The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  Yet Lewis’s attitude to what he called ‘the execrable slave trade’ was ambivalent. Though benignly protective of his slaves, he feared (like Governor Eyre forty years after him in the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion) that too-hasty emancipation might lead to the expulsion, or worse, of Jamaica’s minority white population.

  In the summer of 1816, after his first visit to Jamaica, Lewis travelled to Switzerland to visit his friends the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary and Lord Byron. At their villa overlooking Lake Geneva Lewis unsettled his guests with tales of ‘zombification’ and the brutalities he had witnessed first-hand in Jamaica. Incredulously his hosts learned that sugar cane was grown in Jamaica. Sugar cane! The uprooter and enslaver of men! Cultivated and reaped by Lewis! One year later, on 5 November 1817, Lewis returned to Jamaica, this time having altered the beneficiaries of his will to include his slaves.

  He stayed at Hordley for just five days, but that was enough for him to see how his slaves had been ‘maltreated with absolute impunity’ by their overseer. Lewis dismissed and demoted the staff responsible, and on 4 May 1818 he left for England. To his mother he wrote from shipboard, ‘You see I am still alive, which is strange enough, for I have been doing everything that makes other people die outright here.’

  Lewis had in fact developed Yellow Fever. During his homeward voyage to England he managed to scrawl in his journal, ‘It is a matter of perfect indifference to me what becomes of this little ugly husk of mine.’ Those were to be virtually his last recorded words. He died on 16 May and was buried at sea, but his coffin was seen to bob up and drift back across the Gulf of Florida towards Jamaica. He had never married, but a relative reported that he ‘provided very liberally for his beloved Mother, who mourned his loss’. Byron, on hearing of his friend’s death, wrote:I would give many a sugar cane

  Matt Lewis were alive again.

  On the outskirts of Hordley the road climbed above banana groves, dark green amid the lighter green of sugar canes. Hector’s River flowed to our left and wisps of smoke coiled off the riverside fields. The road - made of Barber-Greene asphalt - was named the Ken Jones Highway after the JLP minister and brother of Evan and Richard Jones, who died after falling drunk off a hotel balcony in Jamaica in 1964. (Ken Jones is portrayed in Stone Haven, not very flatteringly, as the alcoholic politician John Newton.)

  At Hordley works yard a group of Rastafarians was busy repairing cane carts. Smoking lung-scorching Lion Pride cigarettes (imported from India), they nodded a laconic greeting as we arrived. Nearby a man in a hard hat was consulting a clipboard. Seeing Richard, he hailed him with an uplifted hand and came over to greet us.

  ‘Morning, Mr Jones, sir.’

  ‘Morning, boss,’ said Jones.

  Courtesy of this sort is quite common in rural Jamaica.

  The man in the hard hat shook my hand with both of his and smiled in welcome. He introduced himself as Henry Gray, the Boiling House Superintendent of the Duckenfield sugar factory. Richard asked him to show me round Hordley great house and he laughed softly at the request. ‘Hordley great house? How come I never heard of it?’ This was because the property lay concealed in vegetation; battered by the hurricane in 1988, it had been left to rack.

  Hordley, situated not far from the works yard, was, sure enough, smothered by greenery. Accompanied by Gray I forced my way inside. The remains of a double stairway emerged from the undergrowth and, where the roof had been, light leaked through a lattice of vegetation. In the green-tinged light we could make out a stone ‘cooler’ window and the remains of a stone porch, its brickwork spangled with flowering plants. Surreally, a fig tree had taken root in the window ledge and spread down the side like Daliesque chocolate. Hornets were flying round the ledge with a low drone. Gray confessed he was afraid of them.

  He was born in Golden Grove - the sugar cane shanty of ‘The Song of the Banana Man’ - in 1957. His Hindu parents were descended from labourers imported from the British Raj to meet the labour shortage following emancipation in 1834. His father’s name of Lal had been changed to ‘Gray’ by an ignorant Scottish overseer, who was unable to pronounce it. Henry Gray himself seemed to care little for his Indian ancestry. What caste his grandparents were, where in India they came from, was only of academic interest to him. Quakers had converted his parents to Christianity and his parents in turn had extinguished all traditional Indian practice from their home. Henry later rebelled against their new-found militant Christianity. ‘And I’m still rebelling,’ he said, as ‘My Boy Lollipop’ (certainly not a Quaker hymn) blasted from his car radio.

