Caribbean: a novel Part 40

He drilled them on about sixty questions with which interrogators tried to trick couples they suspected of fraud, and when he felt that his sister and her Indian had their answers pat, he turned to the matter of the money.

'Did you give her any money?' he roared at Ranjit, who fumbled. 'Listen, d.a.m.n you! This Schwartz could be very rough. He's got a million tricks. Now, did you give her any money? The answer is No! No! No!'

'Did you give her a wedding ring? Yes! Yes! Yes! Where is it now? And you both say that she hocked it when we needed money for a suit for you-you d.a.m.ned dumb Indian.' And he gave his sister a p.a.w.nbroker's receipt with an appropriate date. 'It's effective if you cry when you say it, Molly, and you must look very ashamed, Hindu.'

When he felt they could defend themselves he allowed them to go into Miami to face their ordeal with this Schwartz, whoever he was, and as soon as Molly entered his office she noticed the seersucker coat hanging on a rack, and Schwartz noticed that she noticed, so they started even, but not quite, because he did not separate them for the traditional private grilling her brother had antic.i.p.ated. Instead, he sat them in comfortable chairs, then called out for Joe Anderson to come in.

'This is my man Joe. Now, Joe, I want you to tell these good people what you did this morning the minute you were sure that these two and her brother Gunter had left the house at 2119 San Diego in Coral Gables, not far from the university.'

Joe, a hefty fellow who looked capable of defending himself if he stumbled into trouble, said: 'I went to the front door, knocked, and showed the woman who answered the door this court order.' He showed them the doc.u.ment, a search-and-seize order covering the premises at 2119 San Diego.

'And then what?' Schwartz asked, and Joe said: 'I searched the place, as you directed.'

'You mean the whole house?' and Joe said: 'No, just the cellar, like you said.'

The Banarjees gasped, Ranjit more than Molly, for when Schwartz said: 'Tell them what you found, Joe,' the latter went into another room and returned with the entire bed on which Ranjit had been sleeping since his marriage.

Then, with remorseless probing, Schwartz hammered at the now-confused couple and all of Gunter's careful coaching flew out the window, for Schwartz did not ask one of the antic.i.p.ated questions. When he had them hopelessly bewildered and practically admitting that their marriage had been a fraud, he signaled Joe, who now brought in brother Gunter and one of the men who had partic.i.p.ated in the a.s.sault on him, and from an entirely different set of papers he read the results of a longtime investigation of the racket that the Hudak family had been running.

Icily he ticked off details of the three earlier marriages Molly had contracted, the amounts of money exchanged and the disposition of the cases against the unfortunate aliens who had been involved. When the irrefutable facts were laid out, he told Gunter and his thug: 'Don't ever slug a special agent in the mouth. There are harsh laws against that. It cost me three hundred and twenty dollars to get my teeth fixed. It's going to cost you and your buddy about fifteen years,' and Gunter was led away by two policemen.

But even when Schwartz was satisfied that his case against the Hudaks was so tight that they would surely go to jail in a later trial, he wasn't so sure about Molly. 'Look,' he told his team, 'since we deported her three illegal husbands, the only one we have to testify against her is her husband, who we know won't say a word.'

'We have the Hindu,' Joe said, but Schwartz cautioned: 'That little fellow is starry-eyed. He still loves her ... would never say a word against her.'

Joe protested: 'Boss, consider what she did to him. Never allowed him to kiss her. Made him sleep in the cellar. Had her brother beat him up at least twice. Mark my words, Banarjee will make her burn.'

'I'm not so sure,' Schwartz said, for his stomach was sending messages, and when Ranjit was summoned to a hearing two weeks later, he refused to testify against the woman he had considered his real wife.

'Dr. Banarjee,' the Federal District judge said, 'I want you to stand over here so we can talk, man to man.' Ranjit stood before the bench, a frail Hindu in a J C Penney suit that didn't quite fit, and awaited the questions.

'Do you still claim that yours was a marriage for love, not money?'

'I do.'

'And do you still love your wife?'

'I do.'

'And if I order you to be deported, do you wish to be returned to Trinidad?'

'I do.'

'You will be removed this day to the waiting area at the Krome Avenue Detention Center, from which, two days hence, you will be flown to the airport at Port of Spain, Trinidad. You may approach the bench.' When Ranjit stood before him, he said so that others could not hear: 'You seem a decent sort. I'm sorry you've treated the United States poorly and vice versa.'

