Caribbean (5 page)

When Karúku and three others left the sunrise side one morning to explore their newfound island, they moved stealthily and with intense purpose, and after they had probed through the forests for some hours without spotting any signs of habitation, they began to ascend the high mountains that filled the center of the island. Night overtook them before they had seen anything, but this did not distress them, for they were accustomed to sleeping in the open, and for food, they carried with them fragments of fish and meal of which they would eat sparingly, for they could not anticipate who or what they might encounter before they returned to their own people.

On the afternoon of the second day they came upon a sight that delighted them: it was a clearing in the forest and they concluded that it must have been made purposefully by human beings, for there grew in a consciously designed pattern the tuberous manioc, a major
source of food. “They’re here!” Karúku cried, and the way in which he uttered the words betrayed not joy in finding that other humans were on the island, but grim satisfaction that his group would soon once more be in combat with a new foe for the possession of a new land.

For the rest of the day the spies moved cautiously, always westward, until they reached a high spot from which they could look down upon the village they had been seeking. There it lay in the sunlight of late afternoon, a collection of well-made huts to be occupied when the present owners were dispossessed, canoes already built, fields close at hand in which foodstuffs could be grown. But there was also the placid sea, so much gentler than the wild ocean to the east, and as the sun set on that first evening, the Caribs were convinced that they had come upon a paradise much more desirable than any they had known along the Orinoco or elsewhere on their journey north.

“We shall go back,” Karúku said, “collect our men and return to take this village.” As he uttered these commands he was looking down at the hut surrounded by varicolored croton, and to himself he said: That one for me, and with purposeful strides, as if he could hardly wait to assault the sleeping village, he led his men back to their dark side of the island.

Bakámu and his wife, because of the valuable skills they possessed, enjoyed special positions in their village, he as an athlete of unusual ability and strength, she as the keeper of a secret that accounted for much of the tribe’s good fortune.

Tiwánee understood the ways of manioc, source of four-fifths of the stuff her people ate, and one of the world’s most remarkable good-evil foods. Like potatoes, yams and beets, manioc produced under the surface of the earth a bulbous growth which when rooted out and shredded yielded a potatolike food that looked and smelled most inviting. However, in this stage of its existence, it contained among its fibers a thick, deadly poisonous juice, and manioc culture required that this juice be extracted, and totally, before the residue could be processed into an excellent flour from which a nutritious and highly satisfying bread could be baked.

Long before Tiwánee was born the ancient ones sought a solution to the problem: How can the poisonous juices of the manioc be
removed and their deadly power exorcised? The answer came from a clever Arawak woman, who while huddling in the jungle had seen a boa constrictor grasp a shrieking rodent in its cavernous jaws and slowly swallow it, still kicking. She then saw the great snake digest its heavy burden by tightening and relaxing its powerful belly muscles until all bones were broken and absorption could begin. Cried she: “If I had the help of that powerful snake, I could squeeze the poison from my manioc,” and this idea so possessed her that she brooded for weeks and months as to how she might make herself a snake, and finally she found the solution: I’ll gather the best and strongest palm fronds and the thinnest vines and weave me a long, thin, narrow snake whose sides will compress and relax like his, and by that means I’ll expel the poisons.

She did this, fabricating an imitation snake called a matapi, some ten feet long, very narrow, very strong, and into its insatiable maw she crammed all the manioc she and her neighbors had grated that day. And now her genius manifested itself, for after she had squeezed the snake by hand for some time she discovered two facts: the plan worked, for the poisonous juice did spew forth; but it was murderously difficult work: I’d go mad squeezing like this all day!

So she constructed a device which enabled her to apply such extreme pressure on the snake that she could extract the poisonous juice with relative ease. First she attached the top of her ten-foot snake to a rafter some dozen feet above her. Then, using a pile of rocks for a fulcrum, she converted a long plank into a child’s seesaw, with two little girls at one end, a heavy woman perched on the other. To the seesaw she attached the tail end of the snake, placing a large wooden bowl below to catch the liquid. When the woman weighed down her end of the plank, the tension on the woven sides of the snake expelled the poisons, then the woman ran forward toward the fulcrum, and the two girls were able to pull down their end and the snake relaxed. And so it went.

When the game ended, the dried contents of the imitation snake were ready for baking. This manioc flour was called cassava; from it, big, flat breadlike pancakes were made, and on it the Arawaks thrived.

In Tiwánee’s village she was one of the women responsible for processing the manioc, and it was thanks to her ever-inquisitive mind as she performed this menial task that a bold innovation was introduced. In all the ages before she was born, the poisonous liquor expelled from the make-believe snake had been discarded as both
useless and dangerous, but one day she noticed that when she inadvertently left some of the liquid in a clay bowl standing in bright sunlight, the intense heat caused it to change color to a rich golden brown, which looked so inviting that she told her husband: “Anything that looks so good ought to taste good, too.”

“Tiwánee!” he shouted. “Don’t be foolish!” but despite his pleading she dipped a finger into the altered substance and gingerly brought it to her mouth. As she had expected, that first exploratory taste was reassuring: salty, sharp, with an invitation to try more, which she did, without apparent danger to herself. In succeeding days she kept tasting her brew, finding it increasingly good, and at last, without advising her husband of the bold step she was about to take, she gulped down such a generous amount of her new substance that had it been the original poison, she would surely have died. She didn’t. In fact, she felt extremely well, and after two days had passed without ill effect she told Bakámu: “It’s safe and tastes good.”

