The Middle Passage Part 10

I could not leave Surinam without going to the district of Coronie, whose inhabitants had endeared themselves to me by their reputation as the idlest people in Surinam and their universal description as de luie neger van Coronie, the lazy Negroes of Coronie.* When slavery was abolished the coconut-planters abandoned their plantations to their former slaves, who settled down to an idyllic, isolated existence (communication between Coronie and Paramaribo was by sea), chasing out all newcomers of other races, including one hundred Indians, whose energy threatened to disturb Coronie calm: to this day the Negroes of Coronie will not sell land except to Negroes, and Negroes like themselves. From time to time they need money; then they gather some coconuts and sell them to the oil factory. The factory is regarded only as a convenience and its full capacity is seldom engaged. The planners despair, but the Negroes of Coronie, who are now in possession of the vote and know their own power, refuse to be rushed. They permit Chinese to do the shopkeeping for the district; and for some reason they have allowed one Indian farming family to settle.

This at any rate is the legend in Paramaribo. Johnny, the barman at the Palace Hotel, who knew Coronie and knew its one Indian family, offered to come with me; and early one morning we started on the hundred-mile ride. Outside the town the road was unsurfaced and worn into corrugations such as might have been caused by the pa.s.sage of a tank. Cyclists were masked against the dust and many of the innumerable roadmenders wore goggles.

The land was flat, always flat. The forest lay immediately behind the huts that were strung along the road. Surinam is an underpopulated country. Here it felt neglected and abandoned and, oddly, related to nothing else, with the inhabitants, mainly Javanese, lost in an unfamiliar landscape, whose monotony invited no exploration. But each hut had its provision garden; here were not the helots of the British Guiana coastland.

Cool coconut groves, spotted with soft white blurs of sunshine, announced Coronie. We stopped under the eaves of a Chinese shop and I looked for de luie neger. Three old men were gossiping across the road in the scant shade of a tree. Surrept.i.tously, because of the reported hostility to foreigners, I made ready to photograph them. I caught them posing, with fixed smiles. One man was filling a water-barrel on an ox-cart; he too posed and made his son smile. Another man was wheeling a bag of coconuts on the handlebar of a bicycle, doubtless on the way to that celebrated oil factory. No one else was around. I put away my camera. I suppose I had expected something more Arcadian, something less familiar than a run-down West Indian village with its concrete government buildings and wood-and-corrugated-iron food-shops.

Below a high hot sky the flat fields spread north to the sea, intersected by long straight ca.n.a.ls in which one or two Van Goghlike masted boats rested askew in the mud. We walked to the coconut fields, where the gra.s.s was thick, the ditches choked, and the mosquitoes large and vicious, injecting their stings through my khaki trousers and terylene socks. Small grey-black wooden houses on low stilts were set in clean dirt yards baked by the sun; and in these yards pomegranate trees grew, three or four to a house. Each yard had a small heap of coconuts, and in each yard there was a little wooden stand with a modest display of fruit: two or three oranges, a melon perhaps, two or three pomegranates, nothing more: stall facing petty stall across the gra.s.sy footpath and the deep ditches. Dangerously narrow lengths of board, and sometimes only a trimmed coconut tree trunk, bridged the ditches.

Johnny the barman had seven children and wanted to take back some fruit to Paramaribo. He crossed a ditch into a yard, climbed up the front steps of the house and knocked on the closed door, the lintel of which was marked in blue paint: G.o.d is boven alles. A window was opened; Johnny explained. Presently the door was opened and a Negro, adjusting his clothes, came down barefooted into the yard, picked some pomegranates from the low trees, tiptoeing once or twice, gave the fruit to Johnny, received some coins, politely bade us good day, went up the steps and closed the door once more.

We had some trouble locating the Indian family: the paths and ditches and houses and fields looked so alike. The house stood on a rectangular plot of land, and, with ditches on all sides, appeared moated. Rusting junk in a rusting corrugated-iron shed; a bicycle wheel against a pillar; chickens in the dust and drying mud below the two or three dwarf coconut trees; a bad-tempered barking mongrel; and the mosquitoes thick in the damp heat. A young spastic Indian woman in a slack cotton dress held the dog. We crossed the moat and made our way to the back of the house where, unprotected from the sun, a very old man with white hair and a bristle of white beard sat on the ground rubbing oil on himself. The mosquitoes left him alone; they left Johnny alone. But they fastened on to me, to my hair, my shirt, my trousers, and even the eyelets of my shoes. Movement didn't disturb them; they had to be brushed off.*

The old man was pleased to have visitors. He had just had a nasty accident: he had fallen from the top window of his house to the ground. 'It cost him thirty guilders,' Johnny said. But the old man told the story as though it were the purest comedy. He was amused at his own decrepitude a it was, after all, so very absurd a and he invited us to share the joke. His face, though shrunken, was still handsome; his eyes were the liveliest part of him. He was born in India and had come out to British Guiana as an indentured labourer. He had served his indenture and gone back to India; then he had indentured himself again. He spoke English of a sort and Hindi, no Dutch. How did he come to Surinam? That was the sweetest part of the whole joke. He had married in British Guiana and then a he had run away from his wife! He said this more than once. That act of roguishness of forty or fifty years ago was the biggest thing in his life and had never ceased to amuse him. He had run away from his first wife!

