They explored other possibilities, but in the end the canon returned to the one that lay closest to his religious belief: ‘Beyond all doubt, Laura, the best route, the one that God has always wanted you to take, is to marry the young man and start a Christian …’
She cut him off: ‘Impossible.’
‘Why?’ both Tarletons asked, and she said grimly: ‘Because he wouldn’t marry me, and I would never marry him.’
‘Who is he? I’ll talk to him.’
‘The Rastafarian.’
‘Oh my God!’ Reverend Tarleton cried, for he had only yesterday received from the church in Jamaica a report on Ras-Negus Grimble, and the information still burned in his mind:
We’re glad you asked for further information on your visitor. Some years ago he formed a fast friendship with our famous reggae singer Bob Marley and together they strung together several Bible texts like the fundamental one in Genesis: ‘Male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply.’ Using such quotations, they constructed a doctrine which preached: ‘Rasta Man must have as many children as possible and he must help Rasta Woman do the same.’ It is known that Marley impregnated twelve different women. Your man, Ras-Negus Grimble, has done almost as well, for we know of eight children he has fathered without ever having been married. When challenged about this, he told one of our social workers in my presence: ‘God has directed me to have children. That’s my job. Yours is to find ways to care for them.’
Turning to his wife, he asked, ‘Should we show her the letter?’ and she replied: ‘I do believe we must,’ so without comment he handed it to Laura and watched her handsome face as she read it, observing that her expression passed from shock to anger.
Then Laura slowly folded the letter neatly, used one corner to tap her front teeth, and very quietly asked: ‘As a man of God, where can you send me to have an abortion?’
Neither of the Tarletons drew back from the responsibility implied in this terrible question. Instead, the clergyman took Laura’s hand and said: ‘It would be better, my beloved daughter, if you had the child. But twice in my ministry I have been forced to advise otherwise. Once when a girl was pregnant by her father, again when a child of fourteen was pregnant by her idiot brother. Today you are pregnant by the devil, and you must go to this address in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and now, let us pray.’
This time they knelt, and he said simply: ‘God in heaven, who has watched this meeting from the start, forgive the three of us for departing from Thy teachings, but we are faced by wholly new problems and are honestly striving to do our best. Bless Thy servant Laura, who is a good woman and who has ahead of her a life of great potential contribution, and please bless my wife and me, for we did not seek this problem, nor did we resolve it carelessly.’
As Laura rose to leave, both Tarletons kissed her, and he said: ‘If you should need airfare to Trinidad, we could help,’ but she said: ‘I can manage.’
The presence of the Rastafarian posed a dilemma to another person—Lincoln Wrentham, eight years older than his sister Sally and proprietor of the Waterloo. During the first month of Grimble’s stay in All Saints, Lincoln had been only vaguely aware of his presence. He had seen his tall and distinctive figure once or twice moving rather furtively about the back streets, and after the incident with the American tourist woman from the Tropic Sands, he heard that it might have been the Rastafarian’s preaching that had triggered the affair. As a man whose business now depended in large part on a constant new supply of American travelers, he was so concerned that he sought a meeting with Harry Keeler, at which he demanded action: ‘You’ve got to do something about this fellow.’
Harry nodded, but then pointed out: ‘Isn’t that more your father’s job than mine?’ and Lincoln had to agree, so he went along to his father’s office, and there he was pleased to learn that the police were keeping a sharp eye on the Jamaican. ‘Any agitation, troublemaking, off this island he goes,’ Commissioner Wrentham assured his son, and there the matter rested. But sometime later, while Lincoln was tending bar at his café, he overheard two patrons talking about the Rastafarian, and one said, ‘I think he’s dating Sally from the prime minister’s office,’ and Lincoln drew closer to eavesdrop, but the men did not refer to his sister again.
He was sufficiently disturbed to stop by his father’s office to ask if he knew anything about Sally’s possible involvement, and was told: ‘No, Sally’s been going to different affairs, cricket matches and the like, with young Harry Keeler, and I’m very pleased about it. The Rastafarian? Sally’s not the type to fool around with him.’
And there Lincoln’s investigation ended, but the confidence that he and his father expressed about Sally’s level-headedness was ill placed, because at the very time they were talking she was deeply involved with Ras-Negus, not like her friend Laura Shaughnessy as a bed partner, but rather as one interested in probing the depth and significance of his vision about the future of the world’s black people, and especially those in the Caribbean.
She met with him after work, sometimes talking till near midnight, at other times just closing her eyes and listening to his rendition of some Bob Marley reggae, with the booming of the empty box echoing in her ears as Ras-Negus thumped it. But almost always, whether the session had begun with talk or music, it ended with them chanting ‘Four Hundred Years.’ Regularly he tried to make love with her, but her earlier experience in the back of Laura’s car had ended any involvement in that area. What attracted her and kept her coming back to argue with him was his extraordinary views about life in general, his conviction that blacks could run their own affairs, and his certainty that domination by the white race was at an end. His Jamaican experience had not allowed him to know that about half the world was neither Caribbean black nor English-American white, but an Asian yellow. Still, the intensity of his thought regarding the little world of the Caribbean gave him authority, and Sally wished to share in it.
