Caribbean

  These young people were able. They had all graduated from that commendable group of schools which England had scattered through her colonies, with each school likely to have one superb teacher like Mr. Carmody of Queen’s Own. But Ranjit was also aware that U.W.I. had no students from Cuba, largest of the Caribbean islands, and apparently none from Guadeloupe or Martinique.

  In those first days Ranjit identified no Indian students from the other islands and only two from Trinidad, so he was thrown in with a heady mix of young people from almost a score of different islands, and as he listened to their talk he began to acquire that sense of the Caribbean which would become his distinguishing mark. If a young man with a heavy Dutch accent said that he was from Aruba, Ranjit wanted to know all about that island and how it related to the other Dutch islands of the group, Curaçao and Bonaire. He was fascinated to learn that Aruba had a language of its own, Papiamento, comprised of borrowings from African slave speech, Dutch, English and a smattering of Spanish. ‘Less than a hundred thousand people in all the world speak it,’ the Aruba man said, ‘but we have newspapers printed in it.’

  But as Ranjit settled down for the three years of hard work—doing extra papers during vacations would enable him to graduate early—he found that the true excitement at U.W.I. was the faculty, who were so compelling that, as before, he was drawn to several different disciplines: anthropology, history, literature.

  A Dr. Evelyn Baker, a white woman on loan from the University of Miami, was an inspired sociologist who had conducted field studies in four different islands while earning her doctorate at Columbia University in New York. She had an ecumenical grasp of the Caribbean that attracted Ranjit, who aspired one day to have the same. She was about forty years old, the author of two books on the islands, and a disciplinarian where term papers were concerned, for she taught as if every student facing her was destined to be either a sociologist or an anthropologist. Early on she recognized Ranjit’s capacities, and paid such special attention to him that before the end of the first term she was satisfied that she had in this bright Indian boy a new cultural anthropologist for the area she had grown to love.

  However, another teacher—Professor Philip Carpenter—a small, wiry, acidulous young Barbados scholar, a black man with his doctorate from the London School of Economics, that inspired breeding ground for colonial leaders, quickly recognized Ranjit as a young fellow ideally suited for historical studies: ‘I read your contribution to the anthology, Banarjee. Remarkable historical insight regarding the various Sirdars of your family. You could make a real contribution. History of the Indians in Trinidad … or the whole Caribbean. Why they prospered in Trinidad. Why they didn’t in Jamaica.’ He walked about, then asked: ‘Were you Indians ever tried as field hands in Barbados? I really don’t know. I wish you’d look into that, Banarjee. Give me a paper on it. We both need to know.’

  His most interesting professor was a black woman from Antigua who had taken her advanced degrees at the University of Chicago in Illinois and at Berkeley in California. An expert in the literature of colonial areas, Professor Aurelia Hammond had written on the religious writers of seventeenth-century New England and the early novelists of Australia. But her unique talent was that she could relate literature to reality, and place any colony, regardless of degree of servitude or freedom, in its exact developmental stage: ‘If you read what the dreamers and poets are saying, you know what’s happening in the society,’ she told Ranjit. Contemptuous of much that she saw in the Caribbean, she was not averse to saying so: ‘Barbados and All Saints remain English colonies spiritually. Guadeloupe and Martinique should be ashamed of themselves for being tricked into thinking they’re an indigenous part of metropolitan France. The Dominican Republic doesn’t know what it thinks, and Haiti is a disgrace.’ She had high regard for Trinidad: ‘Its nice mix of African black, Indian Hindu and a few white businessmen has a good chance of creating a new prototype for the area,’ but her personal affection was saved for Jamaica: ‘You cannot imagine how exciting it was for me, a little black girl, coming from hidebound Antigua to this university and finding a creative environment in which music and art and politics and social change were all happening on an island bursting with energy and hope.’ Few who studied with her ever forgot her incandescent vision of the Caribbean.

