The Middle Passage

by V. S. Naipaul

  To the people of Trinidad, Wilberforce is a name in a history book. In Martinique the name of Schoelcher, the emancipator who came a decade after Wilberforce, cannot be avoided. He is commemorated in a grotesquely ornate building in the centre of Fort de France, in the names of streets and schools throughout the island. There is no need to ask why.

  When I was making my way back late that night to the hotel, a Negro youth shouted contemptuously: ‘Ey! You! You are an Englishman!’ It must have been my purpleheart walking-stick – I had been limping about on one. Whatever it was, I was getting tired of the French colonial monkey-game.

  * ‘On the quiet and picturesque island of Tobago, twenty minutes’ flying time to the north-east of Trinidad, the district servant said the humble inhabitants would easily take first place in the West Indies for politeness and friendly reception. There are many sheep-like persons in Tobago, and by Jehovah’s undeserved kindness they will be gathered before Armageddon.’ From the 1958 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  * In January 1804, during the war against Napoleon, this isolated bare rock, as faceted as a diamond, was garrisoned by the crew – one hundred and twenty men and boys – of a British cruiser, and commissioned as a sloop-of-war. H.M.S. Diamond Rock harassed French shipping for eighteen months and surrendered only after a fortnight’s blockade by ‘two seventy-fours, a frigate, a corvette, a schooner, and eleven gunboats’.

  * ‘ “A nice fellow, Jones; eh? very intelligent, and well mannered,” some stranger says, who knows nothing of Jones’s antecedents. “Yes, indeed,” answers Smith, of Jamaica; “a very decent sort of fellow. They do say that he’s coloured; of course you know that.” The next time you see Jones, you observe him closely, and can find no trace of the Ethiop. But should he presently descant on purity of blood, and the insupportable impudence of the coloured, then, and not till then, you would begin to doubt.’

  * From the article on Martinique in the 1959 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses: ‘There is the opportunity of witnessing to drivers of trucks bringing bunches of bananas from the thirty-two communes of the island to load special boats. At times fifty or more of these trucks are waiting in line at the gates of entrance to the docks. The alert publisher will use the Awake! magazine and offer it to the driver of the first truck and work from one to the other through the whole line. A pioneer reported: “I placed more than thirty magazines within an hour’s time.” ’

  6. ON TO JAMAICA

  ANTIGUA, AND AN APOLOGUE

  AS SOON AS we were seated in the British West Indian Airways plane it was no longer of importance to be French, and it was chastening to see how within minutes some of the Martiniquan passengers declined from privileged mulattoes, Frenchmen, the cream of café-au-lait society, into fairly ordinary Negroes, the very word ‘mulatto’, with its precise and proud racial connotation, being used less frequently outside the French islands.

  Glad as I was to leave Martinique, I was inexpressibly saddened to land in Antigua. They have sold portions of the tiny island to tourists; they have built a nice new airport to receive the tourists; and tourists were as thick on the ground as West Indians in Victoria or Waterloo Station when the immigrant boat-trains arrive. I hadn’t planned to go to Antigua – I was only there because there were no direct flights to Jamaica – and had made no arrangements. A hotel list, with prices in American dollars as well, showed that I couldn’t afford a hotel. I could barely afford a boarding-house; and the four-mile taxi-ride to the city would cost seventeen shillings. There was some competition among the uniformed Negro taxi-drivers to take this sum off me. I chose one driver, and we scooted away before the disapprobation of the others.

  ‘They don’t like me here, you know,’ my taxi-driver said, quickly getting in his taxi-driver’s chatter (we didn’t, after all, have far to go). ‘I am not a native of this place, you know. I know these Antiguans well, man. Is only when you live here as long as me that you know the sort of animal it is.’

