The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  I was hardly disposed to like Edward Seaga; behind his courting of Jamaica’s Revivalist poor there was a cool brain combined with a canny political finesse. For all his popular appeal, Seaga had a reputation for vindictiveness, violence, and scything his path to power. In 1974 he became the leader of the JLP and, in 1980, prime minister. Along the way, he exploited Afro-Jamaican religions and Pan-Africanist ideology for his own ends. In 1964, for example, he personally arranged for Marcus Garvey’s remains to be repatriated from London, thus forging a quasi-Rastafari association with the man they called the Black Moses. After that, Seaga began to incorporate black Revivalist symbols and elements of Afro-Jamaican music into his election campaigns. He was thus able to win the support from swathes of Jamaican society that the leftist PNP had previously called their own. To his enemies, this was mere cynical opportunism or ‘voodoo politics’.

  All the same, Seaga’s knowledge of Afro-Christianity, its music and beliefs, is impressive. In 1969, having graduated in social studies from Harvard University, he published in Jamaica Journal an article, ‘Revival Cults in Jamaica’, which provided the first mainstream account of the island’s Afro-Caribbean wakes and burial rites. With a view to preserving Jamaica’s indigenous black music, moreover, Seaga had founded West Indies Records Ltd, which issued vinyl recordings of Kumina drumming and Revivalistinspired ska, the music of his crowded downtown constituency. He understood, as few Jamaican politicians have since, that the best way to reach the Jamaican people was through the music.

  ‘I’ll happily talk to you about Revivalism,’ Seaga had told me on the telephone, ‘but not about politics.’ (Seaga had been misquoted enough times by journalists.) We met at his office in the University of West Indies in Kingston, where he had been a Distinguished Fellow since retiring from politics in 2005. The office was cluttered with display cabinets full of academic awards and diplomas picked up round the world. I was struck first of all by Seaga’s extraordinary whiteness and restless manner. Throughout our conversation, a nerve in his face twitched with a tic.

  Seaga had conducted the bulk of his doctoral investigations in St Thomas. Why? ‘Because St Thomas is the Kumina parish - the Anglican church never got much of a foothold there, it’s too remote.’ Seaga added, ‘Kumina comes out of the Angola region - West Central Africa - and it’s survived in St Thomas as a largely African ceremony, one where the ancestral dead have the power to influence us from beyond the grave.’

  His fieldwork was indebted to the black American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston (a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance) who, in 1936, had set out to explore Jamaica’s Africa-derived religions. In Tell My Horse (1938), her magnificent ethnographic account of Jamaican (and Haitian) animist practice, Hurston concluded that Jamaica was a ‘seething Africa under its British exterior’. The book remains a key work in the literature of Caribbean folk life, and the Seaga version of Revivalism drew on it.

  ‘True,’ he said, when I put this to him, ‘Hurston was an influence. Mark you, it can’t have been easy for a foreigner - and a woman, at that - to infiltrate Revival. Hurston must have had nerves of steel.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘And me?’ The tic in Seaga’s right eye had stopped. ‘Well, my mother was a Seventh Day Adventist and extremely apprehensive about my living with the sufferers.’ That word again. Like many middle-class Jamaicans, she took a dim view of Afro-animist cults and her son’s penetration of the Jamaican world of so-called superstition. Kumina and Revival, far from being inspired by the Holy Spirit, were regarded by Seaga’s Adventist mother as undisciplined, even animal beliefs. She was mortified when, in the early 1960s, as the JLP’s minister of development and welfare (‘minister of devilment and warfare’), her son decided to live among the urban poor in Kingston’s Back-o-Wall ghetto. Seaga then became intimate with Revivalist ‘shepherds’ - as well as port-workers, higglers, domestic servants. For a scion of a Jamaican Lebanese merchant family, this was considered unseemly.

  In the 1950s and 1960s, Seaga made a series of reel-to-reel recordings of music in Back-o-Wall and St Thomas. These are deposited in the library of the Institute of Jamaica in Kingston, and I went there to listen to them. The recordings, interrupted by background murmurs, sotto voce remarks and the voice of Seaga himself (‘Cut eight - spool one’), reveal percussive African beats with high-pitched hallelujahs and a repetitious Kumina rhythm vaguely reminiscent of Steve Reich’s minimalism. Coming through the headphones was an ancient, Africa-derived music of massparticipation aimed at inducing spirit possession. Most religions in Jamaica formally reject possession (or ‘myal’, possibly from the Hausa tribe word maye, ‘intoxication’), yet Baptists and Methodists may sometimes quietly and unobtrusively become entranced in church. Rastafari, despite its claim to be the most Africa-oriented of all Jamaican religions, affects to despise Revival as mere animist worship. Yet even Rastas may on occasion call down the spirit of Haile Selassie through collie weed intoxication.

