Blackwood Meeks, and at, right, the park's beautifully lit fountain.
Amina Blackwood Meeks, Contributor
I AM WILLING to bet that there are many Kingstonians who do not have any practical understanding of what a park is for. Okay, it is a place to take a short cut through Half-Way Tree or downtown Kingston. And, oh yes, there is latter day place named Emancipation Park where Prime Minister Patterson took his historic oath of allegiance to the Jamaican people. And what again? Oh, that's where they had the different groups and individuals performing every evening for a whole week before Christmas? Yes, that's the kind of practical thing we were thinking of.
Back in the day, my mother used to dress up har children on a Sunday evening, put them on the bus an send them downtown to Victoria Pier to listen to the police band play music. We got off the bus at Parade and walked down to the Pier. Well one day I discovered that there were men who gathered in the park I didn't know the name of it then and 'talked politics'. Suffice it to say that many were the threats I received from a certain sister, to tell my mother that I sent them off to the pier while I remained in the park "listening to big people business". It just seemed like such a wonderful thing to do in the park talk, or listen to people talk, make friends, eat cotton candy and just stroll around.
That was long before people started to do other things in the park like hold up other people in broad daylight, rob them, kill them off, meck dem fraid fe use de space. Till Jamaicans who didn't know any better go to England and envy 'the nice green spaces' where people just gather and eat lunch or jog or walk dem dog or just watch who doing it walking dem dog, that is.
Once upon a not-so-long-time ago, my friends Bello and Blacka had a notion that they would stage lunch-time concerts on the steps of the Ward Theatre and eventually move the concerts across the street to St. William Grant Park and sooner or later it would become a place where people would just gather for artistic outpourings. Plenty people thought they were psychiatrically challenged, and didn't realise that Bello and Blacka had also experienced the park in its heydays. Eventually nothing happened with their grand re-design, except that the park, just like the one in Half Way Tree, continued to have a reputation as a place where only bad things happened. Or where politicians compete to see who could have the largest crowd gather in a veritable contest of colours.
The other parks around the town always seemed to be locked up. You kinda wondered why these beautiful spaces had these huge iron gates like an unspoken "look but don't touch" and bad things happened in the wide open spaces that no one seemed to be taking care of. And then, there was Emancipation Park, in which so many people said "not a ting wudda gwaan". Till a couple brave souls decided to use the walking track one day and soon enough a couple other brave souls followed and liked it. And even though the trees barely start to grow, some days you will see people there having lunch. Till dem have a whole nine nights of 'Christmas in the Park' with hundreds of mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, grandparents coming out every evening to enjoy what was going on, while joggers still minding dem own business and people mekking friends and talking politics and I don't care what my sister tell my mother, I listening to inside the Park. Some people I know who not going downtown in the day if you pay them, ketch de fever to go down to St. William Grant to witness that Tree Lighting Ceremony for themselves. And then Minister Portia Simpson Miller had a similar delightful little do in Mandela Park in Half-Way Tree. And I've had the pleasure of having people tell me how much they enjoyed themselves at the tree lighting in Emancipation Square in Spanish Town.
I think is more than just the Christmas Spirit, for Christmas Spirit pass every year and is a long time him doan stop into the park dem like dat. I think this year him stop for a reason. Cause guess what? We don't have to go quite to Europe to enjoy green spaces and we don't have to abandon our green spaces to people who don't have a practical understanding of how we can live and grow and sow the seeds of harmonious togetherness in our parks.
Hundreds of Jamaicans were exposed for the first time to performers like Flo Darby, Calabar Chapel Choir, Jon Williams, Stella Maris Dance Troupe, To-Isis, Caribbean Regal Steel Drummers and plenty more through the activities which took place in our parks this past Christmas.
But it is also an indication of how we can reclaim our past and build our future one park at a time. It is one way in which we can operate free of fear in attractive surroundings which fill the soul and release it to be the best of itself in a march towards spiritual, cultural and material prosperity.
