I made official approaches to the companies. They replied with unofficial invitations to friendly barbecue parties beside swimming-pools. They were very friendly parties. The men had friendly rolls of flesh about their waist; they played with balls and dogs and occasionally dropped stern words to splashing children. Meat hissed over charcoal; laughing wives basted. In this atmosphere talk about bauxite seemed perverse, when it came from me, and threatening, when it came from them. A new arrival was greeted; a silent local housemaid appeared; someone laughed at a swimming dog. And I was being told that in South America bauxite, of excellent grade, lay below white sand, which had just to be hosed off; that in Jamaica the bauxite lay just below a couple of inches of stoneless earth; and that Australia was in fact a continent made entirely of bauxite. The bauxite of Isabella was difficult to mine and of indifferent grade. By making too much trouble we were gambling with our future; even as it was, there was little to stop all the companies leaving Isabella, and then the natives could play as long as they pleased with the red dust, as they had done before 1935. Besides, any degree of uncertainty about the future might lead to the abandonment of plans, well under way, for the establishment of an alumina plant. And that was an investment of some millions.
The case was overstated. I was not alarmed. The Socialist continued to express its resentment, but it seemed that that was all we could do. How can you negotiate about something whose value you don’t know? To all our official approaches the companies replied with unofficial invitations. I believe some of the managers changed in my time, but the barbecue, family atmosphere remained the same and our conversations were the same. The companies didn’t want to be rude to us. We were a new country and so on, and they were in our life and part of it — the theme of their soft-sell advertisements in our newspapers — but their line was that there was nothing to discuss. And we couldn’t do a thing. There was no question of calling out the workers to support us. We had no control of that union. Besides, the companies’ workers were the best-paid in Isabella — there was a continuous scramble for jobs with them — and so far as things like housing and recreation facilities went, they were model employers. So there we were. Another message to be taken back to the people, another exercise in leadership.
We were saved by Jamaica. They had more resources, a more experienced and energetic government, and more international contacts. They too had been exercised about their getting their bauxite, so easy to mine, renegotiated; and at last they seemed to be getting somewhere. We merely followed their example and advice. The barbecue parties stopped. Instead we were photographed with our aides in a conference room, amid blank blotters and carafes and tumblers. We all looked stern and businesslike. From their advertisements, no one was happier than the companies.
It was a triumph. It was the peak of my political achievement. After this descent was to be rapid.
The smaller the society the more complex the issues: the hostilities and alignments in a parliament of six hundred are more easy to follow than those in a parish council of twenty. To me even now there is only a sequence of events. Everyone’s motives remain unclear, and I doubt whether an impartial commission of inquiry will establish more than confusion, leading cloudily to a resolution of some sort. I am sure that motives and alliances shifted rapidly in the month after the renegotiating of the bauxite contract. Crunch-time was near; there was alarm and nervousness.
Coinciding with the flight of the Czech whose plastic stank, coinciding with the jubilation and publicity over the new bauxite contract, there occurred a great and continuing disturbance throughout the Stockwell sugar estates, which our police force for almost a week was powerless to control.
See how the first two events had me as their centre; see how jumpiness linked me to the third. It was a movement of Asiatics, so cool to the idea of sharing distress. It was the first serious challenge to order we had had to face, and we recognized it as a show of true strength. It was the crop season. Ripe canes stood in the fields waiting to be cut; the loss from arson was immense. See how quickly jumpiness turned to alarm; see how many interpretations could be put on this disturbance, which at first seemed so unmanageable. See how many ways of action suggested themselves to men who distrusted each other and saw their own power as nothing more than bluff. There was the desire to win over and control this suddenly displayed strength; there was the desire to destroy it. There was talk of exploitation and absentee landlords; at the same time, here and there in towns, there were demonstrations of counter-violence, totally racial in character.
I was at the centre of events which I could not control. I was aware of feeling focusing on me. I was aware of every sort of rumour. Even those barbecue parties were being sinisterly interpreted: the delaying tactics of a man bribed, the delaying tactics of a man committed throughout his political career to the fortunes of his race. Easy to prove in a way, because The Socialist, against common sense, had continued to proclaim nationalization of the sugar estates as a desirable goal. It was part of my consistency, briefly my strength, and now the very thing to be used to destroy me.
Yet out of all the confusion, against daily reports of ripe, burning canes and violence in the towns, this was the very cry that came out and was echoed from one end of the island to the other: nationalization. The estates had to be nationalized for the sake of unity, for the sake of that freedom from exploitation about which so much had been said. The estates had to be nationalized to balance the good fortune of the new bauxite contract. The estates had to be nationalized to prevent such threats to order in the future. I was at the centre; the task was mine. Browne spoke and was ambiguous: the task was mine. My supporters, and there were many, no doubt hoped for a miracle. Nationalization was as impossible as getting rid of the expatriate civil servants: so much London had made clear. A delegation to London was proposed. The expected reply came: there was nothing to discuss. But the cry did not die down on the island; I could not ignore it. Nationalization had become a word. It had no meaning. It held only Asiatic threat and Asiatic hope; to some it was a word of fulfilment and to others a word of revenge. Nationalization became less than a word: it became an emotive sound. The sugar-cane fields burned; two or three police stations in the country were overrun; in the towns shops and houses were looted. We were in the midst of a racial disturbance, but we spoke of it as nationalization. And to everything said by friend and enemy I was committed: to nationalization, to unity, to dignity, to the sharing of distress.
Once before, as a young man, I had been in a situation where I would have had to laugh my way to death by a Luger on a sunless beach; to the end I would have had to pretend that it was a joke, because it might have been. So now I found myself imprisoned in pretence, when it was so clear what was being prepared. On both occasions I might have cried out: ‘No! You are not going to kill me!’ On both occasions the reply might have been: ‘But who is going to kill you?’ Better the pretence, the joke.