Had I Known

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  The festivities begin at 4 a.m. on the Monday before Ash Wednesday with a ritual called Jouvay, from either the French jour ouvert (“opening day”) or the Creole jou ouvé? (“Is it daybreak yet?”). I had no idea of what I was getting into when I “registered” at the 3canal storefront center the day before. 3canal is both a musical band and one of the many small production companies that stage carnival; the name, according to one of the musicians, Roger Roberts, derives from a type of machete used by cane cutters and, he says, is “a metaphor for cutting and clearing a path and space for vibes to flow and grow.” Despite assurances that no one really has to pay, I’d plunked down 60 Trinidadian dollars (about $10 US) for a bag containing a 3canal badge, a white tank top, a square of silver lamé cloth and—ominously—a plastic water bottle filled with white paint.

  A little after 4 a.m, I returned to the 3canal storefront with my little lime of four—two Trinis and two other Americans—to find hundreds of people milling around a flatbed truck from which the 3canal musicians were blasting the band’s heavy beat into the darkness. Around Port of Spain, people were assembling into fourteen other Jouvay bands, each several hundred to a thousand strong, and each with its own music and colors.

  When the flatbed truck started rolling, the crowd danced along behind it or, more precisely, “chipped,” which is Trinidadian for moving individually to music. At first I chipped in my resolute white-lady way, conscious of my status as the only visible blue-eyed person in the crowd. But then the paint came into play, hurled from bottles and dabbed on any body at hand. A plastic bottle of rough whiskey was passed around. There was a moment of near-panic when a police car forced its way through the crowd, and I learned later that in the pushing and shoving a knife fight had broken out just behind us. But still, the vibe here was overwhelmingly sweet. A teenager planted himself in front of me and announced that I looked “too nice,” a condition he corrected by gently anointing my face with fresh paint. I don’t know the origins of this orgy of body-painting, and I am glad I hadn’t joined one of the Jouvay bands that use chocolate or mud instead, but I know its effect: Race was dissolved; even age and gender became theoretical concepts.

  In the tradition of Western sociology, crowds are dangerous because they can turn into mobs. So when a contingent from our procession broke away to chase a group of Chinese men watching from the sidelines, I ran along anxiously behind them. Was there resentment of these workers, imported to build downtown skyscrapers? No. Would there be violence? No, the Jouvay celebrants just wanted to cover the foreigners in paint, and the Chinese were doubling over with laughter as they escaped. This was the true and ancient spirit of carnival: There can be no spectators, only participants, and everyone must be anointed.

  Sunrise found us in a small public square, and in a condition far from the one we’d started in. We’d been moving through the streets for over three hours, powered by beers passed from hand to hand, and even my ultra-buff American friend was beginning to sag. People were still chipping away, raising their heads toward the already-hot blue sky in a kind of triumph. Hardly anyone was noticeably drunk, but we were annihilated, as individuals anyway—footsore, bone-tired, dripping with paint and sweat. We were, in some transcendent way, perfected.

  But carnival has many faces and many moods, with different towns observing it in their own special ways. At dusk we were in the tiny mountain town of Paramin, sitting at an outdoor fried-chicken place. The townspeople were slowly assembling on the edge of the road, drinking beer and chipping to a sound system that had been erected just behind our table. At nightfall, the sound system fell silent, and ten men beating drums made out of biscuit tins emerged from the darkness—a reminder of the Trinidadian ingenuity at drawing music out of industrial detritus, like the island’s steel drums, traditionally crafted from oil barrels. Behind the drummers came twenty people of indeterminate age and gender, covered in blue paint, some wearing grotesque devil masks, others leering hideously, leaping and writhing. Then another band of drummers, followed by another contingent from hell.

