The Boy Between Worlds: A Biography

by Annejet van Der Zijl

  But times did not get better. On the contrary, a few weeks later an influenza epidemic spread across the city like wildfire and claimed thousands of lives from the impoverished population. In the months that followed, it became clear that the end of the war had come too late to breathe new life into the colony’s moribund economy. The goldfields had gone dry, the price of natural rubber on the international market had hit an all-time low, and Suriname’s golden years were over. Almost every year, the colonial government, the Koloniale Staten, was forced to make the humiliating journey to Holland to balance the books. Unemployment grew to unprecedented proportions, especially among the Creoles, who faced formidable competition from the tens of thousands of Hindustani and Javanese migrants who had been lured to the colony to work on the plantations after the abolishment of slavery.

  Anyone who had the opportunity to leave did. Black men took refuge in the Antilles or Venezuela, where there was good money to be earned in the up-and-coming oil industry. People of mixed race went to the Dutch East Indies, where the Netherlands Trading Society was developing relatively well and was happy to hire the “Dutchified” Surinamese. And the well-to-do went back to Holland, where industrialization was in full swing. Among them were many Jewish families who had long been the backbone of the colony. After laws limiting Jews were abolished in 1825, they gained even more influence in the colony. Salomon Soesman, owner of Waldemar’s grandmother Mietje, had come to the colony as a young man from Amsterdam in 1826 and managed to become one of the richest men in Suriname and the vice-chairman of the Koloniale Staten. But after slavery was abolished, the plantation world that had made Soesman so successful ended up being his downfall. In his day, going back to Europe, like the other Dutch were doing, was still deemed too dangerous for his people. But now, in the enlightened twentieth century, the Jewish people didn’t have as much fear in the Old World. They headed back to Europe unperturbed about the future.

  During this economically unstable time, Koos had completely disappeared from his homeland and left Eugenie alone in the big house on the Waterfront. She scraped by on the ever-dwindling rental income from the ground-floor tenants and her husband’s last bits of real estate. When that was no longer enough, she sold her most tangible memories of her former luxury: her jewelry. After that, she tried to start a hotel. The house was certainly large enough, and in the old days, the location would have been ideal. But the quays that were once teeming with European visitors looking for a comfortable bed in a proper environment were now miserably empty. Investors were no longer willing to risk sinking their money into the bottomless pit on the other side of the ocean, and the officials that came to the door on the night of July 31, 1921, as part of the Great Census counted only one person at house number 76 who wasn’t in the family—a boarder employed as a clerk.

  But even though Eugenie was struggling to make ends meet, she and her children still did their best to live as members of the upper class. Sixteen-year-old Hilda had been courted by an engine driver in the merchant navy for years, but as the granddaughter of Grandma Elder, she had grown up all too aware of subtle differences in social status and refused him time and again. Even though they were now forced to rent out rooms in their home, they were still the Nods children, and a black shoemaker’s son with frizzy hair was simply beneath her dignity. She preferred to help her mother by working as a grocery store bookkeeper. Every Saturday, even in the sweltering heat, the Nodses still ate calf’s liver and potatoes. For even though the Dutch government was impatient to be rid of the poverty-stricken colony, and the people in Paramaribo were endlessly complaining about the arrogant, meddlesome penny-pinchers in The Hague, the motherland was still a symbol of the big world, the source of all knowledge and prosperity.

  The Creole population was particularly devoted to the Kingdom of the Netherlands and its royal family. Even during the economic depression, when Queen Wilhelmina celebrated the silver jubilee of her reign in 1923, no other territory collected as much money for her gift as the one on the Suriname River. And it was still the dream of every Surinamese parent of standing to give his or her child a European education. Even Eugenie did everything in her power to make this dream from better times a reality; however, in the disillusioned Suriname of the 1920s, the costs of such an endeavor had become unfathomable. While an annual salary of 1,000 guldens was considered a decent living in the colony, a second-class ticket for the Atlantic crossing was at least 200 guldens, and in pricey Holland, living costs and school fees quickly added up to 175 guldens a month.

