Prospero's Daughter (3 page)

TWO

CHACACHACARE, where Mumsford was heading that morning, was a leper colony. It was not always so. In the eighteenth century Spanish and French settlers brought their African slaves to the island. Within a year, working the Africans mercilessly, they turned Chacachacare into a thriving cotton plantation, one so successful that the Amerindians, who were summarily chased off the island but continued to fish close by, named the island Chacacha, the Amerindian word for cotton. By the mid-nineteenth century, though, cotton plantations in North America made growing cotton on Chacachacare no longer lucrative and the island became a seaside resort for the sons and daughters of former slave owners.

Whalers had also made a fortune in the waters around Chacachacare. Gulfo de Ballena, Gulf of the Whales, the Spanish settlers called the Gulf of Paria, the body of water cupped in the embrace of the two strips of land that extended off the western coast of Trinidad, the northern entrance guarded by the Dragon—the Dragon’s Mouth—the southern by the Serpent—the Serpent’s Mouth. Like cotton, however, whaling had come to an end long before the century closed.

Chacachacare was not a seaside resort when Dr. Peter Gardner arrived on the island with his daughter, Virginia, who had recently turned three. And strictly speaking it was not a leper colony either. Though the leprosarium continued to operate on a small scale, it was officially closed in 1950 when the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena, who had ministered to the sick there, left the island enfeebled by age and the relentless sun, and unable to replenish their ranks because of a world war that had halted recruits. The Dominicans were replaced by the Sisters of Mercy from America, but life on the island among the lepers proved more than the American nuns were willing to endure. Count Finbar Ryan, archbishop of Port of Spain, had left them no room for compromise. “Sign a blank check,” he counseled those who answered his call, “and honor whatever the Lord may write on it.”

The Lord wrote more than the new nuns could bear. They lasted barely five years, until 1955, not long after a fisherman found a nun’s white habit floating on the sea off Chacachacare, a suicide attributed to depression.

In fairness to the Dominicans, they had not abandoned their patients. By the time they left, new sulphonic drugs were halting the progress of the bacteria that caused nerve ends on the afflicted to wither and die, the skin to rot, and fingers and toes to fall off. Nevertheless, the lepers begged them to stay. “The doctors seem to give us up [to] death,” one of the patients wrote, expressing the sentiments of the others in a petition sent to the governor. “The Sisters on the contrary care for us. The more miserable, pitiful, sinful we are, the more they show us love. They care for us until they have closed our eyes.”

The Dominicans had come to Trinidad from France in 1868 at the request of the British government. The leprosarium that the British had established in Cocorite, on the outskirts of Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad, had failed to contain the disease. It was spreading like wildfire to the city and beyond, and the British colonizers were terrified.

They were responsible, of course. It was they who had caused this disease to run amuck on the quiet, idyllic island of Trinidad, where hibiscus and bougainvillea bloomed in the sun, anthuriums in the shade, and where, in the dry season, the hills were aflame with gold and crimson blossoms from the branches of the flamboyant and dotted with the brilliant reds, yellows, pinks, and whites of the poui rising beneath a sky dazzling blue, clouds white and fluffy as new cotton.

A man could feed his family with what he hunted and fished in those days. For if you saw Trinidad from the height of an airplane, what you saw was an island floating in the delta of the Orinoco, a sliver cut off from the rain forests of the Amazon, its flora and fauna stranded with the divide. There, unlike any other island in the Caribbean chain, agouti, deer, tattou, lapp, manicou, and cats ferocious as tigers ran wild; fish and crustaceans—shrimp, lobster, crab, oyster—everyday table food.
National Geographic
sent in scouts. Everything they could find in the Amazon, they could find here, and there were swampy mangroves, too, and sea the color of turquoise, beaches ringed with coconut fronds and the leaves of wide sea-almond trees.

