The Middle Passage (3 page)

‘The man s-say he went to England for holiday,’ Kripal said, recalled to the subject by the sight of the butcher running around the deck. ‘And he s-spend all s-seven weeks drawing dole.’

Kripal himself had gone to England to study. This studying in England is one of the strange activities of West Indian youth, of well-to-do Indians in particular. It can last until early middle age. Kripal had studied deeply in England and the Continent until his father, alarmed at the expense, had summoned him home to the business and marriage. By travelling tourist Kripal was having his last subsidized fling; his studies were almost over.

One morning, not long after we had left the Azores, I found Correia in a sparkling mood.

‘How, how, man? You is a son of a bitch, you know. You never tell me you was a educated man. Let we go and have a drink, nuh.’

Correia had been lucky in me. He became sea-sick: I had Marzine pills. He had headaches: I had Disprin tablets. He developed a corn: I had Dr Scholl’s cornplasters. When he wanted to drink and couldn’t find Kripal Singh, he came to me. Drinking with him had its dangers. He drank rapidly and became drunk in a matter of minutes. And he seldom had money on him: he preferred to settle later.

‘You know,’ he said at the bar. ‘I had a damn good wash-out this morning. First try.’ This explained his mood. ‘You are a damn good writer, boy. Yes, man. I watch you at the post office in the Azores. Writing off those cards so damn fast I couldn’t even read what you was writing.’

Philip joined us. He had been reading the
Kama Kalpa
in his cabin. I thought he had been reading the wrong book, but he said, ‘This Indian philosophy is a great thing.’

‘It
is
a great thing,’ Correia said, drunk already. ‘What is the first thing you going to do when you get back home, Philip?’

‘I think I have to see about insuring the car, first of all.’

‘I’m going to have a damn good purge-out with some Epsom Salts, boy.’

Both Correia and Philip had married daughters in England, Correia’s daughter had been married not long before; Philip had just attended his daughter’s wedding.

‘You know what it makes a father feel to lose his daughter, Naipaul?’ Correia asked. ‘You know how he does feel when she cry out at the train, “Don’t go, Pa”? You don’t know, Naipaul.
“Don’t go, Pa. Don’t leave me.”
His one and only daughter.’ He beat his feet on the rung of his stool and burst into tears. ‘He don’t know, Philip.’

‘No, old man. He don’t know.’

‘Where your daughter living, Philip? Mine living in a kiss-me-arse place called Dudley.’

Philip didn’t answer. He left the bar and came back some moments later with an album stamped on the white leather cover: The Wedding of Our Daughter. Philip was anxious about his daughter and now, looking through the album, recognizing the working-class faces, clothes and backgrounds, I understood why. What had been desirable in the West Indies appeared differently in England.

Everyone seemed to be thinking about his children that day. The Mackays had left their son in England. Mr Mackay had made his last voyage; he would never see his son again.

‘He’s picking up all sorts of English habits,’ Mrs Mackay said with pride. ‘Everything for him is a “flipping” this and a “flipping” that. I just can’t keep up with his English slang and English accent.’

Mr Mackay smiled, remembering.

It is possible for an escaped English convict to be welcomed by the white community in Trinidad and set up in business. And the West Indian, knowing only the values of money and race, is lost as soon as he steps out of his own society into one with more complex criteria.

The captain, an aristocrat in visage and bearing, invited no passenger to his table. He dined with his senior officers. I didn’t know whether this was Spanish naval etiquette or whether it was the etiquette of the immigrant ship. I think it was the latter. From the wireless officer and the purser, the only officers who permitted us to approach them, we learned that just before loading up with the West Indian immigrants we had seen at Southampton, the ship had taken several hundred Moroccan pilgrims to Mecca. Some of these pilgrims had died on the way and had to be thrown overboard; afterwards the ship had to be deloused.

