The Middle Passage

by V. S. Naipaul

  ‘It coming, it coming. I feel it coming.’

  By lunchtime, to add to his troubles, he was sea-sick.

  I reported this to the table.

  ‘He wake me up at five this morning asking for Eno’s,’ Philip said.

  The coloured man, Mr Mackay, said, ‘We have two madmen with us this trip. Black fellers. I was talking to their keepers this morning. White fellers. The British Government paying for them going out and coming back.’

  ‘I see them walking up and down,’ Philip said. ‘Is a funny thing. But you could always tell people who make it their business to keep other people lock up. They have this walk. You ever notice?’

  ‘You see how these black fellers going to England and stinking up the country,’ Mr Mackay said. ‘I mean, if a black feller want to get mad, he could stay home and get mad there.’

  They spoke of the telephone strike in Trinidad, which had been going on for some time. Mr Mackay said that the strike was a racial one. He spoke of this with feeling. Quite suddenly he was identifying himself with the black fellers. He was an old man; he had never risen to the top; superiors had always been imported from England.

  ‘Is these Potogees who cause the trouble, you know,’ he said. ‘They have their hands in the stinking salt-fish barrel and they are still the first to talk of nigger this and coolie that.’

  ‘I believe the ship has a list,’ Philip said. ‘Go up on the sun deck and see.’

  ‘I must say I don’t care for the look of those lifeboats. If anything happens we drowning like hell. As soon as we get to the Azores I am going to try to insure Mrs Mackay and myself against accident. I suppose you could do that sort of thing in the Azores?’

  ‘But you don’t know the language, Daddy,’ Mrs Mackay said.

  ‘Why, what they talk there? A sort of Potogee patois?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Philip said. ‘But I could help you with it.’

  ‘What, you know Potogee?’

  ‘We used to speak it at home,’ Philip said.

  So Philip was Portuguese.

  Mr Mackay fell silent. He stared at his plateful of Spanish food and looked unwell.

  Philip said briskly. ‘This Trinidad coming like a little America. All these strikes. All these hold-ups. You hear about that man the police catch with eighty-three thousand dollars in notes stuff up in a chest-of-drawers?’

  Mr Mackay spoke at length about getting insured at the Azores. And for the rest of the journey he was silent about Portuguese and others and spoke only of black fellers. It was a cramping of his style; but in the West Indies, as in the upper reaches of society, you must be absolutely sure of your company before you speak: you never know who is what or, more important, who is related to what.

  It was warm. The tourist-class passengers, who had for a day or two been battened down, it seemed, on the lower decks, emerged singly and in pairs and sunned themselves. The two lunatics came out with their keepers. The young Baptist missionary from the North of England, off to the West Indies on his first posting and travelling tourist out of a sense of duty, read large theological works and made notes. A Negro woman of about eighty, wearing sensationally old clothes, wandered about with cheerful inquisitiveness. She had left St Kitts to look for work in England; the rumour went round that the British Government was paying for her passage back.

  Because there were so few passengers the class divisions on the ship were ignored. An Indian butcher from British Guiana trotted round the first-class deck morning and afternoon. A tall handsome Negro, who spoke to no one, walked around the deck as well, for hours at a time, smoking a tiny pipe and holding a paperback called The Ten Commandments, the book of the film. This man, according to Mr Mackay, had had some mental trouble in England and was being sent back, at his own request, at the expense of the British Government.

  We all rooted among the tourist-class passengers and brought back stories.

  Miss Tull, the librarian, came back distressed. She had met a woman who had left England because she couldn’t get a room for her baby and herself. ‘The landlord just threw them out when the baby came,’ Miss Tull said, ‘and put up a big sign in green paint. No Coloured Please. Do you mean that in the whole of Britain they couldn’t find room for one woman and her baby?’

  ‘They’ve found room for quite a lot,’ Mr Mackay said.

  ‘I can’t understand it. You West Indians don’t seem to care at all.’

  ‘All this talk about tolerance is all right,’ Mr Mackay said. ‘But a lot of you English people forget that there is a type of black man – like the Jamaican – who is an animal.’

