Before I introduce you to our narrator, a few weeks shy of her 100th birthday, you’d better take a moment to prepare yourself. Tuck that shirt in. Stand up straight. Fix your hair. And for goodness sake, don’t patronise her. Our heroine – mother, grandmother; friend, lover, widow; a successful ganja farmer; a survivor, who sleeps with a cutlass under her pillow – is a force to be reckoned with. “Me is not you fuckin Granny,” she snaps, early in the book. “Me haunt you for fuckin ever if you mek me die inna hospital,” she threatens, later on. Pauline Evadne Sinclair is her full name – Miss Pauline, to you and me.
We are in Jamaica. Not the touristy coastal towns, but inland: a quiet village in St Mary parish, Mason Hall. Miss Pauline’s life is rooted in this soil: she was born here; she and her partner, Clive, built a house and raised their family. She lives alone now, but she still tends her kitchen garden and climbs the steep slope down to the river to fetch water. But recently, her worries have been on the increase. Her stomach gripes. A walking stick might soon be needed. And even worse, the stone walls of her house have begun to shake. She tells no one in the village about this last development, lest she be labelled a “mad ooman”. In any case, she’s already convinced that she knows the cause: “the stones know what she did all those years ago … The past [is] seeking its reckoning.”
