Caribbean: a novel Part 37

Betraying his delight with the sonnet, Carmody said quietly: 'I'm sure we can guess who wrote these lovely words,' and almost automatically the boys turned to look at Ranjit Banarjee, whose embarra.s.sment showed as he enjoyed the fruits of authorship.

'Yes,' Carmody said, 'our fledgling poet is Ranjit, a quiet lad whose waters run deep,' and the cla.s.s applauded, but he stopped them with a surprising discussion that none who heard it would ever forget: 'There's a great deal wrong with this poem, and in our enthusiasm we must not overlook the errors. Let's look at the octet first.'

But after a long discussion of the rules of sonnet writing, Carmody stopped abruptly, placed his hands flat on his desk, and leaned forward: 'Students, what have I just been engaging in?' When no one spoke, for they had not understood what point their teacher was trying to make with his harsh criticism, Ranjit said in a low voice: 'Pedantry.'

'Yes!' Carmody cried, bringing his hands down on his desk with an invigorating slap. 'Pedantry. Remember what we said about Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger? Victor, what was it?'

'He knew all the rules for writing a song but never how to write one.'

'Yes! Our Ranjit has broken all the rules, but he has written a perfectly lovely little sonnet immortalizing a great explorer.' He smiled approvingly at Ranjit, then concluded: 'And I, who know all the rules for sonnet making, could never in a hundred years compose a decent one. Ranjit, you're a poet and I'm not.'

Having at last identified a possible genius, Carmody decided to strike fast and hard, and that afternoon he asked Ranjit to remain behind as the other boys thundered off to the cricket field: 'Ranjit, you're a quiet lad, but one with great potential. What course in life do you intend following as you grow up?'

Innocently, the Indian boy looked up at this master he had grown to respect, and said: 'I don't know.'

This irritated Carmody, who banged his desk: 'Dammit, lad, you've got to put your mind to something, don't you? Time's wasting. Look at Dawson. He wants to be a medic, and by the end of next year he'll have finished, right here in Queen's, many of the courses he'll need for the first year of his university work. What will you have accomplished and in what direction are you heading?'

When Ranjit said defensively: 'But I don't know. It's all so confusing,' Carmody decided to take matters into his own hands. After gaining permission from the dean, he plopped the boy in his little Austin and drove to Port of Spain, asking Ranjit to direct him to his grandfather's Portugee Shop.

'My grandfather is Sirdar Banarjee. Sirdar is a traditional name in our family.'

Sirdar was a bustling white-haired man who had kept his Portugee Shop focused on two essential services: providing cheap, well-made clothing for the locals and expensive trinkets for the tourists, with special emphasis on keeping both groups happy. Eagerly extending his hand, he said effusively: 'Ranjit tells me you're his favorite master, a very intelligent man indeed, Trinity College in Dublin. Now, what can I do for you?'

'Could we please talk about your grandson?'

'What's he done wrong?' Sirdar asked, scowling at the boy.

'Nothing! Quite the contrary, he's done so many things right that I want to talk seriously about his future.'

'Future? Here's his future,' and he spread his arms outward to encompa.s.s his shop.

'Could we, perhaps, ask his mother to join us? These are matters of great importance, Mr. Banarjee.'

'Matters of great importance are settled by men,' he said, stressing the word, and he led Carmody and Ranjit into his cluttered office, where he said, with hands spread on his desk: 'Now tell me the problem, and reasoning together like sensible men, we can solve it.'

'Your grandson here is a boy of dormant ability.'

'Dormant means sleeping?' When Carmody nodded, Sirdar cuffed his grandson: 'Wake up!'

'It's really you, Mr. Banarjee, who must wake up.'

'Me? You don't run a shop like this in Trinidad by sleeping.'

'Where'd you get the name Portugee?' Carmody asked, seeking to placate the man.

'When the Indians came here in 1850 or thereabouts to work the cane fields, most of the shops were owned by Portugees, and since they had the reputation of offering the best bargains, anyone who started his shop, like my grandfather, called it a Portugee.'