  Decy turned out to be too much like his adventurous father to sit in school, and as soon as he turned sixteen, he left for Curaçao in search of the fortune that was so terribly hard to come by in his homeland. And so, it was up to his little brother, Waldemar, to make his mother’s dream come true. Starting July 1, 1923, Waldemar attended the Hendrik School, the only school in the colony to offer an advanced elementary education certificate that would be recognized in Holland. The Hendrik School on the Gravenstraat had once been attended exclusively by rich children of plantation owners, wealthy Jews, and members of the Dutch elite. The only black people on the school premises were the servant girls who waited for their young masters by the gate, bearing trays with glasses of chocolate milk or lemonade—neatly covered with paper against the flies. But following the exodus in the second half of the nineteenth century, the institution became open to students of color, and in 1891 it admitted the first full-blooded African student. By then, more than half of the students and teachers at the Hendrik School were Creole.

  This was by no means the end of racial discrimination in Suriname. Even though the Surinamese students were generally more well liked than their Dutch peers—who apparently made little effort to hide their disdain for this so-called monkey land they had found themselves in—they still enjoyed less prestige. Students were forbidden to speak “Negro English,” a dialect spoken by many Creole Surinamese, and the lessons were an exact copy of those in the motherland. The rhythm of the Dutch school day was strictly adhered to—even though it was totally unsuitable in a tropical climate. If the teachers wished to teach their pupils anything about their own country, they were left entirely to their own devices. For example, when rain fell on the Petrea-vine-covered school grounds, a first-grade teacher might explain how little streams from the highlands made their way down to the sea and eventually came together to form big, wide rivers like the Suriname River and the Commewijne.

  Waldemar was cheerful and took to school easily, but he didn’t love studying. He preferred to roam the city with his friends. Even though the Pearl of the West had lost much of her golden sparkle, for young boys from the tropics like Waldemar, it was still a virtual Eldorado, an inexhaustible source of adventure and distraction. As soon as the clock on the famous wooden cathedral next to the school struck three, the rest of the day was theirs. They would head down to Bourne’s on the Waterfront to look at cars, go fishing in the Sommelsdijk stream, or watch the big ships come in at Fort Zeelandia. They explored the green districts around the edge of the city, where the Javanese and burus, poor Dutch farmers who had been shipped to Suriname, worked in the fields, and where they could pick sweet mangos right off the trees. The only place they didn’t dare go was into the impenetrable jungle beyond the fields, because, like most city-dwelling Creoles, they were in the habit of telling each other horror stories about all the wild animals and shady types roaming around in the trees. They were happier taking their boats upriver to fish, swim, and sail.

  Waldemar’s carefree life came to a screeching halt in 1924 when his mother was urgently rushed to the Catholic hospital on the Koninginnestraat. A few days later, Eugenie died of appendicitis. She was just fifty years old. After her children had laid her to rest at the Lutheran cemetery on the Wanicastraat, the house on the Waterfront was vacated. Waldemar and his sisters moved in with their aunt Marie in her stately home on the Wagenwegstraat. Eugenie’s sister was married to a civil servant and therefore among those wh
o had suffered the least during the crisis. She was known for being a rather cold woman, but in her own undemonstrative way, she took excellent care of her nieces and nephews. To his four little cousins, Waldemar was like a wonderful big brother; he even let them borrow his long trousers so they could sneak past the age limit at the cinema. In July 1926, Waldemar took his final exams. Two months later, he and his fellow graduates rode through Paramaribo in a honking convertible, and he began preparing to fulfill his mother’s dying wish.

  His entire childhood, Waldemar had seen them go, the ocean swimmers envied by all. And now he himself was one of the young men headed off to Holland, off to a promising future. Hilda had made arrangements for his arrival on the other side. It turned out that their father had conceived a son with a married mistress who had moved back to the motherland ten years before. The son, David Millar, had written that he was prepared to take care of his half brother on the condition that, if anyone asked, he would say he was a nephew.