  For all that I knew about Seaga, ours had been an enjoyable conversation. ‘Go to St Thomas - that’s where you’ll feel the hypnotic sway of Revival,’ he had assured me.

  It was close to four in the morning when we left the dead yard, and the stars were putting out one by one. Prince, driving away from Leith Hall, looked at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘Well, Mr Ian, good show, no?’

  ‘Good show,’ I agreed. My face was blotched with insect bites.

  ‘Nuh worry, Mr Ian,’ said Peter, sitting next to me. ‘Everything smooth an’ cool.’

  Back at Stanton Estates I bolted the jalousies in my room, and watched a lizard suction-fix itself to the ceiling. Revival seemed to offer a very comforting cosmology, where the ancestral dead are always close to the living. As the Jamaican anthropologist Jean Besson had told me, ‘All those ancestors in one’s back yard!’ After her father died in 1986, Revival had helped her through ‘a very difficult time’. Still I could not sleep off the hot Revivalist night, but lay restless in bed, waiting for daybreak.

  13

  Don’t Call Us Immigrants

  Linval Cousins, a Jamaican enthusiast for Queen and country, was born in St Thomas in 1933 but had lived in north London now for over a quarter of a century. On Dowsett Road - his Tottenham address - the only reminder of his native Jamaica was a West Indian takeaway: Peppers and Spice. Otherwise, Cousins complained, his street had gone ‘all foreign’, by which he meant ‘East European’. It annoyed him that Poles and other immigrants from the former Soviet bloc were allowed to travel and work freely in Britain. ‘They can’t sing a word of the national anthem, can they? They’re immigrants, that’s why.’

  Perhaps the Poles reminded him too painfully of what he used to be like. Perhaps abusing the next wave of immigrants is how earlier waves seek to prove their assimilation. ‘I know all my British hymns,’ Cousins protested. ‘That’s as British as you can get.’

  ‘Define British,’ I asked him.

  ‘British? Well ... Just don’t call us immigrants.’

  Cousins had left St Thomas in 1955 - the year Jamaica ‘celebrated’ three centuries of British rule. He was full of hope for a better future and felt secure in his British citizenship. But seven years into his London life, in 1962, the British government passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. By imposing tough new restrictions on entry into the UK (only migrants who had employment contracts or specific skills or who were the dependants of immigrants who had already settled in Britain were allowed in), the Act discriminated heavily against ‘coloured’ Commonwealth citizens. It was a humiliation for Cousins to have to provide renewed evidence of his British citizenship. He thought of going back to Jamaica but reckoned it was too late for that. ‘I felt I was marooned in England,’ he said, permitting himself a note of despair. The more his life was lived in Britain, the more his ties to and involvement with Britain - despite the existence of organisations like the British Ku Klux Klan, the English Rights Association and the Racial Preservation Society - bound him to it. Gradual
ly it dawned on him (as it did on many British West Indians) that the dream of return was just that: he was here to stay. ‘Not that we older folk wanted to go back to what we’d once been in Jamaica - it wasn’t much.’ The one time Cousins did return to Jamaica, in the early 1980s, he found the island had changed utterly. ‘The old sense of community had gone - everyone’s an individual now.’

  He leaned back in his chair, and contemplated the damp patch on the ceiling. ‘Jamaica needs Britain to be strong again - we need the British to take care of us.’ A lifetime ago, perhaps, that might have been possible; but the British Empire was long dead, and Cousins was better off now that Greater Britain had dissolved. Still, it would take more than the collapse of the Empire to undermine his relationship with Britain. The idea of Mother Africa and the Rastafari movement emerging in Jamaica following the Empire’s demise was anathema to Cousins. Africa, far from being the cradle of mankind, was for him almost a place of ancestral shame.