  Ranjit’s education did not revolve solely about his professors; his fellow students were equally instructive, especially a Jamaican whose parents now worked in London: ‘They paid my way to go over last year. What a wonderful city! Hundreds of Trinidad Indians there, Ranjit. You’d be at home.’ He was so enchanted by the virtues of London that he wanted Ranjit to fly over in the coming vacation: ‘Once you see it, you’ll make it your second home. As for me, soon as I get my degree, it’s good old London for me.’

  Ranjit took his vacations seriously, as he did everything else, and to provide data for his essays he fanned out from Jamaica on cheap excursion airfares to a good mix of the Caribbean islands. He saw lovely Cozumel off the Yucatán coast but felt no affinity with the vanished Maya: ‘Egyptians are a lot more interesting, from what I’ve read.’ With two other young men from different islands, he took a quick trip to Haiti and was terrified by it, as were they: ‘It’s so different from a well-ordered British island,’ one of his fellow travelers said, ‘Good God! They’re living on earthen floors, one piece of furniture to a one-room shack for a family of eight.’ Any black or colored student from the other islands had to be perplexed as to why the Haitian blacks ruled their attractive country so poorly.

  One of the best trips he took with the limited funds his grandfather was able to provide was a special air pilgrimage arranged for students by a Caribbean airline to seven different islands. He saw not only fascinating little islands like St. Martin, half-Dutch, half-French, but also the big French islands. Guadeloupe fascinated him. ‘It’s two islands, really,’ the guide pointed out, ‘separated by a channel so narrow you could almost jump across.’ When the students convened at Basse-Terre to compare notes, an extremely attractive young woman from U.W.I. sat down beside Ranjit; he was delighted because he would never have made any approach on his own. He learned that she was Norma Wellington, niece of the medical doctor on St. Vincent, Church of England, and a premed student at U.W.I. who thought she might go on to the States for graduate work in hospital management. She had a sharp eye, evaluated different islands unemotionally, and displayed no nationalistic preference for her island over any other. She obviously found this young Hindu scholar interesting, or even exotic, for she conversed with him repeatedly on the tour.

  Still very shy where girls were concerned, Ranjit found it difficult to engage in the normal chatter that young men his age employed when trying to impress their women friends, but once, as Norma and he were trudging along together on a quiet road in Grenada, he summoned courage to ask: ‘Norma, if you’re so beautiful, why aren’t you engaged … or something … or even married?’ and she laughed easily: ‘Oh, Ranjit, I have so much to complete before that sort of stuff.’

  Interpreting this as a rebuff, when Norma had intended merely to say that she felt she must attend to her education first, he retreated from his burgeoning interest in girls and found solace instead in the work he was doing with his three professors.

  Professor Hammond, the teacher of literature, told him: ‘You can write, young man. At least you know what a paragraph is, and that’s more than I can say for most of my students.’ Dr. Baker, the sociologist from Miami, said: ‘Excellent perceptions, Mr. Banarjee. At some point in your education you might want to write more fully on the Barbados syndrome.’

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked, and she said: ‘The belief that if you wish strong enough, you halt the flow of change.’

  But it was Professor Carpenter who provided the immediate impetus to Ranjit’s next concentrated work, for he gave an inspired lecture on a historical figure he termed ‘the most effective man the West Indies has so far produced and a principal architect of the Amer
ican form of government.’ His lecture started with a dramatic account of a typical West Indian hurricane:

  ‘In 1755 there was born on the insignificant island of Nevis an illegitimate boy whose poor mother had a difficult time ensuring the protection of her family. Hoping to better her fortune, she moved to the Danish island of St. Croix, and there on the night of 31 August 1772, her son first experienced a major hurricane. Six days later he composed a remarkable account of the storm which was later published in the Royal Danish American Gazette.’

  Without revealing who the boy was, the professor read from the first paragraphs of the letter, pointing out that the writing was concise and the scientific data accurate. Only then did he disclose who the author was: ‘Alexander Hamilton wrote this account when he was either seventeen or fifteen, for throughout his life he lied about his age.’ And with that, he launched a scathing denunciation of the presumptuously long middle section of the letter.

