Like the other cruisers, we’re horrified that this little piece of undeveloped paradise may disappear—especially since the rumors also suggest that freeloading cruising boats will no longer be welcome in the bay. But communal self-interest aside, this really is a pristine piece of Grenada; to turf off the Grenadians and turn it into just another foreign-owned hotel and golf course with questionable benefit to the local economy would be a sad ending. Still, without any physical activity onshore indicating the start of a development, and with Grenada’s existing resorts not running at even close to capacity, the story had lacked believability on the cruisers’ grapevine. But here is Mr. Butters saying he expects to be booted off his land any day now—which is why he cut back on how much he planted this season, and why there’s not much for sale. “Dey offered me other land, but it’s no good for growin’ tings, not like dis.”
He’s had some press for this outrage and even found himself on TV: He may not own this piece of hillside, but he’s cleared it, improved it, and worked it for seventeen years and, around here, that makes it as good as his. His indignation, though, has mostly faded to resignation by now. When we say good-bye to trudge back to the dinghy, I’m doubtful he’ll be here the next time we come—even though the bulldozer is overgrown with foliage.
That night, I sauté a couple of cloves of garlic in olive oil, add Mr. Butters’s escarole and some thin slices of smoked sausage, toss it all with penne, and grate some good Parmesan on top. (I’ve managed to keep a hunk of Reggiano in the fridge since Florida, always finding a place to buy more—at great expense—before there’s nothing but rind left. It’s one of the few back-home ingredients I can’t bear to give up.) I chop the basil and sprinkle it on thick slices of the sun-ripened tomatoes, and christen the dinner Pasta and Salad from Mr. Butters’s Garden. I sure hope he’s there for more.
The path is ridiculously easy to find, of course, on our second trip, and Mr. Butters is still there, as laconic as last time. Which makes him positively chatty compared to his wife, who is cooking in one of the shacks today, deftly turning sizzling slices of eggplant in big blackened frying pans over a wood fire. She seems quite shy and, despite my practice with Dingis and Gennel, I’m not yet skilled enough in Grenadian English to understand the few words she offers up. When I lean in to ask her what she’s making, a shimmering wall of heat almost knocks me over. No wonder she’s not talking.
“Any news about the development?” Steve asks Mr. Butters.
“I have to leave, maybe tomorrow,” he says morosely.
When you shop at Mr. Butters’s, taking along a shopping list or planning to buy ingredients for a particular dish is a waste of time. After the delicious pasta, I’m looking forward to getting another big bunch of escarole. No luck. No escarole. The trick, then, is finding out what Mr. Butters does have, because he never volunteers the information. Instead, you play twenty questions, which is particularly difficult since we don’t really know what-all he grows. “Do you have any eggplants today?” “Are there ripe tomatoes?” “Is there lettuce?” “How about mangoes?” Eventually, after he says “no” to three or four items, the rules of the game permit me to ask if he has anything else that’s ready—at which point he might allow that, yes, there are cantaloupes or, yes, he has some squash.
One day, when I’ve reached the end of my questions almost empty-handed, he reveals that he has beets. After all that, he comes up with the one vegetable Steve won’t go near. I explain, but he insists I take a couple along anyway, without charge, for me. Another visit, he offers up what he calls a “marsh melon.” Its rind is exactly like a watermelon’s, but it’s perfectly round and when we cut it open back on the boat, the flesh is a dazzling lemon yellow. It’s absolutely gorgeous . . . and tastes just like watermelon. Steve and I can entirely demolish one of Mr. Butters’s watermelons, I’m embarrassed to admit, in a single afternoon. Whatever the color.
Unfortunately, one thing Mr. Butters never offers is breadfruit. We’ve been tantalized by them for weeks, as the bus whips by the pendulous trees on its way into St. George’s. As we rocket around every curve, the pebbly skinned, cantaloupe-sized green globes hang almost within reach. Just try to buy one.
Even though the trees are laden with them, there are none visible in the market. And there are none up the hill at the Marketing & National Import Board, the set-price (no bargaining allowed), government-owned business that sells “food crops” purchased from local farmers. None for sale on the streets. I decide to ask the market lady who’s been helping me learn my mangoes. “All gone,” she says. “Come in the morning.” It’s barely midday at this point.
