Caribbean: a novel Part 1

Caribbean.

a_novel.

James A. Michener.

This book is dedicated to the gentle memory of ALEC WAUGH.

who told me when we were working together in Hawaii in 1959.

'Someday you must write about my Caribbean.'

FACT AND FICTION.

Though it is based on fact, this novel uses fictional events, places and characters. The following paragraphs endeavor to clarify which is which.

I. Croton. The peaceful Arawaks were overrun by the warrior Caribs at about the time indicated. There is historical evidence for the life of the two tribes as portrayed. All characters are fictional.

II. Maya. Tulm, Cozumel, Chichen Itza and Palenque are historic sites accurately portrayed. All characters are fictional.

III. Columbus. Cristbal Coln, King Ferdinand, Francisco de Bobadilla and the heroic canoeist Diego Mendez are historic characters; all others are fictional. Coln was heavily investigated and was sent home a prisoner.

IV. Spanish Lake. Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake are historic, as is Viceroy Martn Enriquez, their Spanish adversary at San Juan de Ula. All other Spanish characters are fictional. The exploits of Drake are accurately summarized.

V. Barbados. Lord Francis Willoughby, Sir George Ayscue and Prince Rupert are historic, all others are fictional. The various events are historic and are accurately presented.

VI. Buccaneers. Henry Morgan and his various raids are historic and are accurately portrayed. All other characters are fictional. The circ.u.mnavigation of South America occurred, but with real buccaneers and in about the same route and elapsed time as given.

VII. Sugar. Admiral Edward Vernon, General Thomas Wentworth and the Spanish naval hero Don Blas de Lezo are historic, and their confrontation at Cartagena is accurately portrayed. The great Beckford and Dawkins planter families are accurately depicted. William Pitt (the Elder) is historic, as were the Danish rules for disciplining slaves. All other characters are fictional.

VIII. Nelson. Horatio Nelson, Admiral Sir Edward Hughes and Mrs. Nisbet are historic. All others are fictional, but everything said about Nelson and his frantic search for a wealthy wife is based on fact.

IX. Guadeloupe. Victor Hugues was a real man, but while sources agree on his behavior during the French Revolution, both in France and in the islands, they vary as to his early years. Some deny that he had ever been a barber in Haiti. All other characters are fictional, but the grisly events in Guadeloupe are historic and Hugues did die a strong reactionary in responsible office.

X. Haiti. The black General Toussaint L'Ouverture, Napoleon's General Charles Le Clerc and his wife Pauline Bonaparte, the English General Thomas Maitland and the black voodoo leader Boukman are all historic, as was the ill-fated Polish battalion. All other characters are fictional, but the various swings of war and the ultimate black victory are accurately described.

XI. Martial Law in Jamaica. Only the two plantation owners, Jason Pembroke and Oliver Croome, are fictional. Governor Edward John Eyre and all others are historic, especially the leaders of the debate in London: Tennyson and Carlyle of the pro-Eyre forces, Mill of the antis. Their att.i.tudes are reported accurately. The actions of the two murderous martial-law enforcers, Hobbs and Ramsay, are historic, including their suicides. The ugly opinions of Carlyle can be found in his writings.

XII. Letters at All Saints. The island itself is purely fictional, a composite of several real places. All characters are fictional, except that the great black cricketer Sir Benny Castain is based upon four real black athletes of considerable fame.

XIII. Trinidad Scholar. The events and the characters who partic.i.p.ate in them are totally fictional, but the two universities, West Indies and Miami, are faithfully presented. Events relating to the fraudulent marriage were verified by Immigration authorities and represent common practice.

XIV. Rasta Man. All events and characters are fictional, but the characteristics of the Rastafarian and his religion are based on careful study and interviews.

XV. Cuba. Fidel Castro is historic. All other characters are fictional, but none are exaggerated. Data on life in Miami and Havana are authentic, but the interview with Castro is based on reports of others.

