He talked — I heard him more than once during the few weeks I spent in Trinidad at that time — as though the whole movement was an expression of his will and his ideas, as though he had brought it into being.
Yet he was not one of the people trying to get into the new politics. He had no local base. He was not one of the men to whom power came. After the elections he disappeared, as he had disappeared after the Butler oilfield strike.
That was all that I knew of Lebrun when Foster Morris talked of him three years later. For both of us he was a man from the past. What we didn’t know was that Lebrun — the sexual taunter in the oil-lamp shadows of the little Trinidad country house in 1937, as yet unknown as writer or agitator, the man to whom Foster Morris as a London writer might have shown patronage — was going to be another person to whom Foster Morris was going to say goodbye.
In extreme old age Lebrun fetched up in England, and in a world greatly changed, where black men were an important subject, he was “discovered” as one of the prophets of black revolution, a man whose name didn’t appear in the history books, but who for years had worked patiently, had been behind the liberation movements of Africa and the Caribbean. So a kind of fulfilment came to him. It was very much the idea of himself he had had, and had promoted, for much of his life. It had anchored him, had been a kind of livelihood, that idea. But it had also got him into trouble, with the very people whose cause he thought he served.
ONCE HE was declared to be an undesirable immigrant by the chief minister of one of the smaller West Indian islands. In the long run this didn’t do Lebrun’s reputation any harm, but at the time — this was at the start of decolonization, and this chief minister was one of the lesser men of the region — it was a humiliation: the old black revolutionary barred from the revolution he claimed as his own.
Not long after, I went to this island. I sent in my name to the chief minister’s office — as a courtesy, and an insurance against trouble. To my surprise, the chief minister asked me to have lunch with him at Government House. He wanted to talk about Lebrun.
He said, “Let him come here and try to walk the streets.”
Street-corner talk in Government House. Lebrun wasn’t at all a street-corner man, but as a revolutionary — even in the Butler days — he had always thought that the strength and roughness of the crowd were things he might call on. Now they were being used against him.
The new politics had thrown up people like the chief minister in almost every territory. Most had started as trade-union organizers; and many of them, like Butler in Trinidad, had a religious side.
This man now lived in Government House. It was a modest house, but it was the best in the small island. The uniformed sentry, the local abstract paintings, the heavy locally made furniture — it was all there, the inherited pomp, as in other territories. But the chief minister was already bored. He had already got to the limit of what he could do with power. Power had already begun to press him down into himself, and he now lived very simply, as though it was a needless strain to do otherwise. He didn’t make many speeches now. He seldom went out.
The person closest to him was a middle-aged black woman called Miss Dith, a woman of the people, someone you wouldn’t notice on the street. She was said to be his spiritual adviser, his housekeeper, his cook, his protection against poison.
For the lunch Miss Dith had prepared shredded saltfish in a tomato sauce, sliced fried plantains, rice. You couldn’t get simpler food on the island. She brought out the dishes herself. The food was cold. The tablecloth was stained.
Once the man who was now chief minister would have been flattered by Lebrun’s attentions. He would have loved the big, technical-sounding words Lebrun would have used to describe the simple movement he had got going. He would have loved Lebrun’s introductions to more prominent leaders in other islands. But Lebrun had other ideas about what power might be used for, and the chief minister wanted no part of that. The chief minister didn’t want to undo the world he knew; he didn’t want to lose touch with the power he had risen to.
He said of Lebrun, “The man want to take you over.”
Lebrun was an impresario of revolution. That was the role he had fallen into; it had become his livelihood. He had no base of his own, no popular following. He always had to attach himself to other leaders, simpler people more directly in touch with the simple people who had given them power, and with a simpler idea of that power.
It had always been like that. It had been like that for Lebrun even in the days of Butler. Butler hadn’t achieved power — he had emerged in colonial days, when such power was not to be had. But in his own eyes Butler had achieved something that wasn’t far short of that power: he had achieved the headmanship or chieftaincy of his particular group. And then, after the excitement of the strike and the marches and the Charlie King affair, he had become bored. He was interned during the war. That might have suited him. His political activity afterwards never amounted to much. He became a member of the legislative council, but he preferred to spend his time in England, far away from his followers — doing no one knew what, perhaps doing nothing, perhaps just letting the days pass. Leadership and action no longer had any meaning for him. All that mattered — as it mattered to the chief minister who had roughed up Lebrun — was his chieftaincy, his position; that was what he was keen to protect.
So that contradiction between the complicated ideas of Lebrun and the simple politics he encouraged was always there; and couldn’t but be apparent to him. Foster Morris said he was the most dangerous man around Butler. And I suppose what he meant was that in another situation, at another time, Butler or someone like him might want to do more than win a chieftaincy, might want to turn the world upside down, and Lebrun would have been there to show him how.
In the meantime he was a man still on the run, though often now from old associates; never living with the consequences of what he encouraged as a revolutionary. Others had to endure that: like certain middle-class brown people in that island where Miss Dith read the cards and kept in touch with the spirits and cooked for the chief minister. There were dozens of ways in which these brown people could be tormented. And they were; not as part of any programme of action on the chief minister’s part, but simply because this tormenting of people was an aspect of chieftaincy.
“THE MAN want to take you over,” the chief minister had said over the stained tablecloth in Government House. And I knew what he meant, because Lebrun had tried to do something like that to me. This was at the time of my break with Foster Morris.
He wrote an article about my books in one of the Russian “thick magazines.” He sent me the magazine, together with a translation (or the original) of his article, and a card. He gave a London address; from this I assumed he was still “on the run.”
The article filled many pages of the thick magazine. No one had ever written at such length about my books. To tell the truth, I didn’t think the books I had so far published deserved it. I thought of myself as still a beginner whose big books were to come. I knew that there were people who disapproved of my comedy, some of them because they felt I was letting my side down, and I thought that Lebrun in this Russian magazine would be severe with me.