Sugar in the Blood (47 page)

Every summer we returned to Barbados to spend time with our extended family. As a young girl I was particularly impressed by the austere habits of my paternal grandfather, Egbert. In his later years, he ate one meal a day, went to church every evening, and whenever I saw
him, no matter how hot the weather, he was dressed in a sombre grey three-piece suit, with belt, braces and hat. After his divorce, Egbert had remained in the family home, and we used to visit him there, in a hot wooden house perched alongside a main road. It was impeccably clean and somewhat crowded with the conventional bric-a-brac of a Caribbean home of that period: religious iconography, porcelain figurines, crystal vases, chiming clocks.

My paternal grandmother, Louise, meanwhile had become a hotelier, owning and running the Blue Caribbean, an establishment that fronted onto the sea and was situated on the corner of St. Lawrence Gap, now one of the busiest tourist strips on the island. Our family stayed there when we visited, and as small children my brother, sister and I would play in the sea and, to her annoyance, trail sand across the balcony where guests would sit to enjoy the view. In her latter years she would share her life with an elderly gay Englishman called Robin, who helped her to run the hotel and while away the evening hours. I remember her as a rather exquisite creature, an ebony-skinned woman who favoured large hooped earrings and colourful kaftans.

We also spent time with my maternal family at Plumgrove, which was still a working plantation farmed by working-class Barbadians. Our father would drive our rental car up the bumpy rocky track known as “The Gap” past the large standpipe from which water was collected and in which nutmeg-skinned boys bathed naked. At the road’s end, past the tenants’ chattel houses, was the large two-storey stone house. It was dominated by an imposing central staircase so steep that, long after I could walk, I would climb up it on hands and knees. This led to a living-cum-dining area that stretched almost the entire length of the house. My grandfather Vere was gone—he had died a year before my birth—but my grandmother Muriel was still there holding court, sitting me on her lap while she read magazines or shelled peas. The three upstairs bedrooms overlooked the cane fields at the back of the house, while downstairs two great double doors opened onto a dark cool space which included a few more bedrooms and vast storage areas. It was down here, I remember hearing with awe, that my mother sheltered alongside her family, the field workers and the livestock, as the worst hurricane of the last century raged around them.

Immediately surrounding the house was a meticulously cultivated
garden, dominated by large tamarind and frangipani trees whose flowers and leaves almost obscured the house; these were offset by hibiscus, pines and bougainvillea that added an irresistible scent to the air. To the west there was a small grotto of mysterious origin, with two little arches standing amidst the plants; in front of the house were the exotic trees that provided fruit like custard apples and sour-sops. To the north stood a covered well, the subject of many tales among us children: that if you threw a penny into it your wish would come true; that it was so deep that you could not hear the stone splash when it finally hit the water; that a slave had once drowned in it and the spirit now haunted the property.

On the east of the house, near the laundry lines, were the remnants of a drip stone, whose provenance was so ancient it dates the property back to the seventeenth century. The drip stone, an invention of the Amerindians who once populated the region, purified water, filtering rainfall through its two-tiered edifice of coral stone and collecting it in an impervious marble bowl at its base. The dripstone continued its work even when I was a child, but the bowl to collect the fresh water had been moved to feed the pigs, so it leaked incessantly, its clear sweet water evaporating in the bright sunshine.

Some days we would venture beyond this magic circle, to the pond draped in vines adjacent to the house or to the wood with its mahogany and fustic trees, where the ground was covered in a tangle of weeds which grew around their swollen ebony roots. At other times we rampaged through the cane fields, never waiting long before somebody would cut us a “finger” of cane so that we could suck the sweetness from its fibrous strands, just as my mother had done so many years before. At night we sat around the house, as the cane shivered in the breeze and the ubiquitous cane rats scratched on the roof.

IN 1966, WHEN
I was four years old, my parents returned to Barbados to celebrate the island’s independence. For many of the islanders, sovereignty had seemed a very long time coming. Beyond their shores, they heard the rhetoric of the American Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and they had been inspired by the radical politics of Black Panther Stokely Carmichael and the towering Malcolm X. So when two other notable British West Indian islands, Jamaica and Trinidad, declared their own independence in 1963, it seemed the time had truly come. Two years later, in late 1965, Barbados’s Democratic Labour Party, led by my father’s old friend, the war hero Errol Barrow, was ready to present to Parliament a draft Constitution calling for independence. This was rubber-stamped by the British government the following year, and plans for the celebrations began.

Alongside a flood of other ecstatic Barbadians who believed that independence was “
the road to destiny,” my parents flew back to the island. On 29 November 1966, a crowd of about 50,000 people gathered at the Garrison Savannah, the vast green situated on the outskirts of the capital, Bridgetown, where races are held, cricket is played and concerts are enjoyed. At midnight, they watched as the Governor General and the Prime Minister lowered the Union Jack that had flown over Barbados for more than 300 years. Then the new blue and gold flag of an independent Barbados was raised in its place. Afterwards my mother in her black and white sequined dress danced the night away in my father’s arms, to the music of Diana Ross and the Supremes.

