Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  ‘Home’, for me, was an ill-defined area called Republic Park. It began on the edge of the city and petered out in the cane fields. As a neighbourhood, I was never quite sure if it was on the way up or on the way out. Half the houses seemed empty, or covered in razor wire, and the roads were merely long white furrows of powdery sand. Taxi-drivers used to love telling me who lived up here: drug barons, traffic cops and some fancy politicians. But the biggest house, which looked like a slice of Versailles, was owned by an evangelical pastor. ‘Ah, yes,’ they’d say, ‘the church is some good business in Guyana.’

  The house that I stayed in was the smallest of them all. It had so many bars and grilles that, from the outside, it looked like a cage finished off in concrete. But inside, it was cheery and cool, with burned-orange walls and African masks. I had my own bathroom, complete with a small yellow frog that lived in the cistern. In the mornings it made a noise like a tiny generator. I enjoyed this, the idea of a frog-powered house.

  The arrangement I had was a bit unusual. Before coming to Guyana I’d spent weeks trying to find a family who’d have me to stay. This was obviously a novel concept in Georgetown. Why would a bucra want to stay in a Towny home instead of a big hotel? What will he eat? Will he need a pool? Undaunted, I sent out more emails, and they began to percolate into the Diaspora, spreading out from Canada to Israel. At last someone came up with a family, or at least half of one. Get in touch with Lorlene James, they said, who lives with her eight-year-old son.

  I still laugh when I think of Lorlene. Although she was thin and light-footed, she had a fat person’s gift for expression. Whatever she said was often, I realised, a hilarious distraction from whatever she felt. Of course, she could also be serious, coquettish, intellectual, furious and wry, but mostly she was funny. People loved her, and she could imitate anyone; the good, the straight, the cops and the people that ran the country. If there was rum around, she could even make herself laugh, and that’s when I noticed that, between the gasps, there was always a chink of sadness.

  We’re all, I suppose, a product of the fortunes that have brought us where we are. The mystery, in Lorlene’s case, was how her humour had survived the journey. She described a life buffeted along from one calamity to another. A beautiful Georgetown childhood had suddenly ended in the ’70s, when the entire family was expelled. ‘My father was editor of The Guyana Chronicle,’ she told me, ‘and had a radio show that fell foul of the dictatorship.’ Canada offered asylum and seemed big and exciting at first. But it was no place to be black and hard up. Her father got a soulless job, vetting other immigrants, and his marriage fell apart. Bullied almost all the way to university, Lorlene realised that Canada was not for her. She decided to return to Guyana.

  ‘I got back eleven years ago,’ she said, ‘and realised I’d missed it every day.’ For a moment there were shoots of genuine happiness. Lorlene married, Floyd was born, and she threw herself into politics. She joined the AFC – Alliance for Change – a party whose novel claim was to represent all the different races. Soon, she became a member of parliament, and her bill for the abolition of corporal punishment was enthusiastically received. But this was a Guyanese tale, and so it was bound to end in surprises. First, her husband was killed by one of the country’s only sports cars, and then her bill began to fall apart. ‘The ruling party killed it off,’ she told me; ‘they weren’t going to be told what to do by someone they saw as skinny, Canadian and AFC. I hated politics. It was so futile. There was nothing we could do.’

  Floyd hadn’t known his father, but somehow he seemed to absorb his mother’s misfortune as though it was all his own. I’ve never met a child so acutely sensitive to the needs of adults. Once, after I’d taken him swimming, he asked his mother if I’d marry her. Lorlene explained that I already had a family, but Floyd never gave up. Every time I took off on one of my trips into the interior he’d hug me and start to cry. It still pains me to think of his tears splashing down my shirt, and his curious, ill-formed hopes. All he knew was that they had to emigrate, and he’d spent hours searching his books and comics looking for somewhere to live. Eventually he’d come up with the answer to everything, and that was Japan.

  As Guyana’s only landlady, Lorlene was hopelessly generous.

