The Writer and the World (14 page)

All the history of St. Kitts is on this road. There, among those houses on low stilts, whose dirt yards run down through tangled greenery to the sea, Sir Thomas Warner landed in 1623, to found the first British colony in the West Indies. Here, in the barest opening in the sugar-cane, are two rocks crudely carved by the aboriginal Caribs, whom the English and French united to exterminate just there, at Bloody River, now a dip in the road. Sir Thomas Warner is buried in that churchyard. Not far away are the massive eighteenth-century fortifications of Brimstone Hill, once guarding the sugar-rich slave islands and the convoys that assembled in the calm water here for the run to England. The cannons still point; the site has been restored.

In the south-east the flat coastal strip broadens out into a little plain. Here, still set in the level green of sugar-cane, are the air-strip and the capital, Basseterre. There is one vertical in this plain: the tall white chimney of the island’s single sugar factory.

The neatness and order is still like the order of the past. It speaks of Papa Bradshaw’s failure. He hasn’t changed much. His fame came early, as an organizer of the sugar workers; a thirteen-week strike in 1948 is part of the island’s folk-lore. But Bradshaw’s plantation victories mean less today to the young. They do not wish to work on the plantations. They look for “development”—and they mean tourism—on their own island. The air over nearby Antigua rocks with “Sunjets” and “Fiesta Jets.” St. Kitts only has brochures and plans; the airfield can only take Viscounts. It is unspoiled; the tourists do not come. The feeling among the young is
that Papa Bradshaw has sold out to the sugar interests and wants no change.

And Bradshaw’s victories were only of St. Kitts. They meant little to the peasant farmers of Nevis, and nothing to the long-independent farmers and fishermen of Anguilla, seventy miles away. The Nevisians and Anguillans never voted for Bradshaw. Bradshaw didn’t need their votes, but he was irritated. He said he would put pepper in the soup of the Nevisians and bones in their rice; he would turn Anguilla into a desert and make the Anguillans suck salt. That was eleven years ago.

“Gahd bless Papa Bradsha’ for wa’ he do.” It is only the old and the devout among the plantation Negroes in St. Kitts who say that now. They remember the
ola
or trash houses, the cruel contract system, the barefoot children and the disease. Bradshaw himself worked as a young man in the Basseterre sugar factory; he carries a damaged hand as a mark of that service. Like many folk leaders, he never moved far beyond his first inspiration. It is also true that, like many folk leaders, he is responsible for the hope and the restlessness by which he is now, at the age of fifty-one, rejected.

T
HE WEATHERBEATEN
little town of Basseterre also has a stage-set simplicity. There is a church at the end of the main street. PAM hangs its home-made board in the veranda of a rickety little house. Directly opposite is a building as rickety, but larger; this is labelled “Masses House” and is the headquarters of the Bradshaw union. At times of tension this section of the main street is known as the Gaza Strip.

Masses House has a printery which every day runs off 1,200 copies of a ragged miniature newspaper called
The Labour Spokesman.
Even with large headlines there isn’t always enough news to fill the front page; sometimes a joke, headlined “Humour,” has to be added. Sport is good for a page or two or three. A cricketer like Sobers can make the local sportswriter ambitious. “The shy boy of seventeen, not yet lost his Mother’s features on his debut against England in the West Indies in 1954, has probably rose to the pinnacle of being the greatest cricketer both of our time and the medieval age. If W. G. Grace were to twitch in his grave at the comment he would only turn over on the other side to nod his approval.”

A few doors away from Masses House is Government Headquarters,
a modernistic building of three storeys. Grey air conditioners project from its façade; a pool in the patio is visible through the glass wall. The hotel is opposite, a converted old timber house. The manager is a gentle second-generation Lebanese whose nerves have been worn fine by the harassments of his large family, his staff, untrained or temperamental, the occasional assertive Negro group, and the political situation. “Have you seen our Premier, sir?” He supports Bradshaw but avoids controversy; he knows now he will never see Beirut.

