Is Just a Movie

by Earl Lovelace

  “To see you there, boy! To see you. There.”

  By that time I was spending more and more time in Port of Spain, making my way as a calypsonian, where I get involved with Black Power, ending up in the days I was in Cascadu organizing our own demonstration to add to those taking place in all parts of the islands.

  The Red Flag

  The night before the Black Power demonstration in Cascadu, I had arrived with Ibo and Marvin to talk to fellars of the cricket team gathered under the streetlight at the corner and to give out placards for the march. Right away Romesh remembered he had to run an errand for his father on Saturday morning; Soogrim explained that his mother was distressed about the violence on these marches and was concerned that he would be arrested. Although I explained and they knew that we never supported any burning or looting and that in all the events we had throughout the island is only one bad-lucky fella who get killed, Soogrim did not believe he could convince his mother to allow him to go. It was clear that Romesh also wanted out, so it didn’t surprise us when Soogrim and Romesh get up and leave. I didn’t look at Manick. But I paused, waiting to see if he too would get up to go. When he didn’t, we started to give out the placards. Franklyn selected one marked Power to the People, Evrol get one marked Change is Nothing to Fear, Beresford had After Four Hundred Years, Marvin had one Nobody Will Tell You Who You Are, Ibo handed Manick the one marked Africans and Indians Unite and Manick take it. But you could see is not what he wanted; he look around with what I thought was a feeling of unease, wondering, I supposed, if he was offered that one because he was the only Indian present, which was true but was not how we would have liked him to see it. I for one didn’t see him as the token Indian made to carry the placard on race relations, but still he was an Indian and I could see how Ibo would give it to him. Seeing Manick’s hesitation, Ibo tried to cover up what he now must have felt was his error: “You don’t like that placard? If you don’t want that one, you could get another. Which one you want? You want Power to the People or Change is Nothing to Fear? You could have any of them. Maybe you want People of the Caribbean you do not know who you are and Nobody will tell you who you are. If you want you could exchange with Marvin.”

  When I look at Manick I see he is not looking at the placards; he is looking at the flags. Ibo see it too. And, right away, I know is trouble.

  “It have these three flags,” Ibo said. “The red flag is for the blood that has been shed in this struggle and the blood that might still be shed in the struggle; the black flag is for the land, for the place, for the people who we fighting with and for; and the green flag is for the peace that will flow afterward.”

  Manick is looking at the red flag.

  “The red flag is the one for war,” Ibo say quickly, cautioning. “The green one is the one for peace.”

  And, yes, just as I wondering where this talk was heading, I hear Manick saying, “You know what I want. I want to carry the red flag. Give me the red flag.”

  At first I thought Manick was making joke. But when I look at him I see the man is serious. He wanted to carry the red flag.

  “The red flag?” about three-four fellars asked.

  “That is what I want to carry.”

  Then it entered my mind, he is the only Indian here, how could we allow him to carry the red flag, the principal symbol of the Black struggle. And how could he, knowing the situation, want to carry the red flag?

  But if, and this must have popped into his head

  same way it popped into mine, if he couldn’t carry the

  red flag, then what was he doing there? What was his purpose?

  Because if he was one of the fellars, one of us, if we were in this together, how come he wasn’t allowed to carry the red flag? And, if he couldn’t carry the flag, what was his position in this demonstration? Why should he be in it at all? Was he there just to support us? Or was he there as a separate revolutionary in his own right? What did he want? What was his position?

  I waited for Manick to say something. I kinda hoped he would see the awkwardness of the situation and withdraw his request and leave us to ignore those hard questions. But he said nothing. I didn’t speak either.

  And after more silence, as if he had come to his own decision, he stood up. I suppose we all thought he was about to leave. Ibo chuckled. And whether it was from a feeling of being offended by Ibo’s chuckle, or that in fact he was already on his way out, Manick walked away without a word. I didn’t try to stop him.

  It would be after he had gone and the rest of the placards given out that I learned Manick had prepared a speech, which he had hoped to deliver on the march. He had learned it by heart and had recited it for Beresford. Something about Africans being emancipated to nothing, and, in a society facing at Emancipation the prospect of change, Indians brought into the plantation country, not to change the society but to keep it from changing. And they were granted the instruments to make them more properly part of the system by having a contract (bad as it was) and being granted land in lieu of passage back to India. Africans were set adrift. There was no burning economic reason to grant them compensation or land. There was no economic reason for their condition to be addressed. The reasons were moral. And the colonizers’ moral best had already been done in the name of Emancipation.

  Indians, he said, had played their roles well. They worked hard, took over the sugar industry, developed agriculture, and through sacrifice certainly, but also already shaped by a system of labor, they turned to small business, while the system continued. Many of them

  had become fervent supporters of the system. Since Emancipation had not liberated the society, they now needed to come together with Africans to work for its liberation.