It was greed that caused the epidemic. Slavery had been abolished and the Africans, scarred by nightmares of the horrors of the plantation, had fled to the cities. Left with no workers to cut the sugarcane, process it into sugar, and ferment the juices into alcohol, for which they had developed an addiction, the British raked the slums of their continental colonies in the east. Five acres of land after five years, they promised, if the workers wanted to stay, or passage back home. Thousands came from India. They came with the disease.

At first the nuns treated the patients topically with chaulmoogra oil from the seeds of tropical trees in Asia belonging to the genus Hydnocarpus, and with cod liver oil from codfish, but the oils did not work. The disease still gutted faces, lopped off limbs. So they injected the oils, once a day, in the afternoons, and startled birds from their evening roosts when bloodcurdling screams from children, full-grown women and men, too, rent the air. Then, from late afternoon until well after the sun had set below the horizon, the sky was filled with the frantic flapping of wings, and as far away as Cocorite across the sea, street dogs howled and tears sprang from the eyes of villagers.

They ran away. They would not stay, the ones subjected to these treatments. The cure to them, the searing pain of those injections, was a million times worse than the disease. So the epidemic spread. The nuns gave the colonial government a choice: a colony in Chacachacare or the end of Trinidad. The British sent in troops. One of the nuns’ diary dated May 10, 1922, records the day:

At 6 a.m., the patients were seized with horror when the news spread throughout the wards that the whole place was surrounded and cordoned off by policemen on foot and on horseback. A dead silence set in . . . since it was impossible to escape, all had to be resigned to their fate. Some were sobbing, others fainted, and others again were seized with fits. The sisters could hardly bear the sight of the distress. Even the policemen were moved with compassion. A crowd of onlookers gathered outside to see the patients being escorted by policemen to the Cocorite pier, where a steamer was waiting to take them to Chacachacare.

The sons and daughters of slave owners who had got rich on the cotton plantations on Chacachacare did not sob and faint, but it was no less difficult to pry them away from their vacation homes. Chacachacare was Crown land; it belonged to the British royal family. When the governor issued the order, the vacationers were obliged to leave. They were compensated, of course. Even today, the descendants of some of these slave-owning families hold rights to large plots of seafront land on the offshore islands. Ninety years they were given in exchange for a meager fee, and for at least one of them, a lease that would not expire until the year 2051.

In its own way, the clergy smoothed the way for the colonial government by fanning the flames of superstition already raging in the Caribbean. To most people in this part of the world, leprosy was a curse from God, a disease of the poor and the slovenly. Even after it was renamed Hansen’s disease, after the Norwegian Armauer Hansen, who had identified it in 1874, it still bore this stigma that had its roots in the Old Testament.

But leprosy was caused by bacteria, not God’s curse, and it was not absolutely clear that it was sufficiently contagious to warrant the isolation of those infected from the rest of the population. In eighty-two years, only two of the nuns succumbed to the disease. To the religious, of course, this was not proof that the disease was not contagious, but, rather, evidence of Divine intervention, God protecting those who had given themselves willingly to Him in His service. In the case of Sister Rose de Sainte Marie Vébert, who, in the opinion of many, deserved to be canonized, there seemed to be merit in this faith they had in God’s mercy. It was said that the disease had so ravaged her that it took both her tongue and her sight, though for eighteen years she continued to nurse the sick.

When she died, the hand of God was evident. Another entry in a nun’s diary dated June 17, 1937, tells the story:

The sisters kept singing hymns and canticles by her bedside to help her regain her calm when the terrible fits shook her poor body. Finally she breathed her last, gently. The sisters transported her body to the chapel. While she lay there exposed, something extraordinary happened: all traces of the awful disease disappeared from her face, and it was looking most beautiful . . .