While he spoke the woman sat with the angry dog in the shade some distance away and looked at us, playing with her loose dental plate.

And what about me, the old man wanted to know. I had been abroad? What was it like? Did people have to work? What sort of work did they do abroad? What did abroad look like? He wanted me to give him concrete details. I tried. And so I really knew this abroad? He was amused and incredulous but reverential: he called me babu. He could scarcely conceive a world outside British Guiana and Coronie a even India had faded, except for a memory of a certain railway station a but he felt that the outside world was the true, magical one, without mud, mosquitoes, dust and heat. He was going to die soon, on that moated plot in Coronie; and he spoke of death as a ch.o.r.e. In the meantime he spent his days sitting in the sun, sometimes lying down in what looked like a fowlcoop; it was only at night that he went indoors. But he was forgetting: we were visitors: would we take something? A coconut?

He rose, the woman rose, the dog growled. He took a cutla.s.s from the dust below the house and cut a few coconuts for us.

My back itched. It was b.u.mpy with mosquito bites. So was my scalp. Neither Italian cotton nor thick hair was protection against the mosquitoes of Coronie.

A derelict man in a derelict land; a man discovering himself, with surprise and resignation, lost in a landscape which had never ceased to be unreal because the scene of an enforced and always temporary residence; the slaves kidnapped from one continent and abandoned on the unprofitable plantations of another, from which there could never more be escape: I was glad to leave Coronie, for, more than lazy Negroes, it held the full desolation that came to those who made the middle pa.s.sage.

* Bush Negro Art: an African Art in the Americas by Philip J. C. Dark (London, 1954).

* J.W. Gonggrijp: 'The Evolution of a Djuka Script in Surinam': Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 1960, p. 40.

* From the article on Surinam in the 1958 Yearbook of Jehovah's Witnesses: 'In spite of rough travelling conditions, crossing two rivers by ferry and finally loading all the brothers into trucks for the last stretch, 175 tired but happy witnesses reached the a.s.sembly destination, a coconut plantation called Coronie. One of the highlights of the a.s.sembly was the unexpected attendance of 408 at the public talk given across the street from the Protestant church. The sight of some 300 persons watching the baptism of twelve new brothers in a nearby ca.n.a.l made one think of how it must have been in the days of the apostles.

'We are proud of one of our isolated brothers, who, besides his daily fishing work on the rivers, also takes time to fish for men of good will. Although being the only witness there, he never becomes discouraged, but is known for his preaching activity.'

* Stedman once killed thirty-two mosquitoes at a single stroke.

5. MARTINIQUE.

I HAVE NEVER cared for dressing up or 'jumping up' in the streets, and Carnival in Trinidad has always depressed me. This year, too, the 'military' bands were not so funny: they vividly recalled the photographs of the tragic absurdities in the Congo. With this Carnival depression I flew north over the Caribbean. The sea was turquoise, with blurred white banks and blue deeps; out of it rose brown islets frilled with white.

In the society page of the Trinidad Guardian I read that yet another American had bought a piece of the island of Tobago, following those who had bought pieces of Barbados, Antigua, Dominica, Montserrat (the Montserrat Government had been running a campaign to attract American buyers). These islands were small, poor and overpopulated. Once, because of their wealth, a people had been enslaved; now, because of their beauty, a people were being dispossessed. Land values had risen steeply; in some islands peasant farmers could no longer afford to buy land; and emigration to the unwelcoming slums of London, Birmingham and half a dozen other English cities was increasing. Every poor country accepts tourism as an unavoidable degradation. None has gone as far as some of these West Indian islands, which, in the name of tourism, are selling themselves into a new slavery. The elite of the islands, whose pleasures, revealingly, are tourist's pleasures, ask no more than to be permitted to mix with the white tourists, and the governments make feeble stipulations about the colour bar.

'And so she went down to the ladies' room,' a taxi-driver in one of these islands told me. 'And a you know these people a they thought she was just another black 'oman. And they tell she no, sorry, no black 'oman could use the ladies' room.' The taxi-driver cackled. 'They didn't know she was the minister wife, man. They had to apologize like h.e.l.l. We don't stand for that sort of thing here.' For the taxi-driver it was a personal triumph that the minister's wife, if no one else, was permitted to 'mix' with the tourists.

We stopped for a few minutes at St Lucia. The landing field was next to the sea and the airport buildings were like those of a railway halt. 'Reminds me of dear old Tobago,' one bermuda-shorted tourist said. And my depression was complete.*

Martinique is France. Arriving from Trinidad, you feel you have crossed not the Caribbean but the English Channel. The policemen are French; the street name-plates in blue-and-white enamel are French; the cafes are French; the menus are French and are written in a French hand. The landscape, in the south, is not stridently tropical. Rolling pasture land, worn smooth and unfruitful by cultivation, with dark blobs of scattered trees, and little claws and tongues of land sticking out into the clear sea, suggest a gentler Cornwall. Unlike the other islands, which have one main town to which everything gravitates, Martinique is full of little French villages, each with its church, mairie and war memorial (Aux Enfants de -- Morts pour la France), each with its history and its ill.u.s.trious, for whose descendants pews are reserved in the church. The radio station announces itself as 'Radiodiffusion Francaise'. The political posters a Voter Oui a de Gaulle (the referendum had taken place not long before) and Meeting de Protestation: Les Colonialistes Ont a.s.sa.s.sine Lumumba a are of metropolitan France and unlike anything else in the Caribbean. The tobacco kiosks stock Gauloises; and the advertis.e.m.e.nts are for Cinzano and St Raphael and Paris-Soir. Only, most of the people are black.