'Very practical, and now I want you to be practical.'

'This is going to cost me money, isn't it?'

'Yes. I want you to send Ranjit on to the university. He deserves it.'

'University? Where?'

'I feel sure he could win a bursary in almost any of the finest. You have a very intelligent grandson, Mr. Banarjee. He deserves an opportunity.'

Carmody saw at once that he had used effective words: bursary, intelligent, finest and opportunity. The conversation had been elevated to a level that the grandfather recognized and appreciated.

'That word bursary. Does it mean what I think?'

'That the university will pay most of his fees? Yes.'

'Like what university?'

'Cambridge, Oxford, our own Caribbean university in Jamaica.'

For the first time Ranjit entered the conversation: 'Columbia in New York.'

Sirdar leaned back and smiled, first at Carmody, then at Ranjit: 'You mean that this boy could go to those places?' and Carmody said with vigor: 'Yes, if you help him financially, and if he directs all his efforts to accomplishing something specific.'

'What's he failing in?' and when Carmody explained that in little things Ranjit was doing well but that in big ones like the direction of his life or preparation for some major contribution he was accomplishing nothing, the old shopkeeper showed no anger: 'I've known for some time that Ranjit would never be satisfied with taking my place. I've laid other plans ... one of his cousins who is working in a sugar mill. That boy has desire.' Then he turned to Ranjit and said: 'Time is a fleeting chariot across the sky. So quick it sets at dusk behind the clouds. Talk with Master Carmody. Find out what you can do, and if you really have promise, as the master says, we can find the money to help. Oxford! My goodness.'

On the trip back to school Carmody spelled out the agenda: 'You've proved you can write, but you haven't proved you can tackle a subject of some importance and stay with it. If you demonstrate that ability, I'm positive I can land you a major bursary, because remember this, Ranjit, all universities are searching for really bright boys. The average, they can get by the bushel.'

'What do you want me to do?'

'I don't want you to do anything. I want you to settle upon some project of substance and show me what you can accomplish.'

The boy did not answer, but four days later Carmody again found on his desk a single sheet of paper, once again labeled Master Carmody, but this time it covered a sheaf of nine pages. The general t.i.tle of the essay was "Teachings of My Grandfather Sirdar," and before Carmody had read the fourth page, so Indian in subject, so mature in observation, he muttered: 'He can do it. My G.o.d! This Indian boy out of nowhere can do it!'

Who are the Trinidad Indians? In 1845 the white plantation owners of Trinidad finally awakened to the harsh facts: 'Because the Sentimentalists in England have outlawed slavery, we are allowed no more African Negroes, and the ones we already have prance around shouting: "We're free! Work no more!" ' So the owners sent ships to Calcutta to import huge numbers of Indian peasants, who, when they reached here, were described in whispers as 'our light-skinned slaves' and treated that way.

My ancestor, the first Sirdar. In one of the ships bringing Hindus to Trinidad was a young man of clever mind and unknown caste. Seeing that the British owners of the ship needed someone to keep the Hindus in order, he announced himself as a former Sirdar of distinguished caste, a kind of general manager of everything, and he made himself so helpful that those in command accepted him as their Sirdar, and he liked the t.i.tle so much he kept it, and we Banarjees have used it ever since. Late in life, when his Portugee Shop was making lots of money, he provided his grandchildren a statement which they treasured but kept secret: 'My name was not Banarjee. My caste was the lowest. I did not come from Calcutta. And I learned French when I was exiled to Reunion.' And my grandfather told me that when he heard our first Sirdar, his grandfather, tell the story, the old man ended: 'And I'm the best trader ever to reach Trinidad, no matter what color.'

Carmody was delighted to think that in two paragraphs Ranjit had succintly defined his ancestry, but he was far more impressed by what the boy revealed about the Banarjees of this century.