  On Saturday morning, October 22, 1927, Waldemar was taken by family and friends in a small boat to the Belwaarde docks, where the boilers of the Oranje Nassau were already generating steam for the great crossing. Waldemar knew the ship well. He and his friends had often hung around the stern in their little boat. The ship, which was approximately 328 feet long and could accommodate about sixty passengers, was the property of the Royal Dutch Steamboat Company, which had recently taken over the four-week Holland–Suriname line. It had been at sea for two months already and now, having left the New York and West Indian ports, it was on its way back to its home port in Amsterdam. Around noon came the shrill sound of the steam whistle and the rattle of anchors being pulled up.

  Slowly the ship came to life, and Waldemar glided away from the only world he had ever known. The farewell cries of the people on the quay were gradually overpowered by the soft monotone drone of the engines churning in the belly of the ship, and soon enough the sight of their waving arms had disappeared as well. Paramaribo sparkled white in the bright sun, the trees on the Waterfront looked dusty, and the riverbank seemed as endless and impenetrable as ever. Every now and then, the passengers might have caught a glimpse of an old white plantation house peeking through the green or a whiff of blooming mahogany trees and burning wood carried to the deck by the wind. After a few miles, Fort New Amsterdam was in sight, and as always, the boat let off a final farewell signal, rousing the screaming monkeys in the surrounding jungle. But this time there were other boys untying their boat and waving goodbye to the passengers, and Waldemar could no longer dive into the water and let the rising tide carry him home. He watched them follow the ship until the river’s sandy waters swirled into the ocean’s blue. The ship was headed north-northeast—away from the sun and into the falling darkness.

  The journey began splendidly. Although it was still very warm, the sea breeze was cool and pleasant; the smooth, blue Atlantic Ocean stretched out as far as the eye could see. Flying fish skimmed across the surface of the water like silver stars, and every now and then, glistening dolphins would swim alongside the boat. For a while, the passengers could still make out the low coastline of the Guianas. Somewhere in that far-off strip of monotone green was the crumbling, forgotten plantation where Waldemar’s family came from, and where his half-Indian great-grandmother, Prinzes, and her mother, Aurora, were still buried in the slave graveyard that had long been overgrown by the jungle.

  Every morning, the sun rose a little bit earlier, and the ship’s clocks were set forward; and every evening it would go down a bit earlier in the ship’s wake. After a few days, the Oranje Nassau left the Caribbean and ventured forth into the Middle Passage, as seafarers called the infamous intercontinental crossing. The ship more or less followed the same route the European slave traders had taken centuries earlier, their wooden vessels full of human misery—the misery of the suffocating slaves crammed into the belly of the ship, and the misery of the poor devils working as sailors, who were even less likely to make it home alive. Unlike their human cargo below deck, their lives weren’t worth a penny.

  But death was aboard the Oranje Nassau as well. At about latitude 25° north, when storm clouds formed in the clear blue sky and white-crested waves—or “white horses” as the sailors called them—appeared on the sea, a forty-year-old Danish passenger died of malaria. Just a few months earlier, she and her family had come to Suriname full of hope. Like so many immigrants who’d gone before them, they were naive and totally unprepared for the extreme tropical climate and terrible economic situation that awaited them. At the peak of Suriname’s biannual dry period, she had become so sick and feverish in the scorching heat that her husband and two children scraped together all the money they had and booked their tickets on the first ship away from the godforsaken land and home to the mild, green hills of Denmark—hills that Mrs. Ericson would never see again.

  Death on board was bad luck, everyone knew that, and preparations were quickly made for a burial at sea. But when Mrs. Ericson’s husband and children got wind of the plans to relinquish her body to the waves, they protested: if she was to be thrown overboard, they would go down with her. There were no cold stores on the ship, and in the end, the captain had no choice but to assign the ship’s doctor the unpleasant task of preserving the body in alcohol and salt and stowing it away on the highest deck.

