The Middle Passage (11 page)

So in Trinidad you must always walk careful of your dignity, and you must impose yourself whether you are in a store or a bank, whether you are crossing the road or driving a car. The treatment of the sick poor in drug-stores is notorious. In a bank it is always better to be served by an expatriate; he may know that your account is negligible, but he will be civil. On the highway no one will dip his lights for you; you must blind in return, and learn the Trinidad highway game of driving into the blinding lights, to make your opponent swerve.

Throughout the picaroon society violence and brutality are accepted. Twenty years ago an extremely popular calypso urged the reintroduction of corporal punishment:

In 1960 the Grenadian illegal immigrant who was hounded by the police was a subject for calypso; and the brutality of the police was applauded:

Sentimentality and brutality go together. The man who, during an emotional mother-and-son scene in a B-film, turns to you and says hoarsely, ‘A mother is a helluva thing, you know, boy. You only have one,’ is the same man who, watching Belsen camp scenes, will roar with derisive laughter.

To bring political organization to the picaroon society, with its taste for corruption and violence and its lack of respect for the person, has its dangers. Such a society cannot immediately become responsible; but it can be re-educated only through responsibility. Change must come from the top. Capital punishment and corporal punishment, incitements to brutality, must be abolished. The civil service must be rejuvenated. In the colonial days the civil servant, his way blocked by the expatriate who was sometimes his inferior and occasionally corrupt as well, expended all his creative energies on petty picaroon intrigue and worked off his aggression on the public. His duties were those of a clerk; he was never required to be efficient; he never had to make a decision. Pitch-forked now into the ministerial system, turned from clerical or at best executive grade officer into administrative, the average civil servant is out of his depth. Contempt for the public lingers on, as well as the tradition of responsibility-dodging. The public, obliged to beg favours, continues to hold authority in dread and contempt. What is true of the civil service is true of most of the business houses.

The need to be efficient will change some of these attitudes. An efficient civil service is in some ways a considerate civil service. The assistant in a drugstore, if required to be efficient, will see that her position is not simply one of authority over the poor who are sick; the policeman will see that he is more than a licensed bully; and perhaps, gradually, there will be a lessening of the need now felt by everyone all down the line to display his authority by aggression.

From the
Trinidad Guardian
:

From the
Trinidad Guardian
:

Three youths were talking about this affair one afternoon around a coconut-cart near the Savannah.

The Indian said, ‘I don’t see how anybody could vex with the man.
That
is brains.’

‘Is what my aunt say,’ one of the Negro boys said. ‘She ain’t feel she get rob. She feel she pay two dollars for the
intelligence
.’

She feel she pay two dollars for the intelligence.
And at once analysis is made ridiculous. For here is a natural sophistication and tolerance which has been produced by the picaroon society. How could one wish it otherwise? To condemn the picaroon society out of hand is to ignore its important quality. And this is not its ability to beguile and enchant. For if such a society breeds cynicism, it also breeds tolerance, not the tolerance between castes and creeds and so on — which does not exist in Trinidad anyway – but something more profound: tolerance for every human activity and affection for every demonstration of wit and style.

There is no set way in Trinidad of doing anything. Every house can be a folly. There is no set way of dressing or cooking or entertaining. Everyone can live with whoever he can get wherever he can afford. Ostracism is meaningless; the sanctions of any clique can be ignored. It is in this way, and not in the way of the travel brochure, that the Trinidadian is a cosmopolitan. He is adaptable; he is cynical; having no rigid social conventions of his own, he is amused by the conventions of others. He is a natural anarchist, who has never been able to take the eminent at their own valuation. He is a natural eccentric, if by eccentricity is meant the expression of one’s own personality, unhampered by fear of ridicule or the discipline of a class. If the Trinidadian has no standards of morality he is without the greater corruption of sanctimoniousness, and can never make pleas for intolerance in the name of piety. He can never achieve the society-approved nastiness of the London landlord, say, who turns a dwelling-house into a boarding-house, charges exorbitant rents and is concerned lest his tenants live in sin. Everything that makes the Trinidadian an unreliable, exploitable citizen makes him a quick, civilized person whose values are always human ones, whose standards are only those of wit and style.

As the Trinidadian becomes a more reliable and efficient citizen, he will cease to be what he is. Already the gap between rich and poor – between the civil servant, the professional man, and the labourer – is widening. Class divisions are hardening and, in a land where no one can look back too far without finding a labourer or a crook, and sometimes a labourer who became a crook, members of the embryonic middle class are talking of their antecedents. Standards are being established by this class, and the fluidity of the society has diminished. With commercial radio and advertising agencies has also come all the apparatus of the modern society for joylessness, for the killing of the community spirit and the shutting up of people in their separate prisons of similar ambitions and tastes and selfishness: the class struggle, the political struggle, the race struggle.

