Homecoming, page 14
His first reaction was to get away before he was seen – not silently, but run wildly, as in panic. There was danger here, his thoughts were jumbled as he tried to reason it out, flashing across the years to his childhood, keep off the white man’s land, don’t go near the overseer’s house, turn your head away if you see the white man’s wife. Such were the warnings of old men who in their youth had laboured in the fields and passed their experiences to their sons. [His father] in particular, Tiger knew, had a grovelling respect for the white man, and only rebelled peacefully, in the night over a pipe, muttering grumbles in his sleep.9
Tiger, who considers himself as belonging to a generation that can look straight at a white person, is shocked to find he has inherited the fear. He fights against it, but at the moment of crisis, he finds himself unable to live up to his chosen standard of conduct: when the woman shouts a greeting at him, unreasoning terror seizes him, and he runs away madly. This completely shatters his previous conception of himself. He wants a second chance to repair the broken image.
All his mind cried to go back, to repair this damage to his dignity before it was too late. He actually took a few steps angrily, thoughts flying about in his head confusedly, but of one thing he was sure: he had made a mistake in fleeing. He had run away like a little boy, scared, because a white woman had called out to him. He, Tiger, who had his own house, who had a wife and a child, who worked with Americans during the war, who drank rum with men and discussed big things like Life and Death, who could read and write. Better if he had cringed, if he had bowed and stooped and blurted out good morning like some illiterate labourer and asked if there was something he could do. But to run away, to panic as if the devil were at his heels – for that there was no forgiveness.10
The encounter does not let loose a stream of hatred or protest against the white presence and injustice. Not that the condemnation of racial bigotry and arrogance is absent: some characters complain that no non-white can hold a responsible job; Tiger’s father, who is practically in charge of the whole sugar estate, cannot be trusted with paying out money; and Robinson, the supervisor, is depicted as arrogant and condescending. But the condemnation of racial injustice is incidental, merely implied. What interests Selvon is Tiger’s interior life. The encounter has initiated a stream of self-exploration. His self-esteem broken, his harmony disrupted, Tiger takes to excessive drinking and a melancholy but ruthless questioning of the underlying purpose of life. ‘You study this, you study that, and in the end you hungry, in the end you wondering whether you going to meet Singh for a drink…’ Perhaps old men who have lived life will give him the answer which Shakespeare, Plato and Aristotle – ‘all of them fellers are dead’ – have failed to yield. In the end he discovers that no man can prescribe a formula for another. The individual attains wisdom by actively participating in life. Tiger cannot exorcise Doreen (white presence) by wishing her away, or ignoring the attraction that lingers in the air when the two are together. Their second meeting by the river, not surprisingly, is seen in terms of a human wrestling with self. The old dragon of fear shows its head – his leg muscles are taut to spring and run – but he cannot resist what is an inevitable clash.
Hatred, fear, lust, fought in him, jumbled, his heart was going thud, thud and sweat ran down his face and over his lips and he licked them for the moisture and couldn’t swallow.
She took a step forward, another. She was close to him. He held the cutlass tightly and said to himself that he would kill her. When he said that, it gave him courage: his grip tightened and he felt that if he had killed her everything would be all right after.
