The Middle Passage Part 11

To the people of Trinidad, Wilberforce is a name in a history book. In Martinique the name of Schoelcher, the emanc.i.p.ator 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 a I had been limping about on one. Whatever it was, I was getting tired of the French colonial monkey-game.

* 'On the quiet and picturesque island of Tobago, twenty minutes' flying time to the north-east of Trinidad, the district servant said the humble inhabitants would easily take first place in the West Indies for politeness and friendly reception. There are many sheep-like persons in Tobago, and by Jehovah's undeserved kindness they will be gathered before Armageddon.' From the 1958 Yearbook of Jehovah's Witnesses.

* In January 1804, during the war against Napoleon, this isolated bare rock, as faceted as a diamond, was garrisoned by the crew a one hundred and twenty men and boys a of a British cruiser, and commissioned as a sloop-of-war. H.M.S. Diamond Rock hara.s.sed French s.h.i.+pping for eighteen months and surrendered only after a fortnight's blockade by 'two seventy-fours, a frigate, a corvette, a schooner, and eleven gunboats'.

* ' "A nice fellow, Jones; eh? very intelligent, and well mannered," some stranger says, who knows nothing of Jones's antecedents. "Yes, indeed," answers Smith, of Jamaica; "a very decent sort of fellow. They do say that he's coloured; of course you know that." The next time you see Jones, you observe him closely, and can find no trace of the Ethiop. But should he presently descant on purity of blood, and the insupportable impudence of the coloured, then, and not till then, you would begin to doubt.'

* From the article on Martinique in the 1959 Yearbook of Jehovah's Witnesses: 'There is the opportunity of witnessing to drivers of trucks bringing bunches of bananas from the thirty-two communes of the island to load special boats. At times fifty or more of these trucks are waiting in line at the gates of entrance to the docks. The alert publisher will use the Awake! magazine and offer it to the driver of the first truck and work from one to the other through the whole line. A pioneer reported: "I placed more than thirty magazines within an hour's time." '

6. ON TO JAMAICA.

ANTIGUA, AND AN APOLOGUE.

AS 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 pa.s.sengers declined from privileged mulattoes, Frenchmen, the cream of cafe-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 a I was only there because there were no direct flights to Jamaica a 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 s.h.i.+llings. There was some compet.i.tion 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 pa.s.sageway 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 1959 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 a the only other guests, and on excellent terms with management a filled the shaky old house with their rompings and laughter. The servant was muttering to herself in the kitchen, and when I pa.s.sed 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 sc.u.m 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.'

THE REJECTION OF BABYLON.

Jamaica was a nice island, but the land has been polluted by centuries of crime. For 304 years, beginning in 1655, the white man and his brown ally have held the black man in slavery. During this period, countless horrible crimes have been committed daily. Jamaica is literally h.e.l.l for the black man, just as Ethiopia is literally Heaven.

'The Creed of a Ras Tafari Man'*

Jamaica presents to the outside world two opposed images: the expensive winter resort a turquoise sea, white sands, reverential bowtied black servants, sun-gla.s.sed figures below striped umbrellas: Tourism matters to you is the theme of a despairing advertising campaign run by the Jamaica Tourist Board to diminish the increasing hostility to tourists a and the immigrant boat-trains arriving at London's gloomy railway stations: n.i.g.g.e.rs go home painted in large red letters in Brixton and Keep Britain white chalked everywhere.

It is possible, though, to be in Jamaica for some time without seeing either the Jamaica of the tourists or the Jamaica of the emigrants. The tourists are on the North Coast, which is separate from the rest of the island and almost like another country. And the Jamaican middle-cla.s.s world, in which the visitor moves, with its s.p.a.ciousness and graciousness, its tradition of hospitality, its PEN meetings and art exhibitions, its bars expensive or bohemian, its clubs and hotels, its c.o.c.ktail parties and dinner parties, is physically so disposed a almost by design, it appears a that one can move from suburb to suburb and never cease to be sheltered from offending sights. On drives to the country peasants can of course be seen; but these people have little in common with the desperate and rebarbative immigrant stereotype; their manners are gentle, they have a Welsh feeling for rhetoric, and they speak the purest English of all West Indians.