Perhaps it had been “the road to destiny” after all, since Barbados was one of the few ex-colonies that fared better after independence than it had done before. This was partly to do with the rise of the tourist industry. The business of entertaining visitors had begun in a gentle way in the early twentieth century, when the island began to attract holidaymakers from Britain and from North and South America. According to the historian F. A. Hoyos, “Some of these tourists [visited] Barbados during the winter months, staying at the island’s hotels which were soon to enter a boom period.
Others, notably the South Americans, came from Brazil on the Lamport and Holt ships, which were accustomed to stop at the island for essential supplies like coal and water.” They would stay for longer periods, renting “bay houses,” chiefly in the district known as Worthing, which had taken its name from the English seaside town.

Barbados quickly learned the art of catering to visitors, and hotels like the Crane and the Marine began appearing along its golden coastline. By 1912, the Colonial Secretary was able to claim that “
the colony owes much of its increasing prosperity to the visitors who stay in the island.” The new wave of tourists was attracted by the idyllic vistas—the panoramic blue skies, the sparkling seas and the pale, sun-warmed sand—that had bewitched the original planters, and had kept luring pirates, dreamers and entrepreneurs for centuries. There was a rapid increase in the development of the tourist industry after the Second World War, particularly with the invention of the jetliner in the 1950s. And by the 1970s, tourism had overtaken sugar as the island’s most valuable industry. This transition from agricultural outpost of empire to independent luxury resort would soon begin to alter the lives of the islanders just as comprehensively as the “white gold” once had.

Barbados for us was a holiday haven, peaceful and safe, in contrast to the island where we had based our lives. For in Jamaica the post-independence dream was decaying. It was a shocking reversal for the English colony that was predicted to be “most likely to succeed” after
emancipation. But by the middle of the 1970s, the traditional star of the anglophone colonies was in chaos, torn apart by political factionalism. On one side was the left-wing People’s National Party (PNP), led by the charismatic Michael Manley, on the other the conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), led by Edward Seaga. Both of them were battling it out for political control of the country and the opportunity to exploit its wealth. The intensity of this conflict was exacerbated by Cold War politics. Jamaica was a key player in the region, and so external forces quickly became involved in the island’s clashes; and there were allegations that money and guns were being smuggled into the island by the American CIA as well as the Communist regime in nearby Cuba, both groups hoping to sway the island towards their particular ideological position.

Most of the violence was centred around the inner city of Kingston, in places like Trench Town, which had originally been established as a social housing project for workers, but had by the 1970s become a place for the poor and dispossessed. These ghettos were divided into factional terrains, one section claimed for the PNP, the other for the JLP; and politicians from both sides provided their supporters with guns and funds in order to cement votes and loyalties. Here illiterate teenage boys, armed with Kalashnikovs or U.S.-import Glocks, roamed the streets picking off enemies who threatened the integrity of their territory. Inevitably some of the money and weapons went to seed the narcotics business. And thus out of the smouldering ashes of these violent streets emerged the “Yardies,” who became one of the most significant crime cartels in the world. It was a frightening and dangerous time, with violence erupting unpredictably and constantly.

At least some of the country’s problems had their roots in Jamaica’s brutal slave past. As the richest of the British colonies, it had attracted the most rapacious attention from its colonizers and suffered the most terrible cruelty and abasement of all the English sugar islands. The violent resentment this provoked had simmered for centuries and was now spilling over into all areas of Jamaican society. By the midpoint of the decade the professional middle classes were migrating from the island as quickly as they could, and in 1976 my family also took flight. The country we were destined for was the very one that George Ashby had left behind over three centuries before.

We landed in a country that was a cauldron of bitter rhetoric about migration which left us in no doubt how unwelcome we were. The backstory to this had begun in the post-war period, when Britain had experienced a shortage of labour in key areas of its reconstruction programme, such as transport, catering and the National Health Service. Desperate for new workers, the government launched a widespread advertising campaign in the Caribbean to lure the islanders to Britain. It played on their loyalty to the “mother country,” and stressed their patriotic duty to help with rebuilding the nation. As a result, in the years spanning 1948–73, over half a million Caribbean people migrated to Britain, most of them arriving before 1962. These people became known as the “Windrush generation,” after the first ship of these migrants to dock in Britain. Most were Jamaican; only 25,247 or 8.5 per cent were Barbadians. But by the time we arrived in the 1970s, Britain was in recession and unemployment was rising, and a vociferous minority were demanding that these migrants be sent home. Their most respectable spokesperson was the Conservative MP Enoch Powell. His infamous “rivers of blood” speech criticizing Commonwealth immigration, delivered at the Conservative Party conference in 1968, had warned that Britain would disintegrate into open conflict if the repatriation of these people did not take place.

Even as a fourteen-year-old, I could appreciate that this was a debate beset with ironies. The British, who had first colonized the Caribbean and enriched themselves on black backs, now wanted people of Caribbean descent out of Britain because they were “costing” the country too much. And their unworthiness to stay in England was justified by the very same racist theories that George Ashby and Robert Cooper had used to validate their own misuse of their slaves.