  ‘Let’s say we accept his claim and grant that he was only fifteen. Imagine the pomposity of writing: “My reflections and feelings on this frightful and melancholy occasion, are set forth in the following self-discourse.” And with that modest statement he proceeds to write eight paragraphs of the most overblown theocratic nonsense one will ever read. Let me give you some samples:

  ‘ “Where now, oh! vile worm, is all thy boasted fortitude and resolution? Why dost thou tremble and stand aghast?”

  ‘ “Oh! impotent and presumptuous fool! How durst thou offend Omnipotence, whose nod alone were sufficient to quell the destruction that hovers over thee or crush thee into atoms?”

  ‘ “And Oh! thou wretch, look still a little further; see the gulph of eternal misery open. There mayest thou shortly plunge—the just reward of thy vileness.”

  ‘ “But see, the Lord relents. He hears our prayer. The lightning ceases. The winds are appeased … Yet hold, Oh vain mortal! Check thy ill timed joy. Art thou so selfish to exult because thy lot is happy in a season of universal woe?” ’

  When he had the full attention of his students, he proceeded to the worst of Hamilton’s effusions, passages which caused the students to break into laughter, but then he squelched them:

  ‘It is the closing passages of this extraordinary letter which interest us, for they reveal like lanterns in the night the future politician and financial planner Hamilton. He utters a heartfelt cry on behalf of the poor who have been desolated by the storm and an appeal to people of wealth to contribute a fair portion of their goods to help the stricken. I am very proud of Hamilton when he cries: “My heart bleeds but I have no power to solace. O ye, who revel in affluence, see the afflictions of humanity and bestow your superfluity to ease them.” Here Hamilton the man speaks, the future financial genius of a new nation. Tax the rich to succor the poor.

  ‘But it’s in the final paragraph that he really delights me. This lad of fifteen feels obliged to pass judgment on the governor of St. Croix, and we see the future politician displaying his capacity and willingness to intervene: “Our general has issued several very salutary and humane regulations, and both in his publick and private measures, has shewn himself the Man.” There spoke the rigorous taskmaster of the early 1800s.’

  He ended his lecture with the information that Hamilton, as a result solely of having written this letter, was invited at the expense of older men who saw in him a touch of genius to come to their America, where he would receive a free education at a school in New Jersey and later at King’s College in New York. With a flourish Professor Carpenter said: ‘So if you write good term papers, there’s no telling what good things might happen,’ and his students applauded his bravura performance.

  The story of Alexander Hamilton so inflamed Ranjit’s imagination that for some days he moved about the pleasant campus of the university picturing himself at the heart of a hurricane whipping about Jamaica, and then as a colonel fighting alongside Lafayette and Kosciusko, and finally orating in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention and serving as the Minister for Finance who saved his fledgling nation.

  But insistently in his daydreaming he came back to the famous Hurricane of 1772 and the boy Hamilton caught in the mighty whirl but still taking mental notes of what was happening, and the event became so vividly real that he dropped out of classes for a full week to compose a heroic poem of a hundred and sixty-eight twelve-syllable lines. When finished, he typed out three copies, delivering one to each of his professors, with the curt explanation: ‘I’ve been engaged. Please forgive my absence.’ And each of the three read his poem with the conviction that Ranjit had spent his arbitrary vacation working on ideas promulgated in his or her class:

  TO ALEXANDER HAMILTON

  STRUGGLING IN THE HURRICANE OF 1772

  The hurricane that swept me from my island home

  Was benedicted with no clever name like Bruce.

  Its cognomen was Ridicule or Racial scorn,

  Justice deferred, The death of hope or Poverty,

  Those sinister arrangements that good nations make

  To drive their favored sons to exile in strange lands …

  The first fifty lines of his poem summarized the reasons why a man like Hamilton in his day, or Ranjit in his, would feel driven to emigrate; some of the reasons were fatuous, most were real and inescapable, and their impassioned recitation by this Indian lad from Trinidad demonstrated how much he had matured since leaving the relative calm of Michael Carmody’s class at Queen’s Own two years before.