They are black, but they are Frenchmen. For Martinique is France, a legally const.i.tuted department of France, so a.s.similated and integrated that France, or what is widely supposed to be that country, is officially seldom mentioned by name. 'M. Cesaire est en metropole,' the chef-de-cabinet said to me, as though M. Cesaire had simply motored down to the country for a long week-end and hadn't flown 3,000 miles to Paris. The myth of non-separation is carried to the extent that routes nationales, which presumably lead to Paris, wind through the Martiniquan countryside.

Even thirty years ago, according to Geoffrey Gorer in Africa Dances, a Martiniquan in the French Army in West Africa was officially a Frenchman, a cut above the native African, who was segregated from him. Times have changed; in Martinique I met a Martiniquan Negro woman who had left her home in Senegal because of African racism, to her an incomprehensible phenomenon, a sign of primitive perversity; she spoke with some bitterness and referred to herself as une francaise. In a restaurant during a tourist invasion I saw a white woman turn to a sun-gla.s.sed black Martiniquan and say, 'Nous sommes les seuls francais ici.' 'You are English?' a white Martiniquan asked me. No, I said; I came from Trinidad. 'Ah!' he said, smiling. 'Vous faites des nuances!' Alexandre Bertrand, the Martiniquan painter, who is not altogether satisfied with conditions in Martinique and is something of a nationalist, wanted to know about the race riots in England. What had caused them? He couldn't understand how colour prejudice could exist in a country like England. His pipe almost fell out of his mouth when I told him about discrimination in housing and employment; it was like explaining the Earth to someone from another planet. 'I am glad I am a Frenchman,' he said. The word had slipped out. 'Well, a Martiniquan with French affiliations.' More than England to the British West Indian or even Holland to the Surinamer, France is the mother country to the Martiniquan. The highest positions are open to him in France; it is a cause for pride, and not surprise, that a French West Indian represents an important French town in the National a.s.sembly and was for some time the const.i.tutional successor to President de Gaulle.

Dr Saint-Cyr, who comes from one of Martinique's distinguished coloured families, invited me to lunch one Sunday at his in-laws' country house at Sainte Anne. Saint-Cyr was a tall, well-fleshed mulatto; but after a minute you forgot his race and were aware only of his Frenchness, in speech, manner, gestures. On the way south we stopped to meet and guide more guests, two metropolitan Frenchmen and a Frenchwoman, who were waiting in their car at the roadside. We were late for this rendezvous, and Saint-Cyr's profuse apologies were adroitly brushed aside by one of the Frenchmen: 'Mais c'est ma faute. On m'a dit qu'aux Antilles il est impoli d'arriver a l'heure.' After this exchange of courtesies we started off, stopping at two or three places to admire, for a few calculated minutes, certain approved views. Past the smooth brown slopes of La Monnerot, we came to Vauclin, where, the fishing boats arriving as if to Saint-Cyr's order, we made a further stop to admire the picturesque haggling scenes. And so at last to Sainte Anne.

We were introduced to Madame Saint-Cyr, her father, and her two brothers who in appearance and charm were indistinguishable from Frenchmen. Guests arrived continually in new cars, up the concrete drive between the slender-trunked trees, through the old gateway, to the s.p.a.cious grounds of the s.p.a.cious house, which was one hundred and fifty years old, ancient by the standards of Trinidad. We sat in the low-walled veranda, drinking aperitifs of milk and rum and nutmeg, nibbling savouries of fish-fries; and we looked down past a rusting rum-factory to the sea, Diamond Rock in the distance, the light changing continuously and with it the colours of the sea and sky, Diamond Rock disappearing whenever it drizzled.*

The Prefect, a short, blunt-featured Corsican, arrived. Everyone rose to greet him and his handsome white-haired wife.

Dr Saint-Cyr announced a short swim before lunch for all who cared. I changed in one of the bedrooms upstairs. The bed was high and wide and ma.s.sive. On a shelf there was a small collection of old books, among them an old edition of La Cathedrale, as brown and as sharply musty as only old French books can be: reflecting a once alert French taste and now suggesting, not a West Indian house, but a French house from which, with the ageing of its old and the growing-up and departure of its children, a tradition of reading had disappeared.

We drove down to the beach in two cars; and after exclamations at the beauty and warmth of the water, the whiteness of the sand, the perfection of the brain-coral found on the beach a every pleasure noted and acknowledged, it seemed, for the benefit of the host, who appeared to instruct and regulate our delight a after the briefest of dips, we went back to the house and dressed and had a further drink before sitting down at the long table, where covers had been laid for twenty or more.