  As I say, I didn’t hear the speech myself, but it did not surprise me. That was the season of speeches. Everybody was making one. Black Power had placed each of us with enough courage and conviction on a soapbox with a microphone before us and an audience ready to cheer. Young, idealistic, each of us wanted to be part of the roaring, of the awakening that was sweeping the country’s youth. What Manick was reported as wanting to say was not entirely new. It was what we in Black Power were saying. The great value of such a speech from him was to put Africans and Indians side by side in the liberation struggle – at least in Cascadu. That was what I, for one, was fighting for.

  But I couldn’t call him back, because I still wasn’t sure that it was appropriate to let him carry the red flag. The fellars were as confused as I. In the end, I left it alone.

  On the march next day, Manick did not appear at the demonstration. He did not come. I did not see him at any of the other rallies either.

  Then it had ended, the state of emergency, the arrests. He was not arrested so he was denied being a hero. Ibo, Marvin, Sonnyboy and me (those of us arrested) had become martyrs after a fashion. Franklyn went up into the hills to his death, Manick did not seek us out.

  And when I saw him we said little more than hello. I didn’t think of it this way at first, but increasingly I wondered whether he really believed we had wronged him. I had many questions: Was there something he believed would have been achieved by his carrying the red flag? Would he have stayed and made the speech if

  we had let him carry the red flag? It troubled me. I had to consider whether the price he had set for telling what

  we all knew to be a historical truth was that he be allowed to lead the march.

  That incident remained between us. He never volunteered an explanation and I did not seek him out to give one, though the story I heard placed him in the role of victim who along with Romesh and Soogrim had been excluded from the march by those of us who wanted to see it only as an African thing.

  His brother-in-law Doon was gleeful at what he chose to interpret as our lack of regard for Manick. “They spit you out like a plum seed,” Doon tell him. “That is what you get from them.”

  Doon was a strong supporter of Mr. Bissoon and the Democratic Party. He had erected in his yard a c
luster of jhandis. In his mechanic shop, his radio was always on the station playing Indian music, at volume not only to allow him to hear, but for all around to know that he was listening.

  What effect Doon’s observation had on Manick, I do not know. When I returned to Cascadu after Nelson Island, he had moved from the district.

  The Doubles Man

  Manick left his job as a checker and for a time more or less managed a hardware store an uncle of his had opened in Curepe. While there, he started a correspondence course in law from Wolsey Hall in the UK. He joined a cricket club in Tunupuna, where hearing the favorable comments on his playing encouraged him to put more effort into his game and he was called up for trials for North Trinidad, though by then his best days had gone, but he wondered what he would have accomplished had he started out in the savannah earlier. What would have happen if his father had let him out earlier and he didn’t have the cow to graze? If he was free to play cricket like Franklyn, how would Cascadu have looked at him?

  “You woulda been our hero. Like the great spin bowler, Sonny Ramadhin,” Doon tell him, in a tone that left him unsure whether Doon was commending him or mamaguying him.

  Our hero? That was not the answer Manick was looking for. But he didn’t tell Doon nothing.

  Manick left the job in Curepe and returned to Cascadu. He bought a secondhand van and went into the business of transporting household items, beds, fridges, and later he bought chairs and tents and tables which he rented out for weddings and parties. The old cricket team had ceased to function and his business begin to claim him and for a time he turned his attention to his nephews, Romesh and Sunil, Doon’s two sons. On weekends he went over to the house of his sister and brother-in-law Doon with bat and pads and wickets. And he started.

  He showed them how to bat, the various strokes. But he also spoke to his sister about their diet, about their freedom, their self-confidence. Seeing how strict she and Doon were with them, he sought to intervene: “Allow them to break a glass, to walk inside without wiping their foot at the door. Let your children branch out, let them go, don’t hold them back, yes, see ’bout the shop, the food, the education, see ’bout the cow,” he said, remembering his own childhood, “but set them free.” And for a few months he was very attentive to them, buying balls, giving them the benefit of his experience as a cricketer, batting the balls away from them and having them run from one side of the yard to the next, pick up the ball and hurl it back at him, teaching them to watch the ball as it was released from the bowler’s arm, requiring them to tell him which way it was spinning, showing them how to move their front foot to get to the pitch of the ball, how to point the elbow, how to grip firmly the left hand.

  “You go kill them fellars,” Doon said, referring to his sons.

  “Nah, man.”

  “Yes, you go kill them. With all that running.”

  Now, after some time, whenever he went over to Doon’s the boys were not available. They were either inside the house doing home lessons or in the yard helping their father fix a car, since by then Doon, who had learned his trade by being apprenticed to the town’s mechanic Freddie, had established a shop in his yard and even on a Sunday the boys would be tinkering with one of the cars left there. Believing that Doon had agreed with his Indian cricketing star project and was happy that his sons were first to benefit from his coaching, Manick complained to him about the unavailability of the boys, only to discover that Doon had other ideas for them.