To see the Jamaica of the emigrants you have to look. And once you start looking, you can see nothing else. The slums of Kingston are beyond description. Even the camera glamorizes them, except in shots taken from the air. Hovels of board and cardboard and canvas and tin lie choked together on damp rubbish dumps behind which the sun sets in mocking splendour. More respectable and on drier ground are the packing-case houses, the tiniest houses ever built, suggesting a vast arrested community given over to playing in grubby doll's houses. Then there are the once real houses packed to bursting point, houses so close in streets so narrow that there is no feeling of openness. Filth and rubbish are disgorged everywhere; everywhere there are puddles; and on the rubbish dumps latrines are forbidden by law. Pigs and goats wander as freely as the people and seem as individual and important. Outside each 'yard' there is a cl.u.s.ter of raised letter boxes a these Jamaicans, I was told, like writing 'little notes' to one another a and these letter boxes are like tiny toy houses which repeat the shape, number and often the positions of the buildings whose correspondence they receive. They emphasize the lilliputian aspect of the Kingston slum settlements, where everything has dwindled beyond what one would have thought possible. And wherever you look you see the surrounding Kingston hills, one of the beauties of the island: freshening now into green after rain, blurred in the evening light, the folds as soft as those on an animal's skin. Against such a view lay a dead mule, its teeth bared, its belly swollen and taut. It had been there for two days; a broomstick had been playfully stuck in its a.n.u.s.

Neuroses afflict communities as well as individuals, and in these slums the sects known as the Ras Tafarians or 'Rastas' have developed their own psychology of survival. They reply to rejection with rejection. They will not cut their hair or wash; and for this neglect of the body, this expression of profound self-contempt, they find biblical sanction. Many will not work, turning necessity into principle; and many console themselves with marijuana, which G.o.d himself smokes. They will vote for no party, because Jamaica is not their country and the Jamaican Government not one they recognize. Their country is Ethiopia, and they wors.h.i.+p Ras Tafari, the Emperor Haile Sela.s.sie. They no longer wish to be part of that world which has no place for them a Babylon, the world of the white and brown and even yellow man, ruled by the Pope, who is really the head of the Ku-Klux-Klan a and they want only to be repatriated to Africa and Ethiopia. They are not interested in a indeed, some discourage a improvements in Jamaica, for such improvements might only encourage them to remain in slavery in Babylon. Already the Jamaican Government is compelling black men to go to England, where Queen Elizabeth I a reincarnated as Elizabeth II a and her lover Philip of Spain a reincarnated as Philip, Duke of Edinburgh a rule as the last sovereigns of white, black-enslaving Babylon. But the emanc.i.p.ation and triumph of the black man is at hand. Russia, the bear with three ribs mentioned in Revelations, will soon destroy Babylon. G.o.d is, after all, black; and the black race is his chosen race, the true Israelites: the Jews have been punished by Hitler for their imposture.

The Ras Tafari movement is not organized. It is split into various sects, and has no fixed hierarchy, doctrine or ritual. The movement had its origin in the back-to-Africa campaigning of Marcus Garvey (to whom several hundred speakers on the subject of racial harmony are indebted for that metaphor about the white and black piano keys). One of Garvey's statements was that the deliverance of the black race would occur when a black king was crowned in Africa. In 1930 Haile Sela.s.sie was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia. The Emperor was a brown man, and in his country there were still Negro slaves. This was unknown or disregarded. Ethiopia was an African country; it was a kingdom; it was independent. Photographs of the Emperor went up in thousands of Negro homes throughout the West Indies. What followed remains a puzzle. Several Jamaican preachers, of a type in which the island abounds, after independent study of the Bible, Garvey and the newspapers, decided that the black race in the New World were Ethiopians, that Ethiopia was the black man's promised land, that Haile Sela.s.sie was divine; and at more or less the same time began to spread this last message of hope through the slums of Kingston.

