by Ian Thomson
Recalling her St Elizabeth childhood, Eunice told me of a friend of Miss Hyam’s in Berlin, called Miss ‘Goatfoot’ Gertrude. ‘She used to say the only thing she liked about black was the colour of her shoes. And you know what colour Miss “Goatfoot” was? Right. Black.’
‘So would you like to go to Scotland?’ My question, I realised, was ridiculous. Lancel Graham was an old Treasure Beach fisherman; how could he get to Scotland at his age? But he answered, ‘I have a brother in Scotland.’ Graham, a physically slight, quick-witted man, agreed that his surname was ‘full-on Scottish’. He pointed to a LOCH NESS fridge magnet from his brother Aston in Scotland. Amazingly, Aston had been resident in Peebles on the Scottish Borders for seventy years now and (according to Lancel) spoke English with a Jamaican-Scottish accent. The strangeness of Aston’s itinerary from the ‘Scottish’ shores of Treasure Beach to Scotland was not untypical of Jamaica’s mixed bloods and destinies.
Lancel Graham had hints of blue in his eyes. ‘I don’t look right to black people,’ he said, ‘but I’m not white, either - I’m a red man.’ His wife, Vanita Simmonds, was effectively white. To me she said, ‘You’d be as brown-lookin’ as my husband if you’d stayed in Treasure Beach - brown as a berry.’
‘He’d be a red man,’ Lancel offered.
‘My husband,’ Vanita said, ‘is really a black Scotsman. Yes, he’s a black man at heart, with a little Scottish blood.’
About the Scottish shipwreck Lancel knew very little, only that it had happened in 1690 or perhaps 1750.
In fact, as I discovered later in the British Library in London, St Elizabeth had been populated in 1699-1700 by the remnants of the ‘Scotch Darien colony’. The planter-historian Edward Long, in his History of Jamaica (1774), tells how the Scots merchant entrepôt and colony was situated on the Darien coast of Panama near what today is the Colombian border. It was intended to be Scotland’s gateway to the New World.
The five ships that set sail from Scotland in the summer of 1698 carried the hopes of a nation. Half the capital available in Scotland - a sum of £400,000 - had been raised for the Darien cause. The expeditionary force comprised over 1,000 Scottish volunteers and their families, among them doctors, ministers, lawyers and seamen, all of them skilled, and all of them anti-Catholic, Protestant-Calvinist. Having weathered the Atlantic, they anchored off a Panamanian jungle that the settlers named New Caledonia (marked on today’s map as Punta Escoces - Scottish Point).
At first things went well: a site for a fort, St Andrew, was chosen, and a town, New Edinburgh, was built. The colonists wrote of an abundant ‘Eden’, and in the fertile plains round Darien they raised cattle, hogs and what crops they could. Within less than a year, however, it was a different story. The colony had begun to collapse owing to disease and attacks by the Spanish stationed in Panama. The failure of the first expedition was unknown to the second when it arrived in November 1699 at the swampy isthmus of New Caledonia, now a ‘vast, howling wilderness’. Most of the original settlers had either perished or escaped to English colonies in the West Indies, where it was feared they had been sold into slavery.
By April 1700, Scottish imperial dreams had come to dust in the Panamanian hellhole. The governor of Jamaica, Sir William Beeston, reported to London: ‘The Scotch are quite removed from New Caledonia, most of them dead and the rest in so lamentable a condition that deserves great compassion.’ So ended Scotland’s dream that it could compete with the other seafaring powers. In all, 2,000 men, women and children were sacrificed to the Caledonian trading expedition. Scotland was broken by the experience; English propagandists could therefore argue that the Scots were unfit for sovereignty. Five years later, in 1707, the Act of Union obliged Scotland to surrender its independence to England.
Only one ship, the Caledonia, made it back to Scotland. Two others, the Hope of Bo’ness and the Duke of Hamilton, were washed up on the southern coast of Jamaica. Crammed in stinking holds, the 500 Scottish survivors had had only spoiled oatmeal for sustenance. Edward Long, writing seventy years after the catastrophe, claims that they ‘may now be traced by the names of several settlements hereabouts’. Curiously, St Elizabeth reminded me of Scotland, where the low-lying hills had a faint amethyst outline at sunset like the Cuillins of Skye.
