I turned away from it, feeling disappointed. I don’t know that the people who heard him were all that moved either. I followed him throughout the campaign but he never strayed far from his ambiguous position. It seemed to me that it was not so much what he was saying, it was what he was not saying. So although Sonnyboy donned his green T-shirt with its forceful slogan, The Power of the Hard Wuck, and went with Manick through the district from house to house, reminding them of the adventure of self-development, of the need for sacred spaces, and the delight in finding names for native plants and the birds, something was missing. Manick didn’t have the fire to inspire them with anything more than his sense of efficiency and, some felt, the idea that he was ready to go beyond the narrow vision expressed by Mr. Bissoon. He didn’t have the fire. The campaign changed from dream to the practical, as if he too was not allowing himself to cut loose. I attended meeting after meeting, waiting to see him cut loose, who I saw was the patient careful batsman who didn’t want to get out. I still did not believe he had revealed himself to us. I couldn’t help him.
Sonnyboy himself looked spent. It was as if the fun was gone. The game, I thought, was at an end. The Hard Wuck Party had become hard work. The adventure, moved by the spirit of Sonnyboy, was over. Manick, however, had made a showing good enough to encourage the optimism of the leader of the Hard Wuck Party.
“Brother,” the Hard Wuck leader said to Sonnyboy, “we are getting there. We are overcoming tribalism with ideas, with mission. The country is advancing, eh, comrade?”
When Sonnyboy did not answer immediately, the leader of the Hard Wuck Party prompted, “Eh, comrade?”
“Yes, Chief,” Sonnyboy answered. “We advancing. Slowly.”
“And that was when I know I was bigger and more real than these highfalutin intellectual people,” Sonnyboy told me. For him, the Hard Wuck Party experience had reached its end.
The Coming of Electricity and
Clayton Blondell
On his home front, the car Sonnyboy had bought to run
as a taxi was a memory, the business was in need of
his attention, his grandmother had aged rapidly and began to carry on conversations with her deceased husband, Horace Apparicio, who was a soldier in World War Two, fighting in Egypt. They had been talking of going to Tobago when he returned and having a second honeymoon. They would take the island ferry. She would purchase the tickets and book the hotel, so she wanted Sweetie-Mary to get information on the times the ferry left Port of Spain for Tobago, its cost, and details of the hotel where she and Horace intended to spend their honeymoon.
She had taken to going on long walks by herself and sometimes people had to bring her home since she forgot not only the place where she was going or coming from, but what day or month or year it was. Just before Christmas that year, Sonnyboy returned from the Cunaripo market to find Sweetie-Mary frantic. His grandmother had not returned from one of her walks. After hours of searching the town, they found her sitting in the shade of an umbrella on a bench on the bank overlooking the old railway station. She was there she said to meet her husband, Horace Apparicio, who was returning from the Second World War on the last train. Sonnyboy and Sweetie-Mary suggested to her that it would be more comfortable for her to wait for him at home.
They brought her back home and sat her on the rocking chair on the veranda, where she was to remain waiting for Horace in her best clothes, singing the World War Two calypso composed and sung by Lord Executor:
Run your run, Kaiser Wilhelm, run your run
Hear what Chamberlain say, Cheer, boy, cheer
With Charity and humanity we go conquer Germany
At times she seemed to catch herself, aware that something had gone wrong in the world, but what, she couldn’t for all her trying work out.
Then she stopped singing and sat there half-asleep waiting, sometimes on her face a look of perplexity, for an event her mind had misplaced, now and again getting up and going to look through the window to investigate a sound only she had heard, sometimes calling Sweetie-Mary or Sonnyboy because your eyes are better than mine to tell her exactly what was going on in the world outside, because she couldn’t make out everything clearly. One day she thought she heard a noise outside. “Yes, Ma,” they said. Yes. But what they heard was not her imagination, it was the long screaming wail of whistles and the abrupt thunder of an invasion, and when they looked through the window, it was to see a convoy of trucks and tractors and cranes, with tanned and muscled men, with power drills to tunnel into the roads and backhoes to scoop earth out the holes in which to set the tall balata poles. The electricity promised by the PM had arrived. Excited by this vision, Sonnyboy hurried to the center of the town, wanting to be there among the people when the trucks and equipment went by. And it was a good thing he did that because he was there to see the caravan toting electricity poles and equipment for the road works, and, following it, merchants, sellers of cloth, pots and pans, electric irons, television sets and stereo systems and behind them the religious people, fastidiously groomed Pentecostal preachers in three-piece suits and silk shirts with a flatbed truck bearing huge tents, Adventists, Hindu pundits, Muslim imams slim in long gowns, Hare Krishna in saffron robes, Shouter Baptist mothers with enormous bottoms and loose dresses, exquisite in red and white, Shango leaders with the slow powerful walk of weightlifters and the shuffle of stickfighters, all the elements that were to take the town into modernity. And when he figured that this new invasion was over, there appeared the big event, the great show, Clayton Blondell, at the head of a group of women and men variously dressed in army jackets, in dashikis, some with caps, others with dreadlocks, others in turbans, Clayton himself bareheaded, shirt collar open, a pendant in the shape of Africa on a chain on his chest, a silver bracelet on his left wrist, the tapestry of healed cuts and bruises that gave his tanned face the toughened look of a street fighter, a gold crown on a front tooth that made his smile sharper, more menacing, with the movements that in another fella might have suggested the exhilaration of dance, in him the loose pugnacity of a swagger, something deliberate and rehearsed, planting his feet down with the authority of a gunfighter who had just tethered his horse, his hands sliding across his hips to touch his thighs as if he wanted to make sure his guns were there in the event that he needed to draw, so that fellars talking about him later said he rode into town. He rode in, evoking the horse, the gunman, the woman to be saved, the bad man to fight. But if was fight he wanted, he had come in the wrong time.
