The Writer and the World (77 page)

On the northern end of the hill, the top of the horseshoe, was the very grand house which was the Governor-General’s residence. It had a wide verandah, stone-flagged where not tiled; a reception room with tall doors, a high timber ceiling elaborately moulded, gilt mirrors and craftsman-made furniture. There, some days later, the Governor-General, a black man, formerly a schoolmaster, a man who now incarnated what was left of the authority of the state of Grenada, witnessed
the swearing-in of the members of his new advisory council. The men swore allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and kissed the Bible.

Legal authority in Grenada still derived its forms from the British Empire. But the most important witnesses that day—apart from the correspondents and the television teams—were General Farris, slender, white-haired, in uniform, commander of the 82nd Airborne, and the man in a blue suit who was the de facto American ambassador, the civilian arm of General Farris’s de facto authority.

In a glass case in the rough little museum in the centre of the town was Britain’s gift to Grenada at the time of independence nine years before: a silver coffee service and twenty-four Wedgwood bone china coffee cups, all laid out on undyed hessian.

The New Jewel Movement had resisted that independence. They had feared Gairy’s excesses in an independent Grenada. The leader of the movement and others had been badly beaten by Gairy’s men during a time of protest. And in another glass case in the museum were souvenirs of that occasion: the leader’s bloodstained sports shirt, the stone that had cracked the leader’s head and left him with double vision.

Violence had indeed come to independent Grenada. Ten years later the leader had been executed by the army he had created. And this time there were no souvenirs. The leader’s body still had not been found.

It was the rainy season in the eastern Caribbean. At dawn the rain clouds rose as fast as smoke above the eastern hill of St. George’s. The sky darkened; the rain poured, feeding the vegetation in the empty rubbled spaces between the eighteenth-century buildings; the sky cleared again. In the late afternoons the golden light, trapped within the curving hill and reflecting off the bay, made all the buildings a rose colour against the dark vegetation and the milky blue eastern sky.

Black helicopters crossed the view, as they had done all day. They hovered for minutes over the civilian prison.

“That’s the military,” an American correspondent said. “Haven’t you been with them before? They like activity.”

T
HERE
was, amazingly, an American “internationalist” worker still on the island. Her name was Michele Gibbs; she was from Chicago. She had been “invited” by the American military to leave Grenada; and she intended to go. She no longer had a cause in Grenada.

She was an attractive brown woman in her late thirties, slender with a small bust, and with unshaved armpits—oddly aggressive, those mats of hair, hard not to look at. Her political cause had been given her at birth, she said: both her parents—her mother a Russian Jew, her father a black man from Texas—had been communists.

The revolutionary black state of Grenada had been a kind of paradise for Michele for three years. She felt she had come home, and she had hoped to live there forever. She had found an apartment on the lower floor of a restored old house on a favoured cliffside spot, just below the Prime Minister’s office. Bougainvillaea shaded her sea-facing front room and her little circular terrace from the afternoon sun. In these conditions, which must have appeared idyllic to someone from Chicago, Michele had served the Grenada revolution, helping with education, doing her revolutionary paintings and writing and publishing her revolutionary poems (handwritten and photo-set).

Now, more than three weeks after the disaster, she was still a little dazed. People were “morally in shock,” she said; they felt they had been “betrayed by their own.” And, speaking of the American invasion, she said that people were “relieved that the situation was taken out of their hands.” All she wanted for herself now was to go “far, far away.”

The communism that had been given to her as a cause had committed her to an almost mystical personal search. In Grenada she had found what she wanted and needed to find; and though among her poems there were some poems of rebuke to someone who appeared to have run out on the revolution, it was not really surprising that Michele’s poems about Grenada were abstract, little more than party slogan-making. Her poems about black life in Detroit were more personal, more concrete, unexpectedly tough, many of the barbs turned inwards. The cause in America had been a kind of pain: it was possible here and there to detect something
like weariness with the life of struggle in America. One of Michele’s longer poems was autobiographical.

Michele had written this poem in Grenada after she had heard that her mother, at the age of seventy-two, had been shot and killed in the United States by a street thief, who might have been black—though the poem didn’t say.

The irony of this death was like the irony of the destruction of Michele’s cause in Grenada. And perhaps her life was full of ironies because of her way of looking or her way of not looking. Her Grenada was private; and her position in Grenada wasn’t what she thought it had been. She hadn’t been taken seriously by all the revolutionaries. She had too American a sense of the self; with her poems and her paintings and her general manner she had seemed too self-promoting. She—like other American internationalists—had been thought of as people “having a holiday” in the revolution, people with American causes, people more concerned with protest than with the use of power.

After I left Grenada I met a West Indian woman internationalist from another territory who thought that Michele might even have been a CIA agent. The West Indian woman had also felt at one time that her own job might have been taken away from her and—as a result of machinations by Michele’s patrons in the revolution—given to Michele.

The revolutionary life—which Michele had painted as an idyll—sounded a little cut-throat. The leaders and the privileged helpers had a vision of a purified people correctly led and living cooperatively together. But at the top and just below the top there had always been dissension, the clash of personalities, the play of human passion that the administrators of the socialist utopia would have liked to deny to the people.

T
HERE
was a purely Grenadian story. It was the story of a retarded island community hijacked by people slightly more educated into the forms of a grandiose revolution. Separate from this, superimposed on it, there was an American story—the story of the U.S. military in Grenada. And it was on this that the American correspondents concentrated.

They hadn’t liked what they had seen of the detention facility at Point Salines. When they came back to the hotel they spoke of eight-feet-square cells set down on the ground, with PVC covers, and four-feet-high entrance flaps. It worried the correspondents that the army people should have been so pleased with the facility and anxious to show it off. Perhaps the facility had been designed beforehand? Perhaps the invasion of Grenada was just an exercise for the invasion of Nicaragua?

