The Writer and the World: Essays

  So close to God, the Anguillans are not fanatical. They have the Negro openness to new faiths. Eight years ago Mr. Webster, the now deposed President, re-thought his position and, at the age of thirty-four, left the Anglicans for the Seventh Day Adventists. He would like to see more and varied missionary activity on the island. “If the Jehovah’s Witnesses or any other denomination convert one or ten souls they are doing a good job and serving the community. Because our basic plan is to keep Anguillans as pious as possible. This keeps out partial and immoral thoughts.”

  The island has its own prophet, Judge Gumbs, Brother George Gumbs (Prophet), as he signs his messages to the new local weekly. He is not without honour; he is consulted by high and low. When the spirit moves him he cycles around with a fife and drum, “a short black man with a cap” (an Anguillan description), preaching and sometimes warning. He is said to get a frenzied feeling about a particular place, a field, a stretch of road; a few days later the disaster occurs. In December, three or four days after Mr. Webster said that Anguilla was going to leave the Commonwealth altogether, Judge Gumbs was out, preaching. I didn’t see him, but I was told he had no news; he just asked the people to pray. No news from Judge Gumbs was good news.

  Certain other reverences remain, to bind the community: certain families act or take decisions in times of crisis. The reverences follow the antique patterns, whose origins have been forgotten. Colour is accidental, and nothing angers the Anguillans more than the propaganda from St. Kitts, seventy miles away, that their rebellion is the rebellion of a slave island, with the blacks loyally following the whites and browns. The reverences are of Anguilla, and the Anguillans describe themselves as Negroes. Mr. Webster, who could be of any race between the Mediterranean and India, describes himself as a Negro. It is true: losing the historical sense, the Anguillans have also lost the racial sense. It isn’t an easy thing to put across, especially to St. Kitts, which is now playing with its own concept of Black Power.

  ANGUILLANS have never liked being administratively linked with St. Kitts, and they have hated Robert Bradshaw, the St. Kitts Premier, ever since, angered by their indifference, he said he would turn the island into a desert and make the Anguillans suck salt. They were frightened by the idea of an independent St. Kitts–Nevis–Anguilla under Bradshaw’s rule; and there was a riot in February 1967, when, as part of the independence celebrations, St. Kitts sent over some beauty queens to give a show in the Anguilla High School. The police used tear gas, but inefficiently. They gassed the queens and the loyal audience, not the enraged Anguillans outside. Reinforcements from St. Kitts’s one-hundred-man police force were flown in the next day. Houses were searched; the Anguillan leaders took to the bush.

  It was the signal for a general revolt. The Warden’s house was set on fire; the Warden fled. From time to time during the next three months shots were fired at the police station at night. The hotel where the acting Warden was staying was set on fire; he too left. The next day the bank manager was attacked. Two days later several hundred Anguillans rushed the police station. The seventeen policemen offered no fight; they were put on a plane and sent back to St. Kitts; and the Anguillans set up their own five-man police force.

  Ten days later, fearing outside intervention (Jamaica nearly sent in troops), and guided now by that religious certitude, the Anguillans raided St. Kitts and shot up the police station and Defence Force Headquarters. The raid, by twelve men, was openly planned; people went down to the wharf in the afternoon to wave as the fifty-foot cutter left for St. Kitts. Five and a half hours later the cutter tied up, quite simply, at the main pier in St. Kitts. Then the Anguillans discovered they hadn’t thought about motorcars. They had intended to kidnap Bradshaw; they had to be content with scaring him.

  Some time later there was a report that thirty-five men from St. Kitts had invaded Anguilla. The man who was the Provisional President flew over the reported landing area in an Aztec, dropping leaflets asking the invaders to surrender. But there were no invaders. The fighting was over. All that followed were words; secession was a fact. Anguilla had become the world’s smallest republic.

  Its status was ambiguous. It still considered itself within the Commonwealth. It looked to London for a constitutional settlement, for some sanction of its separation from St. Kitts. London didn’t know what to do. For more than two hundred years, in fact, no one had really wanted Anguilla or had known what to do with it. The place was a mistake.

