Kamil Ali

turkey in the oven. She grabbed the half-cup of cold coffee from the edge of the center-table and brought it to the kitchen. After turning off the heat and closing the oven door to keep the bird warm for their supper, she poured a fresh coffee and returned to the sofa. Gary said he’d be home by seven. No word from him at seven-thirty did not concern her too much. He had a notorious habit of arriving an hour later than his promised time. The weather forecast called for a snowstorm starting at midnight.
The tips of her fingers and toes sensed the lowering temperature from the hot-water radiator in the room. The cooling floorboards of the hundred-year-old home contracted and creaked.
She leaned on the arm of the sofa and pulled her legs up tight against her body, before covering herself with her thick woolly throw-blanket. She picked up her cup from the table where she had placed it and took a welcome warm sip, hugging the mug for a few seconds longer to warm her hands. Placing the mug back on the table, she pinned the cover under her arms and picked up her book.
Her heart leapt to her throat when the cracking floorboards changed their random pattern and echoed the weight of someone pacing back and forth in the hallway above.
The hallway ran between the two bedrooms of the small house and ended at the top of the stairs. The stairway descended behind a wall to a platform, then turned at a right-angle to land on the main floor. The bottom half of the stairs faced her.
Dropping her book, Dina slid deeper under the cover and perked her ears. Her eyes followed the movement upstairs with pounding heart. The temperature dropped another few degrees. She shivered. The faint outline of her breath streamed from her nostrils. She pulled the blanket up to her eyes and froze, moving only her eyeballs.
Dina yelped when the sudden loud shrill of the phone startled her. She stared at it, not sure if she should jump out of safety to grab it in the kitchen. She had to pass the stairs on her way. With blinding fright, she threw the cover off and dashed to the phone.
“Gary! Gary is that you?” She squeezed the receiver and turned around to gaze at the stairs. She heard static on the other end. The pacing above stopped. “Gary! Are you there?” A bang from the furnace below her feet made her jump and drop the phone.
She scurried back to the sofa and dived under cover. She rolled herself into a protective ball by hugging her knees. Her breathing sounded loud in the dead silence.
A minute later, the pacing started again. Dina gasped when the top step creaked. The pacer had started to descend. She shivered and every hair on her body stood on end.
The second step creaked!
She glanced at the phone. The receiver dangled on it’s cord. With the phone off the hook, she had no communication with anyone outside the house. She had to risk another scamper across the floor and cross the pathway in front of the stairs.
A glance at the back door leading out of the kitchen gave her a second option. With the impending snowfall and dropping temperatures outside, she’d need her coat and boots to get to the nearest safe-haven, if the neighbors had not already left for the winter. If she’d made a mistake and picked the wrong neighbor, she’d have to reverse directions and pass her house to get to the other neighbor. No one else lived near the hill.
Dina had a dilemma, if she chose to flee the house. The coat closet stood between the front door and the stairs. She’d have to stand in front of the steps to get her winter gear.
The third step creaked!
She took a couple of deep breaths and wiped the cold sweat from her face. Dina had to decide her fate. She alternated between loud-prayers and screamed-curses at the entity.
The fourth step creaked!
Throwing the cover off, she sprang up and rushed to the phone. She hung the receiver on the cradle and lifted it again. Hearing no dial-tone, she held the receiver to her ear and pressed the cradle several times without success.
The fifth step creaked!
She dropped the receiver and flung the back-door open. Unable to get to the coat closet by the front door, she sprinted back to the sofa and wrapped herself with the throw.
With no alternatives left, she flew through the back door and ran toward the front of the house. Reaching the street, she decided to turn in the direction of Gary’s approach to the house from the village.
A hundred yards down the road, she spotted approaching headlights. She ran to the center of the road, risking her life in the thickening snowfall. She waved her arms to draw attention to herself. The car almost hit her before it slid to a stop inches from her leg on the slippery road.
She recognized Gary’s car and ran to the passenger door. Yanking the door open, she jumped in to get out of the freezing-cold and blustery wind.
“Oh, my God!” Gary exclaimed and shook his head. After a loud explosion, a huge ball of fire rose from the house and shot into the air, followed by a second and a third.
Dina stared at the roaring flames in total disbelief. Her father’s smiling face appeared in each one. He had returned from his grave to rescue his only daughter from death by the exploding furnace.
“Thank you, Dad.” Gary’s exalted words and loud sobbing of gratitude broke her heart.
His bear-hug squeezed the breath out of her aching lungs but his enthusiasm for her survival brought joy to her desperate gasps for life replenishing oxygen.
“Thank you, Daddy.” She waved, smiled and sobbed beyond control. “You’ll have your grandchild.”
Gary flipped a quizzical glance at her.
“I saw doctor Drew today.” She gave him a wink. “We’re pregnant.”