Dr Saint-Cyr sat at one end of the table; the Prefect, I believe, sat at the other. First we had sea-eggs. Then lobster. Then a third fish course, the large fish appearing whole, but sliced. Then came the meat. Rice and minced meat, first of all. Then, to sighs and exclamations, a servant entered, bearing a whole roasted pig on an enormous platter. The pig was displayed to each guest, the servant walking round the table, fighting back a smile; there were continual exclamations and even some slight applause. The pig was then taken away, to reappear presently, dismembered, on several small platters. Between courses we were refreshed with salads; and from sea-eggs to the blancmange of various flavours champagne never ceased to be poured. When coffee and brandy came it was half past four. Madame Saint-Cyr's father was telling stories about his youth and early manhood. The Prefect, who during the lunch had startled the table with the semi-official disclosure that unexpected economic development awaited Martinique, told stories about President de Gaulle's recent visit. (I had heard earlier that the President had received a welcome so rapturous that he kept asking those nearest him, 'Mais sont-ils sinceres? Sont-ils sinceres?" The island was Vichy during the war.) 'Vous m'avez trompe,' the President had told the Prefect. 'You told me it was just three steps to the Hotel de Ville. I find it's only two.' There was laughter around the table; eyes moistened.

The Prefect left first; and two by two the other guests followed. As long as anyone stayed refreshments were pa.s.sed around: coffee, brandy, ice-cream, and even tea. When most of the guests had gone. Madame Saint-Cyr read aloud a letter from her son, a student in Paris. It was full of criticisms of students and professors; its iconoclasm was greeted with laughter.

That Martinique is France, and more than in appearance, that France has here succeeded, as she has perhaps nowhere else, in her 'mission civilisatrice', there can be no doubt. This is the aspect of French colonialism in the West Indies which has impressed English travellers from Trollope to Patrick Leigh Fermor. 'It is a significant tribute to France's management of her Empire,' Leigh Fermor wrote in 1959, 'that her distant territories should consider this (a.s.similation as departments into the metropole) to be the highest compliment and benefit they could receive.'

Yet eight years after this was written there were race riots in Martinique in which three people were killed; and these disturbances were repeated in 1961, just a fortnight after I had left the island. The Martiniquans may all be Frenchmen, but most of them can be simple Frenchmen only outside Martinique. In Martinique they are black Frenchmen or brown Frenchmen or white Frenchmen.

In spite of all that has been said about French colour-blindness, race has always been important in Martinique. In the days of slavery the free coloured were forbidden by law to wear clothes similar to those worn by the whites; and pedigrees are so carefully watched that there is no possibility whatsoever of anyone with the least tincture of Negro blood, however unapparent, pa.s.sing as white. One of the futile skills unconsciously acquired by anyone who has grown up in the West Indies is the ability to distinguish persons of Negro ancestry. I thought I possessed this skill to a reasonable degree until I went to Martinique. Time and time again I was told that a white-skinned, light-eyed, straight-haired person I had just met was really 'coloured'. Such information constantly circulates; so, in this Martinique oral tradition, family sagas are preserved.

Trinidad is more humane and allows people who look reasonably white to pa.s.s as white. Humane is perhaps not the right word, for this generosity can occasionally impose on the Trinidadian a burden of deception which the Martiniquan, who openly calls himself 'coloured' because the whole island knows he is only fifteen-sixteenths white, never has to bear. Trollope became skilled at spotting persons who were made neurotic by their incomplete whiteness; his tips hold good today.* Nevertheless there is in Trinidad an intention of tolerance and a general laxity which would appal the Martiniquan. And though shade distinctions exist in Trinidad, they are never as oppressive as in Martinique. This comes out clearly if one compares Lloyd Braithwaite's Social Stratification in Trinidad with Michel Leiris's Contacts de Civilisation en Martinique et en Guadeloupe. Braithwaite is a Trinidadian and a Negro; in his admirable study comedy keeps breaking in. Leiris, a Frenchman of liberal views, conducts his survey with a sustained seriousness which at times erupts into indignation.

If the French have exported their civilization to Martinique, they have also exported their social structure. The hard social prejudices of the metropolitan bourgeoisie have coalesced with the racial distinctions derived from slavery to produce the most organized society in the West Indies. In this society education and money and cultured Frenchness matter, but Negro blood is like an ineradicable commonness, a mark of slave ancestry; and in this society, with its single standard of bourgeois Frenchness, social prejudices (which might be racial prejudices) are of importance. No social prejudice, no social sanction really matters in Trinidad: standards are too diverse and society is split into too many cliques. Living in Trinidad and then as an outsider in England, I had never before experienced the organized, single-standard society where sanctions could cripple; and in Martinique I felt choked. Prejudices have been imported wholesale from the metropole. I could never get used to hearing coloured Martiniquans say, just like Frenchmen of a certain type, 'That d.a.m.ned Jew's place is in the ghetto.'

The dinner-table gossip was the most sanctimonious and the most a.s.sa.s.sinating I have ever heard a the French flavour of the last adjective is appropriate. This, combined with what an American official described to me as 'the French Antillean morality', whereby every self-respecting man has a mistress and every self-respecting woman a lover, all the island knowing exactly who sleeps with whom a this made me long for the good humour, tolerance, amorality and general social chaos of Trinidad.

The division of Martinique society into white (of certifiable purity), mulatto and black is accepted as valid and unalterable by all sections. No other territory in the West Indies could produce a popular Negro song like this: Beke ka crie femme-li cherie,

Mulatre ka crie femme-li dou-dou,

Neg-la ka crie femme-il i-salope.

En verite neg ni mauvais maniere.

The white man does call his woman cherie; the mulatto does call his woman dou-dou; the n.i.g.g.e.r does call his woman a stinking b.i.t.c.h. n.i.g.g.e.r ain't have manners, for truth.