Chooosing a wife: One of the first things my grandfather taught me was the importance of finding the right wife: 'No Indian man can marry a black woman. It would be impossible.' And in all the years since 1845, when the first Indians arrived in Trinidad until today, this has never happened among the Indians we know. But he said the same about Chinese women, and Portuguese, and especially white English or French women: 'The Indian man can marry only the Indian woman. That is the one law before all others.' And men like him have waited years to marry till proper Indian wives could be imported from India.

Jewels as a proof of love: Grandfather said that if an Indian really loved his wife, he gave her jewels to prove it. I found a diary of a French traveler who wrote in 1871 of my great-great-grandfather's wife: 'In Port of Spain at the well-known Portugee Shop I met Madame Banarjee, a woman of great charm who wore on each arm some twelve or fourteen big bracelets of solid gold or silver. Around her neck she wore chains of the same metal on which hung large disks of silver embellished with precious stones from Brazil, while in her nose she wore an immense diamond. Her worth as she walked to greet me must have been tremendous.'

How to treat grave robbers: When the wife of my great-great-grandfather died, he buried her wearing all her gold and silver, and an English official protested: 'But you're throwing away a fortune,' but he replied: 'She brought me a fortune, and I would not like to see her in another world poorer than when she came to me.' Three days later, when the police came to the Portugee Shop to inform him that grave robbers had dug into her coffin and taken all the precious metals and the jewels, he said: 'They were hers. She spent them as she thought best.' But when some of the jewels surfaced in the Trinidad bazaars sometime later, he made careful note of who had them and of how they had obtained them, and shortly after that several men were found dead ... one by one.

Carmody read these glimpses into Indian life with growing interest, satisfied that Ranjit had not only a grasp of his heritage but also understood the fascinating complexities and contradictions of Trinidad life.

Muslims: In Trinidad three Indians out of four are Hindus, the others are Muslim, whom Hindus do not like. When you hear of an Indian husband who has cut off his wife's nose or ears, you can be sure it's a Muslim who has caught her looking at another man. He disfigures her so she'll not be pretty enough anymore to attract other men. Hindus act different. My grandfather's brother fancied that his wife was taking an undue interest in another man, and chopped her across the throat. When arrested for murder he could not understand what all the noise was about, and when the English judge ordered him to be hanged, he told the judge in a loud voice to go to h.e.l.l. I think the Muslim way is better, for the husband still has his wife, nose or no nose, while my grandfather's brother lost his wife and his life, too.

Carmody was eager to see what Ranjit had to say about the Indians' capacity to excel in business regardless of where in the world they emigrated, and the boy did not disappoint: Managing a shop: Grandfather told me: 'Since white people have most of the money, you must be nice to them no matter what happens, no matter what complaints they make. If they say the cloth is no good, take it back. And keep on taking it back until they're satisfied. But remember that there aren't too many white people on the island, so you must also be attentive to the former slaves, because although they spend only pennies, if you can encourage enough people to spend their pennies, you can earn a lot of money. Muslims are never to be trusted, but their money is good. And people who get off the ships even for a few hours are to be treated with special care, for such people move about and tell others. And sometimes you'll get a letter from people you never saw, because you were nice to somebody who told them about us. And such letters often contain big orders.' Grandfather has told me and all his grandchildren: 'Integrity is everything. Live so that people speak of you as a man whose word is his bond of honor.'

When Carmody read that excerpt he had to smile, because he had heard two lawyers and a judge affirm in his club that 'Sirdar Banarjee is the biggest d.a.m.ned liar in Trinidad, with Tobago and Barbados thrown in.' Another, overhearing this judgment, added from his table: 'If Sirdar swears it's Thursday, check your calendar. It'll be Friday, but he'll say it's any other day of the week if that's to his advantage.' Carmody was fascinated trying to guess what his star pupil would say about that.

