The Middle Passage (30 page)

In this village Monday was a big day for the peasants, with cock-fighting in the afternoon and folk-dancing in the evening. On the stony, rutted, pot-holed road that ran between the dripping sugarcane – it had been raining – we passed a peasant riding erect on a ribby horse. The cockpit was in somebody’s damp bare yard, on the flattened top of a low incline that rose directly from the road. It was a small pit, a wooden O, hedged with staves over which hung barefooted peasants in straw hats and topees, shouting, ‘Tor! Tor!’ Above the pit and around it were two tiers of seating roughly made from trimmed tree-branches; but no one sat there, apart from two or three children absorbed in their own affairs. The cock-coops stood at one side of the pit.

The heads of the fighting cocks were pecked and bloody and disfigured; so were their necks and rumps, which had been shaved and looked obscene. The cocks were tired and I felt they didn’t want to fight; a Martiniquan in our party said they were of poor quality. Sometimes the cocks only rubbed their bloody necks together. Sometimes they wandered away from one another; then the shouts of the peasants brought them together again, and they leapt and pecked for a moment or so, their wings outspread. When a cock collapsed there was a roar as at a knockout, and the fight temporarily ceased, the owners climbing over the staves into the pit and holding their cocks until the bell (I believe) went.

Somehow the fight ended – I was told, though I did not see, that the spectators had been gambling heavily – and the battered cocks were taken away, their heads erect, their eyes bright and staring. Their owners caressed them and whispered endearments to them. It was an abrupt moment of solicitude and hurt and calm, both bird and owner withdrawn in the midst of the shouting that had broken out over the new fight. Blood was wiped off with fingers from rump and neck and beak. Then the owner, whispering as with pure love, put the cock’s head in his mouth, sucked away the dark thickening blood and spat it out. This was done four or five times. A lemon was peeled and rubbed gently, sacrificially over the bird’s torn shaved skin.

In the evening the yard was lit by flambeaux. The cockpit was occupied by gamblers, and the sloping patch of damp black earth between pit and hut by barefooted dancers. The dancers pretended to wrestle; the drummers drummed; and everyone sang ‘
Votez oui, pas votez non’ –
the Gaullist referendum slogan already turned into a folksong. When the master joined the dance the peasants applauded, and even the gamblers in the cockpit stood up to watch and clap.

The Americans came ashore in uniform, the sailors in theirs, the tourists in theirs: the men in bermuda shorts, gay hats, short-sleeved shirts, and both men and women carrying blue overnight bags lettered ‘Caribbean Luxury Cruise’ or something like that. ‘Where do we have lunch?’ one called. ‘Restaurant dee Europe,’ said another, reading the sign. The French gendarmes, in their very short khaki shorts, noticeably stiffened. The taxi-drivers were feverishly on the prowl, sniffing up streets, peering through café windows, accosting everyone who looked foreign, even those who had settled down in the Restaurant de l’Europe. Very soon the tourists had disappeared from the main square. In less than half an hour they were drifting contentedly back, each carrying a bag from the Roger Albert duty-free shop, each bearing a slip of the
balisier
wild flower like a standard. An American sailor was drinking white rum straight from the bottle and shouting from one end of the rue Victor Hugo to the other. The tourists regarded him with distaste. In the bar the tall North American with the humorous face, who had been drinking steadily since the evening before and buying drinks for all who spoke to him, chanted, ‘I’m not a Yank. I’m a Canadian.’

The Caribbean has been described as Europe’s other sea, the Mediterranean of the New World. It was a Mediterranean which summoned up every dark human instinct without the complementary impulses towards nobility and beauty of older lands, a Mediterranean where civilization turned satanic, perverting those it attracted. And if one considers this sea, which the tourist now enlivens with his fantastic uniform, as a wasteful consumer of men through more than three centuries – the aboriginal population of some millions wiped out; the insatiable plantations: 300,000 slaves taken to Surinam, which today has a Negro population of 90,000; the interminable wars: 40,000 British soldiers dead between 1794 and 1796 alone, and another 40,000 discharged as unfit – it would seem that simply to have survived in the West Indies is to have triumphed.

