The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  Ian Thomson

  London, November 2010

  Introduction

  A History of Paradise

  ‘What are you doing in Jamaica?’ the woman said to me. ‘Have you come to stare and make fun?’ We were at a meeting of the Jamaican Historical Society held in the capital, Kingston. The woman was an elderly white Jamaican. Once, like other white Jamaicans at the top of plantation society, she might have been able to distance herself from ‘the troubles’ (as she called them) of her birthplace. Now she was not so sure. She resented voyeurs of Jamaica. ‘Do we really need another book on Jamaica?’ she went on. ‘You visitors are always getting it wrong. Either it’s golden beaches, or it’s guns, guns, guns. Is there nothing in between?’

  As I journeyed deeper into Jamaica, I realised that my critic had a point. The many wonderful things about Jamaica - its extraordinary music-making, its physical beauty, its athletic prowess (six gold medals at the Beijing Olympics) - contrast harshly with the crime, the violence and the political corruption. Tourists rarely see anything of the twisted side of island life. Yet Jamaica, the ‘paradise’ of travel brochures, is just as often derided as a criminal backwater. Is there nothing in between?

  To the British, Jamaica is the best known of West Indian islands. But what, after three centuries of enforced rule, is the relationship between Jamaica and its former colonial masters? Jamaica was the brightest jewel in the British slave colonies: a prize and inhumane possession. During the period 1700 to 1808, sugar - the endproduct of British slavery - became so profitable a commodity that the prosperity of English slave ports such as Bristol and Liverpool was derived from commerce in what one historian (Sidney Mintz) has called the ‘tropical drug food’.

  So Jamaica provided a sweetener for our tea and coffee. By the late nineteenth century, cut-price jam (one-third fruit pulp to twothirds sugar) had begun to appear in the larder of every working-class household in Britain. When Atlantic slavery was finally abolished (last of all in Brazil, in 1888), cheap sugar was sustained by indentured labour from India and China. The influx from the East coincided with a period of Crown rule, during which Jamaica was governed directly from London, instead of through a local parliament of English slave-owners and traders, as before. The end of the slave trade, however, brought economic decline: Jamaica, a waning asset even under Queen Victoria, was demoted to the imperial category of ‘minor colonies’.

  Nevertheless, during the long twilight of colonialism Jamaica acquired a cosmopolitan character all its own. Immigrant Asia - as represented by those contract labourers from India and China - began to marry into the African slave population, creating a multishaded community of nations which was both parochial and international. Jamaicans are not all black; many gradations - Chinese, Indian, Lebanese - can exist within a single Jamaican family. So Jamaica in the high imperial age after slavery became the oddly ‘modern’ society. The Dead Yard explores, among other things, the island’s bewildering racial and ethnic diversity.

  Even as Jamaica declined, sugar sustained the island. Prices rose significantly during the Great War - sweetening the rations - and slavery cast its shadow as field-hands were overworked by their employers. Cruelty had been implicit in Jamaican life for the 300 years of British rule (‘Jamaican history,’ wrote Karl Marx, ‘is characteristic of the beastliness of the true Englishman.’) Throughout the 1930s resentments simmered again on the plantations, along the Kingston wharves and in the great overcrowding of the ghetto. The common man, said the lawyer and future Jamaican prime minister Norman Washington Manley, would no longer endure inhuman conditions; he was prepared ‘to raise hell’ to have them changed. Amid this civil strife, Jamaican nationalism was born.

  As the 1930s gave way to the 1940s, trade unions, co-operative societies, reform leagues and other bodies developed into political parties. By the end of the Second World War Jamaican nationalist leaders with mass support were agitating for self-rule. Norman Manley, appointed the colony’s chief minister in 1955, made independence his priority. Both he and the British government considered it impractical for islands in the Anglophone Caribbean to ‘go it alone’, so the idea of a British West Indian federation was drafted. Jamaicans tolerated the idea for four years.

