The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (42 page)

I looked around the bar and noticed it had gone quiet, people straining their ears, pretending they hadn’t been listening. I hurried, almost running down that path and across those splendid wide hardwood floors towards the Saaman tree outside.

 

I was unhappy for days. I couldn’t ban Williams from my dreams or my daydreams.
He has appeared. Come to save his vexed and oppress children. He has come forward, cast down he bucket. Everywhere people will bless de name of de hero. Eric Williams
. I tossed and turned. The Robber Man, the Mighty Sparrow. Eric Williams. They harassed me in my sleep. I had nowhere to go, no home to return to in England or France. I took pills and they sent me back to sleep and I dreamed even more about Eric Williams, saw him mocking me, sitting in the white wedding cake on the savannah. Eric Williams wore a white suit. He was reading his own
History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago
aloud to Granny Seraphina and she was nodding, sitting at his feet, her face aglow with reverence.

George and I argued.

‘What’s got into you
now
?’

‘What’s got
out
of
you?
You choose to be blind.’

‘You’re crazy. Politics again, Sabine?’

‘Am I crazy? At least I’m
alive
. Thinking. At least I’m not second-
rate
.’

George stared.

‘Isn’t that why you came here, why you accepted that lowly office job out here, a dot on the map? Out here you can be someone. You can be a master, invent yourself, a little king.’

George stood very still and calm; rage choked in his throat.

‘We invented this island. Wasn’t that the whole point of the West Indies, eh? A get-rich-quick scheme for Europeans?’

‘Is that what you think I’m doing here?’ George said, his voice steely.

‘Yes.’

‘I see.’

‘You had it planned all along, didn’t you? You shrewd bastard. You never planned to leave. You’d done your homework. You
came
to buy, didn’t you? Build, settle, be the king of your castle. Drink rum. Fuck the local women. Keep the wifey sweet, kid her along.
I love you, I love you, Sabine
. Tell her anything, drug her up.’

I thought of the
Cavina
, those great black corbeaux in the sky ready to pick me over. George knew
then.
Dreams and ambitions he never dared reveal, not in one go.

‘Well, why not? Eh?’ George retaliated. ‘OK, why not? Rather a king here than a little clerk in a company in the suburbs of London. Who did you think you were marrying? What did you want from me? Why don’t you save yourself? Leave. Women want men to make them, save them. They get disappointed if we fail, if we do the wrong thing. But what the fuck have you ever done apart from bitch and complain and point out men’s errors?’

‘I hate you,’ I spat.

‘You used to be lovely, sunny, fun. You used to love me. I could feel it.’

George’s eyes pooled. I had never seen him like this.

He was right. At that moment I didn’t like, let alone love him any more.

 

We made love. Hot and passionate and desperate to find each other again. Eric Williams joined us in our bed. I was making love to Williams, too, not just George. I was disgusted, writhing and unable to escape the clutches of either man. This country, this house under the hip of the green woman, this backwards language, this heat, this mad fucked-up legacy of corrupt ruling. This island was cursed. Nothing, nothing would ever wipe away what had gone before. Granny, Venus, my children who were creole. It was all more than I could stand. I hated my husband as I fucked him, as I let myself be fucked; hated Eric Williams; saw them as the same, the same man.

Trouble had been brewing. Like an approaching hurricane in late August, when the keskidees fall silent and the clouds flee from the sky to outrun the winds, there were signs. Strikes, strikes in the oil fields, strikes on the buses, strikes and more strikes. March 1970, the sun was ferocious, relentless. The country was still delinquent, newly pregnant after carnival. There were marches out on the streets; black people marching in the midday heat. Enough was enough. Rallies out at St Augustine, at the university. A new movement was formed: the National Joint Action Committee. A charismatic student leader, Geddes Granger, spoke up for black disappointment, wanting
a complete change of the system of our way of life
. Trinidadians had a black government but no black power.