In October 1986 a disconsolate Ranjit Banarjee, his marriage having been annulled because of fraud, flew out of the United States in a dull, aching trance. As he took his seat in the British West Indies plane to Trinidad, the stewardess handed him a Miami newspaper with the screaming headline JEALOUS NICARAGUAN LOVER MURDERS BEAUTIFUL WAITRESS. There were the photographs, some grisly with blood, some taken years ago when Molly graduated from high school and was quite lovely. On the inside pages were two photographs of her husband but none of Gunter Hudak, the cause of the tragedy.

Fifteen, twenty times during the flight Ranjit reopened the paper to study the front page and pursue the story on the inside, and as the plane approached Port of Spain he asked the stewardess if he could please have the papers that the other pa.s.sengers were leaving on their seats, and she helped him collect some. He folded them reverently, for they contained the only photographs he would ever have of a woman whom he had, in his hesitant way, loved.

In Trinidad his friends, knowing of his arrest but not of Molly's murder, received him with tears of grat.i.tude over his having escaped a prison sentence in America. He had a full-fledged doctorate in philosophy from the University of Miami, but there were no openings at the main campus of the University of the West Indies, nor in its Trinidad branch, and his deportation from the States prevented him from ever returning there for a job. The local colleges, high schools really, judged him to be overqualified for their needs, so after sitting around in idleness for some months unable to find work of any kind, he flew back to Jamaica, asked that his credentials for graduate courses in history be transferred to the registrar at U.W.I., where he enrolled to take a second doctorate, this time in history, and although he seemed ill at ease when the course work started, for he was much older than the other students, he soon found his place and liked it.

He was referred to as Dr. Banarjee, and younger students who hoped to become scholars themselves deferred to him, but those in business or the sciences smiled at his overly courteous manner, his diffident way of avoiding direct confrontations, and his aroma, one might almost say, of bookishness.

Some students in the humanities who rather liked him were perplexed one day when, before the start of a cla.s.s, he was handed a letter bearing quite a few stamps and readdressing labels. Ranjit took it, studied the writing on the front, and said clearly: 'Well, well.' But his hands trembled as he opened it, and when he finished reading, he remained erect in the sunlight, but all the bones seemed to melt within his body, and finally he accepted help from a younger student, who led him to a bench. There he sat, a tidy little fellow, determined not to weep despite the tears welling from his eyes.

The letter was from Norma Wellington, who informed him that she had recently married the head of surgery at her hospital in Chicago and was happily engaged in caring for his two children by a former wife, who had died of cancer. The letter rambled a bit, then got to the point: 'Ranjit, I've heard of the disaster in Miami. Remember that those of us who knew you best love you for the trim little gentleman you are, and that I love you with particular warmth. Keep studying, and someday you'll share your great understanding with the world. Norma.' There was a postscript: 'Mehmed Muhammad is the sensation of our hospital and the entire staff is helping him get his citizens.h.i.+p.'

When he returned to Trinidad with his second Ph.D. he frequented libraries, poked about old records of s.h.i.+pping firms that had imported slaves, and created a bit of stir when it became known that several different universities in Great Britain had inquired about hiring him as professor. He was interested, certainly, and three times he went through the hideous British ritual called 'the short leet' in which the university announced the three or four finalists who were being considered for an appointment. Photographs of the scholars appeared in the newspapers of the university city, of course, and were mailed off to the hometowns of the compet.i.tors, so that Trinidad papers could announce proudly: RANJIT BANARJEE ON THE SHORT LEET AT SALISBURY.

Sadly, he never won an appointment, but despite his repeated failures, his Indian friends in Port of Spain greeted him with extra deference: 'You must be proud, Ranjit. Salisbury, no less,' and he would reply jokingly: 'I'm beginning to feel like those Indian scholars in Bombay and Calcutta who write pa.s.sionate letters to the editor and sign them: "Ranjit Banarjee, M.A. Oxon (Failed)" They had been enrolled at Oxford, had tried and had gained prestige even in failure.' Ranjit's ability to mask his disappointments in jokes at his own expense imbedded him more securely in Trinidad as 'our scholar.'

The one man who was not fooled by Ranjit's apparent indifference was his old master Michael Carmody, who came to him after each announcement that the appointment had gone to someone else: 'It must be galling to go through that experience, but take heart. I read the other day that the world has more than a thousand good universities. One of them will want a real scholar like you,' but Ranjit replied: 'Most of them are in the United States, and even if they did want me, I wouldn't be allowed to go there.'

