Sugar in the Blood

by Andrea Stuart

  Cricket was particularly close to my family’s heart. In the 1940s my mother’s eldest sister, Muriel, would court and then marry a young man who would become a cricketing legend. Born on 17 January 1926, Clyde Leopold Walcott came from a background not dissimilar to that of my aunt. His father was a solid member of the middle class, an engineer with the Barbados Advocate, who lived in the comfort of a home built for a plantation manager. A big bruiser of a brown-skinned man, he became one of the “three Ws,” along with Frank Worrell and Everton Weekes, who have been described by one cricket aficionado as “possibly the greatest array of talent in the middle order of any batting eleven in history.” Clyde Walcott would go on to play his part in the West Indies’ historic triumph on English soil in 1950, when he scored 168 not out. This, the West Indies’ first longed-for and deliciously sweet victory over their colonial masters, was a turning point in the island’s self-esteem. By beating the English literally “at their own game,” the West Indians never felt quite so diminished again. Their conquest not only asserted their equality and independence, it demonstrated their skill, panache and tenacity.

  In September 1955 Hurricane Janet ravaged the island. In contrast to the great storms of the past, however, modern-day meteorological science meant the islanders had at least been forewarned. They took the normal precautions: covering glass, boarding up doors, storing water. But everyone believed that Janet would hit the north of the island, and instead it hit the south and east, with Christ Church—where Plumgrove was located—getting a particular battering. The winds began blowing up in the morning and soon built into a category three hurricane. With its two-feet-thick walls, the family plantation was designed to withstand a tempest, so my grandmother and grandfather, my mother and four of her siblings were initially relatively sanguine, and took shelter upstairs in the living room. My mother remembered being mesmerized by the sight of a cup and saucer lifted by the wind and moving several feet from the dresser to the table, before settling together there unbroken.

  As the hurricane gathered strength it was clear that sheltering upstairs was ill-advised; the wind had found its way under the roof. So the family fled downstairs to the basement, where they were joined by many of the tenants on the land, who knew that their little wooden chattel houses had no hope of surviving such a storm, as well as a menagerie of animals including sheep and goats. There this ill-assorted group stayed for several hours, occasionally nipping upstairs during lulls in the storm to replenish supplies from the kitchen and check out the damage. My mother remembers the mood being tense: “People were frightened. They were anxious about their friends and families, and worried that their homes wouldn’t be there when it was all over.” They barely spoke and instead watched in amazement as sheet after sheet of galvanized steel, ripped by the wind from people’s houses, “flew through the air like birds.”

  By nightfall it was all over; much of the plantation roof had been blown off, but the section over the bedrooms had held. The full extent of the damage became clear with the dawn: trees were flattened, furniture destroyed, debris was everywhere. But the Ashby family and their fellow refugees had been lucky; some of the estate’s other tenants had taken shelter in a new church on Lodge Road, assuming that it would be sturdily built, but once the ferocity of the wind got going, the structure collapsed and several were crushed to death inside.

  By the time Hurricane Janet had passed over the island, it had killed thirty-eight people and made over 20,000 homeless. That same day Janet slammed the neighbouring island of St. Lucia with such ferocity that fifteen- to twenty-foot waves were reported to have engulfed the coast. By the time it hit Mexico and blew through Belize and back through the Grenadines it was a category five hurricane, responsible for millions of pounds’ worth of damage and the deaths of over 800 people. In tribute to its terrible power, the name “Janet” was retired, never to be used for a hurricane again. At a remembrance service held in Barbados fifty-five years later, one speaker stated that while Janet was “not the worst thing that ever happened to the island, it was the most terrible thing that had occurred in living memory.”

  This memorable storm was followed the next year by a memorable meeting, that of my mother and father. He first saw her walking through Bridgetown. When asked today what he thought then, he says jovially: “Pretty good!” But friends say he was smitten. Ferreting around his social circle, he finally found out who she was and discovered that they had mutual friends, who, pressured by my father, invited the pair to a “little get-together.” Theirs was primarily an epistolary courtship because my father, Kenneth, was doing medical research on the neighbouring island of St. Kitts. As was the tradition in the conservative Barbados of the 1950s, my father also paid assiduous court to my mother’s parents. His charm offensive worked on my granny Muriel but was less successful with my grandfather Vere, who referred to him rather dismissively as “the doctor boy.” No doubt Vere’s resistance was in part because my mother was his favourite child and no man would have been good enough for her. But it is also possible that my rather conventional grandfather would have preferred her to marry one of the brown-skinned boys from their own social circle rather than this dark-skinned interloper.

  Despite my grandpa’s reservations, Kenneth and Barbara married in 1958. It was in many ways a good match for both of them. My father got a bright beauty from an old plantation family; and my mother got one of the “coming men,” that dynamic minority of black Barbadians who had seized newly available educational opportunities to take a prominent place in the professions. The event itself was low-key. Much to the amusement of his friends, my father was green and sweating throughout the wedding ceremony; apparently the clergyman, a real old-style blood and thunder merchant, had taken him aside before the service and given him a stern lecture about the responsibilities and commitments of married life. The couple honeymooned in Barbados, at Sam Lord’s Castle, the hotel which had once been the estate of one of the island’s most notorious buccaneers. Afterwards, Kenneth returned to work at the university campus in Jamaica and awaited his new bride, as one friend said, “in a terrible state of nerves.” Several weeks later my mother packed up her existence, boarded a small boat and set off on a week-long sea journey, to start life with a man whom she admits she “didn’t know very well.”