The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 was seen to fulfil certain prophecies in the Bible, and gave the movement impetus. Italian propaganda did more. Shortly after the invasion was set afoot, an Italian called Frederico Philos wrote an article alerting the white world to the existence of a secret organization of 190 million blacks pledged to exterminate the white race. The organization was headed by Haile Sela.s.sie; it was called Nya-Binghi, 'death to the whites', had an army of 20 million and unlimited supplies of gold. The article was reprinted in a Jamaican newspaper, and the news was received with considerable satisfaction by some of the Ras Tafari brethren. Niyabinghi groups were formed; their pa.s.sword was 'Death to the whites!'

In Jamaica, burning with the enthusiasms of innumerable revivalist sects, it caused no surprise that one section of the community should have withdrawn into a private world of farcical fantasy, and until the mid-1950s the Ras Tafarians were regarded as harmless vagrant lunatics made more than usually repellent by their indifference to dirt. But the movement was growing; it was attracting, particularly from America, people who were more embittered than resigned; relations with the police deteriorated. And it was only when the movement claimed its first deaths in 1960 that its strength was realized. The att.i.tude of the middle cla.s.s was one of horror and shame. There were protests when a study team from the University College of the West Indies reported on the movement with sympathetic understanding: this, it was felt, was giving respectability to rabble. While I was in Jamaica one of the convicted Ras Tafarians was due to be hanged. The local evening paper, with its zestful accounts of last hours and last words, generated the atmosphere of the public hanging, almost, it seemed, as a warning to others. So that at last what was farce had turned into grotesque tragedy.

Nationalism in Surinam, a movement of intellectuals, rejects the culture of Europe. Ras Tafarianism in Jamaica is nothing more than a proletarian extension of this att.i.tude, which it carries to its crazy and logical limit. It resembles African nationalism, which a.s.serts the importance of the 'African personality', and is the opposite of middle-cla.s.s West Indian Negro nationalism, which is concerned only to deny the existence of a specially Negro personality. It is regarded by the largely brown Jamaican middle cla.s.s as a black lower-cla.s.s contagion, a sort of backyard Mau-Mau. Your gardener begins to behave strangely; his talk becomes cryptic; he speaks of the promised land of Ethiopia or Saudi Arabia (still a slave country) or even Israel; he starts to grow a beard. The Rastas have got him: you ridicule him or you sack him: henceforth he is unemployable.

The movement awaits organization and exploitation, by communists (Cuba is just to the north) or by politically ambitious racists. It may, however, frustrate or destroy those who attempt to manipulate it; for Ras Tafarianism is like a ma.s.s neurosis and can respond positively only to unreason which is on its own level of unreason. This is its greater danger. On the advice of the University College study team the Jamaican Government decided to send a mission to certain African countries to study the possibilities of Jamaican immigration. This was like treating the symptoms of a neurosis: before the mission could leave, one of its Ras Tafarian members went to prison on a marijuana charge. Repatriation, even if it comes, will not magically remove the Ras Tafarian's life-long sense of rejection and will not alter the social and economic conditions in Jamaica in which the movement flourishes.

Jamaica is eighty per cent black; and what cannot be denied is that just as in England the fascists frenziedly proclaim the racial att.i.tudes of the majority, who are scandalized only by the exhibitionism, so in Jamaica the Ras Tafarians express the basic racial att.i.tudes of the majority of the black population. Race a in the sense of black against brown, yellow and white, in that order a is the most important issue in Jamaica today. The hypocrisy which permitted the middle-cla.s.s brown Jamaican to speak of racial harmony while carefully maintaining the shade distinctions that preserved his privilege is at last provoking anger and creating a thoroughly black racism which could conceivably turn the island into another Haiti.

