The Sugar Islands (15 page)

Next morning, Sara explained to him the enormity of his conduct.

‘You shamed us all. It was Louis's birthday party. We had some very smart people here. People who've never been to the house before. Who'd come all the way from Dondon. Particular people, too, who know the way things should be done. And what do you do? Take no notice of the ladies you're sitting next; not address one remark to them the whole evening. And then, when we'd left the room, you sit there at the end of the table and get drunk; leave the men to come in by themselves and never say good-bye to a single guest. I felt so ashamed. Now, next time, to please me, you will, promise me you will, do better.'

She explained in detail in what way she expected him to improve.

She repeated her explanation in greater detail a month later on the second experiment in entertainment.

It was an August day, hot and airless. Nightfall brought no
breeze with it from the hills. Roger eyed with misgiving the clothes that had been set out for him. He lifted the coat. It was very heavy. He ran his finger meditatively round the collar. He held the waistcoat up against the window. There was a moon. But no light shone through the opaque fabric. He edged his foot into the pointed, buckled shoe. He had been riding all day. His feet were swollen.

‘Oh, what the hell!' he thought. He had not lived all this while to wear clothes like that.

Quietly and breathing softly he tiptoed down the stairway; made his way round to the stable; mounted his unsaddled horse.

A tide of peace flowed about his heart as he saw the lights of Cap François twinkling round the bay. From the waterfront the guttered street ran straight and narrow to the hills. It wasn't much of a place. No one lived there whose job and income did not force him to. There were lawyers there and traders and officials; the houses were for the most part owned by half-castes and ‘poor whites'. Still there were sailors and a number of taverns where the rum was good. With his arms bare, his shirt open at the throat, he sat, his legs thrust out in front of him, breathing slowly the warm, fragrant air.

A couple of sailors were lounging over an adjoining table. One of them was supporting in his lap the head of a comely mulatress. It was very like one of the taverns in Marseilles. However his life had gone, it would have finished up, he supposed, in some such place as this. With the half of his attention he listened to their talk of ships and seafaring. For an hour or so he sat there, brooding. Then a hand fell upon his shoulder.

‘They were worried up there about you, Grandpa. I was sent to look for you.'

It was Edouard, whose social equipment was not yet considered adequate for a large party. In his young, handsome, proud-held head there was a nervous look.

His feelings for his grandfather were of mingled respect and awe. They had seen extremely little of one another. Edouard was uncertain of his reception.

He need not have been. His grandfather signed to him to take a seat, had a glass brought up, and filled it half full of rum. For half an hour or so they sat in silence. Then Roger turned to Edouard with a smile.

‘This is nice,' he said. ‘We must come down here again.'

Edouard's heart beat with pride. His grandfather was a hero to him. Already the
boucaniers
of Tortuga had taken their stand in history. The world was becoming too well policed for that earlier empiry. The successors of Morgan were for the most part brutal and callous cut-throats hiding in whatsoever secluded bay they might chance upon. They had scattered, some of them to the Gulf of Darien; others to Terra Nova and the north; there were those who had gone east as far as Madagascar. Roger belonged to the Homeric days. His grandson honoured him.

‘You must have had an exciting time, Grandfather, in those old days,' he said.

Roger pondered. Exciting? Well, he supposed it had been if you chose to look at it that way. But he had an idea that life in the end amounted to much the same. You had too much of a thing or too little of it. You were either on the Equator, with the sweat running down your face and the fo'castle too hot to sleep in; or you were soaked with Antarctic seas, shivering with cold, with your food sodden, and sleep only possible in uncertain snatches.

For days on end you would be cruising in the Caribbean, tacking to desultory July winds, bored, weary, listless. Then suddenly you'd sight a sail; you'd give chase to it. There'd be the noise of cannon and the clash of steel; the sockets of your arms would ache with fighting, so that you could cry with the pain of it.

For weeks on end you wouldn't see a woman; the thought of women would run maddeningly, inflamingly through your brain; then there'd be a sacked city; and suddenly half a dozen exquisite creatures would be yours for the taking, but with yourself so full of liquor that you could scarcely deal satisfactorily with one of them. Too much of a thing, or too little of a thing. Whatever the framework of your life, that was the way life went.

‘You must have enjoyed life in those days, Grandfather,' his grandson was repeating.

Roger shrugged his shoulders. Yes, perhaps he had. He had found life pretty good all through. But perhaps those days in Tortuga had been his best.

‘They weren't bad,' he said. ‘We wore a pretty comfortable kind of shoe.'

from
HOT COUNTRIES

Written in
1929

When
I told my friends that I was going to Haiti they raised their eyebrows. ‘Haiti,' they said. ‘But that's the place where they kill their presidents and eat their babies. You'd better buy yourself a large-sized gun.”

I did not buy myself a gun. It is those who go through the world unarmed who stand the best chance of passing unmolested. But it was certainly with the feeling that drama and adventure awaited me that I saw from the deck of the
Araguaya
the blue outline of the Haitian Hills. I was familiar with Haiti's story, a long and dark story—so long and dark that no historian can trace to its certain source the river of black merchandise that flowed during the early years of the eighteenth century to the slave factories of the Guinea Coast.

In large part it was composed, that merchandise, of weaker tribes that had been subjugated by their neighbours. There were, however, others of a different caste: proud princes of Dahomey taken in battle, in raids instigated by the slave traders—the conditions of slavery had made highly profitable the spoils of war—men of authority, used to the dignity and exercise of power; men of war, fearless and skilled in battle; the best that Africa could produce; fitted to match a colonial civilization that luxury and easily come-by wealth had weakened; men who were to write Haiti's history.