  IT HAD ITS FORMALITIES. When you got off the Piper Aztec you went through Anguillan Immigration and Customs; they were both in one room of the two-roomed airport building. The Immigration man had a khaki uniform, an Anguilla badge, and an Anguilla rubber-stamp. You needed an Anguillan driving licence; it cost a dollar; you paid at the Police Station in the long low Administration Building. The five-man police force was enough; there was little crime. Women quarrelled and used four-letter words; the police visited and “warned”; that, in the main, was the routine. There was a jail, and there was one prisoner. He had been there for a year, a St. Kitts man on a charge of murder. There was no magistrate to try him. Mr. Webster was hoping to deport the man as soon as the secession issue was settled.

  In the Post Office you bought Anguillan stamps, designed and produced by an English firm and sold by them to overseas collectors for a 15 per cent commission. Incoming mails were regular; Anguilla had beaten the St. Kitts postal ban by having two box numbers on the half-French, half-Dutch island of St. Martin. In the Treasury, next door to the Post Office, there was a notice about the new 2 per cent income tax. Other taxes, on liquor and petrol, had been lowered, to increase consumption and revenue; and it had worked. People told me there were more cars in Anguilla than ever before.

  The administration, spare and efficient, had been inherited with the Administration Building. An elected fifteen-man Council ruled. This structure of government was like sophistication in a community that had for long organized itself around its own reverences. The island ran itself; it worked. After half a day the visitor had to remind himself of size and quaintness. It was there, in the new flag, designed by some Americans: a circle of three orange dolphins on white, a lower stripe of turquoise. And in the fanciful anthem, composed by a local “group”:

  … An island where the golden corn is waving in the breeze!

  An island full of sunshine and where Nature e’er doth please.

  The visitor heard that the beaches were watched every night, in case St. Kitts invaded; that there were secret military exercises every fortnight; that the Anguillans had more than the four machine-guns, fifty-five rifles, fifteen shotguns, and two boxes of dynamite they had at the time of secession. There was talk of a repeat raid on St. Kitts; there was even a hint of a fighter being called in. St. Kitts was still claiming Anguilla and still advertising it in its tourist brochures (“Island of charm … for the holiday-seeker who wants to get away from it all”). But the Anguillans were secure. They knew that St. Kitts had its own political dissensions, that many people in St. Kitts were on their side, and that the 120-man St. Kitts army had enough to do at home. The Anguillans didn’t talk much about Bradshaw and St. Kitts. They talked more of their own dissensions, their own politics.

  Shipwrecked and isolated, the community had held together. With the quick semi-sophistication that had come with independence, the feeling that the island was quaint, famous, and tourist-precious, the old rules and reverences had begun to go. A few months before, on the quaint air-strip, the engine of a Piper Aztec had been smashed up at night with a hammer. Family rivalry was said to be the cause.

  THERE is only one hotel with electricity in Anguilla, the Rendezvous. It is like a rough motel; and the lights go off at nine. It is owned by Jeremiah Gumbs, half-brother of Judge Gumbs, the prophet, and is run by Jeremiah’s sister, who has spent many years in the United States and speaks with an American accent; the atmosphere of Negro America is strong.

  I knew about Jeremiah Gumbs. He had been described to me as “the sma
rt Anguillan,” the only one who had made good in the United States. He was a considerable local benefactor; and he was Anguilla’s link-man with the bigger world. He had given a number of interviews to American newspapers, had presented Anguilla’s case at the United Nations, and had led an Anguillan delegation to the OAS building (they found it closed).

  He was there, assessing and formidable (I had been told in St. Kitts never to laugh at Anguillans), while his sister showed me round.

  “And here, young man, you can plug in your shaver. Which is more than you did this morning.”

  She was very large; she was called Lady B. I recognized her as a “character.” Characters lie on my spirit like lead; and I resolved never to shave while I was at the Rendezvous.

  At lunch Jeremiah, sucking fish, began to boom across the dining-room, at first as though to himself.

