Caribbean: a novel Part 43

Or she could do what many had done in the past-leave All Saints right now, take a job, any job she could find, in Trinidad or Barbados or Jamaica, keep a very low profile, have her baby, put it up for adoption, and about two years thereafter come back home, marry and settle down. Mrs. Tarleton said: 'You would not believe how many have done that, and three of them right now are leaders in our church. And do you know why? Because G.o.d blessed them from the start, just as He blesses you.'

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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d!' 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d blessed them, and G.o.d 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: 'G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d, 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: 'G.o.d 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 a.s.sured his son, and there the matter rested. But sometime later, while Lincoln was tending bar at his cafe, 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sociated 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 cafe 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 preposterous, 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 rea.s.sessment, 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 s.e.xual advances he kept making and letting him know exactly what her interests were, she found his reactions to island problems sensible and refres.h.i.+ng so long as they did not involve religion or s.e.x.

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 pa.s.sages 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 ent.i.tled 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 Ca.n.a.l, 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 s.h.i.+ps, 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 gla.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 foresh.o.r.e 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 s.h.i.+ps coming to north sh.o.r.e 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 s.h.i.+ps came to the same harbors as bauxite, Fyffe & Elder carrying our bananas to Liverpool, Ma.r.s.eilles. 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 Sally 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan.' The Caribbean had no black industrialists or engineers capable of duplicating the way the Taiwanese had leaped into world compet.i.tion to follow the two city-states Hong Kong and Singapore. Citizens of this golden sea were still rural pract.i.tioners, 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.'

'We had bananas, but now with Fyffe & Elder gone, we have nothing.'

She wondered if the Caribbean islands could develop high-technology a.s.sembly industries, employing women to operate the demanding machinery, but Ras-Negus said that the women he knew would not be content to work in closed-in s.p.a.ces: 'They like outdoors.'

This contemptuous dismissal of her proposal angered Sally, and she said: 'The women in Haiti make all the baseb.a.l.l.s used in what they call the American big leagues. Why couldn't we promote some industry like that?'

'Proud black women won't slave for American white men. Never.'

Then, like so many thoughtful people in the islands, she asked: 'Can we expand our hotels and beach areas, and bring in really great numbers of tourists with their dollars and pounds and bolivars?'

He dismissed this bluntly: 'Proud black men don't want to serve those big fat pigs ...' and she exploded: 'd.a.m.n you! Those were your words that crazy man shouted when he a.s.saulted the Jewish woman. "Big fat white pig." You came to this island solely to make trouble, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. I don't want to share anything with you anymore.' Then she shouted: 'If I told my father about this, he'd have you arrested.' And she abruptly got out of the car.

Hesitantly he followed her onto the headland, where her temper subsided, and there she halted her interrogation, for she realized that it was getting nowhere; she had plumbed the depths of his understanding and found them extremely shallow, but as they sat together and as he began talking of the values he really cherished, she found that it was he who was attuned to the great, basic, primordial reality of the Caribbean isles, not she. Her concern was only with the current-day politics and economics of the immediate future; he was in some primitive way in touch with Africa, and the old-time sugar plantation, and the struggle for freedom, and the manifestations of negritude at a basic level which she could never attain. She realized that here in bright daylight with a clean breeze blowing in from the sea, she was in much the same condition as she had been in the back of Laura Shaughnessy's car that night when marijuana fumes filled the air. In her harsh a.n.a.lysis of Caribbean reality a few minutes ago, there had been at best a metallic reality; in the Rastafarian's words, there was a narcotic beauty, and she wondered if, through music and ganja and dreaming, he had not come closer to understanding their Caribbean than she.

He now spoke reflectively in a fearful mix of Rastafarian glossolalia, old African words and rearranged English, but she understood the message: 'The people of the Caribbean are different. Their early life in Africa made them so, right from the beginning. Terrible years on the sugar plantations increased the difference between them and white people. We think different. We value different things. We live different. And we must make our living in different ways. The white man has nothing to teach us. We build a good life here, we find the money to buy his radios, his televisions, his Sony Betamaxes, his Toyotas.'

