The last time we met Smokey, he tried to revive the Liberal Piper Party by bribing Small Pin to protest sex toys outside Parliament. The protest was good for a newspaper headline, but he was back to being the political vagrant of Trinidad and Tobago.
Smokey was now living under a mango tree somewhere in the forests beyond Blue Basin. He would wash his clothes in the Blue Basin waterfall and live off of fruits and nuts while he hid from society. He still kept his suit clean from the mud and leaves of the forest by keeping it in a plastic bag, longing for the day he could return to politics.
One day, Smokey snuck up on a group visiting the waterfall and stole half a newspaper. He snuck off into the forest like a shadow while his smoke-damaged brain read through the headlines.
He saw two stories that piqued his interest: “The Yellow-Footed Tortoise” and “Probe finds Brian Manning seat shaky.” As the narrator, I can tell you the stories had nothing to do with one another, but years of drug abuse told Smokey’s brain otherwise.
“Yuh know Dr Eric Williams said a crapaud could win in a safe seat, but now they putting tortoise?” Smokey said to himself.
Smokey put on his suit and exited the forest to go to Belmont to find Small Pin. Small Pin was on the street corner doing his usual slackness; Smokey handed him the newspaper fragments.
“The newspaper is talking about Aleeyah Ali; she founded The Foundation for Heritage Preservation & Legacy Creation. Shellbee, the yellow-footed tortoise, is not a member of a political party; he’s a real animal,” Small Pin said.
“Nah, it hadda be politics. Lewwe go Arima and investigate this Shellbee.”
Smokey and Small Pin took a maxi to Arima, where they found a woman named Aleeyah Amanda Ali standing knee-deep in a garden bed with a parrot on her shoulder. Aleeyah introduced herself and her parrot.
“That is Ishta,” Aleeyah said, before Smokey could even introduce himself. “She narrates everything. Think of her as press relations.”
“Squawk! Sponsor a tortoise! Squawk!” Ishta said, and Smokey nearly fainted, because that was a better slogan than anything the LPP had produced in four years.
A rabbit hopped past Smokey’s foot and froze, ears up, listening for gossip.
“That’s Blu,” Aleeyah said. “And somewhere up that tree is PeterPan the squirrel.”
Smokey looked around for the tortoise he had heard so much about, the legendary Shellbee, and found instead a story that made his own political career look like a footnote. Shellbee had been rescued as a young tortoise some sixty-odd years before, already over a foot long, and had lived long enough to become an elder among his own kind, courting Buttercup, Susie and Marigold while younger males named Golden Ray and Sunny were left in his shadow.
“He carried an eight-inch scar on his plastron,” Aleeyah said. “That’s the underside of the shell. Hardship marks the body, same as it marks people. We don’t hide that here. We teach children to read it.”
Smokey, who normally could not sit through a five-minute explanation of anything that did not involve money changing hands, found himself listening for a full twenty.
He learned that yellow-footed tortoises like Shellbee are vulnerable and gone entirely from the wild in Tobago. He learned about the Kairi Seed Bank, the Food Support Pantry feeding vulnerable families, the Redzi the Trini Clown workshops teaching children climate resilience through jokes better than his own. He learned Aleeyah had been running this since 1996, registered since 2008, on donations, on a vehicle that was falling apart, and on sheer bullheadedness.
“No cap,” Aleeyah said. “Just 210 animals that need feeding, a washroom we haven’t finished building, and a vehicle that leaks oil worse.”
Smokey stood there quietly for the first time in his political life. Small Pin, meanwhile, had already made friends with Blu, feeding him lettuce like they were old associates.
“I have a business proposal,” Smokey finally said. “Instead of asking you to join the Liberal Piper Party, what if I told everybody in Woodford Square to send you $50 a month instead?”
Aleeyah laughed. “That would actually help.”
And so it happened that Smokey, the political vagrant of Trinidad and Tobago, found the one cause too honest for him to hijack, and instead of exploiting it, he did something completely out of character. He told the truth about it.
If Shellbee could survive a hundred years, a torn shell, and two overconfident young tortoises named Golden Ray and Sunny, the least the rest of us can do is send ten dollars a month to keep his successors fed.
Ambassador for the Warao nation
Unlike Smokey, Aleeyah Amanda Ali is a real person who was appointed Ambassador for the indigenous Warao nation for her distinguished work with animals like Shellbee and indigenous Climate education.
Persons interested in supporting her work can contact The Foundation for Heritage Preservation & Legacy Creation on social media.