  In a referendum called by Manley in 1961 Jamaicans voted categorically to leave the federation and within a year made ready to greet independence. As the clock struck midnight on 5 August 1962, the national colours were raised and the Union Jack lowered for the last time. The British farewell ceremony, held in Kingston’s newly opened National Stadium, drew a crowd of 20,000 people. Tears were shed as ‘God Save the Queen’ was played, followed by the Jamaican national anthem. The new flag had a St Andrew’s cross designed in black, gold and green - the gold and green symbolic of hoped-for rebirth and the black a recognition of continental Africa. Not all Jamaicans cared for it. ‘Black gold’ had been slave-trader parlance for captive Africans; moreover, the flag appeared to be loosely modelled on the Union Jack.

  Once down, the union colours were neatly folded by the dutysoldier and passed on to the sergeant-major, who passed them to the officer-in-charge, who passed them to the governor, who passed them to the sovereign’s representative, who passed them to an aide-de-camp. Britain’s withdrawal was presented (by the British) as a triumph of statesmanship, by no means a sign of national weakness. Jamaica was not getting independence; rather, Great Britain was granting Jamaica independence.

  A clamour of songs exhorted the Jamaican people to join in the 1962 festivities and jump for joy. Derrick Morgan’s ‘Forward March’ opened with a military bugle clarion, its chorus: ‘The time has come when you can have your fun’. Queen Elizabeth II had sent her sister, Princess Margaret, as a symbol of gracious British retreat. ‘But we have further been graced,’ enthused the Jamaican press, ‘with the attendance of Vice President Lyndon Johnson of the United States, a token of the esteem our great northern neighbour holds for us.’ Prescient words: fifty years on, Jamaica has become a quasi-American outpost in the Caribbean; many poor Jamaicans in Jamaica dream of American citizenship.

  The following day, 6 August 1962, Princess Margaret handed the new constitutional documents to the Jamaican prime minister. And with this gesture Jamaica moved, at least in theory, from the protection of the British Crown to self-government. The princess wished the fledgling nation well, and welcomed it to the British Commonwealth.

  So, officially, ended imperial rule in Jamaica. The process of ‘decolonisation’ was marked by the usual contradictions and conflict. Jamaica’s two-party Westminster system (assiduously put together during the last years of British control) was bolstered; but, at the same time, African Jamaican historical figures who had been denigrated, abused or simply ignored by the colonial administration were rehabilitated and made semi-official ‘national heroes’. Among these were Sam Sharpe and Paul Bogle, rebel Baptist preachers who had championed the Jamaican poor.

  Undoubtedly, Jamaica stumbled in the years following independence. During the Cold War in the 1970s, the United States intruded blatantly on Jamaican affairs. A nominally socialist (and outwardly anti-American) government was seeking to nationalise foreign-owned industries, redistribute land and empower the black majority. Jamaica’s proximity to communist Cuba was of the gravest concern to Washington. The United States was determined to ‘rescue’ Jamaica from the threat posed by Fidel Castro. In subsequent years, Jamaica fell deeper into the clutches of North American financial institutions, incurring debts it could ill afford.

  However, the burden of Jamaica’s post-colonial political failure lies not with the United States or with slavery or British imperialism, but with the Jamaican people themselves. A system of ‘clientism’ has evolved in the years since independence, in which patron-politicians provide their client-supporters with jobs, protection and a flow of money, as well as narcotics and firearms, in return for their loyalty. The failure of local politicians to use independence virtuously has become entangled with a culture of vi
olence; this is aggravated in turn by the rate of broken homes and absent fathers in a society already burdened by the legacy of the plantation and the lash.