That was why he held her, to kill her. And when she held on too, straining against him and caressing the sweat on his skin, he was entirely unaware of it. He crushed her to him and they fell locked like wrestlers on dry bamboo leaves. The cause of every personal catastrophe was in his arms, and hatred and lust struggled equally in him. What he did was done blindly and vengefully and he never knew how it was with Doreen. What had tortured him had taken the form of her and that was what he had under him writhing and biting his arms and chest. She never cried out or made a sound but her body was trying like water to quench the rage and fury of his and several times she locked her lips against his, then turned away to clamp like a suction on other parts of his body. Tiger ripped the white cotton shirt off her shoulders and her breasts heaved at him. She was murmuring to him, words he didn’t hear or care about: the sound came to him like a moaning. But now there was nothing to think about, all he had to do was fight and conquer, turn the force that was pulling him down against itself. It was as if the weeks had been built up for this day, day by day, piling up and up and now he had burst like a heavy rain-cloud and all the frustration and fears would be expelled: he wouldn’t run away again, because he would shed this thing from him and it would go away and leave him in peace forever.11
The contact, then, restores Tiger to himself and to life. In the end, the ritual in the wood is seen as an integral part of Tiger’s initiation to manhood. Turn Again Tiger is a novel of growth: things teeming from the earth; and men and women moving in rhythm with the circle of the seasons. The novel ends in a rather romantic universal harmony at harvest-time. Selvon’s white characters are never central, they reside at the edges of the action. Their alien presence, however, does affect the peasant’s and the worker’s relations with his world. The peasant/worker’s humour, and his dogged refusal to bow to hardship, makes him invincible by the destructive side of the white presence.
Selvon’s gentleness and earthy warmth contrast with the violence of Edgar Mittelholzer. In the Kaywana trilogy12, the master’s lashes on the body of the slave, the throbbing sexual energy temporarily sweeping away barriers of race and even those between a mother and son, and the fearful possibilities of in-breeding and heredity, are all played out against what Dathorne has called the ‘brooding landscape’13 of the Guyana jungle. The trilogy goes back to the seventeenth century; through the fortunes of one family, Mittelholzer recreates the violent history of Guyana to the dawn of the twentieth century. The Von Groenwegels believe in the preservation of the strong blood. Their motto is never to surrender even if the whole world is pitted against them, a doctrine which is passed from parents to children: their mission in life is to nurture the strong streak in the family even at the expense of inbreeding. Hendriekje, a second-generation Groenwegel, perfects this outlook into a Nazi-like obsession with the power and purity of a master race of which she is the great grandmother. She argues that the stronger always survive and the weaker get crushed. Life is brutal. This is not pleasant, but a Von Groenwegel must face it as the truth. With such an obsession, a clash across the colour-line (which is also the dividing line between the slave and the master) is inevitable. And when it comes, it is full of relentless cruelty as the slaves, temporarily free, attempt to assuage a century of terror by punishing the white oppressor. The slaves, after capturing some white planters, make the women undress as a sign of submission.
When Amelia was naked, Cuffy grunted. He licked his lips, his gaze shifty. His head trembled. He paced about and then stopped and glared at Jacques. ‘Von Groenwegel, you see your woman! Look at her! She standing with all her clothes off! Naked! You see how she hanging her head. She shame. Yes, she shame!’
His breath came in a strangled manner. He thrust his hands into his pockets and withdrew them again; they were trembling. ‘Last week – before the twenty-first of this month – if I try to touch her skirt you white people give me twenty lashes and brand me on my chest. But now I is Governor! Your woman got to stand before me naked and do what I tell her to do. Georgie, get into bed! Go on! I orders you!’
Amelia stood where she was.
‘Yes that hard for you to do. You never think one day come when you got to lie in bed with black man, eh, Georgie? But that what you got to do now.’
He moved toward her and halted. ‘I got no mercy on you. I is Governor now. Yes, me Cuffy standing here. I is Governor, and you is my woman. You hear that. Von Groenwegel? From now she is my woman. And not just for lust – I want her. I want her so I can shame her – and shame her! Every day I going to shame her like how you white people shame our black women.’ He put out his hand and fondled her breasts. His head trembled. He gulped. ‘Yes, Georgie, I got to shame you so shame you you never want to look black man in the face again and think yourself better than him. Night and morning I going to shame you. You going to turn sick with shame.’ He slapped her face. She was crying softly. ‘Just for shaming you I going to shame you! Get into bed! Get in.’ He spat in her face. ‘Get in!’14
Jacques, who is in the room, asks to leave. He is one of the weak Groenwegels because inwardly he does not share the hard iron outlook of his Grandmother Hendriekje. But Cuffy wants him to witness the act. He appeals to Cuffy’s sense of decency. Cuffy is surprised that a white man, of all people, can ever expect a black man to show decency.
