He had a sense of his audience. He appeared to understand the questions in my mind, and no doubt in the minds of others. Late in the evening he began to talk about himself.
He said, “My mother had an uncle who was a coachman for an English family in Barbados. I’m going back a long way now. I’m going back a hundred years. The thing about being a black man in this Caribbean-Central American region is that you have quite an ancestry here, if you want to claim it. At some stage the English family went to London. I don’t know whether they went for good or whether they went for a short time. They took their black coachman with them.
“In London this coachman became friendly with a black man who worked as a servant in the Tichborne house. A famous family, connected with a famous law case. An uneducated Australian appeared one day and said he was the Tich borne heir. Lady Tichborne, for some strange reason of her own, said the man, who could hardly read or write, was her long lost son. A great Victorian scandal. The best account of the affair is by Lord Maugham, who used to be Lord Chancellor, arid on the evidence of this Tichborne book was a much better writer than his novelist brother.
“The black man who worked for the Tichbornes was married to one of the servant women of the house. This had a powerful effect on my mother’s uncle. He used to be in and out of the house. You must imagine him going down the steps to the basement. He said whenever he went the servants gave him tea and cake. The women petted him. He pined for that when he came back to Barbados. When he was very old he was still talking about the black man in the big house in London who had married the white woman and nobody minded, and he was still talking about the white servants who always made him welcome and gave him tea and cake. He would say of the servants, ‘They always much me up.’ Meaning they had made much of him.
“I heard such a lot about this when I was a child that I developed a fantasy about a big house in England, and white people giving me tea and cake too. The house in my fantasy was like a big estate house. It wasn’t like your big house in Belgravia or South Kensington. And years later that fantasy house came back and got in the way when I began reading the English novelists. It still does, a little bit.
“My mother’s uncle, the old coachman, and a very proud man, used to say, ‘It had no trouble in those days. Black people and white people was one.’ And that was what I grew up believing too, that in the old days things were better. When I was old enough to understand what the old coachman had taught me, I was ashamed. I tried to forget. From various things I deduce that the old man was born in 1840. This was six years after the abolition of slavery. This means that his mother had been a slave, and all the older people around him. It also means something else. The slave trade was abolished in 1807. So when my mother’s uncle was ten or twelve there would have been people of sixty-five or seventy in Barbados who had been brought over from Africa. And still the old man thought that things were better in the old days, and had got me to believe it.
“I was tormented by this memory, until I arrived at my own political resolution, and saw it for what it was.”
“Political resolution”—it was his indirect way of referring to his Marxism; it was as though to speak the word itself would have been too crude.
“But even after I had arrived at my political resolution I couldn’t bring myself to talk of this memory. And then I did so in Trinidad, during the Butler strike. I was at a public meeting, before the big march on Port of Spain that so terrified the colonial government. I was saying something quite simple. Something like: the time had come for black people to take their destiny into their own hands. Just then the memory of the old coachman came to me, and I began to tell the crowd about the white servants and the tea and cake. I could feel them listening in a new way. They had never heard anything like that before from a black man on a public platform. But the biggest effect was on me. As soon as I began to talk about what my mother’s uncle had got me to believe as a child, that in the old days white people and black people were one, as soon as I did that — in five seconds the shame I had carried for twenty years dropped from me.”
He paused. There was a silence. As though everyone was being given time to examine himself.
Then Lebrun said, “And every black man has a memory like that. Every educated black man is eaten away quietly by a memory like that.”
The food was brought out into the dim sitting room. Our hosts were Lebanese, but the food was West Indian, in honour of the occasion. Not the Asian-Mediterranean or French creole style of a cosmopolitan place like Trinidad; but the rough African food of the smaller islands. The central dish was an oily yellowish mound of what looked like boiled and pounded green bananas.
Lebrun made a big show of being excited by this dish.
“Ah,” he said. “Coo-coo. It is the last thing one expected in London. We must give it our full attention.”
Somebody else said, “At home we call it foo-foo.”
Lebrun said, “Coo-coo or foo-foo, it is the serious business of the evening.”
A heavy glistening mound was placed on my own plate. I probed it: boiled yams and green bananas and possibly other tubers mashed together with peppers, the whole mixture slimy from the yams and — the Lebanese touch — olive oil. Below the pepper it had almost no taste, except one of a tart rawness (from the green bananas), and I thought it awful, the texture, the slipperiness. I didn’t think I would be able to keep it down. I let it be on my plate. No one noticed.
While Lebrun ate, and his dutiful woman friend ate, and the smell of meat and oil became high in the squashed sitting room with the old upholstered chairs, and people asked the Lebanese where they had got the yams and green bananas from, I (feeling that I was betraying them all, and separating myself from the good mood of the evening) remembered my aunt twenty years before, fanning her coalpot on the concrete back steps of our house in Port of Spain, and talking about Grenadians boiling their “pitch-oil tin” of ground provisions once a week.
Soon, through his mouthfuls of the coo-coo or the foo-foo, Lebrun began to talk again.
He said, “Perhaps the most extraordinary discussion of the century was the one between Lenin and the Indian delegate, Roy, at the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920.”
I felt that this was an offering to me.
“A re-interpretation of Marx, with special reference to the struggles of non-European peoples in the twentieth century. There is a certain racial view of Marx that we all know about. It was encouraged by the journalism he did about the Indian Mutiny for the American papers. Pieces done to order, unconsidered in parts, clearly not the whole truth. A re-interpretation was necessary, and the work was done all of forty years ago. Some people can forget that. When Gandhi and Nehru and Mountbatten and the others have become footnotes in the history of Asia, people will look back and see that meeting between Lenin and Roy, just three years after the revolution, as one of the crucial events of the century.”
THERE WAS no moment of break with Lebrun, as there had been with Foster Morris. For me the illumination of his article in the Russian magazine remained; but we both soon got to recognize — what I feel sure we always knew — that the relationship between us was forced. We shared a background and in all kinds of unspoken ways we could understand one another; but we were on different tracks.
A great embarrassment occurred just a few weeks after our dinner.
Lebrun’s woman friend — intelligent, easy of manner, accepting, curiously calm — lived in New York. I hardly knew the city and had met very few Americans. I couldn’t set the woman in a background, couldn’t separate what might have been background and background manner from the person. I liked what I saw, though. I liked her especially — she was ten or twelve years older than I — for her calm; that gave her a kind of attractiveness.