My Silenced Shouts

By Cecilia Legister

I cannot tell the last time I smiled.  Call me a woman of sorrows I don’t mind.

 The middle wall of partition that separates the weak from the strong is several inches thick and no one hears my voice no matter how hard I shout for help for the weak living in the bread line.

The other day I shouted for Amy whose shack is about to collapse. The rat bat dung infested ceiling has about three days left before it completely falls and crushes her three orphaned grandchildren sleeping on the dirt floor. AIDS took their mom and dad away but their granny is not letting some social worker drag them off to state care for she says she will not be around when they turn eighteen. And it is a “crime to even be in a children’s home much less turn eighteen there.. She says she prefers to pass the worst with “dem  pickney” so she begs and sends them to school to  learn to read and write. She swears she can love them better than any wicked system can.

I also shouted for Charlotte, the sweet high school teacher who I saw the other day picking up rotten foods from the garbage.  But that wall too thick man. I shouted real loudly,   but all that happened was that my voice echoed back at me. Charlotte’s discolored teeth and bloodshot eyes tried in vain to mask the wonderful woman who spent most of her life molding young minds and I couldn't bear the pain of seeing her this way.  I wanted to talk to her but she says she prefers to hear from some of her past proteges whose voices are much louder than mine.  Then I took a ladder and tried to climb that wall but fell down for it was too high I could not get over it. But Charlotte had warned me that all my doing was in vain. And now I am paying the price with all parts of my system broken and hurt. She had told me, “sometimes you must read the signs on the wall and there is one which says:  mad people not allowed inside.”

I thought maybe something was wrong with the way I shouted and so I put a little hallelujah in it and used a loudspeaker to amplify the sound. This time I shouted for Madeline, a crippled woman imprisoned by a wheelchair and the cold corners of her bedroom. But she remains forgotten cold and incarcerated and my voice a whole lot strained for shouting through that darned amplifier. 

When Fanso told me he was going to give up the ghost because he had no pills and his sugar was way too high, I should have really stayed out of this one. But he had no legs and his lips were quivering as he drank the salty water from his cataract plagued eyes. He had told me: “Miss I truly going dead if I don’t get the pills.”  In the midst of my shouts the old man fell out of his wheelchair and stretched out cold. And I ran like crazy up the road shouting and bawling at the top of my voice.  I stepped on one woman's toe as I ran wildly and she gave me one helluva knock me over the head rendering me unconscious for several days.

I am glad the conductor shouted to the police not to shoot Jerry for he was not the boy that grabbed his wad of creased hundred and fifty dollar bills on Spanish Town Road. God knows I could not take this one as Jerry looks just like my son. He had just crossed Kingston 11 border lines to look a pound of rice and a tin of mackerel for his sick granny. How grandma cried and threw her hands up to heaven when I gave her that bag of food.  But the barking wolves shouted me down when I begged the government five hundred dollars for him. They decided that Jerry must go to his hungry mother and father in Westmoreland, which he is not prepared to do, for he has to hunt food for granny and sometimes he even has to wash her unmentionables when she is too weak to get out of bed. Jerry said too that he will be a master tradesman and he is just finishing up trade school to deal poverty one death blow.

Castro told me that he used to be on the other side of the wall. Nowadays he fights over cardboard territories but times were when he slept in pillow top beds and relaxed in swirling Jacuzzis. He had women by the dozen and threw away the food he hated to see. He gave me a hint of why my shouts might be inaudible - Too much noise coming from the money being counted every day.

And then there was the lady who lived with the rats and roaches in the old van, who warned me about making a scene about her as she preferred to live out of the sight of parasites. But no, I did not hear and now I have to be writing down everything for I have no voice.  The doctor said my voice box is strained for making too much noise.  He does not know if I will ever be able to make a sound again.