Westlake, Donald E - NF 01

by Under An English Heaven (v1. 1)

  U Thant didn't answer this telegram either, but Adams did get an answer from the United States Government. That is, he got it if he read The New York Times for June 17, 1967, which reported, "Officials said today that the United States would never negotiate directly with Anguilla on the question of association. Britain still handles Anguilla's foreign policy 'as far as we are concerned,' Government sources said, adding: If Anguilla is serious, the request must be handled through the United Kingdom.'"

  It's no surprise, really, that the United States was the nation to produce Catch-22. Great Britain wouldn't talk to Anguilla unless the words came through St. Kitts, and now the United States wouldn't talk to Anguilla unless the words came through Great Britain.

  However, with the Anguillans sending out all those telegrams and giving so many statements to reporters, it isn't unlikely that various governments began talking among themselves, suggesting to one another that something be done to quiet things down. Whatever was or wasn't said, Colonel Bradshaw suddenly reconsidered the question of the Fact Finding Mission and decided he'd appreciate their efforts after all. The Fact Finding Mission was forthwith assembled and turned out to be composed of four government officials and one university professor, all from various West Indian islands. It was the sort of group whose equivalent members in the United States would be on a committee to raise funds for a community cultural center.

  The Mission arrived in St. Kitts in late June, at around the same time that something very mysterious was happening on Anguilla. On the night of June 23, two young men patrolling the beach at Limestone Bay saw a ship without lights stopped beyond the reef. Three rowboats were moving toward shore. Limestone Bay is perhaps the most remote corner of the entire island, with neither a road nor a footpath leading to it. The two boys hid in the brush and watched the rowboats land and counted the men who came ashore; they were thirty.

  While one of the boys kept watch, the other took off through the brush until he was close enough to the police station for his walkie-talkie message to be picked up. Truckloads of Anguillans immediately set out, but the trucks had to be left behind on the nearest road while the men ran across the rough ground toward the bay. The noise of their approach alerted the invaders, who immediately got back into their row-boats and headed away from shore again. That is, most of them did; five stayed behind on the island, drifting away into the darkness. When the Anguillans finally thundered down onto the beach, the boats were gone and so were the men; all that was left was one policeman's boot.

  In his as yet unpublished book Anguilla: Island in Revolt, British journalist Colin Rickards mentions this incident and adds, "At noon the following day I happened to see the St. Kitts Revenue Cutter entering Basseterre roadstead towing three rowing boats, but thought nothing of it." When he heard about the previous night's invasion, however, Rickards began to look into things at the St. Kitts end. "My own careful investigation in St. Kitts," he says, "pinpointed five men, all known to be Government loyalists, and all of them crack shots, who were missing from their homes and various places of work."

  The next evening, Colonel Bradshaw got on his radio station, ZIZ, and denied everything. "We sent no one to Anguilla," he said, "and if the island was in fact raided or invaded it must have been done by Anguillans living in Anguilla who are fed up with the terrible state to which Adams and Company have brought their island." He also said that some of the Anguillan rebels were "known to be Communists," which was pretty well news to everybody.

  Meanwhile, the Fact Finding Mission, five men of a different ilk, had arrived on St. Kitts. They talked with Colonel Bradshaw and other officials, and they talked with the detainees. On the twenty-ninth of June, they went to Anguilla to talk to the Peacekeeping Committee. The other five were still on the island then, occasionally showing up at remote houses and stealing food at gunpoint, and these two groups of five show the range of potential solutions being considered for the Anguilla problem.

  The Peacekeeping Committee would have liked to talk to the five men in the bush, but they couldn't find them. However, they were also pleased to talk to the Fact Finding Mission and agreed to send a delegation to St. Kitts to chat with the Government there if three conditions were met: first, they required safe-conduct; second, the British must have somebody present at the meeting; and third, the Governor, Sir Fred Phillips, should preside at the meeting instead of Colonel Bradshaw.

