The Middle Passage (2 page)

We were directed to one of the ocean terminal’s less luxurious waiting rooms, next to the railway sheds, in the gloomy recesses of which we could see the immigrants who had arrived that morning on the
Francisco Bobadilla
: a thick, multi-coloured mass herded behind wooden rails, and as silent as though they were behind glass. We stood at the doors and watched. No one stepped out of the travellers’ waiting room into the immigrants’ shed. There was interest, disapproval, pity and mockery in the gazes, the old hands sizing up the clothes of the new arrivals, clothes like those in which they had themselves landed some time before: thin white flannel trousers, sky-blue tropical suits, jackets with wide shoulders and long skirts, and those broad-brimmed felt hats, unknown in the West Indies yet
de rigueur
for the West Indian immigrant to Britain. Cheap cardboard suitcases were marked with complete addresses, all ending with ENGLAND in large letters. They stood motionless in the gloom; about them bustled dark-coated porters and railway officials; and there was silence.

The Negro with the ruined face stood, tall and totem-like, in the centre of the waiting room. Beside him was the stunted Negro with the short trousers, long arms and big eyes; from time to time he swivelled his head, his eyes never changing expression, his mouth open and collapsed, his large clumsy hands loosely clenched. The fat Englishman gave a cigarette to the man with the ruined face and lit it for him. There was much solicitude in this gesture, and I wondered about their relationship.

As yet we were subdued, as silent as the immigrants outside. But whispered rumours were beginning to circulate. Seven hundred, a thousand, twelve hundred immigrants had come on the
Francisco Bobadilla
. Two trains were taking them to London, from where they would make for those destinations written so proudly in those illiterate hands on their suitcases.

‘You wouldn’t want to travel with all them West Indians,’ the man at the travel agency had said. ‘Even the dockers are sick when they come off those ships. And it takes a lot to make a British docker sick.’

The
Francisco Bobadilla
was indeed in an appalling condition. The crew had not had time to clean up after the seven hundred immigrants. Paintwork was tarnished, metal rusting. In my first-class cabin, so cramped that I could open my suitcase only on my bunk, there was dust and fluff everywhere. The water carafe was hazy with dirt; the hot water didn’t run; the lights didn’t work. I rang for the steward; and many minutes later such an old, fatigued man appeared that I regretted disturbing him. I mentioned only the lights and the dust. He argued; I insisted; I mentioned the hot water.

‘Luego, luego,’
he said.

It was a more urgent word than mañana. When, some time later, I passed his cubby-hole, I saw him dozing on his chair.

But there was an advantage. On this outward journey there were few passengers, and most of those who lined the deck rails as we moved down the Solent were travelling tourist. When the dinner gong went they disappeared to their canteen below decks. There were only nine first-class passengers, and we sat at three tables in one corner of the large shabby dining room.

As he sat down, an elderly coloured man said, just to open the conversation, ‘A lot of these black fellers in Tobago are damn intelligent, you know.’

We were in the West Indies. Black had a precise meaning; I was among people who had a nice eye for shades of black. And the elderly coloured man – a man, that is, of mixed European and African descent, with features and skin-colour closer to the European – was safe. There were no black men or women at the table. The coloured man’s wife was, we were told, Spanish. Correia was a Portuguese from British Guiana. And Philip, who came from Trinidad, where he had ‘a little business’, could have been white or Portuguese or coloured or Jewish.

‘A lot of those black fellers in B.G. ain’t no fools either,’ Correia said.

The intelligence of black fellers in Trinidad and Jamaica and Barbados was assessed; and then they started groping for common acquaintances. It turned out that Correia and Philip had some, in a football team that had toured the West Indies in the 1920s.

Correia was a small, bald man. He wore spectacles, had a sharp hooked nose and had lost his teeth. But he was once a goalkeeper. He had a booming voice.

‘You remember Skippy?’ he asked.

‘I can’t remember when last I see Skippy,’ Philip said.

‘Well, you not going to see him again. Son of a bitch catch a pleurisy and dead. Frankie and Bertie and Roy Williams. All of them dead like hell.’

The waiter, middle-aged and mournful, couldn’t speak English.

