Caribbean (89 page)

As soon as Pembroke recognized him at the head of the group of St. Ann farmers, most of whom lived just over the border from the parish in which Trevelyan stood, he realized there might be trouble, for Gordon’s jaw was fiercely set.

Gordon was a tough man, having come up the tough way. His father had been a sniveling white man who had slipped into an alliance with one of his female slaves, by whom he had seven children. But later in life, when he had accumulated a little money, he threw the slave woman and her brood out of his house, married a white woman, and refused ever to allow any of his half-caste children, George William among them, entrance to his new home. Even so, when the father fell into financial trouble, he came whimpering to his son, begging the money which would allow him to maintain decency. In the meantime, the young man had so prospered in various business enterprises that he was able to finance not only the purchase of a home for his father, but also to assist in the care of the latter’s white wife and children. Such a man could not be dismissed with contempt, despite his unfortunate color.

Pembroke sought to be congenial, inviting the black and colored farmers into the mansion, where he called for refreshments as he listened to the mournful reason for their visit. “You are the wisest member of the council, Mr. Pembroke,” one of the farmers said, “and you know our land in St. Ann better than anyone else except maybe Parson Gordon, who preaches there now and again. We are hardworking men, but we need land for our crops. Thousands of acres lie fallow there, no one working them. When emancipation came years ago we were supposed to receive that land … to buy it if necessary. We’ve saved. We have the money to buy it if the price is reasonable. But the government will not break it loose for us. They tell us: ‘Your role is to work for the white man at whatever wages he chooses to pay you.’ Well, there are no white plantation owners in St. Ann to hire us, and no land on which we can grow our own crops.”

On and on went the pitiful complaints, which could have been echoed in each of Jamaica’s parishes. When emancipation came to the British Caribbean in 1834, the former slaves had been tricked into believing that land would be made available to them, but the Legislative Assembly, composed in large part of white plantation owners and their half-caste employees, refused to cede any land, and the lower classes had no recourse. At one point Jamaica had 450,000 citizens, but only 753 were eligible to vote, and they did not propose to turn land over to the Baptist followers of Preacher Gordon, whom they despised.

Pembroke, understanding these matters, listened attentively to the farmers, and when they finished he suggested that they retire and draft a courteous letter to Queen Victoria, laying out their problems and their views as to how they could be solved. When Gordon volunteered to write the letter, Pembroke said gently: “I think not, sir. You’re known as a radical, and I’d be reluctant to submit one of your agitations to the queen, even though I believe you to be right.”

So with Pembroke’s help the letter was drafted, a sensible, restrained appeal for help in time of drought and a respectful prayer that the queen would release some crown lands, which they would then cultivate with their hearts and hands and remit the required rents. When it was read aloud, the farmers agreed that it represented both their cause and their affection for the queen, and they believed that she would listen favorably. Preacher Gordon felt that it could have been stronger, but Pembroke assured him that this was the proper way to address a queen whose generosity was known to all: “I will forward it through proper channels, and I can assure you she will respond.” And the rump meeting dissolved with mutual congratulations.

Two days later Oliver Croome strode into Trevelyan, his face livid: “What in the name of hell have you done, Jason?”

“What do you mean?”

“That petition to the queen. The one that swine Gordon wrote for the St. Ann people.”

“But I wrote it. In proper tone, I believe.”

“You! God, Pembroke, are you out of your mind? Don’t you realize that those people are all Baptists echoing the lies of that Underhill report? Those people are revolutionaries. Do you want another Haiti on your hands?”

When Pembroke tried to remonstrate with him, saying that he had helped them draft their letter for the precise reason of avoiding
revolution, Croome cut him short: “Jason, you don’t understand the nigger question, and as a member of the council you ought to think about it more clearly. This might help,” and he thrust into Jason’s hands one of the most amazing products of British intellectualism. It had been written sixteen years earlier, in 1849, the year of great revolutions across Europe, and was obviously influenced by those uprisings of the lower orders. It was entitled “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” and was written by Thomas Carlyle, the Scotsman famous for his advocacy of hero worship as a guide to personal and national life. He was also a strong believer in the British right to rule those he lumped together as lesser breeds. And he thought it proper for men to make decisions and for women and children to obey.

