The Writer and the World (16 page)

The administration, spare and efficient, had been inherited with the Administration Building. An elected fifteen-man Council ruled. This structure of government was like sophistication in a community that had for long organized itself around its own reverences. The island ran itself; it worked. After half a day the visitor had to remind himself of size and quaintness. It was there, in the new flag, designed by some Americans: a circle of three orange dolphins on white, a lower stripe of turquoise. And in the fanciful anthem, composed by a local “group”:

The visitor heard that the beaches were watched every night, in case St. Kitts invaded; that there were secret military exercises every fortnight; that the Anguillans had more than the four machine-guns, fifty-five rifles, fifteen shotguns, and two boxes of dynamite they had at the time of secession. There was talk of a repeat raid on St. Kitts; there was even a hint of a fighter being called in. St. Kitts was still claiming Anguilla and still advertising it in its tourist brochures (“Island of charm … for the holiday-seeker who wants to get away from it all”). But the Anguillans were secure. They knew that St. Kitts had its own political dissensions, that many people in St. Kitts were on their side, and that the 120-man St. Kitts army had enough to do at home. The Anguillans didn’t talk much about Bradshaw and St. Kitts. They talked more of their own dissensions, their own politics.

Shipwrecked and isolated, the community had held together. With the quick semi-sophistication that had come with independence, the feeling that the island was quaint, famous, and tourist-precious, the old rules and reverences had begun to go. A few months before, on the quaint air-strip, the engine of a Piper Aztec had been smashed up at night with a hammer. Family rivalry was said to be the cause.

T
HERE
is only one hotel with electricity in Anguilla, the Rendezvous. It is like a rough motel; and the lights go off at nine. It is owned by Jeremiah Gumbs, half-brother of Judge Gumbs, the prophet, and is run by Jeremiah’s sister, who has spent many years in the United States and speaks with an American accent; the atmosphere of Negro America is strong.

I knew about Jeremiah Gumbs. He had been described to me as “the smart Anguillan,” the only one who had made good in the United States. He was a considerable local benefactor; and he was Anguilla’s link-man with the bigger world. He had given a number of interviews to American newspapers, had presented Anguilla’s case at the United Nations, and had led an Anguillan delegation to the OAS building (they found it closed).

He was there, assessing and formidable (I had been told in St. Kitts never to laugh at Anguillans), while his sister showed me round.

“And here, young man, you can plug in your shaver. Which is more than you did this morning.”

She was very large; she was called Lady B. I recognized her as a “character.” Characters lie on my spirit like lead; and I resolved never to shave while I was at the Rendezvous.

At lunch Jeremiah, sucking fish, began to boom across the dining-room, at first as though to himself.

“They call it a rebellion.” His accent too was American. “Most peaceful rebellion in the world. Rebellion? It’s a rebellion against years of neglect, that’s all. What’s wrong with being small? Why shouldn’t a small country have dignity? Why shouldn’t a small country have pride? Why shouldn’t—”

I tried to break into his harangue. “Gumbs. It’s an old island name.”

“One man,” he said. “One man gave this island a library. One man set up the X-ray unit in the hospital. One man did all this. What did Brad-shaw do? Police, plastic bombs, tear gas, things we never saw before. Now he says I am the big villain, the leader of the rebels.”

I had heard no such thing.

“One man. Joe Louis. Marian Anderson. You get no more than one in a generation. It’s because I care. I remember when I was a child we had four successive droughts in this island of Anguilla. I know what poverty is. I remember days in New York in the Depression when I didn’t have
the subway fare and had to walk one hundred blocks to school. Days when I didn’t even eat an apple.”

It hadn’t marked him. He was an enormous man. Fifty-five, sharp-nosed, with a moustache and thin greying hair, he was like somebody out of those Negro Westerns of thirty years ago,
Two-Gun Man from Harlem, Harlem on the Prairie.
It was the way he ate, the way he walked and talked; it was the rock and the dust outside. He was the man opening up a territory.

“You come to write something, huh?”

I said, with acute shame, that I had.

