YOUNG MAROON

Listen: you think you didn’t stitch me up?

Look at my situation! Tell me how

Any of this can be ‘fixed up’? Come on, now.

You’re so butters and old – and honestly?

You’re from trash … Yeah, you’re too ghetto for me!

You think it’s weird that I’m thrashing in bed?

Wish my heart would buss up and leave me dead!

OLD WIFE

And that’s the only reason you’re upset?

YOUNG MAROON

Oh, my days, woman – don’t you get it yet?

OLD WIFE

Well, Maroon boy, I could fix all a dat

If I so chose, in about tree days flat,

If you just treat me a likkle bit kind.

But your ideas about good men I find

Ignorant. You think because you born high,

And your family have money, by and by,

That will make you a noble or good man?

For arrogance like that I got less than

No respect. The proper good man always

Is him who sets himself a goal each day

To do as many good deeds as he can –

That’s what I will call a real gentleman.

It’s from the likes of Christ we learn kindness,

Not from aristocrats and dey riches.

Cos even if you descended from them

And you got the same high-born fancy name,

You will still inherit nutting at all –

No one does. Just cos your pa act moral

Or your grampa, it don’t pass down to you!

No matter how much dey wished that it do.

Some people quote de poets but I like

The wisdom of the yard and the street life,

And there you hear the simple people say:

Ebry day fishing day, but ebry day

No fe catch fish. And God mean it that way.

Not all of de men can be good all day.

It’s hard to be good. And from our elders

We catch nutting but our bodies. Shelter

For a while, till dem frail, and die … Yes, sir!

Goodness ain’t passed down like your hair colour

Maroon boy, everybody knows the truth.

If all it took to be noble was roots

In some old family plot, then these clans

From H’england – with dey grand old posh names and

It might be fun to have a family tree projected somewhere on the back wall, or to have this imagined family otherwise dramatized on stage.

Sugar wealth – they’d shine, all generations.

But he beat his wife. He ran plantation.

Pause, as everyone on stage starts to recognize the wisdom of the OLD WIFE, and gather round her, as round a fire, which fire we now see.

Imagine I get a burning bush, and I take

It to the darkest house ’tween here and Lake

Victoria. And I just shut the door

And come home. Ya nah see it burn no more

Or less than if twenty thousand men see

It burn? Fire don’t need witness to be