Beke ka mange dans porcelain,

Mulatre ka mange dans faience,

Neg-la mange dans coui.

En verite neg ni mauvais maniere.

White man eating out of ware-plate; mulatto eating out of earthenware; n.i.g.g.e.r eating out of calabash. n.i.g.g.e.r ain't have manners, for truth.

At a higher level, it might be said that in his poems about his childhood in the nearby French island of Guadeloupe St John Perse is not forgetful of his whiteness; while the subject of Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal is blackness. At all levels in Martinique race is important and inescapable. This is one reason perhaps why Martiniquans are all Frenchmen. All cannot be white, but all can aspire to Frenchness, and in Frenchness all are equal.

The prejudices of Martinique lose their validity in metropolitan France, and in Martinique metropolitan Frenchmen are exempt from the racial regulations of the society. But one of the paradoxes of the Martiniquan situation is that it is against metropolitan Frenchmen that animosity is directed. The policy of a.s.similation, which in its intention was idealistic and generous, has had unhappy consequences. It has not, as Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote, given to Martinique 'the same privileges, status and representation as the Bouches du Rhone or the Seine Inferieure'. The social benefits of metropolitan France have not been extended to Martinique: the island's economy would have been disrupted, it is said, and the expense would have been too great anyway. Investments have not come to Martinique. With the fierce jealousy characteristic of petty, tight, self-important communities, every Martiniquan capitalist ridicules and does his best to block every project in which he does not himself have a hand. Little is therefore done, and Martiniquan capital is invested instead in France and elsewhere. Martinique is poor, the middle-cla.s.s Martiniquans say. Scarcely any development is possible, for no Martiniquan industry could compete with a French one; and without her connexion with France Martinique would be lost.

So Martinique produces nothing apart from sugar, rum and bananas. Couldn't they even make their own coconut oil for the margarine factory that employs seven people? Surely coconuts can grow in Martinique? 'Impossible,' says one. 'The man is mad. Pay no attention,' says another. And so the bickering goes on and coconut oil is imported, and milk is flown in from France, from the Vosges, by the Air France milk plane. And because Martinique is part of France, her unique rum cannot be exported direct to North or South America, but must first cross the Atlantic to Paris and be redirected from there, enriching middle-men all the way. a.s.similation has not made Martinique an integral part of prosperous France, but has reduced the island to a helpless colony where now more than ever the commission agent is king.

For the metropolitan civil servant Martinique is a relaxing but not important post which he hopes presently to leave for higher things in the metropole. For the metropolitan or the Algerian colon with even a little money Martinique, with its unlimited cheap labour, is inviting. Unpleasantnesses continually occures; and to the coloured population the presence of French police (the Martiniquan policemen serve in France) is an added provocation.

It was the cane-cutting season, and armed French police continually patrolled the trash-littered country roads in jeeps. It was an unusual sight in the West Indies; but I attributed it to the French flair for melodrama.

In one restaurant one day a strapping young mulatto leaned across my table and said in English, with teeth-grinding pa.s.sion, that he was going to start a revolution. He objected to the service that had been given to a sad little prost.i.tute with her over-dressed baby. It irritated him, he said, to see black people being offensive to black people. He wasn't a politician; but he was going to start this revolution, kick every white out, and then hand the island over to the politicians. He had already started in a small way: he had just slapped a metropolitan in the rue Victor Hugo.

And then early one morning a young Negro called on me at the hotel. He waited patiently in the restaurant downstairs. He must have thought me a newspaperman: he said he wanted me to know certain facts about Martinique. He told me little I hadn't already learned a race, poverty, over-population a but I remembered him for his despair. He promised to call again, but never did.

The blue-suited French chef-de-cabinet said with wild French gestures and an official smile that there were no serious problems in Martinique. Industries were being encouraged and so on. At his back there was a large bright painting of a Martiniquan scene. The chair on which I sat, one of three for visitors, was so far from his ma.s.sive desk that I had to lean forward while he leaned back and made continuous circular gestures with both hands. At the end of every long sentence the movement of his hands was arrested and I was fixed with a brief, wide smile.

It was from M. Gratian, the communist mayor of the small airport town of Lamentin, that I learned there was a strike of labourers in the country districts. The communists had been regaining strength in Martinique, and their cause had been helped by M. Gratian's administration of Lamentin. This was admitted by all to be efficient and honest and was proving an embarra.s.sment to Gratian's opponents, who had somehow to put over the view that honesty was the worst policy. Dandling his grandchild on his knee, M. Gratian (he had been chief speaker at the meeting de protestation: 'Les colonialistes ont a.s.sa.s.sine Lumumba') said that the strike was the most important happening in Martinique. It certainly led, a few weeks later, to Martinique's most serious disturbances.

I did not know about the strike because Martinique had no daily newspaper. Surinam has six, and several weeklies besides; but in Martinique the newspapers come from Paris, with the milk. One result is that there is an acute shortage of wrapping paper; and old newspapers have to be imported in bulk from France, particularly by the banana-growers. Bananas are delicate, and before they are shipped have to be carefully wrapped. The wrapping consists of an outer sheet of stiff brown paper and an inner quilt of straw in old newspaper. Straw, brown paper and old newspapers have all to be imported from France.* And to France they presently return. The Compagnie Generale Transatlantique alone is permitted to carry cargo between Martinique and France; it is a lucky shipping line which carries the same cargo back and forth, continually making work for itself.