  Everything was arranged, and the next day the delegation of five went off to St. Kitts, led by Peter Adams and including a man named Jeremiah Gumbs, a businessman who hadn't actually lived on the island for thirty years but who was soon to become more famous and more important in the ongoing Anguilla crisis than any of his fellow delegates.

  In the history of The New York Times, only two Anguillans have ever made its "Man in the News" column; the second was Ronald Webster, but the first was Jerry Gumbs. A big bearish man, with a strainingly sincere expression of face and a deep, mellow, slow-moving voice, Jerry Gumbs is perhaps the most middle-class of all the middle-class Anguillans. Born on February 18,1913, the son of a fisherman, he received primary school education on Anguilla and in his youth became a lailor. "Some people are still wearing suits I made for them," he claims, which says as much for the economy of Anguilla as it does for Jerry Gumbs's tailoring.

  Two of Gumbs's sisters had already emigrated to the United States. When he was twenty-five he followed them. This was 1938 and America was still in the grip of the Depression, but it nevertheless offered far more opportunity to an industrious young man than did Anguilla. Jerry Gumbs stayed in Brooklyn with one of his sisters and enrolled in the Metropolitan Vocational High School to get caught up on his education. Finishing there, he won a scholarship to City College of New York, but immediately after Pearl Harbor, in 1941, he quit college and joined the Army. After six months' service he had the right to become an American citizen, which he did, and after the war he got married and went to college on the GI Bill to learn furnace installation. He's a hard worker, and he's smart about money, and it wasn't long before he had his own fuel-oil delivery business in Edison, New Jersey. (In January of 1968, the Anguilla Beacon ran what it called an "Alphabet of Anguillan Personalities," and when it got to "J" it went: "J is for Jerry, named after the Prophet: If profit's his motive, he gets plenty of it.")

  I talked with Jerry Gumbs late in 1969, and never have I met a man who so totally combined the sincere with the humbug. In fact, he's even sincere about the humbug. For instance, over the years he has been responsible for much charitable fund raising for Anguilla, and he says, "I gave Anguilla secondary education. I gave them a library. I gave them an operating light. I gave them an X-ray. I gave them encyclopedias in every school. I gave them a Community Center. I gave them medical supplies of all lands; in the hospital now there's a frigidaire there; in the health center there's a freezer. And any man who works with his hands as hard as I've worked and do this for a people could not be doing it for personal gain."

  Well, yes and no. The truth is slightly more complicated than that. There are now more than a thousand Anguillans living in the general area of Edison and Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and several years ago Jerry Gumbs founded an Anguilla Improvement Association to raise money to give things like libraries and operating lights to the people back home. It is true that Jerry Gumbs founded the Association, that he has been its leader more years than not, that he has contributed his own money and a great deal of his own time and effort, but to say that he alone is responsible for the Association s good works is not 100 per cent accurate.

  Jerry Gumbs is reminiscent in some ways of a particular kind of forceful movie director—the sort of man who, if a picture turns out well, begins to believe he alone made up the story, wrote the dialogue, worked the camera, designed the sets and composed the music.

  A man like that makes enemies, and Jerry Gumbs has as many detractors as Orson Welles. He is accused mostly of being money-hungry and a sharp practitioner, but that's far too simplistic a reading o
f the man. Listen to him talk about the house he built in Edison: "I built this house with my own hands. I wasn't taught to be a carpenter, but I had to build a home, and I lived in a community where our people, black people, were nobody. And I had to come into a community where there were no black people and do something so people could see. Not by fighting and clubs and marching, but by definitely struggling in a society, the way others have struggled whether they're white or not, to show people that what they're trying to say is not true. I think they got the message. Because right here in this community this was the only ranch-style house built here in 1952. And people moved around it, you look around, you see a piece of land, they built ranch-type homes around it. There was change in the pattern of thinking."

  Did no other pair of hands do any of the work on the house? If so, their contributions have been swallowed within Jerry Gumbs's own pride of accomplishment. "The only reason," he says, "why perhaps I have accomplished what I have accomplished even in building this house is because I was blessed with a body with tremendous strength, and maybe a mind to understand. Two things going together. Now, most people are not that way."