  The life of the newly-weds was centred around the Jamaican campus of the University College of the West Indies, the first university in the Caribbean. Before it had been established in 1948, those hoping to do any further academic studies were compelled, as my father had been, to leave their islands. It represented a huge step forward for the Caribbean sense of independence and its importance continued to grow as, one by one, the sugar islands’ local governments, including that of Barbados, decided to extend the benefits of free secondary education to all children. These developments had far-reaching repercussions: now colour, poverty or social status was no longer a bar to receiving a higher education. Although social class still was—and remains—a strong factor in educational achievement, it had now become possible for a bright child from humble origins to “break through.”

  In 1952, Kenneth joined the Department of Medicine as a Medical Registrar, and steadily worked his way up through the academic ranks from lecturer to reader to professor and then Dean of the Medical School. He was part of a coterie of academics who were absorbed in this pioneering project of bringing higher education to a region that previously had none. They were an idealistic and heterogeneous group drawn from across the world: our neighbourhood included Indians, Africans, Europeans and Jews, as well as every possible variety of West Indian. There was an unspoken utopianism underpinning the whole enterprise. The 1960s were beckoning and everyone (or almost everyone) hoped that our little united nations was the world of the future.

  My mother and father settled into university housing at no. 2 College Common, where, in 1962, I was born, followed by my brother, Steven, eighteen months later. These early years together were interrupted by two successiv
e research fellowships to Harvard University, when our family moved into an apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and where I first saw snow. On our return to Jamaica, we moved a few doors down to no. 7 College Common, where I spent most of my childhood and where, in 1968, my sister, Lynda, was born. Set in two acres of grounds, no. 7 was a bungalow-style house of a type common in the Caribbean. There was a veranda at the front that led to open-plan living and dining areas, with the family’s sleeping quarters to the left, and to the right were a kitchen, laundry room and maid’s room. Domestic help was ubiquitous in the Caribbean of my childhood, and our family was supported by a regiment of nannies, maids and gardeners, many of whom were in flight from labouring on the land.

  The miracle of no. 7 was in the land. The area directly in front of the house was big enough to play a game of rounders or cricket on, while the rest of the grounds were planted with an abundance of exotic fruit trees, which the previous tenant, an agriculturalist, had gathered from across the tropics. There was a Bombay mango tree in the front of the house and a Julie mango tree in the back. There were three types of oranges, and varieties of fruit trees common in the Caribbean: a Jamaican cherry which made a delicious ice; a guinnep tree, whose round green skin covered a sweet slippery interior; and an ackee tree, whose fruit is poisonous unless it is picked at precisely the right time, and which is the main ingredient in Jamaica’s signature dish, ackee and salt fish. We even had a cashew nut tree from Africa and an oatahite apple tree, which bore purple pear-shaped fruit with cool white flesh and was indigenous to the South Pacific. The sheer vegetal exuberance of our garden made it a magnet for the neighbourhood’s children, who congregated there, climbing the trees and scavenging for fruit. Sheltered from the poverty and exploitation of our forefathers, we were a generation of black children who could blithely enjoy the wonders of a Caribbean childhood.

  Every summer we returned to Barbados to spend time with our extended family. As a young girl I was particularly impressed by the austere habits of my paternal grandfather, Egbert. In his later years, he ate one meal a day, went to church every evening, and whenever I saw him, no matter how hot the weather, he was dressed in a sombre grey three-piece suit, with belt, braces and hat. After his divorce, Egbert had remained in the family home, and we used to visit him there, in a hot wooden house perched alongside a main road. It was impeccably clean and somewhat crowded with the conventional bric-a-brac of a Caribbean home of that period: religious iconography, porcelain figurines, crystal vases, chiming clocks.

  My paternal grandmother, Louise, meanwhile had become a hotelier, owning and running the Blue Caribbean, an establishment that fronted onto the sea and was situated on the corner of St. Lawrence Gap, now one of the busiest tourist strips on the island. Our family stayed there when we visited, and as small children my brother, sister and I would play in the sea and, to her annoyance, trail sand across the balcony where guests would sit to enjoy the view. In her latter years she would share her life with an elderly gay Englishman called Robin, who helped her to run the hotel and while away the evening hours. I remember her as a rather exquisite creature, an ebony-skinned woman who favoured large hooped earrings and colourful kaftans.

