Reflection on a Tortured Soul

Memories of my childhood are flooding my mind these days. I imagine it has always happened. I don't know if there is ever a time  in our lives when we are not, in or minds, transported back to the earliest memories of our childhood, but these days, childhood memories seem to have encircled the doors of my memory and have proceeded to bang on the panels demanding to be let in, or let out, depending on one's perspective on such things.
 I grew up with a rather deep sense of fairness, and it did not matter how unfair anyone had been to me; I somehow knew how to handle my own sticky encounter with unfairness, but I was always ready to chime in when someone was being unfair to someone else. I am still very much like that today.
 I remember an old woman who lived close to our home on Thibou Avenue; she was my mother's close friend and she was a member of my mother's church. I remember one carnival when the steel pan reigned, and when the carnival bands took the Central Street route instead of the Cayon Street as they now do. The lady came out of her home and simply could not resist the powerful, deliciously pulsating rhythm of the sweet calypso, and so she pranced from the sidewalk, tossed herself into the midst of the steel band music and did a piece of "wining" that shocked everyone who knew she was a "big" member of the church my mother attended.
In our folklore is told of a prominent pastor, Pastor Connor, who did the same thing, but when derided by onlookers declared that he had gone into the band to look for his members. This one I think is not true.
 One of our better calypsonians mentioned in one of his calypsos that "shackers", a member of Pastor Allan Turner's church, tossed himself into the band one carnival and did a solid piece of "jamming" to the irresistible beat of the music.
 These things were considered funny and hypocritical to an entire nation of people, only because we were taught by the early missionaries who interpreted the Bible for us every Sunday morning, that there was everything wrong with us including our music, our dance and our Carnival,  and that if we dared moved a toe to the beat of the music, or danced in the carnival, an eternal burning hell awaited us. Some of our very own local ministers still torture their own people with such teachings up to this enlightened day, because our people are still largely afraid to think for themselves.
 I remember feeling agonized when a young member of a church told me she was not going to look at the carnival because something in her could not behave when she heard a good piece of calypso rhythm. The missionaries who brought that interpretation of the Bible's instruction on "worldliness" to our shores did not, and still do not hesitate to dance,wildly kicking their feet to the rhythms of their Irish and Scottish ancestors, but we are going to roast in hell if we dance to the rhythms of ours.