How do we know things? What counts as - to use the contemporary American vernacular - “fake news?” “Carry-go-bring-come news” means, simply, gossip: information that has moved, busily, from its source at the original event to curious eyes and ears somewhere in the distance. Hence the conjugation “I is,” the double negative “don’t put no trust” - and, best of all, the wonderful idiom “carry-go-bring-come,” in which four verbs are welded together by hyphens, Voltron-style, to form a single, powerful adjective. It is happening in Augustown, a desperately poor community (the novel’s main character becomes blind after her ceiling collapses under the weight of rats) where the King’s English does not rule everyone speaks in patois. The sentence above is spoken by a woman who has traveled a long distance to see the supposed miracle for herself. Believers are full of hope elites are threatened revolution is in the air. The news has spread across the island, where it is accepted or disputed, cheered or mocked, depending on the audience receiving it. In Jamaica, in 1920, something unbelievable is happening: A preacher has started to fly. “‘As I was saying,’ she picked up naturally, ‘I is a woman who don’t put no trust in carry-go-bring-come news.’”įrom Kei Miller’s “Augustown” (Pantheon, 2017, ), the latest novel from the Jamaican-born writer and poet.
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