XVI. Final Tour. Therese Vaval is totally fictional, as are her ship the Galante and the cruise it makes and the characters she encounters. But some ten or a dozen ships like hers leave Miami or San Juan weekly for island routes that are markedly similar except that they do not visit Trinidad. The general conditions she finds can be easily duplicated and her conclusions are shared by many.

THE CHIEF CHARACTER in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east. Although bounded on the south and west by continental land ma.s.ses, it is the islands that give the Caribbean its unique charm. On the north lies the large and important trio: Puerto Rico, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and great Cuba. On the east are those heavenly small islands that so artistically dot the blue waves: Antigua, Guadeloupe, Martinique, All Saints, Trinidad and remote Barbados among them. The southern sh.o.r.e is formed by the South American countries of Venezuela and Colombia and the Central American nation of Panama. The western sh.o.r.e is often overlooked, but it contains both the exciting republics of Central America-Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras-and the wonderful, mysterious peninsula of Yucatan where the ancient Maya flourished.

The Caribbean, nearly nineteen hundred miles wide from Barbados to Yucatan, does not include either the Bahama Islands or Florida, but does contain near its center an island which at intervals a.s.sumed an importance greater than most of the others, Jamaica with its turbulent history.

In the centuries following its discovery by Columbus in 1492, the Caribbean was dominated by European nations fascinated by its wealth, its inviting charm and its strategic importance in naval warfare. Spain, Holland, England, France and, at brief intervals, Denmark and Sweden all became embroiled in Caribbean affairs, until it seemed that the area's destiny was determined not by actions in the Caribbean but by what transpired in Europe. Conversely, and this became a crucial factor in world history, European destinies were frequently determined by great sea battles in the Caribbean, especially those fought among the fleets of Spain, Holland, England and France.

But one must always keep in mind the salient fact about this sea and its islands: the dominant settlers of the area would become the black slaves who arrived in such droves from Africa that in time they outnumbered and eventually outpowered all other groups combined. Many islands would ultimately become black republics with blacks holding all major offices like governor general, prime minister and chief of police.

In the nineteenth century a heavy influx of Hindus and Muslims from India introduced unique influences, making certain islands and regions even more colorful, while in recent decades businessmen predominantly from Canada and the United States have streamed down to invest their intelligence and money in efforts to make the islands tourist havens and international banking centers.

The Caribbean is often referred to erroneously as the Mediterranean of America. In a strictly geographical sense the comparison is apt: both seas are landbound, they are almost identical in size (Mediterranean, 969,100 square miles; Caribbean, 971,400). Both have been important historically, but there the similarities between the two great seas end. The lands bordering the Mediterranean gave rise to many outstanding civilizations and the three great religions, while the only great indigenous civilization that operated in the Caribbean area was the Maya in Yucatan, and even it was dying out before the explorers arrived from Europe.

But what the Caribbean did provide, and generously, was a sea of heavenly beauty, a cl.u.s.ter of unmatched islands and a varied series of national occupiers; it certainly has never lacked for either variety or excitement. Above all, it was the theater for one of nature's most violent manifestations, the vast hurricanes that were sp.a.w.ned mysteriously off the sh.o.r.es of Africa and came roaring across the South Atlantic with demonic fury. Each summer a gathering of these monsters rampaged among the islands, sometimes missing land entirely, in other years devastating everything, flattening palm trees, tearing houses apart, and killing thousands. The hurricanes kept to a preordained swath, rarely striking as far south as Trinidad or Cartagena, occasionally as far north as Bermuda, but Barbados and Jamaica could expect to be visited at least once in a decade, and some smaller islands were ravaged with even greater frequency. Sunny beaches of white sand and crystal-blue water were the glory of the Caribbean, hurricanes the h.e.l.l.

But however magnificent the sea is, the stories of human endeavor must focus on the scattered islands, just as in the larger world, history concentrates on the settled continents. We have neither the time nor s.p.a.ce to deal with all the islands, each worthy of its own treatment, but we shall visit in close detail more than a dozen, and in the process observe many diverse civilizations dominated by a wide variety of mother nations: Spain, Holland, England, France, Denmark, the United States, and the societies unrelated to Europe: Arawak, Carib, Maya, African, East Indian. It is a rich tapestry we shall be inspecting.

