The Writer and the World (32 page)

The commune had ended swiftly. Jamal survived it by more than a year. On February 7, 1972, five weeks after the death of Benson, Joseph Skerritt, a renegade recruit, was brought down to the commune from his mother’s house in Belmont. A hole was prepared for him the next morning, and just after midday he was chopped on the neck and buried in the position in which he fell, sprawling, legs apart and slightly raised.

Two days later the commune went on an excursion to Sans Souci bay in the north-east, and Steve Yeates was drowned. A length of bamboo attached to a rope was thrown out to him but he didn’t grasp at it. Did he give a grimace of pain before he went under? Or did he grin? Stanley Abbott said: “Steve gave his life.” So it ended for him, after the thirteen years in England, after the two years of waiting in Trinidad, after the solitary night walks around the Queen’s Park Savannah in Port of Spain and the coded messages from the leader in London. After the commune had lasted exactly a year and a day, after the two killings, Muhammed Akbar, Supreme Captain of the Fruit of Islam, Lieutenant Colonel of the Black Liberation Army, was swept out to sea. Nine days later, on February 19, Malik and his family flew to Guyana. That evening the empty commune house burned down.

The lease had expired on February 9. Malik, unwilling or unable to exercise his option to buy, had, after a long wrangle with his landlords, received notice to quit. He had gone wild when he had heard, Stanley Abbott said. And to Abbott himself, after the two killings and the drowning of Steve Yeates, the news that Malik didn’t own the house, owned
nothing, came as a surprise. He felt “ashamed” and “deeply hurt.” He had given Malik a book on leadership; and when he saw Malik reading this book, after they had discussed the notice to quit, and after they had discussed their “needs,” Abbott felt like “going outside for the cutlass” and killing Malik. But then he thought of Malik’s children and Malik’s pregnant wife.

Abbott told Malik he was tired and needed a rest. Malik gave him a hundred dollars, twenty pounds; and, two days before Malik and his family went to Guyana, Abbott went to Tobago. He stayed with relatives and didn’t try to hide. He spent four sleepless nights after he heard that the house had burned down. On February 24—the body of Gale Benson being disinterred, Malik hiding in a darkened hotel room in Guyana—Abbott flew back to Trinidad. From the airport he took a taxi to Port of Spain. He told the driver to drive slowly. He and the driver talked. He told the driver about the commune. The taxi stopped a little way from police headquarters, and the driver shook Abbott by the hand. Abbott walked to the main entrance of the Victorian Gothic building, spoke to the police sentry at the top of the steps and passed inside. It was a few minutes before midnight.

A
YEAR LATER
the Malik house was as the fire had left it. The garden was overgrown, the grass straggly and brown. But the drought had drawn out bright colour from every flowering plant, and bougainvillaea was purple and pink-red on the wire-mesh fence. Beside the peach-coloured hibiscus hedge in the north-west, the hole of Joe Skerritt was dry and cleaned out and shallow, as without drama as that other hole, on the ravine bank. The cover of the septic tank had been dislodged: a dead frog floated. A moraine of litter flowed out from the back door of the house onto the concrete patio between the blackened main house and the untouched servants’ quarters. Solidified litter—many burned copies of Malik’s autobiography, newspapers and magazines burned and sodden and dried into solid charred cakes. The kitchen was black; the fire was fiercest here. The ceilings everywhere had been burned off and showed the naked corrugated-iron roof, a sheet of which hung down perpendicularly in the living room. All the woodwork was charred. But already a green wild vine, a single long green vine, had run from the over-grown garden onto the gritty terrazzo of the living room.

A murderer can become celebrated and his survival can become a cause. A murdered person can be forgotten. Joe Skerritt was not important, and he is remembered, as a person, only in his mother’s house in Belmont. A large unframed pencil portrait is pinned to the wall of the small living room. There are framed photographs of his more successful brother, Anthony (in sea scout uniform), who is in Canada, and of his sister, who was for many years a nurse in England; on a glass cabinet there are the sporting cups won by Michael, another brother. The house is shabby; Mrs. Skerritt does lunches for some schoolchildren, but money is short. She looks after her mother, who is senile and shrunken, skin and bones, with thin grey hair tied up tight and sitting on the skull like a coarse knotted handkerchief. Mrs. Skerritt ceaselessly relives that morning when Malik came for her son. He called her “Tantie” and she looked up and saw “that red man.”

