Caribbean (138 page)

Some men in the group offered ingenious suggestions for new industries, but were told that most had been tried, disastrously, so as the discussion ended she offered her own solution: “The industrial nations of the world, but especially the United States, because these lands are at her doorstep, ought to band together to buy our sugar at just a little over world price. A few cents a pound would allow all the islands you’ll be seeing to prosper … save them from revolution or worse.”

“Does anyone pay that now?” a man asked, and she replied: “Russia buys from Cuba, a little over world, Cuba thrives. France does the same with her two big colonies, Guadeloupe and Martinique. But the United States refuses. Sugar-beet interests in states like Colorado won’t allow it.” She hesitated, then added: “So we stagger along toward a disaster whose timing we cannot predict, but whose coming is inevitable. We’re a fleet of magnificent islands, lost in the sun.”

But even as she uttered this doleful prediction she turned to go
down from the plateau where Vavak had labored under those terrible laws of Denmark, and she saw to the north and east the wonderful little islands of the British Virgins, Great Thatch, Little Thatch, big Tortola and the rest, and she thought: Vavak must have seen them a thousand times and wondered what was over there, but they were never mentioned in our family. My God, they are magnificent, a chain of jewels, and as the Caribbean had a way of doing, the present beauty erased the old ugliness.

But not entirely, for when Thérèse’s group piled into their taxis to catch the ferry that would take them back to St. Thomas and the
Galante
, they found themselves caught in another of the ugly cheats which irritate experienced Caribbean travelers and scare away the novices. Vavak’s plantation, Lunaberg, was on the extreme northern edge of St. John, the ferry depot at the opposite end, and at the start of the trip the taxi drivers had agreed upon a price, fearfully high Thérèse thought, and everyone assumed it was for the round trip—ferry landing and back—but now the drivers carried the travelers to a way station far from the ferry, and said: “You get out here.”

“But we want the ferry!” Thérèse protested, and they laughed: “Trip always ends here.”

“How do we get back to the ferry?”

“He might do it,” one of the men said, and pointed to a confederate, who said yes, he could deliver them to the ferry, three trips, twenty-seven dollars. Before they could protest this holdup, the three original drivers had fled, so that they had to pay the extra fee or miss the sailing of the cruise ship.

When the angry passengers reported their mistreatment to the ship’s officers, one young Swede took them aside and said: “You’ll find that sort of petty cheating wherever you go in the Caribbean. They want tourist dollars but they treat tourists like scum. By the way, Miss Vaval, the police did retrieve your handbag and papers.” She was so relieved to have her cards back that she actually felt grateful toward the thieves: “It was decent of them to return my credit cards,” and the officer said: “We have reason to believe the thief was the brother of the policeman. Small dark fellow with a mustache?” “Yes, I saw him clearly.” Then the officer grinned: “When he grabs a handbag we always get the papers back. His brother sees to it. But beware, on other islands it can be much worse.”

The three academic credits that students could acquire for “Cruise-and-Muse” were not easily won: in addition to the two weeks of classroom study at Miami, and the submission of a sixty-page report within a month after the end of the cruise, the students were given a long reading list by the six lecturers. For her reading list, Thérèse had assigned four nicely differentiated books chosen for high quality and familiarity with English: Germán Arciniegas’ view of the Caribbean as seen in 1946 by a Spanish scholar,
Caribbean, Sea of the New World;
a recent Yale University publication,
Prospect for the Caribbean
, by a local specialist, Ranjit Banarjee from the University of the West Indies; Alec Waugh’s 1955 saucy but instructive novel of Caribbean life,
Island in the Sun;
and a remarkable book which few today would otherwise know,
The English in the West Indies
, 1887, by one of the crustiest, most opinionated historians ever to lift a pen, James Anthony Froude. The literary executor and biographer of Thomas Carlyle, he had adopted that surly gentleman’s near-Nazi inclinations and applied them sulfurously to the Caribbean.

“His opinions,” Thérèse warned her students when placing copies of his book in the corner of the ship’s library reserved for those taking the cruise for credit, “are outrageous, and some are downright infuriating, but it’s refreshing to know what learned and cultured gentlemen thought of this part of the world back when quote ‘things were so good’ unquote. Read and enjoy, but please do not spit on his preposterous pages or throw the book overboard.”

After such an introduction the students became immersed in Froude, and during the next few days Thérèse heard squeals of outrage as one student after another discovered the obiter dicta of brother Froude, who despised slaves, anyone with a drop of color in his blood, Catholics, Baptists, Indians from India, liberals, and with special venom, any Irishmen or Haitians. One student found what seemed to be Froude’s leitmotif: “The English have proved that they can play a great and useful role as rulers over people who recognize their own inferiority.”

When Michael Carmody heard the rumpus being made over Froude’s hideous statements about the Irish, he asked one of the students: “How can a mere book create so much confusion?” and after he had looked into what Froude was saying, he asked: “What other books did your professor assign?” and was delighted to learn that she had selected a work by one of his former students. Seeking her out, he found Thérèse on the sun deck watching the sky, and asked: “May
I take this chair?” and she nodded. Seated beside her, he asked: “How did you learn of Ranjit Banarjee’s study?” and she explained:

“Yale University plugged the book heavily among Caribbean scholars, and rightly so. It’s a fine work, and I was looking for something by a Jamaican.”

“He’s Trinidadian.”

“But I’m sure the blurb said University of the West Indies.”