She had been reared without racial or social prejudices. After all, her grandfather, Black Bart, had been knighted for his exceptional leadership during World War II and it was rumored that her father, the commissioner, was being touted as the next governor general, so she watched in her own family the liberation and acceptance of blacks and browns. But what they would do with their freedom was another matter, and of late she had often wondered whether a minute island such as All Saints with only a hundred and ten thousand people, fewer than a small American or British city, could exist for long unless it associated itself with eight or nine islands of similar size to form a federation. And if they did, which seemed highly unlikely, on what would they subsist? What industry could thrive in such a small arena, except perhaps tourism, and was that a viable base for a society?
These were heady questions, and one might have thought that she would have gone to her friend Harry Keeler for answers, but she did not for good reason: she had already talked with him about these matters, and whatever he said was strongly colored by England’s empire experience, so that all she would be getting from him was standard white-man’s thinking. Nor could she talk seriously with her father or brother, because they had been conscripted into a subtle continuance of the white man’s rule, her father through his appointment to high office with a promise perhaps of a higher one and her brother through his reliance on tourists to keep his café profitable.
What she really wanted at this moment in her life was a solid six hours with Marcus Garvey, the wild black philosopher of Jamaica, but he was long since dead; or with Frantz Fanon, the equally wild leader from Martinique, but he also was dead. These men would have understood both where she stood at this point in her life and where she wanted to go, but their teachings did not give specific answers to that galaxy of new problems that had arisen since their deaths. In their place she had the Rastafarian, whose savage vitality provided a much lower level of intellectualism. She was more than aware that to compare him with either Garvey or Fanon was pr
eposterous, but she also realized that there might be subtle truth in something he had once said: ‘I am John the Baptist of the Leeward and Windward Islands.’ She thought it doubtful that he could be the forerunner of any serious religious movement, but she was not so pessimistic about his ability to inspire political action or at least reassessment, and she needed to hear more of his thinking.
So without ever making a conscious choice, she began engaging in a tricky game, though she wasn’t devious. During normal encounters at the office and in the ordinary social events that came along each week, she encouraged Harry Keeler, in whom she was so interested that she was seriously considering marriage, but late at night or on evenings when Harry was engaged in government business, she sought out the Rastafarian for more discussions. Repelling easily the sexual advances he kept making and letting him know exactly what her interests were, she found his reactions to island problems sensible and refreshing so long as they did not involve religion or sex.
One morning as she dressed she thought it would be profitable if she and Laura Shaughnessy invited Ras-Negus to tour the southern end of the island with them as he had the northern, but when she went to ask Laura to join her in extending the invitation, she learned that her friend had left the island on an extended visit to relatives in either Jamaica or Barbados.
When she drove around to pick up Grimble from the tiny house in which he was living with the family of one of his girl friends, she was astonished to discover that he did not know how to drive. To explain this deficiency he reverted to Jamaican street talk, and Sally thought: This touches him deeply. He’s a child again.
‘That time, long time, me no have nuttin’. Mudder, she work all time, no earn nuttin’. Me never get job drive car, never learn.’
‘That’s all right,’ she told him. ‘I’ll drive,’ and they set off for the new road connecting York to the airport, and on this stretch she had first to rebuff him sharply when he tried to work his way under her dress: ‘Save that for the others, Grimble!’ Then she started the long conversation which would continue almost unbroken till they returned to Bristol Town.
‘What do you think will happen to the Caribbean, Grimble?’ When he started his reply by citing certain obscure passages in Revelation, she cut him short: ‘None of that nonsense! You and I both know that two hundred years from now America will be where it is and functioning one way or another, and some pope will be in place in Rome with more or less power. And our islands will still be here, populated mostly by blacks and untold numbers of Indians imported from Asia. What I want to know, Grimble, is what kind of world we blacks will have here?’
He protested almost petulantly: ‘I don’t like Grimble. My name Ras-Negus.’
She apologized: ‘I’m sorry, dear friend. A man is entitled to be called by what he prefers. But your predictions, please?’
‘In old days lots of blacks from all islands go to work in Cuba cane fields, help build Panama Canal, go live in Central American jungles, cut logwood for dye, mahogany for build things. Most never come back. Later, same kind of men go New York, London, work strong, send much money home. But like others, they too never come back. Things in island stay in balance. Babies born, man go away, room for everyone. But now …’
Sally asked: ‘Ras-Negus, how old are you?’ and he replied: ‘Twenty-five,’ to which she said: ‘You’re a bright, able fellow. I could see that from the first. In the times you were talking about, you’d have left Jamaica for the adventure in Panama or headed for London.’
He agreed: ‘If they start something big in Brazil, I go tomorrow,’ but she would not accept this evasion: ‘There isn’t going to be anything big in Brazil, or Cuba or America. And if there was, people from Central America would rush to grab the jobs.’
‘I think maybe you’re right. London closed, too many out of work. Can’t go Trinidad, they won’t let.’
‘So what?’
