‘I look at her and she’s laughing. I say, “It’s all very well for you, you’re still young.” She’s still in her late twenties, young, adorable-looking Ruth. She says, “It doesn’t really matter, it doesn’t really show.” ’
After Ruth’s death, Wadley became even more precious, his undying presence a great balm. Joe’s protection of Wadley was an obsession; barely anyone was allowed to touch him, and she would not be parted from him for even a night. Whenever Joe mentioned that she was born in 1900, Wadley, she said, would ask: ‘When was that?’ If the taunting mockery of Joe’s mother was transmuted in Ruth Baldwin into sweet conspiratorial laughter, her father’s absence became in Wadley a perpetual innocence. Joe’s father was an almost invisible figure in her life, and she made a virtue of his silence, rendered it divine by recreating it in Wadley’s tacit sympathy. Nearly all the servants within the Great House on Whale Cay were male – Joe liked them for their quietness. ‘They don’t talk too much,’ she explained. Albert Carstairs, like his daughter’s next three ‘fathers’, wore a moustache, and there is a peculiarly melancholy photograph of Joe in early middle age, gazing at the camera with a thick dark moustache across her face.
‘I like men,’ Joe said. ‘Most of my friends are ordinary men. I’ve never been frightfully fond of pansies, but manly men.’
Chapter Fourteen
I had A Country Going
Just before Christmas 1939, three months after the outbreak of the Second World War, Joe gave a banquet for 1,200 people in the southern district of Nassau. It was the first public appearance she had made in her five years in the archipelago. Joe sailed over to New Providence from Whale Cay on Vergemere IV with a troop of eighty boy scouts. Her ‘boys’ – most of them grown men – paraded through the streets, played marching tunes and then served chowder to the people. The Reverend Julian Henshaw presided over the ceremony.
Julian Henshaw, whose real name was said to be Wilfred Henshaw, was priest of the Church of Saint Catherine on Whale Cay. ‘A gay priest,’ said Joe, ‘a very very gay priest’. The story went that Joe had shot at Henshaw, narrowly missing his head, when he first showed up unannounced on the island. In fact, Joe said, he turned up in old shorts, looking rather dirty, and she took him in. ‘Go up and have a bath,’ she said, ‘stay the night, we’ll give you food, and you must come back many times.’ An educated Welshman, Henshaw claimed to have enjoyed a career as a dancer before joining the priesthood. ‘The Bishop of Nassau gave him to us,’ said Joe. The Bishop may well have been glad to get Henshaw off his hands.
Henshaw served as a decadent jester to Joe’s court. His sermons were lively, concerning such subjects as ‘Good and Bad Women of the Bible’. His church was accommodating: sometimes Fifth Day Adventists would preach there; sometimes the place would be given over to ‘Jumpers’ – ‘They made a lot of noise and jumped around a lot,’ Joe explained. Julian also taught history to the older children on the island. He was ‘a great asset’, said Joe: ‘He did the proper thing, but he did have a few hang-ups.’ At parties on Whale Cay Julian would throw open his white robes to reveal his naked body; or would take the cross from around his neck and stick it in the end of a lit cigar. He liked to take Joe’s girlfriends dancing at the Jungle Club in Nassau, where he would shock the tourists by whirling around wildly, dressed in his robes and dog collar. Henshaw visited Capri with one of Joe’s friends and was banished from the island after dancing on a table in a woman’s nightgown. This was the kind of flamboyant mischief-making that Joe adored, for all her claims to like manly men and not ‘pansies’. Henshaw was known to make sexual advances to his choirboys on Whale Cay, a practice to which Joe for a time turned a blind eye. He described the island as ‘Utopia’.
Henshaw drank heavily, and tried to charge his alcohol bills to Joe; on one occasion this elicited a playful but irritated reprimand from Alfred Agostini, the island treasurer. In a letter addressed to ‘The Not Too Reverend Henshaw’ at ‘St Catherine’s Rectory, The Midlands, Whale Cay’, Agostini wrote: ‘In fact and in a word, I am certain that Miss Carstairs would desire me to tell you to pay your own damn liquor bills and not keep having them sent to this office month after month in the (I can assure you, futile) hope that they will slip past the eagle eye of the Chancellor and, in the mad shuffle of pounds and ten, somehow get paid at no expense to your reverend self . . .’ The letter was signed ‘alfred agostini, gentleman in ordinary to M. B. Carstairs’. Henshaw replied to ‘The Chancellor Agostini’, pleading to ‘invoke your august and venerable clemency, forebearance and longsuffering with those responsible for the document which has caused your office so much concern for they live in a world which knows not what it does’.