Soon all the women in the village were keeping pots of the once-poisonous liquor quietly bubbling at the back of their fires and tossing
into the brew bits of vegetable and fish and even agouti meat on the rare occasions when one of those succulent little animals was caught. When sharp and biting peppers were added to the mixture, a fine, tasty and nourishing stew resulted, all thanks to Tiwánee, who by popular acclaim became the seer of the community, not in competition with the old shaman who propitiated the spirits but as the protector of the hearth where men and women were fed and revived.

When this accolade was bestowed upon her, she became a changed woman. She grew noticeably wiser, as if powers long dormant were suddenly codified and whipped into shape, as if knowledge which she had been quietly accumulating mysteriously blossomed to produce new and totally unexpected fruit, and she was recognized as a leader. Throughout the known world this miracle was duplicated: an ordinary man or woman would be elected to some office, and during the conduct of its business would mysteriously become able enough to discharge the duties of that office, so that in the end someone who might originally have been a rather common person developed into a genius.

Having undergone such a metamorphosis, Tiwánee now found little pleasure in her exalted position, for although she was pleased that she had brought her village wise leadership, she realized that with her new position came new responsibilities, and she continued to brood about the possible dangers that might ensue if strangers had indeed settled upon the opposite side of her island.

One of her duties as a leader in the village was to make the decision as to when it was time to plant the manioc. But because this was of such extreme importance to the village, a matter of life and death, that decision could not be left to her alone; responsibility was shared with the old shaman whose counsel had kept the spirits of the other world favorably inclined toward this village. Fortunately, Tiwánee and the old man cooperated easily, he taking charge of all in the other world, she of the sun, the rainfall and the coming of summer in this, and between them they kept the manioc maturing just when it was most needed. Had they in any way been at odds, their people would have suffered, and they knew it.

On a propitious day before the very hot spell arrived with its threat of hurricanes, the two protectors of the village agreed that the time had come when manioc cuttings should be planted, and as soon as the shaman cried: “The planting can begin!” Bakámu took over the leadership of everything. Dashing along the waterfront, he shouted
joyously: “Ball game! To celebrate the manioc!” and everyone hastened to the flat playing field whose boundaries were defined by large boulders with flattish faces planted like an informal wall around the edges of a rectangular field with clearly marked goal lines at each far end. Mysteriously, these ball courts of the ancient Arawaks and their cousins the Maya to the west were similar in size to the fields that Europeans and Americans centuries later would choose for their soccer, football, rugby and lacrosse fields, some eighty yards long by thirty wide, as if some inner measuring system of the human body had cried through all the centuries: “A man can run, when others are hammering at him, about this far and no farther,” and the fields in all these heavy sports conformed to these dimensions.

The one at Bakámu’s village was located on a majestic spot parallel to the seashore, so carefully oriented that neither team would enjoy any advantage from the changing positions of the sun. It was a splendid green field, with grass chopped low and protected to the east by mountains clothed in purple. It had witnessed games of great excitement and notable performance, games that lived in memory, and some of the best had occurred at times like this, when the entire village came out to celebrate the replenishment of human life. In this village, at least, the great ball game was a thing of zest and wild cheering and victory for everyone, even the vanquished, who knew they had suffered defeat in a joyous cause.

The game required a large rubber ball, but the islands had no rubber trees, and communication between them by canoe was almost unheard of, except for Bakámu’s tentative explorations north and south. Rubber trees grew only in the jungles on lands of continental magnitude, but yet rubber balls on which the near-religious sport of the region depended did circulate even to the most remote islands. It was as if these Arawaks knew what was important in their lives and cherished as national treasures any rubber balls which came their way. At any rate, this village had had a series of such balls, each arriving as its predecessor was about to expire, and each was kept in the protection of the shaman, for it was a treasure beyond mere value: it was almost the soul of the village, for without it the wild games could not proceed, and in their absence the manioc plants might die, and the people, too.

In Bakámu’s village the game was played by two teams of four men each; in other villages with somewhat larger fields there might be as many as six, but on this smaller field four seemed about right.
Each team had a goal to defend, but every member was free to roam the entire field, so long as he was always ready to scamper back to defend his own goal. The aim was to drive the ball across the other team’s goal line, and whenever play approached one of the goals, the screams of the spectators lining the fields grew intense.

Hands could not be used. If one touched the ball, the player was sent to the sidelines, for the ball must be struck primarily off the shoulder or the hip; not even elbows could be used, nor heads nor heels, but even under these limitations the players became wonderfully adept in moving the ball around. Since the strategies of the game demanded that players be prepared to throw themselves on the ground to obstruct opponents or dive for the ball, men wore knee and elbow guards, always on the right joints, but the captain of each team wore in addition a remarkable piece of equipment. It was a huge stone ring, unbroken in its circle but with an opening just wide enough for him to step into it, then bring it up over his knees and wide hips until it rested easily about his middle. Since it weighed twenty-four pounds, it gave extraordinary power when he struck the ball either with it directly or with his weighted hip.

When the teams lined up, the two captains, each with a stone circle about his waist, obviously located themselves as goalkeepers, sending any ball which came their way far back in the opposite direction with a tremendous blow.