Caribbean (120 page)

She said she would like some, then explained that she was bewildered by Rastafarianism, and as soon as she said the word, he stopped pouring and said: “Yes, I know he’s been doing a lot of talking, that fellow from Jamaica.”

“He’s certainly been talking to me, quite persuasively.”

“Now, now, Sally! You’re much too sensible to be taken in by that nonsense.”

“But he quotes the Bible with such telling effect. Tell me, Canon, are the words of Revelation meaningful?”

Canon Tarleton sipped his sherry, then broke into robust laughter: “Sally, I’m going to answer your question with what might be called terrible frankness, but for God’s sake, listen to me. The religious kooks and weirdos of this world, and I’m borrowing a wonderfully appropriate pair of words I picked up from a recent issue of
Time
, have used two books of the Bible for the last two thousand years to prove any confounded thing they wished. Daniel and Revelation! They do as much harm in the world as Jamaica rum and Holland gin.”

“How do you mean?”

“They’re apocalyptic. Inspired rantings. You and I this morning could dip into those two books and prove almost anything we wanted to.” He reached for his Bible, showed her that he was opening it to Revelation, and read a farrago of words and symbols and sheer obfuscation: “Now tell me, pray what does that mean?” And very cleverly he began to assign arbitrary meanings to each of the words and symbols, until in the end he had proved, by juggling Revelation, that in the year 2007 Canada was going to invade both the United States and Mexico.

“Using Daniel and Revelation, you can prove anything.” He rubbed his chin and chuckled at a preposterous scene he had witnessed:
“When I was in Washington last year for the meeting of our church, I listened to this new crop of radio and television ministers. What clever men they are! How handsome they are on the telly! And half of them were ranting about some inscrutable passage in Revelation.”

“Then what the Rastafarians say is all junk?”

“You used the word, I didn’t. But without answering you, because it’s never right for one religion to knock another, I’m going to look out the window and nod my head.”

Sally, much relieved to hear her suspicions confirmed, changed the subject: “Would you please look at Numbers—Chapter Five, verse six. I memorized the place because when he read the passage, it did seem to me to justify the strange way he wears his hair. Tell me, Canon, have you ever seen this Rastafarian?”

“I have. The other night at dusk, and he scared me half to death.” He was trying to find the passage, and when he did he said: “I’m afraid there’s nothing here that says anything about hair.”

“Try Chapter Six, verse five,” she said. “I may have gotten it backward.”

“Ah ha!” he chuckled. “This is the famous passage that rebellious young men in London used to convince their parents that long hair for men was ordered by the Bible: ‘The vow … there shall no razor come upon his head … he shall be holy, and shall let the locks of the hair of his head grow.’ ” Closing the Bible, he turned to Sally and smiled: “That certainly justifies … What is it they call that infamous hair? Dreadlocks?”

“It seems to.”

“Ah, but my dear young woman. You can go terribly wrong if you settle upon one short passage of our Bible for your sole instruction on anything. When the young mods, as they were called back home, threw that notorious passage at their elders, scholars in our church combed through their Bible to see what other firm instructions were given about men’s hair, and in Leviticus, the great book of law, they found in Chapter Fourteen, verses eight and nine, these words: ‘And he that is to be cleansed shall wash his clothes, and shave off all his hair, and wash himself in water, that he may be clean … he shall shave all his hair off his head and his beard and his eyebrows, even all his hair he shall shave off: and he shall wash his clothes …’ Your Rastafarian could profit from those admonitions, especially the part about washing.”

Sally reached for the Bible, read the passages, and smiled, but the canon was not finished: “But as so often happens with the Bible, it was stout old St. Paul who clinched the matter in First Corinthians, if I can find the passage that was widely circulated when long hair for men first hit the streets. Yes, Chapter Eleven, verse fourteen: ‘Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?’ ”

After Sally had had an opportunity to study that passage, the old clergyman said compassionately: “A minister my age has seen a dozen sects rise and fall, and those that rely on selected passages from Daniel and Revelation are the most pernicious. But their error is understandable. Men and women grow restless when faced by tough, tested teachings of Roman Catholics or American Baptists. People aren’t ready to discipline themselves according to the truth that has been distilled over twenty centuries. So they construct their own apocalyptic religions, all fire and hell and golden chariots and a hundred and forty-four thousand of this and that, and I suppose that in the long run, they do no great harm. But in the short span, dear God, can they be destructive!”

As she was about to leave, he said: “I heard about his predictions on Ethiopia, and you can find passages which support his wild dreams, but in Zephaniah, a little-known book tucked away near the end of the Old Testament, the prophet takes care of your Rastafarian’s Ethiopia: ‘The Lord will be terrible unto them: for he will famish all the gods of the earth … Ye Ethiopians also, ye shall be slain by my sword.’ ”

When he led her to the door he said amiably: “Sally, you and I, using our scissors and paste, could construct a wonderful new religion, but we’d use only the noble parts, Deuteronomy, Psalms, St. Luke, the letters of St. Paul. But of course, such a religion has already been compiled for us. It’s called Christianity.”

In the weeks following the tour of the north part of the island, the Rastafarian became an object of suspicion in Bristol Town. Harry Keeler, in charge of the managerial aspects of tourism, was distraught when a rather fat white woman from New York who had come ashore from a Scandinavian cruise ship was physically abused on the street by a big black man, who shouted at her in a loud and menacing voice: “Go home, you big fat white pig.” When she regained
her balance and looked at him in bewilderment, he added: “We don’t want you fat pigs on our island.”

