by Ian Thomson
The music, upbeat, welled from the scratchy vinyl as Lord Creator rubbed a hand slowly over his face. ‘Sometimes it grieve me to listen to my music,’ he said. ‘No matter how popular I became, I never got no money from it. I had praise - but no raise.’
During the 1960s Lord Creator cut a series of ballads (‘Someday’) and ska numbers (‘Don’t Stay Out Late’), as well as the beautiful duet with Norma Fraser, ‘We Will Be Lovers’, about a Guyanese girlfriend of his called Pinkie. ‘I doubt Pinkie knows she’s the subject of that song,’ Lord Creator said, adding, ‘assuming she’s still alive.’ The singer smiled with a rueful concern. ‘But right now I’m feelin’ tired, tired.’
‘I think,’ June Gay interrupted, ‘we should now say a prayer.’ Lord Creator and his wife compliantly bowed their heads as Mrs Pringle, a sympathetic Adventist presence, stood up and began, ‘Dear Lord, in your mercy, please help Mr Creator -’
‘Lord Creator,’ the singer corrected her.
‘ - Lord Creator to continue to stop drinking and also to regain his health. And, Lord, I beg you to remember Lord Creator’s songs, each and every one.’
She paused to glance at the singer. ‘He is coming tonight, Lord Creator. Are you ready if He comes tonight?’
The singer declared that he was ready; and, exuding a polite concern that we had enjoyed our visit, said to us, ‘Any time you want to come back, you’re most welcome.’
26
Life of Contradiction
My last days in Jamaica were spent in Falmouth, a coastal township in the north with a typically rich island history. (The headstones in the Jewish cemetery, strikingly, had been manufactured at a stonemason’s off the Mile End Road, London.) Following emancipation in 1838, Baptist freetowns had sprung up in the hills nearby, where the formerly enslaved were allowed to cultivate handkerchief plots of land. One of these was Barrett Town, named after Edward Barrett, great-grandfather of the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and a former Falmouth sugar baron. Everything the Barrett family owned and all that emancipation forced them to give up came from the Falmouth slave trade.
In its heyday, Falmouth rivalled Kingston as a slave port; it had its own newspaper, the Falmouth Post (1835-76), and could hold up to thirty slave ships in the harbour at any time. It had been named after the Cornish port in England, from where HM packet ships routinely took mails to Jamaica. In the 1760s, Falmouth had been laid out to a New York-style grid plan; it remains the only town in Jamaica where eighteenth-century planter architecture prevails. Work is currently under way to restore this to its original (or near-original) Georgian state.
The Falmouth Heritage Renewal Company responsible for the restoration is run by an energetic, Oklahoma-born former US marine named Jim Parrent. By training a marine archaeologist, he had acquired an abrasive, no-nonsense manner in the US Navy, and is now one of the most revered (possibly also most feared) foreigners in Falmouth: ‘Sir P’, the locals call him. He had lived in Jamaica for thirty years and was married to a Jamaican.
Stocky, with close-cropped red-blond hair, Parrent was waiting for me outside the Baptist manse on Market Street, a cut-stone Georgian building inhabited once (so it is believed) by the British abolitionist William Knibb. As we set off on our tour of Falmouth Parrent explained how his work had been wracked by controversy. His restoration of Georgian courthouses, wharves and warehouses had led locals to believe, understandably, that he was trying to resurrect an image in Falmouth of slavery. Parrent refutes the charge. If his heritage enthusiasms had been redolent of planter class nostalgia, that was in the minds of Jamaicans only. ‘Jamaicans can be very suspicious of outsiders,’ he judged. Dr Parrent was viewed more favourably in Falmouth when he opened a vocational training centre for youths who, being homeless or illiterate or just prone to violence, were not suited for gainful employment elsewhere.
The forty-odd trainee carpenters and masons in his care have become proficient in replicating Georgian sash windows, weatherboards and panelled doors; the restoration of Falmouth is a source of pride for them, apparently, even if Dr Parrent subjects them to what he calls a ‘tough love policy’ where laziness, unpunctuality, drinking or drug-taking are countered with blasts of US navy slang and threats of expulsion. In gratitude the trainees help to chase off (sometimes beat up) the local crack-heads who broke into the workshop fourteen times in 2008 alone, hoping to steal equipment.
