Two Bushes and the Dark

One at a time

I have told you about more than one bush. They are not a set.

Do not run them together in the same day, and do not start two of them in the same week. If you try one, try one, and give it a month before you even think about the next. Two of the things on this paper push in the same direction, and nobody knows what two or three of them do to a body at the same time — not me, not your doctor, not a study. I am not going to pretend I know either.

Your medicine keeps its own hour

Pick the hour you take your tablet and leave that hour empty. Nothing from me for two hours before it, and two hours after it.

Thick water can hold a tablet so your body never gets it. You will not feel that happen. You will feel nothing at all — that is what makes it bad. It is not one plant that does this; anything slippery or thick can do it. And tell your doctor what you are drinking, by name. He cannot help you with the half you did not tell him.

Before any surgery or procedure

Stop, and tell them. Tell the doctor and the one who puts you to sleep, even if nobody asks. That goes for a colonoscopy and an eye as much as a knee.

What the old people say

The leaf is a sleeping bush. It quiets you, it carries you down. That is true, it is old, it is written down in more than one island, and I am not going to stand here and call my own people liars. It is in our hands and it belongs to us.

What doctors actually went and counted

Where our people drink that leaf the most, doctors went in and counted. And the ones drinking the leaf tea came out worse, not better — in the head and in the walking. They went back years later and counted again, and it came out the same way the second time.

Now I will give you the other half, because a man who only tells you one half is selling you something.

They did not prove the leaf did it. They said so themselves. Other things live in that soil and in that life. And there is a real argument on the leaf's side: the cup carries only a small part of what the fruit carries, and I want you to hear that, because it is honest. But it was the cup that showed up in those counts. Not the fruit. The cup.

So I will not tell you

I will not tell you that leaf gives a man a shaking sickness. It has not been proven and I am not going to frighten you with something nobody proved. That is the same lie turned inside out.

Here is what I will tell you, and it is the whole reason I am going back on it:

Nobody on this earth can tell me how much of that tea, every night, is safe. Not one office in one country has been willing to put a number on it. And on the other side of the scale — the sleep — nobody has ever tested that leaf on human beings for sleep. Not once.

So I would be asking you to take a risk nobody has measured, for a help nobody has shown. I do not do that to my own people, and I will not do it to you.

A cup now and then in your own yard is between you and your grandmother. Every night because Ras Ezra told you — no. I take that back.

What goes in the third place instead

The third one is not a bush. The third one is the dark.

The cooling of the evening. The last hot cup with nothing sweet in it. The lamp low. Not rum to catch sleep — rum will drop you and then wake you at three in the morning and leave you there. That is what the old people had, it costs nothing, it does not travel with any tablet, and no doctor is going to knock it down.

And if you want something warm in your hand while you do it: fever grass. Plain lemongrass. A stalk or two, hot water, off the fire, five minutes with the lid on, no sugar.

Now hear the honest part, because this is the part that makes me worth listening to. They did test fever grass on people. They looked at the blood, the liver, the kidney, the heart, and nothing moved — but they only watched it for two weeks. Two weeks is all anybody ever watched. And then they tested it for sleep, against a cup with nothing in it, and it did not beat the cup with nothing in it.

So I am not selling you fever grass for sleep. I am telling you it did not win. It is a warm thing in your hand at the end of the day, the way my people always did it. The dark is doing the work.

What the old people say

Cerasee is ours. Leaf and vine, boiled brown, taken in the morning. They called it a wash out and a blood cleanser. They took it for a bad belly, for a rash and for the itch on the skin, and they bathed children in it. That is real, it is written down, and half the island has a bush of it on a fence.

They also never drank it straight through the year. They drank it and they stopped. I do the same. I do not have a reason out of a book for that — I have the reason they gave me, and I am telling you plainly that is all it is. And I am not going to repeat the story you have heard about it resting your liver, because that story is not true and I checked.

What was actually tested on people

They tested this one plenty. Some tests said it helped the sugar a little. When they put every test together, the little got smaller. And when they stood it beside the tablet your doctor gives you, the tablet won.

And hear this — every one of those tests used the fruit, weighed out, in a hospital. Nobody has ever tested a pot of leaf and vine boiled in a yard. Mine has no measure on it. Neither does yours.

How I make it

A small handful of the dried leaf and vine. Cold water on it, bring it up, then the fire low until the water goes brown-green. Off the fire, strain it.

One cup. Light, not black. Do not boil it down until it is black and do not pour a second one because the first one did not do anything. More is not better with bush. More is how people get hurt.

The correction on the hour

In the video I told you one cup in the morning, before anything else. I have to add something to that, and I am adding it here because I did not say it there.

Take it with food in your belly. Not on an empty stomach. Not in place of a meal you skipped. And not in the same hour as your tablet — that hour stays empty.