By Romeo Kaseram
Andrew Salkey (Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey) was born on January 30, 1928, in Colón, Panama, to Jamaican parents, Andrew Alexander Salkey, a businessman, and Linda Marshall Salkey, a teacher. The young boy was sent home to Jamaica when he was two years old. Here he was raised by his grandmother and his mother, while his father remained behind in Panama working in a rent and repair boat business. An adult Salkey would later see his father again at age 32. The young Salkey was educated at St George's College in Kingston, and at Munroe College in St Elizabeth, then one of Jamaica’s prestigious boarding schools. He left for England in the early 1950s and attended the College of St Mark and St John. In the mid-1950s he taught English at Walworth Secondary School. It was also in this time during the 1950s when he became part of the emerging community of West Indian writers that included George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, among others. Salkey was also a freelance writer and journalist; he also contributed to the British Broadcasting Company as a radio interviewer, critic, and author of radio plays and features.
The young writer took with him from Jamaica the language and influence of its oral tradition, which was passed on by his mother and grandmother. Also making a notable impact were the Anancy stories, and its improvisational style of folklore narration. Such was the impact of this early introduction to narration and folklore that it would later be used in his writing, particularly through the trickster figure, Anancy, which appears in his short-story collections ‘Anancy’s Score’ and ‘Brother Anancy, and Other Stories’; it is also notably evident in his first novel, ‘A Quality of Violence’. Such was this background and upbringing that it made Salkey a fit for what was then emerging as the wholesome, Caribbean literary genre. According to Stuart Hall, writing in Salkey’s obituary in the ‘Independent’, published in May, 1995, the writer “quickly took his place at the centre of a small but outstanding circle of Caribbean writers and intellectuals”.
Hall adds: “For a critical period [Salkey] was the key figure, the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World Service at Bush House, London, and his programmes became a glittering showcase for a generation of writers, including Sam Selvon and George Lamming, who had made London their second home. Established and aspiring authors were chivvied, cajoled, gently chastised, inspired and schooled to produce new work for radio on the Caribbean Voices programme over which Andrew Salkey often presided.” According to Hall, the young Naipaul was encouraged to continue writing after Salkey read his first story.
Perhaps it is Salkey’s timely positioning in this literary space among the emerging luminaries of postcolonial writings, as Selvon, Lamming and Naipaul, upon which his main reputation rests – so writes Jonathan Ali, in the ‘Caribbean Literary Review’: “When speaking of the writers who decamped from the Caribbean and headed to Britain in the 1950s — those halcyon days of West Indian literature that more and more feel anomalous, rather than precipitous — it is de rigueur to mention the late Andrew Salkey. Coming from Jamaica… Salkey set up shop at the BBC’s Caribbean Service, a member of the boys’ club that included George Lamming, Edgar Mittelholzer, Vidia Naipaul, and Sam Selvon. Salkey’s importance and influence in the Caribbean Service, and the Caribbean Voices programme in particular, are undeniable; according to Stuart Hall he was the ‘key figure’ of the programme for a critical period in its history. Yet though he would go on to be a prolific writer in all the genres and win a number of awards… Salkey’s reputation appears to rest more on where he happened to find himself at a certain point in time, rather than what he wrote.”
Unlike his peers, canonical positioning appears to have eluded him. Yet Salkey is well-known throughout the Caribbean, but mostly for his children novels, ‘Hurricane’ (1964), and ‘Earthquake’ (1965); ‘Drought’ was published in 1966. His first novel, ‘A Quality of Violence’ (1959), also about drought, is set in remote Jamaica during the 1900s. His second novel, ‘Escape to an Autumn Pavement’ (1960), was followed by the more successful and well-known children’s novels. Later, he wrote the popular short-story collection ‘Anancy’s Score’ (1973), returning for a later short-story collection, ‘Anancy, Traveller’ (1992). Along with the novels, Salkey also published several volumes of poetry, and edited anthologies of Jamaican and Caribbean short stories and folktales.
He remains a prolific writer, publishing more than half a dozen novels, several volumes of poetry, three travel books, ten anthologies for which he was editor, and at least ten children’s books, including short stories and folk tales from the Caribbean. Also among his works are one of the first anthologies of Caribbean short stories, ‘West Indian Stories’ (1960); later novels include ‘The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover’ (1968), ‘The Adventures of Catullus Kelly’ (1969), and ‘Come Home, Malcolm Heartland’ (1976). In 1966 he co-founded the Caribbean Artists Movement with John La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite. This organisation became a platform for Caribbean artists, writers, actors and musicians. In his address at its third and final conference, Salkey referenced the importance of “Black awareness”, stating, “Our own Caribbean communities must become the new centres of which we first seek approval of the fruits of our imagination. Only then may we move from within our society outward with assurance.”
He won many awards, including a Guggenheim in 1960, and was recognised in 1992 by Black Scholar magazine for his output and contribution to black literature around the world. Praised for 40 years of producing poetry, fiction, for his journalism and editing work, Salkey received the magazine’s 25th Anniversary Award for Excellence in the Field of Literature. He was also a director and constant supporter of the London-based publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture, founded by Guyanese-born Jessica Huntley. In June, 1992, a two-day symposium and celebration, ‘Salkey's Score’, paid tribute to him for his work in London in the 1960s and 1970s. It recognised his efforts with the Caribbean Artists Movement, and for work with the BBC radio programme ‘Caribbean Voices’. Also cited were his contributions to developing the teaching of Caribbean writing in schools, the recognition he brought to the relationship of Africa to personal and communal Caribbean identity, his work in Cuba, and of course, his prolific body of work including novels, poetry, and other writings. In the latter part of his life, Salkey taught Literature and Creative Writing at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where the Andrew Salkey Memorial Scholarship is established in his memory. He died on April 28, 1995.

(Sources for this exploration were Britannica, Wikipedia, The Independent, and Caribbean Literary Review.)

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