The Middle Passage (33 page)

Not a word, you notice, about the white and black piano keys making harmony together: so far has the nationalism of the twenties and thirties grown more embittered, so close has the intellectual moved to Ras Tafarianism.

I went to the country to talk to one of the communists ‘in the field’. He received me in a box-like one-room office which stood on stilts and contained two tables, one chair, one typewriter and nothing else. He stood up and began delivering an oration with so many gestures and in such a loud voice that I begged him to sit down and speak more softly. He announced with a slightly crooked smile that he was a man with ‘international connexions’. It had been a long drive, and I was too hot to be frightened or impressed. He said again that he had international connexions. I invited him to have a drink in the Chinese rumshop, where we would at least have more room. He made a speech about the evils of drink. I said if he didn’t come I would go alone. He shut up his little office and we drove to the rumshop. He never gave a straight reply to any question and said with a smile that he had learned ‘caution’. He spoke in pure metaphor. Were the communists gaining strength in his area? ‘The river must flow,’ he said. To another question he replied, ‘We need petrol for the lamp of revolution.’ At one stage he made a long speech about the oppression of the people and the inevitability of revolution. Were they getting help from Cuba? ‘I have learned caution. I am a man with international connexions. Do you think you can bell the cat?’ I felt they were getting no help from Cuba. I asked him how he started. Here he became more conversational and West Indian and told me of his wartime beginnings as an agitator among Jamaican airmen in the R.A.F. ‘I used to be a sort of lawyer for the boys. Whenever they was in hany real trouble I used to tell them, “Boy, your only hope is to start bawling colour prejudice.” ’ The memory amused him. Then, speaking as of a triumph which was yet an injustice, he said, ‘They push me up to a place in Scotland. Not one black man in the place.’ At this stage I saw that the move to the rumshop was an error. The two foolish Jamaicans I had brought with me from Kingston for their local knowledge were drunk. They began to speak against communism in ear-splitting shouts, and my communist, absolutely sober, responded gamely with all his distorted Jamaican Welsh rhetoric. I left them and went to the bar and took some Phensic. The shouting went on. Drink, rhetoric, loud repetitive argument: many of the Jamaican gatherings I went to ended like this.

So always in Jamaica one lived in two unrelated worlds, the world of the middle class – the businessman’s Jamaican-grand, pseudo-American talk, the women’s chatter about the wages of servants and the treachery of servants – and the vaster, frightening world beyond it. You went to Caymanas for the Jamaica Turf Club meeting. You had to take another trip to the Caymanas of the sugar estates: the unemployed labourers in bright jerseys idling below a tree, their faces sullen with resignation, complaining without passion about the destruction of their vegetable gardens by the estate: ‘Young, young pumpkins,’ they said, and made it sound like murder, though there was clearly another side to the story; the sign on the factory gate: ‘Anyone found eating canes in the yard will be dismissed’; the beautiful black peasant woman with seven children by her ‘present’ and ‘twelve in all, including abortions’: ‘They have no thought for us, down in the dust and the hashes.’

Beyond the world of refrigerators and motor-cars on hire-purchase (‘Everybody’s car-conscious,’ an English girl told me), the hi-fi record players and the talk of Lawrence Durrell, one found the attitudes, little changed from those which infuriated Trollope a hundred years ago, of people who objected to regular work and were content to live from hand to mouth. Like the man in the rumshop outside Mandeville who had given up his job with the bauxite company because it simply went on and on, and he preferred intermittent employment. ‘When I left the bauxite people,’ he said, ‘I rested myself well for a month, taking my two waters (rum and water) every day.’ Each world made the other unreal; and the radio services overlaid both with an atmosphere of fantasy. The breathless, opulent gaiety of the commercial jingles of Radio Jamaica; the quality service of the Jamaica Broadcasting Company, its talks, features, well-mannered discussions and news-analyses: they both belonged to a settled, confident society. I could not associate them with the people or the land about me, and they seemed no more than irrelevant words and music in the overheated air.