The story begins in the year 1310 on an island-which would later be named Dominica-lying in the middle of the eastern arc.

Tiwanee suspected there might be trouble as soon as she heard that strangers had settled on the other side of the island. She learned this disturbing news from the most reliable man in the Arawak settlement, her mate Bakamu, who on one of his constant roamings had espied the three strange canoes from the top of a hill where he was digging for an agouti. The canoes were much larger than those familiar to the island, and the people taller and darker-skinned.

Forgetting his pursuit of the agouti, which had burrowed deeper than usual, he ran back across the island, beneath the branches of the tall cl.u.s.tering trees that covered the hills, to shout to his woman: 'They have come.'

These words summarized a world of mystery and apprehension, for never before had strangers come to the island, nor was there any conceivable way in which Bakamu could have known that they were coming, or even that they existed elsewhere. But Bakamu was not an ordinary man, as his name testified-it meant he has struggled back-and it was well earned, for as a young fellow, still bearing his birth name Marabul, he had hollowed out a huge log, made himself a stout canoe, and in it had paddled bravely to other islands not seen before. To the north he went over open seas to the island that would centuries after his death be named Guadeloupe and to the south he visited Martinique, discovering that his smaller island lay between two larger ones which seemed to be uninhabited.

He had pondered the mystery of why his small island contained people, while its larger neighbors had none, but could find no answer, and talked with no one about it. He kept his silence even after he took Tiwanee as his wife to live with him in the shelter he had built for them. She has great wisdom, he thought, and someday I will tell her. But now Bakamu was caught up in the discovery that his wife had acc.u.mulated rare knowledge, and better than other women, she knew when to plant manioc and sweet potato, how to cultivate corn, and where in the forest she could find star apples, guava and especially the rich, sweet cashew nut. And when her man brought home an iguana, once or twice a year, she knew how to prepare the first joyous feast and then dry the rest of the meat and save it for later.

Tiwanee's skills were respected by all in the village, and they formed one of the most attractive couples on the sunset side, he a man of robust build and somewhat ponderous, she a darting little brown bird looking into everything. Since he demonstrated unusual ability in whatever physical activity he attempted-running, leaping, swimming, games-he commanded the respect of his fellows and in public his words carried weight, but everyone knew that in the home he listened to and obeyed his wife. Although men did not consider her beautiful, the wonderful animation of her pert little face when she talked or smiled attracted special attention. And when they walked together along the beach or through the village, Tiwanee in her brightly colored garment, Bakamu in a dun-colored breechclout, she invariably stayed in front, as if she with her rapidly scanning eyes and natural inquisitiveness was scouting the way for him. But regardless of where they were or what they were doing, they laughed a lot, and it was clear to all that they were happily mated.

It was easy to determine where Bakamu and his wife lived, for although their round hut built of wooden poles, wattles and mud resembled all others cl.u.s.tered in friendly circles, the plot of land on which it stood was outlined by a remarkable hedge which glowed when sunlight reflected from it.

When planting it, Tiwanee had used only the croton, a tropic plant which produced in its big, broad leaves a variety of colors that was bedazzling. There were reds, yellows, blues, purple, deep brown and four or five other colors, all dusted with iridescent specks of gold. Some plants, for no discernible reason, had leaves of all one color, others displayed the wildest variations, and occasionally, as if to prove its versatility, the same plant would produce one bright color topside of each leaf, a much darker color on the underside.

A hedge of croton was a perpetual bewilderment and joy, because the individual plants were a rowdy lot; they grew in wild profusion, obedient to none of the sensible laws that governed ordinary plants. Had Tiwanee used in her hedge any of the glorious red flowers her village produced-those that would later be called poinsettias, anthuriums or hibiscus-she would have had a known quant.i.ty; those flowering shrubs grew to a preordained height, behaved themselves, and clung together as if ruled by only one benelovent spirit: 'You were intended to be thus and so you will remain, to gladden men's eyes.'