During the latter half of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth, pamphlet after pamphlet, debate after parliamentary debate, expressed the horrors of ‘the middle passage'. But the clearest picture of slave conditions that I have seen is to be found in a small handbook, published in 1811, on the treatment of negro slaves. [
I very foolishly did not take a note of the publisher of this book and have not been able to trace it.
] It was written for the young planter, and was not unlike those tips for the newly joined subaltern that were issued in the war. It consisted
of practical advice. The anonymous author regarded the negro as so much machinery for the management of estates. His concern was the development of that machinery to the highest level of efficiency. One of the early chapters describes the treatment necessary for slaves on their arrival. He assumes as a matter of course that for days they will be unfit for work. They will be sick, weak, poisoned. He catalogues the diseases from which as a result of their journey they are likely to be suffering. They will need very careful treatment. He presents his facts without comment: he accepts the conditions as a matter of course. He intends no criticism; the criticism that is implicit in that acceptance is a more potent witness than the statistics of a thousand pamphleteers.

To those who are interested in the question of the slave trade that handbook is an invaluable informant. Its argument that the slaves are the most valuable part of a plantation is usually overlooked by those who dilate on the cruelty of plantation life. A negro was worth between a hundred and a hundred and fifty pounds. One does not by wanton cruelty lessen the value of one's property. On the well-run estates the negro was happy and well cared for. He had his own hut, his own garden, whose produce he could sell and from which he could make enough to purchase his freedom if he cared. His old age and his children were provided for. The negress would show her babies proudly to her master. ‘Good nigger boy to work for Massa,' she would say. There were a number of suicides, but that was due to the negro's belief that when he died he would go back to Africa. In some plantations you would see cages containing severed hands and feet. This was not a warning of future punishment; it was a proof to the negro that though the gods of Africa might be able to transport to Africa the bodies of the dead, they could not transport the limbs that the white man had cut off. ‘Do you want,' said the planter, ‘to go home without hands and feet? Why not wait till you die of old age and can return there complete; for I shall certainly cut off the hands and feet of every one of you that kills himself.'

There were punishments, and brutal punishments, but they were used in an age of punishment, when the flogging of sailors and soldiers was regarded as a necessary piece of discipline. Examples had to be made in a country where the white man was outnumbered by the black in the proportion of ten to one. The catalogue of punishment that Vassière has patiently amassed
would make the Marquis de Sade envious. Such punishments, however, were exceptional. Bryan Edwards was of the opinion that the condition of the slave in the West Indies was no worse than that of the European peasant. Nor, though he suggests that the avariciousness of the French made them overwork their slaves, did he consider that the French planters were any less considerate to their slaves than the Spanish or English were.

Two facts, however, contributed to make San Domingo a more likely stage for disturbance than Barbados and Jamaica. The first that the French, though good colonists, are never really happy out of France. The second that the French system of the kept mistress led to a far more rapid growth of the mulatto class in San Domingo than in the English islands. The French never made their homes in the West Indies. They lived in large houses, in conditions of great luxury, attended by many slaves; but their halls were bare. They had no fine furniture, no pictures, no rich brocades. It was not worth the trouble, they said. They were there for so short a time. Their talk was of France; of their last visit there; of how soon they could return. Their one object was to live in Paris on the profits of their estates. And it was on the estate supervised, not by the owners but by overseers that the atrocities were committed. It was the absentee system that was responsible for the barbarities of West Indian life. There were many such estates in San Domingo.

There were also the mulattoes. They were rich; they had been educated in Paris; they were numerous. By the end of the eighteenth century a tenth of the French part of the island was in their hands. They had a grievance. In spite of their numbers, their riches, their education, they were allowed no voice in the government of their island. They could occupy no official position. They could get no redress from justice when they were assaulted or insulted by the
petits blancs
, the clerks and adventurers, the registrars of estates, dissolute and incompetent, whom the mulattoes knew to be their inferiors, whose acquaintance they would have derided in France, but who here could order them and outrage them because of that quartering of savage blood.

Nowhere was the colour line drawn more strictly than in Colonial France. Colour precluded a man from every right of citizenship. Nowhere were the distinctions of colour defined more exactly. Moreau St. Méry has catalogued the two hundred
and fifty different combinations that interbreeding may produce. The man who was four-fifths white was incontestably superior to the man who was three-quarters white. But as long as there remained a drop of coloured blood a man was debarred the rights of citizenship. The mulattoes were very conscious of their grievance. They were rich; they were educated; they were well-bred; they carried in their veins the blood of the oldest families of France, of the healthiest and handsomest of the imported Africans. The half-caste is usually despised because he is a mixture of bad blood, of bad black and of bad white. The mulattoes of San Domingo, however, combined the best of France with the best of Africa—a mixture to which most of what Haiti has achieved is due. Such men found intolerable the insults of the
petits blancs.
In Paris they were respected; why should they be despised in their own country?

Many were the complaints that they addressed to the French Government. But the French Government, blind though it was to the interests of its colonists at many points, supported them in this. ‘The colour line,' insisted the Whites, ‘must be maintained. We are outnumbered by the Blacks in the relation of ten to one. We must uphold our prestige. We are superior to the mulatto. And by refusing to countenance the claims of the mulatto we must keep this fact before the Blacks. Our prestige once lost, we should be powerless.' The Government upheld its colonists.

It was, however, one of the few points in which it did. The Creole Whites had grievances. In the same way that the English Government had regarded its American colonies as nothing more than a profitable source of revenue to itself, so did the bureaucrats of Paris enforce harsh and tyrannical regulations on its colonial trade. Produce might only be carried in French ships and to French ports. Duties were levied at excessive rates. The Planters grumbled. Everyone was grumbling. Everyone had a grievance of some sort.