Caribbean

  Today would be a harsh, almost brutal ride into the realities of a new black republic with its dominant African heritage extruding at a dozen unexpected points. Laura, several shades darker than Sally, drove her small car with Ras-Negus Grimble hunched up beside her in the front seat and Sally tightly packed into the rear.

  The difference between the two excursions started immediately, for instead of taking the mountain road south, Laura headed north, and as soon as they left the town, the Rastafarian took command, as if he were a young king and they his concubines. What he wanted to see was the lay of the land, its capacity for agriculture, the crops it was already growing, and how the little farms that peppered this apparently empty part of the island were positioned. Twice he ordered Laura peremptorily: ‘Stop! I want to visit that farmer,’ and when he left the car to talk with the black people occupying the hut he spoke about crops with such obvious authority, that Sally thought: I’ll bet his ancestors inspected their fields that way in Africa.

  When they were about two miles south of Tudor, Sally accompanied him on a walking visit to a third farmer whose fields were off the road, and was amazed at the turn their conversation took. ‘Can you grow a good ganja on your back fields?’

  ‘Never tried.’

  ‘If I brought you number-one seed, would you try?’

  ‘How I gonna sell ganja, suppose I grow it?’

  ‘Great Babylon Americans hungry for ganja. Very good price.’

  ‘We don’t grow much here All Saints. Don’t use it much.’

  ‘All that’s going to change. Remember. I told you. Great God Haile Selassie say so.’

  On the short hop into Tudor, Sally asked: ‘Isn’t ganja what is usually called marijuana?’

  ‘Ganja is the sacred herb of Rastafari. Opens all doors.’

  In Tudor he was electric, moving about among black people, who were overwhelmed by his tremendous locks, his colorful shirt, the secure manner in which he conducted himself. Sally noticed that he tended to keep away from people of light color like herself; his message was for the black farmer, the black storekeeper, the woman who washed clothes, and it was always the same: ‘Black people gonna rise all over the Caribbean. God comin’ back to earth in Ethiopia, reconquer the world for us.’

  When his listeners asked about the messages on his shirt, he pointed to the picture of Haile Selassie and told them: ‘Great ruler. He conquer all Africa.’ He told them that his lion was the one mentioned in the Bible: ‘Lion of Judah. Come to give us total power.’ He also explained that the pope in Rome would soon be destroyed because he was the spirit of Babylon, but the Great Babylon itself was America, which would also be destroyed. He further predicted that very painful punishments would soon overtake Queen Elizabeth II: ‘She the daughter Queen Elizabeth I, who send her captain, John Hawkins, to Africa to bring your mammies and daddies here as slaves.’

  When the people stopped to listen to his ranting, intermixed with long passages of incomprehensible Rastafarian jumble, he dropped his voice and ended with great seriousness: ‘America the Great Babylon overseas. Who the Great Babylon here All Saints? The police.’ Always when he said this, he stopped, stared at his listeners with a fierce glance, utilizing his height and the fearful appearance of his hair and beard to terrify them. Then he would drop his voice to a whisper: ‘Great Babylon must be destroyed. The Bible say so. Revelation.’

  And now he whipped out his Bible: ‘Chapter Eighteen, verse two, look at it, read it for yourself: “And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen and is become the habitation of devils …” And now read verse twenty-one: “And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all.” ’

  Sally noticed that he always stopped short of calling for outright revolution or an attack on the police, but that was certainly the import of his words, and his listeners knew it. But when the tension was at its maximum, he became once more the gentle messenger she had seen that first night at the meeting. Then the warmth in his eyes and the reassurance in his placid face, framed as it was in his Christ-like beard, exuded love for all and an invitation to join his crusade to rescue the black people of this earth.

