The Middle Passage (4 page)

The barman vented his rage on two small emigrant children who had drifted into the bar, still in their fussy emigrant clothes. He lifted the counter flap, shooed the young emigrants to the door, and, blind to their charm, lifted them firmly and with an expression of distaste out on to the deck.

Sometimes for as much as three months at a time a slave ship would move from anchorage to anchorage on the West African coast, picking up its cargo. The
Francisco Bobadilla
would be only five days. It would go from St Kitts to Grenada to Trinidad to Barbados: one journey answering another: the climax and futility of the West Indian adventure. For nothing was created in the British West Indies, no civilization as in Spanish America, no great revolution as in Haiti or the American colonies. There were only plantations, prosperity, decline, neglect: the size of the islands called for nothing else.

What are the points in the history of an island like Jamaica? ‘This isle,’ we are told in 1597, in
A True Relation of the Voyage Undertaken by Sir Anthony Shirley
, ‘is a marvellous fertil Isle, & is as a garden or store house for divers parts of the maine. We have not found in the Indies a more pleasant and holsome place.’ From that, to Trollope in 1859: ‘If we could, we would fain forget Jamaica altogether. But there it is; a spot on the earth not to be lost sight of or forgotten altogether, let us wish it ever so much.’ From Trollope in 1859 to the Ras Tafarian of 1959, who rejects Jamaica entirely and wishes to return to Africa, to a heaven called Ethiopia: ‘Jamaica was a nice island, but the land has been polluted by centuries of crime.’

When Columbus put his ideas to King John II of Portugal in 1483, King John, telling Columbus nothing, sent a ship out into the Atlantic. Within weeks of the discovery of the New World in 1492, Columbus’s companion Pinzôn, deserting, took the
Pinta
off on his own to look for gold in an unknown sea. And there, in the treachery of the Portuguese king, in Pinzôn’s courage, treachery and greed, are all the elements of the European adventure in this part of the New World.

There is a myth, derived from the Southern states of America, of the gracious culture of the slave society. In the West Indian islands slavery and the latifundia created only grossness, men who ate ‘like cormorants’ and drank ‘like porpoises’; a society without standards, without noble aspirations, nourished by greed and cruelty: a society of whose illiteracy metropolitan administrators continued to complain right until the middle of the last century; illiteracy which encouraged Governor Vaughan of Jamaica to suggest the placing of a collection of books in the English language ‘in the most conspicuous places where such of the gentry as are studious may always resort, since there is nothing more ridiculous than ignorance in a person of quality’; grossness to which traveller after traveller testifies and which made a seventeenth-century observer say of Barbados: ‘This Iland is the Dunghill whareone England doth cast forth its rubidg: Rodgs and hors and such like peopel are those which are gennerally Broght heare. A rodge in England will hardly make a cheater heare; a Baud brought over puts one a demuor comportment, a whore if hansume makes a wife for sume rich planter.’
*

How can the history of this West Indian futility be written? What tone shall the historian adopt? Shall he be as academic as Sir Alan Burns, protesting from time to time at some brutality, and setting West Indian brutality in the context of European brutality? Shall he, like Salvador de Madariaga, weigh one set of brutalities against another, and conclude that one has not been described in all its foulness and that this is unfair to Spain? Shall he, like the West Indian historians, who can only now begin to face their history, be icily detached and tell the story of the slave trade as if it were just another aspect of mercantilism? The history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies.

*    *    *

In the morning I was calmer. The emigrants had got out of their going-away clothes and were sitting in the sun in simpler, less constricting garments, so that the deck looked like a West Indian slum street on a Sunday. One or two of the women had even put on slacks; the cloth was new, not yet washed, and one could detect the suitcase folds.

I fell into conversation with a man who was wearing khaki trousers, blue shirt and unlaced white canvas shoes. He was very big, with thick hands and slow thick speech. He was a baker. In a good week he could make thirty dollars. This I thought to be a very good wage in the West Indies, and I wondered why he had given up his job to go to England.

‘Look, eh,’ he said. ‘I ask God, you hear. I went down on my two knees and ask God. And I always do what God tell me. Don’t mind the Jamaicans gone and stink up England. I bound to get through. Morning and evening I does go down on my two knees and consult God.’ His eyes became smaller, fixed on the horizon, and he was slowly raising his enormous hands in what could have been a suppliant or a strangulatory gesture.

I tried to change the subject to baking.

He didn’t listen. In biblical language he spoke of his religious experiences and his colloquies with God. Then, breaking off, he asked, ‘You know Sloughbucks?’

‘Slough, Bucks?’

‘Is there I going. You think they have bakeries there? How much you think they would start me off at? Twelve pounds? Fifteen?’ ‘I don’t know. You could bake good bread?’ ‘With the help of the Lord.’