Martinique in the interior is prettily feudal, with a white or coloured gentry and a respectful ma.s.s of straw-hatted black people who can only be described as 'peasants', the twentieth-century literary discovery, whose soft manners, acquiescence in their status and general lack of ambition or spirit can be interpreted as 'dignity'. The peasant doffs his broad-brimmed straw hat to the master, but a man is a man and the peasant will be offended if the master does not shake his hand. This fisherman-peasant was carrying live and frenzied lobsters in both hands; and, on being introduced, I only bowed. For this I was later rebuked by my host. I had wounded the peasant; and I felt I had also damaged the dignity of the host himself. I should have offered my hand; the peasant would have turned away the lobsters and offered me his forearm, his biceps or even his shoulder. So later, when I was introduced to this other peasant whose hands were thick with mud, I confidently stuck out my hand; and he, sure enough, offered me a sweating forearm.

In this village Monday was a big day for the peasants, with c.o.c.k-fighting in the afternoon and folk-dancing in the evening. On the stony, rutted, pot-holed road that ran between the dripping sugarcane a it had been raining a we pa.s.sed a peasant riding erect on a ribby horse. The c.o.c.kpit was in somebody's damp bare yard, on the flattened top of a low incline that rose directly from the road. It was a small pit, a wooden O, hedged with staves over which hung barefooted peasants in straw hats and topees, shouting, 'Tor! Tor!' Above the pit and around it were two tiers of seating roughly made from trimmed tree-branches; but no one sat there, apart from two or three children absorbed in their own affairs. The c.o.c.k-coops stood at one side of the pit.

The heads of the fighting c.o.c.ks were pecked and b.l.o.o.d.y and disfigured; so were their necks and rumps, which had been shaved and looked obscene. The c.o.c.ks were tired and I felt they didn't want to fight; a Martiniquan in our party said they were of poor quality. Sometimes the c.o.c.ks only rubbed their b.l.o.o.d.y necks together. Sometimes they wandered away from one another; then the shouts of the peasants brought them together again, and they leapt and pecked for a moment or so, their wings outspread. When a c.o.c.k collapsed there was a roar as at a knockout, and the fight temporarily ceased, the owners climbing over the staves into the pit and holding their c.o.c.ks until the bell (I believe) went.

Somehow the fight ended a I was told, though I did not see, that the spectators had been gambling heavily a and the battered c.o.c.ks were taken away, their heads erect, their eyes bright and staring. Their owners caressed them and whispered endearments to them. It was an abrupt moment of solicitude and hurt and calm, both bird and owner withdrawn in the midst of the shouting that had broken out over the new fight. Blood was wiped off with fingers from rump and neck and beak. Then the owner, whispering as with pure love, put the c.o.c.k's head in his mouth, sucked away the dark thickening blood and spat it out. This was done four or five times. A lemon was peeled and rubbed gently, sacrificially over the bird's torn shaved skin.

In the evening the yard was lit by flambeaux. The c.o.c.kpit was occupied by gamblers, and the sloping patch of damp black earth between pit and hut by barefooted dancers. The dancers pretended to wrestle; the drummers drummed; and everyone sang 'Votez oui, pas votez non' a the Gaullist referendum slogan already turned into a folksong. When the master joined the dance the peasants applauded, and even the gamblers in the c.o.c.kpit stood up to watch and clap.

The Americans came ash.o.r.e in uniform, the sailors in theirs, the tourists in theirs: the men in bermuda shorts, gay hats, short-sleeved shirts, and both men and women carrying blue overnight bags lettered 'Caribbean Luxury Cruise' or something like that. 'Where do we have lunch?' one called. 'Restaurant dee Europe,' said another, reading the sign. The French gendarmes, in their very short khaki shorts, noticeably stiffened. The taxi-drivers were feverishly on the prowl, sniffing up streets, peering through cafe windows, accosting everyone who looked foreign, even those who had settled down in the Restaurant de l'Europe. Very soon the tourists had disappeared from the main square. In less than half an hour they were drifting contentedly back, each carrying a bag from the Roger Albert duty-free shop, each bearing a slip of the balisier wild flower like a standard. An American sailor was drinking white rum straight from the bottle and shouting from one end of the rue Victor Hugo to the other. The tourists regarded him with distaste. In the bar the tall North American with the humorous face, who had been drinking steadily since the evening before and buying drinks for all who spoke to him, chanted, 'I'm not a Yank. I'm a Canadian.'

The Caribbean has been described as Europe's other sea, the Mediterranean of the New World. It was a Mediterranean which summoned up every dark human instinct without the complementary impulses towards n.o.bility and beauty of older lands, a Mediterranean where civilization turned satanic, perverting those it attracted. And if one considers this sea, which the tourist now enlivens with his fantastic uniform, as a wasteful consumer of men through more than three centuries a the aboriginal population of some millions wiped out; the insatiable plantations: 300,000 slaves taken to Surinam, which today has a Negro population of 90,000; the interminable wars: 40,000 British soldiers dead between 1794 and 1796 alone, and another 40,000 discharged as unfit a it would seem that simply to have survived in the West Indies is to have triumphed.