As Jason started to read Carlyle’s rantings, Croome said: “I’ll inspect how you make your great Trevelyan rum,” and left his cousin alone in his study.

Quickly Jason caught on to the author’s two code words. All blacks, especially freed slaves, were called Quashee, a euphonious name which one of the African tribes used for any child born on Sunday. Carlyle apparently liked the word for the humorous way it dismissed any black to whom it was applied, for he used it almost ad nauseam in his vitriolic comments. He had also picked up, possibly from some visiting cotton or sugar plantation owner from the Carolinas, the idea that blacks spent all their time lolling in the shade eating watermelon, but since Carlyle had never seen a watermelon, he confused it with a pumpkin and filled his essay with humorous references to Quashee and his pumpkins.

Jason frequently gasped as he continued to read the essay, for he could not believe that an intelligent Briton could write such trash: “Our beautiful Black darlings are at last happy; with little labour except to the teeth, which surely in those excellent horse-jaws of theirs, will not fail!” “With a penny-worth of oil you can make a handsome, glossy thing of Quashee.” “No, the gods wish that besides pumpkins, that spices and valuable products be grown in their West Indies. Infinitely more they wish, that manful industrious men occupy their West Indies, not indolent two-legged cattle, however happy over their abundant pumpkins.”

Then came the crux of Carlyle’s solution to the “nigger question”: “Quashee, if he will not help in bringing out the spices, will get himself made a slave again, and with beneficent whip, since other methods avail not, will be compelled to work.” In other words, Carlyle,
a devotee of the master-race theory, was calling for the reimposition of slavery, at least in the West Indies, where lack of slaves had slowed the sugar industry.

He then rhapsodized over the brave British men who had brought civilization to the islands: “Before the West Indies could grow a pumpkin for any Negro, how much European heroism had to spend itself in obscure battle … Under the soil of Jamaica, before it could even produce spices or any pumpkin, the bones of many thousand British men had to be laid. How they would have rejoiced to think that all this was to issue in growing pumpkins to keep Quashee in comfortably idle condition!”

In fiery sentences Carlyle spelled out his vision of the world: “My obscure Black friends, you will have to be servants to those who are born
wiser
than you, that are born lords of you; servants to the Whites, if they are (as what mortal man can doubt that they are?) born wiser than you. That is the Law of the World, to be servants, the more foolish to the more wise.”

So sorely was Jason Pembroke shaken when he finished this incredible screed that he went outside and shouted to his cousin: “This is appalling—making fun of human beings, speaking of them as if they were horses, calling for the reinstitution of slavery.”

“Wait a minute! Do you want what happened in Haiti to happen here? Or another Indian Mutiny? Carlyle speaks the truth, the hard ugly truth. Niggers are really little better than animals, and if they won’t work our fields at the wages we propose, they must be made to work, and if that means bringing slavery back, so be it. They asked for it.”

Shocked by Oliver’s vehement adoption of all that Carlyle had said, Jason inadvertently stumbled onto the one name that would infuriate his cousin: “No wonder Gordon makes headway with the blacks.”

“Gordon!” Oliver bellowed as if stabbed near the kidney. “Are you listening to that ranting fool? People like you say he was kind to his white father. But did you know that he had money only because he stole land and houses from that father? Did you know that he had his workers run down the values of all the father’s farms so that the old man had to sell at a great loss? And who bought? Gordon.”