As England receded, people prepared more actively for the West Indies. They formed colour groups, race groups, territory groups, money groups. The West Indies being what they are, no group was fixed; one man could belong to all. A small group of Indians, dropping the competitive talk of London and Paris and Dublin and brilliant children studying in England, Canada and America, discussed the political situation in Trinidad. They spoke of Negro racism, and on the subject of miscegenation repeatedly wound themselves up to hysteria. The British Guianese Indians, among them a man who spent much of the voyage playing Monopoly and reading the first volume of Radhakrishnan’s
Indian Philosophy
, were less impassioned. Believing that racial coexistence, if not cooperation, is of urgent importance to the West Indies, I was disturbed by these Indian views and wanted to explore them further. But I had to drop out of the group because of the unpleasantness with Mr Hassan.

Mr Hassan had lent me a copy of
Time
magazine. I had lent it to Philip (in exchange for his
Kama Kalpa)
, and when on the following day Mr Hassan asked for his magazine, it couldn’t be found. Thereafter, four, five, six times a day, Mr Hassan asked for his magazine. He waited for me on deck. He waited for me before and after the film show. He waited for me outside the dining room. He waited for me in the bar. I bought him drink after drink. But he never relented. I promised to buy him a copy in Trinidad. But he wanted his particular copy of
Time
. I told him it was lost. That didn’t matter. He wanted his
Time.
After three days of this persecution I burrowed deep down into the tourist class and, miraculously, found someone who had a copy of the magazine. It was then, needless to say, that Mr Hassan’s own copy turned up. Mr Hassan’s main subject of conversation had been his wealth and his persecution, at the hands of government departments, customs officials, shipping companies, his wife’s family, his children’s teachers. From the depths of my heart I wished his persecutors greater strength and a long life.

And one day there was very nearly a racial incident in the bar. It seemed that a group of tourist-class passengers, made restless by the long journey and the approach of their various native lands, and provoked by the comparative emptiness of the first-class bar, had decided to rush it. A group burst in that evening, singing. They came running in and bobbed up and down before the bar. They called loudly for drinks. The barman refused to serve them. The group, still bouncing abruptly stilled, their high spirits gone, stood silently in front of the bar for a few seconds. One man withdrew. The others followed him. They walked in a body down the deck, then back again. They stood in the doorway and muttered. At length one man left the group and, buttoning his jacket, walked up to the bar and said, ‘Gimme a pack of cigarettes, please.’ The barman handed over the cigarettes. The man looked at the cigarettes, surprised. For a second he hesitated. Then, with careless swinging steps, he strode out. The group, moral victory theirs, went running off to the tourist bar, singing loudly.

And poor Miss Tull became more and more worried about her return journey. No one could console her. Philip suggested that she should abandon her sunshine cruise at Trinidad and fly back to England.

‘I’m not going to lie to you,’ Mr Mackay said. ‘When I saw that pack of orang-outangs getting off the ship at Southampton, I didn’t feel good. It was a damn frightening thing to see. You can’t blame some people for not wanting to call themselves West Indians.’

‘Angus always tells people he’s Brazilian,’ Mrs Mackay said. ‘He could pass for one too.’ Angus was her son, who spoke English slang with an English accent.

*    *    *

We were near St Kitts. A drink, a sunset as flamboyant as one could have wished, the Caribbees pastel-grey outlines around us, the waters where the navies of Europe acquired their skills in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: it wasn’t enough to take our minds off the horror that was nearly upon us. That evening we would take on our first load of emigrants. St Kitts, the mother colony of the British West Indies, ‘the first and best earth’ (according to an inhabitant of 1667) ‘that ever was inhabited by Englishmen amongst the heathen cannibals in America’, today an overpopulated island of sixty-eight square miles, producing a little sea-island cotton, having trouble to sell its sugar, and no longer growing the tobacco, the first crop of the settlers, which Thomas Warner took back to England in 1625 to prove the success of his enterprise. The romance of its history – Warner and his Amerindian mistress, their son ‘Indian’ Warner – is buried. There are reminders only of the brutality of that history: the slaves shanghaied there, their descendants abandoned when prosperity went, and now
their
descendants, their belongings packed, their good-byes said, searching the sea for the black smokestack of the
Francisco Bobadilla
, prepared for another middle passage.

It was night when we anchored, far out at sea. We saw nothing of St Kitts except the scattered lights of its capital. We looked for tenders; several lights deceived us. Nothing moved, except the headlamps of motor-cars.

