Caribbean (4 page)

But croton was an outlaw. Again and again Tiwánee would trim her hedge all of a level and then one morning she would find that two of her plants had taken off like seabirds leaving the bay to soar aloft. They would grow like determined little trees, until they were so out of proportion that she had to eliminate them, for they ruined her hedge. Or again, she would have in one section of her planting crotons of one color, perhaps all yellow, a gorgeous plant, when out of nowhere would spring up one that became a dark purple, and again her design was destroyed.

No one could make a bunch of croton behave, not in size, or color, or general appearance. The most irritating behavior of all was when some especially beautiful plant, showing perhaps a combination of four colors, would suddenly stop growing upward and decide to grow with great proliferation sideways, its leaves becoming ever more glorious as its form degenerated.

One evening as Tiwánee sat with her husband in the sunset glow, surveying her lovely but unruly croton hedge, she told Bakámu: “This is the plant closest to people. It can be anything, tall or short, this color or that, bright or dark. You can’t make it obey, for it lives by its own rules, but if you let it have its own way, it can be glorious. Look over there!” And they studied a splendid stretch of hedge in which all the plants were of the same size and color, a scintillating
red, all that is except one in the middle which ruined the whole display: it was a garish purple, two times taller than any other and determined to grow higher.

“That one reminds me of you,” she said, “going your own way.”

She was right in thinking that Bakámu acted according to his own rules, and when he finally shared with her his knowledge of the other islands he had discovered, she snapped: “You should have told me sooner. Doesn’t it stand to reason? If we’re here, won’t someone else be there?” Most earnestly she wanted to go back with him to inspect those lands more closely, but that, of course, was impossible, for if any woman touched Bakámu’s special canoe, which had the form of a man’s genitals, he believed she would destroy its magic, and were she actually to get into the canoe for a voyage, that exploration would surely end in disaster.

But that did not keep her agile mind from traveling even further than he had gone, and she reasoned: “Remember the legends, Bakámu? That we came from a great water to the south, down there, and that when we came here we first settled on the sunrise side where the waves are intolerable? There all bad things happened to us till we came around in our canoes to the sunset side. Then we prospered.”

Bakámu nodded, for that was the accepted truth of his people, and his own experience confirmed the old stories, for when he had first started exploring in his canoe he had paddled and sailed around the island, and on the sunrise side had encountered only trouble and destructive waves and forbidding cliffs, and he had been wise enough to detect that the ocean, the one to be called the Atlantic, controlled a far more powerful type of magic than the sea which would come to be known as the Caribbean: “No protection over there. Powerful waves. Darker, too,” and then he added the fact which really condemned the sunrise side: “No fish.”

He was widely admired in his village, and in other villages along the sunset coast, as a prodigious fisherman who knew the secrets of the deep. He would remain for hours in his canoe, long spear at the ready, awaiting the arrival of fish in the waters below, and usually he had anticipated where they would come. Now he paddled far to the west trailing a huge manatee that had strayed into these waters, and he stayed with the great sea animal even when he lost sight of the coast, for he knew that if he could somehow bring that huge beast to land, all the villages along the sunset side would have enough meat for feasts untold.

As Bakámu chased the ponderous creature, almost as big as a small whale, one of the raging storms that hammered at the island from time to time, a dreaded hurricane, swept in, and for three terrible days the waves were so tumultuous that even the manatee had to find refuge, while Bakámu’s canoe spun and wallowed in the cavernous waves. Shipping his paddle and lying prone in the bottom of his canoe, he gave thanks to the Great Spirit who had commanded him: “Make your canoe more sturdy than the others, against the storms,” but even so at several moments when the waves were stupendous, he thought he was doomed. He did not cry out in despair, nor did he quake with fear; instead, facedown, he clung tightly to the canoe he had built and muttered: “Man comes, man goes. On sea same as on land.” And then he thought of his woman alone in their hut, and his worry was for her, because in a hurricane at sea, men died swiftly in one shattering destruction of their canoe; on land, death was slower and more painful as dwellings flew apart and great trees fell, often pinning the people to the ground and holding them there until they died.