His contempt for the troublemaker was fathomless, but he saved till last his harshest condemnations: “Are you aware, Jason, that his wife is a white woman … that he married her to improve his position
in the community? And have you heard that in his sermons he often ridicules our established church with his Baptist heresies? And are you aware that in his constant agitation he casts aspersions on our beloved queen? That man should be destroyed, and I’m amazed you allowed him in your house.”

“But don’t you think,” Jason asked quietly, in an effort to lower the temperature of his cousin’s rhetoric, “that your Thomas Carlyle is just as damaging, preaching his hatred?” and Oliver answered: “But they are niggers, Jason.”

When Pembroke delivered the supplication of his St. Ann neighbors to Governor Eyre, that officer thanked him, but as soon as Pembroke was gone, he summoned Oliver Croome, and four like-minded planters who thought like Carlyle, to help frame the Jamaican comment on the farmers’ appeal to the queen, and they, drawing heavily on “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” undercut everything the supplicants had said, assuring the queen that all was well in Jamaica and that the protest came almost exclusively from disaffected blacks and half-castes who were Baptists. “Not one gentleman or plantation owner in the entire island would demean himself by signing such an impertinent letter.” And off it went.

It would never be known for certain who drafted the reply to the starving farmers, but since it was delivered to Jamaica as Victoria’s personal response to their pleas, it became known in history as The Queen’s Advice:

Not a word about starvation, never a promise to release land locked in idleness, for the plantation owners argued that if the blacks got
hold of land for their own use, they would no longer work the sugar fields and rum distilleries. Only that terribly cruel command: “Work for your white masters when they want you, for as long as they want you, and at whatever wages they graciously offer.” Jason Pembroke, on finishing his reading of the letter, muttered: “It could have been written by Thomas Carlyle.”

When Governor Eyre showed The Queen’s Advice to Croome and some of his more conservative friends, they exulted over the fact that Victoria had adopted much of their phraseology, and they loudly agreed with Eyre when he said: “Well, I think that answers the agitations of Brother Gordon.” Eyre approved when Croome suggested: “It’s so clear, so fair that we must put copies of it on trees and buildings throughout the island,” giving authority to print up fifty thousand broadsheets. Croome and his friends arrogantly rushed to all corners of the island, posting these conspicuously and with a final flourish of the hammer as if to shout: “Well, that takes care of your silly petition!”

But when Pembroke saw what was being done, and the sullen rage with which the farmers, the little people and the undernourished mothers read the letter and sometimes spat upon it, he said to himself: It will be worse than Haiti. And he leaped on his horse and rode to Kingston to seek out Preacher Gordon: “My friend, I have grown to respect what you’re trying to do, so for God’s sake watch your step in the weeks ahead. Keep your lips sealed.”

“Why, in the face of such an insulting message from the queen?”

“Because she is the queen. And because men of great power wish you silent.” Then, to ease Gordon’s disappointment and disgust, he uttered a fatal sentence, which when quoted by agitated blacks and coloreds would account for two hundred of their deaths: “And you can be sure that the queen did not write that letter.” With that, he turned and rode back to his plantation, where he tried to reassure his own workers that the queen could never have written that cruel a reply.

The fifty thousand broadsheets which had been nailed to trees and meeting boards were intended, by the foolish writer who composed the letter, by Governor Eyre, who had provided the outline of the response, and by wealthy men like Oliver Croome who circulated it so enthusiastically, to stifle dissent over the harsh way in which Jamaica
was being governed. Croome insisted, after a long excursion into the western parishes: “If they can read, they will applaud the queen’s intelligent response, and if they can’t read, her words can be explained to them. Either way, there should be an end to fruitless discussion and ridiculous claims for land and the distribution of food that hasn’t been properly earned,” and even other plantation owners better informed than he believed the famous Advice had solved all problems for the next decade.

It had quite the opposite effect, because the farmers of St. Ann who had helped draft the original petition saw at once that the queen had evaded answering every one of their complaints: “How can we work if no work is offered? How can we be industrious if we’re allowed no land on which to prove ourselves?”