The Middle Passage (23 page)

The walk to Utshi was made awkward only by the mud and by the single logs over gullies that were sometimes rocky and steep. The Amerindian boys with me ran lightly over the logs; I straddled them. Wild life was regrettably scarce. We saw only the tracks of wild hogs, and Lucio and Nicolas, grinning, made noises to attract them. ‘Snake!’ Lucio cried once, when I had seen nothing. He cut a sapling, trimmed it, used it to beat the snake three or four times, without malice, and then threw the snake out of the way. The track was at times visible only to the boys and towards the end led over a chaos of fallen tree trunks. We heard the falls, had a glimpse of them through the tops of the tall trees and then, abruptly, we were out of the forest and in the open: Nature, already grand, grown grander, the falls set in the middle of a vast curving stone wall, a single, small tree at the top, fine spray over everything, the grass thick and springy and waist-deep, the spray billowing out of the booming gorge like smoke. Lucio went down to the rapids, and when I saw him again he was in blue bathing trunks, climbing up the side of the rocky gorge, getting as close as he could to the falls. At its upper levels the gorge, though knobbed and torred, was covered with grass and looked as lush as pasture land. Nicolas went down after Lucio. They gave scale to the boulders of the scree and the sheer stone wall.

Later, beside the Utshi River, they half-built a leaf hut. They did this only at my insistence (it was getting late, but they were after all costing me three dollars a day each). I went swimming naked in the river, having undressed before them. They, more modestly, dressed and undressed away from me. Then we ate. They took all that I offered, without delight or displeasure, without comment; and then they took out their cassava bread and opened tins of sardines and made what they clearly regarded as a real meal. They showed more interest in my whisky bottle. ‘Is that rum, sir?’ ‘No.’ ‘Whisky?’ ‘No. It’s something I use for insect bites.’ Lucio passed his tongue over his top lip.

Around the fire, the river noise at our backs, we talked. Lucio was seventeen; he wanted to learn French. I gave him a few words and he spoke them with a good accent. But general conversation wasn’t easy. It seemed they had a limited conception of time: they could grasp the immediate but could neither look far back nor look ahead. If what I had heard at Kamarang was true, it is only alcohol – and alcohol to which he is unaccustomed – that stimulates the Amerindian’s time sense. Lucio could tell me little of himself or of his family, except that his father was dead.

‘How did he die?’ And I instantly regretted the question, because I knew the answer and didn’t want to hear it.

‘Kanaima
kill him,’ Lucio said, and threw a stick on the fire.

He didn’t think of the future. Of course he would like to get married, but he didn’t want an Amerindian girl, and who else would marry him? ‘Indian girls not good. They don’t know anything.’

The missionary must first teach self-contempt. It is the basis of the faith of the heathen convert. And in these West Indian territories, where the spiritual problem is largely that of self-contempt, Christianity must be regarded as part of the colonial conditioning. It was the religion of the slave-owners and at first an exclusive racial faith. It bestowed righteousness on its possessors. It enabled the Dutch in Guiana to divide their population into Christians and Negroes: the Berbice slave rebellion of 1762 was a war between Christians and rebels. The captured rebels were tried for ‘Christian murder’, and it is instructive to read of the death of Atta, the rebel chief:

Even while I was in Georgetown reading this account by Hartsinck of the Berbice slave-rebellion, Christians in British Guiana were protesting at the government’s plan to take over control of aided schools. Christianity was in danger in British Guiana. Mass meetings of the descendants of Atta’s rebels were held; a missionary wrote to
Time
magazine. So quickly have the postures been adopted, the cries of the
jehad;
so quickly has recent history been forgotten. And this history remains important. Although since emancipation Christianity has asserted itself and has in many ways rescued the colonial society from utter corruption, it has not lost its racial associations, its association with power and prestige and progress. The ministers of God, like the senior administrators of the civil service, were expected to be white; it is only of late that the white collars of church and civil service have begun to set off a certain nigrescence. The striving towards the now accommodating faith of an unaccommodating race has inevitably created deep psychological disturbances. It has confirmed the colonial in his role as imitator, the traveller who never arrives. ‘Indian girls not good. They don’t know anything.’ In his attitude to his people, Lucio spoke not only for the Amerindian convert but also for the East Indian. As for the descendants of Atta’s rebels, it is the cardinal article of their faith.

