As the end of my two-year guest worker stint in England approached, I was told there was a possibility that my visa might be eligible for an extension. But it would cost me a good deal of money upfront and, even with that, they couldn’t guarantee the visa would come through. I was starting to feel like my time was up in that part of the world, but I didn’t know where to go next, aside from back to Kingston. And that didn’t sound particularly promising.
My time in Cornwall hadn’t been a waste- I’d actually been able to pick up solid skills in book-keeping and accounting. But without formal certification I'd never be able to get a legitimate job as a book-keeper. And there was no way I’d ever be able to become an accountant. There was no system for someone like me to forge a path to a real future there- my visa allowed for nothing but a manual labor job on the docks. Education was not part of the package.
I thought back to the words my mother used to say about Windrush Jamaicans. “Like lemmings, running towards freezing weather and terrible food!” I was starting to see her point.
So, when my visa was up, I went back to Jamaica. I returned with a little more money and knowledge than I’d had when I left, but with no more direction or focus.
I spent two years in Kingston, not doing much of anything- flirting with gunman fuckery, clearly heading down the wrong path. Once again, I became a problem to solve. My mother took to praying over me every morning at breakfast-time. Something had to be done.
I then decided for myself to go up to Content Gap. I needed to clear my head for a bit. My father, seeing that I was about to give up, went to my ex-wife’s father and asked him to do right by our family and find me a place to stay in the States. Strings were pulled, my official records were cleaned up and somehow, I “won” myself a green card.
Shortly before my twenty-eighth birthday, I was shipped off to Brooklyn, to stay in a house owned by distant relatives of my ex-wife’s sister’s husband.