But croton was an outlaw. Again and again Tiwanee would trim her hedge all of a level and then one morning she would find that two of her plants had taken off like seabirds leaving the bay to soar aloft. They would grow like determined little trees, until they were so out of proportion that she had to eliminate them, for they ruined her hedge. Or again, she would have in one section of her planting crotons of one color, perhaps all yellow, a gorgeous plant, when out of nowhere would spring up one that became a dark purple, and again her design was destroyed.

No one could make a bunch of croton behave, not in size, or color, or general appearance. The most irritating behavior of all was when some especially beautiful plant, showing perhaps a combination of four colors, would suddenly stop growing upward and decide to grow with great proliferation sideways, its leaves becoming ever more glorious as its form degenerated.

One evening as Tiwanee sat with her husband in the sunset glow, surveying her lovely but unruly croton hedge, she told Bakamu: 'This is the plant closest to people. It can be anything, tall or short, this color or that, bright or dark. You can't make it obey, for it lives by its own rules, but if you let it have its own way, it can be glorious. Look over there!' And they studied a splendid stretch of hedge in which all the plants were of the same size and color, a scintillating red, all that is except one in the middle which ruined the whole display: it was a garish purple, two times taller than any other and determined to grow higher.

'That one reminds me of you,' she said, 'going your own way.'

She was right in thinking that Bakamu acted according to his own rules, and when he finally shared with her his knowledge of the other islands he had discovered, she snapped: 'You should have told me sooner. Doesn't it stand to reason? If we're here, won't someone else be there?' Most earnestly she wanted to go back with him to inspect those lands more closely, but that, of course, was impossible, for if any woman touched Bakamu's special canoe, which had the form of a man's genitals, he believed she would destroy its magic, and were she actually to get into the canoe for a voyage, that exploration would surely end in disaster.

But that did not keep her agile mind from traveling even further than he had gone, and she reasoned: 'Remember the legends, Bakamu? That we came from a great water to the south, down there, and that when we came here we first settled on the sunrise side where the waves are intolerable? There all bad things happened to us till we came around in our canoes to the sunset side. Then we prospered.'

Bakamu nodded, for that was the accepted truth of his people, and his own experience confirmed the old stories, for when he had first started exploring in his canoe he had paddled and sailed around the island, and on the sunrise side had encountered only trouble and destructive waves and forbidding cliffs, and he had been wise enough to detect that the ocean, the one to be called the Atlantic, controlled a far more powerful type of magic than the sea which would come to be known as the Caribbean: 'No protection over there. Powerful waves. Darker, too,' and then he added the fact which really condemned the sunrise side: 'No fish.'

He was widely admired in his village, and in other villages along the sunset coast, as a prodigious fisherman who knew the secrets of the deep. He would remain for hours in his canoe, long spear at the ready, awaiting the arrival of fish in the waters below, and usually he had antic.i.p.ated where they would come. Now he paddled far to the west trailing a huge manatee that had strayed into these waters, and he stayed with the great sea animal even when he lost sight of the coast, for he knew that if he could somehow bring that huge beast to land, all the villages along the sunset side would have enough meat for feasts untold.

As Bakamu chased the ponderous creature, almost as big as a small whale, one of the raging storms that hammered at the island from time to time, a dreaded hurricane, swept in, and for three terrible days the waves were so tumultuous that even the manatee had to find refuge, while Bakamu's canoe spun and wallowed in the cavernous waves. Shipping his paddle and lying p.r.o.ne in the bottom of his canoe, he gave thanks to the Great Spirit who had commanded him: 'Make your canoe more st.u.r.dy than the others, against the storms,' but even so at several moments when the waves were stupendous, he thought he was doomed. He did not cry out in despair, nor did he quake with fear; instead, facedown, he clung tightly to the canoe he had built and muttered: 'Man comes, man goes. On sea same as on land.' And then he thought of his woman alone in their hut, and his worry was for her, because in a hurricane at sea, men died swiftly in one shattering destruction of their canoe; on land, death was slower and more painful as dwellings flew apart and great trees fell, often pinning the people to the ground and holding them there until they died.