Law: Since Indians in Trinidad have the bad reputation of being liars and in court to be perjurers, I wanted to know how my grandfather would explain this, and he told me: 'They say that since we Hindus don't know the meaning of swearing on the Bible, we're all perjurers. It isn't that way. I know very well what it means, Ranjit. It means: "G.o.d up in heaven is watching and listening and He wants me to tell the truth." But the judge is down here and it's my job to tell him what he needs to give the right decision. You have to pick your way between these two persons sitting over you. And a good rule to follow is one I adopted years ago: "Whatever is good for a member of the Banarjee family is good for the island of Trinidad," and that helps me know what to say in court.' Later he gave me a brief summary of his approach to the problem that the whites called perjury: 'You give G.o.d what He expects and the judge what he needs.'

Carmody found Ranjit's writing so capable and his sly comments so witty and mature, even though they may have been inadvertent, that he decided he must force the issue about the boy's ongoing education, so one afternoon when cla.s.ses ended he invited Ranjit to accompany him on a hike into the hills above Tunapuna, and as they looked over the green fields of Trinidad he said: 'Ranjit, with your grandfather willing to help pay for your education and me convinced that I can get you a bursary, you must make two big decisions. What university, and when you get there, what specialization? First the university, Oxford or Cambridge?'

'I might like to go to some good school in New York.'

'That would be a mistake.'

'Why?'

'You live in the Caribbean. Your future is in these English colonies-I mean nations-among leaders who've been educated in the English pattern.'

'Maybe that pattern isn't so good anymore. Maybe I ought to go to j.a.pan. Like all the Banarjees, I find languages easy.'

The idea stunned Carmody. None of his friends in either Ireland or here on the islands had ever contemplated so much as a flying vacation to j.a.pan, and now this youth, this hesitant boy, really, was talking of spending the formative years of his life there. It was preposterous.

'How about the University of the West Indies ... in Jamaica ... for your undergraduate work?' He stopped abruptly. 'You are planning graduate work ... to get your doctorate?'

'Well, if it worked out ... maybe.'

Irritated by the boy's indecision, Carmody asked gruffly: 'How about U.W.I. to sort of feel your way about? You'll get top honors, I'm sure. And decide then where you wish to move on to. Oxford ... I'm quite sure you'll be eligible ... Maybe the London School of Economics if you have a political bent?'

'I still think I might want to go to Columbia in New York.'

'Ranjit, as I've already told you, attending an American university won't help you if you want to make your life in what is essentially a British island.' The boy said nothing, so Carmody said: 'You must tell me what it is you want to be.'

'A scholar. Like John Stuart Mill or John Dewey. I like knowing about things. Maybe I will study the history and the people of the Caribbean.' Almost diffidently he added: 'I can read French and Spanish.'

Carmody contemplated this unexpected turn, and finally surrendered: 'You could do well in such fields, Ranjit. You could pursue such studies and at the end find yourself qualified to go in either direction, writing or scholarship.'

'Why do you always put writing first?'

'Because if a man has a chance to be a writer and turns it down, he's a d.a.m.ned fool.' He stamped about kicking rocks, and came to rest facing Ranjit: 'Have you read any of the Irish writers? Yeats, Synge, Juno and the Payc.o.c.k? You must read them. They took an amorphous ma.s.s and turned it into a nation. Someone will do the same for the West Indies. It could be you.'

'No, I'll be the one who gathers him the data.'

'In that case, you really must spend your first three years at U.W.I. in Jamaica.'

'Why?'

'Because you'll meet students from all the other islands. Learn from them the character of the Caribbean.'

'Why should I do that?'

'Dammit!' Carmody stormed as he pitched rocks furiously into the valley below. 'Don't act the indifferent fool. You said yourself you wanted to study about the Caribbean. The contribution you are ideally qualified to make focuses on this region. You're a Trinidadian, a native of a special island with special opportunities. You're an Indian with perspective on the British and French islands. You're a Hindu with your unique view of the other island religions. And you have been endowed with a rare sense of words and the English sentence. You have an obligation to more than yourself.'