‘Eh!’ Mr Mackay said. ‘They have motor cars here too?’

Tourist class, first class, we were one now, lining the rail, watching the lights of the toy capital where people took themselves seriously enough to drive cars from one point to another.

Mr Mackay, joining us later in the bar, reported that one of the lunatics had been taken off. A launch had taken him away with his keeper; the keeper had returned alone. Presently the keeper himself turned up in the bar. In spite of the gravity of his charge, he had come prepared for the tropical climate, and we had observed his degeneration from grey-flannelled, soft-soled official into red-shirted, sandalled cruise passenger.

A commotion, and some shouts, told us that the emigrants had arrived.

Part of the port deck had been roped off; the companion-way had been lowered. Bright lights made the deck dazzle, bright lights played on the black water. There they were, rocking in the water, in three large rowing-boats. Men sat on the gunwales and with long oars steadied the boats. Policemen had already come aboard. Tables had been placed just in front of the companion-way, and there the purser and his officials sat, consulting long typewritten sheets. Below, the boats rocked. We could see only white shirts, black faces, hats of many colours, parcels, suitcases, baskets. The men with the oars shouted occasionally, their voices dying quickly in the darkness. But from the passengers we heard no sound. Sometimes, for a second or two, a face was upturned, examining the white ship. We saw women and children, dressed as for church. They all looked a little limp; they had been dressed for some time. The lights played on them, as if for their inspection. Beyond there was darkness. We picked out suits, new broad-brimmed felt hats, ties whose knots had slipped, shining faces.

‘They could at least have brought them out in launches,’ Miss Tull said. ‘At least in launches!’

The tourist class looked down, chattering, laughing whenever a rowing-boat struck the side of the ship or when an emigrant tried to get on the companion-way and was turned back.

Presently they started coming up. The companion-way quickly became packed, a line of people from ship to boat. They looked tired; their clothes were sweated, their faces blank and shining. With policemen on either side, they produced tickets and brand-new passports. Separated from them by ropes, we stood and watched. The blue-dungareed crew leaned over the rails, exclaiming at the beauty of black women and pointing; we had never seen them so animated.

The deck became crowded. Passengers recognized an emigrant here and there.

‘What, you come back already?’

‘I just went up on a lil holiday, man.’

‘I think I would go up and try my luck. You see Ferdie or Wallace or any of them up there?’

But most of them were subdued. One or two tried to duck under the ropes before presenting their papers. The tourist class, with sudden authority, bullied them back. The deck was choked with plastic bags in plaid patterns, brown paper parcels, cardboard boxes tied with string. The crowd grew. We lost sight of the purser and his table. The crowd pressed against the rope. One man with a blue suit, a slipped tie and a hat was jammed against me. He pushed his frightened, red-eyed face close to mine. He said hoarsely, anxiously, ‘Mister, this is the ship that going to England?’ Sweat was running down his face; his shirt stuck to his chest. ‘It all right? It does go straight?’

I broke away from the group behind the rope and walked round to the starboard deck, where it was still and dark and silent, and looked at the lights of the island.

‘Well!’ someone said loudly.

I turned to see a tourist. We had not spoken during the voyage. ‘The holiday is over,’ he said. ‘The wild cows are coming on board.’

He spoke in earnest. And what was he, this tourist? A petty official perhaps, an elementary school teacher.
The wild cows are coming on board. No
attitude in the West Indies is new. Two hundred years before, when he would have been a slave, the tourist would have said the same. ‘The creole slaves,’ says a writer of 1805, ‘looked upon the newly imported Africans with scorn, and sustained in their turn that of the mulattoes, whose complexions were browner; while all were kept at a distance from the intercourse of the whites.’ On this ship only the Portuguese and the Indians were alien elements. Mr Mackay and his black fellers, the tourist and the wild cows; these relationships had been fixed centuries before.

The emigrants were running all over the ship. They peered in at the window of the bar, stood in the door-way. The ship was suddenly crowded. The first-class bar was the only place of refuge, and to it now came many of the tourists who had come with us from Southampton. No one objected. There were now only two classes: travellers and emigrants.