  Some of the devils were pulling others on ropes or mock-beating them with sticks in what is thought to be an evocation of the work-’em-till-they-die slavery of early Trinidad. Certainly, there was an edge of menace here. When a Blue Devil approached and stabbed his finger at you, you had to give him a Trinidadian dollar (worth 16 US cents), or he would pull you up against his freshly painted body. The onlookers laughed and shrieked and ran, and in the end I didn’t run fast enough. Having used up my dollars, partly in defense of two genuinely frightened little girls, I was slimed blue. As the devils eased up on their attacks, the crowd swelled and surged toward the town’s central square, where vendors were selling beer and rum amid the ongoing chipping. But I was too sticky with paint to continue—and too shaken, I have to admit, by the mimed hostility of the devils, with its echoes of historical rage.

  Shrove Tuesday, the second day, is when the mas bands parade through Port of Spain to be judged on their costumes and music. If there was a time to witness the corrupting effects of commercialism, this “pretty mas”—so called to distinguish it from the first day’s “old mas”—would be it. There are about two hundred mas bands on the island, and each was offering, for the equivalent of several hundred US dollars, a costume and such essentials as a day’s worth of food and drink and private security. A pre-carnival article in the Sunday Express estimated that the big bands, with 3,500 or more members, would each gross ten million Trinidadian dollars, not counting donations from corporate sponsors, such as the ubiquitous cell-phone company bmobile. This isn’t just partying; this is business.

  According to historian (and soca star) Hollis Liverpool, pretty mas grew out of the upper classes’ efforts to tamp down the African-derived aspects of traditional mas, which they saw as vulgar and unruly. To an extent, they have succeeded: The price of admission limits participation to the more affluent, such as Nadia John, a thirty-year-old lawyer I met in her apartment on the Sunday before carnival. For John, it was all about the costume. She modeled the one she would wear with the Island People mas band: a bikini made of wire, feathers, and jewels, so minimal that she dared not let her mother see it.

  Not that the poor don’t try to crash the party—hence the need for all the private security that surrounds each band as it moves through the streets. According to Wyatt Gallery, one of the owners of the Island People band, this is because “We’re very serious about the competition and don’t want to look bad,” as they might if a lot of un-costumed people slipped in.

  So I wasn’t expecting much, beyond a chance to see Nadia John in her glory, when we walked from our hotel to the part of town where the mas bands would march and found a place on the curb to sit. But it turned out that even pretty mas is impossible to tame. Despite all the “owners” and “producers,” people were still creating carnival themselves, in the streets and on the sidelines—chipping, drinking, eating, and smoking ganja. Then the bands began to drift by, each with its own trucks for music, food, and drink. The marchers were chatting, chipping, and, most notably, “wining.” This is like grinding in American dance culture, only the pelvic motions are quicker, more fluttery—an artistic rendition of sex rather than a simulation—and it can involve up to three people at a time. Probably not quite what the British meant by “pretty.” One costumed woman sticks in my mind, lost in her own chip, throwing her head back, her face gleaming with exultation and sweat. As Goethe wrote of the eighteenth-century Roman carnival, it “is a festival that is not actually given to the people, but which the people give to themselves.”

  Yes, Trinidadian carnival has been commercialized—or “Brazilianized,” as they say locally—with too much money and booty involved. But as Che Lovelace, a young artist told me, carnival “can’t go back, it must go forward.” The money helps support hundreds of Trinidadian artists, musicians, and entrepreneurs, and, he says, “helps drive the economy and create jobs.” In Trinidad, commercialization is not the death of carnival,
but part of how it perpetuates itself.

  Scorecard for carnival 2008: In a win for Trinidad’s persistent devils, a preliminary body count came to 5 dead and 20 others stabbed or shot. But in a triumph for artistry and social relevance, the title of best mas band went to the MacFarlane band with the apocalyptic theme “Earth: Cries of Despair, Wings of Hope.” Its call for planetwide renewal and its towering, avant-garde costumes—giant structures pulled by the wearer and wreathed in colored smoke—stole the show.