Next trip, I try again. It’s about 9 A.M. “All gone,” she says. “Come in the early morning.” The odds of us getting from Receta to the market much earlier are kind of slim, no matter how badly I want to make my own breadfruit salad. Meanwhile, they continue to taunt us from every tree.
Breadfruit plants first came to the West Indies from the South Pacific in the late 1700s, carried by the infamous Captain William Bligh, the idea being that the fruit from these prolific trees would be used by the British to feed slaves cheaply on the sugar plantations. One story suggests that breadfruit was in fact responsible for the mutiny on the Bounty: When Bligh left Tahiti in 1789, he took more than 1,000 breadfruit plants on the ship with him. There was a water shortage on board, and after discovering the captain was using a secret supply of water on his precious breadfruit plants, the crew mutinied. In any event, Bligh and a second batch of plants reached St. Vincent after the mutiny, on another vessel, the Providence, in 1793. (A descendant of one of Bligh’s breadfruit trees still grows in the St. Vincent Botanic Gardens.) The British, however, were thwarted in their cheap-food scheme: The slaves refused to eat the foreign food, and it only achieved acceptance in the Caribbean years after emancipation.
Beneath the breadfruit’s tough, lime-green skin is a firm, white, starchy flesh, slightly porous and fibrous at the fruit’s very center. When boiled or roasted—it can’t be eaten raw—it’s reminiscent of soft, doughy, freshly baked white bread; hence, the name. After this initial cooking, it can be fried, stuffed, mashed, creamed, scalloped, turned into a salad, or eaten plain with butter. In fact, this filling, carbohydrate-laden fruit serves much the same culinary function here as white potatoes (called “Irish potatoes” in Grenada) do elsewhere.
Our persistence in the name of homemade breadfruit salad finally pays off: In the supermarket at nearby Grand Anse, a store not generally noted for a stellar selection of produce, I spot a bin of bright-green cannonballs one day. The problem is, every one of them is cannonball hard. Hefting one of the smallest (which means it’s still pretty large—a breadfruit can weigh up to ten pounds), I home in on a middle-aged shopper and ask her if it’s ripe. She shakes her head with some amusement. “When a breadfruit is ripe, it’s garbage. You want it while it’s green. And you don’t want one that’s soft.” She hands me back my completely solid offering and says it’s ready to cook that day. After they’re picked breadfruit apparently turn in short order to a smelly, unpleasant, mayonnaise-like mush inside, which is why there are so many still on the trees and so few brought each day to market. Dingis later tells me that the surest way to choose a good one is to have the market lady cut it open for you, so you can inspect the solidity of the inside before you buy.
Get out the cleaver: Cutting and coring the one I’ve bought requires serious muscle—kind of like dealing with a particularly ornery turnip, only one with twice the usual diameter to push the knife through. Islanders sometimes cook them whole, either in the oven or outdoors in the coals of a hot fire, and I’m beginning to see why. Once I’ve wrestled it into pot-friendly pieces, I boil it until it’s al dente, about fifteen to twenty minutes.
By the time it’s drained and cooled, I realize I’m confronting quite the pile of breadfruit. I cut half of it into cubes and mix it with chopped onion, celery, dill pickle relish, and a mayo dressing for the long-awaited breadfruit sal
ad. I have enough for an extended-family picnic and, when we taste it, we’d swear we are eating potato salad. The other half I panfry in oil with a little onion. We’d swear we are eating home fries—and I have enough to serve an entire diner during morning rush. Not that both aren’t delicious, but it’s an awful lot of fuss to end up eating potato salad and home-fried potatoes for days.
From now on, if we want breadfruit, we’ll get it in a restaurant—which isn’t exactly hard to do. Wedges of boiled or roasted breadfruit are usually part of “provision,” an assortment of root vegetables that accompanies traditional West Indian meals: boiled yam, sweet potato, dasheen, and taro, and sometimes boiled green plantain and pumpkin as well. The name “provision,” also referred to as “ground provisions,” is a perfect description for these abundant, readily available, nutritious, cheap, and easily prepared root vegetables, which have long provided sustenance in tough times. Eaten as part of provision, breadfruit is kind of like white bread: bland and inoffensive, albeit a useful vehicle for sopping up sauce and filling up hungry customers.