It was Carmody who secretly went from one wealthy Indian trader to the next, saying: 'It's shameful the way Trinidad treats this splendid man. His cousin gives him a n.i.g.g.ardly allowance even though the Portugee Shop should be his, and the poor fellow can hardly afford a new suit. I want you to arrange with your friends for him to have a decent sum each month. And I will launch the fund with this two hundred pounds. In years to come, you'll be proud of this man, a great intellect.'

He also talked them into gathering a fund which enabled the U.W.I. to publish in respectable format a collection of Ranjit's academic essays, including his long poem on Alexander Hamilton and the hurricane and his seminal essay 'Indians in Trinidad.'

It was the circulation of these works which encouraged Yale University to invite him to publish through its prestigious Press his important full-length study Prospect for the Caribbean. Of course, the book earned no money, so Ranjit continued to live off the largesse of his family plus such funds as Carmody could quietly provide. And occasionally some older American couple would debark from a cruise s.h.i.+p for a one-day visit to Trinidad and inquire in the Portugee Shop: 'Would it be possible, do you think, for us to meet your distinguished scholar Dr. Banarjee?' When the clerk said: 'He lives quite close, I'll just ring him up,' Ranjit would hurry down, greet the professor from Harvard or Indiana or San Diego, and lead the pair to the old Banarjee house built by his ancestors. There he would serve limeades and pistachio nuts and hold discourse with his fellow scholars.

PEOPLE WHO SAW HIM approach gasped, and one woman stood stock-still and cried aloud: 'Oh my G.o.d!' All moved aside to give him free pa.s.sage, and well they might, for none had ever seen anything like him on All Saints Island.

He was about twenty-five years old, six feet two inches tall and thin as the legs of a stork. His clothes were sensational: on his head a floppy gold and green tam, on his feet big leather flats, like those of a Roman centurion, with thongs winding up his pant legs, which were a hideous purple, all emphasized by a very loose T-s.h.i.+rt bearing a likeness of Haile Sela.s.sie and, in bold, well-printed letters, three phrases: I-MAN RASTA, DEATH TO POPE and h.e.l.l DESTRUCTION AMERICA.

But what made him look really wild and fierce was his hair, for it had been neither cut nor combed during the past five or six years. Natural tangling, a.s.sisted by plasterings of mud, oil and chemicals, had caused it to fall in long matted strands, which had been separated and plaited into two- and three-foot lengths that fell almost to his waist like writhing vipers. By this device he had converted himself into a male Medusa, whose frightening appearance was magnified by a heavy, untrimmed beard, equally matted. In addition to all this, he had a fierce, penetrating gaze and very white, big teeth that gleamed through his half-open mouth. He looked terrifying.

Inside the All Saints airport he took from his only piece of luggage, a big shapeless canvas sack, his pa.s.sport, which read: RAS-NEGUS GRIMBLE. BORN 1956, c.o.c.kPIT TOWN, JAMAICA. And as soon as an Immigration official saw this, he slipped into a back room to telephone the commissioner of police in Bristol Town: 'Colonel Wrentham, a Jamaican Rastafarian has just landed. Papers in order. Headed your way on the airport bus.'

Pa.s.sengers carefully avoided the man as they took their seats, repulsed by his savage appearance and fetid smell, but once the bus started north along the beautiful sh.o.r.eline with its constant view of the Caribbean, they attended more to the unparalleled landscape than to their Gorgon-like companion. He seemed not to realize that he had frightened most of them, and at one point he leaned across the aisle, looked straight at two middle-aged women from Miami, and gave them one of the warmest smiles they had ever seen-all flas.h.i.+ng eyes and dazzling white teeth: 'Sistas, I-man nebber see ocean like dat.'

Although they could not fathom his words, they were encouraged by his friendly tone, and one of them asked: 'Why do you do that to your hair?' and he replied, as if he had expected their question: 'Dreadlocks.' Indeed, his strings of hair were known in Jamaica as dreads, but again the word had no meaning for the women, who now asked: 'Are you a preacher?' to which he replied: 'I-man be servant Jah, name belong me Negus, same Ras-Tafari, King Ithiop, Lord Almighty, Lion Judah, Ruler all Afrika, Savior World, Death to Pope.'

