Caribbean (109 page)

Without revealing who the boy was, the professor read from the first paragraphs of the letter, pointing out that the writing was concise and the scientific data accurate. Only then did he disclose who the author was: “Alexander Hamilton wrote this account when he was either seventeen or fifteen, for throughout his life he lied about his age.” And with that, he launched a scathing denunciation of the presumptuously long middle section of the letter.

When he had the full attention of his students, he proceeded to the worst of Hamilton’s effusions, passages which caused the students to break into laughter, but then he squelched them:

He ended his lecture with the information that Hamilton, as a result solely of having written this letter, was invited at the expense of older men who saw in him a touch of genius to come to their America, where he would receive a free education at a school in New Jersey and later at King’s College in New York. With a flourish Professor Carpenter said: “So if you write good term papers, there’s no telling what good things might happen,” and his students applauded his bravura performance.

The story of Alexander Hamilton so inflamed Ranjit’s imagination
that for some days he moved about the pleasant campus of the university picturing himself at the heart of a hurricane whipping about Jamaica, and then as a colonel fighting alongside Lafayette and Kosciusko, and finally orating in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention and serving as the Minister for Finance who saved his fledgling nation.

But insistently in his daydreaming he came back to the famous Hurricane of 1772 and the boy Hamilton caught in the mighty whirl but still taking mental notes of what was happening, and the event became so vividly real that he dropped out of classes for a full week to compose a heroic poem of a hundred and sixty-eight twelve-syllable lines. When finished, he typed out three copies, delivering one to each of his professors, with the curt explanation: “I’ve been engaged. Please forgive my absence.” And each of the three read his poem with the conviction that Ranjit had spent his arbitrary vacation working on ideas promulgated in his or her class:

TO ALEXANDER HAMILTON
STRUGGLING IN THE HURRICANE OF 1772

The first fifty lines of his poem summarized the reasons why a man like Hamilton in his day, or Ranjit in his, would feel driven to emigrate; some of the reasons were fatuous, most were real and inescapable, and their impassioned recitation by this Indian lad from Trinidad demonstrated how much he had matured since leaving the relative calm of Michael Carmody’s class at Queen’s Own two years before.

The next sixty lines depicted the kind of Caribbean area that might have kept Hamilton at home, a utopian society in which the races and the social classes cooperated in managing their wealth in sugar, cotton and bananas without the necessity of calling upon Marxism to lead the way. And the last fifty-eight lines were sardonic explanations of why the necessary cooperation was not possible, not now, nor ever in the future.

In these closing lines he reviewed bitterly the poor performances of the leaders in the painful period of 1958–1961 when the British islands of the Caribbean came tantalizingly close to federation, only to be frustrated by the personal vanities of three men: Alexander Bustamante, the flamboyant Jamaican leader; Eric Williams, the vain and scholarly Trinidad spokesman; and the gentle old fellow from Barbados, Sir Grantley Adams, who accepted the prime ministership of a federation that no longer really existed, and who tried heroically but in vain to hold the fragments together. Ranjit’s final lines were mournful:

As Michael Carmody had done in Trinidad, Ranjit’s three professors saw to it that his poem was read in various places, and recommended him for various fellowships. And then, just as in Hamilton’s case, as if good actions as well as hurricanes repeat themselves, he received three offers of fellowships leading to the doctorate. And he had a choice of three different fields of specialization, depending upon which local professor had put in the recommendation to that particular university: Chicago wanted him for history, Iowa for writing, and Miami for sociology.

He oscillated among the three, inclining first this way, then another, but the first to be eliminated was the writing program, because he still felt that this was not his forte. Writing came easily to him, obviously, but not with the all-consuming force that he believed necessary to sustain a career in that calling. “I love words,” he explained to his literature professor, who had arranged for the fellowship at Iowa, “but truly, I have no conviction,” and from her long experience with Third World writing, she said in local lingo: “If you ain’t got that fire in the gut, Ranjit, you ain’t got nuttin’, and she wished him well: “Maybe you have something even bigger, Ranjit. You have a burning integrity. Maybe that’s what we need in the Caribbean more than anything else.”

Now as his soul-awakening years at U.W.I. drew to a close in the final Trinity Term in the spring of 1973, with any decision regarding his future still floating aimlessly above the beautiful hills of Jamaica, he sought counsel from Norma Wellington: “What’s to do? What would you do, Norma?” and they wandered over the low hills lying east of the campus, discussing her future and his. “I have this invitation to the best nursing school in the United States,” she said, and he asked: “Why would they do that for a young woman from U.W.I.?” and she explained: “Because the American hospitals have found that girls from the Caribbean make the very best nurses in the world. Take away the Caribbean nurses, and half the hospitals in the eastern states would shut down.” Then, aware of her own boastfulness, she added: “They want to train me for hospital administration. In Boston.”

