How old was he? 26.

Where was he from? Originally, Beterverwagting.

Where does he live now? Annandale.

So what was growing up in BV like?

It is the answer to this last question which stunned.

“Well,” Charles said casually, “me didn’ grow up in BV, me grow up in foreign. Me is a deportee.”

Deportee. Here in Guyana, as applies elsewhere in the Caribbean, “deportee” is a dirty word. It is evocative in the CARICOM imagination of other words like “doomed”, or “dangerous”, or “criminal”, or “failure.”

The word “deportee” punctuates a man’s life. It is a comma providing that crucial pause within the sentence to which he is condemned. It is a colon which both connects and contrasts that which has gone before with that which is still yet to come. It the expression of exclamation which remains indelible upon his name as it is upon his resume. It is the question mark burdening him with the fatal query of the future, “What will I do now?”

But more often than not, the word is the ultimate full stop, what is known in the Spanish language as “el punto final”, signifying that he has come irredeemably to the end of his life’s story.

For Clifford Charles, it was all this but it was also something else: a blank page upon which he would be able to start over.

Early years Charles grew up in the village of Beterverwagting on the East Coast of Demerara. He doesn’t remember much about his life then, outside of the fact that everywhere he went he would sing. Before he was seven, he and a brother could belt out by heart every song in his father’s oldies collection. People would remember him as the boy who was always singing.

At the age of seven, he and one of his brothers left Guyana to join their separated parents overseas. Charles went to live with his mother, stepfather and two sisters in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York. It should be noted that Bed-Stuy, as this area is known, was home to many of America’s top black musicians like The Notorious B.I.G., Lil Kim, Mos Def, and Jay-Z. Comedian Chris Rock also grew up in the area, and his new comedy series, `Everybody Hates Chris’, is set in Bed-Stuy.

Charles’ brother went to live with his father.

In America, Charles would continue singing, trading his father’s golden oldies for a genre closer to home, reggae. As he grew older, he would eventually do a couple of small talent shows, once even making an unsuccessful bid for a gig at the famous Apollo Theatre.

“And me and a friend used to go about trying to make record deals, trying to get on to one of them big labels,” he recalled.

In his academic life, like many children from Guyana who enter the American educational system at an early age, Charles had high grades throughout his school career, first at Public School 305, then at what he referred to a junior high school for “the gifted and talented”, Satellite East otherwise known as IS 113, also in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area.

Getting into trouble

From Satellite East, he went on to the Murray Bertram High School in Brooklyn, Manhattan.

“By the Brooklyn Bridge,” he clarified.

It was at Murry Bertram, by the Brooklyn Bridge, that Clifford Charles’ friends as well as his life style began to change. One indicator of this shift was his music, from the reggae he entertained friends and family with to a genre that more accurately captured the life he was now living.

“I started to write hip hop,” Charles told the Sunday Chronicle, “until some people start say that my hip hop better than my reggae.”

Like most of the hip hop coming out of poor, inner city America, Charles said that his music then reflected a deep yearning for a life better than he was accustomed to.

“In that time,” he reflected, “I used to write music with nuff passion, nuff rage. Me nuh rich, and the stereotype was that if you nuh got money, you’re a nobody. When me writing at that time, it was about me got to get money, me got to get rich, me got to wear the biggest chains, and the biggest rings, and gold teeth in meh mouth.”

It was not that his family was hopelessly poor.

“We got through,” Charles recalled on first going to America, “Meh mother worked, meh stepfather worked. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment. I grew up just like any other black person grew up.”

The one-bedroom apartment would later be left behind for a larger two bedroom apartment, but around the time that Charles started going to Murray Bertram, he had already begun spending most nights away from home, choosing to stay unsupervised with a young cousin of his who had been left with what amounted to his own place.

Eventually, Clifford Charles changed the tune of his hip hop.

“Meh started to differentiate,” he said, “to writing different styles, different themes, different storylines. Meh started enjoying writing the music.”

While the theme of his music changed however, the trajectory of his life did not. By associating with the friends he did, Charles found himself increasingly immersed in a culture of crime. He remembers once walking with a friend who just suddenly stopped and robbed a man passing by on the road. Though he had nothing to do with it, he said he felt as if the allegiance to his friend – underscored by an unspoken threat – won out over any moral qualms he might have had: you were either with them or you were or against them. Of course, there became a time when allegiance was not enough, when the pressure mounted to turn his passive acquiescence into participatory action.

“Is always a prove point,” Charles stated, “When you deh with a group, you got to prove a point to somebody. Me can’t lime with you and you do this and you money a spend pun me; you a watch me, so me got to do something.”

The day eventually came when he was called upon to take part in a crime.