While he was having these agitated thoughts at sea, Tiwánee was in their hut, protected by her croton hedge and wondering in terror what might be happening to her man, and like others in the village when the hurricane abated she looked out to the empty but still turbulent sea and concluded: Oimé! The great fisherman, the daring explorer, is dead. And the villagers, after burying those who had died on land, helped organize a mourners’ ceremony for Bakámu who had died at sea.

When two boys playing along the shore spotted a canoe approaching two days after the great storm had subsided they began to shout, and everyone streamed down to the water’s edge to see this amazing sight, their man Bakámu bringing his canoe back through the waves and towing behind the body of the manatee he had tracked again when the storm subsided. It was then, in that moment of joy, that an old man cried: “He has struggled back!” and the name Bakámu gained even greater honor.

Now, as they talked about the strangers in the big canoes and he reminded Tiwánee of how desolate the sunrise side was, she asked thoughtfully: “Is it as bad over there as our legends say?”

“Worse.”

“But if our early ones found it unkind, won’t the newcomers want to leave?”

“Maybe so.”

“And won’t they do what our people did? Come over here to the better side?”

“They might.”

At this point she began the kind of intense interrogation she engaged in when her suspicious mind felt the need for more specific knowledge: “You say they were darker in face than we are?” Yes. “And their women crept about like frightened animals?” Yes.

Continuing with her questions, her inquisitive face close to his, she uncovered two facts about which Bakámu wanted to talk in greater detail, for he too was eager to understand the newcomers and fathom their intentions. Accordingly, he volunteered this information: “Their leader, a bigger and rougher man, carried a huge club which he often swung about his head, driving everyone back. And once I saw him so angered that he struck a man with it, knocking him flat.”

“Killing him?”

“I think so. Others carried him away.”

Now came a painful pause, for Bakámu wanted to share with his wife a fearful doubt he had been unwilling to admit even to himself: “Tiwánee, I must say this. Soon after, the ones who took the dead man away came back with large pieces of meat. Not agouti, not manatee, and they threw the meat into a pot and prepared for a feast.”

Tiwánee listened to the awesome words, sucked in her breath, and asked quietly: “You think they ate their own brother?” When Bakámu remained silent, she broke into a wail, crying: “These are evil times,” and terror fell upon them both.

Her questioning had been so orderly and its revelations so conclusive that she began that afternoon to take those prudent steps which would enable her to protect her family and herself against the brutal newcomers when they came over the mountains, which she was certain they would.

That phrase—“when they came over the mountains”—dominated all her thinking in the days ahead. She said it as she broke branches to mask the obvious approaches to their hut, and she repeated it when she asked Bakámu to fetch her a branch of very hard wood from the forest. “What are you going to do with it?” he asked, and watched in amazement as she cut an arm’s length of the wood, then
sharpened one end to a fine point, which she hardened in her cooking coals. When she did this, the delicate tip burned away, but then she whittled the remaining end to a new and harder tip until at last she had a short, fire-hardened, deadly dagger.

Bakámu was astonished to see her do this. The Arawaks on this and other islands were one of the most peaceful peoples in the world: they had no word for
war
, for none was needed, and they reared their children in abounding love. They revered their old people and eased them along their journey through the years, bringing them portions of maize and collecting taro roots for them, and even sometimes sharing with them a succulent little coney if they caught one sunning itself beside its burrow. They lived in harmony with their small universe, reveling in the abundance and beauty of the island and accepting the hurricanes when they roared in to remind them that nature was omnipotent, not man.

Indeed, their lives were measured principally by the sunset. At the end of each long day it was customary for them to sit along the shore in the evening and watch the glorious orb of the sun as it dipped swiftly toward the distant waves; then mothers assured their children: “It will come back.” When the sun disappeared the Arawaks renewed their faith, and in the following darkness retired in peace to their small circular dwellings and an evening meal.