  We also spent time with my maternal family at Plumgrove, which was still a working plantation farmed by working-class Barbadians. Our father would drive our rental car up the bumpy rocky track known as “The Gap” past the large standpipe from which water was collected and in which nutmeg-skinned boys bathed naked. At the road’s end, past the tenants’ chattel houses, was the large two-storey stone house. It was dominated by an imposing central staircase so steep that, long after I could walk, I would climb up it on hands and knees. This led to a living-cum-dining area that stretched almost the entire length of the house. My grandfather Vere was gone—he had died a year before my birth—but my grandmother Muriel was still there holding court, sitting me on her lap while she read magazines or shelled peas. The three upstairs bedrooms overlooked the cane fields at the back of the house, while downstairs two great double doors opened onto a dark cool space which included a few more bedrooms and vast storage areas. It was down here, I remember hearing with awe, that my mother sheltered alongside her family, the field workers and the livestock, as the worst hurricane of the last century raged around them.

  Immediately surrounding the house was a meticulously cultivated garden, dominated by large tamarind and frangipani trees whose flowers and leaves almost obscured the house; these were offset by hibiscus, pines and bougainvillea that added an irresistible scent to the air. To the west there was a small grotto of mysterious origin, with two little arches standing amidst the plants; in front of the house were the exotic trees that provided fruit like custard apples and sour-sops. To the north stood a covered well, the subject of many tales among us children: that if you threw a penny into it your wish would come true; that it was so deep that you could not hear the stone splash when it finally hit the water; that a slave had once drowned in it and the spirit now haunted the property.

  On the east of the house, near the laundry lines, were the remnants of a drip stone, whose provenance was so ancient it dates the property back to the seventeenth century. The drip stone, an invention of the Amerindians who once populated the region, purified water, filtering rainfall through its two-tiered edifice of coral stone and collecting it in an impervious marble bowl at its base. The dripstone continued its work even when I was a child, but the bowl to collect the fresh water had been moved to feed the pigs, so it leaked incessantly, its clear sweet water evaporating in the bright sunshine.

  Some days we would venture beyond this magic circle, to the pond draped in vines adjacent to the house or to the wood with its mahogany and fustic trees, where the ground was covered in a tangle of weeds which grew around their swollen ebony roots. At other times we rampaged through the cane fields, never waiting long before somebody would cut us a “finger” of cane so that we could suck the sweetness from its fibrous strands, just as my mother had done so many years before. At night we sat around the house, as the cane shivered in the breeze and the ubiquitous cane rats scratched on the roof.

  21

  The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

  —DEREK WALCOTT

  IN 1966, WHEN I was four years old, my parents returned to Barbados to celebrate the island’s independence. For many of the islanders, sovereignty had seemed a very long time coming. Beyond their shores, they heard the rhetoric of the American Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and they had been inspired by the radical politics of Black Panther Stokely Carmichael and the towering Malcolm X. So when two other notable British West Indian islands, Jamaica and Trinidad, declared their own independence in 1963, it seemed the time had truly come. Two years later, in late 1965, Barbados’s Democratic Labour Party, led by my father’s old friend, the war hero Errol Barrow, was ready to present to Parliament a draft Constitution calling for independence. This was rubber-stamped by the British government the following year, and plans for the celebrations began.

  Alongside a flood of other ecstatic Barbadians who believed that independence was “the road to destiny,” my parents flew back to the island. On 29 November 1966, a crowd of about 50,000 people gathered at the Garrison Savannah, the vast green situated on the outskirts of the capital, Bridgetown, where races are held, cricket is played and concerts are enjoyed. At midnight, they watched as the Governor General and the Prime Minister lowered the Union Jack that had flown over Barbados for more than 300 years. Then the new blue and gold flag of an independent Barbados was raised in its place. Afterwards my mother in her black and white sequined dress danced the night away in my father’s arms, to the music of Diana Ross and the Supremes.

  Perhaps it had been “the road to destiny” after all, since Barbados was one of the few ex-colonies that fared better after independence than it had done before. This was
partly to do with the rise of the tourist industry. The business of entertaining visitors had begun in a gentle way in the early twentieth century, when the island began to attract holidaymakers from Britain and from North and South America. According to the historian F. A. Hoyos, “Some of these tourists [visited] Barbados during the winter months, staying at the island’s hotels which were soon to enter a boom period. Others, notably the South Americans, came from Brazil on the Lamport and Holt ships, which were accustomed to stop at the island for essential supplies like coal and water.” They would stay for longer periods, renting “bay houses,” chiefly in the district known as Worthing, which had taken its name from the English seaside town.

  Barbados quickly learned the art of catering to visitors, and hotels like the Crane and the Marine began appearing along its golden coastline. By 1912, the Colonial Secretary was able to claim that “the colony owes much of its increasing prosperity to the visitors who stay in the island.” The new wave of tourists was attracted by the idyllic vistas—the panoramic blue skies, the sparkling seas and the pale, sun-warmed sand—that had bewitched the original planters, and had kept luring pirates, dreamers and entrepreneurs for centuries. There was a rapid increase in the development of the tourist industry after the Second World War, particularly with the invention of the jetliner in the 1950s. And by the 1970s, tourism had overtaken sugar as the island’s most valuable industry. This transition from agricultural outpost of empire to independent luxury resort would soon begin to alter the lives of the islanders just as comprehensively as the “white gold” once had.