It happened that I had to go to New York. I had a commission of sorts: to provide a story idea, for a possible film (really an impossible film): the kind of futility and self-betrayal a young man can be easily lured into. Near the end of the Maida Vale dinner, when things were more informal, I mentioned this trip to Lebrun and his friend. They were interested. They mentioned names to one another. Then Lebrun said he would send me a list of people I should meet in New York.
He did what he said (I always found him punctilious in that way). And so a few weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon, having been let out as on parole from the expensive hotel where my film work was like a torment, I found myself being driven around Manhattan, having the famous sights pointed out to me, by a couple who were overwhelming me with their friendship, and more than friendship: involving me with something like love as Lebrun’s fellow countryman and London friend.
After the sightseeing there was to be a dinner. They had invited some people to meet me; Lebrun, they said, had written to various people about me. The dinner was going to be very nice, the lady said. They had prepared some special dishes; they had prepared gefilte fish.
She asked, turning around to me from the front seat of the car, “Have you had gefilte fish?” (A memory here, connected with this movement, that she was wearing a fur coat.)
She looked happy to hear that I hadn’t.
I knew almost nothing of New York, and couldn’t place these people, couldn’t assess the suburb and the house to which we drove when our sightseeing in Manhattan was over. I couldn’t assess the people who began to arrive, quite early, as I thought, for the dinner and the special dish the lady had gone straight to her kitchen to see about.
They remain vague, but I know they were nice people, intelligent, friendly people. Some were near neighbours. Others had come from some distance for this Sunday dinner. They were all anxious to show friendship to me; but I knew they were showing friendship to Lebrun.
I had accepted Lebrun’s introductions, but I had never really believed in the value of his international contacts. Even with the regard I had grown to have for him, I thought of him as a talker more than anything else. I saw him as a gifted black man compelled by the circumstances of his time, from fairly early on, to live on his wits. His Russian connection, the article in the Russian magazine, his appearance at the Maida Vale dinner with the attractive Polish or Czech woman — all of that, though real enough, I saw as attributes of the now old black man living as by second nature on his wits.
He belonged to the first generation of educated black men in the region. For a number of them — men as old as the century — there was no honourable place at home in their colony or in the big countries. They were in-between people, too early, without status; they tried to make their way. They came and went; they talked big in one place — the United States, England, the West Indies, Panama, Belize — about the things they were doing somewhere else. Some of them became eccentric or unbalanced; some attached themselves to the Back-to-Africa movement (though Africa was itself at that time colonized); some became fraudsters.
When I came to England in 1950 there were still extravagant black figures from that generation about on the streets of London: men in pin-stripe suits and bowlers, with absurd accents. Sometimes they greeted me; they were prompted to do so by solitude, but they also wished to find someone to boast to. One wet winter evening one of these men, met in a Regent Street bus queue, straight away took out his wallet and began to show me photographs of his house and his English wife. They were shipwrecked men. They had lost touch with themselves and now, near the end, were seeing the fantasies they had lived on washed away by the arrival of new immigrants from Jamaica and the other islands, working men in Harlem-style zoot suits and broad-brimmed felt hats.
Lebrun, with all his gifts, I saw as part of that older generation. He too came and went, and was spoken of (like many others) as a man of mystery. But my feeling always was (considering my own arrangements) that the hidden, foreign segments of Lebrun’s life would have been quite tame and full of small financial alarms. In that way I thought he would have been a little like Butler, the 1937 strike leader, who, after the war and internment, went to live, very quietly, in London, cutting himself off from the demands (though not the subsidy) of his followers and his political party, the British Empire Workers and Citizens Home Rule Party. I thought that Lebrun’s time abroad would have had that element of quietness and rest.
So, just as I had been overwhelmed by Lebrun’s article in the Russian magazine, never expecting such penetration from him, now in this New York suburban house I was thrown into some confusion by this evidence of Lebrun’s international life, which was far more elegant than anything I had expected. It was far more elegant than anything I had known.
They knew a lot about the politics and the personalities of the islands; and they knew about this from Lebrun’s side, as it were. They satirized the local politicians who were Lebrun’s enemies; they described one as a gangster, another as a witchdoctor.
One woman had travelled in the islands, visiting places I didn’t know. It was impossible, she said, to be in those islands without having an idea of their history, and some sense of their future. What had she seen? She couldn’t really tell me. She refused to speak as a tourist; that refusal was like part of her self-esteem. And I felt that, just as (considering the island she had spoken of, the one with the witchdoctor) all the forests that had been there at the discovery had been scraped away for the sugar-cane fields, so she had stripped the people she had seen of all their too easily seen attributes, to get down to some ideal structure that existed in her head.
I remembered the effect on me of Lebrun’s article in the Russian magazine: it had appeared to take me above road-level and show me the pattern of things from above. I felt that Lebrun had done the same for this group, that everything in that woman’s way of looking would have come from her own interpretation of what Lebrun had said.
I remembered how out of tune Lebrun had been in Woodford Square in Port of Spain during the great emotional assemblies of 1956. The meetings were billed as educational; the square was described as a university. People hadn’t of course gone to learn anything; they had gone to take part in a kind of racial sacrament. Lebrun had appeared to be participating in that when he talked about having waited all the years of the century for this great occasion, and never having doubts that the moment would come. But then he had gone off on a track of his own. He had begun to talk about history and the production of sugar.
Windmills and tall factory chimneys were a feature of the landscape of the islands, he had said; they had been for more than two centuries. The large-scale production of sugar had always been an industrial process. Sugar-cane was a perishable crop. It had to be cut at a certain time and it had to be processed within a certain time; in the making of sugar many things could go wrong. This meant that the black people of the islands were among the earliest industrial workers in the world, obeying the discipline of a complex manufacturing process. For this reason they escaped standard racial categorization; they were not like the peasantry of Africa and Asia and large areas of Europe. They were a very old industrial proletariat, and the history of slavery had shown them to be always a revolutionary people. Now they were destined to be in the forefront of the revolution in the New World.
People hadn’t understood what he had said, but he had spoken with passion and fluency, and this had made it appear to be part of the great movement of the square; and he had been applauded. (And the photograph of him on the Victorian bandstand in the square, addressing the crowd below the trees, had been used on the cover of the two or three books of his speeches that had been published in Czechoslovakia or East Berlin.)