Two reasons, and I will give you both. The first is that this cup can push your sugar down while your tablet is already pushing it down, and an empty belly is the worst place for that to happen. The second I read, I did not see it: little ones were carried to hospital after this same cup on an empty belly. I read it in a doctor's writing, I did not stand there. A child is not a grown man. But it was enough that I changed my own instruction, and it is enough that I will not put this cup on an empty stomach and I will not give it to a child.

The thing some of us carry in the blood

This is the page I would want somebody to give me.

There is a thing some of us carry in the blood, from back home, from the old side of the family. Most who carry it were never told. It runs in men more than women, and it runs in our people. When something oxidises the blood of a man who carries it, his blood can break down — and there is a doctor's write-up of a man who drank a bitter melon tea for a stretch of days and ended in the emergency room, yellow, with his water the colour of cola.

I cannot test you. So I will not tell you this cup is safe for every body — I do not know your body. Anybody who tells you different is telling you about a body he has never met.

If your water turns dark like cola, or the white of your eye goes yellow, or a weakness comes over you all at once — stop, and see a doctor the same day. Do not wait for the next morning to see if it passes.

And when you do go, ask for both blood tests for sugar — the one they take before you eat anything, and the long-memory one. Not just one of them. For some of us the long-memory one reads kinder than the truth.

Who does not touch this at all

• Leaf and vine only. No seed, and not the little red skin around the seed. That is where the trouble in that plant lives.
• No bag without a label. If you cannot read what is inside it and where it came from, leave it on the shelf. Powder and capsule I do not send you to buy at all — the harm that has been written up came out of a bottle, not out of a pot.
• Not a woman carrying, might be carrying, or trying.
• Not a child.
• If you take insulin, or the tablet that makes you sweat and shake when you skip a meal — you talk to your doctor before your first cup, and the tablet keeps going exactly as it is. Not one dose moved, not by you, not by me.

So I will not tell you

In the video I said bitter in the cup, sweet in the blood. It sounded good. On paper it reads like a promise that this cup brings your sugar down, and that is the sentence that makes a man skip his tablet. So I am taking that half back too.

Bitter in the cup. That is all I can promise you — that it is bitter.

What the old people say — and what I will not claim

Here I have to be straight with you, because a man who pretends every plant is his birthright is selling you something.

This tree is not my grandmother's. In India they have eaten this leaf longer than Jamaica has been Jamaica, and in Africa too. It came across the water. And I will be careful even about that: I did not watch the tree come. I watched us start drinking it. That is what happened in my lifetime, and that is all I can honestly claim.

So when I put it in my pot, I am not standing on my ancestors. I am standing on the fact that it is good food.

What was actually tested on people

They tested it. Then somebody put all the tests side by side and looked properly — and most of what people say about this leaf did not hold up.

• I will not tell you it brings your pressure down. The best look anybody has taken does not hold that up.
• I will not tell you it brings your sugar down. The tests do not agree with each other, and the people who counted them said out loud the good result may be bigger on paper than it is in a body.
• I will not tell you it kills inflammation. That one was never even tested on human beings. Not a little — not at all. It was tested in dishes and in animals, and that is not you.

What holds up is the plain thing: it is a heavy, green, feeding leaf. Treat it like callaloo. That is the only claim strong enough to carry weight, and it is enough.

How I use it

Strip the little leaves off the stalk with one pull — the stalk is stringy, leave it out. A handful into the pot at the end of the cooking, the way you would put in any greens. Soup, rice, callaloo, a pot of peas. Cooked, in food, in your mouth.

The correction: the pot, not the pill

In the video I said a handful of leaves in the pot, every single day. I have to add two things to that, and I am adding them here because I did not say them there.

The first. When you go looking, you will find the powder. You will find the capsule. They will tell you it is the same leaf, only stronger. It is not the same thing. The pot is the part people have been doing for generations. The capsule is the part nobody has watched for long — and the one liver that was written up as hurt by this leaf was hurt by a capsule, and hurt again when the woman went back to it. I said the pot. I meant the pot. I do not send you to buy powder.

The second, and this one is me softening my own instruction. Every single day, forever is more than I can stand behind. As food in a pot, people have eaten this leaf for generations — that is the longest anybody has watched anything I have named, and it is why I keep it. But nobody has watched it beside three prescriptions. So eat it the way you eat any greens: some days yes, some days no. Greens are not a dose.

So I will not tell you

The leaf is what you eat. The root is not a stronger leaf — it is another thing entirely. Root, bark and flower have been used to bring a pregnancy down. Do not buy them, do not dig them, do not hand them to a woman who might be carrying. And I will not even tell you the leaf is free of that in a strong form, because in animals it was not. A woman who might be carrying does not try any of it, leaf or powder.