This was such a fusillade of ideas that the women could do no more than stare at the young man, but their curiosity had been aroused, and he was proving so congenial that they were emboldened to point to the messages on his s.h.i.+rt and ask: 'Why do you want to kill the pope?' and he said, almost gently: 'He-&-he Great Babylon, must be die, all men free.'

'But why do you want to h.e.l.l Destruction America?' and he explained something that was of extreme importance to him, his face becoming grave as he said in a low, confidential voice: 'America Great Babylon, Great Wh.o.r.e of World, Bible say so,' and from the canvas sack that carried all his goods he produced a Bible, which he turned expertly to Revelation 14:8, reading in an apocalyptic voice which could be heard through the bus: ' "Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication." '

The words seemed to intoxicate him, and he got up, stalking through the bus, pointing at white people, and shouting in a demonic voice: 'Pope be Babylon, America be Great Babylon, police, sheriff, judge be Babylon the Wh.o.r.e. All be destroyed Marcus Garvey Great Emperor Haile Sela.s.sie. Afrika rule all de world. Negus say so. I-&-I perish.'

He seemed almost demented as he preached from his Revelation text, but having made his point about the destruction of the pope, America and the white race, he returned to his seat, leaned once more across the aisle, and whispered, with a smile so winning that it once again charmed the two women who a moment before had been terrified: 'Sistas, Emperor Sela.s.sie, King of Judah, I-man save good people.'

When the bus came to a halt in Bristol Town, the driver managed rather clumsily to obstruct any exit of pa.s.sengers until the island's black commissioner of police, Colonel Thomas Wrentham, had time to leave his office and walk casually past the bus as if he had no interest in it whatever. But when Grimble descended with a half coconut sh.e.l.l dangling by a cord from his waist, a homemade lute under his arm and his sack in his hand, Colonel Wrentham positioned himself in such a way that the self-proclaimed Rastafarian had to pa.s.s near him.

'Hullo,' the police officer said easily. 'What brings you to All Saints?'

'I-man go here, go there, Jah direct.'

'You have friends on the island?'

The newcomer, shaking his matted reptilian locks, smiled as if to embrace all the people on the island, and said: 'I-&-I who love Jah, my friends.'

'Good,' Wrentham said, nodding to the young stranger as if the entire island welcomed him, but as soon as the Rastafarian had disappeared toward the little jungle of cheap waterfront shacks, he hurried back to his office, where he made several rushed telephone calls: 'Tom, cable Jamaica. Ask them to send full details. Ras-Negus Grimble, age twenty-five, c.o.c.kpit Town.' To a schoolteacher he said: 'Can you come down to the police office right away? No, you're not in trouble, but I may be.' And to the Church of England minister he said: 'Canon Tarleton, could I borrow your wisdom and counsel for about an hour?'

When the teacher, the radioman and the minister a.s.sembled, the first a black islander, the other two white Englishmen, Wrentham started speaking without the usual courtesies: 'I've got two problems on my hands, and I need your help for answers. What is your explanation of a Rastafarian? And how do I get rid of the one that just landed at the airport?'

'Is he from Jamaica?' the teacher asked.

'Yes. And he has a valid ticket on to Trinidad, I called the airline. It's an open date, so we may have him for some time.'

The clergyman asked: 'Is there any way you can move him on? I mean, off the island? We've learned that men like him always generate trouble.'

For the moment Wrentham evaded the suggestion that the man be deported, for he did not wish to embroil the government in drawn-out legal maneuverings unless he had no choice. To gain time, he asked the schoolteacher: 'They tell me that when you studied at the university you dug pretty deep into this Rastafarianism. Tell us how the d.a.m.ned thing got started.'

'Simple, if I'm allowed to skip the nuances. In the 1920s a Jamaican black, Marcus Garvey, appeared as a kind of John the Baptist talking about the revival of the black race, the return of blacks to Africa and the impending triumph of Africa over all the white nations. Heady stuff. He went to America, got hold of a s.h.i.+p illegally and proposed sending all blacks back to Africa. Landed in the penitentiary for fraud ... set black minds afire. My grandfather believed every word Garvey said, tried to lead a contingent of blacks back to Yoruba lands. He wound up in jail, too.'

The commissioner nodded, then asked: 'Where does Haile Sela.s.sie enter the picture? Wasn't he the emperor of Abyssinia?'

