Caribbean

  Inside the All Saints airport he took from his only piece of luggage, a big shapeless canvas sack, his passport, which read: RAS-NEGUS GRIMBLE. BORN 1956, COCKPIT TOWN, JAMAICA. And as soon as an Immigration official saw this, he slipped into a back room to telephone the commissioner of police in Bristol Town: ‘Colonel Wrentham, a Jamaican Rastafarian has just landed. Papers in order. Headed your way on the airport bus.’

  Passengers carefully avoided the man as they took their seats, repulsed by his savage appearance and fetid smell, but once the bus started north along the beautiful shoreline with its constant view of the Caribbean, they attended more to the unparalleled landscape than to their Gorgon-like companion. He seemed not to realize that he had frightened most of them, and at one point he leaned across the aisle, looked straight at two middle-aged women from Miami, and gave them one of the warmest smiles they had ever seen—all flashing eyes and dazzling white teeth: ‘Sistas, I-man nebber see ocean like dat.’

  Although they could not fathom his words, they were encouraged by his friendly tone, and one of them asked: ‘Why do you do that to your hair?’ and he replied, as if he had expected their question: ‘Dreadlocks.’ Indeed, his strings of hair were known in Jamaica as dreads, but again the word had no meaning for the women, who now asked: ‘Are you a preacher?’ to which he replied: ‘I-man be servant Jah, name belong me Negus, same Ras-Tafari, King Ithiop, Lord Almighty, Lion Judah, Ruler all Afrika, Savior World, Death to Pope.’

  This was such a fusillade of ideas that the women could do no more than stare at the young man, but their curiosity had been aroused, and he was proving so congenial that they were emboldened to point to the messages on his shirt and ask: ‘Why do you want to kill the pope?’ and he said, almost gently: ‘He-&-he Great Babylon, must be die, all men free.’

  ‘But why do you want to Hell Destruction America?’ and he explained something that was of extreme importance to him, his face becoming grave as he said in a low, confidential voice: ‘America Great Babylon, Great Whore of World, Bible say so,’ and from the canvas sack that carried all his goods he produced a Bible, which he turned expertly to Revelation 14:8, reading in an apocalyptic voice which could be heard through the bus: ‘ “Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.” ’

  The words seemed to intoxicate him, and he got up, stalking through the bus, pointing at white people, and shouting in a demonic voice: ‘Pope be Babylon, America be Great Babylon, police, sheriff, judge be Babylon the Whore. All be destroyed Marcus Garvey Great Emperor Haile Selassie. Afrika rule all de world. Negus say so. I-&-I perish.’

  He seemed almost demented as he preached from his Revelation text, but having made his point about the destruction of the pope, America and the white race, he returned to his seat, leaned once more across the aisle, and whispered, with a smile so winning that it once again charmed the two women who a moment before had been terrified: ‘Sistas, Emperor Selassie, King of Judah, I-man save good people.’

  When the bus came to a halt in Bristol Town, the driver managed rather clumsily to obstruct any exit of passengers until the island’s black commissioner of police, Colonel Thomas Wrentham, had time to leave his office and walk casually past the bus as if he had no interest in it whatever. But when Grimble descended with a half coconut shell dangling by a cord from his waist, a homemade lute under his arm and his sack in his hand, Colonel Wrentham positioned himself in such a way that the self-proclaimed Rastafarian had to pass near him.

  ‘Hullo,’ the police officer said easily. ‘What brings you to All Saints?’

  ‘I-man go here, go there, Jah direct.’

  ‘You have friends on the island?’

  The newcomer, shaking his matted reptilian locks, smiled as if to embrace all the people on the island, and said: ‘I-&-I who love Jah, my friends.’