‘Bob Marley … Jesus Christ of the Caribbean. Great, great man. He go Africa …’ and apparently memories of Marley seduced him back into a Jamaican street vocabulary which she could not follow, so after she protested, he said: ‘Very impressed. Great place, Africa. He tell me when he get back: “Maybe better we all go Africa. Like Marcus Garvey say. I mean everybody in Jamaica. Just up and go.” I beginnin’ to think same way.’
‘Have you any idea how many ships, big ones, it would take to move Jamaica to Africa?’
‘Atom power, maybe nuclear power, it could be done.’
When they reached the airport at the southern extremity of the island, she interrupted the dialogue with a suggestion he appreciated: ‘Let’s go into the canteen and have something to eat,’ but when they sat down at the counter she was amazed when he ordered not only a meat sandwich, but a large bowl of chili, a helping of French fries and a slab of chocolate cake with a large glass of milk. ‘I thought you ate only natural foods,’ she chided, and he explained: ‘Festival with beautiful girl,’ but she noticed that he did move all the food into his coconut bowl before he ate. He made no effort to pay for what he called his festival, for as usual he had no money, but he ate as if famished, and when Sally could not finish her generous sandwich, he wolfed that down too.
On the drive north, they stopped again, at the deluxe hotel at Pointe Neuve, where she treated him to a lemon squash, and after that she returned to her earlier question: ‘So what’s to become of us in the Caribbean?’ and with all other options foreclosed, he said thoughtfully: ‘Population grow. That for sure. Then people go Trinidad whether they want us or not. Maybe Venezuela, Colombia too. Also Cuba for sure, maybe United States, like people from Haiti.’
‘Do you think those other countries will allow us in?’ and he replied instantly: ‘They better. What choice they got?’
‘I think you’ll find they have many choices. Guns along the shore, for example.’
‘They might. But people tell me guns along Florida don’t stop Cubans, Haitians.’
‘So what else did you and Bob Marley have in mind?’
‘Marley no politician. He pure Rasta voice of Jah. That for sure.’
‘I still want to know, Ras-Negus, what else?’
As she asked this question they were driving slowly along the glorious foreshore of the Caribbean, with an entire world of sun and bending trees and sudden glimpses of Morne de Jour far to the north, and Grimble suddenly cried: ‘Our islands are too beautiful to lose!’ And she noted that now he spoke perfect English.
‘Of course,’ she bore in. ‘But what are we going to do to keep them?’
‘You know anything about communism?’
‘Not much, except that it doesn’t seem to work too well in Cuba. Why?’
‘I’ve been wondering. Maybe in our islands we need something different. Like sugar and tobacco in the past, even the things we do now, maybe they’re gone … forever. Like bauxite in Jamaica. When I was a boy, all men in my village looked forward to jobs in bauxite mines, big ships coming to north shore Jamaica, loading our bauxite, carrying it to Philadelphia’s big aluminum plants, make frying pans, all things. Now that’s all gone. Suppose you’re a farmer, you don’t want bauxite work, you want to raise bananas on all the hillsides. In the old days big ships came to the same harbors as bauxite, Fyffe & Elder carrying our bananas to Liverpool, Marseilles. Now no more. In old days, everybody worked, everybody happy. Now it’s all gone.’
He raised his hands in a gesture of despair, then he twisted his lute and began to sing ‘Four Hundred Years,’ in which she joined. In this manner they came finally to that lovely pinnacle which housed Pointe Sud, one of the rocky guardians of the Baie de Soleil, from which they could see ships moving from the Caribbean into the baie, with handsome Bristol Town gleaming in the distance, the sunlit roof of Government House high on its hill and The Club just visible behind. It was a sight to gladden the heart of any All Saints man, and even a stranger from another island like Grimble could appreciate the unmatched grandeur of this scene.
When Sa
lly pulled her car into a paved parking lot atop the pinnacle, from where they could see both the town to the east and the sea to the west, she asked, not having lost her train of thought: ‘If Cuban communism isn’t the answer, and I’m afraid it isn’t because the other islands are too small and too disjointed to work as a unit, what is?’
The Rasta Man had exhausted his alternatives—negritude, Rastafarianism, communism. He had nothing more to offer the Caribbean islands, whose populations were not yet capable of making choices in a complex modern world or of executing them if they did make them. No Caribbean citizens had trained themselves the way the Japanese had before they boldly cried: ‘We can build automobiles better than Detroit!’ or like the Koreans of a decade later who shouted: ‘We can make steel better and cheaper than Japan.’ The Caribbean had no black industrialists or engineers capable of duplicating the way the Taiwanese had leaped into world competition to follow the two city-states Hong Kong and Singapore. Citizens of this golden sea were still rural practitioners, some of the most congenial in the world, but self-restricted to digging, cutting and hauling.
Sally, dismayed to see this striving man lost in his simplicities, tried to bring common sense into their discussion: ‘Could we serve as a kind of manufacturing area for big firms in Britain and America?’
‘They’re Babylon. They’re to be destroyed.’
Sally became furious, and showed it: ‘Grimble! For Christ’s sake, stop that nonsense! Put your mind to work. Do you think we could attract manufacturing? Sewing clothes or putting machines together?’
‘Jamaica had bauxite. They left. Now we have nothing!’
‘But we have people. Very able people who could learn anything.’