  “They call it a rebellion.” His accent too was American. “Most peaceful rebellion in the world. Rebellion? It’s a rebellion against years of neglect, that’s all. What’s wrong with being small? Why shouldn’t a small country have dignity? Why shouldn’t a small country have pride? Why shouldn’t—”

  I tried to break into his harangue. “Gumbs. It’s an old island name.”

  “One man,” he said. “One man gave this island a library. One man set up the X-ray unit in the hospital. One man did all this. What did Brad-shaw do? Police, plastic bombs, tear gas, things we never saw before. Now he says I am the big villain, the leader of the rebels.”

  I had heard no such thing.

  “One man. Joe Louis. Marian Anderson. You get no more than one in a generation. It’s because I care. I remember when I was a child we had four successive droughts in this island of Anguilla. I know what poverty is. I remember days in New York in the Depression when I didn’t have the subway fare and had to walk one hundred blocks to school. Days when I didn’t even eat an apple.”

  It hadn’t marked him. He was an enormous man. Fifty-five, sharp-nosed, with a moustache and thin greying hair, he was like somebody out of those Negro Westerns of thirty years ago, Two-Gun Man from Harlem, Harlem on the Prairie. It was the way he ate, the way he walked and talked; it was the rock and the dust outside. He was the man opening up a territory.

  “You come to write something, huh?”

  I said, with acute shame, that I had.

  “You go ahead and write. They come all the time. They sit on the beach and write all day long.” His voice began to sing in the American way: “Just like Nature intended.”

  I resolved never to set foot on his beach.

  We met that afternoon on the dusty road, he in his high jeep, a territory-opener, I in the low exposed mini-jeep I had rented from him.

  “You making out all right?”

  I was choking with dust and had already been lost twice (those Anguillan compass directions), but didn’t tell him: he had sold me a map.

  “You write and tell them. You tell them about this bunch of rebellious savages.”

  FOR A SHORT time after secession the Anguillans flew the flag of San Francisco, the gift of an editor who belonged to what is known in the island as the San Francisco Group. The Group took a whole-page advertisement in the New York Times in August 1967 for “The Anguilla White Paper,” which they composed.

  Anguillans, the White Paper said, were not backward simply because they didn’t have telephones. “Do you know what one Anguillan does when he wants to telephone another Anguillan? He walks up the road and talks to him.” But the absence of telephones was part of the case against St. Kitts; and it isn’t easy to get about the island without a jeep. There are people in West End (where the people are mainly blackish, with occasional blond sports) who have never been to East End (where many of the fair people are).

  Anguillans didn’t “even want one Hiltonesque hotel”; it would turn them into “a nation of bus boys, waiters, and servants.” They didn’t want more than thirty “guests” at one time; it wouldn’t be polite for a guest to go away without at least lunching with the President. They didn’t want “tourists.”

  The White Paper—it offered honorary citizenship for $100—made $25,000 for Anguilla. Some Anguillans felt that they had been made ridiculous by the White Paper. But Mr. Webster, who signed it as Chief Executive, told me he stood by it. Jeremiah Gumbs, though, was extending his hotel; other people had put up establishments of their own of varying standards (the tourist future could still be one of rough bars and souvenir-stalls and ice-cream stands, very private enterprise); and Mr. Webster himself said that he would like to see Anguilla as a tourist resort.

  It was part of the Anguillan confusion. Too many people had wanted to help, finding in Anguilla an easy cause, a little black comedy. The Anguillans, never seeing the joke, always listened and then grew frightened and self-willed.

  One member of the San Francisco Group was Professor Leopold Kohr of the University of Puerto Rico, a sixty-year-old Austrian who went to live in America in 1938. Kohr has long promoted the theory of the happy small society; his book, A Breakdown of Nations, was published in London in 1957 (it is now out of print). In 1958 Kohr addressed the Welsh Nationalist Party that wants Wales to break away from England; he is now on a year’s sabbatical at the University of Swansea. Kohr feels that small communities are “more viable economically than larger powers,” and he thought Anguilla “the ideal testing ground.” Immediately after secession the Anguillan leaders were beating up support in the nearby islands. They met Kohr and the San Francisco Group in Puerto Rico. “My team,” Kohr says, “was accepted within twenty-four hours.”

  There appeared to be early proof of economic viability when it was rumoured that Aristotle Onassis had offered a million dollars a year for the right to use Anguilla as a flag base. The story is still current in the West Indies and Kohr still appears to believe in it. In St. Kitts and Anguilla, however, it was dismissed as one of Jeremiah Gumbs’s stories. Mr. Webster, as Chief Executive, wrote twice to Onassis but got no reply. The commercial offers that did come from the United States were, in Kohr’s words, from “interests of all shady shades.”

  A local man I met at the airport one Saturday—like market-day, then, with the cardboard boxes and baskets and parcels coming off the Aztecs, the women waiting for letters, messages, remittances from their men in the American Virgin Islands—a local man whispered to me about the Mafia and their agents among the local people. (From recent newspaper reports I feel he has been whispering to many other visitors.) I asked Mr. Webster about this. He said, puzzlingly, that this whispering about the Mafia was official Anguillan policy, to keep the Mafia away. He also asked me not to pay too much attention to white “stooges.” At this stage I began to feel I was sinking in antique, inbred Anguillan intrigue.

  There were people, though, who, while not wishing to go back to St. Kitts, had become less happy about the future than Mr. Webster or Professor Kohr. They had seen no “development” in a year of ambiguous independence and they feared what would happen if Anguilla officially declared itself outside the Commonwealth. Anguilla, like Rhodesia, would be outlawed. It would attract outlaws.

  The new weekly, The Beacon (typewritten and offset, the equipment a gift from a Boston firm), had run an editorial warning against a unilateral declaration of independence. It had created some doubt in the island; it made independence appear a little more difficult.

  “If we sell away our rights to American businessmen now,” the young electrician-editor said to me in a bar, “we will be the laughingstock of the Caribbean and the world. Don’t get me wrong,” he added, speaking slowly while I took down his words. “If Britain don’t do nothing, then I feel we should go on our own.”

  “I go put his balls through the wringer,” a young man said angrily to Mr. Webster at the air-strip, showing The Beacon. Such violence of language was once reserved for Bradshaw of St. Kitts. Mr. Webster, hiding his distress—it was Saturday, his sabbath—calmed the young man down.

  The frightened, the bold, “stooges,” ?
??Mafia”: this was the rough division at which the visitor arrived, feeling his way through intrigue that appeared to follow no race or colour line. Responsibility, acquired lusts and fears now balancing the old certitude, had brought dissensions, the breaking up of that sense of isolation and community which was the point of independence.

  THERE was the Canadian with the idea for a radio station, for which for some reason he required stretches of beach. There was Jeremiah Gumbs’s plan for a Bank of Anguilla (he actually started building), which frightened many people. There was Jeremiah Gumbs’s plan for a “centre for physical medicine.” “The trouble is, will I get my people to understand it? Or will they object to it like the American Medical Association?” I could never understand what he meant; I heard it said that he wanted to bring down an American who had a magic cure. I remembered Jeremiah’s half-brother, Judge Gumbs.

  The Anguillan faith in Jeremiah Gumbs as their guide to big American investment had been shaken by these projects and he had been dropped as an adviser to the Council. When I was in Anguilla I felt he was in disgrace, sulking at the Rendezvous. And his own attitude to Anguilla changed from meal to meal. Sometimes he was a patriot. “St. Kitts will be sorry if they attacked us. When we have finished with them, the British Government will have to feed them on crackers and molasses, I guess.” Sometimes he was despairing about Anguillans. “They don’t know they don’t know.” He could give this a gloss. “The trouble,” he said during one gloomy meal, “is that colonialism has made the Anguillan a shell.”

  His changes of mood were linked with the arrival, examination, and dismissal of another American with an idea. This man was looking for a “franchise”: a grant of land and, I believe, a twenty-five-year monopoly in the quarrying and block-making business. His examination by the Council and the Council’s lawyer, who had flown in from Trinidad, lasted eight hours; and when he appeared at Jeremiah Gumbs’s table at dinner, a young soft-bellied man in trousers of shocking Sherwood green, he looked bruised. I heard later that toward the end of his examination he was close to tears.