The Middle Passage

by V. S. Naipaul

  A young Jamaican woman came out of the lodge. She said calmly, ‘Welcome to Frenchman’s Cove,’ and gave me a letter. Thereafter things happened quickly. My driver was sent away. A Jamaican in black trousers, white shirt and a black bowtie put my luggage on a small white electric car; I sat down; and with my luggage and myself quite exposed, we drove out from under the canopy into the sunlight and up the narrow gravelled path, hearing no sound except the whirring of the motor. We followed the path where it branched right, went past a pale-green shadowed pool, then up an incline between trees. I had a glimpse of the beach: a break in the coral cliff, the water blue shading into green and almost colourless where it touched the white sand. Black canvas chairs stood in the shade of almond trees; but the beach was deserted. Climbing higher, we drove at the edge of a lawn planted with young coconut palms. Then up a sharp incline over-arched by more trees, and we came to a house. ‘This is your cottage,’ the driver said, stopping at the foot of the concrete steps. Throughout the drive I had seen no one.

  My cottage was a complex of two grey stone cottages and a stone-and-glass house, set at different levels. The cottages were on either side of the steps, the house at the top. The stone was handcut, the blocks of varying sizes, the mortar deeply recessed. The black door of the house opened and a middle-aged Jamaican woman in spectacles, pink dress and a small white apron, smiled welcomingly.

  I went in and found myself in a large high room almost at the edge of a coral cliff. The wall overlooking the sea was of glass. The terrace was set in the coral, which looked like foam rubber.

  I looked at the furnishings: the low, plain, inviting chairs and sofa set on three sides of an Indian carpet with an un-Indian design, the tall lamps with pottery bases and large linen shades, the glass table spread with magazines and books (The Power Elite among them). It was familiar because ideal; one had known it from the escapist magazines of design; and because ideal it was a little separate from reality. The unexpected setting made the separation complete. Beyond the glass wall and rising, it seemed, out of the grey coral, were the almond trees, most artificial-looking of tropical trees, with round leaves, green and copper, set symmetrically on horizontal branches, and between the leaves one saw the high irregular cliffs, the blue sky, the limpid, dancing blue-and-green sea.

  From disordered bush along the winding Jamaican road, to a drive in a comic white car through silent, deserted, landscaped grounds, to a stone-and-glass house with a view of the sea below: it was as though one had driven out of Jamaica, as though, to find the West Indies of the tourist’s ideal, one had had to leave the West Indies.

  Yielding to the serenity, the feeling of abrupt transference, I had not thought it strange that although moments ago it was warm, it was now cool, and though the sea below was restless, it made no sound. Now I saw that the house was completely enclosed and air-conditioned.

  I read the letter the secretary in the lodge had given me. It welcomed me more formally, told me how I could get what I wanted, asked me not to tip, and gave the name of our housekeeper. Then I took up the Visitors’ Book. Among its few names I saw those of a Rockefeller and the Diefenbakers.

  ‘You will like it here,’ the housekeeper, Mrs Williams, said. ‘And that,’ she added, ‘is the telephone.’

  Instantly I knew that this was the instrument, the Aladdin’s lamp of Frenchman’s Cove about whose powers (‘champagne every hour’) all Jamaica knew. ‘Anything you want,’ Mrs Williams said, ‘you just take up the telephone and ask for.’

  The telephone was grey, of a design I had never seen: It stood upright on a round base.

  ‘Suppose I wanted champagne?’

  ‘Anything. The people before you, you should see them drink! Ooh! These Americans can drink. You would like the champagne now?’

  I needed something stronger. ‘A little brandy? Whisky?’

  ‘Just telephone the bar.’

  I hesitated.

  ‘You’re bashful.’ Mrs Williams lifted the grey telephone, dialled briefly and said, ‘This is Stokes Hall. My guest would like a bottle of whisky, a bottle of brandy and some sodas.’

  The telephone squawked. Mrs Williams handed it to me.

  ‘What sort of brandy, sir?’ a male voice asked.

  My response was automatic: I spoke the words of a well-known advertisement.

