When a Jamaican sees me, they must think, “A who dis ya one yah?” or, translated, “Who is this New York boy with the locs like dread?” I stepped out of the airport and into the tunnel where the porters waited for 14 or more older women who wanted to be wheeled from the plane. A lot of us think this looks silly, but it’s a rite of passage, and I hope I’m proud and stubborn and alive enough to let the airline staff roll me to my gate and my flight one day.

In JFK, this is how I spot the flights to DR, PR, Guyana, and Jamaica: I do the math of how many seniors have chosen to be wheeled and guess which country they’re going back to. They’ve spent enough time on American soil, working American jobs, and fielding American disappointments to know that ain’t no such thing as a free ride. So when the airport offers you a service whose basic cost is the lean reality of your age, you take that rolling chariot to retirement tenderness because it may be one of the only benefits left to claim as your value gets spat back at you.

Awaiting the rideshare pickup—there’s Uber now in Jamaica—I watch the other side of the car’s dash for Rolando. “Blessings! Jah’s blessings” He greets me like this and I think he’s signifying that he knows I’m Rasta. The hair is my connection to a culture, yet the tradition has skipped a generation. I will have to remember this when I walk the road later and am offered weed, goodwill, wisdom, and incense. He’s blasting a mix and the word “pussy” is like a verbal tic in the dancehall tracks pulsing out of his system. What the singer will do to the pussy. What the singer won’t believe about pussy. Where the pussy goes when the right touch approaches. It’s 5:45 in the afternoon in the capital city and I know everything I need to know about pussy in the 30-minute cab ride to my rented room.

Then, I have to remember that Jamaicans bowed to the Tourism Gods but they still own a Maroon spirit. In the book I’m reading, Island On Fire, by Tom Zoellner, he describes how the Maroons ended Tacky’s Rebellion. A sharpshooter from their sequestered colony in the hills shot the leader in his head. The Maroons had worked out a deal with the British colonizers so they could be left alone, living off the land, untouched. The enslaved laborers who stole munitions, swelled to an army of nearly a thousand, and massacred the slave-holding landowners had upset this Maroon treaty. This story feels very Jamaican in that one group was “out of order,” like the patois says, and they had to be handled lest their rebellion ruin the well-being of the secluded few. I am the descendant of both the enslaved Africans, pushed to every limit, and the Maroons, who could make a society of their own, depending on who was asking for their allegiance.

I’m a Maroon in Kingston, especially, where my country roots and coffee bean skin distinguish me from the Chinese and Indo-Jamaicans who make up the elite class. I walk into a restaurant expecting to look more like the servers than the owner. While slipping in and out of patois, I tap a calculator to find the exchange rates, and order a fancy dinner. The lighter-skinned, better-dressed Jamaicans will be served first, which I accept. Other than being draped in name brands, Nike and Ralph Lauren and Muji, my Americanness doesn’t scan well. I’m lucky I already don’t feel like I should be important or I might feel truly unimportant, hidden in the shadows of the mosquito-ridden corner of an outdoor bistro.

That’s another American thing I do. I’m always scratching. My mother grew up in Jamaica and was bitten all the time. (It’s true that this is all genetic and the qualities of my blood make me more susceptible to those itch-infusing fuckers.) But I’m always slathering my skin in repellent and dragging my nails across the sour bites. The waitress takes my order without looking at me, or pretending pleasantries matter here. I love that I’m Jamaican because I want this treatment. I need to feel like I’m the last person she’s here to deal with and, in fact, a nuisance to her day. If I ever come here, the land where I was born, and that quintessential rudeness has changed, I want them to bury me on the spot. We didn’t come out of volcanic ashes of the sea to turn docile in a lifetime. I forgot how much I missed Jamaica.