Tiwánee, as the mother of a lively baby girl, named Iorótto after the hummingbird, realized that she had a special responsibility for protecting and cultivating the child’s promised beauty. The Arawaks were one of several tribes throughout the world who believed that the human face was most attractive when the forehead sloped sharply backward from the eyebrows; a head which rose directly upward from the nose bridge was considered gross and somehow offensive. So, each night, in a patient effort to make Iorótto more beautiful, her mother bound against her forehead a wide, flat board which would press the frontal part of the skull slowly backward until the desired slant was attained. In this position the little girl slept, for among the Arawaks beauty was both prized and desired.

As the sun set and little Iorótto went peacefully to sleep, the strangers on the sunrise side of the island were settling in. They were the Carib Indians, who had come north from the great rivers of what would be called South America, a wildly different lot from the peaceful
Arawaks. They gloried in war and organized their society solely for its conduct. A fierce, terrible people, they were cannibals who fought any strangers, not only to subdue them but also to eat them.

Precisely as Tiwánee had predicted, they had been on the ocean side of the island only briefly when their leader, one Karúku, a violent man in his mid-twenties, with black hair shorn so that it fell down toward his eyes, decided that his clan must move across the island toward what he was sure would be a gentler climate with food and fish more abundant. But he was impelled equally by the fact that this sunrise side was unpopulated and therefore provided no targets for the warfare in which he excelled. He longed to have his warriors intermingled with people against whom they could exercise their martial arts and from whom they could take prisoners, but he also had a strong personal motive: on the voyage north from the jungles of the Orinoco River his wife had died, and since all the women in the three canoes were taken, he was left without a wife and was not happy about it. Guessing that the other side of the island must be more clement and possibly inhabited, he directed his Carib warriors to prepare for scouting expeditions into the mountains in search of settlements from which he might capture a wife.

This tactic of stealing women was an important part of Carib culture, one that had been practiced for hundreds of years; the warriors might eat the men they captured in battle, and they castrated young boys to fatten them like capons for later feasts; but they did not eat women, they were too valuable for breeding and as the creators of future warriors.

So with varied purposes Karúku the Carib laid plans to conquer whatever he might find on the island, and the end of the battle was clear in his mind: the extermination of the others.

In many corners of the world at this time similar expeditions were being launched with similar goals, as groups of human beings, finding it impossible to coexist with those of a different color or religion, were concluding that extermination was the only solution. This conviction would continue to scar the world for the next eight hundred years and probably long after that.

Karúku was a formidable foe, for he had demonstrated in forays along the Orinoco his skill in warfare and had left that amiable river primarily to find a new area which he could dominate. He was not only skilled in face-to-face battle, wielding a huge war club violently and cracking any skulls that came in the way, but he also had a keen
sense of tactics and strategy taught him by his father and grandfather, who had also been awesome warriors.

The heritage of the Caribs was brutality, warfare and little else. They would bequeath to the world words originating in force and terror:
cannibal, hurricane
, the war
canoe
, the manly
cigar
, the
barbecue
, in which they roasted their captives. As they marched they had war drums but only a few songs of battle and none of love. Their food habits were totally primitive and graced with none of the refinements that the Arawaks and other tribes had developed; the Caribs ate by grabbing with dirty fingers scraps of meat from the common platter, the men invariably snatching theirs before the women, who were allowed the leftovers. Their canoes were heavy and crude, not the flying things of delicate line created by others, and even their personal adornment was invariably of a warlike nature, and it was the men, never the women, who were decorated with the whitened bones of their victims.

But like the military Spartans of ancient Greece, who also seemed brutal when compared to the more cultured Athenians, the Caribs were very good at what they chose to do, and were the terrors in any area into which they wandered. They believed that by eating the most powerful of their enemies they inherited their prowess, and that by taking the most beautiful and healthy of their women they enhanced the vitality of their own group; in this latter belief they were, of course, correct. They were a hybrid group of people, constantly reinforced by fresh blood, and they profited from the brutal strength that such hybridism often produces.