Granger was educated, angry and articulate. Halle-bloody-lujah! I was sick, sick, sick of it. First Williams, then Granger. The same thing all over again, the same man. Except Granger was a much more glamorous figure than Eric Williams; younger. A handsome, bearded black man in jeans and an African shirt, his fist raised.
Power to the black man
, he shouted. And yet, just like Eric Williams, his eyes were shrouded behind dark glasses and there was something about this screened-off demeanour that was all too familiar. I wanted to knock their heads together.

 

Venus was unhappy.

‘Granny listen to dese Black Power fellers in Woodford Square. She too old to stan up all day in de sun, man. But she stan up and she listen to dem. She gone de whole day and when she come back she does talk a lot, man. Talk more dan ever about change, about startin’ over here in Trinidad, a new time . . .’

‘Maybe you should go, too,’ I said, testing her.

‘Nah! I doh want no trouble. Granny a mad crazy woman. Nah, not me in de street. Granny Seraphina tell meh to march, too, you know, Miss. She tell meh to quit mih job here, grow afro and be proud and go out and pelt bricks at de Red House. She gone
mad,
Miss. I ‘fraid she. Boy, she vexed wid de PNM. She gone back to Woodford Square, dis time wid broomstick and she listen to de new leaders, what dey sayin’. I tink she go lick dong de entire buncha dem government fellas. She dangerous, Miss!’

 

The PNM had reacted badly to all this Black Power business. Stokely Carmichael, the great Black Power leader himself, was barred from entering Trinidad. His books were banned. And Carmichael was a Trinidadian! A black man banned by the black government. The PNM loathed him and his type. Everywhere afros and hippie beads like in America, everywhere
Negritude
on the streets, anger expressing itself in protest, in barely contained malevolence. There was even a chapter of the Black Panthers in Trinidad. Holy God on earth. And thousands gathering in Woodford Square, all over again, this time marching to Shanty Town, all led by Geddes Granger.

 

I drank lots of rum. I paced about the house. George didn’t seem to care.

‘It’ll all blow over,’ he predicted. ‘We need to sit tight, wait it out.’

I threw a glass of rum in his face.

‘Why did you do that?’

I glared at him. ‘It’s all beneath you, isn’t it, all this shouting and marching? Emotion is vulgar to you, isn’t it?’

‘You’re being vulgar now, yes.’

I stormed off, slamming doors. ‘This country can go and rot. Let them kill themselves.’

Lucy was stoic, calm. She walked in to us every day from Santa Cruz, over the saddle cut into the mountain. Sometimes she took a route taxi. But her fellow travellers harassed her when she asked the taxi to pull up outside our gate.
Leave dem blasted white people. You still house slave? House nigger to white people?
She told us of their taunts.

‘Lucy, don’t come in then,’ I begged.

She wasn’t bothered by it all.

‘Dey can’t stop me comin’ to work,’ she complained. ‘I not angry, not like dese fellas.’

 

I scribbled furiously to Eric Williams.

The phone rang late one morning. It was Mrs Roberts, Pascale’s schoolteacher. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Harwood, but we’re sending the children home. It’s not safe. We’re closing the school for the rest of the week. Please come and collect her.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Riots. Riots down in Port of Spain. A Molotov cocktail hurled into the home of the Minister for Education. Shops on fire.’

George came home right away.

‘It’s true,’ he confirmed. He’d sped through town; his hands were shaking. We left the house immediately, driving with all doors locked, windows up, towards Pascale’s school lower down in Winderflet. Everywhere, black faces were leering into the car. Small stones hit the windscreen, the back windows.

I clung to the edge of the car seat. ‘Their own government did this,’ I cried. ‘They did this to
themselves
. The white man left, quit, years ago. Why are they blaming
us
? What have we done? What have we done to this place?’

George was like granite, his jaw twitching.

‘Fools!’ I cried. ‘We’re stupid fools.’

We turned into Valenton Avenue to find a traffic jam, a long queue of cars. Black people standing on the pavement, glaring. More of them than us. I began to pray in English and then in French:
Marie, pleine de grâce, protégez-nous, gardez-nous, nous sommes -
CRACK! A cobweb of glass appeared in the windscreen.