  His older brother, Lorenzo ‘Larry’ Cousins, was a Justice of the Peace in the unfrequented uplands of St Thomas. Richmond Gap (formerly Wilson Gap), the village where Larry lived, was not marked on my map of Jamaica, but at the Morant Bay courthouse I was able to negotiate the fee for a taxi there. Four other passengers accompanied me, all of them women. One was a security guard, the others, higglers.

  At Bottom Pen we rattled over a bridge where the river was roaring white beneath us. Rainfall is ordinarily sparse in St Thomas, the riverbeds cracked and dry, but Hurricane Dennis had caused cars to vanish in mudslides and graves to be uprooted in torrents of water. Beyond Trinityville the river had pushed houses off a gully bank. Landslips had inundated an ackee-canning factory and even a dairy farm. The female security guard, surveying the devastation, announced, ‘I’ll get out of Jamaica if it’s in a suitcase. Don’t know when, but before I dead I do it.’ The sight of drowned trees and collapsed houses drew gloomy comments from the higglers, too. ‘God strike me dead if I don’t migrate to ’Merica.’ At this the security guard laughed; fat chance, she probably thought.

  Larry Cousins was waiting for me at the police station in Cedar Valley, not far from Richmond Gap. Inside the wood-frame bungalow, painted a constabulary blue and white, a woman officer was talking to a tall thin man in his eighties. He looked up as I walked in. ‘Mr Cousins?’ I asked, and he replied, ‘Call me Larry.’ I followed Larry to his old Land Rover parked outside. Round his midriff he wore a leather truss. Two years earlier his car had slipped over the roadside and somersaulted three times down a ravine, coming to rest against a tree. ‘It’s a miracle I survived,’ he commented, apparently unruffled by the memory.

  As we drove uphill through old slaveholding estates, the landscape was increasingly forbidding. St Thomas, at around 5,500 feet, looked like a massive rock outcrop, with here and there a clump of green jungle like rampant broccoli. Along the road, farmers called out ‘Justice!’ to Larry in deference to his JP status. To these people of the interior, Larry was a well-liked man, their first link with the government and the wider world. Here in rural St Thomas it seemed a respect for elders persisted, and I was pleased it did. Larry was everything the locals expected: kind, gentle, humorous, as well as a little melancholy.

  After an hour we arrived at a shed-like structure on the edge of an abandoned coffee field. ‘Welcome to my shop,’ Larry said. We parked in a strip of garden desultorily planted with grapefruit trees, the fruit mottled green and, according to Larry, ‘bee-sucked’. Inside, shelves were lined with tins of fruit juice, lengths of dried cod, packets of Black Cat cigarettes and half-bottles of rum - the stockin-trade of the Jamaican country trader. Life in Richmond Gap, a settlement of perhaps twenty families, was tough. Most of Larry’s sixty acres of land were lying idle. Farming was considered ‘slave’s work’, Larry explained; it was linked with backwardness and degradation. The young had therefore left for Kingston: anything to break free of sugar cane.

  Outside the shop, I saw a gaunt-looking man approach, machete in hand.

  ‘Phensic!’ Larry called out to him (as in the headache pill ‘Phensic’).

  The men embraced, and with a jolt I realised that I had met Phensic’s father in Brixton, south London, some months earlier. Over drinks in the Paulet Arms, Cedric Wilson had told me he had six or seven children, ‘give or take one or two’, and that one of them lived in Richmond Gap. I asked Phensic if his father was Cedric and he looked at me with astonishment. But I soon fell silent as the present moment of heat, dust and poverty returned. Phensic cultivated a few bananas and carrots to sell on Fridays in Morant Bay market. He knew this land the way a dog knows a bone, a land fissured and strewn with stones, and given over to neglect, where men like Phensic each day faced destitution.

  Another mile or so of driving brought us to Larry’s house, which commanded spectacular views all round of the parish. ‘What do you think?’ Larry asked me, his arms extended in a sweep that embraced the St Thomas hills and the glittering sea beyond. We were at the highest point in the parish. ‘I think it’s amazing,’ I said, truthfully. This land, with its unruly natural beauty, was associated with the Jamaican outlaw Three-Fingered-Jack who, having lost two fingers in a fight, was eventually ambushed and killed by Redcoats in St Thomas in 1781. Obi: or, Three-Fingered-Jack, was staged in London in 1880 to wild cheering crowds. A pantomime, it equated runaway slaves with black magicians or obeahmen from Africa and confirmed the British public’s view of West Indian fieldhands as devil-worshippers. A similar prejudice and Uncle Tom minstrelsy (‘See the Lawd Gawd dere!’) is evident in such Jamaican novels as A Quality of Violence (1959) by Andrew Salkey, an account of religious oblivion and rum-fuelled Revivalist devilry in turn-of-the-century St Thomas.