  From the start she refused to accept any rent and instead threw a party. Her friends, both Africans and Indians, were like the people from the Sidewalk Café – except even more political. When the food appeared – a vast spread of spicy chicken, rice, fried bananas, huge pastries called ‘doubles’, stewed channa, fillets of Banga Mary and enormous flagons of punch – they gathered round it in a scrum. Soon the glasses were clinking and everyone was holding forth. It was like twiddling the dial of a radio and getting all the pundits at once. I was surprised how simple politics can sound. The AFC people said they’d been burgled, ostracised and completely excluded from public life, for daring to occupy the centre and courting all the races. For some of Lorlene’s older, Trotskyite friends it was even simpler still: there were no such things as mishaps, life was a series of remarkable conspiracies. One lady solemnly told me that dark outside forces were responsible for everything here, from floods and robberies to the price of sugar. ‘Even the AFC,’ muttered another, ‘are puppets of the CIA.’

  Between these chicken fights Lorlene took me out on tours of the city. Being borderline solvent, she had a borderline car. It had no paintwork, no bumpers and no name. As it had no handles either, Floyd would have to climb in through the back window and burrow through the rubbish to release the doors. I enjoyed the idea that people thought this was a gift from the CIA. Once under way, it was like riding along in a skip – until we reached full speed. Then there’d be a gruesome howling sound, and everything would shudder. Several times we felt components detach themselves from the undercarriage and we’d watch as they clattered off down the road. ‘Ah well,’ Lorlene would say, as though they were bits of her life, ‘we’re still moving, aren’t we?’

  I loved these tours. We’d howl through rusty suburbs, drive along the edge of the blazing cane, visit a few fish shops – or bars – and poke our heads into all the public buildings. Although Lorlene kept insisting there was nothing to see, Georgetown was defiantly fascinating. It seemed that, wherever we went, people were trying to create a spectacle, with whatever came to hand. Even the dead were doing it, with their plumed horses and carriages of glass. Once, the draymen shut off the whole of Homestretch Avenue and had a mule race like something from Ben Hur (except with rubber wheels and distemper). Other spectacles were less ambitious, and involved rags and sticks and little creatures found in the forest. With these, people made kites and footballs, and the national sport was ‘rackling’. To be a rackler, you had to put a tiny bird in a cage and then coax it to sing.

  Our tours often ended by the pool of the Pegasus Hotel. There, for a small fortune, Floyd could eat fries and pretend he was somewhere else. Around the pool there were plenty of others who, in their own small way, were escaping. Some were local girls, beautifully coiffed and primped, hopeful of a foreigner and available for marriage. Often too there were British soldiers here. Mostly they’d been doing jungle training and were now trying to reacquaint themselves with society through the medium of cocktails. AIRBORNE, read their tattoos, as though that said it all. The sight of the girls would make them dive off the tables and show everyone their buttocks.

  A slave girl is given 200 lashes in 1773. The brutality of that time would leave an enduring legacy. (Illustration credit 1.3)

  ‘Is this normal?’ asked Lorlene.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘for squaddies, I’m afraid it is.’

  Lorlene frowned. I’d often heard it said that the Guyanese were prissy and that it was only deep below the surface that there was a rich seam of philanderers and lovers. In the full glare of daylight, explained Lorlene, it was a different matter.

  ‘As you’ve seen,’ she said, ‘everything here has to be just so.’

  There was only one pl
ace Lorlene refused to take me to: the old slave market.

  ‘You’ll be mugged …’ she said.

  Her friends agreed. ‘People have been raped in there …’

  ‘… choke and rob …’

  ‘… bodies dumped in the Demerara …’

  It seemed that, apart from brutality, only a name had survived. Once, the word Stabroek had suggested a promising Dutch city, but now it was mostly just the market. Any sign of the old Hollanders, however, had long since gone. In 1880, seventy-five years after their eviction, the British had covered the whole site with a monstrous mock-Tudor fortress, made entirely from iron and tin. I often wondered what ‘mock-Tudor’ meant to the descendants of the slaves. Unfinished? Other-worldly? Or just mildly daft? Whichever it was, they’d be right. This great lump of a place was originally supposed to have been a station, and from here trains were to fan out across the continent. But the fanning never happened, and the engines never came. As the idea of Georgetown Central faltered, the grim reality of Stabroek Market revived.