‘You’ve been asking me all the questions,’ Dick Kinkead said to me. ‘Now let me ask you some. Are you Scottish? You have a Scottish name.’
‘My father was born in Glasgow,’ I said. ‘I don’t have an English bone in my body.’
‘I’ve never been to Scotland,’ said Kinkead. ‘I’d like to one day.’ He added quickly, with a look of regret, ‘But there won’t be time now, not at my age.’
Kinkead was a pharmacist based in Kingston. The family business used to operate from 20 King Street (now the Hanna’s Betta Buy clothes store where weeks earlier I had equipped myself with trousers and tie for a murder trial). It has now moved to a dishevelled harbour-side street near the Air Jamaica offices, where it stocks Victorian-sounding tinctures (Swimmer’s Ear Drops, Witch Hazel Gel), as well as sick room and nursery requisites. Errol Flynn obtained his prescriptions for morphine there and the Duke of York, the future King George V of Britain, paid for some pills with a cheque simply signed ‘George’, now on display above the Kinkead cash till.
Kinkead’s great-grandfather had run a sugar estate outside Kingston called Stirling Castle. ‘They say he was a cruel man,’ Kinkead told me. In fact it was his overseer, an Englishman named Sharkey, who was murderously severe. He lost no opportunity to flog his slaves into their graves if he felt like it. Sharkey is mentioned in the book, Jamaica Plantership, published in London in 1839, by Benjamin McMahon. The author, a Scot who worked for eighteen years in Jamaica as a doctor, writes with an awareness of the troubling ethical and religious issues involved in the ‘Africa Trade’. ‘Mr Kinkead was no lover of the whip,’ McMahon comments of the pharmacist’s Scottish forebear. However, he turned a blind eye to the butchery and draconian punishments meted out round him daily at Stirling Castle.
Very shortly after I met him, Dick Kinkead died. He was eightynine. His daughter, the photographer Cookie Kinkead (credited on the first Bob Marley and the Wailers album, Catch a Fire), informed me that the funeral service was to be held at the Scots Kirk of St Andrew’s, downtown Kingston. During the service, the organist played a Scottish air. Around me, memorial tablets attested to the dedication of missionaries come here from Midlothian and Elgin. Beneath the polished mahogany pews other tablets were inlaid in the floor, commemorating the lives of engineers and ‘gentle ladies’ who had settled in Jamaica after Culloden. For Dick Kinkead, those memorials were the closest he got.
23
Herbsman Hustle
I was due to leave Kingston at first light for a journey to Black River, on the south coast. It was a relief to get out of the capital; the summer air had turned thundery and thick with car exhaust, and I could feel the pressure closing in. I had cadged a lift from Don Plunkett, who was driving down to visit relatives in the Black River area. In his mid-fifties, stocky and reserved, he spoke a thick patwa and carried himself with an air of mystery and importance. Big gold rings flashed on his fingers and mutton-chop sideburns enhanced the Johnny-Too-Bad appearance. He worked part-time as a driver for a Kingston tour operator. As we set off, Plunkett turned on the car radio and, adjusting his wraparound sunglasses, said, ‘No problem.’ No problem; when Jamaicans say that, invariably there is a problem.
We had no sooner left Kingston than an armed policeman stopped us. Roadside checks are frequent in Jamaica as they are an opportunity for the police to get a ‘let-off’ (bribe) for turning a blind eye to various offences. Having flagged us down, the sergeant asked me what was in my bag. I told him truthfully: a lavatory roll and a paperback copy of The Ballad of the Sad Café. He gave me a searching look. ‘You an author?’ When I said yes, he answered, ‘Make sure you tell the truth about Jamaica.’ In Plunkett’s view, the sergeant ‘kudda been more polite�
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Once out of Kingston, Ernest Ranglin’s beaming, Nelson Mandela-like face loomed down at us from billboards advertising cures for diabetes; other billboards cautioned against speeding: ‘DON’T BE IN A HURRY TO ENTER ETERNITY’. At Mandeville Plunkett stopped to enquire the way from an old man. ‘OK, Dads,’ he thanked him, adding, ‘Walk good.’ At dusk we had reached the outskirts of our destination in St Elizabeth parish. A sign - ‘WELCOME TO BLACK RIVER’ - was pointing into the ground.