  The reality, for most Jamaicans, was that independence in 1962 brought only disappointment. For all the promises of prosperity and social justice, thousands of country folk continued to drift hard-broke into Kingston in search of non-existent jobs. The island’s class and racial divides remained stubbornly in place. The problem of the colour-line continues to haunt Jamaica. The lighter your complexion, the more privileged you are likely to be. An insidious ‘shadism’ has ensured that a minority of white (or near white: what Jamaicans call ‘local white’) inhabitants still control the plantations and other industries, while the black population remains separated from them by the powerlessness or poverty of their lives. The frequent appearance in The Dead Yard of white and upper-echelon Jamaicans might suggest a skewed image of island society. However, white Jamaicans still wield huge (if not uncontested) power; the Jamaica created by the merchant-capitalists of slavery has survived. So anxious are some Jamaicans to ‘whiten up’ that they use skin-bleaches-a sad after-effect of the aristocracy of skin nurtured by the British during slavery.

  For good or ill, British culture remains a significant part of what it means to be Jamaican today. The independence constitution of 1962 - still in existence today - had recognised Queen Elizabeth II as the Queen of Jamaica and the Governor General as her chosen representative. In spite of the British legacy (or because of it), Jamaica currently has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the English-speaking West Indies. Though Jamaica has a vibrant literature of its own, reading seriously, at any age, is often associated with reading for examinations.

  Instead, the history and mythology of the Jamaican people are fabulously revealed in music. Music is a very serious business in Jamaica, influencing every aspect of life from dress to speech. Reggae, specifically deejay-based dancehall, now dominates the music scene, but old-time gospel and mento (a type of calypso) can still be heard. Chapter titles in The Dead Yard are taken from reggae (or reggae-related) songs. Reggae was - and is - the musical voice of Jamaica, just as rai is the musical voice of Algeria or flamenco that of Spain; it is a trance-inducing music out of Africa that I have come to love.

  It may be salutary to reflect that the only time Jamaica prospered economically was during the sugar boom of slavery. The view that Jamaica was ‘better off’ in the British system (even if that means slavery) is held by some Jamaicans; yet it is not one that I share. The passing of the British Empire was good for Jamaica (independence came about because the Empire was opposed to Jamaican national interests); and it was good also for Britain, which by 1962 lacked the strength to carry out its overseas responsibilities. The Empire - Rudyard Kipling’s ‘dominion over palm and pine’ - had created in Jamaica a white man’s country within an impoverished black majority.

  All the same, a surprising number of Jamaicans remain nostalgic for imperial glories, or at any rate a notion of British law and order, and deference to authority. The conviction that things were once a lot better is often voiced by older Jamaicans or returned Jamaican migrants. After their long years of expatriation in Britain or North America, returnees may come home to find Jamaica changed beyond recognition. In all likelihood this nostalgia has more to do with emotions invested in the remembrance of the past - the legendary period of their youth, when lives were organised and given meaning by the Union flag. To the post-imperial reader it may seem surprising - even shocking - that some Jamaicans should hold romantic opinions of Empire or at least display a pious Anglopatriotism. Yet, as one Jamaican (certainly not an imperialist) asked me, ‘What has Jamaica done with its independence?’

  Pro-British Jamaicans, young and old, are so much a presence in The Dead Yard that I have had to consider (if only to register my impressions) whether the new-born nation did not in fact lose something after 1962, when the United States - the ‘Colossus of the North’ - began to strengthen its influence, and the island which had been overrun by one kind of empire was overrun (in a different way) by another.

  Anthony Trollope, during his 1859 tour of the Caribbean, predicted that England would one day be ‘no more than a name’ in the West Indies: Uncle Sam would soon take the upper hand. Currently, the United States absorbs the majority of the 15,000 Jamaicans estimated to migrate each year. Britain is no longer such an attractive destination, not least because Jamaican nationals must now have a visa to enter. The legislation, passed by Tony Blair’s Labour government in March 2003, was intended to curb the number of Jamaicans entering the United Kingdom as drug couriers. Yet most ordinary Jamaicans come to Britain to visit family and friends; the visa requirement is deeply offensive to them. Britons do not need a visa to go to Jamaica (or any other Caribbean island); why, then, should Jamaicans need a visa to enter Britain?