  ‘But this woman isn’t Jamaican,’ Miss Tull said, conceding the point.

  ‘A lot of these black fellers provoke the English people,’ Mr Mackay said, putting an end to the discussion. Like all good West Indians, he was unwilling to hear anything against England.

  My own encounter had been with a fat brown-skinned Grenadian of thirty-three. He said he had ten children in Grenada, in various parishes and by various women. He had gone to England to getaway from them all, but then had begun to feel that he should go back and face his responsibilities. He thought he might even get married. He hadn’t yet decided who to, but it probably would be the mother of his last child. He loved this child; he didn’t care for the others. I asked why, then, he had had so many. Didn’t they have contraceptives in Grenada? He said with some indignation that he was a Roman Catholic; and for the rest of the journey never spoke to me.

  From our ventures among the tourist class we came back with stories, and sometimes with captives. Correia’s captive was an Indian boy called Kripal Singh from British Guiana, who so endeared himself to the company that he was invited to tea.

  ‘So handsome,’ Mrs Mackay said over and over. ‘So fair.’

  ‘This boy,’ Correia said, ‘comes from one of the best families in B.G. You never hear of them? Biggest people in the ground provision business. Singh Brothers, man. Singh, Singh, and Singh.’

  Kripal Singh looked correctly modest, his manner suggesting that what Correia said was true but that he didn’t want to boast. He was tall and slender; his features were fine, his mouth as delicate as a girl’s. He smoked with nervous elegance.

  ‘Tell me about your family, Kripal,’ Correia said.

  Kripal, bowing slightly, offered cigarettes. He was a little drunk. So was Correia.

  ‘They don’t grow the ground provisions, you know,’ Correia said, taking one of Kripal’s cigarettes. ‘They does only buy and sell. Tell them, Kripal.’

  ‘So fair,’ Mrs Mackay said.

  For the rest of the voyage Kripal remained attached to the first class, only sleeping with the tourists and eating with them. He could find no suitable drinking companions among them; and he shared a cabin with the British Guianese butcher, whom he detested.

  ‘The man s-say he went to England for holiday,’ Kripal said, recalled to the subject by the sight of the butcher running around the deck. ‘And he s-spend all s-seven weeks drawing dole.’

  Kripal himself had gone to England to study. This studying in England is one of the strange activities of West Indian youth, of well-to-do Indians in particular. It can last until early middle age. Kripal had studied deeply in England and the Continent until his father, alarmed at the expense, had summoned him home to the business and marriage. By travelling tourist Kripal was having his last subsidized fling; his studies were almost over.

  One morning, not long after we had left the Azores, I found Correia in a sparkling mood.

  ‘How, how, man? You is a son of a bitch, you know. You never tell me you was a educated man. Let we go and have a drink, nuh.’

  Correia had been lucky in me. He became sea-sick: I had Marzine pills. He had headaches: I had Disprin tablets. He developed a corn: I had Dr Scholl’s cornplasters. When he wanted to drink and couldn’t find Kripal Singh, he came to me. Drinking with him had its dangers. He drank rapidly and became drunk in a matter of minutes. And he seldom had
money on him: he preferred to settle later.

  ‘You know,’ he said at the bar. ‘I had a damn good wash-out this morning. First try.’ This explained his mood. ‘You are a damn good writer, boy. Yes, man. I watch you at the post office in the Azores. Writing off those cards so damn fast I couldn’t even read what you was writing.’

  Philip joined us. He had been reading the Kama Kalpa in his cabin. I thought he had been reading the wrong book, but he said, ‘This Indian philosophy is a great thing.’

  ‘It is a great thing,’ Correia said, drunk already. ‘What is the first thing you going to do when you get back home, Philip?’

  ‘I think I have to see about insuring the car, first of all.’

  ‘I’m going to have a damn good purge-out with some Epsom Salts, boy.’

  Both Correia and Philip had married daughters in England, Correia’s daughter had been married not long before; Philip had just attended his daughter’s wedding.