  In the Bay of Biscay, a furious storm broke out. The ship was thrashed about for days on end. Anything that wasn’t battened down rolled back and forth, and when Waldemar walked from his cabin to the passengers’ mess hall, he had to hold on for dear life. By then the coffin was emitting an intolerable odor that could be smelled all over the ship. Once they entered the English Channel, the wind died down a bit. Still carrying the macabre cargo, the Oranje Nassau plowed through the leaden waves at top speed. The superstitious sailors wanted nothing more than to step off the ill-fated ship as soon as possible, and they did everything they could to limit the stopovers in Plymouth and Le Havre to an absolute minimum. Counting down the days until they reached the Suriname quay in the Port of Amsterdam, passengers tried to ignore the smell of death in their nostrils.

  The ship arrived in the IJmuiden locks four days ahead of schedule. The first thing Waldemar saw in his new country was the dunes rising up on the gray horizon, and the flat, soggy pastures on either side of the North Sea Canal. Shivering, he stood at the railing in his elegant tropical jacket, which was far too thin for this new climate. His brown skin looked sallow in the northern light. It was November by the time he arrived in rainy, windy Holland. The last leaves clung to their branches, and the people hurried down the wet streets seeking shelter and a place to call home.

  3

  The Boarder

  From the moment Waldemar set foot on shore, the promised land he and his friends had imagined while swinging in the lithe branches of the guava trees was different than he had expected. In fact, his first steps on Dutch ground ended up being delayed for days, for as soon as the Oranje Nassau moored on the Surinamekade in Amsterdam, the Danish passengers began shouting for the police. When the authorities finally arrived, the family reported a murder, claiming that the ship’s doctor had failed to provide their wife and mother with proper treatment. Her corpse, which was in an advanced state of decomposition by then, was proof. No one could leave the ship while the investigation was underway, and it was nearly a week before Waldemar was picked up by his “uncle” David Millar and taken to The Hague.

  The boy from Paramaribo had landed in a strange new world. The trees were so bare they seemed dead. The streets and stoops looked as though they’d been drawn with a ruler, and—perhaps most remarkable of all—white people did jobs that even black people would turn their noses up at in Suriname, like collecting trash and sweeping the street. Everything was different in Holland. Even the moon stood up straight in the sky rather than sprawling out over the sea like it did at home.

  The climate was cold, and the people were even colder. David’s wife, for example, was oddly
cool toward Waldemar. No matter how polite and quiet he was, Christien managed to find something wrong with everything he said and did. Even her two children acted peculiarly—they seemed a bit afraid of him and crawled under the table whenever he tried to play with them. As for David Millar, he had very little time for his half brother, and whenever he was home, he was short-tempered because of stress at work.

  Most Surinamese who came to the Netherlands settled in Amsterdam, a loose, cosmopolitan city where they could find plenty of compatriots in the sailor bars around the Zeedijk and in the neighborhoods around the harbor. A thriving Surinamese community was emerging in Amsterdam around that time, which included a workers’ union, the Bond van Surinaamse Arbeiders in Nederland, and cultural associations such as the Vereniging Ons Suriname. But The Hague had neither the ambience nor the nightlife to make people from the West Indies feel at home. What’s more, differences in class traveled with the ship. Although Surinamese men were all equally black in Dutch eyes, among themselves the social differences in the colony were still perfectly apparent, and a black university student wouldn’t dream of fraternizing with a black engine driver.

  Though the Nods family had lost much of its wealth over the years, Waldemar had always been counted among Paramaribo’s social elite. But in Holland, he was suddenly nothing more than a poor black immigrant surrounded by European wealth. All the guldens his family had worked so hard to scrape together for him would have constituted a fortune back home, but here they were barely enough to put warm clothes on his back.

  In his host family, Waldemar was clearly unwelcome; in his university preparatory course, he was an outsider; and on the street, he was an object of curiosity. Sometimes people secretly tried to touch him to see if his dark pigment would rub off, and in the tram, children stared at him as if he were the bogeyman himself. Dumbfounded, Waldemar spent his first year in Holland wandering the endless streets and housing blocks of The Hague. No one knew him, and no one seemed to want to know him. He became shy and unsure of himself and, above all, extremely lonely.