Caribbean (139 page)
Authors: James A. Michener
Under heavy questioning from the students, he defended his thesis that the best run of the Caribbean islands, all criteria considered, were the French: “We have a style suited to islands … an inborn love of freedom but also a desire to make something of ourselves. We’re pragmatic people. We handle race problems better than either the English or the Americans …”
“How about the Spanish?” someone asked, and he said, whimsically but truthfully: “The dear old Spaniards, they never handle anything well, race or anything else. They just go banging down the road of civilization like a car with one drooping fender. But dammit, they always seem to reach their destination at just about the same time that we and the English do.”
He emphasized the point that others had made about the Caribbean: it would probably be better if all the islands had remained under one European ownership rather than falling into scattered hands as they did, but he conceded that because Spain had been so lax in her custodianship, the scattering of interests became inevitable.
Before this easy generalization became too attractive to the students, Thérèse raised a ticklish question: “Would one religion for the region have helped?” and he replied: “Yes. In the Caribbean, in Europe, in the world.”
“The Catholic, perhaps?” and he said: “Especially the Catholic. By and large, it’s the easiest religion for a nation-state to live with.”
Thérèse pressed: “You refer to the great accomplishments in Haiti? It’s Catholic,” and Lanzerac replied, with an ingratiating Gallic shrug: “You win some, you lose some.”
On the final morning the group rented horses, and Lanzerac and Thérèse led the students on a long canter to the east, following the paths taken by Paul Lanzerac and Solange Vauclain in 1794, before the terror broke, and they called to each other in French as Paul and
Solange must have done on their daring rides. The earth and the sky and the memories became so French that Thérèse was almost persuaded to believe that even though France had made a complete mess of Haiti, which still bore the scars of her mismanagement, it might truly have been better for the Caribbean if these civilized men and women had made all the islands integral parts of homeland France. But that night when they returned to the
Galante
she asked Lanzerac: “Have you ever heard about the terrible international debt that France hung around the neck of Haiti at the granting of independence in 1804?” and he said: “Never heard of it,” and she said: “A Haitian historian told the truth: ‘We spent most of our energy in the nineteenth century repaying France, and our nation fell so far behind in all social services that it could never catch up.’ ” And Lanzerac said: “When I get back to Paris, I’ll ask for a report on that.”
None of the students who spent those two days in old Point-à-Pitre would ever again feel that the Caribbean was a Spanish Lake, or an English one, either, for it also contained a powerful French coloring, which made it even more interesting.
As the
Galante
steamed south from Guadeloupe an informal committee of women students accosted Thérèse with a justified complaint: “Wherever we stop, the stories are about men. Your ancestor Vavak, the murderer Hugues. Weren’t there any women on these islands?”
Thérèse thought it odd that the question should come at this propitious moment, for to the west, adorned in sunset glow, rose the majestic peaks of France’s other island, Martinique, and she told the women: “Fetch the others and I’ll tell you about two girls a little younger than you who went to visit a cave on that island in the 1770s.” When some men students wandered by she invited them to listen, so as night fell, most of her class were either sitting cross-legged before her or lounging about the deck where they could hear.
“Two centuries ago on that island lived a daydreaming girl of noble ancestry with a name like a poem, Marie-Joséphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, and she had as her bosom friend a girl who was an even more confirmed dreamer, Aimée Dubec de Rivery. One afternoon, summoning their courage, they climbed a hill near their homes to visit a sorceress who lived in a cave. It must have been a mysterious affair, with incantations and rituals calculated to impress young girls,
but suddenly the sorceress stopped in midflight, stared in openmouthed amazement at the two, and said in a powerful voice they had not heard before: ‘You will each become a queen! You will live in palaces surrounded by a magnificent court. You will reign over entire nations and men will bow before you, because you will have majestic power.’ The strange voice stopped. The sorceress resumed speaking as before, and when the girls asked what the interruption had been, she affected not to know what she had said, but she assured them: ‘Whatever it was, it was the truth, for I did not say it. But since the ancient ones spoke through me, you can rely upon it.’
