The three academic credits that students could acquire for ‘Cruise-and-Muse’ were not easily won: in addition to the two weeks of classroom study at Miami, and the submission of a sixty-page report within a month after the end of the cruise, the students were given a long reading list by the six lecturers. For her reading list, Thérèse had assigned four nicely differentiated books chosen for high quality and familiarity with English: Germán Arciniegas’ view of the Caribbean as seen in 1946 by a Spanish scholar, Caribbean, Sea of the New World; a recent Yale University publication, Prospect for the Caribbean, by a local specialist, Ranjit Banarjee from the University of the West Indies; Alec Waugh’s 1955 saucy but instructive novel of Caribbean life, Island in the Sun; and a remarkable book which few today would otherwise know, The English in the West Indies, 1887, by one of the crustiest, most opinionated historians ever to lift a pen, James Anthony Froude. The literary executor and biographer of Thomas Carlyle, he had adopted that surly gentleman’s near-Nazi inclinations and applied them sulfurously to the Caribbean.
‘His opinions,’ Thérèse warned her students when placing copies of his book in the corner of the ship’s library reserved for those taking the cruise for credit, ‘are outrageous, and some are downright infuriating, but it’s refreshing to know what learned and cultured gentlemen thought of this part of the world back when quote “things were so good” unquote. Read and enjoy, but please do not spit on his preposterous pages or throw the book overboard.’
After such an introduction the students became immersed in Froude, and during the next few days Thérèse heard squeals of outrage as one student after another discovered the obiter dicta of brother Froude, who despised slaves, anyone with a drop of color in his blood, Catholics, Baptists, Indians from India, liberals, and with special venom, any Irishmen or Haitians. One student found what seemed to be Froude’s leitmotif: ‘The English have proved that they can play a great and useful role as rulers over people who recognize their own inferiority.’
When Michael Carmody heard the rumpus being made over Froude’s hideous statements about the Irish, he asked one of the students: ‘How can a mere book create so much confusion?’ and after he had looked into what Froude was saying, he asked: ‘What other books did your professor assign?’ and was delighted to learn that she had selected a work by one of his former students. Seeking her out, he found Thérèse on the sun deck watching the sky, and asked: ‘May I take this chair?’ and she nodded. Seated beside her, he asked: ‘How did you learn of Ranjit Banarjee’s study?’ and she explained:
‘Yale University plugged the book heavily among Caribbean scholars, and rightly so. It’s a fine work, and I was looking for something by a Jamaican.’
‘He’s Trinidadian.’
‘But I’m sure the blurb said University of the West Indies.’
‘It could just as properly have said University of Miami and reared in Trinidad.’
‘That must account for his breadth of vision. It’s an eye-opening book for my young people.’
‘It is indeed. And when we make our stop in Trinidad for Carnaval, you must meet him.’
‘Where does he teach?’ She noticed that when she asked this question, a slight frown skittered across Carmody’s face, as if he had at some point been at odds with the author of the book. After some undue hesitation, the Irishman said: ‘It’s quite unfathomable, really. He has no university affiliation.’
‘High school?’
‘No, he’s like so many Indian Ph.D.’s, especially in India—fabulously trained but unable to locate an opening.’ Thérèse saw that he obviously wanted to say more, and again she suspected that he had been in some way responsible for Banarjee’s loss of a job or, even more ugly, had caught the Indian in some misbehavior that made him unemployable, but since Carmody seemed to have decided not to talk about it, she ended the conversation lamely: ‘Well, he’s written the best book I’ve come across since Arciniegas’ years ago.’
As Carmody rose to leave, he said: ‘I must congratulate you. If a student digests your four books, she or he will have a good grasp of the Caribbean, but now I want to hear the French version of the story,’ and he invited her to accompany him to Senator Lanzerac’s first lecture. The senator spoke formal English, but with a mesmerizing French accent which he used to maximum effect:
‘First thing to know about my island, it has been French for many, many years, and is indeed two islands separated one from the other by an arm of the sea you can almost jump across. After three hundred years of colonial status, it became in 1946 a structural part of metropolitan France, with two senators and three deputies who meet in Paris with all the others who help rule France. Therefore, we are nothing like Barbados, Trinidad or Jamaica, who pertain to Great Britain in an emotional sense but who are not a functional part of that country. Nor are we like Puerto Rico, which is essentially a colony of the United States, nor like Cuba, which is a free, independent country on its own. We are unique.