  Larry unlocked the front door and we went into his kitchen with a single barred window high up on one wall. He poured two glasses of fruit juice for us and led me through mosquito-screened doors into another room, where we made ourselves comfortable in facing chairs.

  Larry wanted to tell me about Britain at the war’s end, when small, inter-racial communities had begun to evolve in the roominghouse sections of London, and writers and academics were starting to explore the attitude of British whites towards West Indians. Kenneth Little’s Negroes in Britain, published in 1948, had concluded hopefully that a ‘great deal of latent friendliness underlies the surface appearance of ... prejudice in a large number of cases’. In Brixton, where Larry had settled in 1946, a number of well-intentioned societies had sprung up with the aim of bringing white and black citizens together. The Racial Unity Club, founded by Mary Attlee (sister of the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee), appointed Larry to its committee, while another brotherhood that claimed his attention at this time was the Black and White Social Club, founded in a Brixton church hall in 1947.

  These societies were mostly run by white middle-class philanthropists with contacts in the National Council for Civil Liberties and the Institute for Race Relations. Larry was especially fond of Molly Huggins, wife of a governor of Jamaica, Sir John Huggins, who in 1945 had set up the Mass Marriage Movement in Jamaica. The movement aimed to halt the spread of ‘promiscuity’ and premarital sex in the island by encouraging couples to marry and stay married. It did not meet with much success. Lady Huggins had also set up, in south London, the Metropolitan Coloured People’s Housing Association, which provided low-cost accommodation for Commonwealth citizens newly arrived in Britain. ‘Molly was among the best women Jamaica had,’ Larry remembered. ‘You could call her up any time - she wouldn’t mind.’

  But, as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, Larry decided he wanted no part of the nascent multi-cultural, Afro-Asian Britain. He was even, I understood, a reluctant supporter of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which, by restricting the flow of West Indians into Britain, ensured that Jamaicans already resident in Britain had more time to settle and improve themselves without fear of overcrowding and competition. ‘I could see that Britain was going to be racially mixed up, that there wa
s even a future in being mixed up,’ Larry said to me, ‘but in the end I came to believe that Jamaicans belong in Jamaica, not in Britain, or anywhere else.’ So, in 1973, after thirty years of exile in Britain, he went home. Today he prefers to think of himself as a Jamaican who had never left Jamaica. ‘I don’t feel I was ever really out of the Yard,’ he said.

  The Jamaican author Evan Jones, for his part, seemed impatient of race distinctions. ‘As a child,’ he told me, ‘I grew up with white Jamaican family members and black Jamaican family members, so I could be with one uncle who was black, and with another who was white; it made no difference to me.’ Jones’s novel Stone Haven (1993) is key, I think, to understanding the life and politics of Jamaica today. The novel filters five decades of island history through the life of a single Jamaican family in Portland parish: the semi-fictional Newtons. Grace, a Quaker missionary from America’s Midwest, has defied her family by marrying a ‘coloured’ Portland planter, Stanley Newton. Stone Haven, the name of the house which Stanley builds for Grace on their marriage in 1920, becomes the focus of the Newton dynasty’s increasingly clamorous sexual and political improprieties. Along the way, Jones charts the turbulent years of Jamaica as it struggled for independence up to and beyond the 1970s.

  I met Jones, a tall man in his mid-seventies, at his home in south-west London. The study upstairs was cluttered with mementoes from his career as a scriptwriter for Joseph Losey and for BBC television (one of his BBC plays, The Madhouse on Castle Street, starred a young Bob Dylan in 1962). When I asked Jones about his mixed race background he replied that he had only encountered colour prejudice, in its legalised form, in America in 1945, when the United States still had ‘White’ and ‘Coloured’ signs in railway stations. ‘When I first saw those signs I didn’t know which waiting room to go into. Black? White?’ In the end he just stood on the platform. As the calypsonian Lord Beginner put it in 1952: ‘You can never get away from the fact, if you not white, you considered black.’ Much the same point is made by Barack Obama in his memoir, Dreams from My Father.