  ‘Dudley is a good boy,’ Mrs Williams said.

  I was relieved that the man on the telephone had a name.

  There was a knock at the door and Mrs Williams let in a European who was dressed like a chef.

  ‘Morning, sir.’ I couldn’t place his accent. ‘And what would you like for lunch?’ He pulled out pad and pencil.

  He caught me by surprise. Remembering only now that I didn’t eat meat, I asked, ‘Do you have eggs?’

  The chef’s disappointment was expressed only in the slight separation of pad from pencil.

  I wished I had paid more attention to the stories I had heard (‘anything you want’, ‘caviare for breakfast’).

  ‘Or fish?’ I could think of nothing else.

  Pad came closer to pencil. ‘A little salmon, perhaps?’

  ‘Yes, a little salmon.’

  I watched the chef go down the hill in his little white car. Then another car came up and a bowtied Jamaican got out with a case.

  ‘Your drinks, sir.’ He seemed extraordinarily pleased. With light, swift gestures he set the bottles out; and he was gone.

  Glass in hand, I explored. The bedroom extended the width of the house; its glass louvres were shadowed by trees outside. The bathroom had a sunken tiled bath which was like a small pool. And there was a carpeted dressing room. I went back to the main room, slid the glass door open and went out on to the terrace on the coral cliff. At once I was aware of warmth, wind, noises: birds, leaves, the sea below. A rowing-boat bucked in the bay.

  I sat down in a low chair, shook my glass to hear the ice tinkle; and, dropping the ash from my cigarette into a dark blue ashtray, began to read The Power Elite.

  Mr Wright Mills’s style becomes almost impenetrable when taken with whisky and soda. I put down The Power Elite and picked up a magazine. It was an escapist magazine of design. In it I saw the carpet on which my feet rested.

  Someone was at the door. Mrs Williams admitted two handsome waiters carrying a basket which I thought far too large for what I had ordered. Briskly they laid the table. Then, ceremoniously, they invited me to sit. They moved lightly and their gestures – the bows, the extended dish-bearing hand – were a little extravagant. Exaggerating their role, they behaved like benevolent magicians.

  The salmon was garnished with caviare.

  I heard music.

  The taller waiter was standing, with his magician’s smile, beside what I now recognized as a stereophonic record-player.

  Within twenty-four hours my interest in food and drink had disappeared. Everything was at the end of the telephone, and it was my duty to have exactly what I wanted. But how could I be sure what I wanted best? Wouldn’t a whisky now spoil my appreciation of the wine later? Wouldn’t the wine now send me to sleep for the rest of the precious afternoon? Did I really want a soufflé? No decision couldn’t be regretted. I gave up. I left everything to the chef. I never ordered a meal, and the next day I went without dinner.

  The struggle between duty, to indulge, and inclination, which was not to bother, was unequal. I fell into a torpor. The whisky remained untouched beyond that first day’s sampling; and at the end of my stay I had drunk only half the bottle of brandy. All the stories about Frenchman’s were true. But I didn’t want to go rafting or boating. I couldn’t be a tourist in the West Indies, not after the journey I had made.

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ Mrs Williams said. ‘Just like the Diefenbakers.’

  For seven months I had been travelling through territories which, unimportant except to themselves, and faced with every sort of problem, were exhausting their energies in petty power squabbles and the maintaining of the petty prejudic
es of petty societies. I had seen how deep in nearly every West Indian, high and low, were the prejudices of race; how often these prejudices were rooted in self-contempt; and how much important action they prompted. Everyone spoke of nation and nationalism but no one was willing to surrender the privileges or even the separateness of his group. Nowhere, except perhaps in British Guiana, was there any binding philosophy: there were only competing sectional interests. With an absence of a feeling of community, there was an absence of pride, and there was even cynicism. There was, for instance, little concern about West Indian emigration to Britain. It was a lower-class thing; it was a black thing; it was a Jamaican thing. At another level, it was regarded with malicious pleasure as a means of embarrassing the British people, a form of revenge; and in this pleasure there was no thought for the emigrants or the dignity of the nation about which so much was being said and which on every side was said to be ‘emergent’. And the population was soaring – in thirty years Trinidad has more than doubled its population – and the race conflicts of every territory were growing sharper.

