The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  Saying this, Slimfort gave a sudden start, and half rose from his chair. ‘Whoa! Here comes the rain!’ From far off came a whooshing sound made by fat raindrops as they pelted down on the banana leaves. Moving inexorably towards us, the sound grew louder. ‘You get a five-minute warning before the rain falls right on your head,’ said Slimfort, with a laugh. Soon the rain was hammering on the roof of the house, and then it was absolutely roaring. But just as suddenly it was quiet again, and the insects were back to whirring round our faces.

  The Trident Hotel, a Disney-like folly on the Port Antonio seafront, was owned by Earl Levy, a white Jamaican who had been very much a part of Portland’s demi-monde. The hotel was spookily empty when I arrived, with a recording of Richard Clayderman piped into the forlorn-looking bar.

  ‘Yes sir?’ There was nothing on the hotel barman’s face, apparently, but boredom.

  ‘Is Earl Levy in?’

  ‘I’ll check for you - can I get you a drink?’

  He poured me a soda, then spoke into a phone at the end of the bar. When he came back he told me that Earl Levy was away in Vienna with Errol Flynn’s widow; he would be happy to see me on his return.

  My impression, as I carried the soda over to the dining room, was that I was in a re-make of The Shining, where the hotel is alive with unseen ghosts. The dining room, quite empty, was decorated with vases of peacock feathers and bowls of potpourri. Camp? I should say so. The bright red, frilly table cloths looked like coffin linings. I took a seat. Twenty minutes went by and the piped Clayderman coming though a mock-Greek archway had changed tempo without my noticing it.

  Truly vibrant tourism in Jamaica only exists in the north coast resorts of Negril and Montego Bay. They present a white man’s fantasy of a ‘paradise’, one in which Jamaicans are vendors of coconuts and coloured beads, their native calypso-reggae ‘pulsing’ exotically behind them. In Negril especially, you feel you are in a Disneyfied version of Jamaica. On the day I visited, life-size Sesame Street puppets wobbled up and down the beach, dispensing beer and hot dogs to groups of Americans too scared to leave the environs of their hotel.

  There was no one to leave the Trident Hotel, however, because the Trident Hotel was empty. I had brought along my book, Slaves Who Abolished Slavery (1985), by the Jamaican historian Richard Hart, about Jamaica’s runaway slaves or Maroons. I was reading the introduction when a shadow fell across my table. ‘Tonight the chef is recommending fish fingers,’ the waiter announced as he handed me a menu decorated like an illuminated manuscript.

  ‘Fish fingers?’

  ‘I am sorry’ - he corrected himself - ‘on this night we have soup and a curried goat.’

  ‘Sounds good. But tell, me is the Trident always this empty?’

  ‘These days, yes. We really could do with some business.’ The waiter’s string vest showed through his white shirt.

  I went back to reading my book and was halfway through the chapter ‘The Beginning of Black Resistance’ when the waiter announced at my elbow, ‘Your bread roll, sir’; and, lifting the lid of an aluminium salver, transferred the roll to my plate with a pair of tongs. ‘Water, sir?’ I said yes but immediately wished I had not. A too enthusiastic measure was poured and ice cubes plopped from the jug on to my lap. With an apology the waiter began to remove the cubes with his white-gloved hands (though not, I am glad to say, with the tongs). The atmosphere in the dining room was now more Carry On than Shining. Having successfully disposed of the ice cubes, the waiter continued to hover, his brow creased in a troubled smile, at my table.

  The mulligatawny, when it arrived, was garnished with a whorl of stiff cream substitute. I waited in apprehension for the curried goat. As I ate the goat the dining-room lights went out one by one, and by the time the coffee had arrived I was in semi-darkness. A fingerbowl was the final gracious touch to what had been an unusual evening. Outside, the early moon lay quiet on the hotel lawn, and the Trident’s façade was bone-white in its glow. A romantic night, but I had a damp patch at my groin where the ice had been.

  Earl Levy was dressed in a poplin shirt and white loafers with gold buckles; but he looked discontented. In its heyday the Trident had been patronised by a handful of royalty and epicureans of independent means. Princess Margaret, inevitably, languished there beneath the palms, lost in a haze of Famous Grouse and tranquillisers. Since then the Trident had been prinked, re-staffed and re-furbished several times but still nobody came. Tourists preferred the all-inclusive resorts on the north coast. ‘The only way to bring this hotel back to life is to have the English nobility back here again, but there’s no longer any demand for marvellous things, I’m afraid,’ said Levy. ‘The English have all gone to Barbados.’ He lowered his voice on the word ‘Barbados’ with a suggestion of disapproval.

  Earl Levy’s Sephardic Judaism had been abandoned for Anglicanism long ago - officially there was now no Jewish blood in his parentage and, I suspected, he would flinch from the very idea. ‘Did you know Princess Margaret?’ he enquired. ‘No? Sarah Churchill? Surely you’ve met her. No? Oh dear.’

  Levy moved uneasily in his seat. ‘I am a prominent and I may say an influential member of Jamaica’s aristocracy. Indeed I am an Earl!’ He laughed at his own humour, and added self-deprecatingly, ‘One of my ancestors was an Irish sea captain - that was back in the days of the potato famine.’ I suspected this was fantasy; fantasy was what animated Earl Levy.

  For all his fine ‘English’ manners, Earl Levy had a foul temper. We were watching peacocks on the hotel lawn beyond the French windows when he said with sudden rage: ‘One of my staff - the stupid bitch! - pulled out four of that peacock’s feathers. Said she’d picked them off the grass, but the tips were bloody, anyone could see that.’ He threw up his hands and brought them down thwack on his knees. ‘Oh, I could’ve whipped her. I sacked her.’ I was too startled to say anything. A little later a wedding party arrived at the hotel and assembled on the lawn. The party was black and, it seemed, not to Levy’s taste. ‘Oh, they’re just unsophisticated little people,’ he said in a tone that admitted no argument. Jamaica’s old class rankings and race barriers were firmly in place.

  Occasionally, to Levy’s delight, an English aristocrat turns up at the Trident. In 2000 the twelfth Earl of Portland (the actor Tim Bentinck) arrived in the hope of exploring the Jamaican parish which had been named after the Duke of Portland, governor of Jamaica from 1723. On his return to England, the Englishman invited Earl Levy to stay with him in his house. ‘I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep,’ Levy said to me. The earl took him to see the House of Lords and Buckingham Palace; and so, after a fashion, his craving for social acceptance was gratified.

  ‘But now, my dear sir,’ Levy said with a sigh, ‘the Trident’s dying and I can’t even afford to pay the electricity bills. And do you know,’ sinking his voice into a conspiratorial whisper, ‘I’m tired of Jamaica. I never thought I’d say that - tired of Jamaica, but it’s true.’ In 2007, shortly after my third visit to Jamaica, the Trident was bought by a Jamaican Chinese businessman, Michael Lee Chin. Its future is uncertain.

  15

  Everything Crash

  In 1968, when the Ethiopians released ‘Everything Crash’, Jamaica was convulsed by industrial strikes and go-slows. The JLP government under Prime Minister Hugh Shearer, one of the most repressive that the island has known, had failed woefully to improve the social and civic rights of the poor majority, as it had pledged to do. While a number of reforms were made (the provision, for example, of hundreds of primary schools), this JLP party had by now abandoned its trade-union roots and, just six years after independence, served merely to aggravate social inequalities and tensions.

  In Jamaica, as elsewhere in the English-speaking West Indies, what the Colonial Office called the ‘orderly transition’ to self-government had been deceptive. Beyond the clarion-call of decolonisation simmered a volatile mixture of nationalist pride, Black Power activism and racial resentment. ‘Everything Crash’, with its lita
ny of woes, became a best-selling record of 1968:What go bad a morning

  Can’t come good a evening

  Everyday carry bucket to the well

  One day the bottom must drop out

  Everything crash

  The song (affectionately known as the alternative ‘National Anthem’) is still routinely broadcast on Jamaican radio in times of crisis.

  I met Leonard ‘Sparrow’ Dillon, the lead singer of the (still existent) Ethiopians, in a bar adjacent to the Port Antonio police station. Immensely tall, he said he was descended from runaway slaves or Maroons. And, like many Maroons, he was very black, his blackness emphasised by a black baseball cap, black T-shirt and baggy black shorts. Dillon ordered a Campari mixed with Stones Ginger Wine (a classic Jamaican ‘man’s drink’), and said to me, ‘Everybody did have a problem back in 1968. Yes, man, even in them days things a get from bad to worse.’

  The Ethiopians, one of the great vocal groups of 1960s Jamaica, were among the first ska-reggae bands to play in England; their music, rooted in the calypso and Revival rhythms of Dillon’s native Portland parish, was heard in a number of venues from the Ramjam in Brixton to the African Club in Sheffield. The audiences were usually mixed, and sometimes predominantly white. ‘I worked some places in Kent and in the audience is just one black I see!’ Dillon raised a be-ringed finger and reached for his tumbler of dilute Campari. ‘Yes, in them days the English like my music very much.’ But now his music had been superseded by dancehall, of which Dillon took a characteristically dour view. ‘Dancehall is a different call,’ he said; it reflected a ‘darkness’ at the heart of modern Jamaica.

  The ‘bottomless decline’ of Jamaica, as Dillon went on to call it, was a subject I constantly heard discussed. Jamaica had apparently come crashing down in the 1970s under the left-wing premiership of Michael Manley, who served two terms in the 1970s and one towards the end of the 1980s. During his earlier ‘populist’ terms Manley had sought to instil self-respect in the Jamaican poor and rid them of the sense of servility ingrained by slavery. He died in 1997, at the age of seventy-three, almost convinced that he had achieved his goal.

  To be called a ‘Manleyite’ in some quarters today is an insult; the implication is that Manley has become a byword for disaster. To his enemies, Manley was an insecure, rash-tempered man driven by a need to outshine his more capable (if rather less charming) father, the PNP founder Norman Washington Manley, who in the post-war years had helped to lead Jamaica towards independence. Michael Manley’s speeches were deemed to be full of overheated meaningless phrases (‘black redemption’, ‘social struggle’) and dangerous enthusiasms elevated to the status of wisdom.

  To his supporters, though, any attempt to examine Michael Manley’s pretensions and failures is tantamount to heresy. Manley was a heroic individual who had rescued Jamaica from colonial dereliction. A myth has thus emerged of Manley as a Castro-like spokesman of the dispossessed.

  Rachel Manley, in her memoir of her father, In My Father’s Shade (2004), invites us to reflect on Michael Manley as a glamorous failure. In this work of filial devotion at least, Manley emerges as the man whose reformist vision of Jamaica as a nation without race hierarchies or colour prejudice was both timely and necessary. From an early age, Rachel had learned that the island was run by a small ‘brown’ elite made up of ‘Syrian’ (Lebanese), Asian, Chinese, white and near-white (‘local white’) British Jamaicans. Only black Jamaicans were desperately poor; white Jamaicans were not.

  Manley was no sooner elected than he urged Jamaicans to abandon the streak of self-hatred and suspicion towards their own kind. In his Garvey-inspired vision, Jamaica’s African heritage was the colonially induced dark area of self-denial in the national psyche. It was time to rehabilitate the notion of Mother Africa and, to that end, Manley established links with Jamaica’s Rastafari communities and even allowed himself to be called Joshua. Like his Biblical namesake, he was a prophet come to rid the nation of the corrupt ‘Pharaoh’ - Hugh Shearer of the ruling JLP. Manley promised to beat Shearer with the ‘Rod of Correction’, a cane given to him in 1970 reportedly by Haile Selassie himself.

  Though Manley adopted rhetoric from the Black Power and Civil Rights movements of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, he was a lightskinned Jamaican of the middle classes. His forebears were a variety of English tradesmen and Methodist priests who had married into Kingston’s European and mixed-race families. Proud upholders of the British Empire, they formed part of the island’s small professional class whose job was to ensure that, as Rachel Manley puts it, ‘colonial life ran smoothly’. So Michael Manley was both beholden to and in symbolic rebellion against his ‘browning’ ancestry, his partial ‘whiteness’, like that of Barack Obama after him, a mixed blessing.

  After Manley’s landslide victory in 1972, Jamaican politics shifted decisively to the Left as he nationalised the foreign-owned electricity, telephone and public transport companies, as well as a number of North American sugar factories, mining firms and the British-run Barclays Bank. The expropriated foreign owners were compensated financially, but they harboured a hatred of Manley and his experiments in centralised socialism. While foreign capital leaked out of Jamaica, Manley aligned himself further with the ghetto and Rastafari communities. Not that he liked reggae much (his preferred music was bossa nova). Yet during this early, hopeful period, many reggae singers backed Manley. ‘Better Must Come’, by Delroy Wilson, had been co-opted by the PNP as their campaign song, while ‘Press Along Joshua’ and ‘Let The Power Fall On I’ were pro-Manley 45 rpm anthems by the great Max Romeo.

  All kinds of Jamaicans, not just Rastafarians, supported the newly elected leader. Black, white, brown and yellow; Indian, Chinese, Jewish, rich and poor, working, middle and upper classes, vested interests, professionals, business people; all were joined in optimism about Jamaica’s future and prepared to make a contribution and a sacrifice. ‘Jamaicanisation’ became the new watchword, and ‘Jamaicanisation’ extended to music, art, literature - even to fashion. Out went the tweeds and ties of the colonial British, and in came the loose-fitting bush jacket or Kareba. (No self-respecting PNP minister was without his Kareba; JLP activists, pointedly, continued to wear suits and ties.)

  Key social reforms were pushed through, among them the adult literacy programme of 1973-4, which enabled poor Jamaicans to attend reading and writing classes. A feeling of pride and self-worth was instilled by the literacy (JAMAL) programme. In 1975 a national minimum wage was introduced after a radio call-in programme, Public Eye, exposed the scandalously low pay of Jamaican domestic servants. Maids and stewards began to call in to say how they had been locked in rooms without food or water as punishment for ‘stealing’. Wealthier Jamaicans, feeling themselves under attack, proclaimed the programme’s host, John Maxwell, a ‘class traitor’. Shops in uptown Kingston meanwhile sold out of telephone padlocks which immobilised the dial phones used by maids who ‘wanted to phone Maxwell’. In the end, PNP justice prevailed, and the minimum wage was fixed at US $20 a week. Jamaicans in socially degrading occupations became aware for the first time of their political potential.

  John Maxwell, a burly man with a hip-jive patter, had stood against Edward Seaga in the 1972 general election and saw then how the JLP was dispensing guns in return for votes. Later he campaigned, fruitlessly, on Public Eye for a nationwide ban on firearms. By the mid 1970s, gangs on both sides of the JLP-PNP divide were killing each other senselessly and, it seemed, without restraint. For all his original good intentions, Manley came to preside over new heights of violence as fears intensified that he was planning to adopt, not just a ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism, but the Cuban model of communism.

  Manley’s admiration for Castro, genuine enough, was not unqualified. He could see that Cubans were suffering the indignity of police surveillance and rationed food. Yet it was hard for his party to quibble with the improvements made in Cuba to health and literacy. Before the nationalist-communist revolución of 1959
, almost half of Cuba’s rural population was illiterate. By the time Manley was elected in 1972, only 2 per cent of Cuban adults were unable to read and write. Manley visited Castro for the first time in 1975; afterwards he said that he would ‘walk with Castro to the mountaintop’. Such public declarations did not go down well with wealthier Jamaicans, who began to transfer their capital out of Jamaica to the United States and Canada. Increasingly, skilled workers, managers and professionals packed their bags for Miami and Toronto; many of them never came back.

  At one point it seemed that Manley was even encouraging Jamaicans to leave. ‘For anyone who wants to become a millionaire,’ he is reported to have said on his return from Cuba in 1975, ‘we have five flights a day to Miami.’ The remark, made half in jest, was picked up by the pro-Seaga Gleaner newspaper. The next day, and for months afterwards, flights to Miami were booked solid.

  Throughout the 1970s, as well-off Jamaicans continued to migrate, it became apparent that Manley was no longer able to take the middle classes with him. He had attempted too much too soon, and now he had run out of funds. Edward Seaga, the opposition JLP leader since 1974, saw a conspiracy at work in his rival’s regard for Cuba. Though Manley had not advocated armed struggle (as the Cuban revolutionaries had), in his speeches he pledged to make Jamaica’s foreign policy less subservient to Washington and seemed to endorse Castro’s ideological aversion to the United States. Washington bullets wanted Castro dead: well then, Manley wanted nothing to do with Washington.