Last summer, I had returned home for the first time in years. My family’s house outside Montego Bay, like many things with the distance of time, had become a romantic vision in my head. I hadn’t been home since I was 14 and I hadn’t been in the house for longer than a week since I was 12. It feels bizarre trying to return to a rhythm that you’ve been apart from in so long. I found myself wandering around it aimlessly, staring out towards the horizon trying to recall what it was like when I saw this as just a normal home and not the place of worship I had created in my mind.
Quite often, I would find myself sunbathing with a book, roasting my pale body to a crisp while a tan refused to set. It was about my third day of performing this ritual when I noticed a pattern. At around noon, every day, a John Crow would make one sweep around the house before disappearing.
A John Crow is not a crow at all but rather a vulture. To be exact, it’s a turkey vulture. A hunched body with black feathers, massive claws and a raw pink head from which a sharp beak protrudes - up close, the John Crow is not a looker. They scavenge any decaying and decomposing creature and usually pick the carcass clean. At first when I saw him swooping by, I assumed that I was the closest thing resembling a bloated cadaver in the creature’s radius and everyday he came to check if I was still alive. But I realised, even without me offering my body up for the John Crow’s lunch I would see him swoop by, even when I myself was eating inside.
I found myself waiting for the single bird to fly past and although he wouldn’t come everyday, he slowly became a constant. I wanted to name him, but I never came up with one that satisfied me. I played with Ringo for a bit - I thought naming him after a Beatle like the vultures in The Jungle Book would be fun - but it didn’t suit him, so I just stuck with John Crow. It’s a name within itself.
I’ve always thought that John Crows were strangely beautiful. Maybe not up close (up close their resemblance is uncanny to a few sunburnt octogenarians I had encountered in the UK) but if you ever see John Crows fly, you would understand. They hardly flap their wings and instead, lay them out against the sky, riding the invisible wind currents. They’re never in a rush. They fly in the way humans desire to fly, not relentless flapping like other vermin (pigeons) but wings out, soaring in the open air.
A lot of Jamaicans do not like John Crows. For a large number of people, a John Crow flying over my house would be an omen of death - some design of Obeah (a type of ritualistic Jamaican witchcraft). As omens go, it’s a bit heavy handed. The black bird which eats dead things is a symbol for death; I think we could’ve been more creative with that one. Therefore, the John Crow is hated not for what it is, but for what it represents.
Quite often, you would hear a Jamaican tell someone they ‘fava John Crow batty’ (they look like a John Crow’s bottom - if you haven’t gathered, it’s meant as an insult). I find it odd that it’s the backside we often tend to focus on, despite them having such ugly heads. I don’t know who the first person to see a vulture’s batty up close was, but I don’t envy them. The John Crow does not get an Ugly Duckling story but rather is the pariah of tropical birds. It is not redeemed by the vindicating delay of beauty. It will always be an outcast, an observer. A bird that does its job, helps clean otherwise disease ridden carcasses but never gets recognised as anything but a scavenger.
I do miss seeing John Crows in the sky when I’m in England. It’s one of those slightly bizarre aspects that I miss about home, one of the things you don’t expect to long for. As birds go, the John Crow doesn’t really inspire visions of a tropical paradise. It is not the type of bird a tour guide would point out to tourists. Of course, they are as Jamaican as any other bird on the island, but we tend to ignore them. They’re often higher up, in the distance, never daring to show their faces to people who would scorn them. It’s the hummingbird we put on our logos and the parrots we let the tourists hold. The John Crow, however, is but a black spot against the sky. A shame above our heads, present but ignored.
Of course, I miss the hummingbirds at my Grandmother’s house in Ocho Rios, dive bombing you as they zip between feeders and flowers or the parrots that chatter past at sunset, settling in the ackee trees to eat all the best fruit. But it’s the John Crow I still instinctively look up to see in the skies. He hasn’t followed me across the Atlantic.
There is the possibility, that the John Crow that would fly past was not the same bird each time. It’s also possible that the bird wasn’t coming to greet me at all but just looking for some food. But that would be too cruel on life’s behalf. Even the universe is not that vindictive.
My John Crow never settled himself on our roof, the branch of a nearby tree or even the ground. It came to a point where I wondered if he would ever land. Or if he was waiting for us to receive him, not as the omen of death but as the lonely friend coming home.