After that writing I went back to Trinidad for a few weeks. I went by steamer. The clock was put back every other day; the weather slowly turned. One evening on deck a breeze started up. I braced myself for the chill, but the wind that played about my head and face was warm. I felt when I arrived, and went visiting, and found people becoming less dark than they seemed on the streets, that an age — a vanished adolescence, a forced maturity, England, a book — separated me from the people in the Registrar-General’s Department. But for them only six years had passed. Dingier walls; a more crowded office; more tables. Blair had gone, but so many of the others were still there: Belbenoit, the long-limbed boy (or man) from St. James with the lady’s bicycle, the typist who hadn’t liked what I had written. They were friendly. But there was something new.
I had heard on the steamer that a new kind of politics had come to Trinidad. There were regular meetings in Woodford Square, across the road from the Red House, which the Spaniards had laid out in the 1780s as the main city square, and which the British had later embellished; where the destitute Indians, refugees from the plantations, had slept until they had died out; and where later the black madmen had come to camp. In that square now there were lectures about local history and slavery. People were being told about themselves, and black feeling was high. This was the politics that had claimed Blair.
I went to a meeting one night. The square, its scale already altered for me, looked different again now, with the electric lights, the speakers and the microphones on the old bandstand (which I had found so beautiful the first time I had seen it, and now saw as the Victorian or Edwardian bandstand of an English city park); and the dark, scattered, unreadable crowd. The big trees threw distorting shadows and looked bigger than in daylight. Some people stood at the very edge of the square, against the railings; there were some white people and Indians among them.
The men on the bandstand spoke of old suffering and current local politics. They spoke like people uncovering a conspiracy. They were at one with their audience. They made jokes easily; and laughter, or a kind of contented humming, came easily to the crowd. The people who spoke were not all black or African, but the occasion was an African one; there could be no doubt of that. (I didn’t see Blair on the bandstand. He was never an orator or front-of-house man; he didn’t have the manner.)
I knew few of the speakers; I couldn’t pick up the references and the jokes. It was like entering a cinema long after the picture had started, but I felt that what was said didn’t matter. The occasion itself was what mattered: the gathering, the drama, the mood: the discovery (and celebration) by many of the black people in the square, educated and uneducated, of a shared emotion. Of aspects of that emotion I had had many intimations long ago, before I had gone away.
Intimations: people had lived with this emotion as with something private, not to be carelessly exposed. Everyone — the typist in the office, the black boy or man from St. James, Blair, even the master of ceremonies at the Miss Fine Brown Frame contest, the mocking crowd there, and some of the self-mocking contestants — everyone had lived with it according to his character and intellectual means. Everyone you saw on the street had a bit of this emotion locked up in himself. It was no secret. It was part of the unacknowledged cruelty of our setting, the thing we didn’t want to go searching into. Now all those private emotions ran together into a common pool, where everyone found a blessing. Everyone, high and low, could now exchange his private emotion, which he sometimes distrusted, for the sacrament of the larger truth.
In the square, romantic with its lights and shadows, they talked of history and the new constitution and rights; but what had been generated was more like religion. It wasn’t something that could be left behind in the square; it couldn’t be separated from the other sides of life. And I understood the exaltation, and distance, I had sensed in people when I had visited my old office in the Red House.
In the outer office of the Registrar-General’s Department I had remembered the lawyer’s clerks sitting like students at their sloping desks and searching for deeds in large bound volumes. They were modest but self-respecting people; some wore ties and white shirts. They had a kind of ambition, like everybody else. Sometimes they pretended to be more ambitious than they were, but many of them knew they weren’t going far, and they were reconciled to it, as you could see when sometimes an older man — of a generation without possibilities, a generation now more or less finished — came to do some searching, and led them all into a kind of pointless barber-shop chatter, like servant-room gossip, full of knowingness and conspiratorial hints, but really quite empty, mere words.
(I had got to know about this barber-shop gossip even before I went to work at the Red House. After I had applied for my little temporary clerkship, word was sent back to me, through a cousin, from someone said to be in the know, someone deep in the machinery of the Red House: “Pereira is the man he have to see. All those papers pass through Pereira hand.” Pereira was a clerk in some department. One midday a man cycling down the Western Main Road was pointed out to me: “Look. Pereira.” The great man, just like that, in the Western Main Road, with everybody else! He was a mixed man, more Indian-looking than Portuguese, not old, and I suppose he was cycling home from the Red House for lunch. He had no hat and, in all the hot sun, he was taking his time, sitting upright on the saddle of his heavy, pre-war English bicycle, pen and pencil clipped to the pocket of his shirt, and with his socks pulled up over his trouser bottoms, which were neatly folded back over his shins. In another memory of this sighting, Pereira was on a slender-framed racing cycle, crouched over the dropped handlebars, sitting high on the narrow, ridged saddle, and pedalling away. The second memory is probably satirical and mischievous. I don’t know. I never saw Pereira again; I don’t even know whether the man pointed out to me was Pereira. I got the job because my former school principal recommended me for it, and no one talked to me about Pereira again.)
Some of those search clerks in the Registrar-General’s Department were still there. They were easy with me; they were ready to chat. But there wasn’t the barber-shop slackness about them. I thought I detected a new intensity, a new stiffening; and I felt that that intensity — hidden, unacknowledged — had always been there, and even in the older man.
I felt this even when I met simpler people. Like the paunchy department messenger, pleased to make the same joke he had made six years before (“You always query me. Why you query me so for?”). Or the elderly, sour-faced freelance searcher, waiting every day outside the office door for illiterates to come and give him work, living on the edge when I knew him, occasionally needing the gift of a drink, and now a little more broken down, his services less and less needed. Or the old Barbadian mason who had done work for our family. I used to like to see him at work; I liked his songs; and I liked the way the hairs sprouting out of his nostrils were dusted with cement, like a bee’s legs with pollen. He came to see me now. He stood on the pavement and leaned on the gate. He didn’t want to come into the yard because he had come to ask for money. Times were hard, he said. The lighter colour on his nostril hairs was not cement now, but the grey of grey hair. Even in these people I felt the new sacrament of the square, a little new glory.
Much of this feeling might have been in me — I was full of nerves on this return, for all kinds of reasons — but I believe I was only amplifying something that was true. The history of the place was known; its reminders were all around us; scratch us and we all bled. The wonder was that it had taken so long for black people to arrive at this way of feeling. In our colonial set-up the champions of black people had been white men or coloured men like Belbenoit. Black men, with their self-distrust, had looked to such people to be their leaders. Political life had come late to black people; confidence had come late; too many generations had had to bury or mock their emotions in barber-shop gossip. There had been a big strike in the oilfields in 1937, but the leader there, a man from one of the smaller islands, had been more of a country preacher, uneducated and a little mad, quickly going idle after his initial political inspiration, and offering his followers only a kind of religious ecstasy. The new sacrament of the square went far beyond that.