They Were People Too 1

Welcome to  this series of blogs which I am calling THEY WERE PEOPLE TOO. It is a moment of refection. A moment when I look back on the days of my boyhood and remember a few of the human beings in the Basseterre, and specifically the Mc. Knight community, who were in some way damaged beings, products of the 1930s and 40s perhaps, whose mental and emotional wounds were inflicted by the crushing weight of poverty and colonialism.
 Take Doose, for example. Doose was a rather tiny man. We never knew his real name. Everybody called him "Doose, Doose, Doose".
We had no idea what "Doose" meant. We knew that doose was the name of something associated with a game big men played around a table, making noises with each other, causing dogs to bark and neighbours like Pooter to demand that these men lower their voices, but we had no idea if Doose's name came from the game, or if he was called Doose simply because he was a tiny man. We did not know where Doose lived, if he had a mother, brothers or sisters. We did not know who his father was, or why he behaved the way he did.
 Doose, like many of the men and women in McKnight, I think Doose was from Haynes Smith Village area, but I can't be certain. No one was certain it seemed.
 Doose walked fast; his two tiny legs moving like the peddles of a racing bicycle, his clothes were rags and he spoke in a sandpaper voice to people inside his head. His hands swung and flipped suddenly in every direction when he was angry with the people in his head. Nobody knew what Doose was saying when he barked at the people in his head, but there were sudden outbursts of grating, loud, barking, rumblings sounds that emitted from the bottom of his throat . Doose loved women. Sometimes he would pull at them, and they would beat him, half serious, half-playfully, hitting him over his tiny, crouching frame, but he would laugh in his groggy voice and run away on his mini legs, only in a few seconds to forget the feathery slapping of the embarrassed women to continue on his journey, and to carry on his conversation with the people in his head.
 Doose is not here any more, and I don't know which of the graves holds his tiny remains, but I can still hear his gruff, like crashing ocean-wave, sandpaper-ranting voice inside my head.