“As the impressionable girls returned to their homes, each looked at the other and burst out laughing: ‘You a queen! Palaces and glittering festivities!’ The idea was so ridiculous they told no one of their visit, but in the long years ahead, separated by thousands of miles, they must often have reflected on that strange session in the cave.”
“What happened to them?”
“Does the name Beauharnais mean anything to you?” When no one responded, she said: “The Tascher girl married a handsome young nobleman, Alexandre de Beauharnais, when he visited the island, and he took her back to France. He didn’t amount to much and was guillotined during the Revolution, leaving her a widow in perilous times.”
“What happened?” one of the girls asked, and all leaned forward to hear the conclusion of this tantalizing story.
“She called herself Joséphine, became known in Paris, was thrown into prison, and was on the verge of being guillotined herself when she caught the eye of a young officer with a bright future. His name? Napoleon Bonaparte. He fell desperately in love with her, married her, and she became, as the cavewoman had predicted, his empress.”
There was silence as the young people studied the gradually vanishing island. “And what of Aimée?”
“A French ship on which she was sailing in the Mediterranean was captured by Algerian pirates. She was whisked off to Constantinople and sold as a slave. One of the sultan’s eunuchs, seeking replenishments for the royal harem, saw her, bought her for his master, and she was so entrancing, so wise and witty, that she made the sultan her emotional slave, and he made her the equivalent of his queen.” When some of the young women gasped, Thérèse added: “Romantic things can happen on the islands … especially French islands.”
One young woman, already beginning to dream, asked: “Could
what you’ve just told us possibly be true?” and Thérèse replied: “I’m like the old woman in the cave. Everything I said is true.”
Almost as if the organizers of the trip wished the tourists to see in rapid sequence the best of the French followed by the best of the British, the
Galante
deviated slightly to visit next the placid, gentle island of Barbados, treasured by stormbound Canadians, who sent two or three big airplanes down to Bridgetown every day filled with tourists seeking respite from the rigors of Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. As a representative of the Swedish Lines remarked to Thérèse: “If you closed Canadian airports for one week, Barbados would perish.”
A special lecturer joined them for the next three-day leg of the journey. He was Major Reginald Oldmixon, descendant of a famous Royalist family who had led a minor uprising in favor of the Divine Right of Kings after the beheading of Charles I in 1649, and at his first session with the travelers he made his apologies: “Barbados has a black governor general, a fine black prime minister, a black chief law officer, and black heads of most of the departments. I’d probably do a more representative job if I were black, but I do like to talk, and my family has been on the island since before any part of the United States was settled, so I do know something about the jolly old place.” He laughed and said: “And to make things perfectly clear, my immediate boss is a black who can beat me at tennis.”
He proved a great hit with the younger passengers and especially with Thérèse’s students, for he had a lively wit, an aptitude for making himself the butt of jokes, and an agenda which he jolly well intended to further: “My job is to make you interested in Barbados and to feel at ease on our glorious island. It’s always been popularly known as Little England, and we’re proud to confess that the name has been appropriately awarded. When the rascals in the homeland chopped off the head of our king, we on Barbados said: ‘You can’t do that!’ and declared war on the whole empire, such as it was at the time. We still feel that way. If things go bonkers in England, you can always find refuge in Barbados. Population two hundred and sixty thousand, like a small American city, area a hundred and sixty-six square miles, about like one of your larger counties, quality of life, among the best in the world.”
By the time the
Galante
reached Bridgetown, the pleasant port
on the western side of the island, nearly everyone aboard was prepared to like Barbados, and when the tour buses set forth with the regular passengers, the occupants saw an island which in no way disappointed. The transition from a sugar culture to one of mixed enterprises had been easily, almost graciously made, and since Barbados had never had any spare land, when the end of slavery came, there had been no hiding place for disgruntled free men to run to, as there had been on the other islands; the blacks had to stay put and work things out with their former masters. There had been the standard uprisings, some of them quite vicious, but they had neither lingered nor festered, so that in the end Barbados found itself with about the best island relationships in the Caribbean.
