The Middle Passage (31 page)

We roused the driver, and he took us to his chapel. The barrack-dwellers, Indian and Negro, followed us with their gaze, proud to be the object of a visitor’s interest. This chapel was much smaller; it was almost like a closet. There was an eroded, indistinct carving on the sacrificial stone outside, and the statues inside were if anything cruder than those we had seen before. There were no riders on horseback, only a shelf of images. That, said the driver, pointing to one statue, was
la sainte vierge
. Was Joseph there as well? Of course, of course, the driver said, affronted that I should ask. People from all over the world came to see this chapel. Did I know that? His eldest son had done the carvings. It was a sacred art, and he had handed it down to his son. Did the Indians in Trinidad – in whose existence he made it clear he did not believe – have chapels as fine as this? They didn’t? Did they have a statue of
la sainte vierge
with a bracelet? He was beginning to regard me as an impostor. There were little dark bowls of stinking oil before the statues; this oil was brought by the faithful. We walked back to the car, past a trailer packed high with canes. Did they have lorries as big as that in Trinidad? In England? I said no. He looked pleased, though not surprised.

Anca Bertrand, who is a folklorist as well as an original and accomplished photographer, had a folk-dance rehearsal that evening. It took place in a seaside settlement, in a low
case
of naked corrugated-iron, which on the inside was papered over with sheets of
France Soir.
The oil lamp had a long slender glass chimney; it threw theatrical shadows. The drummers sat on their drums on a table; there were also stick-beaters and an accordionist. After much chatter space was cleared for the dancers, and they started. The dance was the
bel-air.
The ladies were old and wore large straw hats; one man wore a white topee. And in the dark
case
full of badly dressed people whose features for the most part remained purely African, in the long yellow-lit room where, by listening beyond the drums to the accordion, one could perceive the stringed instruments of two centuries ago, and see the dances which even now were only slightly negrofied, the atmosphere became thick and repellent with slavery, making one think of long hot days on the plantation, music at night from the bright windows of the estate house, the acrid, flambeau-lit interiors of negro-houses which were like this case. It was hot and the air was heavy. The dancers sweated. The old ladies, their faces hidden by their straw hats, looked down as if studying their steps. Despite their age and size they moved lightly, even daintily. The music and motions of privilege, forgotten elsewhere, still lived here in a ghostly, beggared elegance: to this mincing mimicry the violence and improvisation and awesome skill of African dancing had been reduced.

To the people of Trinidad, Wilberforce is a name in a history book. In Martinique the name of Schoelcher, the emancipator who came a decade after Wilberforce, cannot be avoided. He is commemorated in a grotesquely ornate building in the centre of Fort de France, in the names of streets and schools throughout the island. There is no need to ask why.

When I was making my way back late that night to the hotel, a Negro youth shouted contemptuously: ‘Ey! You! You are an Englishman!’ It must have been my purpleheart walking-stick – I had been limping about on one. Whatever it was, I was getting tired of the French colonial monkey-game.

ANTIGUA, AND AN APOLOGUE

A
S SOON AS
we were seated in the British West Indian Airways plane it was no longer of importance to be French, and it was chastening to see how within minutes some of the Martiniquan passengers declined from privileged mulattoes, Frenchmen, the cream of
café-au-lait
society, into fairly ordinary Negroes, the very word ‘mulatto’, with its precise and proud racial connotation, being used less frequently outside the French islands.

Glad as I was to leave Martinique, I was inexpressibly saddened to land in Antigua. They have sold portions of the tiny island to tourists; they have built a nice new airport to receive the tourists; and tourists were as thick on the ground as West Indians in Victoria or Waterloo Station when the immigrant boat-trains arrive. I hadn’t planned to go to Antigua – I was only there because there were no direct flights to Jamaica – and had made no arrangements. A hotel list, with prices in American dollars as well, showed that I couldn’t afford a hotel. I could barely afford a boarding-house; and the four-mile taxi-ride to the city would cost seventeen shillings. There was some competition among the uniformed Negro taxi-drivers to take this sum off me. I chose one driver, and we scooted away before the disapprobation of the others.

‘They don’t like me here, you know,’ my taxi-driver said, quickly getting in his taxi-driver’s chatter (we didn’t, after all, have far to go). ‘I am not a native of this place, you know. I know these Antiguans well, man. Is only when you live here as long as me that you know the sort of animal it is.’

We stopped outside a pinkish wooden house, at the downstairs window of which I saw two patriarchal Negroes. My bag was passed up to them from the street, and I entered a shabby room furnished in the dark crowded style of Negro petty bourgeois houses. There were calendars and holy pictures on the walls. A side door opened on to a garden where chipped metal tables and chairs rusted below trees. The bulky radio was turned up loud: the Antigua Broadcasting Service, just a few days old, playing records. The announcer had a soft voice that was charged with delight and became reverential during his frequent breaks for station identification. When, at two o’clock, he had to close the transmission, I could feel his grief.