“Well,” he recalled, “me had a friend who used to rob people and he always used to say ‘I going tek you with me’. One morning early he come by meh house and seh, ‘Man you ready?’ and meh can’t back down because me done been talk up all the time. So, he get a gun and seh man, we gun rob this shop here. The gun ain’t even get no bullets inside. When we go and rob the shop now and we running away, the people called the police, and within about five minutes of we leaving the scene, we get apprehended.”

Reflections in prison The criminal career of Clifford Charles was officially nipped in the bud. He was just 17 years old, but the mastermind of the crime was just around that age as well.

Charles got two to four years in prison. His friend, an American, got roughly the same thing.

“In jail,” said Charles, “you stick to yourself, you don’t step on anybody’s toes, you respect. But still jail is a crazy place. At a young age, meh pass through Ryker’s Island, and Ryker’s Island is hard to describe.”

Charles said that he was put in the juvenile department, apart from the adult prisoners but this was no comfort.

“We went in a dorm for adolescents, but adults went all around. And the adolescents cause more problems than the adults. Is a place where everyday you see people get cut, stab, all type of gang wars. I stick to me corner and just ride out me time.”

He was to spend ten months at Ryker’s awaiting his sentencing. From there, he was transferred to the Washington Correctional Facility in upstate New York; from Washington he went to the Clinton Correctional Facility; and from there, finally to the Bayhill Correctional Facility, about two hours away from the US-Canadian border.

Incarceration gave Charles time not only to reflect on his life, but to translate that reflection into his songwriting. With nothing else to do, he wrote song after song.

“Meh write nuff music in jail, meh lef nuff song in jail too because when the officers would come to search they would just throw away all your papers and suh,” Charles recalled.

Ironically enough, prison also gave him an opportunity to showcase his talent far more than he ever really had, since some facilities held the occasional talent show.

“Meh used to get people applauding me and cheering and tell me, ‘Boy, you good’,” remember Charles. If, in many ways, it was the worst of times, in others, it was also the best of times.

When his condition of release date came up, Charles found out that he was not to be let go. He was handed over to Immigration where he spent another year and several months. During his final days in the system, he was not allowed any contact with his family, something the immigration authorities officially did, he said, in order to prevent family members from trying to spring deportees loose. His mother knew he was to be deported but she had no idea when.

“I came back to Guyana, November 21st, 2001,” Charles said. Fourteen years after he first left, he was sent back to the country where he had spent the fuzzy first third of his 21-year old life.

“Me din had no experience,” Charles said of first returning to Guyana, “Me bin remember certain faces, because when you see a family face you could recognise it. But me din had no recollection of Guyana, how Guyana was, how things does operate, how the money value, nothing. They didn’t give you this information; they didn’t prepare you for coming back.”

He said that when he came back, after passing through Customs, he and several other deportees spent the night at Timehri. The next day, they were transported to Police headquarters at Eve Leary, where their photographs were taken and other personal information submitted. Then it was time to leave.

“They asked, ‘Who know where they’re going?’, and everybody a watch each other,” he recalled. A few people could remember certain addresses and checked them up in the phonebook. Some were successful. For a while, Charles said, all he could do is sit and hold his head, tug at his hair in despair.

“Me see a phonebook, and me seh, leh me look up my Aunty name,” he said. He tried the Buxton number listed next to the name and fifteen minutes after he had put down the phone, his uncle was there to pick him up.

`Like you from Alabama!’

Clifford Charles was faced with a new life, back at the place where everything started. Soon enough, the time spent in the United States appeared to be an unfortunate detour in the young man’s destiny. Although he couldn’t remember most people, many remembered him as the boy who did virtually nothing but sing.

Before long, he and a brother – the only one who had never left Guyana to live in America – were hooked up, courtesy of his uncle, with the EC Connections Band. During that time, he also earned himself a nickname, one he now uses as his official stage name.

“When I first come back,” Charles told the Sunday Chronicle, “I had a lil accent, and somebody seh, “Boy like you from Alabama.’”

Soon, `Alabama’ was making a name for himself on the local band circuit. His first gig with EC Connections was at the Army headquarters, Camp Ayanganna, but a technical fault prevented him from singing.

His second performance was perhaps symbolic of the path Charles’ life has taken so far. While other deportees were carrying out the infamous Mashramani 2002 Jailbreak, Alabama was performing on a float with EC Connections, enjoying the time of his life.

“We was playing soca and the crowd was just getting on bad,” he remembered.

After that first real performance for him, he said that he went with the band to different gigs every weekend: C&S on Sheriff Street, Club Bloomingsdale on Durban Street, shows at Uitvlugt. Other bands began to notice his talent and when there was no work for EC Connections, he would go and sing for others like Lick Shot, Rhythm Force and Blue Ribbon.

After EC broke up, he started freelancing on one-man-band shows, among other things.

