‘Dying to be HOME’
THE RECENT Yuletide season, with all its endless goodwill gestures – people bringing cheer and goodwill to each other, decorating their homes with lights and enjoying lots to eat drink – was indeed a time of joy. For Zaneta Scott, as for many others, Christmas is a mixed bag – a time of reflection on the good times that she used to share in her family home, and its sudden traumatic change when, last year, the life of her father, Wilton Scott, was ended by a gunman’s bullet in his own home – leaving a family and a community shattered.
Indelibly scarred, but not broken, she reflects on home and life leading up to that fateful Friday morning on January 5, 2018. This is her story.
MY PARENTS bought and built their home together. It would be the stage where the drama of our lives unfolded.
For a long time, number 188 never fully felt like home to me. ‘Home’ was an idyllic place we lived at for a little over 10 years, inclusive of all the trappings – beautiful garden, an actual white picket fence, and the dog (a Doberman named Hazel). It was the backdrop to what I considered a fairy-tale childhood. Because of the richness of experiences I had in that place, I never thought us to be poor.
The dream of homeownership was for my parents, as for many working-class Jamaicans in the 1980s and early 1990s, a little out of reach. Much of that changed with a surge of new housing projects across Portmore, St Catherine, in the 1990s.
Greater Portmore, with a promised 10,000 new houses, was shaping up to be their chance. I recall my mother’s stories of a crowded National Arena, the air thick with desperation and promise – of husbands, wives, sons and daughters, battling the heat of day, and braving the cold of the floor at night – in hopes that they would win the lottery of fate and be chosen.
My parents were selected and given the number 188, assigned to a plot of land that would eventually host their quad. Excited soon-to-be homeowners, my parents made an early site visit. I remember them describing how their excitement was a little muted by their disbelief that the design of the community would make no accommodation for individual yards or parking areas. Space was configured in a way that suggested the owners of Greater Portmore ‘starter homes’ were never supposed to move beyond starting.
We continued to live at my childhood dreamland for some years after their proud purchase and number 188 was rented for some time until my parents commenced their construction project.
Our new home was comfortable. It was the sanctuary of my adolescence, of tears and laughter and many firsts, and Sunday afternoon post-church living-room conferences. It was there I learned to draw, to love music, to stare back at the piano that begged to be played. It was in that house I learned the passionate satisfaction of arguments and the wisdom of healthy communication. That’s also where I learned to take the bus, to walk to the library or the shopping centre to buy meaningless things in Woolworth with pocket money. I developed my sense of identity there.
SENSE OF COMMUNITY
But my relationship with Greater Portmore was mainly with that house. It was a place to come home to and to leave from. I never really got to know many of the neighbourhood kids or the name of the shop owner across the field. But my parents had this uncanny ability to connect with the people around them. Somehow, they knew that within a 200-metre radius of our home, there was a grille man, mechanic, painter, and a plumber.
Daddy, especially, had a deep sense of community. He would plant his grass and his beautiful garden, which would become a snapchat filter to the high-school students walking by, and he’d let them take their pictures without making a fuss. He’d talk to young men about the supremacy of the flavour coming from coal stove cooking as he prepared a pot of mannish water for the entire walkway.
As my sister and I got older, my parents decided it was time to build again. Though a well - advanced project, my father would never get to see its completion. The newly constructed upper floor had windows, but we weren’t yet ready for the grilles. There were more tiles to be purchased, more paint to buy, more work to be done. We thought we were safe – relatively.
My regular routine became calling Daddy when I was more or less five minutes from home so he would meet me at the bridge. That pesky absence of individual parking became increasingly inconvenient as our household’s cars-to-people ratio grew to almost one to one. Daddy would meet me at the bridge from the parking lot to our house to make sure the 30-second walk from the car to the house would bring me no harm.
I was held up at gunpoint at that very bridge a few years prior. An unfortunate miscalculation on the part of the gunman – and alarming terror on mine – he mistook my suitcases for a would-be ‘foreigner’ going to the airport (and therefore loaded with foreign currency). But to his disappointment, those suitcases were only packed with necessities for youth camp. But Daddy never
forgot, and I never forgot his helplessness in realising that it all could have ended so differently, so close to home. So meeting me at the bridge became part of our ritual.
We were further jolted out of that idea of relative safety when Daddy’s van was stolen. Old and dutiful, but untempting, it was parked under the same tree for nearly 17 years until one morning it turned up missing. It was never recovered.
The stolen van undoubtedly left a cloud over us. So we pressed on with our usual routines and rituals. Daddy still met me at the bridge in the evenings. We made a thing of Christmas, decorating as we usually did.
Daddy was uncharacteristically into the festivities that last
Christmas. We came home to see the ackee tree bejeweled in string lights and the verandah laced in coloured lights. It was an average Christmas but being our last, I now treasure it in all its ordinariness.
Daddy and I spent our last week – our last days –bent over a woodwork project together. He sanded, I painted. I was to add some calligraphy artwork to the finished product. We were at home in the comfort of our house and each other’s company.
The morning of January 5, 2018, is stained with blood and marred with piercing sounds that my mind will never be able to erase. Awindow left ajar – yet ungrilled – was used to access and destroy the sanctity of our home, the peace of our sleep, and the wholeness of our family. Daddy was shot by an intruder, who left with nothing more than outdated electronics, that we would have eagerly given away. He bled out in front of me, on the very tiles he helped to pick out, in the home he worked to build.
PICKING UP THE PIECES
We are all still piecing together the fragments of ourselves that remain after losing Daddy. But that house can never be home again. I have never laid my head down to sleep there a single night since that day. Home is where you are supposed to feel safe, protected, and loved, but homeownership did not stop my father from being shot fatally.
My parents dreamed of owning a home in an age where housing for the working class was a scarce commodity. Now, my generation, oriented to think of homeownership as an obtainable goal, dreams of being safe at home.
It is this reality that political leaders, developers, and policymakers must recentre in thinking about what it means to be at home in Jamaica in an age of insurmountable violence.
What is required is a response that does not merely retreat into the enclaves of gated communities, which, by design, prices ordinary citizens out of safe housing options.
Jamaicans of all classes, experiences, backgrounds, and income want and deserve that: to feel at home in their four walls, however they are constructed, and regardless of whose name is on the title or whether you had to pass a security checkpoint on your way in.
As for me, I’m just dying to be home.
‘The morning of January 5, 2018, is stained with blood and marred with piercing sounds that my mind will never be able to erase. An ajar window – yet ungrilled – was used to access and destroy the sanctity of our home, the peace of our sleep, and the wholeness of our family. Daddy was shot by an intruder, who left with nothing more than outdated electronics which we would have eagerly given away. He bled out in front of me, on the very tiles he helped to pick out, in the home he worked to build’
My parents dreamed of owning a home in an age where housing for the working class was a scarce commodity. Now, my generation, oriented to think of home ownership as an obtainable goal, dreams of being safe at home.