The Middle Passage (28 page)

Johnny the barman had seven children and wanted to take back some fruit to Paramaribo. He crossed a ditch into a yard, climbed up the front steps of the house and knocked on the closed door, the lintel of which was marked in blue paint:
God is boven alles. A
window was opened; Johnny explained. Presently the door was opened and a Negro, adjusting his clothes, came down barefooted into the yard, picked some pomegranates from the low trees, tiptoeing once or twice, gave the fruit to Johnny, received some coins, politely bade us good day, went up the steps and closed the door once more.

We had some trouble locating the Indian family: the paths and ditches and houses and fields looked so alike. The house stood on a rectangular plot of land, and, with ditches on all sides, appeared moated. Rusting junk in a rusting corrugated-iron shed; a bicycle wheel against a pillar; chickens in the dust and drying mud below the two or three dwarf coconut trees; a bad-tempered barking mongrel; and the mosquitoes thick in the damp heat. A young spastic Indian woman in a slack cotton dress held the dog. We crossed the moat and made our way to the back of the house where, unprotected from the sun, a very old man with white hair and a bristle of white beard sat on the ground rubbing oil on himself. The mosquitoes left him alone; they left Johnny alone. But they fastened on to me, to my hair, my shirt, my trousers, and even the eyelets of my shoes. Movement didn’t disturb them; they had to be brushed off.
*

The old man was pleased to have visitors. He had just had a nasty accident: he had fallen from the top window of his house to the ground. ‘It cost him thirty guilders,’ Johnny said. But the old man told the story as though it were the purest comedy. He was amused at his own decrepitude – it was, after all, so very absurd – and he invited us to share the joke. His face, though shrunken, was still handsome; his eyes were the liveliest part of him. He was born in India and had come out to British Guiana as an indentured labourer. He had served his indenture and gone back to India; then he had indentured himself again. He spoke English of a sort and Hindi, no Dutch. How did he come to Surinam? That was the sweetest part of the whole joke. He had married in British Guiana and then – he had run away from his wife! He said this more than once. That act of roguishness of forty or fifty years ago was the biggest thing in his life and had never ceased to amuse him. He had run away from his first wife!

While he spoke the woman sat with the angry dog in the shade some distance away and looked at us, playing with her loose dental plate.

And what about me, the old man wanted to know. I had been abroad? What was it like? Did people have to work? What sort of work did they do abroad? What did abroad look like? He wanted me to give him concrete details. I tried. And so I really knew this abroad? He was amused and incredulous but reverential: he called me
babu
. He could scarcely conceive a world outside British Guiana and Coronie – even India had faded, except for a memory of a certain railway station – but he felt that the outside world was the true, magical one, without mud, mosquitoes, dust and heat. He was going to die soon, on that moated plot in Coronie; and he spoke of death as a chore. In the meantime he spent his days sitting in the sun, sometimes lying down in what looked like a fowlcoop; it was only at night that he went indoors. But he was forgetting: we were visitors: would we take something? A coconut?

He rose, the woman rose, the dog growled. He took a cutlass from the dust below the house and cut a few coconuts for us.

My back itched. It was bumpy with mosquito bites. So was my scalp. Neither Italian cotton nor thick hair was protection against the mosquitoes of Coronie.

A derelict man in a derelict land; a man discovering himself, with surprise and resignation, lost in a landscape which had never ceased to be unreal because the scene of an enforced and always temporary residence; the slaves kidnapped from one continent and abandoned on the unprofitable plantations of another, from which there could never more be escape: I was glad to leave Coronie, for, more than lazy Negroes, it held the full desolation that came to those who made the middle passage.

I
HAVE NEVER
cared for dressing up or ‘jumping up’ in the streets, and Carnival in Trinidad has always depressed me. This year, too, the ‘military’ bands were not so funny: they vividly recalled the photographs of the tragic absurdities in the Congo. With this Carnival depression I flew north over the Caribbean. The sea was turquoise, with blurred white banks and blue deeps; out of it rose brown islets frilled with white.

In the society page of the
Trinidad Guardian
I read that yet another American had bought a piece of the island of Tobago, following those who had bought pieces of Barbados, Antigua, Dominica, Montserrat (the Montserrat Government had been running a campaign to attract American buyers). These islands were small, poor and overpopulated. Once, because of their wealth, a people had been enslaved; now, because of their beauty, a people were being dispossessed. Land values had risen steeply; in some islands peasant farmers could no longer afford to buy land; and emigration to the unwelcoming slums of London, Birmingham and half a dozen other English cities was increasing. Every poor country accepts tourism as an unavoidable degradation. None has gone as far as some of these West Indian islands, which, in the name of tourism, are selling themselves into a new slavery. The élite of the islands, whose pleasures, revealingly, are tourist’s pleasures, ask no more than to be permitted to mix with the white tourists, and the governments make feeble stipulations about the colour bar.

‘And so she went down to the ladies’ room,’ a taxi-driver in one of these islands told me. ‘And – you know these people – they thought she was just another black ’oman. And they tell she no, sorry, no black ’oman could use the ladies’ room.’ The taxi-driver cackled. ‘They didn’t know she was the minister wife, man. They had to apologize like hell. We don’t stand for that sort of thing here.’ For the taxi-driver it was a personal triumph that the minister’s wife, if no one else, was permitted to ‘mix’ with the tourists.

