paul with his machete.