I was glad I had insisted about the hut, for it began to rain during the night: a pleasant noise on the sheltering leaves. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ I heard Lucio say. ‘Can Nicolas and I move our hammocks here?’ They had been sleeping in the open; and it was astonishing to see them in pyjamas as in the morning to find them pulling out toothbrushes and tubes of Colgate.

On the way back we came upon an old Amerindian bowed down under an enormous load in his
warishi
carrier. Frustratingly, the packing cases were Heineken beer cartons; and the whole load was topped with a brand-new panama hat. Quite half an hour later we met the rest of his family crossing a rocky riverbed: two very old women and two girls, all barefooted, all carrying loads. One of the women held a rum bottle containing a white liquid labelled ‘The Mixture’. The forest appeared to be full of Amerindians that morning. A little later, at a cool shallow stream that ran over rocks as large and flat as paving stones, we found the guitar-player from Santa Helena resting with his family and dog on the high dry rocks beside the bank. They were going back to Santa Helena: the walk would take a week. They had built a fire on one rock, and the guitar-player, who wore a knife-chain, shoes and socks, was using his knife to make a sort of
warishi
for his two cardboard suitcases. He asked for a cigarette. Then, suddenly in the Amerindian way, he left, the dog tremulously following through the shallow but swift stream and frantically wagging his tail when after two failures he managed to climb up to the other bank.

Nearing Paruima, we came out of the forest into a clearing, where a low crumbling mud hut was set in a small cultivation of giant plantain trees and clumps of giant sugarcane. A family was sitting in the sun in the yellow dirty yard. The young girl and the women, in dirty sack-like cotton dresses, fled to the darkness of the hut. Two tiny pink rubber dolls were left on the ground among bits of chewed sugarcane. The man, relaxed in the dirt, was eating sugarcane: he bit, chewed, sucked, swallowed, spat out. We exchanged greetings and walked on. When the hut was about fifty yards behind, Lucio said, ‘Would you wait for me here?’ They had been invited to a meal. We walked back. The boys took off their
warishis
and sat down on low benches in the yard. The women put a grater on the ground, a straw mat on the grater, and cassava bread on the mat. They brought out various enamel pots: one with vegetables in an oily stew, one with dasheen, one with black-eye peas. Lucio and Nicolas used pieces of cassava bread as dippers and ate from the pots. Then from another pot and with great contentment they drank a thick white liquid. Their hosts looked on approvingly, the man laughing and chattering in the yard, the women standing silent in the hut. I was given bananas and sugarcane.
*

‘Why, hello there!’ Mr Winter called, as I came up the hillside. And he was at once full of questions. What about the wild hogs? The logs over the gullies? (The Chinese boy had spoken of these logs and I believe had frightened Mr Winter as much as he had frightened me.) Were the boys all right? Did they ever leave me behind? Was I tired when I got there? How long did it take me to get my second wind?

‘It took you two hours, did it? That’s the way I woulda done it. Just foo-lin’ along for those two hours. Say, what was the water like up there? White or black? I sure have had enough of this black water. With all this washing that’s been going on, the whole river’s polluted for sure.’ He gave me a little of his news. He had rowed some distance up the river and found a white-water stream. So he had at last had a proper bathe. ‘Say, do you know this yellow fever they’ve been going on about? I don’t think it’s yellow fever at all. It’s hepatitis.’

I didn’t know the word.