  BOURGEOIS BLUNDERS

  Family Values

  The Worst Years of Our Lives, 1990

  Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of “traditional values” installed. It was part of what may someday be known as the “Reagan renovation,” that finely balanced mix of cosmetic refinement and moral coarseness that brought $200,000 china to the White House dinner table and mayhem to the beleaguered peasantry of Central America. All of the new traditions had venerable sources. In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies and esteemed customers, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.

  A case could be made, of course, for the genuine American provenance of all these new “traditions.” We’ve had our own robber barons, military adventurers, and certainly more than our share of enterprising evangelists promoting ignorance and parochialism as a state of grace. From the vantage point of the continent’s original residents, or, for example, the captive African laborers who made America a great agricultural power, our “traditional values” have always been bigotry, greed, and belligerence, buttressed by wanton appeals to a God of love.

  The kindest—though from some angles most perverse—of the era’s new values was “family.” I could have lived with “flag” and “faith” as neotraditional values—not happily, but I could have managed—until “family” was press-ganged into joining them. Throughout the eighties, the winning political faction has been aggressively “profamily.” They have invoked “the family” when they trample on the rights of those who hold actual families together, that is, women. They have used it to justify racial segregation and the formation of white-only, “Christian” schools. And they have brought it out, along with flag and faith, to silence any voices they found obscene, offensive, disturbing, or merely different.

  Now, I come from a family—was raised in one, in fact—and one salubrious effect of right-wing righteousness has been to make me hew ever more firmly to the traditional values of my own progenitors. These were not people who could be accused of questionable politics or ethnicity. Nor were they members of the “liberal elite” so hated by our current conservative elite. They were blue-eyed, Scotch-Irish Democrats. They were small farmers, railroad workers, miners, shopkeepers, and migrant farmworkers. In short, they fit the stereotype of “real” Americans; and their values, no matter how unpopular among today’s opinion-shapers, are part of America’s tradition, too. To my mind, of course, the finest part.

  But let me introduce some of my family, beginning with my father, who was, along with my mother, the ultimate source of much of my radicalism, feminism, and, by the standards of the eighties, all-around bad attitude.

  One of the first questions in a test of mental competency is “Who is the president of the United States?” Even deep into the indignities of Alzheimer’s disease, my father always did well on that one. His blue eyes would widen incredulously, surprised at the neurologist’s ignorance, then he would snort in majestic indignation, “Reagan, that dumb son of a bitch.” It seemed to me a good deal—two people tested for the price of one.

  Like so many of the Alzheimer’s patients he came to know, my father enjoyed watching the president on television. Most programming left him impassive, but when the old codger came on, his little eyes twinkling piggishly above the disciplined sincerity of his lower face, my father would lean forward and commence a wickedly delighted cackle. I think he was prepared, more than the rest of us, to get the joke.

  But the funniest thing was Ollie North. For an ailing man, my father did a fine parody. He would slap his hand over his heart, stare rigidly at attention, and pronounce, in his deepest bass rumble, “God Bless Am-ar-ica!” I’m sure he couldn’t follow North’s testimony—who can honestly say that they did?—but the main themes were clear enough in pantomime: the watery-eyed patriotism, the extravagant self-pity, the touching servility toward higher-ranking males. When I told my father that many people considered North a hero, a representative of the finest American traditions, he scowled and swatted at the air. Ollie North was the kind of man my father had warned me about, many years ago, when my father was the smartest man on earth.

  My father had started out as a copper miner in Butte, Montana, a tiny mountain city famed for its bars, its brawls, and its distinctly unservile workforce. In his view, which remained eagle-sharp even after a stint of higher education, there were only a few major categories of human beings. There were “phonies” and “decent” people, the latter group having hardly any well-known representatives outside of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John L. Lewis, the militant and brilliantly eloquent leader of the miners’ union. “Phonies,” however, were rampant, and, for reasons I would not understand until later in life, could be found clustered especially thick in the vicinity of money or power.