'Everything you mentioned comes from j.a.pan, not from white people.'

Ras-Negus, always displeased when reality was thrust into his dreams, ignored this: 'So we make our life simple, strictly black folk living and working with black folk, we unite all the islands, even Cuba and Martinique, and we tell the rest of the world: "This our little world. We run it our way. Stay out!" '

And Sally had to ask the terrible, unanswerable question: 'But where do we get the money to live?'

But he did have an answer and it astonished her, for it was delivered with such poetic force and such rich allusion that she had to grant that he believed it: 'When we lived free in Africa, we existed, didn't we? When we came over in the dreadful slave s.h.i.+ps, most of us survived, didn't we? And when our fathers worked like animals, dawn to dusk in the sugar fields, we managed to remain human beings, didn't we? How in h.e.l.l do you think you and I would be here if our black ancestors didn't have a powerful will to live? I got that same will, Sally, and I think you do, too.'

Then came the incandescent moment she would never forget, regardless of what happened to Ras-Negus and his confused dreams. An earlier group of visitors to this headland had held a picnic, and to toast their bread and heat water for their tea they had scoured the area for limbs and branches to build a small fire. Somebody had dragged in a piece of wood much too long to be fitted in the fire, and it had been left behind for Ras-Negus to find.

Realizing that his conversation with Sally had come to an end, he lifted the piece of wood almost automatically, hefted it several times, and found that although it was as narrow as a broomstick, in other respects it resembled a cricket bat; length, weight and general feel were right. After taking a few desultory swings, he a.s.sumed the proper stance of a batsman in his crease, and as he lashed out at imaginary b.a.l.l.s-a spinner attacking his wicket, a googly in the gra.s.s, a body-line b.u.mper of the kind the mighty Larwood used to throw, right at the batsman's head-he began to speak of the real West Indies: 'I saw my first cricket match in Kingston. I was nine and an uncle took me to the Oval, and for the first time I saw the players in their clean whites, the umpire in his linen duster, the colorful crowd, and I was captured.

'You want to know what our islands are best at? Cricket. In 1975, when I was nineteen, they got all the top countries of the world together, those that played cricket, and they held a world champions.h.i.+p series in England: Ceylon, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, India, and especially the Big Three, Australia, England, us. Two brackets. One-day matches, knock-out rounds. And who do you think won? West Indies! Sore losers in London and Delhi and Sydney shouted: "Freak! The wicket wasn't sound!" So they held the same champions.h.i.+p matches in 1979, and who won this time, against the world's best? West Indies. Champions of the whole world, twice running.'

Then, a.s.suming the postures of the great batsmen, he reeled off the names revered by West Indian boys, and by their elders too: 'Sir Frank Worrell, from my island, Jamaica, maybe the handsomest man who ever played the game. I have a photo of him leaving the field at Lords after having demolished the English bowling. Head high, bat trailing, confident smile, he was a young G.o.d.

'Then there was Sir Gary Sobers,' and here he took a series of wild cuts at the invisible ball. 'Termed by critics in all countries the greatest all-round cricketer there ever was. Fantastic batsman, great bowler, maybe best at fielding with those catlike moves. He came from Barbados and blazed himself into glory.'

He stopped, broke into a smile, waved his bat a couple of times, and said: 'And there was Sir Benny Castain of your island. He was the little round fellow that everybody loved. Used cricket as a key to men's hearts.' He reflected on the impressive parade of world-cla.s.s figures that had come from his little islands.

He spent the next minutes in a haunting ballet, swinging his bat in borrowed glory, reliving the time when his black fellows were champions of the world, and wondering when the days of glory would come again. Cars pa.s.sing on the road stopped to watch this very tall Rastafarian in his green and gold tam, flying dreadlocks, flopping stenciled s.h.i.+rt and unkempt trousers as he epitomized in his dance the one sure thing in which his islands excelled. It was one of the pa.s.sengers in these stopped cars who recognized Sally Wrentham sitting on a rock, watching the dance, and who hurried back to Bristol Town to inform her brother.