He worried me. But many of the emigrants I spoke to had consulted God and He had advised them to throw up their jobs – no one I spoke to was unemployed – and go to Sloughbucks. In Sloughbucks wages were high. And once they made it clear that they were not Jamaicans, they would be treated with regard. Only Jamaicans were beaten up in race riots, and deservedly, for they were uneducated and ungrateful and provoked the English people.
*

The young Baptist missionary, with his collar on, worked hard that morning, explaining in what direction England play, where London was, and unscrambling the apocalyptic name of Sloughbucks. He drew innumerable diagrams of the London Underground, and advised one man against taking a taxi from Southampton to Sloughbucks.

From the St Kitts
Labour Spokesman
(‘Sound Speech That Cannot Be Condemned’ – Titus ii, 8), 14 September 1960:

Encouraged by the example of the missionary, I went among the emigrants after lunch – they were fed at long tables, in relays:
‘Son buena gente
, they are good folk,’ a member of the crew said – to find out what had made them leave St Kitts, what they hoped to find in England. I had no official position, no clerical collar, and I attracted the attention of the emigrants’ leader, a tall, high-bottomed brown-skinned young man.

‘Don’t tell him nothing,’ he said, running up, some of his flock at his heels. ‘Don’t tell him nothing. What he want?’

He was an educated man. He travelled first. He spoke very quickly.

‘What you want? Why you discouraging the poor people?’

He didn’t give me a chance to speak.

‘The poor people just come on board the ship and you discouraging them?’

‘I wasn’t doing nothing, and he came up and start asking me all sort of question. Why I was going to England and things like that.’ This was from the God-inspired baker.

‘Don’t worry with him,’ said the leader. ‘He is a propagandist.’

This appeared to be a well-known word of abuse among the emigrants.

‘What happen, man?’

‘We pick up a propagandist.’

‘A propagandist?’

‘You come from Kenya, nuh?’ the leader asked. ‘I bet you you come from Kenya.’

‘He call me a nigger,’ a man said. (I had jotted down his details on the
Labour Spokesman
an emigrant had given me: $3.90 a day during the crop season, $2.82 during the slack season. His destination was Sloughbucks. He had not consulted God.)

‘What is this? What is this?’

‘A propagandist from Kenya called Boysie a nigger.’

‘He call me a nigger,’ Boysie said, his voice now touched with genuine hurt.

‘Well, this ain’t Kenya, you hear,’ the leader said. ‘I mad to get the boys to give you a ducking. The British Government send you out here as a propagandist, eh? Let him prove that he don’t come from Kenya?’

I was rescued by the missionary.

‘I know the type of provocator,’ the leader said, addressing his flock. ‘He don’t care about the poor people. He don’t care that a hurricane blow way the whole of Anguilla.’

I decided that the attitude of Mr Mackay and Philip and Correia and most of the tourist class was healthier. They had ignored the emigrants altogether, and were in the bar. I joined them.

‘That Baptist boy keeping busy like hell,’ Correia said. ‘He must be really like the work.’

‘He say he would like to go up England with them,’ Philip said. ‘Better he than me,’ Mr Mackay said. ‘Tomorrow afternoon please God I getting off this ship, and that is that.’

It was from the emigrants’ leader that I first heard of the hurricane, Donna, which had struck Anguilla and caused many deaths. The
Labour Spokesman
carried further details: the cables received and sent, and an account of the rescue operations. The cables interested me; for their style, first of all: an early longwindedness, urgency expressing itself only towards the end, in the omission of a few prepositions; and because they showed the delight West Indian politicians take in their new titles. St Kitts is sixty-eight square miles, Montserrat thirty-two.

And so it went on, an exchange of salutations. Mr Manley of Jamaica was more positive:

The Chief Minister of St Kitts was determined to show Mr Manley more honour than Mr Manley had shown him:

Another cable repaired omissions.

The story was rounded off by an article on the relief work. The writer was Mr John Brown who, according to an announcement in the same paper, was lecturing, even while the boatloads of emigrants were rocking in the shadow of the
Francisco Bobadilla
, on ‘Dialect, Drama and West Indian Culture’ and was inaugurating a Literary Club.

I had some idea who the ‘etc.’ were. But the Jaycees were new to me. It was hard, on this immigrant ship, to associate the West Indies with well-dressed young businessmen, well-dressed and helpful young wives, and well-publicized acts of public service.

The emigrants’ leader had his tea in the first-class dining room. He had excellent manners and skipped no part of the tea ritual. His followers peered approvingly through the windows at him. He concentrated on his tea. Sitting apart from us, and without the occasion to talk, he looked a little constrained. But I felt he would go far and that one day he too would be sending off cables. As soon as he had finished his tea and had daintily pressed a paper napkin to his lips, he rejoined his followers and started jabbering again, walking round and round the deck. We had occasional glimpses of his high bottom bobbing up and down outside windows. Then the class barriers on the deck came down and his walks were cut short. He stayed with his followers in their reserve.