‘But look at this, nuh,’ Correia boomed. ‘And I got to spend fo’teen days on this ship. Look here, man, look here. I want some tomatoes. You got that? Tomatoes. Having a lil trouble with the stomach,’ he explained to us. ‘Tomatoes. You got that? Me. Wantee. Tomatee. Me wantee tomatee. I don’t know where they pick up these people who can’t speak English.’

The Spanish lady couldn’t talk Spanish; Correia himself couldn’t talk Portuguese. West Indians are English-speaking and when confronted with the foreigner display the language arrogance of all English-speaking people.

A young couple from Northern Ireland and an English librarian sat at the next table. The librarian was distressed. She had been under the impression that the
Francisco Bobadilla
was a cruise ship and had booked for the round trip. She had just learned that we were going to the West Indies to pick up another seven hundred immigrants.

When I went down I saw the old steward coming out of my cabin with brush and pan. He smiled and limped away. But the floor was still dusty; the balls of fluff were still under my bunk; the carafe was still dirty; the hot water didn’t run. I couldn’t complain, though: the lights were now working.

Early next morning I was awakened by Correia. He had the cabin across the corridor from mine. He came into my cabin naked except for a pair of pants. He was without his spectacles; his little face was haggard; his beard had begun to sprout; his thin hair was disarrayed; and he was hugging himself.

‘Hi there, man. How you sleep? Lemme see a cigarette, nuh.’ He took one of mine and lit it. ‘You look as if you sleep well, you know. I had a hell of a night, boy. Didn’t want to wake you up earlier. Thought you would be sleeping. But I can’t open my suitcase. The one with pyjamas and soap and razor and Eno’s and every blasted thing in. You want to try it?’

The canvas suitcase was bulging and taut; it was a wonder that Correia had managed to close it.

‘I try those blasted keys all how,’ he said, sitting on his bunk, while I tried.

Eventually we opened it, Correia jumping on the suitcase, I turning the key.

‘Thanks, thanks, man. I hope I ain’t catch a cold, boy. You ain’t have a lil Eno’s or Andrews with you? Stomach giving me hell, boy. Went three times already this morning. Not one blasted thing. Is this damn
mañana
food. First and last Spanish ship you catch
me
on.

And all that morning he padded up and down outside the lavatories, smoking, head bowed as if in meditation, tie slackened, spectacles half-way down his nose, hands in pockets. Whenever I went down he gave me a progress report.

‘It coming, it coming. I feel it coming.’

By lunchtime, to add to his troubles, he was sea-sick.

I reported this to the table.

‘He wake me up at five this morning asking for Eno’s,’ Philip said.

The coloured man, Mr Mackay, said, ‘We have two madmen with us this trip. Black fellers. I was talking to their keepers this morning. White fellers. The British Government paying for them going out and coming back.’

‘I see them walking up and down,’ Philip said. ‘Is a funny thing. But you could always tell people who make it their business to keep other people lock up. They have this walk. You ever notice?’

‘You see how these black fellers going to England and stinking up the country,’ Mr Mackay said. ‘I mean, if a black feller want to get mad, he could stay home and get mad there.’

They spoke of the telephone strike in Trinidad, which had been going on for some time. Mr Mackay said that the strike was a racial one. He spoke of this with feeling. Quite suddenly he was identifying himself with the black fellers. He was an old man; he had never risen to the top; superiors had always been imported from England.

‘Is these Potogees who cause the trouble, you know,’ he said. ‘They have their hands in the stinking salt-fish barrel and they are still the first to talk of nigger this and coolie that.’

‘I believe the ship has a list,’ Philip said. ‘Go up on the sun deck and see.’

‘I must say I don’t care for the look of those lifeboats. If anything happens we drowning like hell. As soon as we get to the Azores I am going to try to insure Mrs Mackay and myself against accident. I suppose you could do that sort of thing in the Azores?’

‘But you don’t know the language, Daddy,’ Mrs Mackay said.

‘Why, what they talk there? A sort of Potogee
patois?
’

‘Something like that,’ Philip said. ‘But I could help you with it.’

‘What, you know Potogee?’

‘We used to speak it at home,’ Philip said.

So Philip was Portuguese.