The sisters remained in Chacachacare for twenty-eight years. Few spoke English when they first arrived and they had to rely on hand gestures and drawings before they managed to pick up the rudiments of the language from the patients. But this was not their only challenge. There was no electricity or running water in Chacachacare, and during the war years, from 1939 to 1945, when there were constant fears of German U-boats patrolling the waters, which, after all, were British waters since Trinidad belonged to England, service between the leprosarium in Chacachacare and the mainland was often curtailed, and food was scarce. Patients, who in the past were not allowed to fish or cultivate the land, now fished and grew vegetables, and, troubling for the nuns, were also permitted to work side by side with members of the opposite sex. This liberal attitude of the colonial government posed a moral problem for the nuns. They would not be the conduit for sin, for base carnality. They had taken pains to prevent this occurrence and in this holy endeavor, the island had been their naturally.

Chacachacare was shaped like a horseshoe. It was fairly flat in the middle with two fingers of hilly land that curved out to the sea on either side. The nuns arranged for the doctors to be on one end of this horseshoe and for them to be on the other (the doctors being male and they female). In the middle, they put the hospital and living quarters for the patients, which were strictly segregated by gender. Men and women came into contact with each other only under the supervision of the nuns or medical personnel. But all that changed with the war. The colonial government was struggling to keep its empire intact and there was no time for Chacachacare, for enforcing laws to appease the consciences of nuns.

But there were other considerations. There was the matter of babies born of the couplings of men and women riddled with the disease.

Years later, the sisters would say that the most painful task they were ever called upon to do was to take these babies away from their parents and place them in the orphanage in Trinidad. The mothers were inconsolable. They cried for weeks on end. Some, refusing to eat, died within months. Those who lived to be cured often faced rejection from their children when they went to the orphanage to collect them.
No, no, you are too ugly to be my mother.

But the Chacachacare Mumsford was on his way to was a different place. There were better drugs, better treatments, and patients stayed on the colony because they chose to, because the disease had so deformed them they feared ridicule on the mainland, because they preferred to be treated at the leprosarium in Chacachacare than at the outpatient clinics in Trinidad, where they were seen as pariahs. In fact, for a brief time, between 1950 and 1952, visiting doctors performed surgeries in Chacachacare to excise and graft sagging lips, build bone nose bridges where the tissue had been eaten away, correct “claw hands,” and open eyes closed by the disease.

There was one doctor left on the island now, the commissioner had informed Mumsford. Most of the doctors had been Europeans who had come to the colony primarily to conduct research. Once that research had produced a cure, he said (Mumsford thought with some bitterness), they left for new adventures.

Was the remaining doctor Dr. Peter Gardner? Mumsford asked reasonably.

Oh no, not Dr. Peter Gardner. Yes, Gardner was a medical doctor, but he was referring to the other doctor, a local man who sometimes stayed on the island and took care of the remaining patients.

“Then what is Dr. Gardner doing there?” Mumsford asked.

The commissioner had no answer, but to Mumsford’s second question as to the character of Dr. Gardner (“What sort of man is he?” Mumsford had asked), he was quick to respond. “A gentleman. A rare breed. A white man who is not intimidated by the goings-on on the island these days.”

The harshness of his tone puzzled Mumsford. There it was, without the least prompting from him, the commissioner had spoken disparagingly about “goings-on,” and yet it had been impossible to draw him out to say unequivocally that he supported the Crown against the movement for independence.

“What goings-on?” Mumsford took the chance to ask.

“Colored people getting too big for their shoes,” the commissioner said.

And because on that point Mumsford could agree, he didn’t press him for more, he didn’t ask, as he wanted to, if he didn’t think the people in Trinidad owed a debt to England for the progress they had made, and, if owing England, they shouldn’t be willing to remain, as the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe were willing to remain, a loyal Crown colony.

The commissioner’s orders to Mumsford were to get Dr. Gardner’s deposition and to bring the alleged assailant (he could not bring himself to say rapist) back with him to Trinidad. Mumsford was not to question the English girl. In his letter, Dr. Gardner had specifically requested that no one interrogate his daughter. She was only fifteen. He did not want her involved in a scandal. He had done his part: filed the complaint and locked the savage in a pen in the back of his house. All that was left for the commissioner to do was to arrange to have the brute taken to prison.

“Of course we cannot do that,” the commissioner said to Mumsford.