by Ian Thomson
In America at that time, Jones would have been described as ‘yellow’; in Jamaica, as ‘red’; in England, as ‘half-caste’. The colour bar in the United States shocked Jamaicans who settled there during the war to work as farm labourers (though it was often seen as preferable to the subterranean, furtive racism of Britain). America nevertheless offered Jamaicans the possibility of employment, as well as a chance to improve their education.
Since his experience of America, however, Evan Jones vowed to see the Jamaican people, not as Black Power or White Power, but as who they are. The greatest honour one can confer on Jamaicans, he said, is to see them as people with ‘individual backgrounds and realities’, who exist in ‘various colours’ and in ‘separate and different ways’.
I guessed it was easy for Jones to say that. It was only with the help of the ‘white’ half of his ancestry that he could afford to ignore the Third World notions of ‘Blackness’ and Pan-Africanism that swept Jamaica in the 1970s. The quest for ‘identity’ and ‘roots’ that animated many other Jamaican writers held little or no interest for Jones; he had become as British as his Anglican great-grandfather, who arrived in Jamaica from Wales in 1842 to serve as a church missionary.
In 1952, as befitted his class and colour, Jones came to England in some style. He and a Jamaican friend stowed on a banana boat (no Windrush ‘immigrant’ transport) destined for the London docks. Jones was about to read English at Oxford University and with the money he and his friend won at poker during the voyage they were able to pay for a taxi from London all the way to Oxford. ‘Oxford,’ they told the cab-driver at the dockside, and the driver said, ‘Oxford Street. What number?’
At Oxford, Jones befriended the Jamaican poet and fellow Rhodes scholar Neville Dawes. In a pub one night Jones announced to Dawes that what Jamaica needed now was a literature of its own that would be accessible to the British tradition (Shakespeare, Chaucer), yet rooted in Jamaican patois or patwa. Like the Jamaican novelist Claude McKay before him, Jones saw the need for a parallel literary tradition in Jamaica, which would complement the BBC English of ‘high culture’. English was officially the language of Jamaica, but it was not the language of most Jamaicans, who spoke (still speak) patwa, a vernacular with a folk strength that contains elements of English, Spanish, East Indian and Chinese, as well as words from West Coast Africa. Only by writing in this Caribbean tongue, Jones believed, could he celebrate the Jamaican people in their proper humour, hopefulness, fortitude and worship of God. ‘Do it,’ Dawes challenged him.
The result was the epic poem ‘The Song of the Banana Man’. From the first stanza it was clear that Jones had captured a Jamaican ‘back-a-yard’ free of the gracious suavities of standard English. A tourist accosts a banana-seller in a market in Portland parish:Touris, white man, wipin his face,
Met me in Golden Grove market place.
He looked at m’ol clothes brown wid stain,
An soaked right through wid de Portlan rain,
He cas his eye, turn up his nose,
He says, ‘You’re a beggar man, I suppose?’
He says, ‘Boy, get some occupation,
Be of some value to your nation.’
I said, ‘By God and dis big right han
You mus recognize a banana man.
The poem, first broadcast on BBC radio in 1953 and today much anthologised, influenced Linton Kwesi Johnson and other Jamaican ‘dub’ poets of the 1970s, among them Mutabaruka and the late, great, Michael ‘Mikey’ Smith. Johnson, who uses a London-sited Jamaican Creole as a weapon of resistance and political protest, told Jones he revered ‘Banana Man’ as a chant and mantra style verse that ‘told it like it was’. In Jamaica, Jones is perhaps better known for his 1975 television documentary, The Fight Against Slavery, transmitted each year on Independence Day on 6 August.
Portland parish, where Evan Jones was born in 1927, is a damp and mountainous terrain adjacent to St Thomas. The writer’s younger brother, Richard Jones, a vet by training, currently runs the family estates there. At one time these had covered 10,000 acres, but now they were part of the increasingly barren Portland countryside, and drifting towards impoverishment.
