Come Mr Tally Mon....

Day-o, day-ay-ay-o
Daylight come and he wan' go home
Day, he say day, he say day, he say day, he say day, he say day-ay-ay-o
Daylight come and he wan' go home

Work all night on a drink a'rum
(Daylight come and he wan' go home)
Stack banana till morning come
(Daylight come and he wan' go home)

Come, Mr. Tally Mon, tally me banana
(Daylight come and he wan' go home)
Come, Mr. Tally Mon, tally me banana
(Daylight come and he wan' go home)

It's six foot, seven foot, eight foot, BUNCH!
(Daylight come and he wan' go home)
Six foot, seven foot, eight foot, BUNCH!
(Daylight come and he wan' go home)

-Harry Bellafonte

That song annoys me. It bugs the hell out of me and pisses me off something crazy. And not for the reasons a rocker would normally hate such forms of music. This one digs a bit deeper than that. Today as I was working in the garden, raking up leaves, mowing the grass at a 45 degree angel (my hell will probably see me mowing Malbolge at angles worse than that, keep notes all ye daemons) and trying not to think of potential Peruvian boomslangs hanging from the branches of our mango trees (fuck you Mr King; you come explore the bottom of my garden for a bit and you’ll be seeing gateways to another world down there, that place is scary) when all of the sudden something happened. My worry for the amount of diminutive frogs I’d accidentally chopped up in my lawn adventures faded and a chill ran down my spine. That song entered my head and I knew I had to tell you all this story; the one about why every time I hear it I think of a man cradling something in his arms, tears running down his face, staring at a small dismembered hand lying in front of him…

It was a while back, about three or four years back. Always been a bit confused as to whether you should include an entire year to your retelling, as this had happened when I was twenty and being twenty-four now, well you do the math. It was the year I like to refer to as The Wits Year. Yeah i know you’ve all heard tales of that year, but this one has never been a feature. The year before that had been small compared to it; or at least not half as busy.

My ninteenth year had seen me working as a waiter (waitron, whatever you wannabe politically correct fuckheads call it) and barman (come on, try and make that more governmentally feng shui. Bartron?) at the Due East cocktail bar, hanging out at The Doors as much as I could, had some games of Dungeons and Dragons, although very few they were, and met up with a woman who changed my life quite considerably. Yeah you know who you are. I still remember the one thing you said near the end of it all, “I wish I could walk into due east sit at a table and ask someone, who is that cute barman over there, and start it all over again.”

It was at Due East that Sam had warned me about my “Calling”. Much use that was, warning someone about something they can’t avoid. It was there that I realized what alcohol could really do to you, there that I made some of the friends who would stay with me for a very long time. Sam wasn’t one of them; strange witches, should’ve remembered my younger years and stayed away from them. it was also at Due East that I learnt the craft of being in the service industry, and many of you may or may not believe it, but the only thing you need for that is charisma, not a keen attention to pouring drinks.

That year went by and The Wits Year began, swathed in alcohol, drugs, a girl named Kelly, archaeology, The Doors Nightclub even less and a bit more role-playing than the year before. I’ve told many how I used to spend almost every hour of the day awake, working at News Café in Boksburg at night, studying at Wits in the day and reserved weekends for partying and sleeping; or at least until half four on Sunday, where I’d start working again at News. Hard times, very little sleep, but I wouldn’t give it up for the world.

News Café Boksburg was a strange place. Run by a Greek family, bought by two old Greeks, George Papadopolous or something and his wife, could never get her name right and given to their sons Chris and Andrew like toys to play with. It was a successful business nonetheless, and we made our money. They had a strict women only policy in the bar so I was reduced to working the floors. Running around most nights, charming people into getting more drunk than they were supposed to and raking in the money for our managers and bosses to do with as they saw fit. Across the road from us was the shithole called Vaca Loca, or Fuck-a-Local as we called it and the Thursday nights saw most of us walking over there and getting horrendously trollied. It was all some deal that Andrew and Chris had made with the managers at that place. We never paid entrance and almost always got free drinks. Never my style though and I eagerly awaited the departure.

I am a rocker you see; I call myself a rocker because my tastes in music don’t always stick to the conventions of Cannibal Corpse and Napalm Death, although I do sometimes find them to be quite appealing, so therefore I’m not a metal head, per se. I listen to lighter forms of rock, although I’ve never stooped so low as Nickelback. I do try steer away from the commercial forms. I’ve been a fan for a while now, got my first Nine Inch Nails albums on tape when I was nine (ooh, Nine, nine, see the portents?) and have loved them ever since. I love Tool, Rammstein, Sepultura and many others. And maybe it was cuz I started so young, but I never really did fit in. Not with my sisters, not with the socialites of school, not with any of what most would consider normal or standard. Even in my family I sat apart, doing my thing but mainly watching from the side, plotting their demise with a mouthful of marshmallows and chocolate éclairs I’d always say. And so it was with most social groups afterwards that I stayed along the perimeter, never really jumped in headfirst and was there, but not a part of.

