Caribbean (122 page)

When she drove around to pick up Grimble from the tiny house in which he was living with the family of one of his girl friends, she was astonished to discover that he did not know how to drive. To explain this deficiency he reverted to Jamaican street talk, and Sally thought: This touches him deeply. He’s a child again.

“That time, long time, me no have nuttin’. Mudder, she work all time, no earn nuttin’. Me never get job drive car, never learn.”

“That’s all right,” she told him. “I’ll drive,” and they set off for the new road connecting York to the airport, and on this stretch she had first to rebuff him sharply when he tried to work his way under her dress: “Save that for the others, Grimble!” Then she started the long
conversation which would continue almost unbroken till they returned to Bristol Town.

“What do you think will happen to the Caribbean, Grimble?” When he started his reply by citing certain obscure passages in Revelation, she cut him short: “None of that nonsense! You and I both know that two hundred years from now America will be where it is and functioning one way or another, and some pope will be in place in Rome with more or less power. And our islands will still be here, populated mostly by blacks and untold numbers of Indians imported from Asia. What I want to know, Grimble, is what kind of world we blacks will have here?”

He protested almost petulantly: “I don’t like Grimble. My name Ras-Negus.”

She apologized: “I’m sorry, dear friend. A man is entitled to be called by what he prefers. But your predictions, please?”

“In old days lots of blacks from all islands go to work in Cuba cane fields, help build Panama Canal, go live in Central American jungles, cut logwood for dye, mahogany for build things. Most never come back. Later, same kind of men go New York, London, work strong, send much money home. But like others, they too never come back. Things in island stay in balance. Babies born, man go away, room for everyone. But now …”

Sally asked: “Ras-Negus, how old are you?” and he replied: “Twenty-five,” to which she said: “You’re a bright, able fellow. I could see that from the first. In the times you were talking about, you’d have left Jamaica for the adventure in Panama or headed for London.”

He agreed: “If they start something big in Brazil, I go tomorrow,” but she would not accept this evasion: “There isn’t going to be anything big in Brazil, or Cuba or America. And if there was, people from Central America would rush to grab the jobs.”

“I think maybe you’re right. London closed, too many out of work. Can’t go Trinidad, they won’t let.”

“So what?”

“Bob Marley … Jesus Christ of the Caribbean. Great, great man. He go Africa …” and apparently memories of Marley seduced him back into a Jamaican street vocabulary which she could not follow, so after she protested, he said: “Very impressed. Great place, Africa. He tell me when he get back: ‘Maybe better we all go Africa. Like Marcus Garvey say. I mean everybody in Jamaica. Just up and go.’ I beginnin’ to think same way.”

“Have you any idea how many ships, big ones, it would take to move Jamaica to Africa?”

“Atom power, maybe nuclear power, it could be done.”

When they reached the airport at the southern extremity of the island, she interrupted the dialogue with a suggestion he appreciated: “Let’s go into the canteen and have something to eat,” but when they sat down at the counter she was amazed when he ordered not only a meat sandwich, but a large bowl of chili, a helping of French fries and a slab of chocolate cake with a large glass of milk. “I thought you ate only natural foods,” she chided, and he explained: “Festival with beautiful girl,” but she noticed that he did move all the food into his coconut bowl before he ate. He made no effort to pay for what he called his festival, for as usual he had no money, but he ate as if famished, and when Sally could not finish her generous sandwich, he wolfed that down too.

On the drive north, they stopped again, at the deluxe hotel at Pointe Neuve, where she treated him to a lemon squash, and after that she returned to her earlier question: “So what’s to become of us in the Caribbean?” and with all other options foreclosed, he said thoughtfully: “Population grow. That for sure. Then people go Trinidad whether they want us or not. Maybe Venezuela, Colombia too. Also Cuba for sure, maybe United States, like people from Haiti.”

“Do you think those other countries will allow us in?” and he replied instantly: “They better. What choice they got?”

“I think you’ll find they have many choices. Guns along the shore, for example.”

“They might. But people tell me guns along Florida don’t stop Cubans, Haitians.”

“So what else did you and Bob Marley have in mind?”