“You go ahead and write. They come all the time. They sit on the beach and write all day long.” His voice began to sing in the American way: “Just like Nature intended.”

I resolved never to set foot on his beach.

We met that afternoon on the dusty road, he in his high jeep, a territory-opener, I in the low exposed mini-jeep I had rented from him.

“You making out all right?”

I was choking with dust and had already been lost twice (those Anguillan compass directions), but didn’t tell him: he had sold me a map.

“You write and tell them. You tell them about this bunch of rebellious savages.”

F
OR A SHORT
time after secession the Anguillans flew the flag of San Francisco, the gift of an editor who belonged to what is known in the island as the San Francisco Group. The Group took a whole-page advertisement in the
New York Times
in August 1967 for “The Anguilla White Paper,” which they composed.

Anguillans, the White Paper said, were not backward simply because they didn’t have telephones. “Do you know what one Anguillan does when he wants to telephone another Anguillan? He walks up the road and talks to him.” But the absence of telephones was part of the case against St. Kitts; and it isn’t easy to get about the island without a jeep. There are people in West End (where the people are mainly blackish, with occasional blond sports) who have never been to East End (where many of the fair people are).

Anguillans didn’t “even want one Hiltonesque hotel”; it would turn them into “a nation of bus boys, waiters, and servants.” They didn’t want
more than thirty “guests” at one time; it wouldn’t be polite for a guest to go away without at least lunching with the President. They didn’t want “tourists.”

The White Paper—it offered honorary citizenship for $100—made $25,000 for Anguilla. Some Anguillans felt that they had been made ridiculous by the White Paper. But Mr. Webster, who signed it as Chief Executive, told me he stood by it. Jeremiah Gumbs, though, was extending his hotel; other people had put up establishments of their own of varying standards (the tourist future could still be one of rough bars and souvenir-stalls and ice-cream stands, very private enterprise); and Mr. Webster himself said that he would like to see Anguilla as a tourist resort.

It was part of the Anguillan confusion. Too many people had wanted to help, finding in Anguilla an easy cause, a little black comedy. The Anguillans, never seeing the joke, always listened and then grew frightened and self-willed.

One member of the San Francisco Group was Professor Leopold Kohr of the University of Puerto Rico, a sixty-year-old Austrian who went to live in America in 1938. Kohr has long promoted the theory of the happy small society; his book,
A Breakdown of Nations
, was published in London in 1957 (it is now out of print). In 1958 Kohr addressed the Welsh Nationalist Party that wants Wales to break away from England; he is now on a year’s sabbatical at the University of Swansea. Kohr feels that small communities are “more viable economically than larger powers,” and he thought Anguilla “the ideal testing ground.” Immediately after secession the Anguillan leaders were beating up support in the nearby islands. They met Kohr and the San Francisco Group in Puerto Rico. “My team,” Kohr says, “was accepted within twenty-four hours.”

There appeared to be early proof of economic viability when it was rumoured that Aristotle Onassis had offered a million dollars a year for the right to use Anguilla as a flag base. The story is still current in the West Indies and Kohr still appears to believe in it. In St. Kitts and Anguilla, however, it was dismissed as one of Jeremiah Gumbs’s stories. Mr. Webster, as Chief Executive, wrote twice to Onassis but got no reply. The commercial offers that did come from the United States were, in Kohr’s words, from “interests of all shady shades.”

A local man I met at the airport one Saturday—like market-day, then, with the cardboard boxes and baskets and parcels coming off the Aztecs, the women waiting for letters, messages, remittances from their men in
the American Virgin Islands—a local man whispered to me about the Mafia and their agents among the local people. (From recent newspaper reports I feel he has been whispering to many other visitors.) I asked Mr. Webster about this. He said, puzzlingly, that this whispering about the Mafia was official Anguillan policy, to keep the Mafia away. He also asked me not to pay too much attention to white “stooges.” At this stage I began to feel I was sinking in antique, inbred Anguillan intrigue.

There were people, though, who, while not wishing to go back to St. Kitts, had become less happy about the future than Mr. Webster or Professor Kohr. They had seen no “development” in a year of ambiguous independence and they feared what would happen if Anguilla officially declared itself outside the Commonwealth. Anguilla, like Rhodesia, would be outlawed. It would attract outlaws.