While he was having these agitated thoughts at sea, Tiwanee was in their hut, protected by her croton hedge and wondering in terror what might be happening to her man, and like others in the village when the hurricane abated she looked out to the empty but still turbulent sea and concluded: Oime! The great fisherman, the daring explorer, is dead. And the villagers, after burying those who had died on land, helped organize a mourners' ceremony for Bakamu who had died at sea.

When two boys playing along the sh.o.r.e spotted a canoe approaching two days after the great storm had subsided they began to shout, and everyone streamed down to the water's edge to see this amazing sight, their man Bakamu bringing his canoe back through the waves and towing behind the body of the manatee he had tracked again when the storm subsided. It was then, in that moment of joy, that an old man cried: 'He has struggled back!' and the name Bakamu gained even greater honor.

Now, as they talked about the strangers in the big canoes and he reminded Tiwanee of how desolate the sunrise side was, she asked thoughtfully: 'Is it as bad over there as our legends say?'

'Worse.'

'But if our early ones found it unkind, won't the newcomers want to leave?'

'Maybe so.'

'And won't they do what our people did? Come over here to the better side?'

'They might.'

At this point she began the kind of intense interrogation she engaged in when her suspicious mind felt the need for more specific knowledge: 'You say they were darker in face than we are?' Yes. 'And their women crept about like frightened animals?' Yes.

Continuing with her questions, her inquisitive face close to his, she uncovered two facts about which Bakamu wanted to talk in greater detail, for he too was eager to understand the newcomers and fathom their intentions. Accordingly, he volunteered this information: 'Their leader, a bigger and rougher man, carried a huge club which he often swung about his head, driving everyone back. And once I saw him so angered that he struck a man with it, knocking him flat.'

'Killing him?'

'I think so. Others carried him away.'

Now came a painful pause, for Bakamu wanted to share with his wife a fearful doubt he had been unwilling to admit even to himself: 'Tiwanee, I must say this. Soon after, the ones who took the dead man away came back with large pieces of meat. Not agouti, not manatee, and they threw the meat into a pot and prepared for a feast.'

Tiwanee listened to the awesome words, sucked in her breath, and asked quietly: 'You think they ate their own brother?' When Bakamu remained silent, she broke into a wail, crying: 'These are evil times,' and terror fell upon them both.

Her questioning had been so orderly and its revelations so conclusive that she began that afternoon to take those prudent steps which would enable her to protect her family and herself against the brutal newcomers when they came over the mountains, which she was certain they would.

That phrase-'when they came over the mountains'-dominated all her thinking in the days ahead. She said it as she broke branches to mask the obvious approaches to their hut, and she repeated it when she asked Bakamu to fetch her a branch of very hard wood from the forest. 'What are you going to do with it?' he asked, and watched in amazement as she cut an arm's length of the wood, then sharpened one end to a fine point, which she hardened in her cooking coals. When she did this, the delicate tip burned away, but then she whittled the remaining end to a new and harder tip until at last she had a short, fire-hardened, deadly dagger.

Bakamu was astonished to see her do this. The Arawaks on this and other islands were one of the most peaceful peoples in the world: they had no word for war, for none was needed, and they reared their children in abounding love. They revered their old people and eased them along their journey through the years, bringing them portions of maize and collecting taro roots for them, and even sometimes sharing with them a succulent little coney if they caught one sunning itself beside its burrow. They lived in harmony with their small universe, reveling in the abundance and beauty of the island and accepting the hurricanes when they roared in to remind them that nature was omnipotent, not man.

Indeed, their lives were measured princ.i.p.ally by the sunset. At the end of each long day it was customary for them to sit along the sh.o.r.e in the evening and watch the glorious...o...b..of the sun as it dipped swiftly toward the distant waves; then mothers a.s.sured their children: 'It will come back.' When the sun disappeared the Arawaks renewed their faith, and in the following darkness retired in peace to their small circular dwellings and an evening meal.