  The next sixty lines depicted the kind of Caribbean area that might have kept Hamilton at home, a utopian society in which the races and the social classes cooperated in managing their wealth in sugar, cotton and bananas without the necessity of calling upon Marxism to lead the way. And the last fifty-eight lines were sardonic explanations of why the necessary cooperation was not possible, not now, nor ever in the future.

  In these closing lines he reviewed bitterly the poor performances of the leaders in the painful period of 1958–1961 when the British islands of the Caribbean came tantalizingly close to federation, only to be frustrated by the personal vanities of three men: Alexander Bustamante, the flamboyant Jamaican leader; Eric Williams, the vain and scholarly Trinidad spokesman; and the gentle old fellow from Barbados, Sir Grantley Adams, who accepted the prime ministership of a federation that no longer really existed, and who tried heroically but in vain to hold the fragments together. Ranjit’s final lines were mournful:

  The hurricane returns, the ship is driven far

  But who like Hamilton can find a fresh new land

  Which needs his talents and his vision of a world

  That could rebuild itself in discipline and hope?

  Today our exile is to lands worse than our own

  Where greed prevails, hate thrives, force rules, and hope is flown.

  As Michael Carmody had done in Trinidad, Ranjit’s three professors saw to it that his poem was read in various places, and recommended him for various fellowships. And then, just as in Hamilton’s case, as if good actions as well as hurricanes repeat themselves, he received three offers of fellowships leading to the doctorate. And he had a choice of three different fields of specialization, depending upon which local professor had put in the recommendation to that particular university: Chicago wanted him for history, Iowa for writing, and Miami for sociology.

  He oscillated among the three, inclining first this way, then another, but the first to be eliminated was the writing program, because he still felt that this was not his forte. Writing came easily to him, obviously, but not with the all-consuming force that he believed necessary to sustain a career in that calling. ‘I love words,’ he explained to his literature professor, who had arranged for the fellowship at Iowa, ‘but truly, I have no conviction,’ and from her long experience with Third World writing, she said in local lingo: ‘If you ain’t got that fire in the gut, Ranjit, you ain’t got nuttin,’ and she wished him well: ‘Maybe you have something even bigger, Ranjit. You have a
burning integrity. Maybe that’s what we need in the Caribbean more than anything else.’

  Now as his soul-awakening years at U.W.I. drew to a close in the final Trinity Term in the spring of 1973, with any decision regarding his future still floating aimlessly above the beautiful hills of Jamaica, he sought counsel from Norma Wellington: ‘What’s to do? What would you do, Norma?’ and they wandered over the low hills lying east of the campus, discussing her future and his. ‘I have this invitation to the best nursing school in the United States,’ she said, and he asked: ‘Why would they do that for a young woman from U.W.I.?’ and she explained: ‘Because the American hospitals have found that girls from the Caribbean make the very best nurses in the world. Take away the Caribbean nurses, and half the hospitals in the eastern states would shut down.’ Then, aware of her own boastfulness, she added: ‘They want to train me for hospital administration. In Boston.’

  ‘Are you going to take it?’

  ‘I really don’t know. I’d not feel safe so far from home. Besides, there’s that color problem in the States.’

  ‘Come on! You’re as good-looking as Lena Horne. She’s fought your battle for you.’

  ‘You always think in historico-sociologic terms, don’t you.’

  ‘I do. I want to anticipate how the various mixes are going to work out.’

  ‘Dammit, Ranjit! You’ve got to make up your mind. Historical approach? Sociological?’

  ‘I simply don’t know.’

  With that melancholy kind of self-indulgence for which only the French word tristesse is appropriate, the two young people, a dark Hindu from Trinidad and a beautiful light-skinned girl from St. Vincent, strolled among the low hills that rimmed their university, each aware that with their graduation, even their ephemeral, barely stated friendship was ending. It would have been impossible for him to take a girl of color, no matter how lovely, back to his circle of Indian friends and family, especially since she was also an Anglican, while for her to take a Hindu, educated though he was, into her family would be equally unthinkable.