We were not alone in this need for foreign witness. Even someone like Francis Parkman, with all his Boston security, when he was on the Oregon Trail in the 1840s, felt on occasion, in the splendour of the American wilderness, that in order to show himself equal to a particular scene he had to make some comparison to Italian painting, which at that time he would have known only in imperfect reproductions.
Perhaps there is no pure or primal gift of vision. Perhaps vision can only be tutored, and depends on an ability to compare one thing with another. Columbus saw a fifteenth-century galley where I, standing on the other side, saw a tumble of black rocks with trees that I would not have been able to recognize in another setting. Not many hours after seeing that galley, he was sailing close to the southern coast of the island, and he saw aboriginal village gardens as fair as those of Valencia in the spring. It was a comparison he had made more than once before, about islands far to the north, which are physically quite different. But it was the only way he had of describing vegetation he hadn’t seen before, and it is all that we have of the first sighting of the untouched aboriginal island.
Centuries on, we needed our visitors to give us some idea of where and what we were. We couldn’t have done it ourselves. We needed foreign witness. But disregard came with this witness. And that was like a second setting of history on its head. Because in this traveller’s view — this distant view of people eating bananas and wearing squeaky shoes, this view of a smallness that a cruise passenger could take in in a morning or a day — we, who had come in a variety of ways from many continents, were made to stand in for the aborigines and were held responsible for the nullity which had been created long before we had been transported to it.
AND THEN in 1937 a young English writer called Foster Morris came and wrote The Shadowed Livery, which was another kind of book. There was a big oilfield workers’ strike in Trinidad that year. I don’t know whether Foster Morris knew about local conditions before he came. But the strike and its personalities were at the heart of his book.
Oil had been discovered early in the century; and much of the south of the island (where Columbus had seen the beautiful Valencia-like aboriginal gardens) had been turned into an oil reserve. Most of the oilfield workers in Trinidad were Africans from the small island of Grenada to the north. Local people, East Indians or Africans, could have been used; but the radicals said (and I suppose they were right) that the authorities didn’t want to disturb the local labour market and preferred to have an isolated labour force in the oilfields.
Local people told stories about the poverty and ignorance of the Grenadians. A story I heard as a child (without fully understanding it, not knowing at that time who or what Grenadians were) was that they lived off ground provisions, which they cooked in a “pitch-oil” tin. Ground provisions were tubers — yams, eddoes, cassava, sweet potatoes. The “pitch-oil tins” were originally the tins in which vegetable oil was imported. Normally in Trinidad those tins were used afterwards for storing “pitch-oil,” which was the word we used for kerosene. So the story about the Grenadians boiling whole pitch-oil tins of ground provisions was not only a story about the grossness of their taste, the sheer bulk of the rubbishy food they could put away, but also a story about their poverty. They were too poor to buy proper enamel or black-iron Birmingham-made pots, like the rest of us; they cooked in tins that the rest of us used for pitch-oil.
(I heard this story about the Grenadians from a quarrelsome aunt — and in my memory the aunt, as she told this story, in her usual shrieking voice, was using a woven coconut-leaf fan to get a Birmingham black-iron coalpot going on the concrete back steps of a small house in Woodbrook in Port of Spain. For two or three years many segments of our extended family, refugees from the countryside, were living squashed together in that Woodbrook lot, where there was as yet no proper sewerage. Some years later this aunt migrated to Canada. There, liberated from crowd and poverty and general wretchedness, she became an alert, generous, elegant woman — but nothing of that human possibility is contained in my memory of the shrieking woman fanning her coalpot on the back steps.)
This story about the Grenadians and the pitch-oil tins I heard during the war, some years after they had made a name for themselves in the strike of 1937. So in the years before 1937, when they would have been even less regarded, things would have been very hard for them. And then, from among them, in all their isolation and backwardness, a leader appeared.
The leader was a small bearded man with a long name, Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler. He was a preacher, and there was something in his passion or derangement that took the oilfield workers to a pitch of frenzy. He attracted other people as well. Many radicals, people who described themselves as socialists or communists, attached themselves to him. The strike he and the trade unions called came close to being an insurrection. A policeman was burned alive in the oilfield area. The government began to recruit and arm volunteers. The atmosphere would have been like that of 1805 or 1831, when there was talk of a slave revolt. And then, as happened in the slave days, passion died down, and people returned to being themselves.
This was the subject of Foster Morris’s book. He wrote about Tubal Uriah Butler and the people around him. He wrote of them with the utmost seriousness. He gave them families, backgrounds; he treated what they said without irony. Nothing like this had been written about local people before. He wrote of them as though they were English people — as though they had that kind of social depth and solidity and rootedness.
It was well-intentioned, but it was wrong. Some of the people he wrote admiringly about, like certain lawyers and teachers, were even embarrassed by Foster Morris’s misplaced social tributes. What was missing from Foster Morris’s view was what we all lived with: the sense of the absurd, the idea of comedy, which hid from us our true position. The social depth he gave to ordinary people didn’t make sense. That idea of a background — and what it contained: order and values and the possibility of striving: perfectibility — made sense only when people were more truly responsible for themselves. We weren’t responsible in that way. Much had been taken out of our hands. We didn’t have backgrounds. We didn’t have a past. For most of us the past stopped with out grandparents; beyond that was a blank. If you could look down at us from the sky you would see us living in our little houses between the sea and the bush; and that was a kind of truth about us, who had been transported to that place. We were just there, floating.
Foster Morris, with all his wish to applaud us, didn’t understand the nature of our deprivation. He saw us as versions of English people and simplified us. He couldn’t understand, for instance, that though Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler was a kind of messiah, though in the high moments of the strike educated people like lawyers attributed to him almost miraculous powers, and felt that where he led no harm could come, these very people felt at the same time, in their bones, that he was a crazed and uneducated African preacher, a Grenadian, a small-islander, an eater of ground provisions boiled in a pitch-oil tin.
It was that idea of the absurd, never far away, that preserved us. It was the other side of the anger and the passion that had made the crowd burn the black policeman Charlie King alive. Foster Morris didn’t appear to understand that Charlie King wasn’t hated in Trinidad; that he was to become, in fact, in calypso and folk memory, a special sacrificial figure, as famous as Uriah Butler himself, and almost as honoured, and that the place on the road where he was burned was to be known as Charlie King Corner: a little joke about a sanctified place.