There are degrees of survival. And here and there in the West Indies are little groups of 'poor whites', English, Irish, French and even German, whose poverty is their least sad attribute. Their loss is greater: they have forgotten who they are. A history book I used at school said that the Amerindians 'sickened and died'; these Europeans, during a period of unchallenged European authority, only sickened, and are like people still stunned by their transportation to the islands of this satanic sea.

It had been my intention to go to the Isles of the Saints, south of the island of Guadeloupe, to visit the Breton poor whites whom Patrick Leigh Fermor described in The Traveller's Tree: The remarkable thing about them is that they have turned themselves into Negroes in all but colour, and if all the races of the Caribbean sea were to be repatriated to their countries of origin, the Saintois would now feel more at home in the African jungle than in Brittany. They have long ago forgotten the French language, and speak nothing but the Afro-Gaulish patois of the Negroes, and are more inexpert in correct French and more illiterate than the humblest black inhabitants of the Guadeloupean savannahs.

After my discovery of the Indians of Martinique, however, there was no need to visit the Saintois.

I had never known there were Indians in Martinique beyond the usual businessmen from Trinidad. I had never known that in the French islands, as in the British, indentured Indian immigrants and some Chinese had replaced slave labour after emanc.i.p.ation, and that seventy thousand or more Indians had come to Martinique. Unlike the Indians in British Guiana, Trinidad and Surinam, they came from South India, many from the French Indian colonies. They did not flourish. As one Martiniquan said to me, with disgust and pride, 'They died like flies.' Some of the survivors emigrated to Trinidad and settled in west Port-of-Spain. Only four or five thousand remained in Martinique, labourers on the sugar estates of the north, sweepers in the city, and they made no mark on the society; no Indian even opened a shop. It might be that their numbers were too small. Or it might be that, unlike the Indians of British Guiana and Trinidad, who came in such balanced proportions that they were able to re-create an India in miniature, with the basic Hindu-Muslim antagonism, Shia and Sunni divisions among the Muslims and a complex if rapidly disintegrating caste system among the Hindus a it might be that unlike these Indians, the Martinique Indians came from a single depressed Hindu caste. There is evidence for this in their physical similarity and their religious practices. There is the remarkable fact that just as in India the sweepers' settlement is separated, perhaps by a river, from the town, so in Fort de France the Indian sweepers are separated from the rest of the town by a ca.n.a.l. It is also to be noted that among those who emigrated to Port-of-Spain there was a tradition, now lost, of road-sweeping; and they have proved the most a.s.similable of Trinidad Indians. It is easy to see how such people, without the traditions, apt.i.tudes and drive of other castes, would be helpless; or how any small, alien, impoverished group would remain submerged in Martinique, where society was as rigidly organized as Indian society but where standards were incomprehensible and beyond attainment. The white-mulatto-black world presented a common front of unaccommodating Frenchness; the Indian remained an outsider.

I didn't know of the existence of Martinique Indians until Alexandre Bertrand showed me his drawings of Martiniquan Hindu dancers and told me of their 'Hinduism', nothing more than an occasional sacrificial slaughter of sheep, a degraded form of the degrading kali puja, which, though Catholic converts, they still practise. And one Sat.u.r.day Anca Bertrand drove me north to the Hindu 'chapels'. We drove through well-kept hills in all the gradations of green, through land that appeared to have been landscaped by cultivation, with little of the tropical disorder of Trinidad; we had a glimpse of cloud-topped Mont Pele.

The first chapel we came to was a small rectangular concrete shed with a corrugated-iron roof and walls painted in stripes of chocolate and ochre. A number of people, Negro and Indian, came out of a dingy barrack-like building in the same scuffed yard and stared: an elderly, coa.r.s.e-featured, kinky-haired Indian woman, a baby on her hip, and her equally coa.r.s.e-featured daughter, a very small and very old woman in spectacular rags, a tall Negress, a mulatto in a big loose cotton dress, an Indian woman in a Martiniquan turban, and a young Indian man, small and thin, with his hair in a fringe below an old felt hat, tattered khaki shorts, a torn and dirty shirt, and black mud on his bare feet. We spoke to the young man. His features were fine, as though worn away by undernourishment and underprivilege, his eyes bright and unreliable; he was even handsome, if you forgot the weakness of his face and the debility of his attenuated limbs. His head rocked like a bird's on his stick-like neck, and he continually scratched one muddy foot with the big toe of the other. He didn't speak French; Anca Bertrand had to translate his patois.

The sacrifice, he said, took place on the stone outside the chapel. The stone was below a frangipani tree, now almost bare of leaves and in full flower; delicate pink blooms were crushed into the black, chicken-trampled mud. He went off to get the keys, and the women, all silent and staring, drew closer to us. The young man came back and opened the chapel door (an arch painted in chocolate directly above) and calmly, without flourish, revealed the hideous, tallow-smelling childishness inside: one large figure on horseback to the right, one to the left, both crudely sculptured and painted in strident yellow and red, the mustachios black, the features a pathetic in this setting a aristocratic and serene. Long carved cutla.s.ses rested on their hafts between the forelegs of the horses; the ground in front of them was dark with candle-grease. On the low concrete platform at the back there were many smaller red-and-yellow statues, the miniature form betraying more clearly the crudity of the hand that had fashioned the larger statues. This was the king, the young man said; and that was the queen; and those were their children.