*    *    *

I had been travelling around for nearly seven months. I was getting tired. In Jamaica my diary entries grew shorter and shorter and then stopped altogether. There was nothing new to record. Every day I saw the same things – unemployment, ugliness, overpopulation, race – and every day I heard the same circular arguments. The young intellectuals, whose gifts had been developed to enrich a developing, stable society, talked and talked and became frenzied in their frustration. They were looking for an enemy, and there was none. The pressures in Jamaica were not simply the pressures of race or those of poverty. They were the accumulated pressures of the slave society, the colonial society, the under-developed, over-populated agricultural country; and they were beyond the control of any one ‘leader’. The situation required not a leader but a society which understood itself and had purpose and direction. It was only generating selfishness, cynicism and a self-destructive rage.

FINALE AT FRENCHMAN’S COVE

One evening Dr Lewis, the Principal of the University College, said to me, ‘I have an indirect invitation for you. From Grainger Weston. He owns a place on the North Coast called Frenchman’s Cove and wants to offer hospitality to someone connected with the arts.’

I had heard about Frenchman’s Cove almost as soon as I had got to Jamaica. In a land of expensive hotels – thirteen guineas a day for a cramped double room in Kingston and up to twenty pounds and more on the North Coast – Frenchman’s Cove was said to be the most expensive. No one was sure just how expensive. Some said two thousand American dollars for a couple for a fortnight; some said two thousand five hundred. Lunch cost five guineas, dinner nine. And even so, one Jamaican told me with almost proprietorial pride, you were turned away if it was found that you weren’t in the New York social register.

It seemed, though, that once you had been accepted and had paid, your every request was granted. You could order exactly what you wanted to eat (‘caviare for breakfast’); you could drink as much as you wanted (‘champagne every hour’); you could take boat trips and air trips around the island; motor-cars were at your disposal, horses, rafts; you could telephone any part of the world. You could even leave Frenchman’s Cove, if you didn’t like it, and stay at a hotel of your choice: Frenchman’s paid.

For many days after Dr Lewis had spoken to me I heard nothing. A post office strike, one eruption of the prevailing unrest, was followed by a strike of government subordinate workers. I was resignedly preparing to investigate the problems of tourism in Jamaica when the strikes ended and Mr Weston’s invitation came.

We took the mountain road to the North Coast and then drove east. This part of the coast is not greatly developed; hotels do not screen the sea. The sand is in places greyish, acceptable by the standards of England and even Trinidad, but disregarded locally. (There are unfounded complaints that hotels have bought up all the white sand beaches, leaving only black sand for Jamaicans: a neat symbol of the racial resentment tourism is exciting.) The road is narrow and winding, not like the tourist road that runs west from Ocho Rios to Montego Bay, which is wide and smooth and reasonably straight and carries hotel signs, real estate signs and signs reminding motorists to drive on the left. We drove past broken-down villages, the unremarkable rural slums of the tropics: decay in lushness: pink-distempered shacks of broken boards and rusting corrugated iron, more ambitious concrete buildings, ugly and stained, dingy cafés stocked with aerated water, cakes and patent medicines, and made bright with enamelled advertisements for soft drinks. We came into Port Antonio, a banana port which is seldom busy and had ceased to grow. Then bush and black sand began once more. It was hard to think of this as a setting for luxury, a hideout for millionaires.

Presently we found ourselves driving beside a long stone wall. Separate letters attached to the wall spelled out
FRENCHMAN’S
cove. We turned into the wide drive. The vegetation here was abruptly ordered and open. Beyond the asphalted area gravelled paths led up gentle inclines and disappeared. The grounds were quiet. There were two sports cars, one red, one cream, below the concrete canopy of the lodge, a low stone-and-glass building with clean straight lines. More cars were parked neatly in the sun. I looked with interest and apprehension for millionaires and members of the New York social register. I saw no one. The stillness was unsettling, but the driver behaved as though he drove up to Frenchman’s Cove every day. He drove right under the canopy, came to a stop beside the glass entrance to the lodge, jumped out and opened doors and boot with a decisiveness and noise for which I was grateful.