There are degrees of survival. And here and there in the West Indies are little groups of ‘poor whites’, English, Irish, French and even German, whose poverty is their least sad attribute. Their loss is greater: they have forgotten who they are. A history book I used at school said that the Amerindians ‘sickened and died’; these Europeans, during a period of unchallenged European authority, only sickened, and are like people still stunned by their transportation to the islands of this satanic sea.

It had been my intention to go to the Isles of the Saints, south of the island of Guadeloupe, to visit the Breton poor whites whom Patrick Leigh Fermor described in
The Traveller’s Tree
:

After my discovery of the Indians of Martinique, however, there was no need to visit the Saintois.

I had never known there were Indians in Martinique beyond the usual businessmen from Trinidad. I had never known that in the French islands, as in the British, indentured Indian immigrants and some Chinese had replaced slave labour after emancipation, and that seventy thousand or more Indians had come to Martinique. Unlike the Indians in British Guiana, Trinidad and Surinam, they came from South India, many from the French Indian colonies. They did not flourish. As one Martiniquan said to me, with disgust and pride, ‘They died like flies.’ Some of the survivors emigrated to Trinidad and settled in west Port-of-Spain. Only four or five thousand remained in Martinique, labourers on the sugar estates of the north, sweepers in the city, and they made no mark on the society; no Indian even opened a shop. It might be that their numbers were too small. Or it might be that, unlike the Indians of British Guiana and Trinidad, who came in such balanced proportions that they were able to re-create an India in miniature, with the basic Hindu—Muslim antagonism, Shia and Sunni divisions among the Muslims and a complex if rapidly disintegrating caste system among the Hindus – it might be that unlike these Indians, the Martinique Indians came from a single depressed Hindu caste. There is evidence for this in their physical similarity and their religious practices. There is the remarkable fact that just as in India the sweepers’ settlement is separated, perhaps by a river, from the town, so in Fort de France the Indian sweepers are separated from the rest of the town by a canal. It is also to be noted that among those who emigrated to Port-of-Spain there was a tradition, now lost, of road-sweeping; and they have proved the most assimilable of Trinidad Indians. It is easy to see how such people, without the traditions, aptitudes and drive of other castes, would be helpless; or how any small, alien, impoverished group would remain submerged in Martinique, where society was as rigidly organized as Indian society but where standards were incomprehensible and beyond attainment. The white-mulatto-black world presented a common front of unaccommodating Frenchness; the Indian remained an outsider.

I didn’t know of the existence of Martinique Indians until Alexandre Bertrand showed me his drawings of Martiniquan Hindu dancers and told me of their ‘Hinduism’, nothing more than an occasional sacrificial slaughter of sheep, a degraded form of the degrading kali puja, which, though Catholic converts, they still practise. And one Saturday Anca Bertrand drove me north to the Hindu ‘chapels’. We drove through well-kept hills in all the gradations of green, through land that appeared to have been landscaped by cultivation, with little of the tropical disorder of Trinidad; we had a glimpse of cloud-topped Mont Pélé.

The first chapel we came to was a small rectangular concrete shed with a corrugated-iron roof and walls painted in stripes of chocolate and ochre. A number of people, Negro and Indian, came out of a dingy barrack-like building in the same scuffed yard and stared: an elderly, coarse-featured, kinky-haired Indian woman, a baby on her hip, and her equally coarse-featured daughter, a very small and very old woman in spectacular rags, a tall Negress, a mulatto in a big loose cotton dress, an Indian woman in a Martiniquan turban, and a young Indian man, small and thin, with his hair in a fringe below an old felt hat, tattered khaki shorts, a torn and dirty shirt, and black mud on his bare feet. We spoke to the young man. His features were fine, as though worn away by undernourishment and underprivilege, his eyes bright and unreliable; he was even handsome, if you forgot the weakness of his face and the debility of his attenuated limbs. His head rocked like a bird’s on his stick-like neck, and he continually scratched one muddy foot with the big toe of the other. He didn’t speak French; Anca Bertrand had to translate his patois.