Tiwanee, as the mother of a lively baby girl, named Iortto after the hummingbird, realized that she had a special responsibility for protecting and cultivating the child's promised beauty. The Arawaks were one of several tribes throughout the world who believed that the human face was most attractive when the forehead sloped sharply backward from the eyebrows; a head which rose directly upward from the nose bridge was considered gross and somehow offensive. So, each night, in a patient effort to make Iortto more beautiful, her mother bound against her forehead a wide, flat board which would press the frontal part of the skull slowly backward until the desired slant was attained. In this position the little girl slept, for among the Arawaks beauty was both prized and desired.

As the sun set and little Iortto went peacefully to sleep, the strangers on the sunrise side of the island were settling in. They were the Carib Indians, who had come north from the great rivers of what would be called South America, a wildly different lot from the peaceful Arawaks. They gloried in war and organized their society solely for its conduct. A fierce, terrible people, they were cannibals who fought any strangers, not only to subdue them but also to eat them.

Precisely as Tiwanee had predicted, they had been on the ocean side of the island only briefly when their leader, one Karku, a violent man in his mid-twenties, with black hair shorn so that it fell down toward his eyes, decided that his clan must move across the island toward what he was sure would be a gentler climate with food and fish more abundant. But he was impelled equally by the fact that this sunrise side was unpopulated and therefore provided no targets for the warfare in which he excelled. He longed to have his warriors intermingled with people against whom they could exercise their martial arts and from whom they could take prisoners, but he also had a strong personal motive: on the voyage north from the jungles of the Orinoco River his wife had died, and since all the women in the three canoes were taken, he was left without a wife and was not happy about it. Guessing that the other side of the island must be more clement and possibly inhabited, he directed his Carib warriors to prepare for scouting expeditions into the mountains in search of settlements from which he might capture a wife.

This tactic of stealing women was an important part of Carib culture, one that had been practiced for hundreds of years; the warriors might eat the men they captured in battle, and they castrated young boys to fatten them like capons for later feasts; but they did not eat women, they were too valuable for breeding and as the creators of future warriors.

So with varied purposes Karku the Carib laid plans to conquer whatever he might find on the island, and the end of the battle was clear in his mind: the extermination of the others.

In many corners of the world at this time similar expeditions were being launched with similar goals, as groups of human beings, finding it impossible to coexist with those of a different color or religion, were concluding that extermination was the only solution. This conviction would continue to scar the world for the next eight hundred years and probably long after that.

Karku was a formidable foe, for he had demonstrated in forays along the Orinoco his skill in warfare and had left that amiable river primarily to find a new area which he could dominate. He was not only skilled in face-to-face battle, wielding a huge war club violently and cracking any skulls that came in the way, but he also had a keen sense of tactics and strategy taught him by his father and grandfather, who had also been awesome warriors.

The heritage of the Caribs was brutality, warfare and little else. They would bequeath to the world words originating in force and terror: cannibal, hurricane, the war canoe, the manly cigar, the barbecue, in which they roasted their captives. As they marched they had war drums but only a few songs of battle and none of love. Their food habits were totally primitive and graced with none of the refinements that the Arawaks and other tribes had developed; the Caribs ate by grabbing with dirty fingers sc.r.a.ps of meat from the common platter, the men invariably s.n.a.t.c.hing theirs before the women, who were allowed the leftovers. Their canoes were heavy and crude, not the flying things of delicate line created by others, and even their personal adornment was invariably of a warlike nature, and it was the men, never the women, who were decorated with the whitened bones of their victims.

But like the military Spartans of ancient Greece, who also seemed brutal when compared to the more cultured Athenians, the Caribs were very good at what they chose to do, and were the terrors in any area into which they wandered. They believed that by eating the most powerful of their enemies they inherited their prowess, and that by taking the most beautiful and healthy of their women they enhanced the vitality of their own group; in this latter belief they were, of course, correct. They were a hybrid group of people, constantly reinforced by fresh blood, and they profited from the brutal strength that such hybridism often produces.

