The Middle Passage (5 page)

Someone didn’t approve of the barriers, however. He was the pipe-smoking Negro who had kept to himself throughout the voyage and read
The Ten Commandments
. It was his habit to walk around the deck for hours. Now he broke the barriers outside the dining room, outside the bar. The barman put the barrier up; the pipe-smoker broke it again. A squabble started. The pipe-smoker continued to walk, shouting over his shoulder. He was met at the dining-room barrier by the chief steward. He raised his voice; the chief steward replied. Angrily the pipe-smoker wrenched the barrier up, snapping the thin cord, and crashed it down. He walked past the steward; he was screaming now, incoherent with anger. Groups of emigrants, their faces growing as blank as when they had come up from the rowing-boats, began to gather. Officers were summoned. The pipe-smoker walked measuredly round the deck, breaking barriers, his calm stride unrelated to his hysterical words, which carried across the ship. When he came round to the dining-room barrier again, he had a crowd of frightened emigrants behind him. The emigrants’ leader ran up eagerly, as he had run up to me; his followers opened a way for him; but he only halted and his jabbering ceased. The pipe-smoker walked alone. With an access of added fury he broke the barrier. On one side of the barrier the deck was black with emigrants. On the other side officers and stewards stood in a cool white circle. The pipe-smoker, in black, approached them at an unfaltering pace.

‘He’s gone mad,’ Mr Mackay said.

The emigrants were beginning to buzz.

‘Don’t handle him roughly,’ the purser shouted. ‘Captain’s orders. Don’t handle him roughly.’

The pipe-smoker walked steadily on.

‘I’m gonna get you!’ the chief steward said. He didn’t speak menacingly. He was only speaking an American expression.

‘Terrible, terrible,’ Mr Mackay said at dinner. ‘To see that fine beast trapped.’ His heart was bad; he had been disturbed by the incident and could only nibble at a lettuce leaf. His words were a matter of habit; they were separate from the distress in his voice. ‘I talked to him once or twice, you know. He wasn’t a bad feller. Such a beautiful Negro. Terrible, terrible.’ His mouth was twisted with pain. ‘He must have had a damn hard time in England. Now they’re taking him back to his mother.’

‘They gave him an injection and put him in the sick bay,’ Philip said. ‘I must say I wasn’t expecting that at all. Insulting these Spanish officers in front of everybody.’

‘Saving on the bad food, if you ask me,’ Correia said. ‘I wish they could give me a injection. I not been sleeping on this ship at all. Is the food. All this hispanol this and hispanol that.’

After dinner I went down to the sick bay. The doors were open. All the beds were empty except for one, in the corner, on which the pipe-smoker lay, still in his black serge trousers and blue shirt, a bit of plaster on his forehead. No doors were needed to keep him there.

Very late that evening or very early next morning we were to load up with more emigrants at Grenada, the spice island. It was our last night on board and we had a little party in the bar. The barman had not prepared for us and we quickly exhausted his brandy and Spanish champagne. We roused purser and stewards but could get no more drink. While we were talking to a steward an emigrant from St Kitts said he could help us, if we wanted brandy.

‘Let the poor feller keep it,’ Mr Mackay said, his soft mood persisting. ‘Is probably the first and last bottle of brandy he ever going to buy. When the cold start busting his skin in England he going to be damn glad of that brandy.’

But the emigrant insisted. He was short, middle-aged and fat, with spectacles and a scratched skin.

Kripal Singh and I went down to the emigrant’s cabin, going lower and lower, picking our way past babies down polished, hot corridors, catching glimpses of choked little cabins, heads below sheets, one above the other, opened suitcases, hearing sounds of thick muted activity all round us, seeing men and women hurrying to and from lavatories. The emigrant did not let us into his cabin. He half opened his door – four bunks, each dotted with a head emerging out of sheets, and many suitcases – squeezed in, shut the door, and presently came out with a bottle whose label was all gone except for one corner with the word ‘brandy’.

Kripal Singh, whom I regarded as an expert in these matters, looked satisfied. He gave the emigrant five dollars and the emigrant, retiring, shut the door of his cabin.

We ran up with the bottle to the deck, where the fresh air revived us.

Philip said, ‘This is rum. Even Spanish brandy isn’t that colour. This is a thing they call sugarcane brandy.’

We all three went down again to the hot, airless lower decks. We knocked. The emigrant opened. He was in vest and pants, without his spectacles. He gave us our money back and took his bottle, without a word.

‘You see what I mean, Miss Tull,’ Mr Mackay said. ‘You see how these beasts treat their own people? And he ain’t even get to England. When a few white fellers jump on him and mash his arse he will start bawling about colour prejudice.’

We were leaving Grenada in its early morning stillness when I got up next morning. The sun was not out. The sea was bright grey, the sky light, the hills a cool green, the water at their feet shadowed and still. It was like a Sunday morning. After breakfast the sun was high and hot and the emigrants were thick in the bow of the ship.

Skirts and dresses flapped in the breeze; they chattered and pointed; they might have been on a day cruise.

We now acknowledged Mr Mackay as our West Indian expert. Philip asked him, ‘How about these Grenadians? They does get on with people from St Kitts?’

‘You have me there. People from St Kitts don’t like people from Antigua. But I don’t know about Grenadians. I only hope they don’t start fighting before we reach Trinidad.’