  He gestures across his long, neat living room full of bric-a-brac. "When this was built, there's a steel beam across it, and that piece of steel, I couldn't get it here, although I paid for it. The union would not deliver it. And I had to deliver it, on a little truck that I had, and I did it. And I had to put it up without a crane, and I put it up with my shoulders." All this trouble because he was a black man, of course, building in a white neighborhood. He will be the strongest man around, and he will never stop finding arenas in which to test his strength.

  "You build a house, now," he says, "and at night people are gonna gather and kick it down. They're gonna back up the truck, they're gonna take your lumber, you gotta bring it back tomorrow. It's not easy. And you don't go and make a public scene. Inspectors won't give you a license. You run around for months trying to get somebody to sign a document which is already documented and signed. You dig open a hole to put a sewer in; they tell you you can't put that type of pipe in it, you must put a certain type, and that certain type does not exist in the state." But the house got built.

  Other things got built, too. The fuel-oil business; the Anguilla Improvement Association; a family with four children, all of them college-bound; and back on Anguilla two things, a small air ferry service called Anguilla Airways and the Rendezvous Hotel, a motel-type operation on Rendezvous Bay, where the French dried their powder in 1796. The most modern hotel on the island, it is still a bit more primitive than an Iowa tourist cabin in the twenties. Still, it does have electricity—until nine-thirty at night, when the generator is turned off and the guests convert to kerosene lamps. And it has running water, a trickle, icy cold, from cisterns that catch the infrequent rain. And it has a restaurant, half a dozen tables, with meals prepared by Aunt B, Jerry Gumbs s sister, who runs the place for him. And it also has a beautiful white-sand beach, and if tourism ever does become a major industry on Anguilla, Jerry Gumbs has the jump on the trade and can be relied on to drive himself to stay ahead of the competition. Not entirely for money; to be first, and proud of it.

  When trouble started on Anguilla, Jerry Gumbs couldn't possibly stay out of it. He flew down to the island—the last leg, on his own airplane—joined the Peacekeeping Committee, and bulled his way into prominence as naturally and unmaliciously as if he were building his own house.

  Jerry Gumbs and the Anguillan delegation met with the St. Kitts Government on June 30, 1967. Whether pressure had been exerted on Colonel Bradshaw by outside forces it's impossible to say, but he was more inclined toward compromise than usual. He offered to appoint a new Warden for Anguilla who would not only be Anguillan (Wardens had almost always been Kittitian before this) but somebody acceptable to the people of Anguilla. He also promised to restore mail deliveries once the Warden had been appointed and to arrange for the payment of Government salaries and pensions that had been held up by the rebellion. The delegation said they'd talk it over with the folks back home and let the St. Kitts Government know in a few days.

  The only true comparison with the governmental form on Anguilla is Athenian democracy. Whenever a problem comes up, the entire population gathers at Burrowes Park, everybody shouts at everybody else, a couple of fistfights are dealt with, speeches are made, the Bible is quoted from, God's assistance is invoked, and gradually everybody comes around to the same general point of view. The general point of view that everybody came around to on the first of July, 1967, was that Colonel Bradshaw's offer wasn't good enough. Nothing had been said about an Island Council, nor medical supplies, nor an amnesty. There was no reason to suppose the Colonel would remain even this mellow once the spotlight of publicity had been turned off.

  And those five mysterious invaders were still roaming the countryside, stealing food from poor people at gunpoint. Besides, Anguilla had already declared her independence from St. Kitts, which was what they all wanted; why turn around and go back?

  On Monday, July 3, two cables were sent by the Peacekeeping Committee to St. Kitts from Puerto Rico. One to Sir Fred Phillips, the Governor, said:

  governor may come and bring the mail. can be escorted by mr. wade, chief of police.

  The other one was addressed to Mr. Urban C. Hodge, a retired Anguillan Civil Servant living on St. Kitts, who had been suggested by Colonel Bradshaw as the new Warden; it said:

  happy to have you in anguilla but not as representative of the central government.