When Karku and three others left the sunrise side one morning to explore their newfound island, they moved stealthily and with intense purpose, and after they had probed through the forests for some hours without spotting any signs of habitation, they began to ascend the high mountains that filled the center of the island. Night overtook them before they had seen anything, but this did not distress them, for they were accustomed to sleeping in the open, and for food, they carried with them fragments of fish and meal of which they would eat sparingly, for they could not antic.i.p.ate who or what they might encounter before they returned to their own people.

On the afternoon of the second day they came upon a sight that delighted them: it was a clearing in the forest and they concluded that it must have been made purposefully by human beings, for there grew in a consciously designed pattern the tuberous manioc, a major source of food. 'They're here!' Karku cried, and the way in which he uttered the words betrayed not joy in finding that other humans were on the island, but grim satisfaction that his group would soon once more be in combat with a new foe for the possession of a new land.

For the rest of the day the spies moved cautiously, always westward, until they reached a high spot from which they could look down upon the village they had been seeking. There it lay in the sunlight of late afternoon, a collection of well-made huts to be occupied when the present owners were dispossessed, canoes already built, fields close at hand in which foodstuffs could be grown. But there was also the placid sea, so much gentler than the wild ocean to the east, and as the sun set on that first evening, the Caribs were convinced that they had come upon a paradise much more desirable than any they had known along the Orinoco or elsewhere on their journey north.

'We shall go back,' Karku said, 'collect our men and return to take this village.' As he uttered these commands he was looking down at the hut surrounded by varicolored croton, and to himself he said: That one for me, and with purposeful strides, as if he could hardly wait to a.s.sault the sleeping village, he led his men back to their dark side of the island.

Bakamu and his wife, because of the valuable skills they possessed, enjoyed special positions in their village, he as an athlete of unusual ability and strength, she as the keeper of a secret that accounted for much of the tribe's good fortune.

Tiwanee understood the ways of manioc, source of four-fifths of the stuff her people ate, and one of the world's most remarkable good-evil foods. Like potatoes, yams and beets, manioc produced under the surface of the earth a bulbous growth which when rooted out and shredded yielded a potatolike food that looked and smelled most inviting. However, in this stage of its existence, it contained among its fibers a thick, deadly poisonous juice, and manioc culture required that this juice be extracted, and totally, before the residue could be processed into an excellent flour from which a nutritious and highly satisfying bread could be baked.

Long before Tiwanee was born the ancient ones sought a solution to the problem: How can the poisonous juices of the manioc be removed and their deadly power exorcised? The answer came from a clever Arawak woman, who while huddling in the jungle had seen a boa constrictor grasp a shrieking rodent in its cavernous jaws and slowly swallow it, still kicking. She then saw the great snake digest its heavy burden by tightening and relaxing its powerful belly muscles until all bones were broken and absorption could begin. Cried she: 'If I had the help of that powerful snake, I could squeeze the poison from my manioc,' and this idea so possessed her that she brooded for weeks and months as to how she might make herself a snake, and finally she found the solution: I'll gather the best and strongest palm fronds and the thinnest vines and weave me a long, thin, narrow snake whose sides will compress and relax like his, and by that means I'll expel the poisons.

She did this, fabricating an imitation snake called a matapi, some ten feet long, very narrow, very strong, and into its insatiable maw she crammed all the manioc she and her neighbors had grated that day. And now her genius manifested itself, for after she had squeezed the snake by hand for some time she discovered two facts: the plan worked, for the poisonous juice did spew forth; but it was murderously difficult work: I'd go mad squeezing like this all day!

So she constructed a device which enabled her to apply such extreme pressure on the snake that she could extract the poisonous juice with relative ease. First she attached the top of her ten-foot snake to a rafter some dozen feet above her. Then, using a pile of rocks for a fulcrum, she converted a long plank into a child's seesaw, with two little girls at one end, a heavy woman perched on the other. To the seesaw she attached the tail end of the snake, placing a large wooden bowl below to catch the liquid. When the woman weighed down her end of the plank, the tension on the woven sides of the snake expelled the poisons, then the woman ran forward toward the fulcrum, and the two girls were able to pull down their end and the snake relaxed. And so it went.