“It could just as properly have said University of Miami and reared in Trinidad.”

“That must account for his breadth of vision. It’s an eye-opening book for my young people.”

“It is indeed. And when we make our stop in Trinidad for Carnaval, you must meet him.”

“Where does he teach?” She noticed that when she asked this question, a slight frown skittered across Carmody’s face, as if he had at some point been at odds with the author of the book. After some undue hesitation, the Irishman said: “It’s quite unfathomable, really. He has no university affiliation.”

“High school?”

“No, he’s like so many Indian Ph.D.’s, especially in India—fabulously trained but unable to locate an opening.” Thérèse saw that he obviously wanted to say more, and again she suspected that he had been in some way responsible for Banarjee’s loss of a job or, even more ugly, had caught the Indian in some misbehavior that made him unemployable, but since Carmody seemed to have decided not to talk about it, she ended the conversation lamely: “Well, he’s written the best book I’ve come across since Arciniegas’ years ago.”

As Carmody rose to leave, he said: “I must congratulate you. If a student digests your four books, she or he will have a good grasp of the Caribbean, but now I want to hear the French version of the story,” and he invited her to accompany him to Senator Lanzerac’s first lecture. The senator spoke formal English, but with a mesmerizing French accent which he used to maximum effect:

A man who knew geography asked the question which must have been on many minds: “Why, if you were so close to Martinique and so affiliated, did you allow the island in the middle, Dominica, to remain in English hands?” Lanzerac chuckled and cried: “Ah ha! You’re the one who asks the ugly question, and I’ll give you the ugly answer.

“We tried many times to capture Dominica, and failed every time. Do you know why? Not that English arms were better than ours, but because the damned Carib Indians, fierce cannibals, ate our men every time we tried to land.”

“How did the English manage?” the man persisted, and Lanzerac said: “Because the Caribs were sensible, like people today. They liked French cooking and they couldn’t stand English.”

A vacationing professor from Chicago asked: “I’ve read some fascinating accounts of this man Victor Hugues who seems to have invaded your island in the 1790s. Will you be telling us anything about him?”

“Indeed I shall. Early tomorrow, when we land at Point-à-Pitre, capital of the eastern island, I’ll be giving a short talk there on the infamous Hugues, who chopped off the head of my ancestor Paul Lanzerac and did his best to do the same to his wife, Eugénie Lanzerac. In my family we have no love for Hugues, but his story is a gripping one and you may find it instructive.”

Later, Thérèse sat with him at dinner, and asked: “Didn’t this Hugues free the slaves on Guadeloupe?” and Lanzerac cried with some enthusiasm: “He certainly did! Celebrations. A new day in world history. ‘I kill all the whites, free all the slaves.’ ”

“From my point of view,” Thérèse said with a touch of humor, “he couldn’t have been so bad,” and Lanzerac agreed immediately: “Splendid fellow, on paper. Of course, when Napoleon decided to
reimpose slavery, who was his loudest supporter?” He pointed a sardonic finger at Thérèse and supplied his own answer: “Your boy Hugues. And if I may use an Americanism to a fellow scholar … a real bastard.”

The traditional Caribbean cruise ships, in order to save port fees, almost never remained in any harbor overnight; they left at dusk and spent the dark hours sailing to the next island. But since “Cruise-and-Muse” had scheduled several important seminars on French history and culture at Guadeloupe, the ship spent two days on Grande-Terre, and Lanzerac immediately did something which established the quality of the visit: he conducted his lectures in the open area about the kiosk at the center of the marvelous square in Point-à-Pitre, and as he spoke, surrounded by the handsome old houses in which his ancestors had lived, he made the wild days of Victor Hugues come alive: “In 1794 he erected his guillotine right there where you’re standing. He dragged my famous Lanzerac forebear from that house there. In 1894 my grandfather was expelled from that other house when he married a young woman of color.” Later a student reported to Thérèse: “A morning in the public square at Point-à-Pitre is worth a seminar in the library at Duke.”

On the second evening she suggested that she and Senator Lanzerac hold a colloquy ashore for the students to which townspeople would also be invited, and since she spoke fluent French, he saw this as a fine opportunity to do some campaigning for the next election. So the parish hall was filled, with a bilingual islander translating in whispers for the students.

The forum provided Lanzerac with a springboard from which to glorify the Guadeloupean form of government: “If you take every governmental unit in the Caribbean today, and I mean even Venezuela and Colombia as well as the mixed-up Central American nations and Cuba, the best governed, it seems to me, are the French islands. Becoming a structural part of metropolitan France (in 1946), just as if we bordered on the Rhone, helped us work out some difficult economic problems. We also have developed pragmatic solutions to the race problem, and we enjoy an unfettered freedom. We have no religious riots, no turmoil in the streets.”

“Can your young people get a good education here?” a student asked, and Lanzerac replied as elders had in Point-à-Pitre for the last two hundred years: “Our bright boys we send back to the metropolitan
for their education. I got mine in a fine little mountain village on the Italian border, Barcelonnette, if you care to look it up.”

“Why do that?” the interrogator pursued, and Lanzerac replied: “Because it binds us to France.”

“But do you consider yourself French or Guadeloupean?” and he replied: “French. I’m a citizen of France.” Then he smiled disarmingly: “Of course, if my grandfather hadn’t married a very lovely creole girl with golden-colored skin, I’d not be able to get elected to the senate here.”