The whole town had come out and I was there sitting around a table on the balcony of the recreation club with Sonnyboy, who had left his own place to come out on the main road to see what was happening.
Five, four years ago any one of us would have offered to fight Clayton immediately, just for the swagger of his walk. Then this town belonged to us, or so we thought, and a stranger entering had to know how to walk into it. Now there was nobody to stop anybody.
I saw the genesis of this abandonment of responsibility to the town as connected to our questing for Black Power.
Our novelist John de John wrote in one of his occasional newspaper articles:
In asking for Power we would discover we were indicating that we didn’t have any; in articulating our need for power we had emphasized our powerlessness, so when in an earlier time we felt the town was our own, and therefore to be defended by us, now we couldn’t defend a place we had come to believe we did not own. We had surrendered what we thought we never had. And yet, who among us would not have in that time cried Black Power!?
So we watched this man come in uninterrupted, with such arrogance that Constable Stephen Aguillera in his white tunic and white helmet, keeping duty at the junction, felt a challenge to his resolve not to arrest anyone and although this man didn’t do any act that could be called unlawful, he went over to him to see what misdemeanor he could at least caution him on. He noted the pushcarts, their contents: incense, oils, sandals, belts, sculptures of lions, of Haile Se
lassie, Marcus Garvey, of Ethiopia; books, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, the sixth and seventh Book of Moses, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Destruction of Black Civilization, Signs and Symbols of Primitive Man, books by Ouspenksy and Madame Blavatsky. He picked up book after book.
“You have any banned books here? Any seditious material?” he asked, trying to get him to respond in a hostile way to give him the opening he sought. But the man was careful enough in his answers, and Constable Aguillera walked away without finding any reason to arrest him, leaving him free to walk with his own brand of cockiness onto the veranda of the club where we were drinking and saunter past us with barely a nod, on his way to the bar. So that a little later when Sonnyboy went to the bar, I was not surprised to hear his voice rise in rebuke:
“You walk in here like a hero. Nobody doesn’t know you. And you talking louder than everybody else.”
The noises grew louder. Fearing that Sonnyboy would lose his cool, I went to the bar to see what was taking place. Sonnyboy was getting ready to confront him. I took my drink and encouraged Sonnyboy to return with me to our seat on the veranda. He was still fuming. A little later, the stranger whose name we did not yet know, on his way out, stopped at our table and introduced himself. His name was Clayton Blondell.
“Brother,” he said to Sonnyboy with what I thought was false gentleness, “Brother, I am sorry if I offended you, but there is no cause for you to insult me.”
And turning to me he said, “You see what is happening? The brother is reprimanding me and he doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know anything about me. All I was trying to do was make a little conversation. My brother, we have to be careful with each other. My brother, you see what they have done to us? We have lost respect for one another. And why? We were kings, man.”
“Brother?” he said, addressing Sonnyboy. “Brother, can I sit down?” Disarmed, Sonnyboy said nothing and Clayton sat down and began to speak.
To me, it was as if this man had swaggered in directly from the late sixties or early seventies, the declamatory language, the missionary sense of self-righteousness, the sense of injury, the colossal self-confidence deriving from a certainty of being in the right, the very attitude that we had lost, had left behind, this man had retained. The very period of our history that we had let slip by, this man had decided to resurrect. It was as if he had been asleep and had awakened with potency and zeal without realizing what time of the century it was. Later, as he spoke, we learned that he had been in the USA in the late sixties, he had listened to Ron Karenga, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and he had the books of Marcus Garvey. He was a sculptor and artisan. He had returned to Trinidad just after Black Power and had thrown in his lot with the artists and craftspeople housed in booths along Independence Square by the name The Drag Brothers. He was leader of a commune that had come to establish itself on an old cocoa estate in Cascadu.
It was clear that he had much to say. As he spoke, I heard the tone of impatience, of accusation, the words, images, Pharaoh, Nile, Egypt, Black. Once or twice I tried to interrupt, to ask for clarification, to get him to focus on some particular; but he refused to give way.
“Listen, brother,” I said. “I too have a point of view.”
He had heard that I was a calypsonian and he had some advice for me. Here we were, he said, a black people forced to rebel against a black government in order for the society to extend dignity and justice to Blackpeople. We have to get out of Babylon, to flee.
“Listen, brother,” I said. “It is more complex than that.”