When the game ended, the dried contents of the imitation snake were ready for baking. This manioc flour was called ca.s.sava; from it, big, flat breadlike pancakes were made, and on it the Arawaks thrived.

In Tiwanee's village she was one of the women responsible for processing the manioc, and it was thanks to her ever-inquisitive mind as she performed this menial task that a bold innovation was introduced. In all the ages before she was born, the poisonous liquor expelled from the make-believe snake had been discarded as both useless and dangerous, but one day she noticed that when she inadvertently left some of the liquid in a clay bowl standing in bright sunlight, the intense heat caused it to change color to a rich golden brown, which looked so inviting that she told her husband: 'Anything that looks so good ought to taste good, too.'

'Tiwanee!' he shouted. 'Don't be foolish!' but despite his pleading she dipped a finger into the altered substance and gingerly brought it to her mouth. As she had expected, that first exploratory taste was rea.s.suring: salty, sharp, with an invitation to try more, which she did, without apparent danger to herself. In succeeding days she kept tasting her brew, finding it increasingly good, and at last, without advising her husband of the bold step she was about to take, she gulped down such a generous amount of her new substance that had it been the original poison, she would surely have died. She didn't. In fact, she felt extremely well, and after two days had pa.s.sed without ill effect she told Bakamu: 'It's safe and tastes good.'

Soon all the women in the village were keeping pots of the once-poisonous liquor quietly bubbling at the back of their fires and tossing into the brew bits of vegetable and fish and even agouti meat on the rare occasions when one of those succulent little animals was caught. When sharp and biting peppers were added to the mixture, a fine, tasty and nourishing stew resulted, all thanks to Tiwanee, who by popular acclaim became the seer of the community, not in compet.i.tion with the old shaman who propitiated the spirits but as the protector of the hearth where men and women were fed and revived.

When this accolade was bestowed upon her, she became a changed woman. She grew noticeably wiser, as if powers long dormant were suddenly codified and whipped into shape, as if knowledge which she had been quietly acc.u.mulating mysteriously blossomed to produce new and totally unexpected fruit, and she was recognized as a leader. Throughout the known world this miracle was duplicated: an ordinary man or woman would be elected to some office, and during the conduct of its business would mysteriously become able enough to discharge the duties of that office, so that in the end someone who might originally have been a rather common person developed into a genius.

Having undergone such a metamorphosis, Tiwanee now found little pleasure in her exalted position, for although she was pleased that she had brought her village wise leadership, she realized that with her new position came new responsibilities, and she continued to brood about the possible dangers that might ensue if strangers had indeed settled upon the opposite side of her island.

One of her duties as a leader in the village was to make the decision as to when it was time to plant the manioc. But because this was of such extreme importance to the village, a matter of life and death, that decision could not be left to her alone; responsibility was shared with the old shaman whose counsel had kept the spirits of the other world favorably inclined toward this village. Fortunately, Tiwanee and the old man cooperated easily, he taking charge of all in the other world, she of the sun, the rainfall and the coming of summer in this, and between them they kept the manioc maturing just when it was most needed. Had they in any way been at odds, their people would have suffered, and they knew it.

On a propitious day before the very hot spell arrived with its threat of hurricanes, the two protectors of the village agreed that the time had come when manioc cuttings should be planted, and as soon as the shaman cried: 'The planting can begin!' Bakamu took over the leadership of everything. Dashing along the waterfront, he shouted joyously: 'Ball game! To celebrate the manioc!" and everyone hastened to the flat playing field whose boundaries were defined by large boulders with flattish faces planted like an informal wall around the edges of a rectangular field with clearly marked goal lines at each far end. Mysteriously, these ball courts of the ancient Arawaks and their cousins the Maya to the west were similar in size to the fields that Europeans and Americans centuries later would choose for their soccer, football, rugby and lacrosse fields, some eighty yards long by thirty wide, as if some inner measuring system of the human body had cried through all the centuries: 'A man can run, when others are hammering at him, about this far and no farther,' and the fields in all these heavy sports conformed to these dimensions.