‘You’re lucky. I once knew a man who had hepatitis. They’ve had twelve cases. And that’s enough for a fair-sized town. I know it’s bad not eating their food and things like that. But if I ask you to my home in the U-nited States – and I would love to have you – and if I had hepatitis, I wouldn’t ask you to my home. I would take you out to a restaurant or something.’ The pastor’s dinner invitation still rankled. ‘Do you know,’ he added conspiratorially, ‘I boil the water even in my hotel in Georgetown? Boil it and put it in the fridge. To cool.’

In the next room the Negro teacher and the Chinese boy were talking about boiled eggs. Food seemed to be on everybody’s mind.

When I got out of my hammock in the morning Mr Winter was dressed and packed. His mosquito net had been taken down and was doubtless in one of his polythene sacks. We had coffee; and, waiting for the launch, we talked about the water problem and the sanitation problem.

‘They’re gonna have one hell of a sanitation problem. Right now that latrine smells and has so many flies. I don’t know what it’s going to be like when they get those twenty-five boys they’ve been talking about. Twenty-five boys in full spate. Boy, they’re gonna have a problem.’

By eleven o’clock there was no sign of the launch. We made more coffee. Sipping it, tasting the black river water, we spoke of the deliciousness of pure, tasteless water. I offered the pawpaw the pastor had given me from one of his own trees.

‘No,
thenk
you! Never touch soft fruit.’

But he took one of the Amerindian’s bananas. We ate slowly, without speaking. The banana didn’t help thirst or the craving for fresh water.

‘You know,’ he said after some time, ‘you know – I sure don’t like to mention it now – but you know those cans of Trinidad orange juice? Those large cans with the black-and-orange label? I sure would like to have one now. The next time I come on one of these trips I’m gonna stock up with those cans. They’re heavy, but they’re really worth it.’

It was while I was negotiating for one of the mission’s over-large, over-ripe coconuts that the launch was announced. We ran down to the river, got into the open launch, and sat. There were delays. The sun was hot, the water dazzling and there was no breeze.

‘I suppose,’ Mr Winter said – and now I admired him for his control – ‘I suppose now they’ll go on to the village and
fool
around there a little.’

So indeed they did, and after a while we joined them. There we saw the reason for the delay: a new single-engined aeroplane on the landing field across the river from the village. It belonged to the mission and had just arrived, piloted by an American in green trousers and a green shirt, with the Portuguese pilot from Kamarang Mouth as passenger. It was now half past one and extremely hot. I spoke to Palmer about crops, but without enthusiasm. Even if we started right away it was now too late for us to get to Kamarang Mouth that day. We could travel on the river only by daylight and would have to spend the night at the Amerindian village half-way down. Then the pastor suggested that we should go back to Kamarang Mouth on the plane.

Half an hour later, after a view of the perverse windings and loops of the Kamarang over which we would have spent a day, the Portuguese and American talking all the way of planes and routes just as other men talk of cars and bypasses, we were at Kamarang Mouth.

I loaded an Amerindian boy with my bags and almost ran to Seggar’s refrigerator. I had two beers, the first quickly, the second slowly. Feeling the cold wet bottle in my hand, I luxuriated in the heat. For the first time for days tobacco had a taste. I inhaled deeply and swallowed and gazed down the Mazaruni to where Roraima was hidden by haze. When I went over to the rest house I found Mr Winter lying on his back across the bed, his feet dangling, his hat unhinged without being off, a fulfilled, beatific expression on his face. He raised a languid hand and pointed to the table.

On it I saw a tin of Trinidad orange juice.

‘There it is,’ he said. ‘Left some for you.’

I didn’t tell him about the beer. But the orange juice he had left scarcely came to an inch in a tumbler.

‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, when I had emptied the tin, ‘drink as much of that as you can. Drink it all. I’ve had my share.’

An hour or so later, when calm had returned to both of us and we were preparing once more to leave – a Dakota was coming in unexpectedly and would take us that very afternoon to the coast – Mr Winter said, ‘That orange juice sure was good.’ A smile broke and spread slowly over his face. ‘Drunk more than my fair share.’ He started to laugh. ‘Drunk more than half. Nearly drunk out the whole can. Did you get much?’