  ‘You know what it makes a father feel to lose his daughter, Naipaul?’ Correia asked. ‘You know how he does feel when she cry out at the train, “Don’t go, Pa”? You don’t know, Naipaul. “Don’t go, Pa. Don’t leave me.” His one and only daughter.’ He beat his feet on the rung of his stool and burst into tears. ‘He don’t know, Philip.’

  ‘No, old man. He don’t know.’

  ‘Where your daughter living, Philip? Mine living in a kiss-me-arse place called Dudley.’

  Philip didn’t answer. He left the bar and came back some moments later with an album stamped on the white leather cover: The Wedding of Our Daughter. Philip was anxious about his daughter and now, looking through the album, recognizing the working-class faces, clothes and backgrounds, I understood why. What had been desirable in the West Indies appeared differently in England.

  Everyone seemed to be thinking about his children that day. The Mackays had left their son in England. Mr Mackay had made his last voyage; he would never see his son again.

  ‘He’s picking up all sorts of English habits,’ Mrs Mackay said with pride. ‘Everything for him is a “flipping” this and a “flipping” that. I just can’t keep up with his English slang and English accent.’

  Mr Mackay smiled, remembering.

  It is possible for an escaped English convict to be welcomed by the white community in Trinidad and set up in business. And the West Indian, knowing only the values of money and race, is lost as soon as he steps out of his own society into one with more complex criteria.

  The captain, an aristocrat in visage and bearing, invited no passenger to his table. He dined with his senior officers. I didn’t know whether this was Spanish naval etiquette or whether it was the etiquette of the immigrant ship. I think it was the latter. From the wireless officer and the purser, the only officers who permitted us to approach them, we learned that just before loading up with the West Indian immigrants we had seen at Southampton, the ship had taken several hundred Moroccan pilgrims to Mecca. Some of these pilgrims had died on the way and had to be thrown overboard; afterwards the ship had to be deloused.

  As England receded, people prepared more actively for the West Indies. They formed colour groups, race groups, territory groups, money groups. The West Indies being what they are, no group was fixed; one man could belong to all. A small group of Indians, dropping the competitive talk of London and Paris and Dublin and brilliant children studying in England, Canada and America, discussed the political situation in Trinidad. They spoke of Negro racism, and on the subject of miscegenation repeatedly wound themselves up to hysteria. The British Guianese Indians, among them a man who spent much of the voyage playing Monopoly and reading the first volume of Radhakrishnan’s Indian Philosophy, were less impassioned. Believing that racial coexistence, if not cooperation, is of urgent importance to the West Indies, I was disturbed by these Indian views and wanted to explore them further. But I had to drop out of the group because of the unpleasantness with Mr Hassan.

  Mr Hassan had lent me a copy of Time magazine. I had lent it to Philip (in exchange for his Kama Kalpa), and when on the following day Mr Hassan asked for his magazine, it couldn’t be found. Thereafter, four, five, six times a day, Mr Hassan asked for his magazine. He waited for me on deck. He waited for me before and after the film show. He waited for me outside the dining room. He waited for me in the bar. I bought him drink after drink. But he never relented. I promised to buy him a copy in Trinidad. But he wanted his particular copy of Time. I told him it was lost. That didn’t matter. He wanted his Time. After three days of this persecution I burrowed deep down into the tourist class and, miraculously, found someone who had a copy of the magazine. It was then, needless to say, that Mr Hassan’s own copy turned up. Mr Hassan’s main subject of conversation had been his wealth and his persecution, at the hands of government departments, customs officials, shipping companies, his wife’s family, his children’s teachers. From the depths of my heart I wished his persecutors greater strength and a long life.

  And one day there was very nearly a racial incident in the bar. It seemed that a group of tourist-class passengers, made restless by the long journey and the approach of their various native lands, and provoked by the comparative emptiness of the first-class bar, had decided to rush it. A group burst in that evening, singing. They came running in and bobbed up and down before the bar. They called loudly for drinks. The barman refused to serve them. The group, still bouncing abruptly stilled, their high spirits gone, stood silently in front of the bar for a few seconds. One man withdrew. The others followed him. They walked in a body down the deck, then back again. They stood in the doorway and muttered. At length one man left the group and, buttoning his jacket, walked up to the bar and said, ‘Gimme a pack of cigarettes, please.’ The barman handed over the cigarettes. The man looked at the cigarettes, surprised. For a second he hesitated. Then, with careless swinging steps, he strode out. The group, moral victory theirs, went running off to the tourist bar, singing loudly.