  We stopped outside a pinkish wooden house, at the downstairs window of which I saw two patriarchal Negroes. My bag was passed up to them from the street, and I entered a shabby room furnished in the dark crowded style of Negro petty bourgeois houses. There were calendars and holy pictures on the walls. A side door opened on to a garden where chipped metal tables and chairs rusted below trees. The bulky radio was turned up loud: the Antigua Broadcasting Service, just a few days old, playing records. The announcer had a soft voice that was charged with delight and became reverential during his frequent breaks for station identification. When, at two o’clock, he had to close the transmission, I could feel his grief.

  I went out to explore the town of St John’s. It was dead and empty and lay bleaching in the sun. The houses were white and low, the streets wide and straight and black. Doors and windows were closed everywhere. Jaycees say slow down and keep alive, one sign said. And: e.e.moore, said another. I made my way back to the boarding-house. The window overlooking the street was closed; there was no sign of the patriarchal Negroes. The door was closed; I had no key. No one answered my call. I went for another walk down the empty white-hot street; came back and banged on the closed door; took another, longer stroll down to the e.e.moore sign; came back and, convinced now that I had no audience, banged in long hysterical bursts until, abruptly, the door yielded, and a servant, very calm, let me in without a word. I walked quietly up to my tiny room, where curtains and bedspread and linoleum were in small flowered patterns.

  I couldn’t sleep. If four miles cost seventeen shillings I clearly didn’t have the money for a taxi to Nelson’s derelict dockyard (regarded in its time as one of the Royal Navy’s most insalubrious stations). My suitcases were at the airport. I had no books, no paper, and my pen had been emptied for the aeroplane flight. I began tiptoeing through the house, looking. I fiddled timorously with the radio. No sound came out of it. In a passageway off the drawing room I saw a bookcase with some tattered magazines and a few bound books. The magazines were religious and warned of the coming end of the world. The books were all ‘Yearbooks’. Opening the 1959 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses at random, I read: ‘Guatemala. There was a hectic five months of provincial rule following the shooting of the Guatemalan president, but the preaching word had to go on.’ I turned a few pages and read: ‘Bequia. Investigation reveals that the good efforts of two pioneer sisters are largely nullified by loose morals of those professing interest in the truth.’ I took the book up to my room.

  Just before four it occurred to me that there might be a telephone service in Antigua. I prowled through the empty house and was overjoyed to find a telephone and a toy telephone directory. I began telephoning government departments. Sometimes I put the telephone down when a voice answered; sometimes I got no reply; sometimes I made an appeal for help. At last, to my surprise, I drew a positive response, from a kind voice which I had heard before: it belonged to the announcer of the Antigua Broadcasting Service.

  Fifteen minutes later he came, and drove me to the two-roomed radio station which stood closed and deserted in a sun-scorched field. He had the keys to the building; we went in. While he made ready for the evening transmission, I looked through the station’s records and tapes. I came across a tape of one of my own broadcasts and played it over twice.

  A brisk young woman arrived. She sat before the microphone, looked at her watch and asked, ‘Start off now?’ My announcer nodded. The woman threw some switches and began to speak. The evening transmission had begun. I went outside and sat on the concrete steps. A horse galloped past, a Negro boy riding bareback and barefooted. The sun was going down. The low hills were growing faint and for a few moments a golden light touched the brown field.

  The boarding-house was alive when I went back. The two patriarchal Negroes were at the window and a trio of young English hearties – the only other guests, and on excellent terms with management – filled the shaky old house with their rompings and laughter. The servant was muttering to herself in the kitchen, and when I p
assed she muttered more loudly. ‘I don’t know what she feel she is. Ordering me about this how and that how. Don’t do this. Do that. Hm! Like she feel I bound and ’bliged to stay here, nuh. Hm! Well, you have a shock coming to you, missis.’

  When I came down for dinner the English trio were talking about the race problem in the West Indies. They spoke their liberal views in loud voices; their liberalism had reduced the complex West Indian race situation to the simple and unimportant, though more satisfying, issue of white prejudice.