Those who worked with Joe joined in the fantasy that Whale Cay was a kingdom, with an omnipotent ruler, a stern chancellor, a corrupt church, a well-drilled army, an ocean-going fleet, a flourishing economy and obedient subjects. ‘I had a country going,’ said Joe. ‘I ran a country.’
Joe issued scores of admonitory notices. ‘Notice,’ read one. ‘I eat brown rice in preference to white. Therefore, if brown rice is good enough for me and my household, it is good enough or even too good for the people. M. B. Carstairs.’
‘The strictest law of Whale Cay,’ ran a notice of 1940, ‘is that no alcoholic liquor may be drunk or be in the possession of any person while under my jurisdiction. The continual breaking of this law has caused me to stop all Andros leave until the August holidays. Those wishing to go to Andros will do so at the risk of not being permitted to return to this island. There will not be a holiday on Good Friday. It is unfortunate that the innocent have to be punished with the guilty.’
Several signs took the form of warnings: ‘All bicycles ridden at night must be equipped with a proper light. Anyone found riding his bicycle at night without a light, will have his bicycle taken from him.’ And in 1941:
notice
there are certain people on this job
who may be fired at any moment –
they are slow, lazy and unsatisfactory
the following should beware.
joe brennen tarah brown
roland miller jay minnis
george ferguson hilgrove lightbourne
herman bain wilfred phine
zepheniah dean
there are others who are also in the
firing line . . .
To this Joe added, in handwriting: ‘If this kind of thing happens again every man on the job will be made to suffer. MBC.’
‘Make something of yourselves,’ Joe enjoined in speeches to her people. ‘Quit this ridiculous drinking and marauding.’
Joe was at pains to point out that she was not running a charity. Asked if she would raise wages if Whale Cay turned a profit, she replied: ‘God, no. That would be philanthropy. I detest the word. I’m the fellow with the hand in his pocket.’
The Whale Cay economy was circular and self-contained: the money Joe paid in wages was spent at the store and so returned to her coffers to be paid out again. The islanders were encouraged to use a community bank but they tended to carry their wages in their shoes or handkerchiefs, and when the notes became too dirty in this endless round Joe exchanged them for clean cash in Nassau. The Whale Cay store, by 1940 the biggest in the Bahamas, stocked clothes, blankets, meats (from corned beef to roast mutton), tobacco, Quaker Oats, Coca-Cola, buttons, chocolate. Beer and wine were available, but strictly rationed. Joe filled the shop with supplies she bought at wholesale prices in Nassau and which she sold at cost. On trips to the capital she also visited the Old England Stores, where she would buy a few yards of doeskin or tweed to have made into suits for herself, her girlfriends and Wadley.
Those who lived on Whale Cay remembered Joe Carstairs with respect and affection. They were like her own children, they said. Joe sacked white managers who worked the blacks too hard. She insisted that the islanders go to church every Sunday and that they contribute to a health-care fund, which insured them against hospital treatm
ent. To prevent the spread of disease Joe at one point forbade travel between islands. In Nassau she donated a substantial sum to the Bahamas General Hospital, with which it established the Carstairs ward for children, and she helped found a grammar school. Joe paid for and arranged the funeral of anyone who died on Whale Cay. And, as long as they behaved, Joe allowed her islanders some fun. At Christmas she provided fifty-five-gallon drums of wine; she laid on splendid wedding parties; and the weekly dances at the store were renowned throughout the Out Islands.
Children born on Whale Cay were usually taken to Joe to be named, a tradition that stemmed from the days of the slave plantation. She dubbed the first boy Samuel Octagon Brennan: the Samuel may have been for Samuel Saunders, who built Joe’s first boat; Octagon was the brand of soap stocked in the island store. For several of the girls she chose the names she had spurned, Marion Barbara. ‘God knows why,’ Joe remarked.