  ‘Good,’ Wrentham said, nodding to the young stranger as if the entire island welcomed him, but as soon as the Rastafarian had disappeared toward the little jungle of cheap waterfront shacks, he hurried back to his office, where he made several rushed telephone calls: ‘Tom, cable Jamaica. Ask them to send full details. Ras-Negus Grimble, age twenty-five, Cockpit Town.’ To a schoolteacher he said: ‘Can you come down to the police office right away? No, you’re not in trouble, but I may be.’ And to the Church of England minister he said: ‘Canon Tarleton, could I borrow your wisdom and counsel for about an hour?’

  When the teacher, the radioman and the minister assembled, the first a black islander, the other two white Englishmen, Wrentham started speaking without the usual courtesies: ‘I’ve got two problems on my hands, and I need your help for answers. What is your explanation of a Rastafarian? And how do I get rid of the one that just landed at the airport?’

  ‘Is he from Jamaica?’ the teacher asked.

  ‘Yes. And he has a valid ticket on to Trinidad, I called the airline. It’s an open date, so we may have him for some time.’

  The clergyman asked: ‘Is there any way you can move him on? I mean, off the island? We’ve learned that men like him always generate trouble.’

  For the moment Wrentham evaded the suggestion that the man be deported, for he did not wish to embroil the government in drawn-out legal maneuverings unless he had no choice. To gain time, he asked the schoolteacher: ‘They tell me that when you studied at the university you dug pretty deep into this Rastafarianism. Tell us how the damned thing got started.’

  ‘Simple, if I’m allowed to skip the nuances. In the 1920s a Jamaican black, Marcus Garvey, appeared as a kind of John the Baptist talking about the revival of the black race, the return of blacks to Africa and the impending triumph of Africa over all the white nations. Heady stuff. He went to America, got hold of a ship illegally and proposed sending all blacks back to Africa. Landed in the penitentiary for fraud … set black minds afire. My grandfather believed every word Garvey said, tried to lead a contingent of blacks back to Yoruba lands. He wound up in jail, too.’

  The commissioner nodded, then asked: ‘Where does Haile Selassie enter the picture? Wasn’t he the emperor of Abyssinia?’

  ‘Yes,’ the clergyman said. ‘Jamaicans call it by its Biblical name, Ethiopia. For some reason that’s never been explained, except that the Bible is full of references to Ethiopia and one to the Lion of Judah, the emperor’s appellation.… Anyway, the blacks in Jamaica generated the fantastic idea that Haile Selassie was the latest reincarnation of God. Jah is the name they use …’

  ‘Haile Selassie is God?’ the perplexed commissioner asked.

  The clergyman hesitated: ‘I guess those who cannot read believe Selassie to be God. The more sophisticated hold him to be more like Jesus or Muhammad or Mary Baker Eddy, a favored recipient of holy power. But all believe that he’s somehow a form of Jah who will lead blacks to world power.’

  ‘But Selassie’s dead,’ Wrentham protested, and as soon as he uttered the words he looked appealingly to the others: ‘He did die, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ the teacher said. ‘About six years ago.’

  ‘Then why are these people so convinced that he will save them?’

  His question, which he meant to be rhetorical, evoked a reply from the Church of England man: ‘Christians believe that Jesus long dead will do the same for them, and Muslims believe that Muhammad, dead well over a thousand years, will protect them. And I would think that Mormons and Christian Scientists have similar beliefs.’ Realizing that his words might seem blasphemous, he coughed and concluded rather lamely: ‘So the Rastafarians with their Negus …’

  ‘What’s that word mean?’ Wrentham asked. ‘This young fellow calls himself Ras-Negus Grimble.’

  The schoolteacher answered: ‘Means king. Selassie is often called simply Negus or The Negus.’ But then the clergyman resumed command of the discussion: ‘The Rastafarian movement is bewildering to some, comical to others, but to many of us in these islands it is deadly serious for several reasons. It
preaches that blacks will one day take over the world and rectify old injustices to their race. It teaches that the pope must be destroyed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They say he represents and therefore commands the world power that oppressed them brutally in slavery days and more subtly now. And of course, the United States as the center of visible power in this part of the world—radio, television, autos, surplus foodstuffs—it too must be destroyed. Now, those targets are rather exotic, and the Rastas can’t do much about them, but when they get to fooling around with their favorite anathema, Great Babylon, that’s when you get into big trouble. For they have proclaimed that in addition to the pope and America, the police in the islands are Great Babylon which the Bible says must be destroyed.’