The sacrifice, he said, took place on the stone outside the chapel. The stone was below a frangipani tree, now almost bare of leaves and in full flower; delicate pink blooms were crushed into the black, chicken-trampled mud. He went off to get the keys, and the women, all silent and staring, drew closer to us. The young man came back and opened the chapel door (an arch painted in chocolate directly above) and calmly, without flourish, revealed the hideous, tallow-smelling childishness inside: one large figure on horseback to the right, one to the left, both crudely sculptured and painted in strident yellow and red, the mustachios black, the features – pathetic in this setting – aristocratic and serene. Long carved cutlasses rested on their hafts between the forelegs of the horses; the ground in front of them was dark with candle-grease. On the low concrete platform at the back there were many smaller red-and-yellow statues, the miniature form betraying more clearly the crudity of the hand that had fashioned the larger statues. This was the king, the young man said; and that was the queen; and those were their children.

All places of worship have a distinctive stale smell; this dark little hole smelled warmly of stale, nauseous oil and tallow. Even while we gazed, the woman with the turban – an exhibitionist, I felt – went in, loudly sucking her teeth, and lit candles before the statues. The young man, his explanation given, leaned against the wall, looking away from us and down at the mud; his face was almost hairless. There were no sacred books, he said; he didn’t know whether there were any sacred songs; the ‘priest’ knew everything. How was the priest chosen? He couldn’t say. Sacrifices took place when they wanted to ask a favour of the king and the queen. What sort of favours? He didn’t know; the priest knew everything, and the priest was working in the sugar-factory that afternoon.

We drove on to a small town where the sugar workers lived in hovels beside the large trailers of neatly packed canes. We went into an estate barrack-yard which contained an é
picerie
offering
huil
(comforting to see such misspellings in a French territory) and were introduced to Indian women who were quite negroid. Then into a choked little room adorned with Catholic pictures and some photographs. Here we met the estate ‘driver’. He was small, black, fine-featured, though with a bulbous nose. He wore a khaki jacket and a white topee (in Martinique this appears to be a symbol of a sort of servile authority: it is worn by drivers of official cars).

He sat us down on benches and chairs and announced with peasant pride that he had worked on the sugar estate for thirty-six years and what he didn’t know about sugarcane wasn’t worth knowing. He didn’t speak French and couldn’t even understand it; he spoke the Creole patois and said he knew ‘Indian’. What was the name of this Indian language? ‘Tamul,’ he said. And he could sing the sacred Tamul song all night. What was this song? He behaved like a man who wasn’t going to reveal a secret.

His brother came in and sat on a bench against the oilcloth-covered table and said nothing. A very small boy, the driver’s son, very black and handsome, drifted into the room and was introduced; he was shy and shook hands with his left hand. The driver, who was also the priest of the Hindu ‘chapel’, said he was born in the district and had lived there all his life. Was I an Indian? Were there Indians in Trinidad? He looked incredulous. He said he would have been able to keep up his ‘Indian’ if only he had someone he could practise it with. He spoke a few individual words; not knowing a word of Tamil, I didn’t understand them. He allowed himself a small smile.

We were offered drinks. I accepted a green-coloured soft drink but was unable to finish it. The driver brought out photographs of his daughter’s wedding and passed them around. In the photographs he was wearing a bow-tie. In one of the photographs the blindfolded bride was surrounded by unmarried girls and playing the wedding game, people pretending to be normal, to have important lives of their own. The passport-size photographs on the wall, the glasses on the table, the drinks: it was like any other hovel in the island. Only, it wasn’t. Slumped on his bench, shuffling his precious photographs and quite suddenly lost in their contemplation, the driver reminded me of those Amerindians whose huts I had entered in British Guiana and Surinam. You enter a filthy Amerindian hut; your attitude is one of curiosity and recoil; the owner sits content, bemused, indifferent to your intrusion. Ask him a question and he will answer; say nothing and he will remain silent.