  ‘Trinidad is the worst place,’ one of the men said. ‘The whites there are the scum of the earth. Do you know what told me?’

  I was interested, but the no doubt sensational sentence that followed was whispered.

  The girl, who was wearing tights, said loudly, ‘Well, I have friends of every shade.’

  The talk turned to hunting and shooting, and I gathered that the accident rate in America was higher than in England.

  ‘In England,’ the younger man said, ‘you learn never to point a gun at anyone. You learn it in the nursery. If you come from a shooting family.’

  The older man came over to me and said, ‘Excuse me, sir. Do you know the doctor?’ He indicated the lesser Negro patriarch. ‘It’s his birthday. He’s just coming in and we are going to sing Happy Birthday for him.’

  I pushed my coffee cup aside and ran upstairs.

  The announcer had promised to send a friend of his to help me through the evening; and shortly after the birthday gaiety the friend came and took me on a tour of Antigua by night. Once our headlamps picked out the English trio dancing in an empty street. The lounges and patios of the tourist hotels looked like Hollywood film-sets with well-drilled well-dressed extras and no stars. At one hotel the most noteworthy performer was an energetic little Negro boy. He was dressed up like a member of the band and danced without inhibition; it was generally agreed that he was cute.

  The patriarch of my boarding-house had given me three sheets of ruled paper and after much searching had dug up a pencil stump. With this equipment I was working in bed late that night when I heard a knock. It was the patriarch. He was worried that I had fallen asleep and left the light on.

  In the morning I discovered that the servant had been sacked.

  The proprietress said, ‘The young white girl ask she, all innocently, whether she liked the work. And you shoulda hear how she start up! Saying how I oppress she and work she hard and don’t give she enough to eat. Shaming me in front of the poor white girl.’

  ‘She too lavish,’ the patriarch boomed. ‘Too lavish.’

  * * *

  THE REJECTION OF BABYLON

  Jamaica was a nice island, but the land has been polluted by centuries of crime. For 304 years, beginning in 1655, the white man and his brown ally have held the black man in slavery. During this period, countless horrible crimes have been committed daily. Jamaica is literally Hell for the black man, just as Ethiopia is literally Heaven.

  ‘The Creed of a Ras Tafari Man’*

  Jamaica presents to the outside world two opposed images: the expensive winter resort – turquoise sea, white sands, reverential bowtied black servants, sun-glassed figures below striped umbrellas: Tourism matters to you is the theme of a despairing advertising campaign run by the Jamaica Tourist Board to diminish the increasing hostility to tourists – and the immigrant boat-trains arriving at London’s gloomy railway stations: Niggers go home painted in large red letters in Brixton and Keep Britain white chalked everywhere.

  It is possible, though, to be in Jamaica for some time without seeing either the Jamaica of the tourists or the Jamaica of the emigrants. The tourists are on the North Coast, which is separate from the rest of the island and almost like another country. And the Jamaican middle-class world, in which the visitor moves, with its spaciousness and graciousness, its tradition of hospitality, its PEN meetings and art exhibitions, its bars expensive or bohemian, its clubs and hotels, its cocktail parties and dinner parties, is physically so disposed – almost by design, it appears – that one can move from suburb to suburb and never cease to be sheltered from offending sights. On drives to the country peasants can of course be seen; but these people have little in common with the desperate and rebarbative immigrant stereotype; their manners are gentle, they have a Welsh feeling for rhetoric, and they speak the purest English of all West Indians.