Before Ranjit could react, the emotional Irishman did something of which teachers are always aware but rarely reveal; he related the boy to himself: 'It's not only your investment, Ranjit, it's mine too. A teacher finds a really promising student only once or twice in a long career. Many good, yes, but with a chance to be great ... not often. You're my one chance. I've taught you, charted your progress, written letters to get you bursaries. And for what? So that you will be able to use your brains to the maximum for the rest of your life. You are not allowed to be indifferent, for I ride with you, to the heights or the depths. I've committed these years in Trinidad to you, and you must go forward, because you take me with you.'

The statement so startled Ranjit, who had, up to this moment, never thought of himself as having any significance or the ability to make a contribution-had never, indeed, thought of himself as an adult doing anything-that he sat silent, hands clasped beneath his chin as he looked for the first time at his Trinidad, seeing the sugar fields on which his ancestors in the 1850s had toiled like slaves, and far in the southern distance, not discernible to the eye, the oil fields and the asphalt pits on which the island's riches depended. He caught a vision of himself as a kind of referee collecting data about this and the other islands and forming judgments about them, to be shared. In other words, he had been goaded into thinking of himself as a scholar.

'I will go to Jamaica,' he said solemnly, 'and make myself informed.'

When Ranjit Banarjee, a precocious Hindu boy of fifteen, flew from Trinidad to Jamaica to enroll in the University of the West Indies, he was amazed at the distance between the two islands, more than a thousand miles, and when he studied the map of the Caribbean and found that Barbados far to the east was more than twelve hundred miles from Jamaica, he told an incoming freshman in the registration line: 'Jamaica must have been the worst possible site for an island university,' and the young man, a black from All Saints, replied jokingly: 'Best location would have been my island, All Saints, but it's too small.' Then he added: 'Geography and history don't mix well in the Caribbean.'

'What do you mean?' and the young black responded: 'If Jamaica were a thousand miles farther east, where it's needed, everything would be all right.'

Discussions like that occurred often during Ranjit's first Michaelmas term at the university. When he was not astonished by the wide variety of students-jet-black boys like the one from All Saints, Chinese from the western end of Jamaica, French speakers from the Dominican Republic, and eye-stopping girls of light color from Antigua and Barbados-he was surprised at how well educated they seemed to be. They behaved with a quiet confidence, as if they had come to Jamaica to learn something, and he told himself: I'll bet they were just as good at their books as I was, and his first days in cla.s.s fortified that opinion.

These young people were able. They had all graduated from that commendable group of schools which England had scattered through her colonies, with each school likely to have one superb teacher like Mr. Carmody of Queen's Own. But Ranjit was also aware that U.W.I. had no students from Cuba, largest of the Caribbean islands, and apparently none from Guadeloupe or Martinique.

In those first days Ranjit identified no Indian students from the other islands and only two from Trinidad, so he was thrown in with a heady mix of young people from almost a score of different islands, and as he listened to their talk he began to acquire that sense of the Caribbean which would become his distinguishing mark. If a young man with a heavy Dutch accent said that he was from Aruba, Ranjit wanted to know all about that island and how it related to the other Dutch islands of the group, Curaao and Bonaire. He was fascinated to learn that Aruba had a language of its own, Papiamento, comprised of borrowings from African slave speech, Dutch, English and a smattering of Spanish. 'Less than a hundred thousand people in all the world speak it,' the Aruba man said, 'but we have newspapers printed in it.'

But as Ranjit settled down for the three years of hard work-doing extra papers during vacations would enable him to graduate early-he found that the true excitement at U.W.I. was the faculty, who were so compelling that, as before, he was drawn to several different disciplines: anthropology, history, literature.

A Dr. Evelyn Baker, a white woman on loan from the University of Miami, was an inspired sociologist who had conducted field studies in four different islands while earning her doctorate at Columbia University in New York. She had an ec.u.menical grasp of the Caribbean that attracted Ranjit, who aspired one day to have the same. She was about forty years old, the author of two books on the islands, and a disciplinarian where term papers were concerned, for she taught as if every student facing her was destined to be either a sociologist or an anthropologist. Early on she recognized Ranjit's capacities, and paid such special attention to him that before the end of the first term she was satisfied that she had in this bright Indian boy a new cultural anthropologist for the area she had grown to love.