‘Now when I say we, I mean of course the two related islands, Martinique and Guadeloupe. They are gentlemen, we are businessmen, but we form a strong team.’
A man who knew geography asked the question which must have been on many minds: ‘Why, if you were so close to Martinique and so affiliated, did you allow the island in the middle, Dominica, to remain in English hands?’ Lanzerac chuckled and cried: ‘Ah ha! You’re the one who asks the ugly question, and I’ll give you the ugly answer.
‘We tried many times to capture Dominica, and failed every time. Do you know why? Not that English arms were better than ours, but because the damned Carib Indians, fierce cannibals, ate our men every time we tried to land.’
‘How did the English manage?’ the man persisted, and Lanzerac said: ‘Because the Caribs were sensible, like people today. They liked French cooking and they couldn’t stand English.’
A vacationing professor from Chicago asked: ‘I’ve read some fascinating accounts of this man Victor Hugues who seems to have invaded your island in the 1790s. Will you be telling us anything about him?’
‘Indeed I shall. Early tomorrow, when we land at Point-à-Pitre, capital of the eastern island, I’ll be giving a short talk there on the infamous Hugues, who chopped off the head of my ancestor Paul Lanzerac and did his best to do the same to his wife, Eugénie Lanzerac. In my family we have no love for Hugues, but his story is a gripping one and you may find it instructive.’
Later, Thérèse sat with him at dinner, and asked: ‘Didn’t this Hugues free the slaves on Guadeloupe?’ and Lanzerac cried with some enthusiasm: ‘He certainly did! Celebrations. A new day in world history. “I kill all the whites, free all the slaves.” ’
‘From my point of view,’ Thérèse said with a touch of humor, ‘he couldn’t have been so bad,’ and Lanzerac agreed immediately: ‘Splendid fellow, on paper. Of course, when Napoleon decided to reimpose slavery, who was his loudest supporter?’ He pointed a sardonic finger at Thérèse and supplied his own answer: ‘Your boy Hugues. And if I may use an Americanism to a fellow scholar … a real bastard.’
The traditional Caribbean cruise ships, in order to save port fees, almost never remained in any harbor overnight; they left at dusk and spent the dark hours sailing to the next island. But since ‘Cruise-and-Muse’ had scheduled several important seminars on French history and culture at Guadeloupe, the ship spent two days on Grande-Terre, and Lanzerac immediately did something which established the quality of the visit: he conducted his lectures in the open area about the kiosk at the center of the marvelous square in Point-à-Pitre, and as he spoke, surrounded by the handsome old houses in which his ancestors had lived, he made the wild days of Victor Hugues come alive: ‘In 1794 he erected his guillotine right there where you’re standing. He dragged my famous Lanzerac forebear from that house there. In 1894 my grandfather was expelled from that other house when he married a young woman of color.’ Later a student reported to Thérèse: ‘A morning in the public square at Point-à-Pitre is worth a semina
r in the library at Duke.’
On the second evening she suggested that she and Senator Lanzerac hold a colloquy ashore for the students to which townspeople would also be invited, and since she spoke fluent French, he saw this as a fine opportunity to do some campaigning for the next election. So the parish hall was filled, with a bilingual islander translating in whispers for the students.
The forum provided Lanzerac with a springboard from which to glorify the Guadeloupean form of government: ‘If you take every governmental unit in the Caribbean today, and I mean even Venezuela and Colombia as well as the mixed-up Central American nations and Cuba, the best governed, it seems to me, are the French islands. Becoming a structural part of metropolitan France (in 1946), just as if we bordered on the Rhone, helped us work out some difficult economic problems. We also have developed pragmatic solutions to the race problem, and we enjoy an unfettered freedom. We have no religious riots, no turmoil in the streets.’