But wouldn’t you know it? Now that I’ve satisfied the urge to cook my own breadfruit, the next time I beach the dinghy by the derelict boats, walk the overgrown track, and play twenty questions, Mr. Butters volunteers: “I got breadfruit ready. How ’bout a nice breadfruit?”
The cruisers’ grapevine has more than Mr. Butters and a rumored hotel development to keep it humming these days. Carnival is around the corner, and there are decisions to be made.
“Carnival” comes from the Latin carne vale, which means “farewell to the flesh.” This annual revelry traditionally precedes Lent, and got its start in medieval Europe when the aristocracy held elaborate celebrations and gorged on meat before the fasting and restraint imposed by Lent began. It came to the Caribbean with the French in the seventeenth century, was picked up by their slaves, who began to mock their masters with their own pre-Lenten celebrations, and grew in exuberance from there.
But it’s early August—six months before or after Lent, depending on which way you look at it, and Grenada is getting ready to celebrate Carnival. The connection to Lenten denial has lost out here to practicality. The reason is Trinidad, a scant 75 miles to the south and home to the third largest Carnival in the world (behind Rio and New Orleans). Grenada simply couldn’t compete with Trinidad’s pre-Lenten bacchanal, and therefore switched it to summer, when it would coincide with the August anniversary of the Emancipation Act. Ironically, Grenadians only have themselves to blame: They were the ones who introduced Carnival to Trinidad, when Grenada’s French settlers moved there in the late eighteenth century, after Grenada was ceded to the British under the Treaty of Versailles.
For cruisers spending hurricane season in Grenada, the timing is perfect. By the beginning of August, posters in the shop windows in St. George’s have started trumpeting the various events. Though the preliminaries and semifinals of the music competitions begin weeks ahead, the heart of Carnival is three days, starting with Dimanche Gras—French for “Big Sunday”; through J’Ouvert—French for “daybreak”—on Monday morning, when revellers spread mud, oil, and greasepaint all over themselves and onlookers; through to Monday Night Mas, an “everybody dere” street party; through to the big Carnival finale on Tuesday.
Nimrod’s is full of chat about which band to join for Monday Night Mas.
“Carib deh best.” This, from a local who’s stopped in for a quick eighth of rum with Hugh.
“But they’re not taking any more people.” This, from Steve, who’s already tried to sign us up for the Carib band.
“How ’bout Heineken den?”
“Yeah, I saw the sign in Arnold John’s store. We get six beers apiece if we join that one, which sounds pretty good. Besides, it may be the only band left that will take us. And Ann doesn’t want to be left out.”
“Your wife nice. You don’ want vex she.”
Mas—pronounced “mahss”—is short for masquerade. The real mas bands have been at work for months, stitching sequins and feathers and sparkly bits of cloth into elaborate, sometimes overwhelmingly massive—and other times decidedly scanty—costumes that reflect the theme the band has chosen for this year. These mas bands are serious business, and they will strut their spectacular stuff first in a glittering pageant on Monday afternoon, and then in a parade through St. George’s for Carnival’s finale on Tuesday. We will be spectators for those parts; Monday night is when everybody gets to play mas and dance up and down the hills of St. George’s—no sequins, feathers, or practice required. The costume part is usually just a shirt or maybe a cap advertising the band’s sponsor.
And so about a week before the start of Carnival, Steve comes home from town toting two Heineken T-shirts and the fistful of beer tickets that came with them. “Terry and Nancy and some other people we know joined the Heineken band, too,” he tells me. To our surprise, though, we’ve discovered that not all cruisers are as determined as we are to get involved in island culture. Some aren’t only ignoring local events and music, they’re still eating much as they did back home. “They’ve got bigger freezers and more money than we have,” Steve says, “but I’ll bet they’re not having as much fun.”
The auditorium at the Grenada Trade Centre is packed with well-heeled locals; a government minister is in the front row, and the seats next to me are filled by middle-aged ladies in summery evening-out dresses who chat sedately before the show begins. But once the first performer takes the stage, all semblance of sobriety evaporates and the ladies turn raucous. Soon they’re slapping their thighs, elbowing each other, wiping tears from their faces, and generally killing themselves with laughter. I’m laughing too, though I have only the barest clue why.
