Eden Burning

  “And your daddy?” (He half expected the answer.)

  “He went away.”

  Patrick nodded. Daddies usually did. His mind sped on. “Tell me what happened on the boat?”

  “Well, then, we landed here on St. Felice and found everyone spoke English! I stood on the wharf and wanted to cry. But I wouldn’t, because a crowd was there waiting to hear what was happening in Martinique and I was too proud to cry in front of them all. I didn’t know where to go. Then a white man came and leaned out of his carriage and spoke to me in French, queer French, though he told me later that was the way they spoke it in France. I didn’t believe that but I found out it was so…. Well anyway, that’s how I came to work for the Francis family.”

  “At Eleuthera?”

  “What? What do you know about Eleuthera?”

  “You took me there once.”

  “Lord, you’re ten now. You couldn’t have been a day over three!”

  “Well,” he said proudly, “I remember it. Mr. Virgil Francis died at Eleuthera. I read it in the paper a while ago.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “It was a beautiful house, wasn’t it?”

  “Beautiful? Falling apart! That house hasn’t been fixed up properly since Lord knows when.”

  “It was beautiful,” Patrick insisted. “On top of a hill. Were they nice to you?”

  “Oh yes…. Young Mr. Francis, so gentle he was, reading all day till his eyes hurt. He fell sick soon after he married. I helped nurse him till he died and then I—”

  “He died?” Death interested him.

  “Yes. Oh, that’s enough, I’m running off at the mouth. Listen! The storm’s over.”

  It had passed and crickets had started their music.

  “Tell me about France,” he said suddenly.

  “I don’t remember much about that. It was a long time ago.”

  “The volcano was much longer!” he cried.

  “Anyway, I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t want to! And I like to hear about true things that happened—you know I do!”

  She ruffled his hair. “Sometimes you’re like an old man.” And as if she were not talking to him at all, but into the air, she said, “I hope things will be easy for you.”

  “That I won’t be caught in a volcano, you mean?”

  “A human being is so small,” she said, still talking to the air. “You can squash him like a bug.”

  He persisted. “The volcano, you mean?”

  She looked at him now. “No. Life is what I mean. So go to sleep.”

  Those were the years of his childhood.

  FOUR

  At thirteen or fourteen a boy became a man. Then it was that he might earn his first wage, cutting fodder for the animals on the sugar estate. He would become aware of the ways that were open to him. The most frequented led through the estate, first doing odd jobs on a day-work gang, planting and weeding. If he did well he would probably be hired permanently. By his early twenties he would have learned enough and his arms would be strong enough to cut cane. There would be, then, years of that, the larger portion of his life. When he grew too old to cut cane he would go back among the young boys to care for the animals. All this, of course, depended upon whether he was “taken on” by one of the local estates; if not, he might sail away to try his luck on some other island.

  The other path was narrower by far. If a boy was ambitious and smart at his lessons, and if the money could be found somehow, he might go on to Boys’ Secondary School in Covetown. Then someday, wearing a suit and tie, he would go to work in a shop or bank or perhaps in the customs office or the courthouse. Boys’ Secondary was a white building set among tended lawns, with a Church of England chapel and a fine cricket field in back. The headmaster wore an impressive black gown and a clerical collar. The masters were of the white race, but since planters usually sent their sons overseas to school, few of the students were. Yet the atmosphere was loftily British and a bookish boy from Sweet Apple, passing by and staring within, could not be sure whether his heart was beating with prideful hope or apprehension.

  Oh, it would be foolish to set one’s sights so high! One might not, probably would not, even pass the entrance examinations! So Patrick told himself and told his mother too, who did not want to hear.

  “I’ve saved the money, and you’ll go,” she said.

  Yet, on that first morning while she waited with him for the bus, the bright pink “Jamboree” loaded with laborers and women taking their produce to town, there were tears in her eyes.

  Suddenly it became clear that a human being can be of two minds. Much as she had wanted it for him, so much did she fear the step that he was taking into the larger world, among people who would make him different from the boy she knew. This awareness touched him with brief melancholy, even on so triumphant a morning. Here was a passage, a passing out.

  Yet it had already begun a long time before. Ever since his first day at the village school he had been changing, leaving her. This now was only a further step, toward what he did not know.

  At thirteen one often does as much thinking and inner growing after school hours as in school. If the school stimulates, so much the better—the two parts of the day can complement each other.

  Patrick did well. The masters were serious, disciplined men. Some of them even had some humane comprehension of how a boy from a village shack would need to struggle for survival amid unfamiliar order and decorum. For Patrick it was easier than for many: Agnes had already taught him the social graces.

  In the sciences and mathematics he held his head above water. But in the Latin class, in history and literature, the realms of words, he swam with the best. His favorite class was history, taught by Father Albeit Baker, a celibate, overweight Anglican priest with tobacco-stained teeth and keen, kindly eyes.

  It was through Father Baker that his friendship with Nicholas Mebane came about.

  “You boys should get to know one another,” he said one day after class. “You’d like each other, I believe.”

  Patrick stood awkwardly. Nicholas, he knew, was the son of a doctor and had his own group of Covetown friends among the light-brown aristocracy. The school—the world, he was already able to surmise—was tightly partitioned; here, in addition to Nicholas’s group, were the clustered whites, sons of bankers and middlemen not in a class with planters, who did not necessarily go abroad to school; here, lastly, was Patrick’s group, most of them quite black, these the brightest boys from the villages. Patrick, except for his color, did not fit with Nicholas.

  But the latter put his hand out. He had a frank manner.

  “Glad to,” he said. “I know you don’t live in town, but maybe you’ll stay in later some afternoon?”

  So easily did it happen, so easily can two people surmount all differences when the chemistry is right. Certainly Patrick had never had a friend like Nicholas, and it soon appeared that Nicholas had never had one like Patrick. It was not just because they were both good-looking, capable at sports, and clever at their studies, for these things were mostly true of all the other boys; they would not have been accepted at the school otherwise. It was a sharing, a point of view, a mutual admiration, an indefinable.

  Through the eyes of Nicholas, Patrick saw Covetown as though it were entirely new to him. At the wharf Nicholas pointed out the moored yachts and identified their owners.

  “There aren’t many here now, but before the war the bar of Cade’s Hotel used to be filled with planters and millionaire yachtsmen, my father says. And of course the Crocus Club.” He grinned. “Funny, our country club has everything they have; in fact, our tennis courts are supposed to be better.” He looked at Patrick. “You know what? I bet you could get into any white man’s club.” He put his head on one side. “Well, maybe not. You almost could fool them, though.”

  “As if I would consider trying!” Patrick was indignant.

  “I didn’t mean you would.”

  They stood looking ou
t over the harbor. Sugar lay on the quay ready for shipment. Square-sailed fishing boats had drawn up to unload.

  “I used to see destroyers here during the war,” Nicholas said. “Painted in zigzags. Camouflaged.”

  For Patrick the war had been so far away that it seemed unreal, except when his mother’s newspaper ran a picture of wreckage in London, of houses blown apart, and then he would wonder what had happened to the people in the houses.

  “It’s funny,” Nicholas said. “There was all that modern stuff here, planes and bombs and submarines like the one that came to Grenada. My father was there when it came.” A German submarine had sunk a Canadian passenger ship near shore, and then quite coolly had moved out again into the ocean. “Then you think how, on this island, the quickest way to get from Covetown to the other side is still by sailboat! And some of our roads are so bad that it’s easier to travel by mule than by car. We’re not much changed from what we were two hundred years ago.”

  He’s only quoting his father, Patrick thought, liking his friend none the less for that.

  Turning back to Wharf Street, they paused to peer in at Da Cunha’s glitter.

  “You think they’ve got a lot of stuff in there? I was in their cellar storeroom once. Loaded from floor to ceiling with things from all over the world! A lot of these merchants—I don’t say Da Cunha—but a lot of them make a fortune in smuggled goods, especially whiskey; did you know that?”

  “Even today? I thought all that ended with the pirates.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Nicholas said wisely.

  They went on up the hill past the government buildings. Patrick had never thought about government before. It had only taken shape for him in the form of a mailbox or the sight of a policeman in his white, tropical hat and his red stripes, standing in front of the courthouse. Once when the king had sent a new governor from overseas, he had watched the crowd at Government House, the dignitaries in their fancy clothes passing through the gates. That was government.

  “My father goes there all the time. He’s a member of the Legislative Council.” Nicholas made a pyramid of his hands, wiggling his fingertips. “At the top you have the governor. We’re a crown colony, which means we’re responsible to Parliament in London. We’ve got a legislature with two houses, just like Parliament. There’s the elected House of Assembly—my father started out there—and then there’s the Legislative Council, which is higher. Half of its members are selected by the governor. My father was selected by the governor,” he added with simple pride.

  Such matters of election and appointment were of little interest to Patrick. Regarding the union jack as it floated above the great white mansion, he had a physical sensation of awe, that was all. Councils and assemblies were too complicated to master, and somewhat dry; it was enough now to master Covetown, let alone London.

  “The British Empire won’t last much longer.” Nicholas said then, solemnly.

  “What do you mean? There won’t be any more king?”

  “It’s more complicated than that. My father says there will be what he calls a loosening. It won’t happen all at once. But people aren’t going to work for half nothing anymore. Look at the riots they’ve had in Barbados and Jamaica.”

  Patrick hadn’t heard of the riots but, nodding, pretended that he had.

  “There’ve been more labor laws passed since the war than they’d passed in a century. They know in London that they’ve got to do something about conditions…. Why else do you think they sent Lord Moyne’s royal commission to look into things? They haven’t made the report public yet, but I’ll bet you—my father says—it will favor federation of all the islands. Naturally, the business people and the planters will fight it, but it will come. Anyway, my father says independence will come one day, too, and the English know it. It’s only a question of time. When it comes we’ll need educated men to run things. That’s why I’m going to be sent to England to study law.”

  The school taught to the Cambridge O level, and a sizable group of boys, working toward the overseas certificate, were planning careers in medicine and law. Patrick felt the allure of such a future but very little envy. There was in his nature an element of fatalism, of acceptance. He was not a Mebane and that was that.

  The Mebanes lived on Library Hill, just under the pinnacle on which stood Government House. Here, in a row of stucco houses, each with its fenced-in yard, its boisdiable trees and its porch with a fine view of the harbor, lived the leaders of the black upper class: Dr. Sprague, the dentist, for example, and lawyer Malcolm Fort, and the Cox brothers, undertakers.

  Dr. and Mrs. Mebane were handsome coffee-colored people. Their quiet clothes and the furnishings of their house were refined, Patrick knew, although his experience of refinement had been limited to the headmaster’s rooms at school, where he had been asked to tea, his oddly vivid memory of the Kimbrough house, and his mother’s nostalgic descriptions. All of these had been “white” homes. He was astonished, therefore, to see what he saw in his friend’s house: so many pictures and books, elegant china, and the supper brought in by a servant.

  They made him welcome. Dr. Mebane had a positive manner of speech, as though he were trying to convince the listeners of something important.

  “My father was a doctor before me. I don’t know whether you boys can realize how exceptional that was in those times. The only other two doctors on this island were white men, come out here from England. Both of them were alcoholics. My father, with half the training, was the one you’d want if you were really sick. He’d go way up into the hills at night anytime he was called, riding his horse, carrying a lantern.

  “He worked like two men to educate me and my brother; I don’t know how he did it. My later brother Edgar became a barrister and was one of the leaders of the Pan-African Congress in Paris right after the war. Nineteen nineteen, that was. They had a brave agenda, most of which didn’t come to pass, although some of it did. Well, things move slowly. One learns patience. Anyway, it’s men like him, educated men, who bring about the changes, never forget it.” The doctor knocked his pipe out. “Am I talking too much, boring you?”

  “No, sir,” Patrick said.

  He was honored at being included in serious conversation, even though he did not understand all of it. He felt great respect; he felt himself in the presence of a new way of living.

  “What do they talk about?” Agnes wanted to know. She was pleased and curious whenever Patrick was asked to stay overnight at the Mebane house. Also he was aware of a certain resentment that she was trying to conceal.

  “I don’t know. Everything.” He never meant to make his answer come out irritably. But it was hard, impossible, to explain to Sweet Apple what Library Hill was like. Oh, he could answer to her satisfaction what color the curtains were, and to please her he took care to remember—but the ideas and attitudes were something else.

  There was a vague and growing disturbance in his mind. How little he himself knew compared, for instance, with Nicholas, who was his own age! It was as if he had been living in a cocoon.

  “They say he sees white patients in town after office hours,” Agnes remarked. “People who don’t want to discuss anything too personal with their regular doctor.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to know that. Haughty people, though, aren’t they? All that kind are.”

  “They aren’t haughty to me.”

  Yet there were things he would have been ashamed to let them see. Not his poverty, his simple house, for there was none of that particular kind of falsity in him, but other things: the ignorance.

  Agnes kept the windows tightly shut at night. On each window she had painted a red cross. From earliest childhood he had known that this was to keep a loup-garou from getting into the house and sucking the blood from people’s throats as they lay asleep.

  “Sometimes it flies over the trees,” Agnes had warned him. “You can easily mistake it for a bat. It’s especially dangerous
to babies.”

  When Patrick was about nine years old it had become clear that this was absolute nonsense. They had had a quarrel about it.

  “You think you’re too smart to listen to what I tell you, hah?”. Agnes had berated him. “Getting too big for your boots, you are.”

  Afterwards, as always when she had been short-tempered, she had come to stroke his head. “Well, all right, maybe it isn’t true. But suppose it is? How can one be sure?” That was the sort of thing it would have been embarrassing for the Mebanes to know.

  But it worked the other way, too, an odd reversal. Dr. Mebane said things he would not dare to repeat before Agnes.

  “My great-great-grandmother was a slave for the Francis family,” he told the boys one day. “There’s an old estate on the other side of this island—you may have seen it—Eleuthera. Well, the details are vague, ‘lost in the mist of time,’ I believe the poet says. All I know is, her name was Cupid and her father was a son, or maybe a nephew, of the Francis family. This was toward the end of the seventeen hundreds. She must have been a beautiful girl. White women were scarce on the plantations, you know, and life was very dull. So the white master went to the slave woman and naturally he chose the best-looking, the healthiest. Sometimes there was a lasting love between them. He’d buy jewels for the woman, dress her in satin and lace. When there were children, the father freed them, manumitted them. It would have been scandalous not to do so. Some of these fathers were generous with money, with land or an education. So after a century or more, what have you got? You have a brown class. Brown, less brown, least brown.” The doctor smiled ironically. “‘Least brown’ even acquired the dignity of being addressed as Mr. or Mrs. Well, anyway, that’s the explanation of why the people who work on the sugar estate today are coal black and why,” he said, with a certain mocking tone, “why I am invited to teas at Government House. Not to private little dinner parties, mind you, certainly not. But when you’re in government you’re as good as anyone. Yes, it all goes back to the bed, when you think about it.”