  And poor Miss Tull became more and more worried about her return journey. No one could console her. Philip suggested that she should abandon her sunshine cruise at Trinidad and fly back to England.

  ‘I’m not going to lie to you,’ Mr Mackay said. ‘When I saw that pack of orang-outangs getting off the ship at Southampton, I didn’t feel good. It was a damn frightening thing to see. You can’t blame some people for not wanting to call themselves West Indians.’

  ‘Angus always tells people he’s Brazilian,’ Mrs Mackay said. ‘He could pass for one too.’ Angus was her son, who spoke English slang with an English accent.

  * * *

  We were near St Kitts. A drink, a sunset as flamboyant as one could have wished, the Caribbees pastel-grey outlines around us, the waters where the navies of Europe acquired their skills in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: it wasn’t enough to take our minds off the horror that was nearly upon us. That evening we would take on our first load of emigrants. St Kitts, the mother colony of the British West Indies, ‘the first and best earth’ (according to an inhabitant of 1667) ‘that ever was inhabited by Englishmen amongst the heathen cannibals in America’, today an overpopulated island of sixty-eight square miles, producing a little sea-island cotton, having trouble to sell its sugar, and no longer growing the tobacco, the first crop of the settlers, which Thomas Warner took back to England in 1625 to prove the success of his enterprise. The romance of its history – Warner and his Amerindian mistress, their son ‘Indian’ Warner – is buried. There are reminders only of the brutality of that history: the slaves shanghaied there, their descendants abandoned when prosperity went, and now their descendants, their belongings packed, their good-byes said, searching the sea for the black smokestack of the Francisco Bobadilla, prepared for another middle passage.

  It was night when we anchored, far out at sea. We saw nothing of St Kitts except the scattered lights of its capital. We looked for tenders; several lights deceived us. Nothing moved, except the headlamps of motor-cars.

  �
�Eh!’ Mr Mackay said. ‘They have motor cars here too?’

  Tourist class, first class, we were one now, lining the rail, watching the lights of the toy capital where people took themselves seriously enough to drive cars from one point to another.

  Mr Mackay, joining us later in the bar, reported that one of the lunatics had been taken off. A launch had taken him away with his keeper; the keeper had returned alone. Presently the keeper himself turned up in the bar. In spite of the gravity of his charge, he had come prepared for the tropical climate, and we had observed his degeneration from grey-flannelled, soft-soled official into red-shirted, sandalled cruise passenger.

  A commotion, and some shouts, told us that the emigrants had arrived.

  Part of the port deck had been roped off; the companion-way had been lowered. Bright lights made the deck dazzle, bright lights played on the black water. There they were, rocking in the water, in three large rowing-boats. Men sat on the gunwales and with long oars steadied the boats. Policemen had already come aboard. Tables had been placed just in front of the companion-way, and there the purser and his officials sat, consulting long typewritten sheets. Below, the boats rocked. We could see only white shirts, black faces, hats of many colours, parcels, suitcases, baskets. The men with the oars shouted occasionally, their voices dying quickly in the darkness. But from the passengers we heard no sound. Sometimes, for a second or two, a face was upturned, examining the white ship. We saw women and children, dressed as for church. They all looked a little limp; they had been dressed for some time. The lights played on them, as if for their inspection. Beyond there was darkness. We picked out suits, new broad-brimmed felt hats, ties whose knots had slipped, shining faces.

  ‘They could at least have brought them out in launches,’ Miss Tull said. ‘At least in launches!’

  The tourist class looked down, chattering, laughing whenever a rowing-boat struck the side of the ship or when an emigrant tried to get on the companion-way and was turned back.