The Jelly Man

When I first saw him I didn't give it much thought. It didn't seem very important. A beat-up old van backed into a parking space and an older Rastaman got out, went to the back, and popped open the hatch. Inside were mounds of green coconuts.

None of it seemed very unusual to me, really. Suddenly, though, an explosion of activity engulfed the parking lot.

From over by the swimming pool, where they’d been playing, a stampede of young children came hurtling across the parking lot. At least a dozen kids, shrieking with glee, set an electrical charge to the otherwise serene evening.

“Jelly man! Jelly man!” they shouted.

The unexpected swirl of activity interrupted our progress. We’d been walking back to our room from grabbing dinner at Margaritaville, home of fruity drinks, free Wi-Fi, and a menu to satisfy my daughter’s picky American palate.

Struck by the excitement, my daughter looked towards me with a half grin, her eyes already quizzing me before she ever opened her mouth.

“What’s a jelly man, Dad?”

“Him,” I said, pointing to the man. His greying dreadlocks were tucked into a big, khaki-colored tam, but the few strands that had managed to escape hung nearly to his waist. He held a coconut at the ready in one hand and in the other, a machete with a short, wide blade. His eyes glimmered, as he smiled benevolently over the gathering throng of youngsters.

“He’s the jelly man,” I explained. “Those are jelly coconuts or just jellies for short. Do you want to try one? ”

“Sure,” she said. Her nonchalant, preteen indifference was no match for the infectious zeal of those children.

At the back of the van, the children were jockeying for position. The choir of voices chanted refrains of, “Me! Me next!” and “Jelly man! Jelly man!” A tangle of arms passed money over bobbing heads and reached for the next coconut being passed out.

The jelly man calmly, but quickly, used his machete to lop the tops off the coconuts. Another flick of the wrist and he would pop a hole in the top, so a straw could be put in.

Each eager child got their coconut before drifting back towards the pool. I stood patiently waiting for the kids to get their coconuts first, while my wife and daughter waited under a broad-leafed breadfruit tree.

We had already been in Ocho Rios for a few days by the time we encountered the jelly man at our apartment complex. I say apartments, but condos may be a better description. I don't know. Once upon a time, it had been a regular hotel.

Now, mostly permanent residents occupy the place. The rest of the apartments are rented to tourists and other visitors to the island. When I was a kid, my parents brought me here whenever they wanted to get away for a few days. Now I was bringing my family here on their very first trip to Jamaica.

I hadn’t been back to Jamaica in a long time, either. Coming to Ocho Rios was a little more complicated these days, given the distance. Years ago, when this was a regular hotel, and my parents brought me here, we didn’t come from so far away. Just the other side of the island.

I wanted my family to see where I had grown up, so there we were. It wasn't exactly where I’d grown up, though. Things change with time, of course, but where I grew up was both two hours and a couple of decades away from this place.

Where I grew up was more remote, more rural, and more…something. Unlikely? This place wasn’t quite my Jamaica, but you could almost see my Jamaica from there.

If you don’t know anything about Jamaica, there are things you can never fully understand about me. That’s why we’d taken this vacation. I wanted them to know. I wanted my daughter, especially, to experience this place beyond what’s on the cover of the tourist brochures.

Long ago, this was my life, but it’s still never far from me. It's part of who I am and that's not easily explained. It has to be experienced, but that's the trick.

What can you experience in just over a week? We’d been to the beach, we even swam with dolphins, but how is any of that relevant? It's fun. We were having lots of fun. That's the point of a vacation.

Still, I’d been trying to say something for which I didn’t have the words. It was like trying to go somewhere without knowing the directions. I wanted my daughter to know something, but wasn't completely sure what that something was.

I’d introduced her to all kinds of new stuff. I bought mangoes; four different kinds. I bought a huge wedge of sticky, chewy, sweet jackfruit. I bought apple bananas. Yes, stubby, reddish-colored apple bananas, not the big, long kind found in American supermarkets.

Oh, and I bought guineps, one of my childhood favorites. Clusters of smooth, marble-sized, little green fruits, their insides a perfect combination of sweet and sour. It turns out; my daughter loves guineps, too.

It’s one thing to introduce people to new foods, new places, and new adventures. It’s another thing to know the cycle of the year by the fruits on the trees. Sure, I can point out the local flowers and plants and recite their names, but she won’t remember one tree from another.

