Caribbean (108 page)

“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 damned 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 Paycock
? You must read them. They took an amorphous mass 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 class 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, Curaçao 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 ecumenical 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 Yucatán 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 God! 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 Basse-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 principal architect of the American form of government.” His lecture started with a dramatic account of a typical West Indian hurricane: