As one would expect, these blacks were of very crude appearance; not only ‘country Negroes’ but that in an exaggerated form. Negroes in the West Indies have some tendency to live on the land where they originated, and as it happened most of these Negroes had been born up here and several generations of their forebears before them.
We had brought our lunch along, and this Hans Grumbach and I ate sitting in the Ford under the shade of a grove of magnificent old mahogany trees, and afterwards Grumbach took me up along a ravine to see the ‘fountain’ from which the old estate had originally derived its title.
The ‘fountain’ itself was a delicate natural waterfall, streaming thinly over the edge of a high rock. It was when we were coming back, by a slightly different route, for Grumbach wanted me to take in everything possible, that I saw the tree-man.
He stood, a youngish, coal-black Negro, of about twenty-five years, scantily dressed in a tattered shirt and a sketchy pair of trousers, about ten yards away from the field-path we were following and from which a clear view of a portion of the estate was obtained, and beside him, towering over him, was a magnificent coconut-palm. The Negro stood motionless. I thought, in fact, that he had gone asleep standing there, both arms clasped about the tree’s smooth, elegant trunk, the right side of his face pressed against it.
He was not, however, asleep, because I looked back at him and his eyes – rather intelligent eyes, they seemed to me – were wide open, although to my surprise he had not changed his position, nor even the direction of his gaze, to glance at us; and, I was quite sure, he had not been in that village group when we had stood among them just before our lunch.
Grumbach did not speak to him, as he had done to every other Negro we had seen. Indeed, I observed that his face looked a trifle – well, apprehensive; and I thought he very slightly quickened his pace. I stepped nearer to him as we walked past the man and the tree, and then I noticed that his lips were moving, and when I came closer I observed that he was muttering to himself. I said, very quietly, almost in his ear: ‘What’s the matter with that fellow, Grumbach?’
Grumbach glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, and my impression that he was disturbed grew upon me.
‘He’s listening!’ was all that I got out of Grumbach. I supposed, of course, that there was something odd about the fellow; perhaps he was slightly demented and might be an annoyance; and I supposed that Grumbach meant to convey that the young fellow was ‘listening’ for our possible comment upon him and his strange behaviour. Later, after we had said good-bye to the courteous caretaker and he had seen us off down the first hillside road, with its many ruts, I brought up the subject of the young black fellow at the tree.
‘You mentioned that he was listening,’ said I, ‘so I dropped the matter, but, why does he do that, Grumbach – I mean, why does he stand against the tree in that unusual manner? Why, he didn’t even gee his eyes to look at us, and that surprised me. They don’t have visitors up here every day, I understand.’
‘He was listening – to his tree!’ said Hans Grumbach, as though reluctantly. ‘That was what I meant, Mr Canevin.’ And he drew my attention to an extraordinarily picturesque ruined windmill, the kind once used for the grinding of cane in the old days of ‘muscovado’ sugar, which dominated a cone-like hillside off to our left as we bumped over the road. It was not until months later, when I had gained the confidence of Hans Grumbach, that that individual gave me any further enlightenment on the subject of the man and his tree.
Then I learned that, along with his nostalgia for the life of an agriculturist – an incurable matter with some persons I have found – there was mixed in with his feelings about the Great Fountain estate a kind of inconsistent thankfulness that he was no longer stationed there! This inconsistency, this being dragged sentimentally in two opposite directions, rather intrigued me. I saw something of Grumbach and got rather well acquainted with him as the months passed that first year of my residence. Bit by bit, in his reluctant manner of speech, it came out.
To put the whole picture of his mind on this subject together, I got the idea that Grumbach, while always suffering from a faint nostalgia for his deep-country residence and the joys of tilling the soil, felt, somehow, safe here in the town. If he chafed, mildly, at the restrictions of town life and his storekeeping, there was yet the certainty that ‘something’ – a vague matter at first, as it came out – was always hanging over him; something connected with a lingering fear.
The Negroes, it appeared – this came to me very gradually, of course – up there at Great Fountain, were not, quite, like the rest of the island’s black population; in the two towns; out on the many sugar-estates; even those residues of village communities which continued to live, in that mild, beneficent climate, on ‘turned-out’ estate land because there was no one sufficiently interested to eject these squatters. No – the Great Fountain village was, somehow, at least in Hans Grumbach’s dark hints, different; sui generis; a peculiar people.
They were, to begin with, almost purely of Dahomeyan stock. These Dahomeyans had drifted ‘down the islands’ from Haiti, beginning soon after the revolt against France in the early nineteenth century. They were tall, very black, extremely clannish blacks. And just as the Loromantyn slaves in British Jamaica had brought to the West Indies their Obay-i-, or herb-magic, so, it seemed, had the Dahomeyans carried with them from Guinea their vodu, which properly defined, means the practices accompanying the worship of ‘the Snake’.
This worship, grown into a vast localized cultus in unfettered Hayti and in the Guiana hinterlands down in South America, is very imperfectly understood. But its accompaniments, all the charms, ouangas, philtres, potions, talismans, amulets, ‘doctoring’ and whatnot, have spread all through the West India islands, and these are thoroughly established in highly developed and widely variant forms. Haiti is its West Indian home, of course. But down in French Martinique its extent and intensity is a fair rival to the Haitian supremacy. It is rife on Dominica, Guadeloupe, even on British Montserrat. Indeed, one might name every island from Cuba to Trinidad, and, allowing for the variations, the local preferences, and all such matters, one might say, and truly, that the vodu, generically described by the blacks themselves as ‘obi’, is very thoroughly established.
According to Grumbach, the handful of villagers at Great Fountain was very deeply involved in this sort of thing. Left to themselves as they had been for many years, forming a little, self-sustaining community of nearly pure-blooded Dahomeyans, they had, it seemed, reverted very nearly to their African type; and this, Grumbach alleged, was the fact despite their easy kindliness, their use of ‘English’, and the various other outward appearances which caused them to seem not greatly different from other ‘country Negroes’ on this island of Santa Cruz.
Grumbach had known Silvio Fabricius since he had been a pick’ny on the estate. He knew, so far as his limited understanding of black people’s magic extended, all about Silvio. He had been estate-manager at the time the boy had begun his attentions to the great coconut palm. He had heard and seen what he called the ‘stupidness’ which had attended the setting apart of this neophyte. There had been three days – and nights; particularly the nights – when not a single plantation-hand would do a piece of work for any consideration. It was, as Grumbach bitterly remembered it all, ‘the crop season’. His employers, not sensing, businessmen as they were, any underlying reason for no work done when they needed the cane from Great Fountain for their grinding-mill, had been hard on him. They had, in Santa Crucian phraseology, ‘pressed him’ for cane deliveries. And there, in his village, quite utterly ignoring his authority as estate-manager, those blacks had danced and pounded drums, and burned flares, and weaved back and forth in their interminable ceremonies – ‘stupidness’ – for three strategic days and nights, over something which had Silvio Fabricius, then a rising pick-ny of twelve or thirteen, as its apparent center and underlying cause. It was no wonder that Hans Grumbach raved and probably swore
mightily and threatened the estate-hands.
But his anger and annoyance, the threats and cajolings, the offers of ‘snaps’ of rum, and pay for piece-work; all these efforts to get his ripe cane cut and delivered had come to nothing. The carts stood empty. The mules gravely ate the long guinea-grass. The canetops waved in the soft breath of the North-East Trade Wind, while those three days stretched themselves out to their conclusion.
This conclusion, which was ceremonial, took place in the daytime, about ten o’clock in the morning of the fourth day. After that, which was a very brief and apparently meaningless matter indeed, the hands sheepishly resumed the driving of their mule-carts and the swinging of their cane-bills, and once more the Fountain cane travelled slowly down the rutted hill road toward the factory below. On that morning, before resuming their work, the whole village had accompanied young Silvio Fabricius in silence as he walked ahead of them up toward the source of the perennial stream, stepped out into the field, and clasped his arms about a young, but tall and promising coconut palm which stood there as though accidentally in solitary towering grandeur. There the villagers had left the little black boy when they turned away and filed slowly and silently back to the village and to their interrupted labor.
And there, beside his tree, Grumbach said, Silvio Fabricius had stood ever since, only occasionally coming in to the village and then at any hour of the day or night, apparently ‘reporting’ something to the oldest inhabitant, a gnarled, ancient grandfather with pure white wool. After such a brief visit Fabricius would at once, and with an unshaken gravity, return to his tree. Food, said Grumbach, was always carried out to him from the village. He toiled not, neither spun! There, day and night, under the blazing sun, through showers and drenching downpours, erect, apparently unsleeping – unless he slept standing up against his tree as Grumbach suspected – stood Silvio Fabricius, and there he had stood, except when he climbed the tree to trim out the ‘cloth’ or chase out a rat intent on nesting up there, or to gather the coconuts, for eleven years.
The coconuts, it seemed, were his perquisite. They were, Grumbach said, absolutely tabu to anybody else. It was over the question of some green coconuts from this superior tree that Grumbach himself, with all his authority as estate-manager behind his demand, had come to grips with Silvio Fabricius; or, to be more precise, with the entire estate-village.
I never succeeded in getting this story in detail from Grumbach, who was plainly reluctant to tell it. It reflected, you see, upon him; his authority as estate-manager, his pride, were here heavily involved. But, as I gathered it, his house-man, sent to that particular tree for a basket of green coconuts – Grumbach was entertaining some friends and wanted the coconut-water and jelly to put in a Danish concoction based on Holland gin – had returned half an hour later, delivered the coconuts, and later, it came out that he had gone down the hill to a neighbouring estate for the nuts. Taken to task for this duplicity, the house-man had balked, ‘gone stupid’ over the affair, and upon the dispute which followed the village itself had joined in. The conclusion, as Grumbach gathered it, to his great mystification, was that the coconut tree ‘belonged to’ young Silvio Fabricius, was tabu, and that the village was solid against him on the issue. He, the manager, with control of everything, could not get coconuts from the best tree on the estate! This, attributed to the usual black ‘stupidness’, had rankled. It also more or less accounted for Grumbach’s attitude toward Silvio Fabricius, an attitude which I myself had witnessed. That his ‘fear’ of this young Negro went deeper than that, I sensed, however. I was, later, to see that suspicion justified.
For a long time I had no occasion to revisit Great Fountain. But six years later, while in the States during the summer, I made the acquaintance of a man named Carrington who wanted to know ‘all about the Virgin Islands’ with a view to investing some money there in a proposal to grow pineapples on a large scale. I talked with Mr Carrington at some length, and in the course of our discussions it occurred to me that Great Fountain estate would be virtually ideal for his purpose. Here was a very considerable acreage of rich land: the Copenhagen Company would probably rent it out for a period of ten years for a very reasonable price since it was bringing them in nothing. I spread before Carrington these advantages, and he traveled down on the ship with me that autumn to make an investigation in person.
Carrington, a trained fruit-grower, spent a day with me on the estate, and thereafter with characteristic American energy started in to put his plan into practice. A lease was easily secured, the village was repaired and the fallen stone cabins rebuilt, and within a few weeks cultivating machinery of the most modern type began to arrive on the Frederiksted wharf.
After a considerable consultation with Hans Grumbach, to whose lamentations over the restrictions of town-life I had been listening for years, I recommended him to Mr Carrington as manager of the laborers, and Hans, after going over the matter with his good wife and coming to an amicable understanding, went back to Great Fountain where a manager’s house had been thrown up for him on the foundation of one of the ruined buildings. At Carrington’s direction, Grumbach set the estate laborers at work on the job of repairing the roads; and, as the village cabins went up, one after another, laborers, enticed by the prospect of good wages, filled them up and ancient Great Fountain became once more a busy scene of industry.
During these preparatory works I spent a good deal of time on the estate because I was naturally interested in Joseph Carrington’s venture being a success. I had, indeed, put several thousand dollars into it myself, not solely because it looked like a good investment, but in part for sentimental reasons connected with my great-uncle. Being by then thoroughly familiar with the odd native speech, I made it a point to visit the village and talk at length with the ‘people’. They were courteous to me, markedly so; deferential would be a better word to describe their attitude. This, of course, was wholly due to the family connection. Only a very few of them, and those the oldest, had any personal recollection of Captain McMillin, but his memory was decidedly green among them. The old gentleman had been greatly beloved by the Negroes of the island.
In the course of my reading I had run across the peculiar affair of a ‘tree-man’. I understood, therefore, the status of Silvio Fabricius in that queer little black community; why he had been ‘devoted’ to the tree; what were the underlying reasons for that strange sacrifice.
It was, on the part of that handful of nearly pure-blooded Dahomeyan villagers there at my great-uncle’s old place, a revival of a custom probably as old as African civilization. For – the African has a civilization. He is at a vast disadvantage when among Caucasians, competing, as he necessarily must, with Caucasian ‘cultures’. His native problems are entirely different, utterly diverse, from the white man’s. The African’s whole history among us Caucasians is a history of more or less successful adaptation. Place an average American business man in the heart of ‘uncivilized’ Africa, in the Liberian hinterland, for example, and what will he do – how survive? The answer is simple. He will perish miserably, confronted with the black jungle night, the venomous reptilian and insect life, the attacks of wild beasts, the basic problems of how to feed and warm himself – for even this last is an African problem. I know. I have been on safari in Uganda, in British East Africa, in Somaliland. I speak from experience.
Africans, supposedly static in cultural matters, have solved all these problems. And, very prominent among these, especially as it concerns the agricultural peoples – for there are, perhaps, as many black nations, kindreds, peoples, tongues, as there are Caucasian – is, of course, the question of weather.
Hence, the ‘tree-man’.
Set apart with ceremonies which were ancient when Hammurabi sat on his throne in Babylon, a young boy is dedicated to a forest tree. Thereafter he spends his life beside that tree, cares for it, tends it, listens to it; becomes ‘the-brother-of-the-tree’ in time. He is truly ‘set apart’. To the tree he devotes his entire life, dyi
ng at last beside it, in its shade. And – this is African ‘culture’ if you will; a culture of which we Caucasians get, perhaps, the faint reactions in the (to us) meaningless jumble of Negro superstition which we sense all about us; the ‘stupidness’ of the West Indies; faint, incomprehensible reflections of a system as practical, as dogmatic, as utilitarian, as the now well-nigh universal system of synthetic exercise for the tired businessman which goes by the name of golf!
These Negroes at Great Fountain were, primarily, agriculturists. They had the use of the soil bred deeply in their blood and bones. That, indeed, is why the canny French brought their Hispaniola slaves from Dahomey. Left to themselves at the old estate in the north central hills of Santa Cruz the little community rapidly reverted to their African ways. They tilled the soil, sporadically, it is true, yet they tilled it. They needed a weather prognosticator. There are sudden storms in summer throughout the vast sweep of the West India Islands, devastating storms, hurricanes indeed; long, wasting periods of drought. They needed a tree-man up there. They set apart Silvio Fabricius.
That fact made the young fellow what a white man would call ‘sacred’. Not for nothing had they danced and performed their ‘stupid’ rites those three long days and nights to the detriment of Hans Grumbach’s deliveries. No. Silvio Fabricius, from the moment he had clasped his arms about that growing coconut-palm, was as much a person ‘set apart’, dedicated, as any white man’s pundit, priest, or yogi. Hence the various tabus which, like the case of the green coconuts, had puzzled Hans Grumbach. He must never take his attention away from the tree. There, beside it, he was consecrated to live and to die. When he departed from his ‘brother’ the tree, it was only for the purpose of reporting something which the tribe should know; something, that is, which his brother the tree had told him! There would be drenching rain the second day following. A plague of small green flies would, the third day later, come to annoy the animals. The banana grove must be propped forthwith. Otherwise, a high wind, two days hence, would nullify all the work of its planting and care.
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Page 55