The streets of Belmont are still full of Joe Skerritts. The walls are still scrawled with the easy threats and easy promises of Black Power. The streets are still full of “hustlers” and “scrunters,” words that glamourize and seem to give dispensation to those who beg and steal. Another Malik is possible. At every stage of his career he was supported by some kind of jargon and could refer his actions to some kind of revolutionary ideal.

Malik’s career proves how much of Black Power—away from its United States source—is jargon, how much a sentimental hoax. In a place like Trinidad, racial redemption is as irrelevant for the Negro as for everybody else. It obscures the problems of a small independent country with a lopsided economy, the problems of a fully “consumer” society that is yet technologically untrained and without the intellectual means to comprehend the deficiency. It perpetuates the negative, colonial politics of protest. It is, in the end, a deep corruption: a wish to be granted a dispensation from the pains of development, an almost religious conviction that oppression can be turned into an asset, race into money. While the dream of redemption lasts, Negroes will continue to exist only that someone might be their leader. Redemption requires a redeemer; and a redeemer, in these circumstances, cannot but end like the Emperor Jones: contemptuous of the people he leads, and no less a victim, seeking an illusory personal emancipation. In Trinidad, as in every black West Indian island, the too easily awakened sense of oppression and the theory of the enemy point to the desert of Haiti.

Malik, Jamal, Skerritt, Steve Yeates, Stanley Abbott, Benson: they
seem purely contemporary, but they played out an old tragedy. If the tragedy of Joe Skerritt and Steve Yeates and Stanley Abbott is contained in O’Neill’s 1920 drama of the false redeemer, the tragedy of Gale Benson is contained in an African story of 1897 by Conrad, which curiously complements it: “An Outpost of Progress,” a story of the congruent corruptions of colonizer and colonized, which can also be read as a parable about simple people who think they can separate themselves from the crowd. Benson was as shallow and vain and parasitic as many middle-class dropouts of her time; she became as corrupt as her master; she was part of the corruption by which she was destroyed. And Malik’s wife was right. Benson was, more profoundly than Malik or Jamal, a fake. She took, on her journey away from home, the assumptions, however little acknowledged, not only of her class and race and the rich countries to which she belonged, but also of her ultimate security.

Some words from the Conrad story can serve as her epitaph; and as a comment on all those who helped to make Malik, and on those who continue to simplify the world and reduce other men—not only the Negro—to a cause, the people who substitute doctrine for knowledge and irritation for concern, the revolutionaries who visit centres of revolution with return air tickets, the hippies, the people who wish themselves on societies more fragile than their own, all those people who in the end do no more than celebrate their own security.

One of the last letters Benson received was from her father, Captain Leonard Plugge, who lived in California but continued to use writing paper headed with his Belgravia address. With this letter Captain Plugge
sent a translation he had done—typed out on the Belgravia paper and photocopied—of some lines by Lamartine:

A
BBOTT
was given twenty years for the murder of Joe Skerritt. Malik was sentenced to death by hanging. Both Malik and Abbott appealed against their sentences. And it was only after their appeals had been dismissed—and after the above account had been written—that the trial for the Gale Benson murder took place.

Five men were accused of the murder. But only two were actually tried: Abbott again, and an Indian motorcar salesman named Chadee, who had been hoping to sell twelve cars to Malik and had then become mixed up with the Malik group. Three of the accused couldn’t be tried. Steve Yeates was dead, drowned at Sans Souci, his body never recovered; Kidogo, Jamal’s American “co-worker,” was in the United States and couldn’t be found; Malik was already under sentence of death. So Malik was never tried for the murder of Benson. It was Abbott who had to go through the calvary of two murder trials.