‘I know it going to be hard for you to watch me and her in bed. But I glad it going to hurt you. I want to hurt you, Von Groenwegel. I been waiting years and years for this time when I can punish you Christians for the misery what you bring on us black men. I glad it going to give you pain. Sit down there on that chair and keep your eyes on the bed. Go on. Sit down – or else you go to the stocks!’15
Cuffy protests his ferocity a little bit too much. The slaves heap indignity on the white captive as much to convince themselves that they are now on top as to shame their erstwhile masters.
Mittelholzer remains detached where Selzon is involved with his peasant characters. But in both, the direct confrontation between white and black is rare, and there is little of race consciousness or racial assertion. This is because ‘What is my colour, what is my race?’ is more complex in the West Indies than in other settings.
Naipaul, in Middle Passage, has satirically described West Indian society as having divided people into ‘white, fusty, musty, dusty, tea, coffee, cocoa, light black, dark black’. It is the colour problems and the values inherent in such a society which interest West Indian novelists: broad black-white encounter, even when it is prominent, is often seen as part of what Dathorne calls ‘the polygenous races’ that make up the West Indian scene. In A Morning at the Office one character castigates those who ‘had purposely blinded themselves to the fact if the West Indies was to evolve a culture individually West Indian, it could only come out of the whole hotch-potch of racial and national elements of which West Indies is composed; it could not spring only from the Negro’.16 And Dathorne argues that it is the way this hotch-potch of races intermingle in the West Indian novel that distinguishes it ‘from the narrower dimensions of the standard European fiction’17.
John Hearne’s novels, for instance, are peopled with a cosmopolitan middle class: there is a European Jew who, in the islands, feels ‘that some sort of obscure, powerful resurrection of myself has begun to stir’18. Englishmen with dreams of retirement in an England they were not born in and had only seen as visitors; Englishmen whose first intention is to stay in the islands long enough to acquire specialist knowledge but find the islands claiming them;19 numerous characters (usually from the higher echelons of the professions and from the old landed gentry) of German, French, and African extraction whose one common denominator is their involvement with the islands. George Lamming also accepts the fundamental unity of the hotch-potch, but sees this unity more among the workers, peasants, and children. In Of Age and Innocence, he uses three children representing the three main racial extractions – African, Indian, Chinese – as a symbol of a West Indian community freed from the conflicts of race and colour. In Pleasures of Exile Lamming comments on the diversity of complexions of the three boys. ‘They might have come from three different parts of the world. Yet they speak the same idiom, live the same history.’ With his belief in the fundamental unity of the West Indian experience, he ridicules the West Indians, especially those who make the professional middle class and who place moral value on minute differences of skin colour. Two characters in The Emigrants – Miss Bis, who being ‘one remove from the white’ breaks her engagement to a West Indian doctor ‘several shades darker than her’, and Mr Dickson, who is utterly ashamed of his black skin – are the objects of the author’s ridicule and slightly malicious satire. Selvon’s different characters share a common experience of toil in English factories or of joyous struggle in the sugar-cane fields. They are only superficially sensitive to the different shades of colour; even then, they end up laughing at it or weaving ballads around it. Thus in Turn Again Tiger, Soylo, an Indian hermit, silences Otto’s objections to marrying a black woman by warning him that were he to be choosy he would end up without a wife. He adds: ‘Nigger and Chinese does make good children’. In The Lonely Londoners, the blackest character in the group is nicknamed ‘Midnight’. But a new man joins the group and is christened ‘Five-past-twelve’. V. S. Naipaul on the other hand isolates and explores the Indian community, maybe because he finds it has what he, quoting Graham Greene in Middle Passage, believes comedy needs: ‘a strong framework of social convention with which the author sympathises but does not share’. In most of his novels, characters of African, Chinese or European origins flit about on the fringes of the action. But even in Naipaul, ‘the delicacy of colour perception’,20 or what he himself describes as ‘having a nice eye for shades of black’ often governs or influences the pattern of human relations.