Don Plunkett was full of enthusiasm: ‘Black River!’ he exclaimed. ‘Check it.’ I had read somewhere that Black River, capital of St Elizabeth, was a town surrounded by waterways and swampland and that crocodiles live in the river that had given the town its name. At first sight, Black River had the look and feel of a frontier outpost, with long-unused buildings and empty hotels serving no discernible purpose. It was easy to imagine that I was in Haiti, rather than Americanised Jamaica. ‘Scandal bags’ (black plastic grocery bags from supermarkets) of rubbish left dumped on street corners had long since bleached grey and gone dry as driftwood.
The town had begun life in the eighteenth century as a logwood warehouse. European - pre-eminently German - dye-makers had coveted the purple-red dye extract from logwood trees. The logwood timber would be floated upriver on lighters (flat-bottomed barges), then chipped, weighed and taken out to sea for shipment overseas. Black River, being at the head of the only navigable river in Jamaica, had been a good place for business; Mary Seacole ran a general store here in the 1840s before she left for London and the Crimea.
During the 1980s, government funds had poured into Black River for ‘tourism development’. Boat trips were organised for tourists to see the crocodiles upriver and ‘safari’ hotels were built. But tourists, finding Black River too isolated and too touched with Caribbean confusion and decay, preferred the all-inclusive resorts on the north coast. So the town took on the abandoned air it has today.
On the High Street behind St John’s Anglican church was a canteen or ‘cook-shop’ dingy with frayed postcards up on the wall of George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. I was here to talk to a retired schoolteacher, Albert Reynolds, resident in Black River since 1948. The canteen was run by one of his old pupils, Melford Headley. Though they were friends, Reynolds still pulled rank. Everyone in Black River addressed him as ‘Teacher’, even if they had not been taught by him.
Black River had begun to decline in the 1950s, said Reynolds, when artificial dyestuffs killed off the logwood business. Any logwood trees surviving today are chopped down to make fencing posts, or burned for charcoal. In the post-war years, as a boy, Reynolds had watched boatmen load the logwood planks at riverside wharves. The lighters, chained to each other nose to nose, were pulled out to sea by tugs. As well as logwood, the waiting ships would collect jute bagfuls of sugar. ‘It was heavy work and sometimes very dangerous,’ Reynolds recollected.
Melford Headley, who had been listening to his teacher, spoke of the day in 1962 when eight port-workers drowned while loading the HMS Escalante, a Royal Mail steamer, with sugar. The lighter capsized when the men rushed to the stern to avoid scalding water issuing from the Escalante. None of the men could swim. The Escalante, in Headley’s memory, was ‘the greatest tragedy in the history of Black River harbour’.
Back in the late 1940s, German sailors had begun to come ashore. Once off the logwood ships, they would get drunk and incoherent in the wharfside cook-shops and brothels, much to the annoyance of the Jamaican stevedores toiling thirsty in the timber depots. Few in port could understand a word they said. Melford Headley was not much inclined to like the Germans as Germany had been Britain’s enemy in the Second World War. ‘England! A great country!’ Headley exclaimed, and added quickly, ‘There are good things about America, too, but Jamaica doesn’t adopt them.’ Our conversation had touched on the American influence. Was it so bad? Easier access to college and university education in the United States has enabled many Jamaicans to prosper in business, sports, music and politics. Harry Belafonte, Grace Jones, Kool DJ Herc, Colin Powell, Louis Farrakhan - all are Americans of Jamaican heritage. Perhaps Headley exaggerated the ill effects, as perhaps I, in conversation with Jamaicans, had tended to exaggerate them too.
Like many Jamaicans of his generation, Headley did not (or did not want to) realise that Britain is now as much influenced by America as his own country is. When I told him that the London bus queue was mainly a thing of the past, Headley looked at me with incredulous eyes. ‘I cyaan’ believe it,’ he said. By presenting the view that the United States alone had ‘put paid’ to some sort of Jamaican golden age he was putting a rosy glow on what had actually been achieved by the British in Jamaica.
As I left the cook-shop, Headley looked at me with sadness in his eyes.
‘Is true what you say jus’ now about the bus queue?’ He shook his head gloomily. ‘I cyaan’ believe it,’ he said, ‘I jus’ cyaan’ believe it.’
I splashed cold water on my face, brushed my teeth and left in search of Spiderman, a fisherman whose name had been given to me by Don Plunkett. It was five o’clock in the morning and a bright quarter moon was still in the sky. Spiderman lived in a shanty by Black River’s disused logwood wharf. Once a week he punted upriver to check his fish traps laid amid the mangrove swamps.