  Holland Bay, flat and as dream-like as a Dutch painting, had been irrigated in Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis’s day by a network of canals which, though now overgrown, still showed in the odd cut-stone bank. Scottish engineers had harnessed river-water to flow down the canals; the canals not only powered the water mills, but floated barge-loads of sugar out to the sea. ‘Man! The amount of planning and engineering that went into making this place work!’ Henry exclaimed. From the Lewis family, ownership of Holland Bay had devolved to the British planter-politician Simon Taylor, ‘the richest proprietor in the island’, who died in 1813 in Jamaica. Almost two centuries later, in 1987, villagers descended on his tomb in St Thomas and demolished it with pickaxes, leaving slabs of funerary marble lying broken in the grass. A rumour had circulated that a stash of gold was hidden in the tomb; nothing of any value was found.

  The desecration of the Taylor tomb might well exemplify rural Jamaica’s reputation for superstition combined with violence. Plantation lands, with their history of brutality and romantic air of neglect had fascinated Matthew Lewis. ‘Nothing can be imagined more sublime or more beautiful than this scenery,’ he noted in his journal. A strain of ‘Jamaican Gothic’ runs through many other British accounts of the island. William Beckford, in his Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (1790), described a place of otherworldly beauty and fascination, ‘truly sublime’, yet also ‘with some degree of pleasing horror’. Two centuries later in The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys wrote of a comparably strange landscape. Even Ian Fleming, in his Jamaican novels Dr No and The Man with the Golden Gun, offered glowing sketches of a ‘sublime’ landscape in the pre-Romantic Gothic vein of Beckford and Lewis.

  A more recent novel, John Crow’s Devil (2005), by the Kingston author Marlon James, took the Gothic element in ‘Monk’ Lewis to an extreme. The novel recounts a tale of Jamaican religious mania that occurred in 1957 five years before independence, in the fictitious village of Gibbeah somewhere in the Revivalist heartlands of St Thomas. A spirit of witchcraft descends on Gibbeah, while the inhabitants are plagued by John Crows and other devilish omens. The novel, thrillingly macabre, seems to encourage the view of countryside Jamaica as a place overrun by devilry, pillage and extortion, where tombs are broken open and villagers stoned to death in attempts to exorcise the ‘kingdom of Satan’.

  Continuing our tour, Henry Gray was now standing by a stone humpbacked bridge in front of a ruined Georgian great house. ‘Man, it’s beautiful here,’ he said, smiling. ‘Beautiful.’ The rowing boat he used for fishing was moored in the canal beneath us. Using shrimp for bait, Gray pulls in mudfish, jack, snook, drummer and sometimes also crab. Upstream, he said, the canal broadened into a lake among mangroves, where the water’s surface was broken by lilies and floating coconut limbs.

  Suddenly a bird flapped squawking from the riverbank and Gray was on the alert. ‘Crocodile,’ he said. Six years ago, beneath this very bridge, a boy had been killed by a crocodile. His family had gone hunting for the reptile but it was never found. A little later, some friends of Gray’s visiting from Guyana had wrestled a crocodile out of the canal, killed it and cooked it for supper. ‘The tail was a bit gamey,’ recalled Gray.

  ‘Was it the crocodile?’ I asked him.

  ‘Mos’ def.’

  Next, we took a side road heading for Morant Point, where a lighthouse was said to mark the easternmost point of Jamaica-a ‘mi
racle of British engineering’, Gray called it. On the way we passed Golden Grove, Gray’s birthplace, where the cane-cutter hovels were pervaded by the aroma of clarified butter and curry, a heavy and overbearing smell that Gray said he associates with colonialism and the British Raj. ‘Anyone living in the cane belt is poor,’ he remarked.

  Beyond Golden Grove, a ‘lethal yellowing’ disease had invaded the cane fields and taken the heads off the coconut trees. A tangle of prehistoric aerial roots announced a mangrove swamp on our left. ‘A little tang of hydrogen sulphide in there,’ said Gray, noting the swamp’s rotten egg stench. In the autumn months he likes to drive down here to watch the ducks fly in from North America and skim the swamp’s brackish waters.

  We were now at the eastern extremity of Jamaica. Frigate birds hung motionless in the air, their long beaks angled down like hornet stings. At the end of a dirt track a wire-mesh fence impeded our way. A notice cautioned: ‘PORT AUTHORITY. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED’. The fence marked the end of the Jones family properties and the beginning of government land. Gray drove on through a gap in the fence. ‘It’s like the end of the world down here,’ he said. The beach, alternately rocky and sandy, was littered with plastic bottles and other detritus dumped from Panamanian and Colombian tankers.

  The lighthouse, painted red and white like a candy-striped barber’s pole, stood in a wilderness of thatch palms and saltscorched trees. According to the plaque, Kru tribesmen transported from Africa had built it in 1842. It had been cast in England at a time when the Empire was still spread in swathes of red across the world. But the Kru tribesmen - had they settled in Portland parish? Or had the great Portland emptiness closed in about them, extinguishing all traces?

  A tall thin man was approaching us now, followed by four undernourished-looking children. On reaching us, he said he was the lighthouse keeper, shook a cigarette out of a pack, lit it, and added that he had worked in this bleak station for fifteen years and, yes, those were his four children. ‘Does your wife live here too?’ Gray asked, making conversation. The keeper studied the lighted end of his cigarette before answering that he did not have a wife, and did not want one, either.

  Saying this, he unlocked a door at the base of the lighthouse, and invited us to follow him up the spiral stairway. As we pulled on the stair’s brass handrail we passed cast-iron wall panels stamped ‘Charles Robinson Late Bramah Engineer, London’; the same panels, riveted and stamped ‘Charles Robinson’, line the inside of the engine house of the Battersea Waterworks in south London. In the light-room 100 feet up, the air was hot and fuggy, with a reek of engine oil. Twilight was dimming the skies but we could just make out Morant Cays reef, once feared by sailors. Haiti lay 100 miles due east of the reef.

  In spite of the light-room’s reassuring beacon-code - dark, lightlight, dark - ships continue to be wrecked. One day in 2004 the keeper had watched in horror through his binoculars as a tanker swayed on high seas, with a small craft huddled against it. The craft had gone under, and not reappeared. The keeper assumed the passengers were Haitian refugees. If Haitians stray any distance east of Morant Point they will be swept down towards Panama and, most likely, be drowned. Wooden sail-boats had been found ‘mashed up’ on the shore, with no sign of their crew.

  In 2004, an estimated 600 Haitians were swept up on Jamaica’s east coast. They arrived in flotillas of sail-boats, dehydrated and starving, at points between Morant Bay and Port Antonio. The majority had intended to sail to Miami, but the north-east trade winds had taken them to Jamaica. They were, most of them, supporters of the Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been ousted in an American-sponsored coup earlier that year. (His outspoken advocacy of the poor had made him a red bogeyman to Washington.) People in Manchioneal went out of their way to help the Haitians, bringing them what food and clothes they could; they had been at sea, some of them, for up to five days. Having been ‘processed’ by immigration authorities in Manchioneal, the Haitians were taken to detention centres on the north coast. A lucky few escaped, but most were repatriated to an uncertain future in Haiti.

  It was getting dark now and the air, not yet cool, had a tired end-of-the-day smell of damp sand. ‘All right, gentlemen,’ the lighthouse keeper said to us as the beach turned monochrome in the setting sun, ‘twice blessed and good night.’ This was a sad place in which to leave the keeper and his ragamuffin children. People mostly avoided Morant Point. Even the beach fishermen, who were no strangers to solitude, kept away from the godforsaken loneliness of this outpost.

  14

  English Upbringing, Background Caribbean

  Port Antonio, capital of Portland parish, radiated a torrid, hothouse decay. The streets were lined with old warehouses and wooden tailor’s shops; matchbox buildings, easy come, easy go. At night a damp inshore breeze reached me in my hotel, smelling faintly of muddy water and bananas. It was the sweetish, salty breeze that corroded the metal fittings in people’s homes, and bred damp-rot in their clothes. Port Antonio in the period 1880 to 1920 had been Jamaica’s chief banana port, shipping out three million bunches of ‘green gold’ on average a year. A Boston sea merchant, Lorenzo Dow Baker, had introduced banana shipping to the area; his business became the United Fruit Company.

  When Port Antonio was booming, American tourists began to arrive, and before long Hollywood had discovered this drowsy ‘paradise’. In 1946 Errol Flynn bought a small island here. The British government, worried by the American influence, created the Fyffes banana company in 1913 to rival Dow Baker’s, but it ran into financial difficulties and was taken over by United Fruit. My immediate interest in Port Antonio, however, was the sizeable Indian community hereabouts. Indians, referred to in the West Indies as ‘East Indians’, make up the largest ethnic minority in Jamaica today: between 1.3 and 3.5 per cent of the population. Their migration had been sponsored by the British Colonial Office in 1845, in order to supply post-emancipation Jamaica with plantation labour. It continued for eight decades until just after the First World War. During that time an estimated 38,000 Indians, most of them Hindu, settled in Jamaica from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the Punjab and the North-West Frontier province, Assam, Bengal, Orissa and Rajasthan.

  Poverty had driven them from their homeland and condemned them to a bonded (usually five-year) contract. Poorly paid, the East Indians lived in overcrowded barracks that offered little privacy to married couples; rape, alcoholism and even murder were not uncommon. The statistics for East Indian fatalities in Jamaica are numbing (as statistics so often are in Jamaica). Out of the 5,500 ‘coolie’ labourers who arrived in 1848, over 1,500 died of malaria or hookworm infestation.

  After their five-year term had expired, some 12,000 East Indians went home. (The indenture agreement provided for their return ticket.) Many of them never got beyond the Calcutta docks, and lived out their days as city paupers. The majority stayed behind in Jamaica, where they reverted to their ancestral trades of farming, fishing, jewellery-making and money-lending.

  De Montevin Lodge, with its barley-sugar columns, pepper-pot roof and gingerbread veranda, had an atmosphere of the spittoon and pot plant. It had once been a United Fruit executive’s home. Errol Flynn had planned to turn it into a New Orleans-style brothel but ran out of funds. Port Antonio had everything that Flynn wanted: a warm climate, sailing, rum - and the people spoke English. ‘This must be the Paradise written about in the Bible,’ the film star announced on his arrival. Swollen with alcohol, and fleeing a statutory rape charge, Flynn launched the tourist’s pastime of riverrafting on the Rio Grande and a sexploitation of Jamaican girls that endures to this day. The locals spoke of ‘Flynn Fever’.

  But Flynn was long dead and De Montevin Lodge (to judge by the alien pubic hair in my bed) had become the lowest type of cheap-rent rooming house. The armchairs in the reception area had been covered in protective see-through plastic, with attendant leopardskin rugs and bouquets of ghetto-fabulous plastic flowers. An elderly woman in high-heeled gold shoes showed me t
o my room. The walls did not quite meet the ceiling, so I could hear everything next door, usually a Bible television programme turned up to full volume, with the preacher ranting boringly. On my first night I lay on my bed under the lamp’s glow and looked up at a picture on the wall of Jesus walking on the water.

  In Kingston, earlier, I had met a doctor from mainland India, Ajai Mansingh, who had come to Jamaica in 1973 to lecture in entomology at the university. Nowhere in the world, Mansingh believed, had Indian culture been so neglected as in Jamaica. In 1999, hoping to remedy this deficiency, he and his wife wrote and published a book, Home Away from Home: 150 Years of Indian Presence in Jamaica 1845-1995, which charted the iniquities of the British indentureship scheme and the plight of Hindi-speakers in general on the island. Above all, Laxmi and Ajai Mansingh wanted to show how much Jamaican culture was influenced by Indian culture. Rastafari (in their Indocentric opinion) had borrowed not only the ‘sacramental practice’ of ganja-smoking from Hindu holy men, but also the art of ‘meditation’ and ‘cultivation of dreadlocks’.

  ‘Alas, Mr Thomson, after all these years, we still find that Indo-Jamaicans are very ignorant and uninformed about themselves,’ said Professor Mansingh. We were sitting in his spacious garden off Bamboo Avenue, midtown, sipping iced tea. He went on: ‘Still, I do not regret leaving India, in fact I feel a great happiness to be in Jamaica.’ He was keen for me to meet a learned Hindu man or pundit called Nathan Sharma. ‘Nathan is Jamaican-born. But he is the man you should see for information on Indo-Jamaican culture,’ Mansingh assured me. ‘Each week he is going with his offerings to the temple. I will call him now.’ He dialled a number on his mobile. Bollywood music banged and wailed from his home as he did so.