  When townsmen invited Ras-Negus and his two companions to take lunch with them, everyone noticed that he picked out only certain foods, and before eating, placed them in his coconut shell. Aware of the interest, he explained: ‘No canned food. No meat. Only food as Jah sends it, fresh from field and tree. And no plates or metal spoons. Only fingers as Jah gave them.’ It was sometimes rather trying to watch as he dipped his long, bony fingers into his bowl and brought them dripping to his bearded lips.

  As he ate he took the opportunity to explain to his host in the gentlest terms the principles of Rastafari, and when one man asked: ‘Is it true you have ganja as your sacred herb?’ he replied: ‘It’s the herb Jah sent down to earth to make black people joyous. You smoke ganja like Haile Selassie say, you catch a glimpse of heaven.’ And he left the men bedazzled by his description of what life was going to be like when Haile Selassie, as the seventy-second incarnation of the Godhead, returned to take command of the hundred and forty-four thousand who were to be saved.

  On the way west toward Cap Galant, Ras-Negus spoke with quiet fervor of Rastafarian principles: the concept that all women were empresses, that children were one of the world’s great blessings, that good men and women ate only natural foods and not canned poisons sent to the island in cargo ships owned by the Great Babylon in Miami.

  The drone of his subdued and pleasant voice almost put Sally to sleep, but when, to keep herself awake, she asked: ‘Mr. Grimble …’ and he stopped her: ‘Not Mr. Grimble, Ras-Negus, John the Baptist of the Leeward and Windward Islands.’

  ‘Ras-Negus, what was that hundred and forty-four thousand saved you spoke about?’ and for the first time when talking with her directly he produced his small leatherbound Bible and flipped it open exactly to Revelation, Chapter 14, from which he read in low and gentle tones: ‘ “And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads … These were redeemed from among men, being the firstfruits unto God and to the Lamb.” ’

  Closing the Bible, he said, looking at Sally: ‘You and I should live our lives so that we can be one of the hundred and forty-four thousand.’

  ‘You mean that of all the people on earth only …?’

  ‘Group by group. Of these Windward Islands, maybe only one hundred and forty-four thousand saved.’

  ‘In America, which has a huge population?’

  ‘None. It is Babylon.’

  When they reached Cap Galant they found that the government had erected from stone and wood a spacious belvedere in which some dozen separate groups were picnicking or simply resting to enjoy the noble scene. The appearance of Ras-Negus was so striking that he commanded attention, and soon had about him a small group of curiosity seekers who encouraged him to descant on the glories of Rastafarianism. But Sally noticed that with this audience he did not even mention let alone stress revolution, the supremacy of black over white, or the ritual use of ganja, and she realized that he was much more clever than she had thought, for he knew instinctively how to tailor his comments to his crowd. She had more respect for him when he spoke with blacks, because then he was more forthright. But regardless of his audience, in whatever he said he conveyed a tremendous sense of Africa, and Sally thought: This Rastafarian has never been there, but he exudes the smell of the great rivers, the sounds of the deep jungle and even the chattering of the many plumed birds. God, this man has made himself Africa!

  After he had been orating for some time, a woman came up who had attended that first night meeting and asked him to expound on the curious Rastafarian vocabulary. This was apparently one of the aspects of Rastafari about which he cons
idered himself an expert, for he declaimed wildly and sometimes with unintended humor about how the English language would be modified when the Rastas took over. Among his more memorable suggestions:

  … ‘Politics is how the white man oppresses the blacks. We must call it by its right name, polytricks.’

  … ‘Understand is too beautiful a word to be harmed by the negative concept under. It must become overstand.’

  … ‘Divine has the noblest meaning, but it’s damaged by that first part die. It has to become I-vine, throwing all the divinity on the I, the immortal me.’

  …‘In Tudor just now I saw the new library. Marvelous place for children, but it corrupts them with false information in that first part lie. It has got to be truthbrary.’

  …‘One of the best things a Rasta can be is dedicated. But the power of the word is killed by that first part, dead. We call it livicated.’