And so it was with News Café. And as it is with most social groups rumors would spread, and when you’re dealing with a whole lot of waiters and waitresses who were either struggling with their careers or denying the pointlessness of their actions rumors are the currency. Funnily enough I spread a few about myself, merely to see how gullible and prone to disaster these people were. The one that I was a Satanist was I mistake, one that started because of a religious discussion where I was trying to define the difference between occult Satanism and true Satanism and not claiming to be of either automatically threw me into the label of the cat killers. When the debate on sexuality arouse, I did start the one about me being bisexual, which fit well because I never did anything with anyone at that place, and they found it strange that I either never made any advances or accepted any. They never realized that secretly I found their lack of taste in music to be a turnoff.

Yeah, lame, but it was true. Also I was a bit fucked up from my last relationship. Hee hee hee.

At News I was the guy who did his job, worked my ass off, and went about my way. I had many parties with them at my house, after work, three o’clock in the morning, drinking was the idea. I made my good friends; some still stay with me to this day, and some disappeared.

The main feature at News Café was the regulars. Customers with either too much money to spend or no lives outside of News. And we had many. Although when I look at places like The Doors I realize that they were paltry compared. These were the people who came in often, spent large amounts of money or spent very little and came merely for the ambience. Some came for the waitresses, some for the waiters, none came for me, which I am quite proud of actually, with my sense of individualism and deep seated dislike for those who claimed to be standard. I’ve since gotten over that, but I still think of them as sheep waiting to be fleeced by my wiles. Then again maybe Tibor and Peter came there for me. They were awesome, great people who were too old for their minds, children and geeks but still amazing. And they had good taste too! But hey, that’s not the point.

Oh wait, maybe I should backtrack a bit.

That year I went to the University of Witswatersrand, as I have explained before, and took up studying Archaeology, which I still intend to complete. My other courses were Media Studies, Classics, F.V.P.A. (which was the biggest load of shit ever), and Anthropology. Anthro 101 used to amuse me more because of the person I sat next to, and then turned into pain because of that same person. But there were many correlations between it and Archaeology that drew into its depths further and further and happily at the end of the year I achieved I high mark, albeit due to studying with the help of some A Grade medicinal weed and a shitload of Bio-Plus sweets. I’d just recently taken up smoking, much to the chagrin of my parents and spent most of my well-earned cash on nicotine and alcohol. However, not once did I pay for any of the hallucinogenics I had that year. It just didn’t seem logical. Although if you count the Arhaeology trip to the San caves in the Eastern Cape and the liquid Hoffman’s during that journey then yeah, I did pay once.

I used to love throwing my mind into the subject matter of those two courses, devouring and inhabiting them and then spinning them to my desires. From this came my explanation of running with the bull in Spain merging with the mythology of the Minotaur, and my theory on infibulations depicted on San paintings. Too came my understanding of the Hallucinogenic state, my belief in God, my further dislike of the human race and my knowledge that no, the pyramids were not made by Aliens, screw you Hancock.

It was one day, spent in the Wits library digging for info on Lovecraft that I found an article containing info on the slave trade in Barbados. The book had been left on the table alone and open on a page showing Portuguese slavers flogging their Negro prisoners onto a ship. Seeing as there was no evidence of its previous user around, and considering the library was pretty dead I sat down and took a look at it.

All the images were of the slaves grabbing up sugar cane and whatever else their masters made them harvest but one image stood out for me. All the pictures had been drawn in the style of semi-mythology and showed the Slavers as masters, the slaves as items and pretty much declared more the power of the practice more than anything else. There were a few photos, sepia images of later slavery taking place, but all were the same.; the masters standing proudly as their slaves stood around them with hopelessness etched on their dark faces. However this one image dug a part of me out and stayed there.

Unlike all the other photos, this one showed no master merely a black man sitting on a stone deck, cradling something. You could see the tears running down his face, etched starkly across his features, but his face showed no grief. Instead he looked haunted, staring at that hand that lay on the floor before him. Definitely a child’s hand, it had been severed just below the wrist and a dark brown puddle of blood lay around it. On sepia it looked more like an ink stain than the vital fluid, but the effect stayed the same. On closer inspection of the bundle in the slave’s arms I finally made out what it was he was clutching so tightly to his breast. The small dome of the head of a child was etched across the dark skin of his chest, and the stump of its right arm could be seen protruding from below the man’s elbow.

And that’s when I heard the sound; that low growl, like the sound of a V8 engine starting up, getting ready to roar across the road. Only this came from a throat that seemed organic as well as metal. It seemed to come from the window overlooking the table, and when I glanced quickly in the direction of the source I saw nothing. But still could hear it. That warning snarl that spoke of more than simple danger, but seemed to emanate volumes of pain and suffering.