At the sea end of Market Street we came to Barrett House. Built as a town house for Edward Barrett in 1779, it had wrought iron balconies of smart Regency design, originally imported from Philadelphia. Though vandals had long since taken the balconies away, two boys were guarding the property against further theft. ‘Peter! Claude!’ Dr Parrent called out to them. ‘Dr P!’ they shouted back. There was nothing much left of the property for them to guard. The mahogany panel doors and louvred shutters had also been pilfered. In fact, everything was gone - mahogany columns, railings - that could be put to use.
In addition to being vandalised, Barrett House had become a public lavatory. What was left of the drawing room reeked of waste. But then why should the locals have any interest in restoring this or any other property in Georgian Falmouth? Barrett House was not a part of their history; it was a part of slave-driver history. Only when I shut my eyes could I reconstruct this place in any of its Adam-style period splendour, with its cedar panelling and decorative doorways. The house had been built for a man blinded by greed for money, his slaves labouring from dawn to dusk till in the end they literally dropped dead. Barrett House: let it fall down.
On Edward Barrett’s plantation home of Cinnamon Hill outside Falmouth toiled 10,000 African slaves. They called him ‘Edward of Cinnamon Hill’. (His home would become the property of country and western singer Johnny Cash 200 years later.) The underside of the slave system that brought Barrett such wealth was the mixed blood of the family line. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s father - named Edward after his forebear - feared that the ‘sins’ of his family would work themselves out in later generations. In fact many Barretts were of mixed race or, to use the old planter rankings, were mustees, mustaphinos and octoroons. Elizabeth’s father, a fervid, controlling man, forbade any of his eleven children from marrying; the shame of ‘blood desertion’ weighed so heavy on Edward Barrett.
Elizabeth herself believed she had African blood and saw the Barrett family as somehow cursed by slavery. (‘Cursed we are from generation to generation.’) She was the only one of her siblings to be born in England, yet from an early age she would have heard tales of Jamaican slavery, with their flavour of legal wrangling, sexual scandal, rum and opium addiction, crop failure and other mishaps of the sugar life.
During her honeymoon in Italy in 1846 (kept a secret from Edward Barrett), Elizabeth completed the strange poem, ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’, based on stories told to her by a Jamaican-born cousin. Published in 1848 in the Boston anti-slavery journal The Liberty Bell, the poem is narrated by a runaway slave girl who has murdered her half-white child after being raped by white men. ‘I am not mad: I am black,’ she cries. Early manuscripts indicate that the poem, provisionally entitled ‘Mad and Black and Pilgrim’s Point’, was to have been written from the perspective of a black man. After the woman has buried her child, she reaches Pilgrim’s Point in New England.
In defiance of her family, Elizabeth was an abolitionist, who longed to be rid of ‘dreadful Jamaica’ and her legal status in England as a slaveholder. Her father loathed William Knibb and his army of Baptist preachers, whose testimonies had poisoned the slaves’ minds, he believed, inciting them to rebellion and violent crimes. The British may as well ‘hang weights to the sides of Jamaica and sink it into the sea’, Edward Barrett despaired, if the Emancipation Bill was passed.
It was passed, and on Emancipation Day in 1838 hundreds of freed slaves, young and old, rushed from their shacks on the Barrett estates to join ‘King Knibb’ in the victory celebrations in Falmouth. The Barrett family incurred enormous financial losses
, yet they still owned 31,000 acres of Jamaican land, along with an elegant town house in Wimpole Street in the Marylebone district of London (a residential area long popular with West Indian slave-owners). Every day until his death in 1857 - the year of the so-called ‘Indian Mutiny’ - Edward Barrett had gone to the City to arrange for cargoes of Jamaican sugar and rum to be ferried to London on the two slave ships still in his possession.
On the eve of my departure from Jamaica I went to a country house called Greenwood. Built in the early 1800s by relatives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, it stood on the ridge of a hill high above the sea near Falmouth. Inside, amid a jumble of books (Gibbon, Homer) and custom-made china was a fearsome saw-toothed ‘man-trap’ designed to catch runaway slaves. And, on the wall above the trap was a framed list of the British planter family’s less compliant slaves, including ‘Bob Trouble’.