  On and on he went, as if he were playing a child’s game, dissecting the language and substituting crazy corrections. When he saw picnickers eating the most totally satisfying food of the islands, a ripe mango with its rich-tasting fruit and golden juice: ‘Man-go, it means some good fellow is dying. We make our word I-come.’

  Sally could not determine whether he was making any converts or not, but a remarkable event occurred which proved that he saw his visit to All Saints as a missionary journey, for he attacked his targets with a cleverly designed two-pronged assault: first he gathered them about him with a performance on his homemade musical instrument, singing in fine style one of Bob Marley’s best songs, ‘One Love,’ then he carefully scrutinized their faces to see who might be open to his next approach. With a psychological insight that was extraordinary, he identified half a dozen young men who seemed susceptible to what he intended doing. With Sally and Laura following, he led his group to a secluded portion of the cap and there produced from his bag a supply of the best ganja leaves from the hill country of Jamaica.

  Sally had never before seen the notorious herb, illegal on All Saints, and was surprised at how pleasantly aromatic it was in its natural state, but she was even more startled when she saw how Ras-Negus smoked it. From what she had read in Time, she had expected him to roll it into something like a cigarette, but he did not. Taking a strip of newspaper, he formed a generous cornucopia, small like a cigar at the mouth end, flaring out to a diameter of three inches at the far end. When he lit the weed and started smoking in deep drafts, he looked as if he were making music on old Triton’s ‘wreathèd horn.’

  He inhaled deeply, closed his eyes, allowed a look of saintly benevolence to clothe his face, then passed the strange contraption to the man standing near him, who took four deep first-time puffs. Since the cornucopia contained an immense amount of ganja, some ten young men could share it, and now it came to Laura, driver of the car. She had apparently been introduced earlier to the herb by Ras-Negus, for she took the smoking paper, dragged on it expertly, sighed deeply, and held it out to Sally.

  This posed a problem. Sally, as the daughter of the commissioner of police, was well aware that even the possession of marijuana on All Saints, let alone the actual smoking of it, was illegal, but her experiences on this crowded day had awakened in her such an interest in Rastafari as an authentic black religion that she was inclined to participate in all its rituals, so she accepted the ganja from Laura.

  ‘You must take deep breaths,’ Ras-Negus directed, and when she did she felt the subtle smoke diffusing through her lungs and apparently her heart and head as well. Eight deep drags produced a positive euphoria, and once more she felt the sense of Africa.

  It was late afternoon when they started the drive home, and although Sally’s mind was not entirely clear, it was apparent to her that Laura was surprised when Ras-Negus climbed not into the front seat with her but in the back with Sally. Once there, he lit another ganja cigar, and soon the car was filled with the sweetish aroma and Sally was being pressured to take one drag for every three or four that he took. Laura, from the front seat, also asked for her share, and the little car bounced merrily homeward.

  Now Ras-Negus, in a grand euphoria, started finding in his Bible random passages which more or less substantiated the teaching of Rastafari. Again from Revelation came:’ “And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed …” ’ He said that this proved that Haile Selassie, who was a lineal descendant from King David, would soon take over Africa.

  ‘But he’s dead,’ Sally protested, and he countered: ‘His spirit. Not his followers, like you and me. Africa will be ours.’

  To prove his point, he turned to Psalm 68, where he read in verses 31 and 32: ‘ “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God. Sing unto God, ye kingdoms of the earth …” ’ This clearly meant, he claimed, that Great Babylon America would soon fall under the sway of Ethiopia.