I stood up and left, leaving my books with the other on that table and made for the stairs. Not walking hastily but with enough speed to get me the fuck out of there. The growl seemed to disappear as I stood but I could still hear it ringing in my head. Once I’d reached the library lawns I moved to the volleyball courts met up with Laurence and them and dowsed the sound with a phat joint. I forgot it, left it behind, and didn’t care anymore.

You see the problem I have here is not one of memory or fear. It’s just that that’s what I did. I left. I thought nothing else but get the fuck away, get stoned; that and why now?

I’ve been hearing these growls a lot in my life. I never had a name for them, but thanks to Supernatural, the TV series, I do now. They always turned up when something was gonna happen. Never to me, but to something that would affect me. I sometimes heard them in the distance and soon thereafter something would happen. First time I heard it my sister fell pregnant. I heard it when my friend was raped. I heard the baying in the distance when my dad had his first heart attack. Since then I’ve been doing research on them and have begun to kind of get an understanding of them.

Remember Sam? The person I said told me I was gonna have a “calling”. She mentioned one of them stayed down in the veld at the bottom of the street I’d grown up in. I had chalked it off to wicca, which I always avoided since my dabbling in it during my silly teen years. But they seemed to call at just the right times. Whenever something big happened.

I call them Black Dogs.

They litter history, jazz and blues music and well, are almost anywhere that has had anything to do with the slave trades. They go further back too; there’s biblical references, notes in the Koran, and even Greek and Egyptian mythological representations. But they appear more when it was anything to do with what the white man did to the Africans they then called Negroes.

In a journal of a Barbados planter from 1680, he wrote that “the conversion of slaves to Christianity not only destroyed property but injured the land itself, since converted Negroes became perverted and intractable.” Strange, because the truth of the matter is in Haiti, Barbados, Guinea and ever other place slavery was a common form in, the slaves never actually converted. Instead they assimilated; they created what we would now call Voodoo. The saints became the Loa, the cross became the gris gris.

That day I left wits happy and high. Got onto the bus and went home, got changed, and went to work. It was a Wednesday night, which meant we might leave before three a.m. if we were lucky. But not this night, as it was nearing two the one group of regulars arrived; these being the most regular of the regulars. They were Portuguese all of them, and friends with the one owner Andrew. They stayed all night, like they normally did. Which meant us waiters and barmen had to stay with them. And then it happened.

“Daaaaayy-o!!! daaay-O!”

That damned song. There were times when I’d snuck into the office, sneaking the odd Rammstein and Tool song onto the day playlist on the computer that ran the music, and I had done my utmost to try and find that bloody song and delete it. Never any success though. And here was the reason why. These regulars, whenever they got drunk and Andrew was there, they would call out, and he would go out and play that song. However tonight that song had a particular significance to it.

Their faces drunk and blank, swaying with arms around each others necks, these men shouted out the lyrics, some not even knowing what they were. What was worse was that it wasn’t even the original, but some techno version. However it did not grate on my nerves as it normally did. Because for some reason all I could think of was that one sepia image; that Negro who wasn’t able to reach his daily tally, and as punishment his master had severed the hand of one of his children.

I felt hatred then. Intense burning hatred, I wanted to kill, grab a tray a smash it over one of their heads, use the splinters of plastic and jab them into their eyes, reach over for the meat cleavers we used as steak knives and stab them repeatedly. Bash their skulls in, tear them apart.

Luckily it was my turn for a smoke break. I moved outside, in haste pulled out a Marlboro and took a long deep drag. How dare they? How can they be so happy? How can they smile and wave and get drunk and then expect to party on singing that song? Do they even know what it means? Their ancestors probably were one of those slaving fucks, who simply used them for whatever they felt. Raped their wives, slaughtered their children, didn’t give a flying fuck.

The night progressed onwards, my mind raging. Anndine, one of my best friends and my lift for the night cashed up eventually and we went home. All the time while I was raging I couldn’t hear the sound in the background. Cuz it was still there. The song, yes, but that growling remained.

Two days later I found out that one of them had died. Car accident. Got too drunk and hit a wall. Took two people with them. I felt no shame. However my sales that night were low, very low. Below a thousand, which was bad for a Friday night. It started to dawn on me that every drunken customer I sent home was another casualty. I had their money, and with it their lives.

I quit working there after a month. Went on with my life. But I heard them call again a few times. Once when my dad had his second heart attack. Again with a supposed exorcism, again when another friend died. The growls sometimes, sometimes the baying. Like pain scraped across sandpaper, ground through metal pipes. I heard them again two weeks ago, during a stupid argument. Should’ve listened carefully, shouldn’t have ignored it. Should’ve warned them.

And then today, like I’ve never heard it before, close by, angry, right in my ear, but this time a bark, sharp and razor edged.

Like the slaves before, I understand the beasts, but never have I been protected from them.