The murder of Benson was decided on by both Malik and Jamal. It was at the time when the two men were working on one another and exciting one another and producing “reams of literature.” Jamal was writing his exalted, off-the-mark “nigger” nonsense about Malik; and Malik, in his novel, with this Jamal-given idea of his power (and no
longer a man on the run, as in his previous fiction), was settling scores with the English middle class, turning the fascination of “Sir Harold” and “Lena Boyd-Richardson” into terror.

This was a literary murder, if ever there was one. Writing led both men there: for both of them, uneducated but clever, hustlers with the black cause always to hand, operating always among the converted or half-converted, writing had for too long been a public relations exercise, a form of applauded lie, fantasy. And in Arima it was a fantasy of power that led both men to contemplate, from their different standpoints, the act of murder. Jamal, when he understood that Trinidad wasn’t the United States, began to feel that in an island where the majority of the population was black he didn’t “look good” with a white woman at his side. And Benson, English and middle class, was just the victim Malik needed: his novel began to come to life.

Malik summoned Abbott from London. He sent a one-word letter: “Come.” And Abbott took the first flight out, travelling first to New York and then down to Trinidad. Malik and Steve Yeates met him at the airport and drove him the few miles to the Malik house in Christina Gardens in Arima. Malik’s wife was there; the Malik children were asleep. And there Abbott met Jamal for the first time. Later Abbott was taken across the road to the other house, the one Jamal and Benson were renting; it was where he was to stay. Abbott didn’t see Benson there; she had gone to Guyana to try to raise money for Jamal, but was going to be back in a few days. (Benson’s movements at this time are not absolutely clear. Her papers were destroyed the day she was killed.)

The four men—Abbott, Malik, Steve Yeates and Jamal—talked through the night. At one stage Abbott asked about The People’s Store. This was Malik’s first Black Power “commune” project in Trinidad; and Abbott had earlier in the year worked on it for a month, helping with the painting and the polishing. Abbott said he wanted to see what the place looked like, and the four men drove the twenty miles or so to Carenage, where the store was.

While they drove—in the Sunday-morning darkness—Malik said they now had the best working group in the universe, that they were going places, and were the chosen ones. Abbott thought that Malik was talking to impress Jamal. “With Jamal,” Abbott said, “he kept on with this mind-destroying talk.” And Abbott was disappointed by what he saw of the Carenage house, on which he and Yeates and others had worked so
hard just a few months before. “I saw the house and saw three men—Negroes—living there. I said the house was dirty and it appeared the men were neglected. It looked as though Michael had just placed these men there and neglected them.” They drove back to Arima and Christina Gardens. It was now light; and as though to make up for the Carenage disappointment, Malik showed Abbott the improvements he had made in the Arima house and yard.

The men at Carenage had looked neglected. And that was how Abbott soon began to feel. After the drama of the urgent summons to Trinidad, it seemed that there was nothing important for him to do. He was made to do various yard jobs. He cut bamboo grass for the goats Malik kept and made long journeys to get the hibiscus Malik said the goats needed; he mowed the lawn; he washed the car and the jeep; and he was sent out by Malik to work without payment on the farm that supplied a gallon of milk a day to the Malik family and commune. Abbott said he wanted to be released, to go and live at his mother’s. Malik refused.

It was Malik’s custom to wake Abbott up at seven in the morning. One morning—two days before Christmas, and less than a fortnight after he had arrived—Abbott saw blood on Malik’s mouth and beard. “I told him his mouth was bleeding. What had happened? He said they had killed a calf on the Lourenço farm that morning, and he was drinking blood. I felt scared and sick.” And there was soon another reason for fear. “I heard him speak to Hakim Jamal before the Christmas. He told him to send for somebody in the United States whom he, Jamal, could trust. At that point I walked off, because they were not talking to me. A couple days later this American man, Kidogo, arrived. I again beseeched Michael to allow me to go home, now that he had someone else around to help him. He told me Kidogo was not there for manual work. He told me Kidogo was a hired killer. He elaborated that Kidogo had killed police and all sorts in Boston in the United States, and for me to shut up from now on.”