The subterranean corrosive effects of this – what yet another West Indian writer has called ‘tint discrimination’21 – are well examined and exposed in Mittelholzer’s early novel, A Morning at the Office. With their different shades of colour and racial origins, people working for Essential Products Ltd. superficially make a harmonious cosmopolitan picture. But they are all trapped in their skins. There is Horace Xavier, an office boy with dreams of being the mayor of Port of Spain and a secret passion for the Manager’s secretary; but he inwardly knows that his dark colour and his lowly position are in his way.
He considered that it was foolish of him to have become enamoured of this lady. He was only a black boy, whereas she was a coloured lady of good family. His complexion was dark brown; hers was pale olive. His hair was kinky; hers was full of large waves and gleaming. He was a poor boy with hardly any education, the son of a cook; she was well off and of good education and good breeding. He was lowclass; she was middleclass.22
Nevertheless, the passion dominates him, filling him with ‘uncertainty and instability’ to such an extent that one morning he scribbles a few love lines from As You Like It and pushes the unsigned paper in her tray. Mr Jagbir, the Assistant Accountant and an East Indian, is another man plagued by a feeling of racial and personal inferiority. A labourer for four years after leaving school, Mr Jagbir ‘had been cursed at and threatened and humiliated by a white overseer’, which scarred him for life, so that at fifty, a father of four children, he believes that the white people are at any time liable to dismiss him from a job he has been doing for years.
He made it his business to be well-informed concerning everything that went on in the office. His ears were perpetually on the alert, for the fear was always with him, that, despite his efficiency as a bookkeeper, he would one day be thrown out. He had been brought up to feel that an East Indian’s place was in the field… shovelling and weeding. An office was meant for white people and good-class coloured people.23
The haunting insecurity drives him into sly, prying, but sycophantic habits which make people actually despise him. Their reaction only confirms his inner fears and he shrinks further into his infuriating defensive posture.
Even the privileged class of the whites and the good-class coloured are shown as equally trapped. Mr Murrain, the manager, though attracted to the accounts typist, a coloured girl, will not let himself go beyond his white skin.
He tried to convince himself that he was above race and class prejudice, but the feeling of aloofness remained. The final conclusion would always be that he was distinctly on a higher level.24
Having little to do in the office his main passion is reading the gossip column of the Trinidad Guardian to see if he and his wife have been mentioned. Miss Henerey, the girl to whom he is attracted, belongs to that coloured middle class that conceive of human hair in terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, where ‘good’ stands for hair which is European in appearance. Conscious of her background of gentility and superiority over the negro, Chinese or Indian elements, she slightly resents the fact that the whites debar her from their society.
But like everyone in her class she considered herself the equal of the whites in breeding and general culture. Her pride forbade her addressing a white man as ‘Sir’.25
A clash between her and Mr Murrain, who resents her sauciness, is inevitable. It comes over her leave, to which she is legally entitled. But Mr Murrain is out to hurt her.
‘But, Miss Henerey – really, sometimes I wonder if you forget that to your ancestors such a luxury as leave was entirely unheard of.’
‘Which of my ancestors? Some were whites. Could you be referring by any chance to the English ones who were made slaves from childhood in the factories of 19th century industrial England?’26
Her quick retort makes him quickly retreat into the castle of his skin; but he cannot any more hide the loneliness under that white skin.
The awareness of human loneliness inevitably bred by such a society alleviates the often ill-disguised didacticisms of the novel. The description of Mr Reynolds, one of the very few positive characters in the novel, is an accurate epitaph on the interior state of the other characters.
He was afraid of himself. He dreaded introspecting, for when he introspected he pitied himself and saw his loneliness as a thing of magnified terror and ugliness – something that would pursue him to the end of his days.27