The humanitarian concern of the correspondents was genuine, but mixed up with it were newsmen’s professional instincts. Grenada was a small part of a larger American story; and distrust of the military was a necessary part of the equipment of the good correspondent. In Grenada this distrust was great. American correspondents felt they had been shut out of the invasion, and they took it personally.

“It’s an adversary relationship,” a photographer said. And in a small but irritating way the military were still winning. They were moving in from their field tents and taking over the working hotels day by day. They dug up the beaches to fill sandbags; they put sandbags and a new kind of barbed wire on the lawns; they parked trucks with machine guns among the coconut trees. Correspondents who had been treated by hotel staff as guests in the morning might find themselves challenged for a password in the evening by a nervous sentry. There were women among the marines. The fact was sometimes revealed only by a feminine call, in the night, of “Halt!”

The Grenada Beach Hotel, formerly the Holiday Inn, was the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne. Some of the rooms in one wing had been bombed during the fighting; but the American bombing had everywhere been wonderfully precise, and the hotel was in working order. The Psy-Ops briefing was held in the open dining room, next to the garden, where the barbed wire, new and shiny, as yet unrusted by the sea air, was barely visible. The waiters, as correctly uniformed as the soldiers, were laying the tables for lunch.

The man from the
Miami Herald
wanted to know about the Psy-Ops poster with a photograph of the commander of the People’s Revolutionary
Army. “It shows him naked, sitting only in a bath towel, with a marine behind him. Don’t you think that’s demeaning?”

The colonel said, making a new point with every sentence: “He had what was available when we got there. Maybe they were checking his clothes. Maybe he was taking a shower or something. He chose not to have the sheet over his shoulders. It showed he wasn’t injured. The soldier was there in the picture to show that he was in captivity.”

It was a full reply. But the American correspondents’ main interest was the Special Warfare Centre. It was apparently new to them. They wanted to know where it was based, and what it did, and how it was organized.

“Who is the commander?”

“Brigadier-General Promotable Lutz. L-u-t-z.”

Dutifully, like first-year university students who want to take down everything, the correspondents scribbled. Then someone had a doubt.

“Promotable. Is that his name?”

“It means that in a few days he will be a Major-General.” The colonel smiled. “Sorry about that piece of army jargon.”

So perhaps, properly punctuated, the commander was Brigadier (General, promotable) Lutz.

The main briefing of the morning was in St. George’s itself, in a small, old-style residential house on one of the cross-streets on the hill above the harbour. It was an old West Indian city street, socially mixed. Master and slave had once lived side by side; and slum—verandah-less wooden shacks, close together—could still be only a yard or house-lot away from gentility. The house (with a tablet of local modern sculpture at the entrance, and a local canvas in the hall) had been adapted to the modest Grenadian needs of the University of the West Indies, and had now been re-adapted as a press centre. Handwritten notices pinned above doors said, “Telex,” “Conference Room.” On a green board in one room were chalked the casualty tables.
KIA, WIA
, Killed in Action, Wounded in Action: U.S., 18 and 113; Cuban, 42 and 57; Grenadian, 21 and 280.

The conference was held in the lecture theatre built against the back wall of the house. There was little new to talk about. Most of the questions were about the detention facility and the casualty figures. There was a dispute about the number of the dead: checks with the local mortuaries had given higher figures. Some of the correspondents became aggressive. The military spokesmen, one black, one white, remained
cool. From time to time the black spokesman said, “Do you want me to take that?” Or, “All right, I’ll take that.” “Take” was apparently a technical word: it meant to check up on.

University library staff stood and watched from the windows of the original house. The windows opened directly on to the lecture theatre stage; and the watchers were like figures on a balcony in an Elizabethan theatre, or like West Indian middle-class folk looking on from a respectable distance at a back-yard squabble.

The dispute about the number of the dead was really a dispute about army misinformation, part of the continuing dispute in Grenada between the American military and the American press. Professional pride was engaged on both sides. The awful fact of death was like another story, and Grenada itself just a background.

The bad blood between the correspondents and the military came to a climax two days later, when the correspondent of a famous American newspaper, behaving at a night-time marine roadblock as he might have behaved at a morning briefing, found himself handcuffed and made to sit on the ground.

T
HE IMPORTANT
detainees were in the civilian prison in St. George’s. The lesser folk—suspected members of the People’s Revolutionary Army—were in the detention facility at Point Salines, a few winding miles to the south-west, past bays and scrubland.

This was where the big Cuban-built airport was. It had become the centre of the main American camp, the complete military settlement—with air-conditioned hospital tents of a new design—that the Rapid Deployment Force had set up with the help of its computerized inventory (and could take away again in eighteen hours).

To arrive there after the forests and hills and twisting roads of the rest of Grenada was like coming out into the open, and into another kind of country: a despoiled flatness of concrete and scarred earth, with the two-mile Cuban runway making a broad level stripe to the horizon. There was much heavy Cuban equipment about. Barbed wire ran beside the runway. The unfinished concrete hangars were among the biggest buildings in Grenada; and, three weeks after the invasion, Americans and local men were still filling and stacking sandbags outside the hangars. Garbage trucks were busy. Above, as always, the helicopters clattered.

The detention area, some distance away from the runway, and near a burning rubbish dump (even the rubbish looked new), was ringed by coils of barbed wire and guarded by marines. The PVC-covered cells, eight feet square (as we had been told), were like tall boxes. They were set flat on the ground, in rows. The effect was one of desolation. But the American correspondents’ talk of mongoose cages seemed exaggerated.