  They sat quietly for a while as each man recalled reports of incidents throughout the Caribbean in which black men, their minds addled by Babylon, had attacked individual policemen, or stations, or town halls, or other symbols of repressive power. Finally, Commissioner Wrentham asked: ‘What should our policy be? On this particular island, when so far as I know we have only this one visiting Rastafarian?’

  The radioman, who had been silent up to now, said bluntly: ‘You can expect trouble. I’ve been in contact with men on other islands and they tell me the Rastas are a bad lot.’

  Colonel Wrentham was obviously perplexed: ‘Maybe I’d better seek him out tomorrow and order him off the island.’

  ‘Not too fast,’ the schoolteacher warned. ‘If he hasn’t done anything wrong, he could sue us … and he would.’

  ‘What you’d better do,’ the clergyman said, ‘is consult the island’s legal counsel.’ Then he added: ‘But in the meantime I’d watch the man closely.’

  ‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ the commissioner said graciously, but when they were gone he told his sergeant: ‘They didn’t give me much usable advice.’

  Alone in his office, he telephoned the prime minister’s legal adviser, who lit all kinds of signal fires: ‘Now look here, Wrentham! Last thing we want on this island is any kind of religious trouble. Don’t, for God’s sake, make a martyr of this Rasta. Hands off!’

  ‘Can I keep him under close surveillance?’

  ‘From a distance, yes. But religious dislocations we do not need. Be very careful.’

  When Commissioner Wrentham turned his police headquarters over to the two night men, he walked homeward with only a vague program for dealing with this Rastafarian: Treat him decently, but get him off the island.

  Conforming to his nightly custom, he walked home by a path that took him past his father’s famous café, the Waterloo, and he checked to see how his son, who now owned the place, was doing. When he became commissioner he had felt obligated to get rid of what was essentially a saloon, and Lincoln, thirty years old and named after the Liberator, had improved the place in many ways, making it even more attractive to tourists than it had been before. Thomas chuckled, recalling the troubles Black Bart had suffered on the island: He may have had no Rastafarian. They didn’t exist in his day. But he sure had something worse … The story was part of family lore. Bart’s own cousin, Governor Lord Basil Wrentham, was a bosom friend of the Germans. But Bart, helped by a clever little Englishman named Leckey, managed to tie Lord Basil’s tail in a knot. The noble lord was too stupid ever to know what hit him.

  The commissioner did not stop at the Waterloo, but through the window of the brightly lit café, he saw his son waving to him to let him know that all was well, and Wrentham waved back in acknowledgment.

  When he reached home, a small house occupied by his three forebears for almost a century, he was disappointed to find that his daughter, Sally, a young woman of twenty-two, would not be sharing supper with him, for although he prized the efficient manner in which his son had taken charge of the café, he had always had a special affection for Sally. She was intelligent, had done so well in school that she could have gone to Oxford or Cambridge had she cared to spend the years in England, and possessed the lyric beauty of movement and appearance which made certain young women of the islands so compelling. She was, thought her father, a person of special merit, and he had begun to speculate on whom she might marry.

  Her position in the prime minister’s office, her good salary and her lively interest in political matters made her attractive to many young men; indeed, her would-be suitors ran the entire gamut, from a white Englishman who had come to All Saints to study its economy, through several shades of brown both lighter and darker than herself, and on to one very black chap who might prove the best of the lot. Even though the fact that color distinctions were now of diminished importance on All Saints, the commissioner, despite his modernism, was quietly proud of the fact that Sally was several shades lighter than he or his father. He would be interested to watch whom she settled upon, but he felt no concern, because almost anyone from the field, as he called the young fellows who buzzed around her, would be acceptable.