However, another teacher-Professor Philip Carpenter-a small, wiry, acidulous young Barbados scholar, a black man with his doctorate from the London School of Economics, that inspired breeding ground for colonial leaders, quickly recognized Ranjit as a young fellow ideally suited for historical studies: 'I read your contribution to the anthology, Banarjee. Remarkable historical insight regarding the various Sirdars of your family. You could make a real contribution. History of the Indians in Trinidad ... or the whole Caribbean. Why they prospered in Trinidad. Why they didn't in Jamaica.' He walked about, then asked: 'Were you Indians ever tried as field hands in Barbados? I really don't know. I wish you'd look into that, Banarjee. Give me a paper on it. We both need to know.'

His most interesting professor was a black woman from Antigua who had taken her advanced degrees at the University of Chicago in Illinois and at Berkeley in California. An expert in the literature of colonial areas, Professor Aurelia Hammond had written on the religious writers of seventeenth-century New England and the early novelists of Australia. But her unique talent was that she could relate literature to reality, and place any colony, regardless of degree of servitude or freedom, in its exact developmental stage: 'If you read what the dreamers and poets are saying, you know what's happening in the society,' she told Ranjit. Contemptuous of much that she saw in the Caribbean, she was not averse to saying so: 'Barbados and All Saints remain English colonies spiritually. Guadeloupe and Martinique should be ashamed of themselves for being tricked into thinking they're an indigenous part of metropolitan France. The Dominican Republic doesn't know what it thinks, and Haiti is a disgrace.' She had high regard for Trinidad: 'Its nice mix of African black, Indian Hindu and a few white businessmen has a good chance of creating a new prototype for the area,' but her personal affection was saved for Jamaica: 'You cannot imagine how exciting it was for me, a little black girl, coming from hidebound Antigua to this university and finding a creative environment in which music and art and politics and social change were all happening on an island bursting with energy and hope.' Few who studied with her ever forgot her incandescent vision of the Caribbean.

Ranjit's education did not revolve solely about his professors; his fellow students were equally instructive, especially a Jamaican whose parents now worked in London: 'They paid my way to go over last year. What a wonderful city! Hundreds of Trinidad Indians there, Ranjit. You'd be at home.' He was so enchanted by the virtues of London that he wanted Ranjit to fly over in the coming vacation: 'Once you see it, you'll make it your second home. As for me, soon as I get my degree, it's good old London for me.'

Ranjit took his vacations seriously, as he did everything else, and to provide data for his essays he fanned out from Jamaica on cheap excursion airfares to a good mix of the Caribbean islands. He saw lovely Cozumel off the Yucatan coast but felt no affinity with the vanished Maya: 'Egyptians are a lot more interesting, from what I've read.' With two other young men from different islands, he took a quick trip to Haiti and was terrified by it, as were they: 'It's so different from a well-ordered British island,' one of his fellow travelers said, 'Good G.o.d! They're living on earthen floors, one piece of furniture to a one-room shack for a family of eight.' Any black or colored student from the other islands had to be perplexed as to why the Haitian blacks ruled their attractive country so poorly.

One of the best trips he took with the limited funds his grandfather was able to provide was a special air pilgrimage arranged for students by a Caribbean airline to seven different islands. He saw not only fascinating little islands like St. Martin, half-Dutch, half-French, but also the big French islands. Guadeloupe fascinated him. 'It's two islands, really,' the guide pointed out, 'separated by a channel so narrow you could almost jump across.' When the students convened at Ba.s.se-Terre to compare notes, an extremely attractive young woman from U.W.I. sat down beside Ranjit; he was delighted because he would never have made any approach on his own. He learned that she was Norma Wellington, niece of the medical doctor on St. Vincent, Church of England, and a premed student at U.W.I. who thought she might go on to the States for graduate work in hospital management. She had a sharp eye, evaluated different islands unemotionally, and displayed no nationalistic preference for her island over any other. She obviously found this young Hindu scholar interesting, or even exotic, for she conversed with him repeatedly on the tour.