  On and on he went, galloping through the Bible to lift this arcane morsel and that, but always he came back to Revelation: ‘Victory over Great Babylon isn’t going to be easy. Listen to Chapter Nineteen, verse nineteen: ‘ “And I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their armies, gathered together to make war against him that sat on the horse, and against his army.” ’ This seemed pretty nebulous to Sally until he pulled from his leather bag a small photograph of Haile Selassie perched on a white horse. This led him immediately to Chapter 20, verse II: ‘ “And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and heaven fled away …” ’

  Sally, in her gently muddled state, could not see the connection between a white horse and a white throne, but apparently there was one, for the concept inspired Grimble to lean his head back and recite long passages from the Bible, none of them directly related to Rastafari but all of them wonderfully narcotic, and as she drifted under the united spell of the magical words and seductive herbs, she realized that Ras-Negus was fumbling under her dress and then with his own trousers, but his words were so persuasive and his presence so commanding that she found no wish to resist, until she wakened to the horrifying fact that this frightening man with the Medusa locks intended having sex with her right there in the cramped back seat of the moving car.

  She did not scream, but she did try to push him away. However, he was too powerful, and forced her to keep her hand inside his baggy trousers until he gained partial satisfaction.

  It was frightening but not repulsive, for his entire being—his deportment, his narcotic words, his sense of dedication—bespoke a world she had not known before, and his wild vitality gave substance to that pretty word she and her friends had discussed so glibly: negritude. Exhausted and bewildered as the effects of the ganja subsided, pressed into her corner of the car, she prayed that it might soon reach Bristol Town. When Laura stopped her car at the home of Commissioner Wrentham, Sally jumped out and ran inside as if she sought sanctuary, for here, in the persons of her able father and her sane brother, black Africa and white England did meet in a decent and agreed-upon harmony.

  Sally was so shaken by her experience with the Rastafarian and his ganja that next day at noon she went to the small, neat rectory attached to the Church of England building and asked if she could speak with Canon Tarleton, and his white-haired wife said brightly: ‘That’s what he’s here for, my dear,’ and off she went to fetch him.

  The Reverend Essex Tarleton had been only an average boy at school in England and not much better at the university. In divinity training it was obvious that he was never going to be among the leaders of his church nationwide. But all who knew him in those years were satisfied that he was a young fellow with a clear call to the ministry, and when, in 1939, he joined the navy as chaplain, they were pleased that he had found his niche. After serving at various bases and in several important warships, he was, after the war, assigned to a small church in Barbados, where for many years he was both happy and effective, but when the community grew, it required a younger and m
ore energetic man, and he was shunted off to the less populous island of All Saints. Here he would end his ministry, a well-intentioned white man helping a black congregation establish its norms. On Saturdays he umpired cricket matches, on Sundays he preached, and on all days he held himself in readiness to consult with his parishioners. He would have been astounded had anyone pointed out that he was the kind of humble servant who had held the British Empire together and who now accounted for the fact that on islands like All Saints emotional ties still bound the newly freed young nations to England. They banked in London, sent their bright youths to English schools, and purchased their books and magazines from what even the most ardent black patriot still called ‘The Homeland.’ In cricket it was grand when some fine test team came from Australia or India, but people marked their calendars in gold when an English team arrived.

  ‘And what brings you to my little room?’ he asked Sally as he bustled in, offering her a glass of sherry.

  She said she would like some, then explained that she was bewildered by Rastafarianism, and as soon as she said the word, he stopped pouring and said: ‘Yes, I know he’s been doing a lot of talking, that fellow from Jamaica.’

  ‘He’s certainly been talking to me, quite persuasively.’

  ‘Now, now, Sally! You’re much too sensible to be taken in by that nonsense.’

  ‘But he quotes the Bible with such telling effect. Tell me, Canon, are the words of Revelation meaningful?’

  Canon Tarleton sipped his sherry, then broke into robust laughter: ‘Sally, I’m going to answer your question with what might be called terrible frankness, but for God’s sake, listen to me. The religious kooks and weirdos of this world, and I’m borrowing a wonderfully appropriate pair of words I picked up from a recent issue of Time, have used two books of the Bible for the last two thousand years to prove any confounded thing they wished. Daniel and Revelation! They do as much harm in the world as Jamaica rum and Holland gin.’