  “Doctor and lawyer,” Doon said.

  And, as if to justify his decision, he said, “You feel you could just practice and go out there and beat people? You need self-confidence. What we need is an Indian Prime Minister to give Indians the self-confidence to make us feel a part of this nation. Come with us and work for the Democratic Party and elect Mr. Bissoon as Prime Minister.”

  Manick took his plan to another level. He offered his services to the schools in the area, the Hindu school, the Muslim school, the Presbyterian school. He decided to offer prizes, to give away bats and balls. To honor his generosity, the schools invited him to address the children. He told them about Sonny Ramadhin and Rohan Kanhai, Garfield Sobers, Viv Richards and Alvin Kallicharran and other great batsmen, how widely they were respected, how they belonged to all the people. “You can be that too.” He told them about practice, and another idea he had picked up from reading books on coaching: “Visualize,” he said to them. “See yourself at Lord’s,” he said, remembering Franklyn.

  He roped in some of the Settlement players as coaches. Whenever there was a Test Match in the Oval, he organized the hiring of a bus to take the boys to the cricket. He carried on with such enthusiasm that he came to be known in all the schools and cricket grounds in the constituency.

  “Come out into the open, let loose, compete. We have done well in business, not by just hanging back but by going out and competing, and now we have to compete in other areas. Some of you may not like cricket, but it have other sports.” He gave support to sports in general, karate, weightlifting, and boxing. Everything counted. And when a girl at one of the schools asked, “What about us?” he went to the schools, he talked to the teachers. Why were Indian girls not playing netball, volleyball, cricket, athletics? Why were Indian girls not playing? It was as a result of one of his speeches that he was invited to be a judge in the beauty contest to select Miss India Trinidad that would bring to his attention the startling beauty of Petra Ramnarine who was parading as Miss Delhi. As soon as he saw her, he set his mind on making her his wife. He bribed the organizers to let him give a prize and allow him to crown the queen who he was sure would be she and indeed it was. Miss Delhi first beating out Miss Uttar Pradesh and Miss Bombay respectively.

  He was so carried away by the opportunity to speak in her presence that he became extravagant and his words ended up in the newspapers under the headline

  Indian Businessman Says

  We Don’t Want No India in Trinidad

  “What we want more than a Miss India in Trinidad is an Indian Miss Trinidad and Tobago, someone to represent the whole nation.” And he used the occasion once again to plead with the audience, to “send out your girl-children, let them loose, don’t hold them back.”

  Mr. Bissoon demanded to know what place he had in mind to let them loose into. “The Creole bacchanal? That is where you want them to go?”

  Manick compounded matters further in an oblique reply to Mr. Bissoon at a school function at a Hindu school that won at cricket at primary-school level for the first time: “We have to go out into the wider community. We have to go out into the Creole world like our foods, like roti and doubles, foods that had become national dishes. When people eating them, the last thing they think about is that it is an Indian that make them.”

  It was this speech that was taken up by a media happy to have an Indian openly challenging Mr. Bissoon on racial unity. But even more than that the idea was made the subject of a chutney song on doubles sung by Soogrim nephew Baldeo:

  Doubles in trouble they don’t know my name

  Doubles isn’t only Indian food again

  Creole like hot pepper, anchar the same

  Doubles in the nation not Indian food again

  I went by my boujee, boy she in pain

  I is not a doctor, girl don’t complain

  Doubles isn’t only Indian food again

  I want you remember doubles is the nation, not only the name.

  It was a big hit, made bigger still when Baldeo persuaded him to accompany him at the chutney competition, where he was introduced on stage with a bicycle with a large wooden box on the handle, portraying a doubles vendor. It won the competition and catapulted Baldeo into stardom, the tune popular not only with the regular chutney crowd but played in dancehalls all over the land. Manick benefited from the popularity of the song and it was due to all that publicity that the Hard Wuck Party chose him over Nan King to be its candidate for the County Council election. Immediately I thought of the speech he w
as to have made in 1970. I thought of telling him I was sorry, but he had responsibility too. I was glad he had another opportunity to deliver it. If he delivered the same speech that was reported to me, then I was ready to apologize to him and do what I could to get him elected.

  When I did get to hear him at one of the Hard Wuck Party meetings, the speech I heard was different to the 1970 one:

  Brothers and Sisters, he began. We the people of Indian origin were brought here to save the plantation from ruin and we did a great job for the society . . . I listened for the part about changing the society, about joining the resistance and turning it into construction. But he spoke about the need to access the professionalism produced by all in the society and to elect our best representatives in the same way we picked the best cricketers for our cricket team, without reference to their ethnic origin.