The business enterprise of the Chinese and Syrian communities has aroused envy and hostility. And the rich white tourists, enjoying the private white sand beaches of hotels where the charges for one day exceed the average earnings of a Jamaican for a month, are a standing provocation; so that the Tourist Board is now equally concerned with attracting tourists and reconciling the natives to their presence. As someone connected with the 'industry' said to me: 'Chappie pays a lot of money to fly out here. He goes into his hotel, slips into his little bermuda shorts and hot s.h.i.+rt, hangs his little camera round his neck, sticks a cigar in his mouth, steps out into this d.a.m.ned expensive Jamaican winter suns.h.i.+ne. And bonk! What does he see? A poster begging the natives to be nice to him.'

The Sunday Gleaner of 2 April 1961 carried a whole-page article on the race problem by a student at the University College. In its frank, brutal self-a.n.a.lysis it recalled the mood of the Negroes of British Guiana.

THE QUESTION OF BLACK AND WHITE:.

WHO HATES WHO a AND WHY

In a letter to the Sunday Gleaner from an unknown author

Sometime ago the Hon. R. L. M. Kirkwood made a broadcast in which he condemned the rise of the incidence of hatred of blacks for whites in the island ...

Another worthy gentleman, Mr Barham, has written two letters to 'The Gleaner' in which he warned that the people who controlled money in this island were whites, Chinese, Syrians and Jews. He threatened that unless Negroes ceased to abuse and vilify these people they would leave the island and, so to speak, leave the Negroes to stew in their own juice a unemployment and economic stagnation.

... If the black Jamaican hates other races in the sense that Mr Barnham means then they express their hate differently from other people.

I feel quite sure that if the Creator offered the black Jamaicans the opportunity to be recreated as white men, eight out of every ten black persons in Jamaica would want to become white ... The Negro as a rule shows preference for people of other races ... We, the Negroes, love people with fair skins, straight noses, straight hair and blue eyes ... You would think education would make a difference but it does not. Right here at University a black girl becomes a beauty queen only if the girls of other types stay out ...

There are comparatively few Negro parents who object when their children take partners of another race. If there is an objection, it is usually grounded in fear that the son-in-law or daughter-in-law of another race will alienate the affection of the son or daughter from the parents ...

The black people of Jamaica has served and slaved for people of other races for many a decade. Our newest masters are the Chinese who are doing a good job of treating Negroes the way white people do. In spite of all they have suffered the black man still likes to serve and honour the white man in preference to his own brethren ...

Chinese shops are going up all around us every day all over Jamaica and good shops they are too. But the Chinese shopkeeper with the quickness of his race has learned to sn.o.b [sic] the Negro customer when there are white or fair people around ...

It can't be by accident that in a country in which 75 per cent of the people are Negroes in almost every bank in Kingston the staff is composed entirely of people of every other race except the Negro race. (The coloured girls in the banks would be offended if you called them Negroes.) It is an insult to the Negro race ...

Today the black man, unless he has education, is still a 'black boy'. In the civil service respectable men with families are called 'Caleb', and 'Williams' just like that because they happen to be on the subordinate staff. If anybody thinks the black man is satisfied with the status quo, he is mistaken. He wants a change in this social structure geared to help a few and hinder the many; he wants respect and recognition for his status. He may be deciding that if he is not respected he won't respect anyone. Above all he wants money and economic stability as a race. The saying 'The black man has no money' which is true now must not be true in the next thirty years. If a change cannot be effected by social evolution then it will become necessary to use the methods the white man has used so successfully in so many countries. Either way we are going to get what we want.

As for Mr Barham and the sacred, 'divinely' appointed lords and masters of our race, if they cannot tolerate the growing-pains that the black section of society is showing, we wish them G.o.d-speed, they may go in peace. Their threats and menaces will not deter us.

Finally let me say to all black people in this island that envy and abuse of the other races is not the answer to our problems. To solve our problem this is what we must do.

(i) Respect ourselves.

(ii) Support our own people first a others after. All other races do this.

(iii) Our men must show a greater sense of responsibility and physical courage.