'Yes,' the clergyman said. 'Jamaicans call it by its Biblical name, Ethiopia. For some reason that's never been explained, except that the Bible is full of references to Ethiopia and one to the Lion of Judah, the emperor's appellation.... Anyway, the blacks in Jamaica generated the fantastic idea that Haile Sela.s.sie was the latest reincarnation of G.o.d. Jah is the name they use ...'

'Haile Sela.s.sie is G.o.d?' the perplexed commissioner asked.

The clergyman hesitated: 'I guess those who cannot read believe Sela.s.sie to be G.o.d. The more sophisticated hold him to be more like Jesus or Muhammad or Mary Baker Eddy, a favored recipient of holy power. But all believe that he's somehow a form of Jah who will lead blacks to world power.'

'But Sela.s.sie's dead,' Wrentham protested, and as soon as he uttered the words he looked appealingly to the others: 'He did die, didn't he?'

'Yes,' the teacher said. 'About six years ago.'

'Then why are these people so convinced that he will save them?'

His question, which he meant to be rhetorical, evoked a reply from the Church of England man: 'Christians believe that Jesus long dead will do the same for them, and Muslims believe that Muhammad, dead well over a thousand years, will protect them. And I would think that Mormons and Christian Scientists have similar beliefs.' Realizing that his words might seem blasphemous, he coughed and concluded rather lamely: 'So the Rastafarians with their Negus ...'

'What's that word mean?' Wrentham asked. 'This young fellow calls himself Ras-Negus Grimble.'

The schoolteacher answered: 'Means king. Sela.s.sie is often called simply Negus or The Negus.' But then the clergyman resumed command of the discussion: 'The Rastafarian movement is bewildering to some, comical to others, but to many of us in these islands it is deadly serious for several reasons. It preaches that blacks will one day take over the world and rectify old injustices to their race. It teaches that the pope must be destroyed.'

'Why?'

'They say he represents and therefore commands the world power that oppressed them brutally in slavery days and more subtly now. And of course, the United States as the center of visible power in this part of the world-radio, television, autos, surplus foodstuffs-it too must be destroyed. Now, those targets are rather exotic, and the Rastas can't do much about them, but when they get to fooling around with their favorite anathema, Great Babylon, that's when you get into big trouble. For they have proclaimed that in addition to the pope and America, the police in the islands are Great Babylon which the Bible says must be destroyed.'

They sat quietly for a while as each man recalled reports of incidents throughout the Caribbean in which black men, their minds addled by Babylon, had attacked individual policemen, or stations, or town halls, or other symbols of repressive power. Finally, Commissioner Wrentham asked: 'What should our policy be? On this particular island, when so far as I know we have only this one visiting Rastafarian?'

The radioman, who had been silent up to now, said bluntly: 'You can expect trouble. I've been in contact with men on other islands and they tell me the Rastas are a bad lot.'

Colonel Wrentham was obviously perplexed: 'Maybe I'd better seek him out tomorrow and order him off the island.'

'Not too fast,' the schoolteacher warned. 'If he hasn't done anything wrong, he could sue us ... and he would.'

'What you'd better do,' the clergyman said, 'is consult the island's legal counsel.' Then he added: 'But in the meantime I'd watch the man closely.'

'Thank you, gentlemen,' the commissioner said graciously, but when they were gone he told his sergeant: 'They didn't give me much usable advice.'

Alone in his office, he telephoned the prime minister's legal adviser, who lit all kinds of signal fires: 'Now look here, Wrentham! Last thing we want on this island is any kind of religious trouble. Don't, for G.o.d's sake, make a martyr of this Rasta. Hands off!'

'Can I keep him under close surveillance?'

'From a distance, yes. But religious dislocations we do not need. Be very careful.'

When Commissioner Wrentham turned his police headquarters over to the two night men, he walked homeward with only a vague program for dealing with this Rastafarian: Treat him decently, but get him off the island.

Conforming to his nightly custom, he walked home by a path that took him past his father's famous cafe, the Waterloo, and he checked to see how his son, who now owned the place, was doing. When he became commissioner he had felt obligated to get rid of what was essentially a saloon, and Lincoln, thirty years old and named after the Liberator, had improved the place in many ways, making it even more attractive to tourists than it had been before. Thomas chuckled, recalling the troubles Black Bart had suffered on the island: He may have had no Rastafarian. They didn't exist in his day. But he sure had something worse ... The story was part of family lore. Bart's own cousin, Governor Lord Basil Wrentham, was a bosom friend of the Germans. But Bart, helped by a clever little Englishman named Leckey, managed to tie Lord Basil's tail in a knot. The n.o.ble lord was too stupid ever to know what hit him.