‘Can your young people get a good education here?’ a student asked, and Lanzerac replied as elders had in Point-à-Pitre for the last two hundred years: ‘Our bright boys we send back to the metropolitan for their education. I got mine in a fine little mountain village on the Italian border, Barcelonnette, if you care to look it up.’
‘Why do that?’ the interrogator pursued, and Lanzerac replied: ‘Because it binds us to France.’
‘But do you consider yourself French or Guadeloupean?’ and he replied: ‘French. I’m a citizen of France.’ Then he smiled disarmingly: ‘Of course, if my grandfather hadn’t married a very lovely creole girl with golden-colored skin, I’d not be able to get elected to the senate here.’
Under heavy questioning from the students, he defended his thesis that the best run of the Caribbean islands, all criteria considered, were the French: ‘We have a style suited to islands … an inborn love of freedom but also a desire to make something of ourselves. We’re pragmatic people. We handle race problems better than either the English or the Americans …’
‘How about the Spanish?’ someone asked, and he said, whimsically but truthfully: ‘The dear old Spaniards, they never handle anything well, race or anything else. They just go banging down the road of civilization like a car with one drooping fender. But dammit, they always seem to reach their destination at just about the same time that we and the English do.’
He emphasized the point that others had made about the Caribbean: it would probably be better if all the islands had remained under one European ownership rather than falling into scattered hands as they did, but he conceded that because Spain had been so lax in her custodianship, the scattering of interests became inevitable.
Before this easy generalization became too attractive to the students, Thérèse raised a ticklish question: ‘Would one religion for the region have helped?’ and he replied: ‘Yes. In the Caribbean, in Europe, in the world.’
‘The Catholic, perhaps?’ and he said: ‘Especially the Catholic. By and large, it’s the easiest religion for a nation-state to live with.’
Thérèse pressed: ‘You refer to the great accomplishments in Haiti? It’s Catholic,’ and Lanzerac replied, with an ingratiating Gallic shrug: ‘You win some, you lose some.’
On the final morning the group rented horses, and Lanzerac and Thérèse led the students on a long canter to the east, following the paths taken by Paul Lanzerac and Solange Vauclain in 1794, before the terror broke, and they called to each other in French as Paul and Solange must have done on their daring rides. The earth and the sky and the memories became so French that Thérèse was almost persuaded to believe that even though France had made a complete mess of Haiti, which still bore the scars of her mismanagement, it might truly have been better for the Caribbean if these civilized men and women had made all the islands integral parts of homeland France. But that night when they returned to the Galante she asked Lanzerac: ‘Have you ever heard about the terrible international debt that France hung around the neck of Haiti at the granting of independence in 1804?’ and he said: ‘Never heard of it,’ and she said: ‘A Haitian historian told the truth: “We spent most of our energy in the nineteenth century repaying France, and our nation fell so far behind in all social services that it could never catch up.” ’ And Lanzerac said: ‘When I get back to Paris, I’ll ask for a report on that.’
None of the students who spent those two days in old Point-à-Pitre would ever again feel that the Caribbean was a Spanish Lake, or an English one, either, for it also contained a powerful French coloring, which made it even more interesting.
As the Galante steamed south from Guadeloupe an informal committee of women students accosted Thérèse with a justified complaint: ‘Wherever we stop, the stories are about men. Your ancestor Vavak, the murderer Hugues. Weren’t there any women on these islands?’
Thérèse thought it odd that the question should come at this propitious moment, for to the west, adorned in sunset glow, rose the majestic peaks of France’s other island, Martinique, and she told the women: ‘Fetch the others and I’ll tell you about two girls a little younger than you who went to visit a cave on that island in the 1770s.’ When some men students wandered by she invited them to listen, so as night fell, most of her class were either sitting cross-legged before her or lounging about the deck where they could hear.
