“Go on,” Courtney urged. “Crank it.”

When he twisted the key he felt as if he’d tweaked a lion’s ear. A roar erupted from the belly of the machine.

“Want some music, Fire?”

Courtney pulled some tapes from the backseat.

“Wha y’have?”

“The Diamonds. Go Seek Your Rights; Sugar Minott, Good Thing Going; and a dancehall mix tape. Kilamanjaro versus Stone Love.”

“Yes, rudie,” he said, booming him—pressing fists. “Gimme some o’ dat.”

The windows down, the engine bawling, they shunted onto the motorway, seduced by the nihilistic ghettocentric rhetoric, urged toward rebellion by the brutish kick drum, which came down on their skulls like a pistol whip, commanding them to mash the gas.

When they reached Brixton, though, a different mood fell over them. To Fire it felt as if the skins from the dead in the Atlantic and in the plantation fields had been sewn into a shawl and draped around his shoulders.

Arriving from America, where black people had so much more—more wealth, more education, more numbers, more influence, more history, and consequently more hope—to this London, this England—where black people have lived in large numbers for only fifty years and had not had a chance to nurture their own Spike Lee or Reginald Lewis or Alexis Herman or Toni Morrison or Henry Louis Gates or Colin Powell or Johnnie Cochran or Carol Mosely Braun—underscored his reason for moving home.

Jamaica, despite its motto, “Out of many, one people,” was a black country, and he was a black man, and there, on that island, no matter how hard things were at times, he waited for scraps at no one’s table. He was no one’s scapegoat. No man’s Sambo. No one’s recurring nightmare. And people there did not whisper the word white in conversation, because they know that in 1833 and 1865 and many times before that and since, the black people of Jamaica have risen up and spilled white blood, licked it off their fingers, swallowed it, burped, and said, “No problem.”

On the high street, a doddering bus transformed the car into a front-row seat for the long-running drama of the Brixton tube station, which if it were ever adapted for the stage should be called Notice Me. For camped outside, lying in wait to pounce on weary passengers, were scores of predators, some in packs, some alone. A skinny Trinidadian in a tight brown suit and tube socks was waving his bible like a tambourine and screaming for all to repent. A group of Black Israelites in outfits inspired by Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Star Wars were screaming into a microphone, in a fake American accent no less, that the white man would be the black man’s slave after the coming Armageddon. To which a Greek chorus of coked-up druggies lounging on a cardboard bed in front of the 7-Eleven were screaming, “Monkeys can’t rule anything except bananas.” Which made the schizophrenic dread who’d been screaming as he defended himself against invisible stones realize that he wasn’t being pelted by the duppy of the last white woman who gave him head but rather the last monkey on which he’d performed cunnilingus. “Monkey pussy taste nice but i wi mad you,” he screamed to the preacher. “Doan nyam it.” The preacher screamed back in tongues, “Shala-mala, shala-maloo … askillapunka … I rebuke you.” To which the dread screamed, “You suck de same monkey too.” And the preacher began to beat him with the bible. “Shala-mala, shala-maloo … Lissen, I wi put away God business and throw licks in you moddacunt, y’know. Stop dis chupidniss now!”