I went out to explore the town of St John’s. It was dead and empty and lay bleaching in the sun. The houses were white and low, the streets wide and straight and black. Doors and windows were closed everywhere.
Jaycees say slow down and keep alive
, one sign said. And:
e.e.moore
, said another. I made my way back to the boarding-house. The window overlooking the street was closed; there was no sign of the patriarchal Negroes. The door was closed; I had no key. No one answered my call. I went for another walk down the empty white-hot street; came back and banged on the closed door; took another, longer stroll down to the
e.e.moore
sign; came back and, convinced now that I had no audience, banged in long hysterical bursts until, abruptly, the door yielded, and a servant, very calm, let me in without a word. I walked quietly up to my tiny room, where curtains and bedspread and linoleum were in small flowered patterns.

I couldn’t sleep. If four miles cost seventeen shillings I clearly didn’t have the money for a taxi to Nelson’s derelict dockyard (regarded in its time as one of the Royal Navy’s most insalubrious stations). My suitcases were at the airport. I had no books, no paper, and my pen had been emptied for the aeroplane flight. I began tiptoeing through the house, looking. I fiddled timorously with the radio. No sound came out of it. In a passageway off the drawing room I saw a bookcase with some tattered magazines and a few bound books. The magazines were religious and warned of the coming end of the world. The books were all ‘Yearbooks’. Opening the 19
59 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses
at random, I read: ‘Guatemala. There was a hectic five months of provincial rule following the shooting of the Guatemalan president, but the preaching word had to go on.’ I turned a few pages and read: ‘Bequia. Investigation reveals that the good efforts of two pioneer sisters are largely nullified by loose morals of those professing interest in the truth.’ I took the book up to my room.

Just before four it occurred to me that there might be a telephone service in Antigua. I prowled through the empty house and was overjoyed to find a telephone and a toy telephone directory. I began telephoning government departments. Sometimes I put the telephone down when a voice answered; sometimes I got no reply; sometimes I made an appeal for help. At last, to my surprise, I drew a positive response, from a kind voice which I had heard before: it belonged to the announcer of the Antigua Broadcasting Service.

Fifteen minutes later he came, and drove me to the two-roomed radio station which stood closed and deserted in a sun-scorched field. He had the keys to the building; we went in. While he made ready for the evening transmission, I looked through the station’s records and tapes. I came across a tape of one of my own broadcasts and played it over twice.

A brisk young woman arrived. She sat before the microphone, looked at her watch and asked, ‘Start off now?’ My announcer nodded. The woman threw some switches and began to speak. The evening transmission had begun. I went outside and sat on the concrete steps. A horse galloped past, a Negro boy riding bareback and barefooted. The sun was going down. The low hills were growing faint and for a few moments a golden light touched the brown field.

The boarding-house was alive when I went back. The two patriarchal Negroes were at the window and a trio of young English hearties – the only other guests, and on excellent terms with management – filled the shaky old house with their rompings and laughter. The servant was muttering to herself in the kitchen, and when I passed she muttered more loudly. ‘I don’t know what she feel she is. Ordering me about this how and that how. Don’t do this. Do that. Hm! Like she feel I bound and ’bliged to stay here, nuh. Hm! Well, you have a shock coming to you, missis.’

When I came down for dinner the English trio were talking about the race problem in the West Indies. They spoke their liberal views in loud voices; their liberalism had reduced the complex West Indian race situation to the simple and unimportant, though more satisfying, issue of white prejudice.

‘Trinidad is the worst place,’ one of the men said. ‘The whites there are the scum of the earth. Do you know what told me?’

I was interested, but the no doubt sensational sentence that followed was whispered.

The girl, who was wearing tights, said loudly, ‘Well,
I
have friends of
every
shade.’

The talk turned to hunting and shooting, and I gathered that the accident rate in America was higher than in England.

‘In England,’ the younger man said, ‘you learn never to point a gun at anyone. You learn it in the nursery. If you come from a shooting family.’

The older man came over to me and said, ‘Excuse me, sir. Do you know the doctor?’ He indicated the lesser Negro patriarch. ‘It’s his birthday. He’s just coming in and we are going to sing Happy Birthday for him.’

I pushed my coffee cup aside and ran upstairs.

The announcer had promised to send a friend of his to help me through the evening; and shortly after the birthday gaiety the friend came and took me on a tour of Antigua by night. Once our headlamps picked out the English trio dancing in an empty street. The lounges and patios of the tourist hotels looked like Hollywood film-sets with well-drilled well-dressed extras and no stars. At one hotel the most noteworthy performer was an energetic little Negro boy. He was dressed up like a member of the band and danced without inhibition; it was generally agreed that he was cute.

The patriarch of my boarding-house had given me three sheets of ruled paper and after much searching had dug up a pencil stump. With this equipment I was working in bed late that night when I heard a knock. It was the patriarch. He was worried that I had fallen asleep and left the light on.

In the morning I discovered that the servant had been sacked.

The proprietress said, ‘The young white girl ask she, all innocently, whether she liked the work.
And
you shoulda hear how she start up! Saying how I oppress she and work she hard and don’t give she enough to eat. Shaming me in front of the poor white girl.’

‘She too
lavish,’
the patriarch boomed. ‘Too
lavish
.’

*    *    *