Augustown: A Novel

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses violence, domestic and sexual abuse, discrimination, and anti-Blackness.

The narrator floats in the sky, looking down at the island that is Jamaica. She describes the blue of the ocean, the green of the land, and the inland valley where Augustown sits. The valley is marked by a hill with a visible “scar” that can be seen for miles, left by the bulldozers of industrialization. The narrator postulates that the people of the valley carry the scar “on their own skin” (3). The narrator further describes Augustown and its haphazard layout as well as the dichotomy between the concrete houses and the ramshackle wooden huts, comparing the town to the imagined valley of the past, which was lush with nature. The narrator then announces that it is August 11, 1982, a day she has watched over and over.

Irie Tafarie, known as Ma Taffy, smells a strange scent coming from the little boy Kaia as he walks home. Ma Taffy has been blind since a large family of rats fell through her ceiling 10 years ago, gouging out one of her eyes and badly damaging the other.