‘Two centuries ago on that island lived a daydreaming girl of noble ancestry with a name like a poem, Marie-Joséphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, and she had as her bosom friend a girl who was an even more confirmed dreamer, Aimée Dubec de Rivery. One afternoon, summoning their courage, they climbed a hill near their homes to visit a sorceress who lived in a cave. It must have been a mysterious affair, with incantations and rituals calculated to impress young girls, but suddenly the sorceress stopped in midflight, stared in open-mouthed amazement at the two, and said in a powerful voice they had not heard before: “You will each become a queen! You will live in palaces surrounded by a magnificent court. You will reign over entire nations and men will bow before you, because you will have majestic power.” The strange voice stopped. The sorceress resumed speaking as before, and when the girls asked what the interruption had been, she affected not to know what she had said, but she assured them: ‘Whatever it was, it was the truth, for I did not say it. But since the ancient ones spoke through me, you can rely upon it.”
‘As the impressionable girls returned to their homes, each looked at the other and burst out laughing: “You a queen! Palaces and glittering festivities!” The idea was so ridiculous they told no one of their visit, but in the long years ahead, separated by thousands of miles, they must often have reflected on that strange session in the cave.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘Does the name Beauharnais mean anything to you?’ When no one responded, she said: ‘The Tascher girl married a handsome young nobleman, Alexandre de Beauharnais, when he visited the island, and he took her back to France. He didn’t amount to much and was guillotined during the Revolution, leaving her a widow in perilous times.’
‘What happened?’ one of the girls asked, and all leaned forward to hear the conclusion of this tantalizing story.
‘She called herself Joséphine, became known in Paris, was thrown into prison, and was on the verge of being guillotined herself when she caught the eye of a young officer with a bright future. His name? Napoleon Bonaparte. He fell desperately in love with her, married her, and she became, as the cavewoman had predicted, his empress.’
There was silence as the young people studied the gradually vanishing island. ‘And what of Aimée?’
‘A French ship on which she was sailing in the Mediterranean was captured by Algerian pirates. She was whisked off to Constantinople and sold as a slave. One of the sultan’s eunuchs, seeking replenishments for the royal harem, saw her, bought her for his master, and she was so entrancing, so wise and witty, that she made the sultan her emotional slave, and he made her the equivalent of his queen.’ When some of the young women ga
sped, Thérèse added: ‘Romantic things can happen on the islands … especially French islands.’
One young woman, already beginning to dream, asked: ‘Could what you’ve just told us possibly be true?’ and Thérèse replied: ‘I’m like the old woman in the cave. Everything I said is true.’
Almost as if the organizers of the trip wished the tourists to see in rapid sequence the best of the French followed by the best of the British, the Galante deviated slightly to visit next the placid, gentle island of Barbados, treasured by stormbound Canadians, who sent two or three big airplanes down to Bridgetown every day filled with tourists seeking respite from the rigors of Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. As a representative of the Swedish Lines remarked to Thérèse: ‘If you closed Canadian airports for one week, Barbados would perish.’
A special lecturer joined them for the next three-day leg of the journey. He was Major Reginald Oldmixon, descendant of a famous Royalist family who had led a minor uprising in favor of the Divine Right of Kings after the beheading of Charles I in 1649, and at his first session with the travelers he made his apologies: ‘Barbados has a black governor general, a fine black prime minister, a black chief law officer, and black heads of most of the departments. I’d probably do a more representative job if I were black, but I do like to talk, and my family has been on the island since before any part of the United States was settled, so I do know something about the jolly old place.’ He laughed and said: ‘And to make things perfectly clear, my immediate boss is a black who can beat me at tennis.’
He proved a great hit with the younger passengers and especially with Thérèse’s students, for he had a lively wit, an aptitude for making himself the butt of jokes, and an agenda which he jolly well intended to further: ‘My job is to make you interested in Barbados and to feel at ease on our glorious island. It’s always been popularly known as Little England, and we’re proud to confess that the name has been appropriately awarded. When the rascals in the homeland chopped off the head of our king, we on Barbados said: “You can’t do that!” and declared war on the whole empire, such as it was at the time. We still feel that way. If things go bonkers in England, you can always find refuge in Barbados. Population two hundred and sixty thousand, like a small American city, area a hundred and sixty-six square miles, about like one of your larger counties, quality of life, among the best in the world.’