(iv) We must develop our capacity for independent action and do not depend on government for everything.

(v) We must learn the value of 'group-consciousness' and be ready to sacrifice our personal and sectional interests for the good of the race.

(vi) We have got to wipe out illiteracy and cut illegitimacy among our people.

(vii) Promiscuity of our men and the looseness of our women is sapping the vitality of our race. Our young men need to marry earlier and bring up children in well-ordered homes: as it is our young men spend most of their time philandering, drinking and carousing generally.

(viii) Get into business a scrimp and save and expand.

Not a word, you notice, about the white and black piano keys making harmony together: so far has the nationalism of the twenties and thirties grown more embittered, so close has the intellectual moved to Ras Tafarianism.

I went to the country to talk to one of the communists 'in the field'. He received me in a box-like one-room office which stood on stilts and contained two tables, one chair, one typewriter and nothing else. He stood up and began delivering an oration with so many gestures and in such a loud voice that I begged him to sit down and speak more softly. He announced with a slightly crooked smile that he was a man with 'international connexions'. It had been a long drive, and I was too hot to be frightened or impressed. He said again that he had international connexions. I invited him to have a drink in the Chinese rumshop, where we would at least have more room. He made a speech about the evils of drink. I said if he didn't come I would go alone. He shut up his little office and we drove to the rumshop. He never gave a straight reply to any question and said with a smile that he had learned 'caution'. He spoke in pure metaphor. Were the communists gaining strength in his area? 'The river must flow,' he said. To another question he replied, 'We need petrol for the lamp of revolution.' At one stage he made a long speech about the oppression of the people and the inevitability of revolution. Were they getting help from Cuba? 'I have learned caution. I am a man with international connexions. Do you think you can bell the cat?' I felt they were getting no help from Cuba. I asked him how he started. Here he became more conversational and West Indian and told me of his wartime beginnings as an agitator among Jamaican airmen in the R.A.F. 'I used to be a sort of lawyer for the boys. Whenever they was in hany real trouble I used to tell them, "Boy, your only hope is to start bawling colour prejudice." ' The memory amused him. Then, speaking as of a triumph which was yet an injustice, he said, 'They push me up to a place in Scotland. Not one black man in the place.' At this stage I saw that the move to the rumshop was an error. The two foolish Jamaicans I had brought with me from Kingston for their local knowledge were drunk. They began to speak against communism in ear-splitting shouts, and my communist, absolutely sober, responded gamely with all his distorted Jamaican Welsh rhetoric. I left them and went to the bar and took some Phensic. The shouting went on. Drink, rhetoric, loud repet.i.tive argument: many of the Jamaican gatherings I went to ended like this.

So always in Jamaica one lived in two unrelated worlds, the world of the middle cla.s.s a the businessman's Jamaican-grand, pseudo-American talk, the women's chatter about the wages of servants and the treachery of servants a and the vaster, frightening world beyond it. You went to Caymanas for the Jamaica Turf Club meeting. You had to take another trip to the Caymanas of the sugar estates: the unemployed labourers in bright jerseys idling below a tree, their faces sullen with resignation, complaining without pa.s.sion about the destruction of their vegetable gardens by the estate: 'Young, young pumpkins,' they said, and made it sound like murder, though there was clearly another side to the story; the sign on the factory gate: 'Anyone found eating canes in the yard will be dismissed'; the beautiful black peasant woman with seven children by her 'present' and 'twelve in all, including abortions': 'They have no thought for us, down in the dust and the hashes.'