All places of worship have a distinctive stale smell; this dark little hole smelled warmly of stale, nauseous oil and tallow. Even while we gazed, the woman with the turban a an exhibitionist, I felt a went in, loudly sucking her teeth, and lit candles before the statues. The young man, his explanation given, leaned against the wall, looking away from us and down at the mud; his face was almost hairless. There were no sacred books, he said; he didn't know whether there were any sacred songs; the 'priest' knew everything. How was the priest chosen? He couldn't say. Sacrifices took place when they wanted to ask a favour of the king and the queen. What sort of favours? He didn't know; the priest knew everything, and the priest was working in the sugar-factory that afternoon.

We drove on to a small town where the sugar workers lived in hovels beside the large trailers of neatly packed canes. We went into an estate barrack-yard which contained an epicerie offering huil (comforting to see such misspellings in a French territory) and were introduced to Indian women who were quite negroid. Then into a choked little room adorned with Catholic pictures and some photographs. Here we met the estate 'driver'. He was small, black, fine-featured, though with a bulbous nose. He wore a khaki jacket and a white topee (in Martinique this appears to be a symbol of a sort of servile authority: it is worn by drivers of official cars).

He sat us down on benches and chairs and announced with peasant pride that he had worked on the sugar estate for thirty-six years and what he didn't know about sugarcane wasn't worth knowing. He didn't speak French and couldn't even understand it; he spoke the Creole patois and said he knew 'Indian'. What was the name of this Indian language? 'Tamul,' he said. And he could sing the sacred Tamul song all night. What was this song? He behaved like a man who wasn't going to reveal a secret.

His brother came in and sat on a bench against the oilcloth-covered table and said nothing. A very small boy, the driver's son, very black and handsome, drifted into the room and was introduced; he was shy and shook hands with his left hand. The driver, who was also the priest of the Hindu 'chapel', said he was born in the district and had lived there all his life. Was I an Indian? Were there Indians in Trinidad? He looked incredulous. He said he would have been able to keep up his 'Indian' if only he had someone he could practise it with. He spoke a few individual words; not knowing a word of Tamil, I didn't understand them. He allowed himself a small smile.

We were offered drinks. I accepted a green-coloured soft drink but was unable to finish it. The driver brought out photographs of his daughter's wedding and pa.s.sed them around. In the photographs he was wearing a bow-tie. In one of the photographs the blindfolded bride was surrounded by unmarried girls and playing the wedding game, people pretending to be normal, to have important lives of their own. The pa.s.sport-size photographs on the wall, the gla.s.ses on the table, the drinks: it was like any other hovel in the island. Only, it wasn't. Slumped on his bench, shuffling his precious photographs and quite suddenly lost in their contemplation, the driver reminded me of those Amerindians whose huts I had entered in British Guiana and Surinam. You enter a filthy Amerindian hut; your att.i.tude is one of curiosity and recoil; the owner sits content, bemused, indifferent to your intrusion. Ask him a question and he will answer; say nothing and he will remain silent.

We roused the driver, and he took us to his chapel. The barrack-dwellers, Indian and Negro, followed us with their gaze, proud to be the object of a visitor's interest. This chapel was much smaller; it was almost like a closet. There was an eroded, indistinct carving on the sacrificial stone outside, and the statues inside were if anything cruder than those we had seen before. There were no riders on horseback, only a shelf of images. That, said the driver, pointing to one statue, was la sainte vierge. Was Joseph there as well? Of course, of course, the driver said, affronted that I should ask. People from all over the world came to see this chapel. Did I know that? His eldest son had done the carvings. It was a sacred art, and he had handed it down to his son. Did the Indians in Trinidad a in whose existence he made it clear he did not believe a have chapels as fine as this? They didn't? Did they have a statue of la sainte vierge with a bracelet? He was beginning to regard me as an impostor. There were little dark bowls of stinking oil before the statues; this oil was brought by the faithful. We walked back to the car, past a trailer packed high with canes. Did they have lorries as big as that in Trinidad? In England? I said no. He looked pleased, though not surprised.

Anca Bertrand, who is a folklorist as well as an original and accomplished photographer, had a folk-dance rehearsal that evening. It took place in a seaside settlement, in a low case of naked corrugated-iron, which on the inside was papered over with sheets of France Soir. The oil lamp had a long slender gla.s.s chimney; it threw theatrical shadows. The drummers sat on their drums on a table; there were also stick-beaters and an accordionist. After much chatter s.p.a.ce was cleared for the dancers, and they started. The dance was the bel-air. The ladies were old and wore large straw hats; one man wore a white topee. And in the dark case full of badly dressed people whose features for the most part remained purely African, in the long yellow-lit room where, by listening beyond the drums to the accordion, one could perceive the stringed instruments of two centuries ago, and see the dances which even now were only slightly negrofied, the atmosphere became thick and repellent with slavery, making one think of long hot days on the plantation, music at night from the bright windows of the estate house, the acrid, flambeau-lit interiors of negro-houses which were like this case. It was hot and the air was heavy. The dancers sweated. The old ladies, their faces hidden by their straw hats, looked down as if studying their steps. Despite their age and size they moved lightly, even daintily. The music and motions of privilege, forgotten elsewhere, still lived here in a ghostly, beggared elegance: to this mincing mimicry the violence and improvisation and awesome skill of African dancing had been reduced.