A short side street leads to Pall Mall Square: the church, the timbered colonial-Georgian Public Library and Court, the St. Kitts Club, the private houses with lower floors of masonry, upper floors shingled, white and fragile, and steep four-sided roofs. The garden is unkempt, the wire fences around the central Victorian fountain trampled down, the lamp-standards empty and rusting; but the trees and flowers and the backdrop of mountains are still spectacular. Pall Mall Square is where PAM holds its public meetings. It is also, as all St. Kitts knows, the place where, among trees and flowers and buildings like these, “new” Negroes from Africa were put up for auction, after being rested and nourished in the importers’ barracoons, which were there, on the beach, not far from today’s oil-storage tanks.

The past crowds the tiny island like the sugar-cane itself. Deeper and deeper protest is always possible.

A
T ABOUT
ten every morning the guards change outside Government Headquarters. The green-bereted officer shouts, boots stamp; and the two relieved soldiers, looking quickly up and down the street, get into the back of the idling Land-Rover and are driven to Defence Force Headquarters, an exposed wooden hut on high ground near ZIZ, the one-studio radio station.

Against the soft green hills beyond Basseterre, the bright blue sea and the cloud-topped peak of Nevis, a Negro lounges in a washed-out paratrooper’s uniform, thin and bandy-legged, zipped-up and tight, like a soft toy.

It seems to be drama for the sake of drama. But there are bullet marks on the inside of the hut. These are shown as evidence of the armed raid that was made on Basseterre by persons unknown in June 1967, at the beginning of the Anguillan crisis. The police station was also attacked.
Many shots were fired but no one was killed; the raiders disappeared. Bradshaw added to his legend by walking the next morning from Government Headquarters to Masses House in the uniform of a Colonel, with a rifle, bandolier, and binoculars.

The raid remains a mystery. Some people believe it was staged, but there are Anguillans who now say that they were responsible and that their aim was to protect the independence of their island by kidnapping Bradshaw and holding him as a hostage. The raid failed because it was badly organized—no one had thought about transport in Basseterre—and because Bradshaw had been tipped off by an Anguillan businessman.

Days after the raid leading members of PAM and WAM were arrested. They went on trial four months later. Defence lawyers were harassed; and Bradshaw’s supporters demonstrated when all the accused men were acquitted. Ever since, the rule of law in St. Kitts has appeared to be in danger. The definition of power has become simple.

The poem is from
The Labour Spokesman.
There may no longer be a danger from Anguilla, but the police and the army have come to St. Kitts to stay.

I
FIRST
saw St. Kitts eight years ago, at night, from a broken-down immigrant ship in Basseterre harbour. We didn’t land. The emigrants had been rocking for some time in the bay in large open boats. The ship’s lights played on sweated shirts and dresses, red eyes in upturned oily faces, cardboard boxes and suitcases painted with names and careful addresses in England.

In the morning, on the open sea, the nightmare was over. The jackets and ties and the suitcases had gone. The emigrants, as I found out, moving among them, were politically educated. Copies of
The Labour Spokesman
were about. Many of the emigrants from Anguilla, which had been recently hit by a hurricane, were in constant touch with God.

The emigrants had a leader. He was a slender young mulatto, going to England to do law. He moved among the emigrants like a trusted agitator; he was protective. He was a man of some background and his political concern, in such circumstances, seemed unusual. He mistrusted my inquiries. He thought I was a British agent and told the emigrants not to talk to me. They became unfriendly; word spread that I had called one of them a nigger. I was rescued from the adventure by a young Baptist missionary.

I didn’t get the name of the ship-board leader then. In St. Kitts and the Caribbean he is now famous. He did more than study law. He returned to St. Kitts to challenge Bradshaw. He founded PAM. He has been jailed, tried, and acquitted; he is only thirty-one. He is Dr. William Herbert. A good deal of his magic in St. Kitts, his power to challenge, comes from that title of Doctor—obtained for a legal thesis—which he was then travelling to London to get.

He came into the Basseterre hotel dining-room one morning. As soon as we were introduced he reminded me of our last meeting. The ship, he said, was Spanish and disorganized and he was young. He was as restless and swift and West Indian–handsome as I had remembered: his five months in jail have not marked him.

