The Fire This Time

Garnette Cadogan’s essay begins with two epigraphs: one from Fats Waller’s song “(What Did I do to Be So) Black and Blue?” and the other from Walt Whitman’s “Manhattan’s Streets I Saunter’d, Pondering.” Cadogan walked around his hometown of Kingston, Jamaica, at night during childhood. Warring political factions made the streets dangerous for everyone. During these walks, Cadogan made friends with and took advice from other walkers. He writes, “I imagined myself as a Jamaican Tom Sawyer” (130), and his fantasies turned the night from a treacherous place into an exciting one. He found solace in the streets, removed from threats of his stepfather’s abuse.

He developed skills as Kingston’s “nighttime cartographer” (131), learning its unwritten rules, patterns, and neighborhoods divided by class. He saw homes of all kinds, from mansions to shacks, as he walked down the hills of the city and found more activity in poorer neighborhoods. As a preteen, he developed his after-dark walking habit and sometimes stayed out until sunrise, to his mother’s dismay. 

Cadogan lived in New Orleans for college, and he expected to walk just as extensively, immersing himself in the city’s distinctive cultural blend. Staffers at his college warned him against walking in crime-ridden areas, but Kingston was considered much more dangerous, statistically, so  Cadogan dismissed their warnings.