Still very shy where girls were concerned, Ranjit found it difficult to engage in the normal chatter that young men his age employed when trying to impress their women friends, but once, as Norma and he were trudging along together on a quiet road in Grenada, he summoned courage to ask: 'Norma, if you're so beautiful, why aren't you engaged ... or something ... or even married?' and she laughed easily: 'Oh, Ranjit, I have so much to complete before that sort of stuff.'

Interpreting this as a rebuff, when Norma had intended merely to say that she felt she must attend to her education first, he retreated from his burgeoning interest in girls and found solace instead in the work he was doing with his three professors.

Professor Hammond, the teacher of literature, told him: 'You can write, young man. At least you know what a paragraph is, and that's more than I can say for most of my students.' Dr. Baker, the sociologist from Miami, said: 'Excellent perceptions, Mr. Banarjee. At some point in your education you might want to write more fully on the Barbados syndrome.'

'What's that?' he asked, and she said: 'The belief that if you wish strong enough, you halt the flow of change.'

But it was Professor Carpenter who provided the immediate impetus to Ranjit's next concentrated work, for he gave an inspired lecture on a historical figure he termed 'the most effective man the West Indies has so far produced and a princ.i.p.al architect of the American form of government.' His lecture started with a dramatic account of a typical West Indian hurricane: 'In 1755 there was born on the insignificant island of Nevis an illegitimate boy whose poor mother had a difficult time ensuring the protection of her family. Hoping to better her fortune, she moved to the Danish island of St. Croix, and there on the night of 31 August 1772, her son first experienced a major hurricane. Six days later he composed a remarkable account of the storm which was later published in the Royal Danish American Gazette.'

Without revealing who the boy was, the professor read from the first paragraphs of the letter, pointing out that the writing was concise and the scientific data accurate. Only then did he disclose who the author was: 'Alexander Hamilton wrote this account when he was either seventeen or fifteen, for throughout his life he lied about his age.' And with that, he launched a scathing denunciation of the presumptuously long middle section of the letter.

'Let's say we accept his claim and grant that he was only fifteen. Imagine the pomposity of writing: "My reflections and feelings on this frightful and melancholy occasion, are set forth in the following self-discourse." And with that modest statement he proceeds to write eight paragraphs of the most overblown theocratic nonsense one will ever read. Let me give you some samples: ' "Where now, oh! vile worm, is all thy boasted fort.i.tude and resolution? Why dost thou tremble and stand aghast?"

' "Oh! impotent and presumptuous fool! How durst thou offend Omnipotence, whose nod alone were sufficient to quell the destruction that hovers over thee or crush thee into atoms?"

' "And Oh! thou wretch, look still a little further; see the gulph of eternal misery open. There mayest thou shortly plunge-the just reward of thy vileness."

' "But see, the Lord relents. He hears our prayer. The lightning ceases. The winds are appeased ... Yet hold, Oh vain mortal! Check thy ill timed joy. Art thou so selfish to exult because thy lot is happy in a season of universal woe?" '

When he had the full attention of his students, he proceeded to the worst of Hamilton's effusions, pa.s.sages which caused the students to break into laughter, but then he squelched them: 'It is the closing pa.s.sages of this extraordinary letter which interest us, for they reveal like lanterns in the night the future politician and financial planner Hamilton. He utters a heartfelt cry on behalf of the poor who have been desolated by the storm and an appeal to people of wealth to contribute a fair portion of their goods to help the stricken. I am very proud of Hamilton when he cries: "My heart bleeds but I have no power to solace. O ye, who revel in affluence, see the afflictions of humanity and bestow your superfluity to ease them." Here Hamilton the man speaks, the future financial genius of a new nation. Tax the rich to succor the poor.