  To see the Jamaica of the emigrants you have to look. And once you start looking, you can see nothing else. The slums of Kingston are beyond description. Even the camera glamorizes them, except in shots taken from the air. Hovels of board and cardboard and canvas and tin lie choked together on damp rubbish dumps behind which the sun sets in mocking splendour. More respectable and on drier ground are the packing-case houses, the tiniest houses ever built, suggesting a vast arrested community given over to playing in grubby doll’s houses. Then there are the once real houses packed to bursting point, houses so close in streets so narrow that there is no feeling of openness. Filth and rubbish are disgorged everywhere; everywhere there are puddles; and on the rubbish dumps latrines are forbidden by law. Pigs and goats wander as freely as the people and seem as individual and important. Outside each ‘yard’ there is a cluster of raised letter boxes – these Jamaicans, I was told, like writing ‘little notes’ to one another – and these letter boxes are like tiny toy houses which repeat the shape, number and often the positions of the buildings whose correspondence they receive. They emphasize the lilliputian aspect of the Kingston slum settlements, where everything has dwindled beyond what one would have thought possible. And wherever you look you see the surrounding Kingston hills, one of the beauties of the island: freshening now into green after rain, blurred in the evening light, the folds as soft as those on an animal’s skin. Against such a view lay a dead mule, its teeth bared, its belly swollen and taut. It had been there for two days; a broomstick had been playfully stuck in its anus.

  Neuroses afflict communities as well as individuals, and in these slums the sects known as the Ras Tafarians or ‘Rastas’ have developed their own psychology of survival. They reply to rejection with rejection. They will not cut their hair or wash; and for this neglect of the body, this expression of profound self-contempt, they find biblical sanction. Many will not work, turning necessity into principle; and many console themselves with marijuana, which God himself smokes. They will vote for no party, because Jamaica is not their country and the Jamaican Government not one they recognize. Their country is Ethiopia, and they worship Ras Tafari, the Emperor Haile Selassie. They no longer wish to be part of that world which has no place for them – Babylon, the world of the white and brown and even yellow man, ruled by the Pope, who is really the head of the Ku-Klux-Klan – and they want only to be repatriated to Africa and Ethiopia. They are not interested in – indeed, some discourage – improvements in Jamaica, for such improvements might only encourage them to remain in slavery in Babylon. Already the Jamaican Government is compelling black men to go to England, where Queen Elizabeth I – reincarnated as Elizabeth II – and her lover Philip of Spain – reincarnated as Philip, Duke of Edinburgh – rule as the last sovereigns of white, black-enslaving Babylon. But the emancipation and triumph of the black man is at hand. Russia, the bear with three ribs mentioned in Revelations, will soon destroy Babylon. God is, after all, black; and the black race is his chosen race, the true Israelites: the Jews have been punished by Hitler for their imposture.

  The Ras Tafari movement is not organized. It is split into various sects, and has no fixed hierarchy, doctrine or ritual. The movement had its origin in the back-to-Africa campaigning of Marcus Garvey (to whom several hundred speakers on the subject of racial harmony are indebted for that metaphor about the white and black piano keys). One of Garvey’s statements was that the deliverance of the black race would occur when a black king was crowned in Africa. In 1930 Haile Selassie was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia. The Emperor was a brown man, and in his country there were still Negro slaves. This was unkno
wn or disregarded. Ethiopia was an African country; it was a kingdom; it was independent. Photographs of the Emperor went up in thousands of Negro homes throughout the West Indies. What followed remains a puzzle. Several Jamaican preachers, of a type in which the island abounds, after independent study of the Bible, Garvey and the newspapers, decided that the black race in the New World were Ethiopians, that Ethiopia was the black man’s promised land, that Haile Selassie was divine; and at more or less the same time began to spread this last message of hope through the slums of Kingston.

  The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 was seen to fulfil certain prophecies in the Bible, and gave the movement impetus. Italian propaganda did more. Shortly after the invasion was set afoot, an Italian called Frederico Philos wrote an article alerting the white world to the existence of a secret organization of 190 million blacks pledged to exterminate the white race. The organization was headed by Haile Selassie; it was called Nya-Binghi, ‘death to the whites’, had an army of 20 million and unlimited supplies of gold. The article was reprinted in a Jamaican newspaper, and the news was received with considerable satisfaction by some of the Ras Tafari brethren. Niyabinghi groups were formed; their password was ‘Death to the whites!’