  The Fact Finding Mission was understandably distressed that all its work had come to nothing. They went away from St. Kitts and wrote a report that criticized the British for playing at Watchmaker God while turning out lousy watches. They criticized the Government of St. Kitts for any number of things, including its refusal to offer the Anguillans an amnesty as a first step in negotiations. Exit the five men of the Fact Finding Mission.

  Exit also the other five. After ten days of terrorizing old people and children for food, the five mysterious invaders left Anguilla, at night, by rowboat, out to a ship with a silhouette not unlike that of the St. Kitts Revenue Cutter. They were seen to leave, but a force large enough to capture them didn't arrive in time. "The following morning," Colin Rickards writes in Anguilla: Island in Revolt, "my five missing men' were back at their various jobs in St. Kitts."

  (During the time the five were on Anguilla they very nearly got Jerry Gumbs, though only by indirection. Armed patrols were spending every day searching for the five invaders, and one afternoon two of these patrols spotted each other across Burrowes Park, mistook one another for the enemy, and both opened fire, though without hitting anything. Jerry Gumbs and reporter David Smithers were at the airport nearby, and both went running toward the sounds of shooting. It was late in the day, and both were wearing white shirts; they quickly became the most visible moving objects in the park, and both patrols at once started shooting at them. Gumbs and Smithers jumped behind a tree until passions cooled and they could identify themselves.)

  With the several five-man missions having proved impossible, the Anguillans decided to hold a referendum on the independence they'd already declared. They aimed to prove it was really a popular rebellion, and to counter Colonel Bradshaw's charges that Anguilla was being terrorized by gunmen on the Peacekeeping Committee. (Considering what had happened to Jerry Gumbs, the truth was just the other way around.)

  Walter Hodge, Chairman of the Peacekeeping Committee, explained the referendum, saying, "We are breaking away from St. Kitts because we must. And through this act we know that we are technically breaking away from Britain. But by doing so—and becoming Independent—we hope to show the British Government that we mean business. Then maybe Mrs. Judith Hart will take some notice of us and perhaps we will get what we are asking for, and have asked for all along. Our Independence will, we hope, be our currency and we will have something with which to negotiate."

  Independence, in other words, wasn't
really independence at all, but was simply an effort to switch sovereignties from poor and hated St. Kitts to wealthy and well-liked Great Britain.

  The referendum was announced for July 11, and a proclamation was issued four days earlier to acquaint the people with what was going on. There would be two questions on the referendum, both to be answered either Yes or No:

  "(1) Are you in favour of secession from St. Kitts?

  "(2) Are you in favour of setting up the interim Government?"

  The second one meant that the Peacekeeping Committee didn't look upon itself as a government but would be prepared to organize one if the people did vote for independence. "Interim," of course, meant until such time as Great Britain would take over or regular elections could take place.

  Although Anguilla has 75 per cent literacy—high for the West Indies—symbols were used on the ballots in addition to the printed words "Yes" and "No"; a picture of a hat stood for "Yes," a boot stood for "No." I don't know why they chose the hat to represent secession, but when I think of that lone policeman's boot found on the beach at Limestone Bay I think I know why they chose a boot to symbolize a continued link with St. Kitts.

  The regular Electoral Roll of qualified voters from the last legal election was used to determine eligibility, and just about every registered voter turned out. The results: 1,813 hats, 5 boots.

  Although Paul Southwell had claimed over ZIZ the night before that "terrorized" Anguillans would be "forced to vote at gunpoint," it was probably the most thoroughly observed and uncorrupted election in modern times. Reporters were there from the major wire services and two British papers. In addition, a British television unit from Granada's World in Action was in the area and spent the day on Anguilla filming the voting; the film was shown on British television the following week, under the title "Duel in the Sun." A duel without guns, however; none of the reporters present saw any voters being terrorized. What they mostly saw was voters standing in line at the five polling places, smiling happily in the hot sunshine and singing a new calypso that started, "Papa Bradshaw, run you run." Never was a father so cheerfully disowned by his children.