“Complex for you, but not complex for any other people. We are the most complex people on the planet.”
“Brother, I am just trying to understand you.”
“You do not understand?” He turned to the gathering (for by now he had attracted a crowd): “What have I been saying that any of you do not understand? You don’t understand? OK, then I will explain. Let me explain.” And he was off again: “I am saying,” he said without taking breath, “I am saying that you have surrendered to being less than anybody in this land.”
I could see I was being maneuvered into the position of opponent for his purposes. He had surmised that I had some weight among the men in that gathering and in besting me in an argument he would establish himself. At first I was annoyed and bemused and tried to fight it, to speak; but then recognizing that I was simply a prop for his performance, I let him speak. And as he spoke, batting aside interruptions, I detected no new message, but if his objective was to become the center of focus, he achieved it.
“And what about you?” I asked, after he had attacked government, the men, the schools, everybody.
“Me? Don’t mix me up with you-all. I am African.”
Africa. He was an African.
“Brother, we have to reclaim ourselves as African people, lay claim to our ethnic space. Everybody came here as different ethnic groupings and everyone was allowed his religion, his festivals, except the African and this is what we must reclaim.”
These were words I myself might have used, but hearing them from him, there was a taint of patronage, of being superior to us. I wanted to oppose him. That is what he evoked in me: the desire to oppose him. But there were men who immediately sang his praises and identified with his sentiments and were ready to support his arguments.
Thinking later about what had made him such an arresting figure, I concluded that it was not only because he did not allow anyone else to speak, not certainly because we believed in the simplicity of his accusations, but because we had nothing to say, or, rather, we had been saying nothing. Clayton was filling a space. He had arrived at the moment of our greatest weakness and uncertainty.
I saw that I had to be careful.
In the months to come, Clayton settled into the town, and soon he became a regular at Sonnyboy’s and I was forced to defend myself against his wisdom, his certainties, his abuse, his insults, his Africa. On more than one occasion I had to restrain myself from offering to fight him. He attacked my calypsos as too tame, too concerned with having fun. “How can you have fun when there is so much to be done? How can you dance when your people are at the bottom of the ladder and slipping down further every day?” He attacked our involvement in Carnival as a frivolity we could not afford. “Look at your homes, your families, your children’s education. Where are we going?”
“Tell me,” I asked him in one of our exchanges, “how do you return to being African in this place with so many mixtures?”
“Return? You have never not been African.”
“Look, we can’t give up the future for a past.”
“And you can’t have a future without a past.”
The idea of needing to come together to build a nation, he laughed at.
“You alone. Look at the others. Here every creed and race see ’bout itself.”
Around me people buzzed with agreement and admiration at his wisdom, his courage and forthrightness, for saying things they all thought but he alone was courageous to say. I was trapped. So I watched him grow, his power, his truth, his forthrightness, his honesty, his simplicities, his shifting, his songs about our failure, our shame. I listened to him present his Africa, the sphinx, the pharaohs, the pyramids, the kings and queens of Egypt, its sculptures, its peoples.
And what did I have to show?
The steelband, the Carnival, the calypso that I had been so fond of invoking as symbols of our achievement in this new world began to seem thin, small, light before the monuments of his Africa.
He was commissioned to construct, John de John told me, a representation of the sphinx monument to display in Port of Spain at the Emancipation Day celebrations, to correct the impression that we were a people without history.
“But which people do not have history?” I asked.
“The colonizers did a good job on you,” he replied.
In all these exchanges, I felt myself losing ground and the listeners looking at me with new suspicion. How could I questi
on Africa? How could I deny Africa as dream of potency to people who had been robbed of Africa? I shut my mouth. But it was strange that now when at last we had the opportunity to claim Africa we would want to do so at the expense of all we had created here in the Caribbean. In the arguments I had with Clayton, Sonnyboy was nodding less and less to the points I made and listening with greater interest to what Clayton was presenting. One day when I went to Sonnyboy’s place, I found Sweetie-Mary and him dressed in the most splendid and, I imagine, expensive African clothes. And here was the irony: the man who had influenced me to give up my costume of native was now in a costume of his own. There was a new sign on the place:
Our Ital Shop
“Our Ital shop,” I said, reading the sign.
“King,” Sonnyboy said, sadly, detecting the query in my tone. “It is a pity that a man like you is not one of us.”
In the months to come I began to see another Sonnyboy. It was as if he had joined a priestly order. That year he decided against taking part in Carnival. Because the Blackman can’t waste money, the Blackman waste too much time already, the Blackman watch other people grow rich. The Blackman had to stop this Carnival mentality. The Blackman had to leave Carnival for those who could afford it and see about his family. All of it said with the passionate righteousness of a convert. I couldn’t help feeling that this enthusiastic rejection of all he had been associated with before was not only his way of signaling his elevation to a higher status but his way of punishing the community that had refused to acknowledge him the way he felt it should. He had new friends, strict, zealous converts like himself, who exhibited a new energy for progress. Sonnyboy had joined the existing order. He had fitted in with people who Gilda and Dog couldn’t take on and with whom Sweetie-Mary didn’t have much in common.
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