The commissioner did not stop at the Waterloo, but through the window of the brightly lit cafe, he saw his son waving to him to let him know that all was well, and Wrentham waved back in acknowledgment.

When he reached home, a small house occupied by his three forebears for almost a century, he was disappointed to find that his daughter, Sally, a young woman of twenty-two, would not be sharing supper with him, for although he prized the efficient manner in which his son had taken charge of the cafe, he had always had a special affection for Sally. She was intelligent, had done so well in school that she could have gone to Oxford or Cambridge had she cared to spend the years in England, and possessed the lyric beauty of movement and appearance which made certain young women of the islands so compelling. She was, thought her father, a person of special merit, and he had begun to speculate on whom she might marry.

Her position in the prime minister's office, her good salary and her lively interest in political matters made her attractive to many young men; indeed, her would-be suitors ran the entire gamut, from a white Englishman who had come to All Saints to study its economy, through several shades of brown both lighter and darker than herself, and on to one very black chap who might prove the best of the lot. Even though the fact that color distinctions were now of diminished importance on All Saints, the commissioner, despite his modernism, was quietly proud of the fact that Sally was several shades lighter than he or his father. He would be interested to watch whom she settled upon, but he felt no concern, because almost anyone from the field, as he called the young fellows who buzzed around her, would be acceptable.

The caste system that had prevailed before World War II, when there were rigid delineations-aristocracy, good county families, all other whites, light-skinned browns, dark-skinned browns and blacks-had quietly evaporated with independence. London no longer sent out members of the n.o.bility to serve as governors general, so this cla.s.s had been eliminated. Families with county connections back in England still existed but played a much smaller role in social life, so the three former distinctions among the whites had coalesced into one: white.

It was practically the same with that difficult-to-categorize cla.s.s, the browns. There were almost no situations in which light-skinned browns could lord it over dark-skinned ones, so the two phrases were rarely heard. On All Saints it was simply white, brown, black, and a visitor who knew nothing of past distinctions would be hard put to say, merely from watching the people of the island in action, which category was atop the heap. The governor general was still appointed by the queen, but now he was a native of All Saints and very black indeed. The prime minister, a new official, was elected and was, in the old determination, dark brown, while the third in command, the commissioner of police, was light.

'Where's Sally?' Wrentham asked the older woman who had looked after his house since the death of his wife, and she responded: 'She say: "Meetin' on de black agenda." '

Thomas laughed, for in recent months Sally had been caught up with a feisty group of young people who were discussing a problem that concerned thoughtful people on all the Caribbean islands except Cuba: 'How should the principle of negritude, the spiritual essence of being black, modify personal and political life in the Caribbean?'

The commissioner approved of his daughter's partic.i.p.ation in these discussions, because both he and his father, Black Bart, had been resolute in their belief in black power and forthright in their application of it. The blacks and browns of All Saints still talked admiringly of the manner in which Bart had solved the problem of The Club, that ultra-exclusive gathering spot on the hill in back of Gommint House. Prior to 1957, when a restricted form of self-government was introduced, only whites were permitted to enter those sacred portals, and this exclusivity was not only understood by everyone but also generally approved: 'Each man to his own group.'

But when real self-government came in 1964, with a white governor general still representing the queen but a locally elected black prime minister in effectual charge, Black Bart decided that a change was in order. So, one April evening, as the remaining white establishment was gathering at The Club to discuss the latest improprieties of the newly positioned brown and black officeholders, Bart Wrentham, by then police chief of the island, rode up the hill in his old Chevrolet, walked ceremoniously into the meeting room, and announced in respectful tones: 'I'm applying for members.h.i.+p.' Some of the older members gasped at the insolence, but others clapped hands and half a dozen of the younger members invited Bart to the bar for a drink. The social revolution which so many on All Saints had feared occurred without one ugly word spoken or shouted in public.

As the first non-white member of The Club, Bart paid his dues regularly but never imposed himself on the members.h.i.+p except in those cases when as police chief he had to entertain dignitaries from other islands. Then he appeared neatly dressed in his quasimilitary uniform, introduced his guests to any who were in the bar, and had dinner quietly in a corner where he could discuss Caribbean problems in carefully modulated tones.