‘George!’

George wound down the window, shouting obscenities at a group standing on the corner, threatening to take them on, man to man, hand to hand. The line of cars began to move. George accelerated.

‘That wasn’t very clever,’ I gasped.

‘The fuckers.’ George shook and sweated.

We were halfway up the hill. A white March heat. Trees, cars outlined in silver. The hairs on my arms quivered. We inched our way up the steep road. White people in a line, windows up, cars turning into ovens. White people melting and their hearts thumping and women shouting at their husbands. Arguments raged in every car on that hill up to the school. Women hurled abuse, praying, crying. Marriages teetered on the brink of divorce, ultimatums were being delivered. Mine would wait, till we got home.

We turned the corner, driving along the side of the school. All the classrooms were empty, the playground deserted. The teachers stood outside the sheltered back entrance with the children lined up in their forms, clutching the smaller children by their hands. Small frightened faces in pink- and blue-checked dresses. Khaki short pants. Two security guards waited with the teachers, both black. They peered at us through the hole in our windscreen.

‘That’s Mrs Roberts.’ I recognised Pascale’s form teacher. She saw us, our windscreen, her face gaunt. She gripped Pascale’s hand. In a moment I was outside the car, hugging my daughter. I hugged Mrs Roberts out of nerves.

‘Thanks so much,’ I gasped.

‘We’ll call you when things change,’ she promised.

Everywhere, mothers were hugging their children, cars were nudging and edging forwards, horns beeping, white faces strained and sweating.

‘You’re OK now, OK, my love.’ I hugged my daughter to my chest. ‘OK, my love.’ But Pascale was inconsolable. She didn’t know what was going on.

I glanced at George. His face was stern, concentrating on how to get us back safely. Stupid man. His castle built on sand drenched in the blood of thousands of dark-skinned souls, those brought to Trinidad whether they liked it or not, forced to toil unpaid, all those who lived here before them hounded into extinction. But he didn’t care to add it all up. No white man on the island cared to see that what was happening was natural: cause and effect. The sins of the white man now passed on, mutated, repeated by the black man. Enough was enough for Granny, Geddes Granger. I’d had enough, too. It was then, with my daughter sobbing in my arms, that I made my decision: I was leaving.

 

When we returned, Lucy was standing in the kitchen, reading an article about Geddes Granger in the
Trinidad Guardian
aloud to Venus. Venus was in her mid-thirties, no longer gawky; she’d grown into a tall, straight-backed, blue-black woman with a huge-toothed smile. Venus had raised my children. She was my closest companion, my confidante in all matters of the house. Lucy had reached sixty and had come to smile a bit more, cry less. They were our family in Trinidad: Venus, our friend and critic; Lucy, our wise woman.

‘They threw stones at us,’ I blurted, wretched.

George went straight to the bar to mix two stiff rums. Pascale went straight to Venus. Venus pulled my daughter close and she buried her face in Venus’s long black neck.

I burst into tears.

Lucy clicked her throat and looked ashamed. She hid the newspaper behind her back.

George returned with the drinks and the four of us stood in the kitchen.

‘Madam, don’t worry yourself with all this.’ Lucy tried to console us. ‘This is nuttin, just some young people carrying on. They don’t talk for everyone.’

‘Granny Seraphina is out there with them,’ I snapped. ‘Why aren’t you both out there, too? I’d go if I were you. How much longer are you going to wait for basic sanitation, for electricity? You don’t even care! You’re so used to having nothing you don’t even ask. Why is it the young are the only ones who get angry? Or the very old? Why do we fall asleep in middle age?’

George stared at me, shaking his head.

Venus and Lucy looked embarrassed.

‘Go on, get off your
backsides
! Go out into the streets and protest. You have nothing and this is your chance to shout about it.’

I knocked back my rum. I was absolutely certain then. ‘I’m leaving, George.’