Suddenly at lunchtime the water changed from deep blue to olive, and the new current of colour was edged with white froth. We were in the flood waters of the Orinoco River. I had no idea they reached so far north; and I wondered whether it was true, as Columbus reported, that one could find fresh water on one side of the white line and salt on the other.

We were approaching South America: a low grey range of hills in the distance. It was impossible to tell where South America ended and where Trinidad began. The hills could even have been another island. There was nothing, apart from the colour of the water, to tell us that we were near a continent. The hills grew higher, a dip became a separation, and we saw the channel. Columbus gave it its name: the Dragon’s Mouth, the treacherous northern entrance to the Gulf of Paria. Venezuela was on our right, a grey haze. Trinidad was on our left: a number of tall rocky islets untidily thatched with green, and beyond them the mountains of the Northern Range blurred in a rainstorm.

It was from the South, through what he called the Serpent’s Mouth, that Columbus came into the Gulf of Paria in 1498. The strong currents set up by the flood waters of the Orinoco River as they forced their way into the Gulf of Paria delayed him and nearly wrecked his ship. The currents roared continuously, he wrote; and once, in the middle of the night, when he was on deck, he saw ‘the sea rolling from west to east like a mountain as high as the ship, and approaching slowly; and on the top of this rolling sea came a mighty roaring wave … To this day I can feel the fear I then felt.’ When at last he came into the Gulf he found that the water was fresh. It was this that encouraged him to announce his most startling discovery. He had discovered, he wrote Ferdinand and Isabella, the approaches of the terrestrial paradise. No river could be as deep or as wide as the Gulf of Paria; and, from his reading of geographers and theologians, he had come to the conclusion that the earth here was shaped like a woman’s breast, with the terrestrial paradise at the top of the nipple. The fresh water in the Gulf of Paria flowed down from this paradise which, because of its situation, could not be approached in a ship and certainly not without the permission of God.

Keeping close to Trinidad, hearing the thunder roll around us out of a blue sky, and watching the lightning play on the hills, we swung in a slow wide arc to the left, so that standing amidships on the port deck we could see our wake quickly subsiding to a dimpled glassiness.

The emigrants gesticulated.

‘I hope Immigration keep an eye on these fellers,’ Mr Mackay said. ‘Trinidad is a sort of second paradise to them, you know. Give them the chance and half of them jump ship right here.’

We took on the pilot. We took on the immigration officials.

‘Let them look,’ Mr Mackay said, referring to the emigrants. ‘We have launches here. No damn rowing-boats.’

Flag fluttering stiffly, the launch marked
POLICE
in heavy, reassuring white letters raced beside us, its occupants immaculately uniformed.

‘It ain’t a bad little island, you know,’ Mr Mackay said. ‘I hear they taking college boys in the police these days,’ Philip said.

Port of Spain is a disappointing city from the sea. One sees only trees against the hills of the Northern Range. The tower of Queen’s Royal College pierces the greenery; so does the blue bulk of the Salvatori building. At the bauxite loading station at Tembladora the air was yellow with bauxite dust.

We docked. The emigrants massed on deck and choked their way down the gangplank to get a glimpse of Trinidad (and a few, according to Mr Mackay, to stay).

‘Let the small islanders go first,’ he said.

‘The prop, man,’ someone whispered in my ear. ‘The old propagandist.’

It was Boysie.

In my disembarkation suit and with my typewriter (never to be used) I felt I looked the part.

Correia was in a temper. The ship’s agent had not arranged for his aeroplane ticket to British Guiana. His angry voice boomed out over the ship, down the gangplank; and I continued to hear it even when he disappeared into a customs shed, Kripal Singh at his heels, looking respectable and unhappy in his suit, smoking nervously, his studying days over. And that was the last I saw of them. Philip disappeared. The Mackays disappeared. Miss Tull disappeared; seventeen days with the emigrants awaited her.

The sky was pastelled in spectacular shades of scarlet and gold; the palm trees and the saman trees were black against it. The bar was empty and alien as it had been that afternoon in Southampton. The barman wanted someone to buy him a short-sleeved Aertex shirt. He was negotiating with the lunatic-keeper who, already red-faced, was in his tourist clothes: red shirt, straw hat, khaki trousers, sandals, with a camera slung over his shoulder.

We drove out of the dock area. The way was choked with emigrants, many of them Indians who had flown from British Guiana. Emigrants everywhere, and everywhere the people who had come to see them off. Cars everywhere. We drove very slowly. At the gates we were stopped, our passes checked.

A policeman said, ‘Will you out your cigarette please?’

I outed it.

A
S SOON AS
the
Francisco Bobadilla
had touched the quay, ship’s side against rubber bumpers, I began to feel all my old fear of Trinidad. I did not want to stay. I had left the security of the ship and had no assurance that I would ever leave the island again. I had forgotten nothing: the wooden houses, jalousied half-way down, with fretwork along gables and eaves, fashionable before the concrete era; the concrete houses with L-shaped verandas and projecting front bedrooms, fashionable in the thirties; the two-storeyed Syrian houses in patterned concrete blocks, the top floor repeating the lower, fashionable in the forties. There were more neon lights. Ambition – a moving hand, drink being poured into a glass – was not matched with skill, and the effect was Trinidadian: vigorous, with a slightly flawed modernity. There were more cars. From the number plates I saw that there were now nearly fifty thousand vehicles on the road; when I had left there were less than twenty thousand. And the city throbbed with steel bands. A good opening line for a novelist or a travel-writer; but the steel band used to be regarded as a high manifestation of West Indian Culture, and it was a sound I detested.