Halting his dance to the G.o.ds of cricket, Ras-Negus said to Sally: 'And remember, these were all black men, not white, who mastered a new game and quickly became champions. If we did it once, we can do it again. In whatever field is necessary. You want our women to learn what j.a.panese women know about making televisions? They can do it. We can do anything, we black people.'

He danced away from her, still pretending that he was Sir Benny, but then he threw the bat away and went back to the car: 'I mean it. You and I can do anything. Anything.' Then he added: 'You with brains must tell me what. I with heart will tell you how.'

It was late when Sally delivered Ras-Negus to his digs and then headed for home. But when she reached her driveway, she was flagged down by a young woman who worked in her office and lived on her street: 'I've been waiting for you, Sally.'

'Went for a long drive. We stopped at Pointe Sud for a chat, then I dropped him off at his place.'

'Who?'

'The Rastafarian. He has a world of ideas.'

The woman frowned: 'That's what I feared. Your brother was out asking about you. I told him I didn't know where you'd gone or with who. But later your father stopped by, and he looked pretty angry.'

'What did you tell him?'

'The same.' She hesitated a moment, then shrugged her shoulders as if she had reached a decision reluctantly: 'I guess I'd better tell you, Sally.'

'What? Were they real mad?'

'This is something else. It's about Laura.'

'An accident?'

'No. It seems she went to Trinidad, not Barbados.'

'Why would she tell a lie? What purpose?'

'To have an abortion.'

'Oh my G.o.d, who's the father?'

'Your Rastafarian.'

Sally gasped. Then words and images flashed through her mind in a storm, helter-skelter: Poor Laura ... what a horrible break ... should we take up a collection to help her ... no wonder Linc and Father were mad if they thought ... Poor Laura, couldn't she see what a pathetic subst.i.tute for a real man he is ...

'Are you okay?' the young woman asked solicitously, and Sally replied, 'I think I'll take a walk. Sort things out,' and the woman said: 'Good luck. When they questioned me they looked like a pair of sharks.'

Because she needed time to bring the hurricane revelations about Laura into focus, Sally took a circuitous route, and as she walked slowly, head down, through the warm April night, she tried to bring some order to her vagrant thoughts, and her first focus had to be upon her friend: Poor Laura. We must do everything to help her. I wonder what she thought that evening on our trip back from the north when the Rasta climbed into the back seat of the car to make pa.s.ses at me. Had she been pregnant already? Oh my G.o.d!

Then she could think of herself: He never got me involved ... well, not really. I took care of that as soon as my head cleared. But if that's true, why did I seek him out today, want to talk with him? Because he has a vital message ... I may not like it, and it may not pertain to me, but it could matter a lot to others.

Finally she reached the main point of her a.n.a.lysis: He sure knows what a black person is. He thinks like one. He has the vision, take it or leave it, he has it.

Suspicious of these easy conclusions, she realized they made her look too good. A young woman who thought as straight as she wanted to ought to be judicious, fair to others, and aware of great social and racial problems. But then two other thoughts surged to the fore, and when she grappled with them she did not look so saintly, and she knew it. Why, if she was as interested in Harry Keeler as she apparently was, had she bothered to fool around with the Rastafarian on any terms whatever? Was her relations.h.i.+p with the white man so weak or so fundamentally wrong that the intrusion of the first vital black man, regardless of his appearance, posed a threat? As she asked herself this, she turned a corner, and in the light of the rising moon could see in the distance the headland at Pointe Sud where Ras-Negus had danced in honor of his great cricketing heroes, and she halted for a while to catch her breath and try to get the two men into focus. She could not.

Her final question struck close to home. If she suspected that Ras-Negus had first brought the phrase You big fat white pig onto the island, pa.s.sing it along to sympathetic listeners in the barrios at night, where it lodged in the brain of the man who attacked the New York woman, was she not obligated to report this fact to her father, who was responsible for the safety of the island, or to Harry Keeler, who had to protect the income which the tourists brought?