At Bart's death, The Club sent an official delegation of seven to his funeral, and in the elegies they spoke of him proudly as their first member of color and a man who had served both The Club and the island with distinction. His son Thomas, the present police chief, now called Commissioner, inherited his sensible att.i.tudes toward relations between the races, and had pa.s.sed them on to his children. Two days earlier, when his daughter had informed him that she planned to join the discussion group on negritude, he said: 'Fine. Your grandfather wrestled with the problem when he lived in a Crown Colony with its rigid att.i.tudes, and he taught me how to handle it in these years of independence. Your job is to be prepared for the future, for whatever changes are coming.'

As Wrentham reflected on these matters while eating his supper alone, Sally was immersed in a tense meeting of her group, some sixteen of the brightest young officeholders, all brown or black, who were discussing the significance of a powerful book on the subject of negritude written by a fellow Caribbean, Frantz Fanon of Martinique. His great book, Les d.a.m.nes de la Terre, had been published in English under various t.i.tles, but the copy which the leader of tonight's discussion had acquired was called The Wretched of the Earth, and its mind-shattering call for social change had considerable application to black islands like All Saints.

But when the animated discussion was at its height a young brown woman named Laura Shaughnessy who worked in the governor general's office appeared belatedly, bringing with her the young white Englishman who had come out from London seven years ago as economic adviser to the island government. Some of the discussion group were disturbed that a white official had been inserted into their group, for they feared his presence might inhibit the free flow of ideas, but the young woman who had brought him allayed their fears: 'This is Harry Keeler. You've seen him about the halls. I invited him because he had been a British official in Algiers during the troubles and witnessed the economic and social data on which Fanon based many of his concepts.'

After that introduction, Keeler made a brief statement about his experiences in Algeria and Tunis during the anticolonial revolutions, and then submitted himself to questioning. He could see in the dark faces of his audience their intense interest in his generalizations, so he refused to water down or in any way soften his conclusions: 'Negritude is a powerful unifying force when fighting to gain independence, but I doubt it provides much effective guidance when it comes to governing the territory you've won.' When he was hammered on this conclusion, which most of his listeners did not want to hear, he stuck to his guns and reiterated his message that whereas Frantz Fanon would have been an admirable guide to browns and blacks of All Saints fifteen years ago, what they needed now was an understanding of how General Motors and Mitsubis.h.i.+ operated: 'When your Caribbean islands rejected federation in 1962, I wept. It was your chance to build a viable union of all the big and little English-speaking islands, and you frittered it away. Problem now is to evolve some sensible alternative.'

When this evoked a storm of comment, he listened attentively, made notes of the salient points, and then asked for the floor. He was careful to speak only as an economist and only on those matters about which he had acquired expert knowledge, but he ended forcefully: 'I'm not sure you understand what I'm saying. We've allowed the discussion to become too adversarial. It shouldn't be that. Fifteen years ago on this island, I'd have been a follower of Frantz Fanon on one simple principle: "It's high time!" You and I won that battle. I fought for it in an African country gaining its independence. But tonight it's an entirely different battle, and Frantz Fanon is too impractical to teach us about how to take our next steps.'

His words were so judicious and so straightforward that when he finished, Sally Wrentham went up to him and said: 'Mr. Keeler, you made great sense as a white man looking down from above. But how about us blacks who have to look up from below?' He noticed that although she could have been considered white in many societies he had known, she preferred to call herself black, a good sign in his opinion.

'Now wait a minute, Miss Wrentham. You're the police commissioner's daughter.'

'I am.'

'It seems to me,' and he spoke with charming diffidence, as if he had no right to a strong opinion on something which concerned him intellectually and her emotionally, 'that we must look neither from above or below, but from dead-eye level ... at the reality.' The idea was strong and expressed so cogently that Sally offered no response, so he added: 'In the old days on All Saints men like me were up and blacks like you were down. Your question then would have been quite pertinent. But today I believe that on this island, there is no up or down ... just level eyes sighting level horizons.' With the fingers of his right hand he built an imaginary bridge from his level eyes to hers, and, gesturing, he touched her cheek ... and an electric thrill pa.s.sed between them.

On that evening throughout the world, as the sun drifted to sleep in the west, thousands of young unmarried men in a hundred different countries met socially in groups to talk with young unmarried women, and with rea.s.suring frequency some man would see in a flash some woman of intelligence or understanding or sympathy or sheer attractiveness, and his breath would catch and he would find himself a.s.sailed by ideas which he had not entertained even ten minutes before, and everything would be changed.