Beyond the world of refrigerators and motor-cars on hire-purchase ('Everybody's car-conscious,' an English girl told me), the hi-fi record players and the talk of Lawrence Durrell, one found the att.i.tudes, little changed from those which infuriated Trollope a hundred years ago, of people who objected to regular work and were content to live from hand to mouth. Like the man in the rumshop outside Mandeville who had given up his job with the bauxite company because it simply went on and on, and he preferred intermittent employment. 'When I left the bauxite people,' he said, 'I rested myself well for a month, taking my two waters (rum and water) every day.' Each world made the other unreal; and the radio services overlaid both with an atmosphere of fantasy. The breathless, opulent gaiety of the commercial jingles of Radio Jamaica; the quality service of the Jamaica Broadcasting Company, its talks, features, well-mannered discussions and news-a.n.a.lyses: they both belonged to a settled, confident society. I could not a.s.sociate them with the people or the land about me, and they seemed no more than irrelevant words and music in the overheated air.

I had been travelling around for nearly seven months. I was getting tired. In Jamaica my diary entries grew shorter and shorter and then stopped altogether. There was nothing new to record. Every day I saw the same things a unemployment, ugliness, overpopulation, race a and every day I heard the same circular arguments. The young intellectuals, whose gifts had been developed to enrich a developing, stable society, talked and talked and became frenzied in their frustration. They were looking for an enemy, and there was none. The pressures in Jamaica were not simply the pressures of race or those of poverty. They were the acc.u.mulated pressures of the slave society, the colonial society, the under-developed, over-populated agricultural country; and they were beyond the control of any one 'leader'. The situation required not a leader but a society which understood itself and had purpose and direction. It was only generating selfishness, cynicism and a self-destructive rage.

FINALE AT FRENCHMAN'S COVE One evening Dr Lewis, the Princ.i.p.al of the University College, said to me, 'I have an indirect invitation for you. From Grainger Weston. He owns a place on the North Coast called Frenchman's Cove and wants to offer hospitality to someone connected with the arts.'

I had heard about Frenchman's Cove almost as soon as I had got to Jamaica. In a land of expensive hotels a thirteen guineas a day for a cramped double room in Kingston and up to twenty pounds and more on the North Coast a Frenchman's Cove was said to be the most expensive. No one was sure just how expensive. Some said two thousand American dollars for a couple for a fortnight; some said two thousand five hundred. Lunch cost five guineas, dinner nine. And even so, one Jamaican told me with almost proprietorial pride, you were turned away if it was found that you weren't in the New York social register.

It seemed, though, that once you had been accepted and had paid, your every request was granted. You could order exactly what you wanted to eat ('caviare for breakfast'); you could drink as much as you wanted ('champagne every hour'); you could take boat trips and air trips around the island; motor-cars were at your disposal, horses, rafts; you could telephone any part of the world. You could even leave Frenchman's Cove, if you didn't like it, and stay at a hotel of your choice: Frenchman's paid.

For many days after Dr Lewis had spoken to me I heard nothing. A post office strike, one eruption of the prevailing unrest, was followed by a strike of government subordinate workers. I was resignedly preparing to investigate the problems of tourism in Jamaica when the strikes ended and Mr Weston's invitation came.

We took the mountain road to the North Coast and then drove east. This part of the coast is not greatly developed; hotels do not screen the sea. The sand is in places greyish, acceptable by the standards of England and even Trinidad, but disregarded locally. (There are unfounded complaints that hotels have bought up all the white sand beaches, leaving only black sand for Jamaicans: a neat symbol of the racial resentment tourism is exciting.) The road is narrow and winding, not like the tourist road that runs west from Ocho Rios to Montego Bay, which is wide and smooth and reasonably straight and carries hotel signs, real estate signs and signs reminding motorists to drive on the left. We drove past broken-down villages, the unremarkable rural slums of the tropics: decay in lushness: pink-distempered shacks of broken boards and rusting corrugated iron, more ambitious concrete buildings, ugly and stained, dingy cafes stocked with aerated water, cakes and patent medicines, and made bright with enamelled advertis.e.m.e.nts for soft drinks. We came into Port Antonio, a banana port which is seldom busy and had ceased to grow. Then bush and black sand began once more. It was hard to think of this as a setting for luxury, a hideout for millionaires.