“The secret,” one black bus driver told his wide-eyed passengers who were seeing a peaceful island at work, “is that each of us intends one day to make his fortune and go live like a toff in England.” Proudly he added: “Besides, our little island has produced the greatest all-round cricket player the world has ever seen, the great Sir Gary Sobers, and believe me, that counts for something.”
Thérèse’s students met with government officials in an instructive seminar which told them much about the islands they had already seen or would be seeing shortly. The two principal speakers were Major Oldmixon and a black professor of history from the Barbados branch of the University of the West Indies. Their topic? The abortive effort in 1958 to unite all the British islands in one grand confederation, with one citizenship, one money system, one federal government and one common destiny. Oldmixon spoke first, and at times he was so deeply moved by the tragedy in which he had participated, tears almost came to his eyes:
“Every Oldmixon of whom we have record for the past three hundred and fifty years has been staunchly in favor of Federation for the various islands of the Caribbean belonging to Great Britain, and we usually included land areas in the vicinity like British Guiana in South America and British Honduras in Central. In fact, one of my ancestors, Admiral Hector Oldmixon back in Napoleon’s time, was so enthusiastic about it that he went so far as to capture the French island of Guadeloupe to make it eligible to join. He kept it, alas, for only a few weeks.
“Through the years we had a score of abortive attempts to join the islands into one sensible Federation, and from the beginning it was clear that the three moving forces would have to be Barbados, Trinidad and Jamaica. Most money, most people, most advanced ideas and capabilities. So it became an infuriating three-way jigsaw puzzle. When Barbados and Jamaica agreed, Trinidad held back. And when Trinidad and Barbados saw eye to eye, Jamaica played hard to get. The little islands? They always dreamed of Federation and were willing to make real concessions to get it.
“Finally, in January 1958, everything came together, and believe it or not, under careful urging from Britain, Federation was authorized, a site for our capital was agreed upon, a fine location in Trinidad, and in March of that year elections were to be held, and the final distribution of seats indicates the relative importance of the islands: Jamaica, thirty-one, Trinidad, fifteen, Barbados, five. Great idea, grand potential, but I’ll let Professor Charles tell you what happened.”
The black professor told a dismal story, one of regional hope and national despair, in which the personal ambitions of a few exhibitionistic leaders destroyed the hopes of the many:
“In the end it came down to a clash between black leaders, both honors graduates from English universities: Manley, the strong man of Jamaica, Williams, the extremely vain man of Trinidad; and dear old Sir Grantley Adams of Barbados, always striving to make peace between the Big Two. Vanity, vanity! Reconciliation denied, wrong decisions pushed forward. Through all of 1958 this grand design that might have saved this corner of the world hung in the balance, but nevertheless, princess Margaret of England, the one who lost the man she loved, came out and inaugurated the Federation, with Major Oldmixon and me in the crowd cheering.
“What went wrong? For the most insane reasons in the world Manley threatened to take Jamaica out, so Williams had to respond by threatening to take out Trinidad. Our world was threatened, and by 1960 it was crumbling about our ears. People like Oldmixon and me battled to save the concept, but in September 1961, Jamaica held a plebiscite and the vote was
two hundred fifty-six thousand get out, two hundred seventeen thousand stay in, and the whole castle of cards came drifting down.”
Oldmixon coughed, then said: “Men like my family and his tried to get a Federation of Nine functioning, without Jamaica and Trinidad, but lacking mighty Jamaica, nothing was reasonably possible.”
The professor also lamented the loss, but he did have other considerations: “Geography was so against us. If only God had placed that damned Jamaica farther east, it would be in the center of any federation. What’s the problem? Jamaica’s our biggest unit, and it’s only six hundred miles from Miami but twelve hundred from Barbados, much farther than from New York to Kansas City. Maybe the essentials for a federation were never present, maybe these islands will never be able to confederate on anything.”