“Are you going to take it?”

“I really don’t know. I’d not feel safe so far from home. Besides, there’s that color problem in the States.”

“Come on! You’re as good-looking as Lena Horne. She’s fought your battle for you.”

“You always think in historico-sociologic terms, don’t you.”

“I do. I want to anticipate how the various mixes are going to work out.”

“Dammit, Ranjit! You’ve got to make up your mind. Historical approach? Sociological?”

“I simply don’t know.”

With that melancholy kind of self-indulgence for which only the French word
tristesse
is appropriate, the two young people, a dark Hindu from Trinidad and a beautiful light-skinned girl from St. Vincent, strolled among the low hills that rimmed their university, each aware that with their graduation, even their ephemeral, barely stated friendship was ending. It would have been impossible for him to take a girl of color, no matter how lovely, back to his circle of Indian friends and family, especially since she was also an Anglican, while for her to take a Hindu, educated though he was, into her family would be equally unthinkable.

As they walked beneath tall trees, he asked with a sense of urgency: “Straight answer, Norma, if you were me, what would you do?” When she hesitated, he added: “You’ve known me for over a year.”

“As between Chicago and Miami as universities, I’d take Chicago
by a slight margin. Between them as cities, I’d choose Miami by a very wide margin.”

“Why?” Ranjit asked, and her reply, which came in short clear sentences, revealed what many young islanders who had considered the subject believed: “Whether we approve or not, Miami is destined to be the ipso facto capital of the Caribbean. Our trade is with Miami, not with London. Our money comes from there. When islanders want first-class dental or medical service, we fly to Miami, we do our shopping there, and for our vacations we go there and not to Paris or London. To put it briefly, most of our workable ideas come from there, so if you have a chance to get your doctorate in Miami and don’t grab it, you’re not thinking straight.” She hesitated, for what she had to say next was painful, especially for a young woman from an extremely British island like St. Vincent: “And most of all, I suppose, because inch by inch the Caribbean has to fall under American domination. Know the enemy. Go to Miami.”

Abruptly she stopped walking, stood beside a tree, and looked at him: “It’s awful, really, so goddamned awful.”

“What do you mean?” Ranjit asked.

“I mean that you’ll go to Miami, find a teaching job in the States and never come back to help Trinidad. And I’m worse, because I know better. I’ll go to Boston, lead my class in nursing school, and get four job offers to help manage the best hospitals in the states. Maurice will work for DuPont in Delaware, never for some firm that needs him in Grenada.” She looked away, and said softly: “The waste, the waste is so deplorable. Year by year the Caribbean is robbed of its best, and how in hell can a region survive if it allows that?”

When they returned to the campus, there was no sense of a tragic Romeo-and-Juliet parting; they were two sensible young people from the highest levels of Caribbean intelligence and deportment who understood that their two contrasting cultures would never mix, and there was no sense of loss about the impossibility. Norma appreciated the opportunity she’d had to probe the thinking of a Hindu, while Ranjit was grateful for this escape from the confinements imposed upon him in Trinidad, and when they parted back on the campus, they did not even kiss, for although Norma might have wanted to do so as her gesture of farewell, Ranjit was far too self-conscious.

Three days later he told her as they passed in the hall: “It’s Miami,” and he started to move on, but she reached out, grasped his
arm, and said: “I’m really happy you chose Miami. It’s where the action will center from here on. I envy you.”

“Come down and see the place when it snows in Boston,” he said, and she replied: “I just might do that.”

But his departure from Jamaica was not destined to be as placid as that. Two days before he was scheduled to fly back to Trinidad before enrolling for a doctorate in sociology at the University of Miami, he was in the center of Kingston having a kind of farewell dinner at a low-class eating joint when a riot erupted. A gang of terrifying black men, with long streamers of braided hair reaching almost to their waists, roared through the streets shouting incomprehensible cries. Some carried machetes which they swung wildly. Others dashed up to any white tourists they spotted, shouting in their faces: “Go home, fat white pig!” and in the confusion Ranjit saw two white people, a man and a woman, fall to the street with blood gushing from their wounds.

At the height of the melee he thought of stepping forth to shout: “They’ve done nothing wrong,” but he was deterred by fear of what the rampaging blacks with the terrifying visages might do to someone like him—a Hindu who had no privileged place in Jamaica and was disliked by many islanders, black or white.

So he stayed motionless at the door of the restaurant, trying to make himself invisible, and when the rioting passed to another part of town, the Jamaican students who had accompanied him to the restaurant explained: “They’re bogus Rastafarians. Thugs frightening people.” But next day when he flew homeward the Kingston paper carried bold headlines:
FOUR SLAIN IN RASTA RIOTING
.