When people speak of the race problem in Trinidad they do not mean the Negro–white problem. They mean the Negro–Indian rivalry. This will be denied by the whites, who will insist that the basic problem remains the contempt of their group for the non-white. Now that complaints about white prejudice are rarely heard, it is not uncommon to find whites scourging themselves for the prejudices of their group before black audiences. This they do by reporting outrageous statements made by members of their group and dissociating themselves from their sentiments.

The fact is that in Trinidad power is so evenly distributed – whites in business, Indians in business and the professions, Negroes in the professions and the civil service – that racial abuse is without meaning. What the Calypsonian Sparrow predicted quite recently has already come to pass:

In spite of the abuse in which the white indulges, particularly for the benefit of the outsider, there is no general feeling against the local whites. Against ‘expats’, however, there is a growing animosity; their presence in positions of power is a threat and a humiliation, a reminder of the days when top posts were reserved for expatriates, and a reminder of prejudice encountered in England. But this animosity is not widespread; it does not go beyond certain insecure sections of the middle class.

The virtual by-passing of white prejudice was inevitable. The cultural involvement of the Negro was with the white world in general and not so much with the local whites, who had shown little interest in education and who rarely entered the professions. The break-up of the colonial system made plain their inaptitudes at the same time that it released the pent-up ambitions of the better equipped non-white. The chaotic social divisions also help. Each of the island’s many cliques believes that it is the true élite. The expatriates believe they are the élite; so do the local whites, the businessmen, the professional men, the higher civil servants, the politicians, the sportsmen. This arrangement, whereby most people don’t even know when they are being excluded, leaves everyone reasonably happy. And most important of all, the animosity that might have been directed against the whites has been channelled off against the Indians.

Throughout the Caribbean today the Negro’s desire to assert himself is a constant quantity. This brings him in collision with white, coloured, Chinese, Syrians and Jews in Jamaica, white and coloured in Martinique, Indians in Trinidad. The animosity between Negroes and Indians is, at first sight, puzzling. At all levels they share the same language, the same ambitions –
My Mummy has a lovely Valor –
and, increasingly, the same pleasures. Their interests don’t clash. The Negro is a town-dweller; the Indian is an agriculturist. The Negro with a good handwriting and a head for intrigue goes into the civil service; the Indian similarly equipped goes into business. Both go into the professions.

Of late, with Indians entering the civil service and small-island Negroes muscling in on the taxi business, there has been a certain direct rivalry; but this is outweighed by a long-standing division of labour which is taken so much for granted that Trinidadians are hardly aware of it. Coconut-sellers, for instance, are Indian; it would be unnatural and perhaps unwise to receive a coconut from a black hand. No one, not even an Indian, will employ a mason or a carpenter who is not a Negro. The lower down the scale one goes, the nicer the divisions of labour become. Negroes sell ice and its immediate byproducts: shaved ice, ‘presses’, snowballs. Indians sell iced lollies. Before the war Indians swept the streets of Port of Spain; Negroes emptied the cesspits. Each felt a hearty contempt for the other; and when, during the war, Negroes from the smaller islands began sweeping the streets, it was felt by some Indians that this was another example of Indians losing their grip, the virtues of their fathers.

In St Kitts, if the emigrant on the
Francisco Bobadilla
wasn’t lying, a Negro can bake bread with moderate success. But St Kitts is St Kitts. In Trinidad a Negro who opens a bakery runs a considerable risk, and he is begging for trouble if he opens a laundry. Whatever goes on in the back rooms, Trinidadians like to feel that their clothes are washed and their bread handled by white or Chinese hands. Equally, for all the complaints about white and whitish staff in the banks, there is a strong feeling among Negroes that black people, even when they can be trusted, don’t know how to handle money. In money matters generally there is almost a superstition among both Indians and Negroes about the unreliability of their own race; there is scarcely a Trinidadian who has not at one time felt or said, ‘I don’t have any luck with my race.’ It is an aspect of the multi-racial society to which sociologists pay little attention.

All this speaks of accord. But Trinidad in fact teeters on the brink of racial war. Politics must be blamed; but there must have been an original antipathy for the politicians to work on. Matters are not helped by the fierce rivalry between Indians and Negroes as to who despises the other more. This particular rivalry is conducted by the liberal-minded, who will not be denied the pleasure of appealing to their group to show more tolerance towards the other group, and who are deeply annoyed when it is claimed by liberals of the other party that it is the other group which has to do the tolerating. There is also considerable rivalry as to who started the despising.