  Well before he taught me other useful things, like how to distinguish fool’s gold, or iron pyrite, from the real thing, he gave me some tips on the detection of phonies. For one thing, they broadened the e in “America” to a reverent ahh. They were the first to leap from their seats at the playing of “The Star Spangled Banner,” the most visibly moved participants in any prayer. They espoused clean living and admired war. They preached hard work and paid for it with nickels and dimes. They loved their country above all, but despised the low-paid and usually invisible men and women who built it, fed it, and kept it running.

  Two other important categories figured in my father’s scheme of things. There were dumb people and smart ones: a distinction that had nothing to do with class or formal education, the dumb being simply all those who were taken in by the phonies. In his view, dumbness was rampant, and seemed to increase in proportion to the distance from Butte, where at least a certain hard-boiled irreverence leavened the atmosphere. The best prophylactic was to study and learn all you could, however you could, and, as he adjured me over and over: Always ask why.

  Finally, there were the rich and the poor. While poverty was not seen as an automatic virtue—my parents struggled mightily to escape it—wealth always carried a presumption of malfeasance. I was instructed that, in the presence of the rich, it was wise to keep one’s hand on one’s wallet. “Well,” my father fairly growled, “how do you think they got their money in the first place?”

  It was my mother who translated these lessons into practical politics. A miner’s daughter herself, she offered two overarching rules for comportment: Never vote Republican and never cross a union picket line. The pinnacle of her activist career came in 1964, when she attended the Democratic Convention as an alternate delegate and joined the sit-in staged by civil rights leaders and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. This was not the action of a “guilt-ridden” white liberal. She classified racial prejudice along with superstition and other manifestations of backward thinking, like organized religion and overcooked vegetables. The worst thing she could find to say about a certain in-law was that he was a Republican and a churchgoer, though when I investigated these charges later in life, I was relieved to find them baseless.

  My mother and father, it should be explained, were hardly rebels. The values they imparted to me had been “traditional” for at least a generation before my parents came along. According to my father, the first great steps out of mental passivity had been taken by his maternal grandparents, John Howes and Mamie McLaughlin Howes, sometime late in the last century. You might think their rebel
lions small stuff, but they provided our family with its “myth of origins” and a certain standard to uphold.

  I knew little about Mamie McLaughlin except that she was raised as a Catholic and ended up in western Montana sometime in the 1880s. Her father, very likely, was one of those itinerant breadwinners who went west to prospect and settled for mining. At any rate, the story begins when her father lay dying, and Mamie dutifully sent to the next town for a priest. The message came back that the priest would come only if $25 was sent in advance. This being the West at its wildest, he may have been justified in avoiding house calls. But not in the price, which was probably more cash than my great-grandmother had ever had at one time. It was on account of its greed that the church lost the souls of Mamie McLaughlin and all of her descendents, right down to the present time. Furthermore, whether out of filial deference or natural intelligence, most of us have continued to avoid organized religion, secret societies, astrology, and New Age adventures in spirituality.

  As the story continues, Mamie McLaughlin herself lay dying a few years later. She was only thirty-one, the mother of three small children, one of them an infant whose birth, apparently, led to a mortal attack of pneumonia. This time, a priest appeared unsummoned. Because she was too weak to hold the crucifix, he placed it on her chest and proceeded to administer the last rites. But Mamie was not dead yet. She pulled herself together at the last moment, flung the crucifix across the room, fell back, and died.

  This was my great-grandmother. Her husband, John Howes, is a figure of folkloric proportions in my memory, well known in Butte many decades ago as a powerful miner and a lethal fighter. There are many stories about John Howes, all of which point to a profound inability to accept authority in any of its manifestations, earthly or divine. As a young miner, for example, he caught the eye of the mine owner for his skill at handling horses. The boss promoted him to an aboveground driving job, which was a great career leap for the time. Then the boss committed a foolish and arrogant error. He asked John to break in a team of horses for his wife’s carriage. Most people would probably be flattered by such a request, but not in Butte, and certainly not John Howes. He declared that he was no man’s servant, and quit on the spot.