  While it is true that many of the Caribbean drug kingpins in Brooklyn - ‘Little Jamaica’ - were apprenticed in the slums of Kingston, America’s influence on Jamaica is often wrongly seen as a malign one of consumerism, bling and guns. The US-Jamaican exchange has been - and remains - far more positive than that. The Harlem-based newspaper Negro World, which offered an important ideal of black emancipation to African Americans, was founded in 1918 by the Jamaican race leader Marcus Garvey. In the 1920s, Jamaicans were active in the black American arts movement known as the Harlem Renaissance that coincided with the Jazz Age. Today, around 350,000 people in the East Coast cities of New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston are thought to be of Jamaican origin. The majority of Jamaican-descended Americans - from the eastern shores of Virginia, across the industrial heartland of Ohio and on to the Rocky mountain states of Colorado and New Mexico and beyond - had voted for Barack Obama in the presidential elections of November 2008. The first black president of the United States (in so far as it is necessary to designate Obama’s race at all) is seen my many Jamaican Americans as a Franklin Roosevelt for the twenty-first century.

  My impression of Jamaica was often of a baneful place. Nearly every Jamaican knows someone who has been threatened with a gun or knife - or murdered. With an annual murder rate of around 1,500 in a population of less than three million, Jamaica is now one of the most violent countries in the world, on a level with South Africa and Colombia. A recent report by Amnesty International, ‘Let Them Kill Each Other’ (April 2008), depicted a nation in tragic disorder. Reports on child labour, domestic violence and murder clog the national press. Kingston remains locked in cycles of political and gangland violence; to live there today calls for special qualities of endurance.

  No doubt Jamaica’s reputation for violence has been exaggerated by foreign reporters and in any case is only part of the picture. Rural Jamaica especially has an alluring atmosphere which cannot be guessed at behind the walls of the all-inclusive beach resorts. The Dead Yard, the fruit of three visits made to Jamaica over a three-year period, explores the present reality of island life with all its hospitality, charm and intrigue.

  A word, finally, on the title. In Jamaica, the ‘dead yard’ refers to the house of a recently deceased man or woman; relatives gather respectfully at the dead yard for a wake that can last up to nine days. The term is linked to ‘The Yard’, a colloquial name for Jamaica, the ‘yard’ also being the area round one’s house.

  1

  (Black Man) in Hammersmith Palais

  I began my journey in south London, where James Fairweather had lived since 1947 after serving in the RAF. His Peckham house stood in a Victorian terrace which had been occupied once by horse omnibus inspectors and bank clerks; now, increasingly, by refugees from Africa. On greeting me, Fairweather led the way down a dimly lit corridor to the kitchen. Above the fridge hung an oilskin map of pre-independence Jamaica and, next to it, an out-of-date Page Three girl calendar. In his pinstriped waistcoat, Fairweather was prepared for the interview.

  Another man was seated at the table, drinking white rum (‘the whites’, he called it).
He introduced himself as George Walters, a building contractor. Walters had left Jamaica in 1966. Like Fairweather, he was natty, dressed in a pork-pie hat and a tie with a Top Cat motif. ‘So when are you off to Jamaica?’ Walters asked me, interested. ‘Next week,’ I said. He winced slightly. ‘Mind how you go out there,’ he said.

  Fairweather’s Jamaican childhood, as he described it to me, seemed very remote, a golden age when Jamaica had been an outpost of Britain’s sovereignty. He loved Britain, he said, and the British royal cult with its fripperies and rituals (increasingly meaningless to young Jamaicans). On display in the kitchen were a Union Jack sweet tin and a 1952 coronation mug, as well as souvenir shire horses. Fairweather’s wartime service was prompted by the anti-Nazi film In Which We Serve starring Noel Coward. The film inspired him to join the RAF. ‘We all thought Hitler would bring back slavery and repatriate us to Africa if he won the war.’ In 1943, after training in the United States as a wireless operator, Fairweather was transferred to Scotland, where his white superiors showed him a soldierly respect. ‘There was no place for prejudice back then,’ he explained. ‘A war was on, and it was to be fought by black and white alike.’ Some 8,000 Jamaicans served in the RAF during the 1939-45 conflict.