This is a pre-Carnival calypso and soca concert headlined by the Mighty Sparrow, Grenadian by birth but long since adopted by Trinidadians as their own. Calypso, or kaiso as it’s called in Creole, is social and political commentary, oral history, and just plain bawdy mischief set to music. It has its roots in African culture, and was brought to the Caribbean with slavery. Soca, born in the seventies, is a “rhythmically enhanced” form of calypso with an intricate bass and percussion line; the name is a combination of soul and calypso. Much calypso these days is influenced by soca, and the division between the two musical forms is indistinct. Both, though, are lyrically driven—and when you’re unfamiliar with local culture, politics, and players, still having trouble interpreting basic conversations, it’s not likely you’re going to get the innuendoes of a ribald, government-critical calypso.
It isn’t until the third time through the chorus that I catch on that “Four Kings,” sung by the very popular Beast—a member of the Royal Grenada Police Force when he’s not savaging the government in song—is a double entendre; I must have been misled by the sedate ladies next to me, who unabashedly scream out, “Four King,” every time Beast cues the audience in. The ladies also seem partial to “Deh Monkey,” sung by a handsome young Grenadian named Randy Isaac: “My friend Deneva invite me home by she/She went and take out deh monkey from where it been/Put it under she dress . . .”
“Ah want to see deh monkey, Ah want to see deh monkey,” the ladies belt out enthusiastically when it comes time for the chorus.
Much to my glee, when Mighty Sparrow takes the stage after intermission, he addresses a question directly to one of our group, an I-know-more-than-you-do cruiser who had raised my anxiety level every time I was in his company from Florida, where we first bumped into him, south to the bottom of the box. Now, accompanied by his pale-skinned wife, both their faces tinged a shade of brilliant red, he’s getting it back. “Do you eat white meat?” Mighty Sparrow asks him for all the audience to hear. Unfortunately (from my point of view), he understands what he’s really being asked, and saves himself from further embarrassment by emphatically nodding yes. Mighty Sparrow makes things easy for outsiders by prefacing each of his calypsos with a little introduction, and he has just explained that the next number accuses
the men in the audience—mostly black, of course—of lying when they don’t admit to eating “white meat.” This is accompanied by a dangerous throaty chuckle, and the song that follows is performed in a rich, powerful voice with amazing range and color, accompanied by incredibly sexy moves. The Mighty Sparrow is no spring chicken: Sixty-three years old, he’s been performing for more than four decades. Some of his themes are serious—education, emancipation, a unified Caribbean—though there are also odes tonight to Billy Boy (his penis) and saltfish, the piscine term for white (and dark) meat. The audience knows all the numbers and sings right along.
As Carnival draws closer, we’re singing right along too.
“Dey have deh bellee, dey have deh bellee.” It issues from the speakers on the bus to town, from people walking along the street, and from the radio on Receta during the daily “Top 20 Carnival Countdown.” A contender this year in both the National Calypso Monarch and the National Soca Monarch competitions that are part of Carnival, “Deh Bellee” has caught fire. “But tell dem I am here to help deh country out/And to stop me dey will have to put a handcuff on me mouth/Dey have deh bellee, dey have deh bellee . . .” Getting more airplay even than “Monica Lewinsky” (“Go tell your uncle, go tell deh judge/go tell deh prosecutor dat you and I made love”), “Deh Bellee” even makes it into one of the prime minister’s speeches.
The week before Carnival just happens to include Fidel Castro’s first-ever state visit to Grenada, a major and controversial event, with most of the population still able to recall firsthand the Cuban presence and the U.S. invasion. We go to Tanteen, the parade grounds in St. George’s, where we are given little paper Grenadian and Cuban flags to wave as Prime Minister Keith Mitchell and Castro take the stage. Mitchell makes the formal introduction. Dr. Fidel Castro, he says, has shown during his forty years in power that he has “deh bellee.” If you have “deh bellee,” you have guts, stamina, nerve, cojones.
An Embarrassment of Mangoes Page 17