At the rear of the house, a long veranda commanded giddy vistas of the ocean. The view was so extensive from up here that I could see the curve of the horizon. Perhaps forty miles of Jamaican coastline were in sight: at the sea’s edge was the long fringe of sand from where slaves had loaded sugar on to vessels bound for Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol; then a green ribbon of cane fields; and, behind these, hillsides dotted with the castle-like mansions of drug barons. I looked down at the beach far below me: from these heights, I imagined, the slave-owning British could be the privileged spectators of Jamaica’s physical beauty; they would not have to encounter its human wretchedness, only this endless stretch of sea and sand.
As I was contemplating the view, Bob Betton, the current owner, said to me, ‘Sometimes I think to myself that slavery can’t have been a good thing, but without slavery I wouldn’t be here now, in this house.’ His eye left me for a moment and fell on the turquoise expanse of ocean. Some Jamaicans have never got over the wounds of slavery, Betton went on. But why dwell on the past? Jamaicans are a proud people triumphantly risen above slavery. Betton, born to a poor black family in the Kingston ghetto, relished the irony of this life of his in a white slave-driver’s mansion. ‘How the tables have turned,’ he remarked.
In 1955, with his mother, Bob Betton had bought a house in Stoke Newington, north London, for £400. Marc Bolan (then Mark Feld) lived round the corner but, like many of the Jews in that part of London, the future pop star was reportedly not that friendly to the West Indians, though he later befriended the black American singer Gloria Jones. To belong, you must be included; to be included, you must be accepted, said Betton. In their semi-detached house on Norcott Road, he and his mother eked out the loneliest existence, banned from the whites-only pubs and clubs, feeling godforsaken.
‘Yes, English society was very, very hostile,’ recalled Betton, ‘and the hostility could come from even your neighbours.’ The majority of his neighbours were Orthodox Jews, for whom he was merely a shvartzer odd-job boy who could run errands for them on the Sabbath. Only homosexuals or Communists were interested in him, Betton claimed. So he became a Communist - not to feel so alone. In his Stoke Newington house virtually the only book was the Communist Manifesto, which Betton never managed to read. ‘I wasn’t a true left-winger, only a pretend true left-winger.’
In 1965 Betton’s father left Kingston to join his family in Stoke Newington. He had been making good money back home as a barman at the St Andrew’s Yacht Club and the (now defunct) Myrtle Bank Hotel. He was a Jamaican who knew his place in colonial society, and was deferential to the clubmen with their rum punches and sundowners. In London, however, no matter how hard he tried Betton’s father could not find a job. He ended up as a parkkeeper in Bromley, tending the bowling green. Remembering this, Bob Betton gazed out over the veranda and shook his head sadly. ‘England was awful for my father, awful.’
All this happened a long time ago, but, as Betton said, it was the story of his life. In 1974, after twenty years ‘in foreign’, he returned to Jamaica accompanied by his wife Ann, a New Zealander whom he had met in London one night at the Flamingo jazz club. Betton felt he had to go back. How can you ever be severed from that place you first called home? With money made in England from property development, he bought Greenwood great house from an Englishman who had wintered there with his dogs and servants. In 1980, having re-shingled the roof and removed the linoleum from the floors, he opened up Greenwood as a tourist attraction.
Betton was determined to cut a dash as a returnee, so he drove round Falmouth in his Triumph Stag like a Grand Prix contestant - fast - so that the Greenwood gravel sprayed up under his tyres. He wanted the locals to see how he had mastered the old-fashioned art of idleness. To that end, he employed a black female ‘museum guide’ to stand by the bar dressed as an eighteenth-century servant, a Disneyland emblem of the enslaved Antilles, of the ‘Africa Trade’.
A part of Betton, I understood, admired Britain’s colonial endeavour in Jamaica, even if Britain had left some damaging prejudices regarding race and colour. ‘You Caucasians are much more on the ball with things,’ Betton said in an unguarded moment. ‘I mean, we Jamaicans just don’t rate each other.’ In Jamaica it was accepted that whatever came from abroad - especially from white abroad - was superior. ‘And that’s part of our problem,’ Betton explained. ‘That’s why we’ve got a white man as a copper!’ (He was referring to DCP Mark Shields.)
As we spoke, the evening sun flooded Greenwood with its yellow light, turning Betton’s white shirt to a rose tint. ‘All this,’ he moved his hand in a slow, languorous motion along the ocean rim, ‘all this is mine.’