The house sounded empty when I entered through the front door, and except for a dog, it was. Darlingford, the Jones residence in Portland parish, had thin-slatted jalousies, mahogany rockers and louvred windows that suggested the peace and serenity of a Victorian-era retreat. After calling out Richard Jones’s name, and hearing silence, I wandered down corridors past glass hurricane lamps and white-painted wicker chairs. On a walnut table was a leather-bound visitors’ book signed in 1975 - I noted with interest - by Bob Andy. Andy, whom I had met in Patrick Town, Kingston, had married into the Jones family; he is the model for the reggae singer Hungry Man in Stone Haven. On another table was a note from Richard: ‘Make yourself at home.’
Darlingford, arrived at by obscure bushland paths, had been built in 1910 on a giddy clifftop above the Caribbean Sea half a mile off the road from Morant Bay. The silence in my room was broken by the crash of seawater on the rocks below. I took a shower, then set out on foot for Manchioneal, where the Reverend Jones had built his missionary church in the 1840s.
Once a prosperous port run by the United Fruit Company, Manchioneal survives today through fishing and, occasionally, drugs. Bales of cocaine dumped by Colombian dealers as they try to evade the US Coast Guard get washed up against the Manchioneal coast and are picked up by fishermen. Under cover of dark the fishermen take the bales, weighing up to 300 kilos, to neighbouring Haiti, where they can exchange them for money or guns. They reach Haiti by dead reckoning - without the aid of stars or navigational instruments: a hazardous business.
Manchioneal, when I got there, lay stifling and somnolent across a horseshoe bay. Hard by the Victorian Anglican church a group of Rastafarians was pushing a boat out to sea and on a ribbon of sand at the sea’s edge a John Crow (vulture) spread its wings over a piece of carrion. Just beyond Manchioneal was a village called Hector’s River, where a Quaker meeting was about to begin. My uncertain religious instincts made me uneasy about trespassing on the meeting, yet I admired the Quakers. From the 1780s onwards, the pacific and democratically minded Quakers had been at the forefront of abolition. The ‘Inner Light’ of God’s revelation shone equally on all human beings, they believed, regardless of their race or class. However, the all-important sense of guilt at the heart of Quaker missionary endeavour, and the attendant prohibitions of drink and extra-marital sex, had not greatly appealed to the freed slaves.
Instead, the bulk of Quaker converts in Jamaica was made up of contract labourers from India known as ‘coolies’ (a Chinese term for lowly manual labourer). Evan Jones’s mother, an American Quaker from the Midwest, had converted so many Indians to Quakerism that her Portland parish meeting house became the ‘coolie church’. It was of no concern to Mrs Jones that Indians already had their own religious faith, and she made no distinction between any of India’s vast range of cultures and religions: Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Muslims, Jains - all alike were heathen and ripe for salvation in her eyes.
At Hector’s River the Seaside Friends Meeting House was a solemn concrete building with stained glass windows. A woman in churchgoing white greeted me: ‘Friend, you look like a stranger.’
‘I am a stranger.’
‘So where you from? From distant parts?’
‘England.’
‘But I know your country!’ Her daughter, she said, lived in Tottenham (‘Tottenham N17’, she specified). The woman held up a thick black book, and smiled. ‘Thank you for coming to Seaside, my dear, and take time off to be holy.’
The service was given by Dr Horace Hall, a lay preacher of Indian descent, whom I had met earlier in Morant Bay. Hall had gone to Quaker school in Portland parish in the 1960s, and retained (he said) a very Quaker morality. The stern injunctions on his surgery walls - ‘Smoking Is Dangerous’, ‘Do Not Abuse Alcohol’ - suggested as much. Jamaicans can be very mo
ralistic, yet the Quaker movement now has no more than 400 registered members in all Jamaica. The rise of Pentecostalism - what Dr Hall called ‘the more emotional sort of Church’ - had contributed to the decline in numbers. Quakerism’s silent inward address to God, together with its disciplined pietism, contrasts unexcitingly with Pentecostalism’s good-time effervescence.
Quaker hymns, especially, had lost their appeal to the young. ‘What’s needed is a livelier tempo,’ said Dr Hall, and with this in mind he had made efforts to incorporate ‘up-beat sounds’ into Quaker prayer meetings. ‘But the traditionalists, the old-time people, they don’t want the hand-clapping and the tambourines.’
Dr Hall smiled brightly, neatly. ‘We ask for simplicity in dress - we don’t believe in ritual: no baptisms, no other extravagances. We practise what I call social living and a life of committed social service.’ The early British Quakers, with their loud public prophesying and rejection of conventional society, in some ways foreshadowed Rastafari. Social Living was the title of a reggae album by Burning Spear. Dr Hall paused for emphasis. ‘Like I say, we practise Christian togetherness, and we do so in deference to God.’ But he concluded doubtfully: ‘We Quakers have to change, otherwise we’ll die out. And I’m sure we will continue to exist, in some form or other.’
Dr Hall arrived at the Sunday meeting in a brown suit and matching tie. ‘Morning, Doc,’ the Quakers greeted him. ‘Morning, friends,’ he said. Fifty strong, the congregation was made up of women and children of Indian or part-Indian ancestry. Dressed in blues and pinks, the children wriggled uncomfortably on the oak pews while an elderly woman rose to speak from an improvised pulpit. Her voice increased in volume as she began to fulminate against the sinful life. ‘The devil is smart, oh very SMART. My friends, is he not smart?’ Nobody answered. In a hushed but still emphatic voice she went on: ‘Oh Lord, send us the old-time POWER because we’re stepping out into the light ...’ Here was the Pentecostal influence of which Dr Hall had spoken, the evangelical fulminations against rum and punnani (‘pussy’).
The sermon over, Dr Hall announced: ‘Today we have a very special guest-a warm Quaker welcome, friends, to Ian from England.’ Oh no. ‘Please stand up, Ian, so that we may see thee.’ I got up and smiled, mindful of my dirty, sweat-charged clothes. ‘Ian’s writing a book on Jamaica,’ Dr Hall went on. ‘And you can hardly write a book on Jamaica without taking into account the Quakers.’ This was said lightly, as Dr Hall was anxious that it should not be taken as a church sermon. The ceiling fans whirred and clacked, while we filed out to the strains of ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’ by the Non-Conformist John Bunyan. Pray for Jamaica. Pray for all those souls out there in the dark. Oh Lord.
When I got back to Darlingford a dreadlocked man was leading a horse by the reins across the lawn. ‘How you?’ he called out as I approached. ‘Okay,’ I shouted back. Three other horses stood cropping the grass. The Rastafarian, as I knew from Evan Jones, trained horses for the Kingston racetrack. ‘You were admiring my arses,’ he said. It sounded like a statement, not a question.
‘Arses?’
‘Yeah, man,’ he gestured to one of the chestnut mares. ‘The arses them.’
‘Oh them!’ I replied. ‘Nice, nice.’
The man blinked. ‘Name’s Winston Bernard, but everybody call me Bobcat. I look after the ’orses,’ he said in an amused tone. ‘You know Mr Jones?’
‘I’ve met Evan, but not his brother Richard.’
‘Richard’s the boss.’ Bobcat flicked his cigarette accurately into a watering can on the lawn. ‘Richard call the shots.’
Bobcat was forty-four but, with his somewhat long curling lashes, looked younger. When not training horses he scratched a living in Manchioneal as a fisherman.
‘You’ve worked a long time for Richard?’
‘Oh, a good likkle time now,’ Bobcat said, grinning strangely. He seemed to like Richard because Richard never ‘acted the Massa’. Not all Jamaican landowners were known for their evenhandedness.
Back in my room, the windows thrown open to catch the salt air, I sensed a pre-storm sultriness. Darkness was less than an hour away, something chaotic was stirring.
The cook, Hopeton Patterson, emerged from the kitchen, stopped to say hello to me then went to the veranda where he laid the table. As he did so, I watched the sun disappear into a bank of rain clouds over Portland parish. Visitors to Jamaica often remark on the sadness that falls on the island after sunset. There is scarcely any twilight in Jamaica; when the sun sets, it is dark, finally and completely.
Hopeton did not permit himself to smile much. Years of deference had obliged him to be blank-faced. He knew ‘The Song of the Banana Man’ from school and was amazed, years later, to wait on its author, Evan Jones. There was no bitterness in Hopeton’s voice (more like pride, if anything) as he described his impoverished childhood in nearby Cedar Valley, where he had grown up as one of fifteen children. Kingston, to his mind, was a loveless place, where there was more ‘scoundrel’, more ‘thief’, more ‘whore’ and ‘murderer’ than anywhere else in Jamaica. His wife came from Kingston, and Hopeton was estranged from her. The one, allshadowing trouble of Hopeton’s life seemed to be his three-year-old daughter: who should take care of her? Tonight, Alicia was content to be with her father, and in the kitchen, amid a rattle of crockery, she looked up at me curiously as Hopeton poured her a cup of brown-sugar lemonade. In a land of absent fathers, Hopeton defied the stereotype.
As I ate on the veranda the storm welled up with real violence. To right and left of me, high winds lashed the trees, sending grit and sand flying in whirls. Under the awning I stayed dry but on the rocks down below the sea waves were mounting, and a hard rain was slanting now against the palms. A rainy night in Portland. But, just as suddenly as the storm had begun, it ended. The abruptness of the Jamaican weather, like the abruptness of the Jamaican temper, can leave you feeling disorientated.
‘This land used to be an Eden on earth,’ Richard Jones said to me as we stopped off for coffee in Manchioneal, ‘but it’s been abandoned now.’ In the familiar story, migration had sent everybody packing to Kingston. Jamaica had become, in a sense, Kingston. And while Richard struggled to cultivate coconuts and bananas, leaf-spot disease and bad weather had forced him to rely on Jamaica’s oldest and most bitter crop: sugar. He was agonised by financial worries; Jamaica appeared to be drifting towards disaster on a tide of American imports. These included not only clothes, cars, guns and electrical goods, but sugar. Today, after a generation of ‘development’ since independence in 1962, Jamaica was neither the industrialised country it had wanted to be, nor the agricultural country it once was. According to Jamaican trade statistics released in 2003, 55 per cent of Jamaica’s goods are imported from the United States.
We drove through the Jones family estates, passing mile after mile of unused, unredeemed land, once flourishing but now given over to wild growth; in legal parlance, in ruinate. Most of the villagers worked on Jones properties. In the sugar season from January to July they cut the cane and transported it to the sugar factory at Duckenfield. The factory workers proudly called themselves ‘engineers’ and commanded a certain respect locally. During this slack time of year, however, when the cane required little attention, time hung heavy on the Duckenfield machinists and fieldhands alike. Petty thieving and drunkenness increased. And with the rumdrinking, sometimes, came violence.
Richard could not afford to be discountenanced by these human dramas. Earlier that morning Hopeton and Bobcat had been found siphoning off vodka from the Darlingford drinks cabinet; Richard had had words with them, but no more than that. On his estates he had men and women of all ages who respected and even loved him; it would have been pointless to fall out with them over a quantity of missing vodka. As the last-born of the Jones children (what Jamaicans call the ‘wash-belly’ child), Richard anyway belonged to a less strict generation.
On a chequerboard plain of cattle settlements and grazing pens, Hordley village came
to view. Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis, the English Gothic novelist, had owned estates on the St Thomas-Portland border, one of which was Hordley. I was curious to see what (if anything) remained of it. Lewis had visited Hordley for the first time in 1818 during his last and, it turned out, fatal voyage to Jamaica. Expecting Hordley estate to be ‘a perfect paradise’, instead he found it a ‘perfect hell’. The overseer had created his own fiefdom, like a prototype Kurtz, and subjected his slaves to white-man violence. Lewis made two trips to Jamaica during the last three years of his life but he wanted no part of slave-driving. His Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834), published a full sixteen years after his death, flickers with the shadowy Gothic imagery of his youthful fiction yet it also brilliantly captured that uncertain period in Jamaican history between slavery’s abolition in 1807 and emancipation twenty-seven years later.
Nothing since Lewis’s debut Gothic novel, The Monk, was as good as the Jamaican journal he kept intermittently between 1815 and 1818. It opens in England: Lewis, determined to improve the conditions of his Jamaican slaves, is about to sail from Gravesend laden with trinkets, beads and other gifts for them. Arriving first at his 1,600-acre estate in the west of Jamaica, he sets up a lying-in hospital for the slaves and abolishes the lash. These innovations came a quarter of century before the Crown government under Queen Victoria finally emancipated slaves in the British dominions. By implementing them, Lewis played an honourable if small part in slavery’s eventual eradication. For this he earned the respect of his slaves (some of whom later took his name: Lewis is now one of the most common surnames in Jamaica), as well as the contempt of his neighbours.