Outside the shack two skinny dogs were disputing the rubbish. At my approach they trotted off in single file across a patch of wasteland. I rapped on the door and from inside came a noise of stirring, then a drowsy voice, ‘Soon come.’ Plunkett had forewarned Spiderman of my arrival. In a corner of the yard I could make out, in the half-light of dawn, orange-wire lobster pots prepared with halved coconut for bait. The moon sent little patterns of shadow over the door. The door opened and Spiderman looked at me: his face, mahogany-dark, had a piratical scar down one cheek. He beckoned me in.
The walls were smoke-blackened, with the remains of the previous night’s meal in a cauldron on the table in the centre of the room. The odour here was of ganja smoke and curried vegetables. Spiderman had East Indian blood. He sniffed constantly - muscles twitched round his eyes - and it was not long before I realised he was addicted to (or heavily abused) crack cocaine. He spoke to me later about ‘raw product’ and I knew enough to understand that he meant powdered cocaine. His son, Dwilly, eight, stared at me moisteyed from a corner of the room, a troubled-looking presence. He had been crying. After a breakfast of boiled perch we left the shack and went to Spiderman’s boat moored under the small iron bridge that spanned the old logwood depot. On his shoulder Spiderman was carrying a wooden pole with a hook at one end to pull in the fish traps; Dwilly, running and skipping by his side, was carrying a jerry can full of diesel fuel.
The boat, of fibreglass, was tied up at a point where Black River debouched into the sea. Floating detritus - leaves, plastic bottles - indicated the current’s slow pace there. I looked upriver, where daybreak had begun to spread like a slow, pink conflagration. We climbed on board the boat as children leapt and splashed about in the sludge-green shallows. Spiderman topped up the outboard’s engine with diesel; we were about to leave, when Spiderman called out ‘Delroy!’ and another small boy came running up to us from a scattering of huts. Delroy stopped abruptly when he saw me. He was Spiderman’s other son; his father commanded him, ‘Delroy! Get some Rizlas and my cigarettes.’ The boy ran back across the scrub, pursued by chickens.
Once Delroy had returned with the papers and tobacco, Spiderman fired the outboard and we headed off north towards the bauxite town of Maggotty. Further upstream the waters turned a curious deep brown-purple owing to the logwood chips that had fallen from the boats trafficking on the water, Spiderman said. Rio Cobana, the Spanish called it - Mahogany River.
So far we had seen no crocodiles, but they were lurking in the wild cane, said Spiderman, or in the mangroves, whose aerial roots stretched down towards us now like organ pipes. One hand on the tiller, in his other a lit spliff, Spiderman guided us upriver. Ganja, he explaine
d, is cultivated deep within the Black River wetland - one hundred square miles of marsh forest and jungle known as the Morass. The crocodiles there are at their most dangerous during the egg-laying and mating seasons. ‘When a crocodile get really vex,’ said Spiderman, ‘it make a bellowing noise - like a dog.’ As a child he used to jam sticks into the jaws of baby crocodiles, then watch them sink, fight their way back to the surface, sink again until they died.
Spiderman had placed his traps where the current was slowest, under vegetation along the banks or amid the roots of riverside trees. We stopped to hook in a couple using the pole. Nothing showed inside except a few small crabs dug into the coconut or chicken bait. We lowered the traps and moved on.
Bright flowers rotated like tiny wheels on the river’s surface. Black River was now a soft, unnatural green. ‘We’re in the heart of the Morass,’ announced Spiderman. The landscape, with its vast, aquatic distances, suggested Florida’s Everglades or a South American mangrove wetland, with long-legged wading birds standing on the banks motionless as garden statuary. It was impossible to pass through these mangrove cathedrals - archways of great beauty and serenity - without feeling enchanted.
Spiderman pointed out to me a shape like a black log on the river. As we passed, it dropped below the surface in a wreath of bubbles. Sometimes crocodiles jostle ferociously over chicken scraps that Spiderman throws them for sport. At least 200 crocodiles inhabit the Morass but by midday most of them will have crawled off into the mangroves to be out of the sun’s glare. One of them was lumbering out of the shallows now, and making for the riverbank on its short, hooked legs.