What was the implication of that? That we were on one of the seven spots, and that he was one of the holy men?
I asked, “How do these seven men meet?”
He made a gesture, making a circular sweep above his head with his index finger. “Telepathically.”
Was this magic African? Or was it part of a fantasy of Africa from across the ocean, a hippy-style fantasy about the powers of old cultures, something that had made its way back here and was now being offered as African to travellers, strangers and solitaries who needed this kind of magic?
Soon, I knew, I would be hearing from this man about the extra-terrestrial beings who had landed on a certain part of West Africa. And, indeed, he was beginning on that when we got to the entry to the hotel. He was frightened of the policemen there. He didn’t follow me in.
WE ALL inhabit “constructs” of a world. Ancient peoples had their own. Our grandparents had their own; we cannot absolutely enter into their constructs. Every culture has its own: men are infinitely malleable. And perhaps Phyllis, with the fluidity of character which her African life had given her, enabling her to be many things to many people (critical of Africans, critical of Europeans, critical of West Indians and black Americans, critical of one group by reference to another), perhaps Phyllis, with her initial French-speaking limitations (Guadeloupe, Paris, West Africa), had established her own further construct of the world. Perhaps in that fluidity, in that shiftingness, she had found freedom. Perhaps, as the years went on, she would recede more and more from her own background; perhaps logic would leave her. As much as the principal’s father’s Back-to-Africa escape (or struggle) had determined the principal’s twin natures, so Phyllis’s construct had been determined by her marriage to her little chief and, before that, by her flight from the French West Indies (so liberating to the black man who was the first to teach me French). She couldn’t go back to what she had left behind; she couldn’t absolutely undo anything she had done; that was part of her woman’s nature.
It was otherwise for Lebrun. He had always been on the run, a revolutionary without a base, always a failure in one way, in another way fortunate, never having to live with the consequences, of his action, always being free to move on.
Perhaps he never knew the consequences of his words in the French West African dictatorship, when for the first time he found a ruler of a state who was ready to be his disciple, because the advice so matched the ruler’s own needs.
When the dictatorship collapsed and the desolate country was opened up, no one thought of calling him to account. He was not associated with desolation. He was, rather, the man who had held fast both to ideas of revolution and African redemption; and had not been rewarded for his pains. In the mess of Africa and the Caribbean he was oddly pure.
He was now very old, and famous among people who were interested in colonial and post-colonial history. But the people who wrote occasional profiles of him couldn’t really understand him. They had grown up in another world, and were simpler than he was. The profile-writers and the television interviewers, who promoted him with self-conscious virtue, were serving a cause that had long ago been won. They risked nothing at all. They had no means of understanding or assessing a man who had been born early in the century into a very hard world, whose intellectual growth had at every stage been accompanied by a growing rawness of sensibility, and whose political resolutions, expressing the wish not to go mad, had been in the nature of spiritual struggles, occurring in the depth of his being.
They came with their interview files, and they asked all the questions that had been asked before. They asked especially about his mother’s uncle, the coachman of the English family who had gone from Barbados to London, and had found friends among the servants of the Tichborne house, who gave him tea and cake. Lebrun told the story again and again. Towards the end of his life, he sometimes forgot the point of the story. He had the old coachman say that in the old days black people and white people were one, and then he, Lebrun, searched for the thing that he knew followed but could no longer find. For the interviewer or the television producer it was enough, a text for today; not understanding that Lebrun’s anguish had begun there, with the old coachman taking him far back, almost to the times of slavery, as to the good times. But perhaps, too, in extreme old age, he had become a child again, looking only for peace.
6. A Parcel of Papers, a Roll of Tobacco, a Tortoise: An Unwritten Story
PERHAPS A PLAY or a screen play, or a mixture of both — that is how it came to me, an unrealizable impulse, a long time ago: the first set being a view in section of the upper decks of a Jacobean ship, the Destiny. The time, 1618. The setting, a South American river, grey when still, muddy when rippled. It is almost dawn. The sky is silver. The two-tiered set is in semi-gloom; but the tropical light is coming fast. The pre-dawn silence is broken by the sound of a heavy splash. A man has jumped overboard. After a while there are shouts from the decks of the ship, and the sound of running feet.
At the same time the light begins to show a thin and very old man in Jacobean undress in the captain’s quarters. This is Sir Walter Raleigh. He is sixty-four. He has been ill for many months; he has only eight months or so to live.
He has been a free man for just under two years. For thirteen years before that, he had been a prisoner in the Tower of London, because of some trouble with the king. He has been released in order to go and find the gold mines of El Dorado in Guiana in South America. He has always said that these mines exist somewhere on the banks of the Orinoco, and he has always said he knows exactly where the mines are. Twenty-two years before, he had raided the Spanish island of Trinidad, which guarded the entrance to the Orinoco and El Dorado, and he had captured the Spanish conquistador, Berrio, the so-called governor of the province of El Dorado. He claimed to have plundered all the old conquistador’s knowledge about the golden territories. And he also claimed to have won over all the Indians of the region to his side. He has been let out to prove his point now, and he has accepted conditions that are like those of a game. If he finds gold, everything will be forgiven. He will be executed if he doesn’t find gold, or if he disturbs the Spaniards. Guiana is Spanish territory.
And now — in this land which in his mind and writings existed as a kind of Arcadia where he could be king of the Indians, ruler of a golden empire — he is a man under siege. The Indians avoid him. He cannot get the food he once wrote about, the sweet fresh-water fish from the fresh-water pools in the Pitch Lake. The Spaniards on Trinidad, few, but the advantage is with them, watch him. They have their muskets. They don’t fire recklessly. They wait, they take careful aim at forty paces, no more. He regularly loses one man, two men, when little parties go ashore to get pitch, good for caulking ships, or oysters, or food, or water. Food is running short for him.
As the weeks pass, and no news comes from the south, from that tributary of the Orinoco up which he has sent half of his gold-mine expedition, he feels bereft. The skiff he sent afterwards up the river to get news — with a captured Indian as pilot — hasn’t returned. The conviction grows on him that knowledge of what has happened up river has spread around these Indian villages. The Indians all speak Spanish now. They have no reason to ignore the Spaniards for the sake of Raleigh. Raleigh has stayed away for twenty-two years, after all. And again it was to get news, as much as to get fresh food, the fish from the pools in the hard asphalt of the Pitch Lake, La Brea, and the delicate, “fat” flesh of the “pheasants” of the country, that he allowed the second of the three Indians he captured — secret Spanish-speakers, and possibly in league with the Spaniards in Trinidad and on the mainland — to go ashore, leaving his friend behind as a hostage.