The new weekly,
The Beacon
(typewritten and offset, the equipment a gift from a Boston firm), had run an editorial warning against a unilateral declaration of independence. It had created some doubt in the island; it made independence appear a little more difficult.

“If we sell away our rights to American businessmen now,” the young electrician-editor said to me in a bar, “we will be the laughingstock of the Caribbean and the world. Don’t get me wrong,” he added, speaking slowly while I took down his words. “If Britain don’t do nothing, then I feel we should go on our own.”

“I go put his balls through the wringer,” a young man said angrily to Mr. Webster at the air-strip, showing
The Beacon.
Such violence of language was once reserved for Bradshaw of St. Kitts. Mr. Webster, hiding his distress—it was Saturday, his sabbath—calmed the young man down.

The frightened, the bold, “stooges,” “Mafia”: this was the rough division at which the visitor arrived, feeling his way through intrigue that appeared to follow no race or colour line. Responsibility, acquired lusts and fears now balancing the old certitude, had brought dissensions, the breaking up of that sense of isolation and community which was the point of independence.

T
HERE
was the Canadian with the idea for a radio station, for which for some reason he required stretches of beach. There was Jeremiah Gumbs’s plan for a Bank of Anguilla (he actually started building),
which frightened many people. There was Jeremiah Gumbs’s plan for a “centre for physical medicine.” “The trouble is, will I get my people to understand it? Or will they object to it like the American Medical Association?” I could never understand what he meant; I heard it said that he wanted to bring down an American who had a magic cure. I remembered Jeremiah’s half-brother, Judge Gumbs.

The Anguillan faith in Jeremiah Gumbs as their guide to big American investment had been shaken by these projects and he had been dropped as an adviser to the Council. When I was in Anguilla I felt he was in disgrace, sulking at the Rendezvous. And his own attitude to Anguilla changed from meal to meal. Sometimes he was a patriot. “St. Kitts will be sorry if they attacked us. When we have finished with them, the British Government will have to feed them on crackers and molasses, I guess.” Sometimes he was despairing about Anguillans. “They don’t know they don’t know.” He could give this a gloss. “The trouble,” he said during one gloomy meal, “is that colonialism has made the Anguillan a
shell.”

His changes of mood were linked with the arrival, examination, and dismissal of another American with an idea. This man was looking for a “franchise”: a grant of land and, I believe, a twenty-five-year monopoly in the quarrying and block-making business. His examination by the Council and the Council’s lawyer, who had flown in from Trinidad, lasted eight hours; and when he appeared at Jeremiah Gumbs’s table at dinner, a young soft-bellied man in trousers of shocking Sherwood green, he looked bruised. I heard later that toward the end of his examination he was close to tears.

It was a subdued Jeremiah Gumbs who padded about the dining-room in his slippers, pouring water, offering bread, like a man still with a duty to his ranch-hands. Afterwards he led me through the wire-netting door to the open verandah. Sand-flies and mosquitoes pounced. He slapped and clapped his big hands, killing and calm.

“Who is this lawyer guy? Is he a constitutional lawyer, a company lawyer, a criminal lawyer? Does he know anything about economics? You tell Webster. He’s got to have a development plan. Otherwise he’s going to frighten off a lot of people. And they are not that many. They are not that many.”

In the morning the sad American left, green check jacket matching his trousers.

Jeremiah Gumbs still suffered. “He was gonna invest plenty. He wasn’t gonna make money for four years.
Then
you’ll let someone
else
in? These people don’t understand economics. If Webster could worry he’d be worried. He was gonna build that road, open up that whole area. Put value on people’s property. Houses going up alongside the road. But these people don’t understand. Look at me.
I
put this place up.
I
advertised Anguilla. Now other people have put down their little places. The tourist comes to the airport, the taxi-drivers rush him, take him this place, that place.
I
advertised.” His voice began to sing. “It’s not a way to live. I don’t know. I feel there’s another way to live.”