  Despite all the warnings, I felt I had to go inside. I can still see myself slinking along: a slightly comical figure, conspicuously pale and furtive. I was convinced that, any moment, robbers would put a chain around my neck and then work me over like some sort of human ATM. But they didn’t. Perhaps in the hot, meaty darkness they were far too astonished by the sight of anyone so colourless. ‘Hey, whitey!’ people exclaimed, ‘Whiiiiiite boy!’ Only one person assaulted me. She was an enormous, over-inflated African who gave me a half-hearted slap across the arse. ‘Why you all so, man?’ she bellowed, ‘Come give Mumma a big fuckin’ kiss!’

  Everyone roared, and I pinked and wriggled off into the crowd. I ought to have known something like this would happen. Visitors were always being cautioned. Writing in 1912, James Rodway (British Guiana’s greatest – and only – historian) advised that we ‘must not be too fastidious for the negro women who crowd here are by no means choice in their language’. But it wasn’t just in language that choiceness was deficient. I was now slithering along in the darkness through offal and open drains. Then the air filled with hot, wet gusts of mud, the gloom cleared and there was the river.

  As my anxiety dissipated, an African market took shape. Outside in the mud were the dwarfs and scavengers, but inside business was booming. I came across wild honey, salted shark, crab oil and strips of meat like ancient bark. Some of the hunters also sold weapons and charms, and a deadly form of rum known as ‘Cut and Load’. Then there were the stalls of the witches. Each one was piled with old sauce bottles, refilled with potions and unguents, marked ‘Belly’, ‘Head pain’, ‘Cold’ or ‘Man Builder Tonic’. Although this last tonic sounded intriguing, it was just a jar of chillies pickled in fish-scales and bush rum. Whether this does anything for African manliness I don’t know, but I had a feeling that it wouldn’t do much for mine.

  I did, on the other hand, experience an archaeological moment. Perhaps it was just the sweat and the darkness, but I suddenly felt that I’d stumbled on an earlier age. Had the old Dutch market felt something like this? Well, maybe – except that, back then, the merchandise was altogether different.

  By all accounts, the sale of people was once a source of celebration here.

  Almost everyone dressed for the occasion. According to one Dr Pinckard, who was here at the turn of the nineteenth century, ‘it was quite a holyday’; the planters wore their ‘gayest apparel’ and permitted their slaves to don ‘holyday clothes’. The whole of town would turn up to see the new arrivals. For the planters, here was the opportunity to buy new workers and breeders, while for their slaves, here was the chance of a wife. Sometimes the planters let them choose their own women, and – occasionally – if they were later unhappy with their choice, they’d bring them back and let them choose another. Sales day in Stabroek was not to be missed.

  For the new arrivals, now docking in the mud, the mood was rather less festive. Many would have been captured months earlier, in places such as Niger or Benin, and would already have changed hands several times in exchange for bells or gloves, red hats and beads. Then they’d endured the long voyage – the ‘Middle Passage’ – sustained only by horse beans and oil. Not surprisingly, the survivors would be in a pitiful shape.

  Once off the river, the slavers then set about getting their goods well scrubbed up. The captives had already lost their names, their clothes and all their possessions, and now they’d lose their hair. Then, to make these human lots look sleek and attractive, they were dressed in a compound of lime juice, oil and gunpowder. They were finally ready for sale.

  In 1800 a good African was worth £50–100, which at today’s prices is about half the price of a family car. Pregnant women were worth more, and so were pretty girls, and slaves that could read or sew. Once purchased, most were carted off to the plantations, but some stayed here, tending the Dutch in their homes. Either way they’d be given a new name – such as Smith or Hughes or Amsterdam – and handed over to an old slave for six weeks of instruction. During this time they’d learn the language of slavery (which happened to be English) and recover from the voyage. ‘From living skeletons,’ wrote a Scottish officer in the 1770s, ‘they become plump and fat, with a beautiful clean skin, til it is disfigured by the inhuman flogging of some rascally proprietor.’