“Me started singing part-time for Sandy’s Funeral Parlour, soul wakes and soul funerals,” Charles said.

But even that was not enough to pay the bills. He started trying his hand at masonry and carpentry but he was untrained and unskilled in either field.

People began encouraging him to try out for a television programme, `Talent Exclusive’ hosted by Eon Johnson, otherwise known as Mr. Dynamix. The first time he performed, Charles got `pull up’ three times. A `pull up’ is like an encore, he explained, except that people get so enthusiastic about the singing that they ask for it before the song is even finished. Three times on that first show, he had to stop singing and start again from the top. After that, he made several other appearances on the show, earning, he says, a fair following.

Johnson recruited him for a band he had, the Fire Clan Band, and Charles’ band life got another jumpstart. He said that that was the first time he went out and did his own music with a live band backing him. The only bad thing about that arrangement was when he had to do covers: Charles was growing tired of performing other people’s music.

His enthusiasm for playing with Fire Clan eased off, and he eventually drifted away. Like any serious artist, Clifford Charles decided to find a refuge, a place where he could focus and find inspiration.

Redemption Songs “Meh go up Linden,” he told the Sunday Chronicle, “by my family in the hills, and try to get the right atmosphere, trying to get the quietness, the breeze…I started growing my hair.”

And he wrote songs, “hard songs” as he put it. He came back with new music but no job. After listening to him go a cappella on a couple of his songs, friends encouraged him to go to a new studio being operated by telecommunications equipment firm, Swansea. He was focusing on just surviving then, making sure that everything was okay at home, but after a while he decided to give it a shot anyway.

With a little money in his pocket, he went into Swansea and sat down, waiting for an audience.

“Everybody pass,” he recalled, “like they not got time with me, but then the big man come, Mr. Christian Duncan, and ask if I getting through.”

He started to explain, but then Duncan got a call and went away. Just as he was beginning to despair, the studio’s owner returned.

“Me tell he that I does sing everywhere and how nuff people know me and is just that me not get a studio, and if he could just work with me to help me prepare a package,” Charles told the Sunday Chronicle.

He laid out his spiel as if his life depended on it, telling Duncan with all confidence that he had music of international standard, music that Guyanese people would be proud of, and all he needed was a chance to produce it. When Duncan asked him to give him sample, he let out about five or six new songs. The result was that he was taken into the studio immediately afterwards.

A base reggae track, called the `Culture Rhythm’, was put on and Clifford `Alabama’ Charles started to sing one of his new songs, one called `They don’t care.’ He had only partly written out the words, but by the time the session was over, the song was complete.

“When I finished recording,” Charles recalled, “the man said this is it, this is the hit.”

This reporter heard the recording of `They don’t care.’ The short analysis is that Alabama is the real thing. The best description of his voice would be that it falls somewhere between the plaintive tone of Nanko (`Lucky you’), and the crisp enunciation of Kipritch (`Telephone’).

And his lyrics have weight as well. Although thematically `They don’t care’ doesn’t really depart from the `Jamaican ghetto youth/Rastafari’ fare, he is undoubtedly a wordsmith. Due to be released on a compilation CD along with other artistes including Michelle `Big Red’ King, the single shows a solo artiste with enormous promise.

Meanwhile, Clifford Charles told the Sunday Chronicle, his mother still has high hopes to get him back over to the US, seeing that it was his first offence, and that he was juvenile, and that he served his time, plus extra in Immigration.

This paper asked Charles whether he regrets being deported, if he feels his life would have been better if he had been allowed to stay in the United States.

He doesn’t think so. One of the positive things about Charles’ return to Guyana is that he has found love. Only two weeks after that moment of despair at Eve Leary, when he wasn’t sure where he would go or who he would meet, a cousin introduced him to a friend of hers.

“We just clicked,” Charles told the Sunday Chronicle. That girl he clicked with is now his wife for what will be two years this coming November.

“We married in Buxton, by Charlie’s place, a nice small wedding,” Charles said.

And of course he has found his musical centre, he has set himself on a path where he probably didn’t imagine himself on years ago at Eve Leary sitting on a bench wondering which direction his life would go in.

“In my heart I know seh that I is a musician,” Charles stated, “Everybody who know say that I’m a musician from long. We know seh if me been still in the US with all the distraction, because the place is so fast and speedy, me wouldn’t get to focus. This place is beautiful; this is a place that you could focus if you want to relax and set your meditation. ”

He doesn’t regret coming back to Guyana, outside of being able to see his family regularly. For Clifford `Alabama’ Charles, the time he spent in prison, his deportation to Guyana, actually set him on the path he was meant to be on anyway; his experiences gave him his life.

When asked how his friend turned out, the one who took him that day on the botched robbery, Charles’ demeanour changed slightly but noticeably, a perceptible sobering of the high he got from talking about his music and his ambitions.