His wife, Ann Betton, had been waiting for us in the bar. ‘Would you like a drink?’ She looked at me expectantly. ‘We do a very good planter punch.’ I asked for a glass of soda. No tourists had showed up so far and the ‘museum guide’ in her white blouse and longflowing Gone With the Wind skirt stood at a discreet distance from us. The Bettons had been married for forty years; she, a white New Zealander; he, a black Jamaican. Yet they were united by membership of the British Commonwealth. The Commonwealth had enabled them to share a culture and a heritage, brought them closer together.
‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ Bob said to Ann; Ann smiled thinly, shrugged and said, ‘I suppose so.’
Darkness was falling now, and Bob gave a sudden, uncertain laugh as he recalled the day in the summer of 1953 when he had stood under a hot sun on Hagley Park Road in Kingston, waiting for the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain to pass him in her motorcade. In his hand he held a little Union Jack flag, one of thousands distributed to the crowd by the colonial administration. At that time, no one thought Jamaica would separate from Britain. By a coincidence, Bob’s future wife was also standing on a roadside with a Union Jack flag, waiting for the Queen that coronation year of 1953.
‘Only I was in New Zealand,’ she said to Bob, deadpan, ‘not Jamaica.’
‘I know, darling, but the Commonwealth - it joined us together across time and space,’ Bob insisted sweetly. He was now in grand good humour after a third planter punch.
Yet the Commonwealth, that increasingly ramshackle totem of former imperial glory, now has only the British Crown as its unifying element, and serves merely to sustain a mirage of British importance abroad. The Commonwealth’s governing principle - that people get along better than governments - was a grandiose Anglocentric concept doomed to fail. Few people in Britain today have reason to admire the Commonwealth (the Commonwealth Institute on London’s Kensington High Street was recently closed down). Benefits no longer flow like milk and honey from the mother country to its dependencies; the old loyalties have changed, and Jamaica’s three million are left sheltering under Britannia’s threadbare mantle.
In Greenwood, though, amid the Georgian antiques, Bob and Ann Betton could mourn for an idea of Empire they had known in childhood. The old Jamaica of order and snobbery, of deference to hierarchy and status (those most British of reflexes) still existed for Bob Betton, but only here, in this plantation great house fantasy.
Two sharp beeps from
a klaxon indicated that a coach full of tourists had arrived. Ann Betton stood, smiling welcomingly, as she ushered them in. From their accents I guessed they were North American. Ann, behind the bar counter again, greeted her first customer, a big, sunburned man in shorts, who asked for a Diet Coke.
‘Boy, this is some planter house,’ another tourist said, looking back over his shoulder as he started on the tour. The serving girl in her plantation costume moved off with the group, pausing here and there to touch a termite-eaten book of poems by Barrett Browning or raise a hand to emphasise the significance of the ‘man-trap’. I watched the group disappear into the garden through fragile-leafed jacaranda trees and mossy stone benches. Soon it would be quite dark.
As I took my leave of the Bettons, I walked away from Greenwood, and a solitary hawk wheeled overhead. From the direction of Barrett Town came a bonfire whiff of burning collie weed. I kept on walking towards Falmouth in the gathering dusk. A single coconut tree silhouetted against the sky looked like an advertisement for paradise. By the time I got to Falmouth the town was receding fast into the night. Dr Parrent’s trainee craftsman, Peter, was waiting for me by the Baptist manse, where I was to spend my last night in Jamaica. A hardness about his eyes suggested a difficult home life (or no home life at all).
He unlocked the bolts and padlocks fitted to the huge doors against the crack-heads. As he did so he glanced menacingly down the street, taking in the shuttered front of the Chinese store and the East Indian cook-shop with its dark interior. I shook his hand, went in and chained the doors from the inside, then climbed the wooden staircase to my room. In the box-like quarters was a bunk-bed and, next to that, a dresser, with a small sink in one corner. The kitchen in the adjacent room contained a midget stove with a couple of back burners. I looked out of the window; the light of a street lamp, falling in a yellow swatch across the façade of the Chinese store, fizzed and crackled. Peter was sitting on the kerb opposite, just beyond the lamp’s circle of light. He looked up at me as I stepped back into the shadows.