  The caste system that had prevailed before World War II, when there were rigid delineations—aristocracy, good county families, all other whites, light-skinned browns, dark-skinned browns and blacks—had quietly evaporated with independence. London no longer sent out members of the nobility to serve as governors general, so this class had been eliminated. Families with county connections back in England still existed but played a much smaller role in social life, so the three former distinctions among the whites had coalesced into one: white.

  It was practically the same with that difficult-to-categorize class, the browns. There were almost no situations in which light-skinned browns could lord it over dark-skinned ones, so the two phrases were rarely heard. On All Saints it was simply white, brown, black, and a visitor who knew nothing of past distinctions would be hard put to say, merely from watching the people of the island in action, which category was atop the heap. The governor general was still appointed by the queen, but now he was a native of All Saints and very black indeed. The prime minister, a new official, was elected and was, in the old determination, dark brown, while the third in command, the commissioner of police, was light.

  ‘Where’s Sally?’ Wrentham asked the older woman who had looked after his house since the death of his wife, and she responded: ‘She say: “Meetin’ on de black agenda.” ’

  Thomas laughed, for in recent months Sally had been caught up with a feisty group of young people who were discussing a problem that concerned thoughtful people on all the Caribbean islands except Cuba: ‘How should the principle of negritude, the spiritual essence of being black, modify personal and political life in the Caribbean?’

  The commissioner approved of his daughter’s participation in these discussions, because both he and his father, Black Bart, had been resolute in their belief in black power and forthright in their application of it. The blacks and browns of All Saints still talked admiringly of the manner in which Bart had solved the problem of The Club, that ultra-exclusive gathering spot on the hill in back of Gommint House. Prior to 1957, when a restricted form of self-government was introduced, only whites were permitted to enter those sacred portals, and this exclusivity was not only understood by everyone but also generally approved: ‘Each man to his own group.’

  But when real self-government came in 1964, with a white governor general still representing the queen but a locally elected black prime minister in effectual charge, Black Bart decided that a change was in order. So, one April evening, as the remaining white establishment was gathering at The Club to discuss the latest improprieties of the newly positioned brown and black officeholders, Bart Wrentham, by then police chief of the island, rode up the hill in his old Chevrolet, walked ceremoniously into the meeting room, and announced in respectful tones: ‘I’m applying for membership.’ Some of the older members gasped at the insolence, but others clapped hands and half a dozen of the younger members invited Bart to the bar for a drink. The social revolution which so many on All Saints had feared occurred without one ugly word spoken or shouted in public. br />
  As the first non-white member of The Club, Bart paid his dues regularly but never imposed himself on the membership except in those cases when as police chief he had to entertain dignitaries from other islands. Then he appeared neatly dressed in his quasimilitary uniform, introduced his guests to any who were in the bar, and had dinner quietly in a corner where he could discuss Caribbean problems in carefully modulated tones.

  At Bart’s death, The Club sent an official delegation of seven to his funeral, and in the elegies they spoke of him proudly as their first member of color and a man who had served both The Club and the island with distinction. His son Thomas, the present police chief, now called Commissioner, inherited his sensible attitudes toward relations between the races, and had passed them on to his children. Two days earlier, when his daughter had informed him that she planned to join the discussion group on negritude, he said: ‘Fine. Your grandfather wrestled with the problem when he lived in a Crown Colony with its rigid attitudes, and he taught me how to handle it in these years of independence. Your job is to be prepared for the future, for whatever changes are coming.’

  As Wrentham reflected on these matters while eating his supper alone, Sally was immersed in a tense meeting of her group, some sixteen of the brightest young officeholders, all brown or black, who were discussing the significance of a powerful book on the subject of negritude written by a fellow Caribbean, Frantz Fanon of Martinique. His great book, Les Damnés de la Terre, had been published in English under various titles, but the copy which the leader of tonight’s discussion had acquired was called The Wretched of the Earth, and its mind-shattering call for social change had considerable application to black islands like All Saints.