'August Town', a record of community change

Mel Cooke, Gleaner Writer

Duane Stephenson grew up in August Town, St Andrew, during a watershed between the political violence of the mid-1970s to the 1980 general election and the internecine gang warfare which was staunched only by the 2008 peace treaty between eight gangs, signed at the Mona Bowl at The University of the West Indies (UWI), establishing a five-year ceasefire.

So, as he sings at the beginning of the second verse of August Town, "When I was a young boy, growing up in August Town/we ate from the same pot, we were idrens all around/from Gola to Colour Red Corner/from Rockers to Jungle 12 Tyre/Dread Heights, Bryce Hill to River, all around", Stephenson is speaking about that watershed.

The areas within August Town which he named would one day be locked in deadly battle, but in his childhood, growing up at 37 Bryce Hill Road, the St Andrew community was peaceful and the political wars a distant memory.

"We never saw that. Badness was back in the day," Stephenson said, estimating that in his youth, 50 per cent of the residents worked at the nearby UWI.

The communities' reputation lingered, though, creating an aura just like other areas, and Stephenson laughs as he remembers attending Tivoli Gardens Comprehensive High School.

"I used to hear about this mythical place, Tivoli, you think somebody going to shoot you down," he said. However, "when I tell people I went to August Town Primary they say 'who, you a bad man!'"

Turning point

Then came the turning point, the shattering of the calm, with which Stephenson follows up on the naming of areas in August Town. He sings: "Then the football ground became a battlefield/and my life felt so surreal/people were falling all around/only Jah helped me stand my ground/only Jah."

The game was between Hermitage and Jungle 12. "Everything changed at that football match," Stephenson, who was there, said. "Looking back, it had to have been something that was building up. People were armed," he said. When the battle shifted from the ball to bullets, the policemen assigned to the match "run up to UWI". Some of the armed men were protecting the referee and Stephenson said, "Me have to run, take whe meself."

Stephenson would not write August Town until many years after the memories of his childhood and that football game were carved into his psyche. He was in the closing stages of recording his 2007 debut album and saxophonist/producer Dean Fraser was at Grafton studio, working on some tracks he was sending to Guyana. Stephenson had been at Tuff Gong when the tracks were being laid, but was working on something else and had not been paying close attention.

However, the music caught his ear, though Stephenson says, "At the time, I did not realise it was (the music for) 'Jah Live'... . I said 'Bway, Dean, I do not know what you plan to do, but I love it'. He gave me the track and I went home. At the time I was living in Elletson Flats."

In approaching songwriting, Stephenson goes with the instinctive approach. "They say the first thing that come to mind you move with it. Ninety-nine per cent of the time I do it," he said. And for August Town, "I decided this would be a documentation of the things that got us to the place where we were."

Concurrently, there was a closer physical connection with August Town, as "the night after starting the song, I went back to August Town". He was housesitting for a friend and, although the war was on, Stephenson was unafraid. "I always keep that relationship with the community, where I can walk anywhere, people say 'waapen artiste?'," he said. And the people shooting at each other know their targets very well, for "as much as people a try shoot people, everybody was in the same class".

There are distinct shifts of tone in August Town, the reflection on the change in the community coming after the remorse of someone for whom "Guns and ammunition were my chosen way of life/with God-fearing people I chose to strife/for all of the lives that are taken, they can never be replaced/but still Jah Jah chose to remember my face/though I never lived like he wanted/I'm still mindful of what he taught me/so now I beg and plea, I'm on my bending knees/cause father you rescued me/I've got the scars to show/I barely made it along life's road/cause when my life got dark, he was the only spark/he was the light at the end of the road".

'Donmanship'

The persona who got into the "guns and ammunition" was "Sean Thomas, man who me grow up with a Bryce Hill. Him was in line for donship in August Town".

Driving through the community one day, when he was making significant headway in his solo singing career, Stephenson saw Thomas, also called 'Blacks' and 'Blacka Sean'. "Him say, 'Come een, Finger' (Stephenson was called 'Goldfinger'). Me say, 'Yu nah stop shoot people? Yu nah plan fi heaven?'. Him say, 'Yu know how it go. More time we wonder 'bout it and wonder 'bout it, but you have to cross that bridge when you reach it." They spoke for about two hours and then parted.

Stephenson would never see Thomas alive again. He left Jamaica to do a show and when he returned he heard that Thomas had been killed. He died in Hermitage after being shot in his car while returning from dropping off a woman in August Town. That was in about January 2007.

"Most of the people involved in the war was people me know, but him was the closest," Stephenson said

He breaks into the chorus of August Town and tells The Sunday Gleaner, "It is based on that same conversation." And the death pushed the song along. "I had the ideas turning around in my mind. When I found out he was dead, the song never took two hours to write," Stephenson said.