CHAPTER 5: BOUNDED FREEDOM (20)

   

   As iSangoma Olo swayed with the crowd that awaited his divination, his  mind wondered as he  had told the same story to so many western psychiatrists from such an early age they were the only people that granted him any attention in those days in South London.
   In his drugged state Leroy talked incessantly to the nurses and doctors animatedly.
   “Please excuse my tongue and higher language of words that I may speak to you.”  In fact it was only a regression into a mixture of Jamaican and UK patois, ebonics and welcome- to- Africa speak.  The audience listen intently.
    “I was to live in South London. We lived in one room as a family. I was then worried about my granny and aunty and Philo I dog also Trippy the Billy goat that I had left behind in Jamaica. It was the closeness in this new household I couldn't understand. I couldn't go out to play because it was too cold. The fog was thick so it was always night time and everything was grey. The food didn't have any taste and I never see the sun. It was like they had captured me,” said Leroy as he explained to the psychiatrist.
Interrogation by Doctor “So what did you do?” asked the Normoor Psychiatrist, Doctor Wells.
   “I wanted to run away and go back to the citrus grove and smell the sweet freshly picked tangerines and to squeeze the leaf of a lemon tree between my fingers and smell the sweet sap. I knew from then I had to run
away, to make my escape back to freedom. I missed the heavy rain falling on the rooftop like marbles, the earth, when it is wet and muddy squelching between my toes when everything is fresh and sweet; when the rain stops and the sun start to shine again.”  Leroy thought to himself in a semi-hypnotic state.
   “I over here my mother and my father talking, they say I am a wild Pinckney and I am too dam bad, and they wonder which part  of a Africa I  really come from? ”
   “How did you feel about what they said?” asked Dr. Wells.
   “It made me feel better because at least I knew that I come from somewhere. Not like them who had lived in England for so long and pretending to be grey people like their neighbours.”
   “How do you feel now”? Dr. Wells asked.