Mr Mackay fell silent. He stared at his plateful of Spanish food and looked unwell.

Philip said briskly. ‘This Trinidad coming like a little America. All these strikes. All these hold-ups. You hear about that man the police catch with eighty-three thousand dollars in notes stuff up in a chest-of-drawers?’

Mr Mackay spoke at length about getting insured at the Azores. And for the rest of the journey he was silent about Portuguese and others and spoke only of black fellers. It was a cramping of his style; but in the West Indies, as in the upper reaches of society, you must be absolutely sure of your company before you speak: you never know who is what or, more important, who is related to what.

It was warm. The tourist-class passengers, who had for a day or two been battened down, it seemed, on the lower decks, emerged singly and in pairs and sunned themselves. The two lunatics came out with their keepers. The young Baptist missionary from the North of England, off to the West Indies on his first posting and travelling tourist out of a sense of duty, read large theological works and made notes. A Negro woman of about eighty, wearing sensationally old clothes, wandered about with cheerful inquisitiveness. She had left St Kitts to look for work in England; the rumour went round that the British Government was paying for her passage back.

Because there were so few passengers the class divisions on the ship were ignored. An Indian butcher from British Guiana trotted round the first-class deck morning and afternoon. A tall handsome Negro, who spoke to no one, walked around the deck as well, for hours at a time, smoking a tiny pipe and holding a paperback called
The Ten Commandments
, the book of the film. This man, according to Mr Mackay, had had some mental trouble in England and was being sent back, at his own request, at the expense of the British Government.

We all rooted among the tourist-class passengers and brought back stories.

Miss Tull, the librarian, came back distressed. She had met a woman who had left England because she couldn’t get a room for her baby and herself. ‘The landlord just threw them out when the baby came,’ Miss Tull said, ‘and put up a big sign in green paint. No Coloured Please. Do you mean that in the whole of Britain they couldn’t find room for one woman and her baby?’

‘They’ve found room for quite a lot,’ Mr Mackay said.

‘I can’t understand it. You West Indians don’t seem to care at all.’

‘All this talk about tolerance is all right,’ Mr Mackay said. ‘But a lot of you English people forget that there is a type of black man – like the Jamaican – who is an animal.’

‘But this woman isn’t Jamaican,’ Miss Tull said, conceding the point.

‘A lot of these black fellers provoke the English people,’ Mr Mackay said, putting an end to the discussion. Like all good West Indians, he was unwilling to hear anything against England.

My own encounter had been with a fat brown-skinned Grenadian of thirty-three. He said he had ten children in Grenada, in various parishes and by various women. He had gone to England to getaway from them all, but then had begun to feel that he should go back and face his responsibilities. He thought he might even get married. He hadn’t yet decided who to, but it probably would be the mother of his last child. He loved this child; he didn’t care for the others. I asked why, then, he had had so many. Didn’t they have contraceptives in Grenada? He said with some indignation that he was a Roman Catholic; and for the rest of the journey never spoke to me.

From our ventures among the tourist class we came back with stories, and sometimes with captives. Correia’s captive was an Indian boy called Kripal Singh from British Guiana, who so endeared himself to the company that he was invited to tea.

‘So handsome,’ Mrs Mackay said over and over. ‘So fair.’

‘This boy,’ Correia said, ‘comes from one of the best families in B.G. You never hear of them? Biggest people in the ground provision business. Singh Brothers, man. Singh, Singh, and Singh.’

Kripal Singh looked correctly modest, his manner suggesting that what Correia said was true but that he didn’t want to boast. He was tall and slender; his features were fine, his mouth as delicate as a girl’s. He smoked with nervous elegance.

‘Tell me about your family, Kripal,’ Correia said.

Kripal, bowing slightly, offered cigarettes. He was a little drunk. So was Correia.

‘They don’t
grow
the ground provisions, you know,’ Correia said, taking one of Kripal’s cigarettes. ‘They does only buy and sell. Tell them, Kripal.’

‘So fair,’ Mrs Mackay said.

For the rest of the voyage Kripal remained attached to the first class, only sleeping with the tourists and eating with them. He could find no suitable drinking companions among them; and he shared a cabin with the British Guianese butcher, whom he detested.