A day school was provided for the island children and a night school for the adults, 90 per cent of whom were illiterate. On the schoolroom wall hung a sign reading ‘Long Live the King’. Joe’s boy scout troop, the 87th Bahamas, was in effect a private army of almost 100 men. To teach her soldiers to drill, Joe showed them a film of the guards parading at Buckingham Palace and instructed them to copy their moves exactly. During exercises the troops sometimes flinched and scratched as they were bitten by mosquitoes. Joe admonished them: ‘Look here. You’re not to stir even if a Bengal tiger snaps at your ankles. Get it?’ According to Joe, mosquitoes did not bite her because they could tell she was not afraid of them.
In 1940, the Duke of Windsor was made Governor of the Bahamas in an attempt by the British government to shuffle him and the Duchess off the international stage for the duration of the war. As Edward VIII, he had been dethroned and exiled for offending propriety, much as Joe Carstairs, Speed Queen, had been before him. The Duke of Windsor and his divorcee wife became mock-monarchs in a distant and irrelevant colony; Joe did rather better, creating her own monarchy in the Bahamas as the White Queen of Whale Cay.
When the Windsors arrived in Nassau the 87th Bahamas, Joe’s soldier-boys, were among the troops lining the streets: they bore nickel-plated staves and were beautifully turned out, their limbs shining with oil. The new Governor and his wife were regaled with music by a band of twenty-five Whale Cay boys.
In January 1941 the Duke and Duchess paid a visit to Whale Cay, and Life magazine took photographs of their progress round the island. ‘Damn it,’ said the Duke of Windsor as he inspected the roads, ‘why can’t all the Out Islands make roads like these?’ Joe showed them her boats in the dock, and while the Duke was on the deck of one of the yachts she took the Duchess into the cabin. The Duchess saw Wadley. ‘Who is that?’ she asked (Joe was impressed that she said ‘who’ rather than ‘what’). Joe introduced her: ‘That’s my boy, that’s Wadley.’ ‘My God,’ said the Duchess, ‘he’s just like my husband.’
Joe found the Duke boring and morose but she lent him public support. ‘Fortunately we have a Governor whose heart beats in the soil,’ she wrote in a letter to the Nassau Tribune. As for the Duchess, ‘She was a marvellous person. The English didn’t like her but I thought she was great.’ Julian Henshaw also befriended the Windsors, and spread scurrilous gossip about them (he claimed to have it on the authority of one of the Windsors’ servants that the Duke was far from well-endowed).
Soon Life and the Saturday Evening Post ran cover stories trumpeting Joe Carstairs’ achievements. For the Bahamas Fair in Nassau that February, Joe wrote a manifesto describing her aims on Whale Cay. ‘It is with the hope in mind that the Bahamas will one day be sufficient unto themselves that this project has been undertaken . . . The ambition is to train the people to be expert workers in their various trades which includes: Cabinet making, carpentry, shipbuilding, masonry, farming, engineering, book-keeping, Domestic service, and (last but not least) to teach them to live in cleanliness and order so that they and the generations of the future, shall be fitted to make a decent livelihood, and to be an asset rather than a liability to the community.’
In the Whale Cay booth at the fair she presented garden peas and celery grown on the island, asparagus, beets, carrots, cucumbers, citrus fruit, bananas and canteloupes. She displayed a hutch of rabbits – ‘the ideal poor man’s food’ – and the Whale Cay flag, a yellow sunburst on blue cloth. But the central exhibit was a scale model of the island, constructed at a cost of about $3,000 with the help of her friend Bart Howard. The miniature church was lit from within so that its stained-glass windows shone out. When the church bells rang the lighthouse beacon flashed. It was, in a sense, a Whale Cay for Wadley – the perfection of Joe’s endeavours.
In March the film director Gabriel Pascal premièred his Major Barbara in Nassau, in honour of the Windsors. He too visited Whale Cay. ‘With the possible exception of Katie Hepburn,’ he said, ‘Miss Carstairs is the cleverest woman I ever met. I’d like to have her in my next picture.’ Joe would have been flattered by this comparison: she thought her voice was like Katharine Hepburn’s and said that if a film were made of her life, Hepburn should play the lead.
The number of natives on Whale Cay – which stood at 150 in 1939 and 250 in 1940 – now swelled to 500. It was a measure of the economic importance of Joe’s settlement that she spent more than $250,000 on the construction of her island and paid out $1,200 a week in wages, while the Bahamas as a whole exported only $700,000-worth of produce a year.