The incident caused an uproar, for everyone appreciated instantly the damage it might do their principal industry; and when news was rushed to Keeler’s office, he jumped to the conclusion that the black offender must have been the Rastafarian. But the most casual interrogations proved that to be untrue; the assailant had been identified by several disgusted islanders, and he denied having any association with the Rastafarian.

Keeler swung into action immediately, and without seeking approval from anyone he hurried to the cruise ship,
Tropic Sands
, out of Oslo, to make profuse apologies to the captain, the cruise director and any of the other officials he could find: “This sort of thing does not happen on All Saints. It was a shameful aberration and will not be tolerated. Assure your people of that.”

When an officer took him to the ship’s infirmary, where the New York tourist was resting under mild sedation, he accomplished a great deal of good by making an on-the-spot decision. “Madam, I know how frightened you must have been. Yelled at and pushed by a strange man. I sympathize with you and I’m mortified, because we don’t allow things like that on our island. Here’s what I’m going to do to try to win your forgiveness. The people of this island will pay the entire cost of your boat trip, and since the
Tropic Sands
doesn’t sail until eleven tonight, the governor general invites you to have dinner with him, you and a friend of your choosing, at Government House, seven sharp. I’ll be here to fetch you in a taxi.” Having made peace with the offended woman, he then doubled back to the captain, invited him to the dinner also, and hurried ashore to phone the governor general to advise him of what he had done, and to ask his apology for having made what Keeler called a “unilateral decision.”

The dinner was a huge success. The woman turned out to be a Mrs. Gottwald who served as entertainment officer for a large synagogue in Brooklyn, and it had been she who had organized the Caribbean cruise aboard the
Tropic Sands
that had brought forty-seven passengers to the ship. Suddenly she became a person of great importance not only to the ship but also to the island, and she proved a well-informed talker.

“People like me,” she explained, “and there are lots of us who determine where groups will go for their vacation, are
extremely
 …” (she emphasized the word) “attentive to press reports. Those airplane
hijackings absolutely killed the Mediterranean. We couldn’t give our cruises away. Nobody goes to poor old Haiti anymore. The ugly troubles in Jamaica destroyed its tourism for a while, but now we’re back. But we take our people only to the north coast of the island, never to a troubled town like Kingston.”

Captain Bergstrom said: “It’s becoming profitable for our shipping companies to buy or lease an unpopulated island, or a remote stretch of a troubled island like Haiti or Jamaica, and build our own little vacation dreamland. Walled in behind a palisade, you see only those blacks who are allowed in as part of the work force …”

The way he described this new development in tourism betrayed his low assessment of it, but it remained for Mrs. Gottwald to dismiss it as a solution to the problems of tourism: “I would never take my people to an isolated place like that. And my people wouldn’t want to go. They want to see a marvelous mix like your fine main street. They want to meet black people and brown. Otherwise they’ll stay home.”

This occasioned favorable comment, especially from the black governor general, but then she added the warning that had to be attended to on any island that hoped to maintain its tourist trade: “I shall never forget what happened on St. Croix in the American Virgins some years ago. I had my group, sixty or seventy at that time, in St. Thomas that day and we were terrified when the news flashed along the waterfront and into the cruise ships docked there: Black hoodlums with machine guns attacked guests at the posh Rockefeller golf club on St. Croix. Dead bodies all over the place. It killed the Virgins for that season, and even now we can’t sell day excursions to St. Croix.”

Now the governor spoke: “I do hope, Mrs. Gottwald and Captain Bergstrom, that you can help us avoid inflammatory publicity.” He had been a scholarship student at Oxford and spoke with one of the world’s loveliest accents: pure Oxford softened by Caribbean sunshine. “Of course, if incidents like today’s should be repeated, news would have to circulate, and we would be honor-bound to let that happen, even though we knew it would be damaging our island. But I give you my word that we’re not going to let it happen again …”

Captain Bergstrom chuckled and raised his glass: “You have a tremendous advantage over us, Governor. Our big ships have to stop somewhere. With the Mediterranean closed and the Orient so far away, we’re left with only three choice areas for the American travelers like Mrs. Gottwald and her group: Alaska in the summer, Mexico
and the Panama Canal for the in-between season, and your Caribbean in the winter.” Then he added ominously: “But if things get out of hand, if our travelers are abused when they come ashore, we drop your island, just like we’ve had to drop Haiti.”

As the party broke up, the governor said: “Mr. Keeler, you did me a signal honor in bringing these two experts to dinner. I’ve learned a great deal. And I trust that you, as our expert, listened and will take steps to protect our visitors and our island’s good name.”

Next morning at seven, Keeler was in the office of Commissioner of Police Thomas Wrentham: “Have you arrested the culprit?”

“Easily.”

“Anybody interrogated him?”

“I did.”

“Results?”

“I suppose you want to know whether he had been in any way influenced by the Rastafarian.”

“Exactly.”

“If we can believe him, and I’m inclined to, he’s never even seen the stranger.”

“Was he high on marijuana?”

“Smoking it is not a big problem on this island, as you know.”

“But with the Rastafarian preaching his doctrines, it’s going to be.”

“I agree, but in this case, probably no.”

“Then why in the world would he attack a white woman and say the provocative things he did?”

Wrentham leaned back and reflected on this: “Sometimes it’s in the air. Word from other islands, radio broadcasts about terrorism, an article in
Time
or
Newsweek
 …”

“Or the visit of a Rastafarian,” Keeler suggested, and the commissioner said: “Today, on an island like this, that’s usually the case,” and he took from a desk drawer a report forwarded to him by his opposite number in Jamaica: “Take a look,” and Keeler read: