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The Dead Yard

Page 27

by Ian Thomson


  Travel in rural Jamaica, away from the great tourist tracks, is difficult, and Green Castle agricultural estate was not easy to find. I went there on foot from Annotto Bay, using as my landmark a stone windmill tower that stood, like an imperious beehive, on a hilltop. From the tower I was able to find my way to Robin Crum-Ewing’s house, where I was to spend a couple of nights. A Taino Indian village had been excavated on Green Castle in 1999, and Crum-Ewing had found funds to develop it into a ‘heritage site’. Meanwhile, he was an exception among Jamaica’s landowners, as Green Castle was run by him as a non-profit-making organisation, in which any surplus is shared by the employees. He recognised that the Jamaican agricultural system, with its age-old inequalities and iniquities, was in need of reform.

  I found Crum-Ewing at work in a cattle pen branding heifers. He looked like a Wild West rancher in his wide-brim hat yet he was a physically slight man, with pale skin mottled red with sun spots. ‘Very good,’ he said, emerging dusty from the pen, ‘come with me.’ We got into a van and drove past fields of sleepy-looking horned Brahman cattle.

  During the 1960s, Crum-Ewing had worked at management level for Jamaica’s bauxite industry. Bauxite, the raw material from which aluminium is made, is abundant in Jamaica’s rust-red soil and by the mid-1960s, Jamaica was producing over 20 per cent of the world’s supply. Most of it was mined by foreign multinationals such as Alcan, Reynolds and Alcoa. A few top-ranking Jamaicans, Crum-Ewing among them, profited handsomely. But in the real world, down in the ghetto, the new money had not reached the poor. Jamaican outrage at foreign business concerns was well founded. The bauxite companies were not paying Jamaica anything for the raw material they were taking. In 1974, therefore, Michael Manley subjected the bauxite industry to government regulation, with levies imposed on production.

  Crum-Ewing was a privileged Jamaican by marriage only, having married a descendant of the Scarletts, wealthy landowners in Jamaica since Oliver Cromwell’s time. He wanted to take me to see the strange beehive-like windmill tower, a family inheritance on his wife’s side. It was reached along a rough path leading to Robin’s Bay (where the British painter Augustus John had stayed in 1937). A smell of salt and seaweed irradiated the lukewarm air; the scene was beautifully calm. From a distance the stone tower seemed to be honeycombed with holes. On closer inspection the holes were filled with rotted mahogany beams, which had served as scaffolding. The slave-owning English had used the mill to power cane-crushing machines.

  The mahogany was salvaged, most likely, from a dismantled Spanish vessel or other timber re-used from the time of Christopher Columbus’s first landfall off Jamaica in 1494. It has been radiocarbon-dated to the fifteenth century. Made of coralstone, the windmill tower was unique in Jamaica for its wall-piercings and quaint shape. Chunks of Cornish stone used as ballast on the slave ships had been built into the brickwork. Today the beehive tower is home to nesting owls. Eighty-two bird species had been identified by Crum-Ewing as native to Green Castle. That figure, he conceded, was probably reduced now, as pollution and deforestation had taken their toll.

  This saddened him, as he identified strongly with Jamaica and had developed a relaxed attitude to life with an inclination to do a minimum of work which, he claimed, was Jamaican. ‘It’s like this,’ he explained. ‘We Jamaicans live on a very rich island, but we don’t always get rich from it. We don’t really know how to and we’re too lazy.’ (This was a well-worn chestnut, I thought, about Jamaicans.) ‘We’re hopelessly and irretrievably lazy - lazy and ill-disciplined. Why should we work? We don’t need to work. We don’t need to save money for winter coats for the children - because it’s always warm here.’ In Green Castle, a quiet, slow-moving place, food grew in abundance. ‘And it’s God’s own food ripe for the picking.’ Jamaica’s natural wealth was so great that ‘no one need starve’, he concluded. In the Taino Indian language Jamaica - Xamaica - meant a country abounding in springs; every green valley had its stream, every crag its cascade.

  In this Eden, Crum-Ewing grew orchids for Jamaica’s Chinese market, the flowers cultivated under rows of tunnel cloches. Decorative orchids are displayed by every Chinese business: they are emblematic of fertility and, in the popular Jamaican mind, Chinese aloofness and clannishness. Traditionally Jamaican Chinese have not cared to ‘marry out’, and their perceived standoffishness has helped to stoke riots against them. In 1918 and again, more seriously, in 1965, Jamaica was shaken when ‘Chiney’ shops and ‘Chiney’ homes were looted and set ablaze. At this time of growing ‘black consciousness’, the Chinese, having little involvement in the movement, were seen as a foreign, exploitative people.

  At 176 Old Hope Road, near the Bob Marley Museum in uptown Kingston, is a pagoda-like building with stone lions at the entrance. This is the headquarters of the Chinese Benevolent Society, founded in Kingston in 1891 to oversee Chinese interests in the island. Dalton Yap, the president, asked me cautiously at the entrance, ‘So, why you come here see Yap? You want talk, right?’ He was a thin man with high cheekbones and skin the colour of cork. I followed him downstairs, where he unlocked a door which opened on to a room crammed with jade objects, paper fans, china dolls and items of furniture upholstered in pale green fabric. ‘Good,’ Yap announced, looking around the Chinese museum. ‘Everything good.’ He flicked a switch on the wall and the sound of a stringed instrument plucking a Chinese melody (to my ears, a weird, quarter-tone wail) filled the room. ‘That’s a recording of an ehru guitar,’ Yap said. ‘Oh, it make a terrible melancholy sound.’ The notes hovered in the air like ice crystals.

  On the wall hung an anatomy chart for acupuncture, along with advertisements for Kung Fu lessons and conversational Mandarin. The first Chinese to arrive in Jamaica came from south-east China in the 1840s and spoke Hakka (not Mandarin or Cantonese). They were mostly young, unmarried men. By the end of their sixteenweek sea journey to the West Indies, many of them had died, some of opium withdrawal. The journey had taken them round India with a brief respite in Java to the Cape of Good Hope and on up the western coast of Africa across the Atlantic to Jamaica.

  Unlike their Hindi-speaking counterparts, the Chinese quickly escaped the indignity of plantation labour and set up shops in countryside villages. The Chinese were seen as less lowly (because more ‘white’) by the British authorities who gave them opportunities not available to the East Indians. Chinese shops, redolent of pickled fish and kerosene, offered credit or sold by barter, and were a boon to Jamaicans in the interior without access to provisions. By the early 1890s, almost every Jamaican village had its ‘Chiney shop’ where customers could exchange plantation crops (pimento and ginger) for butter, flour, salted fish and other groceries.

  The fear - then as now - was that the Chinese would monopolise Jamaica’s retail business. From the mid 1920s, as the rate of arrivals increased, Chinese were required by Jamaican law to deposit £30 on arrival and demonstrate a written ability with fifty words in English, as well as submit to a physical examination. Still the ‘Children of the Dragon’ continued to arrive and eventually they moved to downtown Kingston, where they set up betting parlours, laundries, fortune-telling shops, tattoo parlours, supermarkets, bakeries. Barry Street served as the east-west spine of Chinatown, with Hakka restaurants and Hakka shops that sold lychee ice cream, oysters and booby (sea bird) eggs.

  Tensions developed between the Chinese and their black neighbours. The Chinese were ‘dog-eaters’ or ‘bananas’ (Oriental yellow on the outside, white colonialist on the inside). Mixed marriages were frowned on by both sides, with black Chinese mockingly referred to by the Hakka community as ‘Eleven o’clock People’ (Ship Yit Tiam): not quite twelve o’clock, they were not quite complete. Ian Fleming’s sixth 007 novel, Dr No (1957), is coloured by its disgusted (to the modern reader, perhaps disgusting) portrayal of Jamaica’s half-Chinese community as a ‘hideous’ yellow-black race. Fleming, like many Englishmen of his class, was repelled by the notion of hybridity and in Dr No he wrote with ill-conceale
d antipathy of ‘Chigroes’.

  China Town disappeared when Kingston’s railway station was closed in the early 1990s. Far fewer Chinese businesses operate downtown now, the old shops are boarded up or else they serve as crack dens. The Chinese still have their own athletic club, though, as well as their own newspaper (The Pagoda) and their own freemason societies, called Tongs. The Tongs control many of the nightclubs, brothels and illegal betting dens across Jamaica. Most Chinese restaurants in Kingston (notably, the Mandarin on the city’s North Side Plaza) operate a backroom gaming parlour. At Foxy’s International, a nightclub on the north coast, groups of half-Chinese and, increasingly, Russian prostitutes in cheongsams (the high-necked, slit-skirted Chinese dress) talk to customers round the hot centre of the dance floor. When I visited, a couple of middle-aged white women in search of ‘big bamboo’ lay slouched against the bar, plainly drunk or stoned. Another nightclub, the Gemini in Kingston’s Halfway Tree Road, has a raised platform for dancing, a bar and, at the rear, a number of cubicle-like rooms, decorated with orchids, for paid sex. One of the women was visibly bruised, apparently from a pistol-whipping by a Colombian or Russian customer. One word out of line here and you get your ‘cranium cracked’, she told me. What she wanted above all (apart from money) was a bottle of ‘Dom P’ (Dom Perignon), the Jamaican gangster’s preferred drink.

  In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of Chinese record producers operated in Kingston, among them Vincent ‘Randy’ Chin, Leslie Kong, the late Byron Lee and Justin Yap (related to Dalton Yap), who in 1964 signed the Skatalites to his Top Deck label. They have all, at various stages, been accused of ‘Chiney man’ exploitation of ghetto music. Byron Lee sanitised ska for an uptown clientele, adapting it for more affluent white tastes much as Elvis had done with rhythm and blues, or João Gilberto in Brazil with bossa nova, the dance music fashioned out of African samba.

  Byron Lee died in November 2008 at the age of seventy-three, not long after I met him at his home in the Stony Hill suburb of Kingston. It was the aftermath of Hurricane Dennis, and the windows, blown out by the storm, had been replaced with temporary plywood. As I got out of the taxi Lee, a stout man in a track suit, rose from his chair on the porch and gave a bob of greeting. ‘We have a crisis situation - hurricane waters - the house is flooded.’ Inside, stacks of vinyl records, mattresses and a wardrobe spewing clothes had been dragged out into the corridors to dry. The house was airless and sticky - the fans were immobilised - with mosquitoes biting and whining thinly. Lee, a courteous man, apologised for the lack of air-conditioning.

  On the shelves in his office were sepia photographs of Chinese relatives. Lee’s supposedly privileged status as a Chinese belied the fact that his mother was a black (or near black) Jamaican, who instilled in him a love of Afro-Jamaican Revivalist and Kumina music. His father had arrived in Jamaica from Kowloon in the 1920s and spoke no English. ‘Whether they call me a half-Chiney or a Chiney-Royal or an Eleven o’Clock,’ Lee said to me, ‘it make no difference. First of all I’m Jamaican.’

  In 1957, when Byron Lee founded the Dragonaires, Jamaica had no popular music to call its own, but a new sound was evolving in Edward Seaga’s Back-o-Wall constituency. It was called ska, and it was uniquely Jamaican. With Seaga’s financial backing, the Dragonaires put a dance spin on the rackety, ‘hop, skip and jump’ downtown sound, and transformed it into a slick, show-band confection with elements of calypso and traditional Trinidad soca. It lacked the grit and drive of ghetto ska, and Byron Lee was criticised for making money out of a black music not his own. (He later produced Eric Clapton’s sanitised version of Bob Marley’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’.) Byron Lee was not a ska originator, and his professional association with Edward ‘Ska-aga’, a white JLP politician of Lebanese descent, looked like commercial opportunism. ‘People can say what they like,’ Lee protested to me, ‘but until Seaga came along we Jamaican Chinese were not considered part of the music scene.’ Chinese record producers were ‘like garbage’, said Lee, ‘like lower-class’. Lee later purchased Seaga’s West Indies Records company based in Kingston, and renamed it Dynamic Sounds.

  Most controversial was Seaga’s decision to send the Dragonaires to New York in 1964 to represent Jamaica at the World’s Fair. Ska’s true originators, the Skatalites, were not chosen. Why? Their zingy, post-independence music drew from a variety of sources, among them news headlines (‘Christine Keeler’ celebrated the call girl who had helped to bring down the Harold Macmillan government), film themes (‘Third Man Ska’, ‘Exodus’), swing, bebop, Ellingtonian jazz-inflected Chinoiserie and R & B. In these magpie borrowings, surely, there was something for everyone. The bland ska-lyp-so as purveyed by the Dragonaires was hardly Jamaica’s National Sound. Byron Lee’s beaming, mixed-race band wore shiny dinner jackets and Lee himself, like an Ed Sullivan show host, played electric Fender bass. The sound they made was hotel-circuit clean.

  In hindsight, however, Seaga’s was a sensible choice: the Skatalites, insufficiently disciplined, were not to be relied on to provide entertainment for an international trade convention. Their erratic trombone genius, Don Drummond, was probably schizophrenic (indeed, he would soon murder his girlfriend).

  The Dragonaires for their part had already contributed to the soundtrack of the first 007 movie, Dr No (shot in Jamaica in 1962), and introduced tourists to basic ska dance steps such as the ‘Kingston Head Roll’ (done ‘to relax and cool off’) and the more energetic ‘Rowing’. Unfortunately for the money-conscious Seaga, the Dragonaires failed to make an impression in America. Their single ‘Oil in My Lamp’ flopped after just one week in the US charts (at number ninety-eight). In Britain, where Millie Small had triumphed with ‘My Boy Lollipop’ (with Rod Stewart on harmonica), it was a different story. The Mods were listening to ska; and so were Jamaicans.

  Everyone in Morant Bay seemed to appreciate the Chong Sangs-a likeably high-spirited, hard-working Chinese family. George Chong Sang, the father, owned a hardware store and wholesale outlet on Main Street near the Paul Bogle statue. Business, with the everincreasing numbers of returnees, had never been so good. ‘We have five truck and five truck driver. No-stop trucking!’ George said to me. Busy, busy. In the delivery yard George’s four grown-up children were taking stock, clipboards and calculators in hand. They were beautiful and I told George as much. ‘Mix Chinese are beautiful,’ he said proudly. ‘We have all kind of mix people in Morant Bay. Black and brown and Chiney and Hindian. Even chestnut man!’ At the age of three, George was sent to Canton to be educated and learn manners. The school was ‘very strict and harsh’, he recalled, with classes in ‘etiquette correction’. But that was not the worst of it.

  When Japan invaded China in 1937, George was told he might never return home. Emperor Hirohito’s troops - the Asian master race - began to press-gang Chinese into forced labour; street executions were not uncommon. In the Nanking Massacre some 150,000 Chinese civilians were bestially slaughtered. For a long time afterwards George could not look at a Japanese. (‘I hated them.’) Not until 1948, eighteen years into his Chinese exile, was he finally able to sail home to Jamaica. In Morant Bay, he took over his father’s hardware business and was elected president of a local Tong.

  Like many Jamaican Chinese, the Chong Sangs were Buddhist converts to Catholicism. George explained, with an awkward smile, that the Catholic Church was ‘less dominated by black people’; Baptist and Revivalists, for his taste, were a little ‘too black’. Listening to him, I could see how the Chinese might have given rise to the notion that they were in business solely to exploit black Jamaicans. In the summer of 1965, after a rumour had spread that a black woman had been beaten by a Chinese baker in Spanish Town, anti-Chinese riots flared in the Jamaican capital.

  Significantly, the riots came just days after the ‘Negro Disturbances’ (as the Jamaican Gleaner called them) had erupted in the Watts ghetto of Los Angeles. Until 1992, these were the worst urban riots in the United States. In downtown Kingston, as in Los Angeles, Chinese we
re seen as the nearest approximation to white people. Their shops and houses were burned down and looted, the owners verbally abused and even ‘chopped’ - attacked with machetes. The Jamaican establishment showed little sympathy. In an editorial of 31 August 1965 (‘Girls and Mice’) the Gleaner upbraided the ‘Chinamen’ of Kingston for their ‘timidity’ and ‘panicky’ reaction in shutting down shops and homes. ‘It is a pity’, the newspaper lectured, ‘that so many [Chinese] business people lent greater point to the trouble by locking their doors, thus attracting the ribald notice of ragamuffins.’ The language is that of the British country club bar; John Chinaman seen as the slant-eyed coward.

  In 1975, fearing a communist revolution under Manley, George Chong Sang fled with his family to Toronto. For five years they lived in that earnest, multicultural metropolis. George finally returned in October 1980, the month Seaga won the general election, fifteen years ahead of his children. He could not believe Jamaica’s transformation. ‘The traffic! The crowds!’ Some 400 Jamaican Chinese were now living in Morant Bay. Outwardly, relations between them and the black majority were much better. ‘If we treat Jamaicans good,’ George said to me, ‘they come buy from me. We are glad to serve them!’ However, the fact that George had referred to the black community as ‘Jamaicans’ and his own people as ‘Chinese’ suggested a gulf still to be crossed.

  Business is a hard game in Jamaica, and Gloria Palomino (born Lyn Ah Ping), is reckoned to be one of the toughest and most successful financial powers in the land. She owns a diesel haulage company on Marcus Garvey Drive, as well as restaurants and a café in the Blue Mountains. Her home, barred against burglars, is situated in the aptly named Armour Heights area of the Kingston hills. The sitting room with high white walls was adorned with Jamaican art; sticks of incense burned on the balcony. A wide expanse of glass allowed guests to see the port beyond and the shanties sprawling at the sea’s mouth.

 

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