Presently we found ourselves driving beside a long stone wall. Separate letters attached to the wall spelled out FRENCHMAN'S cove. We turned into the wide drive. The vegetation here was abruptly ordered and open. Beyond the asphalted area gravelled paths led up gentle inclines and disappeared. The grounds were quiet. There were two sports cars, one red, one cream, below the concrete canopy of the lodge, a low stone-and-gla.s.s building with clean straight lines. More cars were parked neatly in the sun. I looked with interest and apprehension for millionaires and members of the New York social register. I saw no one. The stillness was unsettling, but the driver behaved as though he drove up to Frenchman's Cove every day. He drove right under the canopy, came to a stop beside the gla.s.s entrance to the lodge, jumped out and opened doors and boot with a decisiveness and noise for which I was grateful.

A young Jamaican woman came out of the lodge. She said calmly, 'Welcome to Frenchman's Cove,' and gave me a letter. Thereafter things happened quickly. My driver was sent away. A Jamaican in black trousers, white s.h.i.+rt and a black bowtie put my luggage on a small white electric car; I sat down; and with my luggage and myself quite exposed, we drove out from under the canopy into the sunlight and up the narrow gravelled path, hearing no sound except the whirring of the motor. We followed the path where it branched right, went past a pale-green shadowed pool, then up an incline between trees. I had a glimpse of the beach: a break in the coral cliff, the water blue shading into green and almost colourless where it touched the white sand. Black canvas chairs stood in the shade of almond trees; but the beach was deserted. Climbing higher, we drove at the edge of a lawn planted with young coconut palms. Then up a sharp incline over-arched by more trees, and we came to a house. 'This is your cottage,' the driver said, stopping at the foot of the concrete steps. Throughout the drive I had seen no one.

My cottage was a complex of two grey stone cottages and a stone-and-gla.s.s house, set at different levels. The cottages were on either side of the steps, the house at the top. The stone was handcut, the blocks of varying sizes, the mortar deeply recessed. The black door of the house opened and a middle-aged Jamaican woman in spectacles, pink dress and a small white ap.r.o.n, smiled welcomingly.

I went in and found myself in a large high room almost at the edge of a coral cliff. The wall overlooking the sea was of gla.s.s. The terrace was set in the coral, which looked like foam rubber.

I looked at the furnis.h.i.+ngs: the low, plain, inviting chairs and sofa set on three sides of an Indian carpet with an un-Indian design, the tall lamps with pottery bases and large linen shades, the gla.s.s table spread with magazines and books (The Power Elite among them). It was familiar because ideal; one had known it from the escapist magazines of design; and because ideal it was a little separate from reality. The unexpected setting made the separation complete. Beyond the gla.s.s wall and rising, it seemed, out of the grey coral, were the almond trees, most artificial-looking of tropical trees, with round leaves, green and copper, set symmetrically on horizontal branches, and between the leaves one saw the high irregular cliffs, the blue sky, the limpid, dancing blue-and-green sea.

From disordered bush along the winding Jamaican road, to a drive in a comic white car through silent, deserted, landscaped grounds, to a stone-and-gla.s.s house with a view of the sea below: it was as though one had driven out of Jamaica, as though, to find the West Indies of the tourist's ideal, one had had to leave the West Indies.

Yielding to the serenity, the feeling of abrupt transference, I had not thought it strange that although moments ago it was warm, it was now cool, and though the sea below was restless, it made no sound. Now I saw that the house was completely enclosed and air-conditioned.

I read the letter the secretary in the lodge had given me. It welcomed me more formally, told me how I could get what I wanted, asked me not to tip, and gave the name of our housekeeper. Then I took up the Visitors' Book. Among its few names I saw those of a Rockefeller and the Diefenbakers.

'You will like it here,' the housekeeper, Mrs Williams, said. 'And that,' she added, 'is the telephone.'

Instantly I knew that this was the instrument, the Aladdin's lamp of Frenchman's Cove about whose powers ('champagne every hour') all Jamaica knew. 'Anything you want,' Mrs Williams said, 'you just take up the telephone and ask for.'