  Dr Arthur Lewis has drawn the distinction between ‘protest’ leaders and ‘creative’ leaders in colonial societies. It is ia distinction of which the West Indies are yet scarcely aware. In the West Indies, with its large middle class and its abundance of talent, the protest leader is an anachronism, and a dangerous anachronism. For the uneducated masses, quick to respond to racial stirrings and childishly pleased with destructive gestures, the protest leader will always be a hero. The West Indies will never have a shortage of such leaders, and the danger of mob rule and authoritarianism will never cease to be real. The paternalism of colonial rule will have been replaced by the jungle politics of rewards and revenge, the text-book conditions for chaos.

  In a recent issue of the Caribbean Quarterly there is an article called ‘A Theory of a Small Society’, in which Dr Kenneth Boulding, Professor of Economics at Michigan University, describes the small society’s ‘road to ruin’:

  Population grows unchecked, doubling every twenty-five years. Emigration cannot keep pace and in any case skims off the cream of the people. Farms are sub-divided and sub-divided until the country produces far more people than it can take and the people crowd into huge city slums where there is large-scale unemployment. Education collapses under the strain of poverty and the flood of children. Superstition and ignorance increase, along with pride. Self-government means that every pressure group has to be placated, and there is less and less discrimination between high and low quality products whether bananas or people. This ends in a famine, an insurrection. The regiment shoots down the mob and establishes a military dictatorship. Foreign investments and gifts dry up; the islands are left to stew in their own misery and the world in effect draws a cordon sanitaire around them. That the road to ruin is a real road, and a distressingly wide and available one, is shown by the example of some nearby islands which have gone a long way down it.

  ‘If we could,’ wrote Trollope, ‘we would fain forget Jamaica altogether.’ The West Indies, he might have said. With immigration to Britain now controlled, a cordon sanitaire of a sort has indeed been drawn around the islands. The process of forgetting has begun. And the West Indies, preoccupied with its internal squabbles, hardly know it.

  The day before I left Frenchman’s Cove, the telephone, unusually, rang.

  ‘Mr Naipaul? This is Grainger Weston.’ The voice was brisk, even hurried. ‘We wonder whether you would like to come over this evening after dinner.’

  I had my last dinner and, with it, a bottle of Chateau Lafitte-Rothschild.

  The waiter said, ‘See you next season.’

  The Westons didn’t live in Frenchman’s Cove but at Turtle Cove, a short distance away. I was not surprised to find that the house was an old-fashioned Jamaican country house, not remarkable in any way, and without air-conditioning.

  Grainger Weston turned out to be a slender man with a sharp ascetic face. I thought he was in his thirties. He wore belted khaki shorts and a white T-shirt. I met his wife and his sister-in-law. We sat outside in the dark and talked, mostly about Frenchman’s Cove.

  Mrs Weston said they were always interested in the reactions of their guests. Some became restless; others just grew very quiet. I recognized the Diefenbakers and myself.

  Drinks were brought out: ginger ale.

  I offered cigarettes. The Westons didn’t smoke.

  Hesitantly, I asked exactly what the charges were at Frenchman’s.

  ‘I can tell you that,’ Grainger Weston said. ‘A thousand pounds a month for two.”

  Two days later I was sitting in a B.O.A.C. Britannia, bound for New York. Beside me was a well-fleshed businessman from the Bahamas. In his lapel he carried a button which marked him as a Gideon, a member of an American Bible-distributing brotherhood. My appearance marks me as a heathen. My expression is benign, my manner gentle; and all the way from Kingston to Nassau I received the Christian message.

  September 1960 – December 1961

  * The Ras Tafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica by M. G. Smith, Roy Augier and Rex Nettleford. Institute of Social and Economical Research, University College of the West Indies, 1960. I have drawn extensively from this pamphlet in this section.