Big Dread

Big Dread

by

Austin Mitchell

        We called him Big Dread. I first met him on my first holiday in Kingston. He and his brother lived next door to my cousin. His name was Evrol and his brother was called Mikey.  I didn’t know that they were Mister Brown‘s nephews. It wasn’t until they came to spend holidays with him and his wife Miss Ivey. They brought their young sister, Dania, with them. They returned home two weeks later and were frequently holidaying in the country after that. I didn’t see them for a number of years. Their sister came to stay with Mr. Brown.  Then I heard that they had migrated.  Sometimes later the sister also migrated.

            I was in my district one day when I saw this tall dreadlocks coming down the road. It was Evrol. I didn’t recognize him but he recognized me.

            “Delton, what’s going on?” he asked.

            It was then that I recognized him.

            “What the hell! Evrol what are you doing out here?” I asked.

            We went to a nearby shop. I bought him a few beers and he told me what had happened to him.

            He had spent time in prison for marijuana possession and also for dealing in it. He had been deported at the end of his sentence.

            “So what happened to Mikey?”

            “Mikey is dead. They just shoot him down. Is so the system operates.”

            According to him, Mikey was at a brethren’s yard. Men came looking for the man and when they didn’t find him decided to kill Mikey as a warning to the man they were looking for.

            People in our village who did not know him began to call him Big Dread. It was because of his height and size and the fact that he was wearing dreadlocks. Although I personally didn’t find anything wrong with him, several persons said that he wasn’t a hundred percent right in the head. He was just too laid back, simple and unenergetic, they said.

            He was now living at his uncle’s yard again. I heard that he was living off the rent he was collecting from a house his mother had in Kingston. I didn’t see him for about a year.

            “I built a little shack in Portland. The police locked me up for a few sticks of week. They gave me three months. When I come out all the zinc from the shack was gone.”
            He told me that as a result all this his books were destroyed.  He was now back at his uncle’s house. I moved to Kingston and didn’t see or hear any news a couple of years later. He had jumped off the roof of a house on which they were holding a party. Sadly, he didn’t survive. I wondered if the system had so messed up these two brothers that they could not have survived. The End. (From the collection of short stories-I'm Back From the Hills Now by Austin Mitchell) Please visit the Austin Mitchell pages at Amazon for a look at some of my books.