‘People are so desperately in need of work,’ Joe told the Tribune in 1941, ‘that they take any risk in reaching my island. Twelve people left Andros to come to Whale Cay the other day but only three reached it – the other nine were drowned. Some of these belonged to families of my people.’ In 1941, for the first time, Whale Cay made some money, by selling vegetables to a cannery which provided tinned food for soldiers. In June the Herald, a liberal Bahamian newspaper, described Joe’s achievement as ‘the greatest story since the landing of Christopher Columbus in this colony’.
Chapter Fifteen
Join Hands on the Roadway to the Sun
‘I wanted to elevate the standard of living for the black people,’ Joe said. ‘I knew damn well that I had the answer.’
In 1939 Joe Carstairs set up an organisation ‘to bring Prosperity to the Coloured People of the Bahamas’. She named it the Coloured League of Youth, not because it was open only to the young but because it was designed to rejuvenate a whole race. ‘The rest of the world has a bad opinion of the Coloured People of these Islands,’ noted the manifesto. ‘The Coloured People do not prosper in the way they should. They do not seem to care, or want to get on. THIS MUST BE CHANGED.’
The league was at once an altruistic project and a bid by Joe to extend her empire, to defy the white ruling class in Nassau and become the de facto ruler of the British West Indies. The success of Joe’s settlement on Whale Cay had convinced her that she had the key to revitalising the entire colony, and she was now trying to initiate a social and economic revolution in the Bahamas. She more than once voiced the opinion that she ought to be made governor. ‘Everybody would have followed me,’ she said.
‘Be clever,’ urged Joe’s manifesto for the Coloured League of Youth, ‘believe in yourselves, be moral, sober, clean and healthy. Fill yourselves with the spirit of progress, have the wish to succeed – join hands on the Roadway to the Sun.’
Despite the Utopian rhetoric, Joe’s plans were firmly rooted in local politics and economics. Ever since the emancipation of Bahamian slaves a century earlier, attempts to make the archipelago agriculturally viable had failed. In part, this was because the Out Islands were widely scattered and resistant to cultivation; but Joe was convinced that if the people organised transport and the distribution of fertiliser, these problems could be overcome. She was also up against the white politicians in Nassau, known as the ‘Bay Street Boys’ because they owned the businesses in the town’s main street. These merchants made their money through imports, and
had no interest in promoting native agriculture. They controlled the boats that travelled between islands and set the prices in Nassau shops. Joe planned to challenge their power.
Joe was Chief Comptroller of the league, and beneath her was an elaborate hierarchy of comptrollers for propaganda, agriculture, accounts and public works, as well as medical, legal and religious officers (the Reverend Julian Henshaw filled this last post). Those who wanted to join the league nominated themselves to an officer, and if approved attended an initiation ceremony. There the nominee repeated a series of prayers, oaths and promises, which were punctuated with drum-rolls and bugle-blasts. At the end a badge was pinned to the new member. According to the constitution, ‘The Member is then handed his Membership card and takes his leave in silence. As the Member passes out of the building, or meeting-place, a bugle-call shall be sounded, so that those outside shall know another Member has been made.’ Joe, believing in her own repeated rebirths, was trying to recreate the black populace, one by one.
Members of the league were entitled to apply to farm on Bird Cay, a small island two miles from Whale Cay, or on their own islands. For the first year the league (that is, Joe) would supply the farmers with free food, clothes, a ration of beer and cigarettes, seeds, tools, fertilisers and advice on farming techniques. Members would be paid no wages, and instead would receive a voucher to the value of the produce they brought to a central market. After a year the free supplies and subsistence would be withdrawn and the farmers would be allowed to sell their fruit and vegetables for money.
Joe further proposed that members of the CLY open a store in Nassau to sell only local produce and compete with the imported fruit and vegetables that were for sale in the rest of the town. She suggested that the league purchase a freight boat to transport Out Island goods to the capital, and hire an agricultural expert to advise on farming techniques. She guaranteed all members of the league free medical treatment, legal and religious advice; in special cases, extra money could be provided for the construction of greenhouses and rain tanks. The goal was self-sufficiency. Just as in her private life Joe strove to need nothing and no one (Wadley excepted), in her public projects she preached self-reliance and independence above all else.
The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water Page 12