A young Jamaican woman came out of the lodge. She said calmly, ‘Welcome to Frenchman’s Cove,’ and gave me a letter. Thereafter things happened quickly. My driver was sent away. A Jamaican in black trousers, white shirt and a black bowtie put my luggage on a small white electric car; I sat down; and with my luggage and myself quite exposed, we drove out from under the canopy into the sunlight and up the narrow gravelled path, hearing no sound except the whirring of the motor. We followed the path where it branched right, went past a pale-green shadowed pool, then up an incline between trees. I had a glimpse of the beach: a break in the coral cliff, the water blue shading into green and almost colourless where it touched the white sand. Black canvas chairs stood in the shade of almond trees; but the beach was deserted. Climbing higher, we drove at the edge of a lawn planted with young coconut palms. Then up a sharp incline over-arched by more trees, and we came to a house. ‘This is your cottage,’ the driver said, stopping at the foot of the concrete steps. Throughout the drive I had seen no one.

My cottage was a complex of two grey stone cottages and a stone-and-glass house, set at different levels. The cottages were on either side of the steps, the house at the top. The stone was handcut, the blocks of varying sizes, the mortar deeply recessed. The black door of the house opened and a middle-aged Jamaican woman in spectacles, pink dress and a small white apron, smiled welcomingly.

I went in and found myself in a large high room almost at the edge of a coral cliff. The wall overlooking the sea was of glass. The terrace was set in the coral, which looked like foam rubber.

I looked at the furnishings: the low, plain, inviting chairs and sofa set on three sides of an Indian carpet with an un-Indian design, the tall lamps with pottery bases and large linen shades, the glass table spread with magazines and books (The
Power Elite
among them). It was familiar because ideal; one had known it from the escapist magazines of design; and because ideal it was a little separate from reality. The unexpected setting made the separation complete. Beyond the glass wall and rising, it seemed, out of the grey coral, were the almond trees, most artificial-looking of tropical trees, with round leaves, green and copper, set symmetrically on horizontal branches, and between the leaves one saw the high irregular cliffs, the blue sky, the limpid, dancing blue-and-green sea.

From disordered bush along the winding Jamaican road, to a drive in a comic white car through silent, deserted, landscaped grounds, to a stone-and-glass house with a view of the sea below: it was as though one had driven out of Jamaica, as though, to find the West Indies of the tourist’s ideal, one had had to leave the West Indies.

Yielding to the serenity, the feeling of abrupt transference, I had not thought it strange that although moments ago it was warm, it was now cool, and though the sea below was restless, it made no sound. Now I saw that the house was completely enclosed and air-conditioned.

I read the letter the secretary in the lodge had given me. It welcomed me more formally, told me how I could get what I wanted, asked me not to tip, and gave the name of our housekeeper. Then I took up the Visitors’ Book. Among its few names I saw those of a Rockefeller and the Diefenbakers.

‘You will like it here,’ the housekeeper, Mrs Williams, said. ‘And that,’ she added, ‘is the telephone.’

Instantly I knew that this was the instrument, the Aladdin’s lamp of Frenchman’s Cove about whose powers (‘champagne every hour’) all Jamaica knew. ‘Anything you want,’ Mrs Williams said, ‘you just take up the telephone and ask for.’

The telephone was grey, of a design I had never seen: It stood upright on a round base.

‘Suppose I wanted champagne?’

‘Anything. The people before you, you should see them drink! Ooh! These Americans can drink. You would like the champagne now?’

I needed something stronger. ‘A little brandy? Whisky?’

‘Just telephone the bar.’

I hesitated.

‘You’re bashful.’ Mrs Williams lifted the grey telephone, dialled briefly and said, ‘This is Stokes Hall. My guest would like a bottle of whisky, a bottle of brandy and some sodas.’

The telephone squawked. Mrs Williams handed it to me.

‘What sort of brandy, sir?’ a male voice asked.

My response was automatic: I spoke the words of a well-known advertisement.

‘Dudley is a good boy,’ Mrs Williams said.

I was relieved that the man on the telephone had a name.

There was a knock at the door and Mrs Williams let in a European who was dressed like a chef.

‘Morning, sir.’ I couldn’t place his accent. ‘And what would you like for lunch?’ He pulled out pad and pencil.

He caught me by surprise. Remembering only now that I didn’t eat meat, I asked, ‘Do you have eggs?’

The chef’s disappointment was expressed only in the slight separation of pad from pencil.