“I don’t want to frighten you,” he said, when he came to see me later that day. “But you should be careful. Writers can disappear. Two soldiers will be watching the hotel tonight.”

We drove to a rusting seaside bar, deserted, a failed tourist amenity.

“Have you seen Bradshaw?”

I said that the feeling in Government Headquarters was that I might be a British agent. Mr. Bradshaw wouldn’t give an interview, but he had come over to the hotel one morning to greet me.

“He’s an interesting man. He knows a lot about African art and magic and so on. It perhaps explains his hold, you know.”

We went to look at Frigate Bay, part of the uninhabited area of scrub and salt-ponds which is attached like a tail to the oval mass of St. Kitts. The government had recently announced a L29-million tourist development plan for Frigate Bay. Some in-transit cruise passengers had been taken to inspect the site a few days before;
The Labour Spokesman
had announced it as the start of the tourist season.

“Development!” Herbert said, waving at the desolation. “If you
come here at night they shoot you, you know. It’s a military area. They say we are trying to sabotage.”

On the way back we detoured through some Basseterre slum streets. Herbert waved at women and children.
“How, how, man?”
Many waved back. He said it was his method, concentrating on the women and children; they drew the men in.

H
ERBERT
is the first and only Ph.D. in St. Kitts. Beside him, Bradshaw is archaic, the leader of people lifted up from despair, the man of the people who in power achieves a personal style which all then feel they share. In St. Kitts and the West Indies Bradshaw is now a legend, for the gold swizzle-stick he is reputed to bring out at parties to stir his champagne, the gold brush for his moustache, the formal English dress, even the silk hose and buckle shoes on some ceremonial occasions, the vintage yellow Rolls-Royce. He has a local reputation for his knowledge of antiques and African art and for his book-reading. He is believed to be a member of several book clubs. He reads much Winston Churchill; his favourite book, his PRO told me, is
The Good Earth;
his favourite comic strip,
Li’l Abner.

It is an attractive legend. But I found him subdued, in dress and speech. I was sorry he didn’t want to talk more to me; he said he had suffered much from writers. I understood. I looked at his moustache and thought of the gold brush. He is well-built, a young fifty-one, one of those men made ordinary by their photographs. We talked standing up. His speech was precise, very British, with little of St. Kitts in his accent. He stood obliquely to me; he wore dark glasses. As we walked down the hotel steps to the Land-Rover with his party’s slogan, “Labour Leads,” he told me he was pessimistic about the future of small countries like St. Kitts. He worked, but he was full of despair. He had supported the West Indian Federation, but that had failed. And it is true that Bradshaw began to lose his grip on St. Kitts during his time as a minister in the West Indian Federal Government, whose headquarters was in Trinidad.

The Negro folk leader is a peasant leader. St. Kitts is like a black English parish, far from the source of beauty and fashion. The folk leader who emerges requires, by his exceptional gifts, to be absorbed into that higher society of which the parish is a shadow. For leaders
like Bradshaw, though, there is no such society. They are linked forever to the primitives who were the source of their original power. They are doomed to smallness; they have to create their own style. Christophe, Emperor of Haiti, creator of a Negro aristocracy with laughable names, came from this very island of St. Kitts, where he was a slave and a tailor; the inspiration for the Citadel in Haiti came from those fortifications at Brimstone Hill beside the littoral road.

T
HE DIFFERENCE
between Herbert and Bradshaw is the difference between Herbert’s title of Doctor and Bradshaw’s title of Papa. Each man’s manner seems to contradict his title. Herbert has none of Bradshaw’s applied style. His out-of-court dress is casual; his car is old; the house he is building outside Basseterre is the usual St. Kitts miniature. His speech is more colloquial than Bradshaw’s, his accent more local. His manners are at once middle-class and popular, one mode containing the other. He never strains; he moves with the assurance of his class and his looks. To all this he adds the Ph.D.

“Tell me,” Bradshaw’s black PRO asked with some bitterness, “who do you think is the more educated man? Herbert or Bradshaw?”

It would have been too sophisticated a question to put to the young and newly educated who went to Herbert’s early lectures on economics, law, and political theory in Pall Mall Square.