She won’t know what it’s like when apple season comes to the mountains in April, the purple blossoms dropping to the ground, creating a royal carpet under a lush green canopy. She won’t know the spongy feel of it under her bare feet, or that the hard buds, plucked from the tree, make perfect ammunition for bamboo pop guns. A week is hardly time for anything.

At that moment, though, we were simply standing there, waiting our turn for a coconut. As the last of the children scurried back to play, slurping down their coconut water, I stepped up to the jelly man with some cash in my hand.

"Wha'appen, dread?” I greeted him. “Mek mi get three jelly, nuh."

The older man gave me a quick second glance. People that look like me usually don't speak like me. No worries, though. With a subtle nod of acknowledgment, he stretched his arm towards me, with his fist clenched.

"Ah, a yardie" he said. " Respect."

"Respect," I replied, touching my knuckles to his.

A yardie. Yeah. Here I was, back in Jamaica. Back ah yaad, as we would say. There was nothing else to be said about that between the two of us.

Without knowing anything, really, he knew enough. He’d heard how I spoke to him and he’d heard how I spoke to my family, switching accents and dialects like the flip of a switch. It didn't need to be said out loud. I was a man standing with each foot in a different world.

My daughter had drawn closer to my side, waiting anxiously for her coconut. The jelly man selected three nice coconuts, chopping each one open, before passing them to me. In turn, I handed one to my wife, then one to my daughter. As he handed the last one to me, our eyes locked for just a moment and then he looked back to my daughter.

“When you finish, you want the jelly out of it?” he asked her.

“Uh, I don't know,” she answered, a bit confused.

She had no idea what that meant. I hadn't thought of it myself, until then. I’d certainly never told her about jelly coconuts, come to think of it. So, I gave her a quick lesson.

Once you finish drinking the water from the coconut, you chop the whole thing open. You cut off a little curved piece from the husk, and then use that to scrape the jelly from the insides. That hard coconut you buy in grocery stores back in the States starts out as this wet, jelly-like stuff. It's a little bit sweet, a little bit not sweet.

I didn't wait for her response. I told the jelly man to go ahead. Yes, we would want the jelly out of our coconuts.

He gave us straws to drink the water from our coconuts. I explained to my daughter that when I was her age we didn't use straws, or buy coconuts from a jelly man. At least not up in the bush where I lived.

We had our own coconut trees and our own machetes. We spent days working in the fields, clearing cane, or planting yams. We spent other days running up and down the mountainsides, playing in the blazing tropic sun. Either way, when we got thirsty, we would just snatch coconuts straight from the tree. After swigging our fill of coconut water, mouths pressed to the husk like a jug, we’d eat the jelly from them.

That was our life. That was our normal. As I shared my story, the jelly man leaned against his van, waiting for us to finish, so he could cut our coconuts open for us.

I scraped out every bite of jelly from my mine, savoring every last drop. My wife didn’t care much for it. My daughter liked it. At least that's what she said, but I wasn’t sure. Maybe she was just being polite.

We finished up and then headed back to our room. That’s where we’d been going, after all. My wife and daughter started ahead of me. Before falling in behind them, I turned to the jelly man and gave him a nod. We reached out and bumped fists one last time.

“Respect,” we said in unison.

The next day was filled with another flurry of vacation activities. We drove to St. Ann’s Bay to swim and eat jerk shrimp by the sea. We strolled through the craft market, stocking up on souvenirs to take back home. We bought more guineps, too. My daughter and I agreed you should eat guineps every day if you can.

It was a good day, but a tiring one. That evening, we just lazed around our living room. My wife curled up on one couch, reading a book, while my daughter lay on the other couch, engrossed in her phone, like most kids her age. I alternated between a cricket match on TV and planning our next day's activities.

I noticed, though, that every couple of minutes, my daughter pulled back the curtain to peek out the window. It wasn’t quite dark yet, but the sun was beginning to set. I couldn’t imagine anything too interesting happening in the parking lot at that hour.

“Hey, kiddo,” I said. “What do you keep looking at out there?”

“I’m looking for the jelly man,” she said.

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If you enjoyed this story, I invite you to read the same story told in the form of a poem: The Song of the Jelly Man