We stopped for a few minutes at St Lucia. The landing field was next to the sea and the airport buildings were like those of a railway halt. ‘Reminds me of dear old Tobago,’ one bermuda-shorted tourist said. And my depression was complete.
*

Martinique is France. Arriving from Trinidad, you feel you have crossed not the Caribbean but the English Channel. The policemen are French; the street name-plates in blue-and-white enamel are French; the cafés are French; the menus are French and are written in a French hand. The landscape, in the south, is not stridently tropical. Rolling pasture land, worn smooth and unfruitful by cultivation, with dark blobs of scattered trees, and little claws and tongues of land sticking out into the clear sea, suggest a gentler Cornwall. Unlike the other islands, which have one main town to which everything gravitates, Martinique is full of little French villages, each with its church,
mairie
and war memorial (
Aux Enfants de —— Morts pour la France)
, each with its history and its illustrious, for whose descendants pews are reserved in the church. The radio station announces itself as ‘Radiodiffusion Française’. The political posters –
Voter Oui à de Gaulle
(the referendum had taken place not long before) and
Meeting de Protestation: Les Colonialistes Ont Assassiné Lumumba –
are of metropolitan France and unlike anything else in the Caribbean. The tobacco kiosks stock Gauloises; and the advertisements are for Cinzano and St Raphael and
Paris-Soir.
Only, most of the people are black.

They are black, but they are Frenchmen. For Martinique is France, a legally constituted department of France, so assimilated and integrated that France, or what is widely supposed to be that country, is officially seldom mentioned by name. ‘
M. Césaire est en métropole,’
the
chef-de-cabinet
said to me, as though M. Césaire had simply motored down to the country for a long week-end and hadn’t flown 3,000 miles to Paris. The myth of non-separation is carried to the extent that
routes nationales
, which presumably lead to Paris, wind through the Martiniquan countryside.

Even thirty years ago, according to Geoffrey Gorer in
Africa Dances, a
Martiniquan in the French Army in West Africa was officially a Frenchman, a cut above the native African, who was segregated from him. Times have changed; in Martinique I met a Martiniquan Negro woman who had left her home in Senegal because of African racism, to her an incomprehensible phenomenon, a sign of primitive perversity; she spoke with some bitterness and referred to herself as
une française
. In a restaurant during a tourist invasion I saw a white woman turn to a sun-glassed black Martiniquan and say, ‘
Nous sommes les seuls français ici.’
‘You are English?’ a white Martiniquan asked me. No, I said; I came from Trinidad. ‘Ah!’ he said, smiling.
‘Vous faites des nuances!’
Alexandre Bertrand, the Martiniquan painter, who is not altogether satisfied with conditions in Martinique and is something of a nationalist, wanted to know about the race riots in England. What had caused them? He couldn’t understand how colour prejudice could exist in a country like England. His pipe almost fell out of his mouth when I told him about discrimination in housing and employment; it was like explaining the Earth to someone from another planet. ‘I am glad I am a Frenchman,’ he said. The word had slipped out. ‘Well, a Martiniquan with French affiliations.’ More than England to the British West Indian or even Holland to the Surinamer, France is the mother country to the Martiniquan. The highest positions are open to him in France; it is a cause for pride, and not surprise, that a French West Indian represents an important French town in the National Assembly and was for some time the constitutional successor to President de Gaulle.

Dr Saint-Cyr, who comes from one of Martinique’s distinguished coloured families, invited me to lunch one Sunday at his in-laws’ country house at Sainte Anne. Saint-Cyr was a tall, well-fleshed mulatto; but after a minute you forgot his race and were aware only of his Frenchness, in speech, manner, gestures. On the way south we stopped to meet and guide more guests, two metropolitan Frenchmen and a Frenchwoman, who were waiting in their car at the roadside. We were late for this rendezvous, and Saint-Cyr’s profuse apologies were adroitly brushed aside by one of the Frenchmen:
‘Mais c’est ma faute. On m’a dit qu’aux Antilles il est impoli d’arriver à l’heure.’
After this exchange of courtesies we started off, stopping at two or three places to admire, for a few calculated minutes, certain approved views. Past the smooth brown slopes of La Monnerot, we came to Vauclin, where, the fishing boats arriving as if to Saint-Cyr’s order, we made a further stop to admire the picturesque haggling scenes. And so at last to Sainte Anne.

We were introduced to Madame Saint-Cyr, her father, and her two brothers who in appearance and charm were indistinguishable from Frenchmen. Guests arrived continually in new cars, up the concrete drive between the slender-trunked trees, through the old gateway, to the spacious grounds of the spacious house, which was one hundred and fifty years old, ancient by the standards of Trinidad. We sat in the low-walled veranda, drinking apéritifs of milk and rum and nutmeg, nibbling savouries of fish-fries; and we looked down past a rusting rum-factory to the sea, Diamond Rock in the distance, the light changing continuously and with it the colours of the sea and sky, Diamond Rock disappearing whenever it drizzled.
*

The Prefect, a short, blunt-featured Corsican, arrived. Everyone rose to greet him and his handsome white-haired wife.

Dr Saint-Cyr announced a short swim before lunch for all who cared. I changed in one of the bedrooms upstairs. The bed was high and wide and massive. On a shelf there was a small collection of old books, among them an old edition of
La Cathédrale
, as brown and as sharply musty as only old French books can be: reflecting a once alert French taste and now suggesting, not a West Indian house, but a French house from which, with the ageing of its old and the growing-up and departure of its children, a tradition of reading had disappeared.

We drove down to the beach in two cars; and after exclamations at the beauty and warmth of the water, the whiteness of the sand, the perfection of the brain-coral found on the beach – every pleasure noted and acknowledged, it seemed, for the benefit of the host, who appeared to instruct and regulate our delight – after the briefest of dips, we went back to the house and dressed and had a further drink before sitting down at the long table, where covers had been laid for twenty or more.