  But life for Stabroek slaves was by no means a series of floggings. In this abhorrent trade it’s often surprising, the small liberties that survived. Most slaves kept their African gods, and their magic and their secret potions. Some ran little businesses and would return here, to the market, to sell whatever they’d made: honey, perhaps, or rum and salted shark. Others had smallholdings and were allowed out until eight at night (provided they carried a lantern). Some slaves even had their own slaves. There were also slave holidays, a slave ball (four times a year) and regular handouts of grog. What’s more, Africans were encouraged to have children – particularly after 1807, when the import of new slaves was banned. That year one of the agricultural societies even offered a medal for the farming of human beings. It was given to the planter who’d raised the greatest number of baby slaves.

  It all seems unreal now, particularly the concept of human property. The slaves weren’t merely chattels, they were also a responsibility; their master was duty-bound to clothe them and feed them for life; he had to discharge all their liabilities (including the cost of imprisonment, at 5 pence a day) and to ensure that they were never a drain on the public purse. What’s more, he was also the only person who was allowed to flog them, work them, free them, donate them or bequeath them in a will. Just as they defined his status (a European had to have twenty-five slaves in order to vote), so he defined their existence. As a matter of law, the slave’s life was, in many ways, like the life of a valuable horse.

  Georgetown’s slavery has proved a difficult stain to wash away. This was partly because there was so much of it left behind. The older parts of the city were almost entirely the work of slaves. They’d cut all the wood and baked all the bricks. They’d started the roads and the sea wall, and cut out all the canals. Then they’d died, taking themselves off to their own huge boggy cemeteries, well away from those of the whites. Even now the outlying neighbourhoods were known as ‘fields’, as though all that mattered was work.

  But it wasn’t just things, it was also lives. Almost half the city’s inhabitants had slave names, with no idea what they’d been before. They also sang slave songs, used slave cures and spoke the standard slavers’ English. The food too – saltfish, yams and breadfruit – was slavish, all introduced to fuel human toil. It sometimes seemed as though even the most intimate aspects of daily life were still somehow tainted by slavery – including marriage. One of my taxi-drivers put it like this: ‘The African don’t like to settle down, get married. Sometime he have three child-mother. I guess it dates from slavery times. What did they call us? Breeding bulls …’

  ‘And what about you?’ I asked.

  ‘Me child-mot
her have two children,’ he said, ‘and me girl have another.’

  Cruelty too still stalked the Guyanese. Out in the street, even perfect strangers could be flailed with words. (‘Hey, coolie t’ing! Fat girl! Why you dis me?’) As one woman told me, you needed a thick hide to survive downtown. But the abuse wasn’t always simply verbal. Forty years ago V.S. Naipaul remarked that nowhere in the world did people beat their children more brutally than here. ‘This could still be true,’ said Lorlene. ‘Child abuse was probably the reason I went into politics …’

  But slave culture also had another, more insidious effect, constantly eroding self-esteem. Being black, I discovered, was not a matter of pride but a question of degree. You had to be the right kind of black, ideally with a hint of white. It all dated back to the days when planters favoured their own half-caste progeny over the pure-bred children of their slaves. Once, this miscegenation had spawned a complex lexicon all of its own; there were cobs (a quarter white), mulattos (half white), mustees (three-quarters white) and octoroons (seven-eighths white). Even now, a slice through Afro-Guyanese society reveals not layers of class but a spectrogram of colours. ‘I’m red,’ said Lorlene, proudly. This meant that as much as her ancestors had been slaves, so they’d also been their masters.

  But sometimes, she said, even being the right shade of black was not enough. ‘If three people go into a restaurant,’ she explained, ‘the white man will always be served first, then the Indian, and then the black. It’s the same whatever the colour of the waiter. And no one will ever say a thing …’

  This was a demoralising thought. Had anything really changed, I wondered, or did slavery still seep out of the earth like some debilitating gas?

  I decided to cheer myself up, by going in search of abolition.

  I didn’t have to go far; churches were everywhere.

  The Afro-Guyanese loved these places. Every variant of Christianity was represented, and their churches came in all shapes and sizes. There were pink ones, green ones, tabernacles, miracle halls, chapels on stilts and temples like rockets. God, it seemed, owned half the city. Although for some people devotion was merely a way of getting through the day, for others it was different. In quaint old structures like St James-the-Less they still sensed the first seeds of revolt. Throughout the 1820s it had been a rallying point in the bid for a human’s life.