“Marley no politician. He pure Rasta voice of Jah. That for sure.”

“I still want to know, Ras-Negus, what else?”

As she asked this question they were driving slowly along the glorious foreshore of the Caribbean, with an entire world of sun and bending trees and sudden glimpses of Morne de Jour far to the north, and Grimble suddenly cried: “Our islands are too beautiful to lose!” And she noted that now he spoke perfect English.

“Of course,” she bore in. “But what are we going to do to keep them?”

“You know anything about communism?”

“Not much, except that it doesn’t seem to work too well in Cuba. Why?”

“I’ve been wondering. Maybe in our islands we need something different. Like sugar and tobacco in the past, even the things we do now, maybe they’re gone … forever. Like bauxite in Jamaica. When I was a boy, all men in my village looked forward to jobs in bauxite mines, big ships coming to north shore Jamaica, loading our bauxite, carrying it to Philadelphia’s big aluminum plants, make frying pans, all things. Now that’s all gone. Suppose you’re a farmer, you don’t want bauxite work, you want to raise bananas on all the hillsides. In the old days big ships came to the same harbors as bauxite, Fyffe & Elder carrying our bananas to Liverpool, Marseilles. Now no more. In old days, everybody worked, everybody happy. Now it’s all gone.”

He raised his hands in a gesture of despair, then he twisted his lute and began to sing “Four Hundred Years,” in which she joined. In this manner they came finally to that lovely pinnacle which housed Pointe Sud, one of the rocky guardians of the Baie de Soleil, from which they could see ships moving from the Caribbean into the
baie
, with handsome Bristol Town gleaming in the distance, the sunlit roof of Government House high on its hill and The Club just visible behind. It was a sight to gladden the heart of any All Saints man, and even a stranger from another island like Grimble could appreciate the unmatched grandeur of this scene.

When Sally pulled her car into a paved parking lot atop the pinnacle, from where they could see both the town to the east and the sea to the west, she asked, not having lost her train of thought: “If Cuban communism isn’t the answer, and I’m afraid it isn’t because the other islands are too small and too disjointed to work as a unit, what is?”

The Rasta Man had exhausted his alternatives—negritude, Rastafarianism, communism. He had nothing more to offer the Caribbean islands, whose populations were not yet capable of making choices in a complex modern world or of executing them if they did make them. No Caribbean citizens had trained themselves the way the Japanese had before they boldly cried: “We can build automobiles better than Detroit!” or like the Koreans of a decade later who shouted: “We can make steel better and cheaper than Japan.” The Caribbean had no black industrialists or engineers capable of duplicating the way the Taiwanese had leaped into world competition to follow the two city-states Hong Kong and Singapore. Citizens of this
golden sea were still rural practitioners, some of the most congenial in the world, but self-restricted to digging, cutting and hauling.

Sally, dismayed to see this striving man lost in his simplicities, tried to bring common sense into their discussion: “Could we serve as a kind of manufacturing area for big firms in Britain and America?”

“They’re Babylon. They’re to be destroyed.”

Sally became furious, and showed it: “Grimble! For Christ’s sake, stop that nonsense! Put your mind to work. Do you think we could attract manufacturing? Sewing clothes or putting machines together?”

“Jamaica had bauxite. They left. Now we have nothing!”

“But we have people. Very able people who could learn anything.”

“We had bananas, but now with Fyffe & Elder gone, we have nothing.”

She wondered if the Caribbean islands could develop hightechnology assembly industries, employing women to operate the demanding machinery, but Ras-Negus said that the women he knew would not be content to work in closed-in spaces: “They like outdoors.”

This contemptuous dismissal of her proposal angered Sally, and she said: “The women in Haiti make all the baseballs used in what they call the American big leagues. Why couldn’t we promote some industry like that?”

“Proud black women won’t slave for American white men. Never.”

Then, like so many thoughtful people in the islands, she asked: “Can we expand our hotels and beach areas, and bring in really great numbers of tourists with their dollars and pounds and bolivars?”

He dismissed this bluntly: “Proud black men don’t want to serve those big fat pigs …” and she exploded: “Damn you! Those were your words that crazy man shouted when he assaulted the Jewish woman. ‘Big fat white pig.’ You came to this island solely to make trouble, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. I don’t want to share anything with you anymore.” Then she shouted: “If I told my father about this, he’d have you arrested.” And she abruptly got out of the car.

Hesitantly he followed her onto the headland, where her temper subsided, and there she halted her interrogation, for she realized that it was getting nowhere; she had plumbed the depths of his understanding
and found them extremely shallow, but as they sat together and as he began talking of the values he really cherished, she found that it was he who was attuned to the great, basic, primordial reality of the Caribbean isles, not she. Her concern was only with the current-day politics and economics of the immediate future; he was in some primitive way in touch with Africa, and the old-time sugar plantation, and the struggle for freedom, and the manifestations of negritude at a basic level which she could never attain. She realized that here in bright daylight with a clean breeze blowing in from the sea, she was in much the same condition as she had been in the back of Laura Shaughnessy’s car that night when marijuana fumes filled the air. In her harsh analysis of Caribbean reality a few minutes ago, there had been at best a metallic reality; in the Rastafarian’s words, there was a narcotic beauty, and she wondered if, through music and ganja and dreaming, he had not come closer to understanding their Caribbean than she.

He now spoke reflectively in a fearful mix of Rastafarian glossolalia, old African words and rearranged English, but she understood the message: “The people of the Caribbean are different. Their early life in Africa made them so, right from the beginning. Terrible years on the sugar plantations increased the difference between them and white people. We think different. We value different things. We live different. And we must make our living in different ways. The white man has nothing to teach us. We build a good life here, we find the money to buy his radios, his televisions, his Sony Betamaxes, his Toyotas.”

“Everything you mentioned comes from Japan, not from white people.”

Ras-Negus, always displeased when reality was thrust into his dreams, ignored this: “So we make our life simple, strictly black folk living and working with black folk, we unite all the islands, even Cuba and Martinique, and we tell the rest of the world: ‘This our little world. We run it our way. Stay out!’ ”

And Sally had to ask the terrible, unanswerable question: “But where do we get the money to live?”

But he did have an answer and it astonished her, for it was delivered with such poetic force and such rich allusion that she had to grant that he believed it: “When we lived free in Africa, we existed, didn’t we? When we came over in the dreadful slave ships, most of us survived, didn’t we? And when our fathers worked like animals, dawn
to dusk in the sugar fields, we managed to remain human beings, didn’t we? How in hell do you think you and I would be here if our black ancestors didn’t have a powerful will to live? I got that same will, Sally, and I think you do, too.”

Then came the incandescent moment she would never forget, regardless of what happened to Ras-Negus and his confused dreams. An earlier group of visitors to this headland had held a picnic, and to toast their bread and heat water for their tea they had scoured the area for limbs and branches to build a small fire. Somebody had dragged in a piece of wood much too long to be fitted in the fire, and it had been left behind for Ras-Negus to find.

Realizing that his conversation with Sally had come to an end, he lifted the piece of wood almost automatically, hefted it several times, and found that although it was as narrow as a broomstick, in other respects it resembled a cricket bat; length, weight and general feel were right. After taking a few desultory swings, he assumed the proper stance of a batsman in his crease, and as he lashed out at imaginary balls—a spinner attacking his wicket, a googly in the grass, a bodyline bumper of the kind the mighty Larwood used to throw, right at the batsman’s head—he began to speak of the real West Indies: “I saw my first cricket match in Kingston. I was nine and an uncle took me to the Oval, and for the first time I saw the players in their clean whites, the umpire in his linen duster, the colorful crowd, and I was captured.

“You want to know what our islands are best at? Cricket. In 1975, when I was nineteen, they got all the top countries of the world together, those that played cricket, and they held a world championship series in England: Ceylon, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, India, and especially the Big Three, Australia, England, us. Two brackets. One-day matches, knock-out rounds. And who do you think won? West Indies! Sore losers in London and Delhi and Sydney shouted: ‘Freak! The wicket wasn’t sound!’ So they held the same championship matches in 1979, and who won this time, against the world’s best? West Indies. Champions of the whole world, twice running.”