It was as though at the very end of his life he had found the role he had been working towards since the beginning. He was the black spokesman of the century, offering not the gross semi-mystical redemption of the politician of the islands, but something higher and more universal, something which had elements of historical inevitability: a little like the view he had offered me in his article on my books in the Russian magazine in 1960.
In his new role he began to make African pilgrimages. In the 1920s and 1930s a number of educated people of Lebrun’s generation had joined the Back-to-Africa movement. As a revolutionary he had disapproved; he had thought the movement sentimental and escapist. He acknowledged that, but he said the world had changed.
He went to Africa as a famous black man. He was welcomed by the leaders; his reputation began to feed on itself. He was said to be advising. He went to all kinds of tyrannies; to countries of murderous tribal wars; to collapsed economies. But when he came back he spoke on the television and radio as though he had been granted a vision of something more ideal, an Africa stripped of all that was incidental and passing: like the vision his New York supporters had been given years before, of latent pure revolution, in the West Indian islands.
He never tried to stay in the places he had visited. He always came back to his base, in England, Europe, Canada. He had learned his lesson from the West Indian islands in the 1950s and 1960s, and wished to threaten no one.
It was a kind of fulfilment for him. It was not to be begrudged. I thought his vision of Africa a harmless fantasy. Then I had a letter from a friend, a writer, in a French-African territory.
Paul wrote, “A funny thing. A black American poet passed through. A grand old man, a proper GOM. The USIS asked me to chair the meeting. But I didn’t want to see the old soak drink. And then your friend Lebrun came, on his own. Looking very grand and wise. The Brits did a little show for him. He began to lecture us about the way Africa had been politicized, in defiance of Marx. That was surprising to me. I thought the man was a communist. Then something happened. He couldn’t bear the sight of the young French coopérants, prancing about in Africa, as he thought, and he didn’t like the sight of the African women of the university with their white boy friends. He began to threaten everybody, in a quiet way. He went wild, and then he calmed down.”
The man with the New York friends, in the old days, and the New York manner, the hard-won political resolution. The old man wild in free Africa, expressing old hurt.
II
NOT LONG after, with no thoughts of Lebrun in my head, and simply to satisfy an old urge, I went myself to French-speaking West Africa for the first time.
And there the French language developed a whole new set of associations for me.
The earliest association the language had had for me—as a child in Trinidad, and not long after I had come to Port of Spain—had been with prisoners escaping in open boats from the prison colony on Devil’s Island off French Guiana. Sometimes their boats drifted on to Trinidad. They were allowed to stay for three days, I believe. They were photographed and interviewed by the Trinidad Guardian and the Evening News; the local people gave food and water and other gifts; and then they were sent on their way again.
At about the same time there was my first-year study of French at Queen’s Royal College. Queen’s Royal was a famous island college. To go there from an intermediate school was not only to make a big academic jump, but also to be more grown up. The study of French was like part of the excitement and elegance of the place.
A lot of what I felt about the French language was given me by my teacher. He was a young man, but with the neatness and formality of someone older. Before he sat down at the master’s table he always greeted the class: “Good morning, boys.” The handkerchief he took out to pat his forehead and mouth and neck on a hot day always remained folded. He came from a well known black family. They were professional, cultured people. That represented a considerable effort, in our colonial setting: there were not many like them.
This teacher loved the French language and French ways, and I heard that he and other members of his family used to spend time in Martinique, the French West Indian island to the north. (This would have been before the war; during the war the French islands were Vichy and out of bounds.) They went for the language, the foreignness, the stylishness, the cafés where you could ask the waiter for pen and paper and write letters at your table. In Trinidad (where the restaurants were Chinese and rough and disreputable-feeling, with tables in separate cubicles) we didn’t have these metropolitan touches. They also went for the racial freedom. I heard it said by many people that in Martinique and Guadeloupe a black man of culture was treated as an equal.
All of this was associated with the language. I transferred it even to the pre-war Siepmann’s French Reader that we used, with French texts on the left-hand pages and, on the right-hand pages, lovely full-page pen drawings of French scenes—streets, gardens, fields—by H. M. Brock.
These were among the ideas and French associations that I took to Martinique—nearly twenty years after Siepmann—when I was travelling for my first travel book. And in less than a week all the stored fantasy connected with the French language, from that early time, fell away. I found a little island that seemed to have been scraped clean of its original vegetation (Trinidad had large tracts of primal forest in the northern hills, and primal swamps), scraped clean and cropped and cropped: small views from the narrow winding roads, but not cosy views, a little island showing its serf past, over-cultivated, socially and racially over-regulated, even obsessed, small, constricted, pressing down on everyone, unconscious cruelty in everyone’s speech. This was a place you wanted to get away from.
My French teacher’s pre-war holidays in Martinique spoke now less of the attractions of the island than of the hardness of the world at that time for black people.
IN THE country where I was in former French West Africa the people I got to know were expatriates. The Africans were in their own country and lived their own lives. The advertisements of the rich city were in French and the traffic signs on the highways suggested France; but the Africans also had their own language, their own families, clans, ethnies, religious practices, their own totems and household gods, their own instinctive reverences. You could meet Africans and talk about the economy and the presidential succession; but afterwards they could retreat to areas of the spirit where you couldn’t follow them.
It was curiously exciting, the thought of that complete and very old other life out there. But for friendship, for dinner companions, for people with whom you drove out to the beach on Sundays, you depended on the expatriates. They were mainly French and Americans. There were also some French West Indian women, in their thirties or forties, from Martinique and Guadeloupe. These women had gone from their islands to Paris. There they had formed the African connections that had brought them here. Now for a variety of reasons they were unattached.
I had never thought that French West Indian women might be a type or a special group. Now I saw that they were different from the black or brown West Indian women I knew: their world-picture was different. The French West Indian women were set apart by the very language that had attracted my French teacher to Martinique and the French islands in the 1930s and 1940s. In those days my teacher had sought to escape not so much from the English language as from its hard racial associations. In the French language of Martinique he could find a whole new idea of himself.
Now it worked the other way. The French language restricted the people of Martinique and Guadeloupe to a special French-speaking world. It shut them off from the other islands and the rest of the continent. Their thoughts were of Paris; legally they were full citizens of France. But the Paris they went to was not the city of light. It was the black immigrant world of that city, which was like a constricted version of home; and from there some of the women went to Africa, following the attachments they had made in their version of Paris. Strange zigzag, in part reversi
ng the journey of the slavers of a hundred and fifty years before; now, though, not returning these women to what was theirs, but sending unprotected women of the New World to what was very far away and strange.
In West Africa I had got to know Phyllis. She was in her thirties or early forties, from Guadeloupe, brown rather than black, speaking a clear, delicate-sounding French. She had married an African in Paris. That marriage, like the marriage of many other antillaises to Africans, had broken down almost as soon as she had come to Africa with her husband. It was to the neighbouring country that she had come out. When her marriage had failed she had left that country and come to this one—the French language and the structure of French-speaking Africa had given her at least that room for manoeuvre. She had found a secretarial-librarian’s job in one of the embassies, and was more than able to look after herself.
She was part of the expatriate group I moved in. I saw her everywhere, at every dinner party, on every Sunday beach excursion (her hair straightened out by the sea, drying to salt on her freshly burnt skin), at every cultural occasion which the foreign embassies laid on, officially for the local African audience, but in reality for the expatriate community. She knew many people, was stylish and self-possessed, was outgoing and generous; but she appeared to have no partner or special friend.
Such energy in going out! It was disquieting, after a time. I felt she didn’t like going back to her flat, and this made me feel she didn’t like being in the Africa she had found herself in. I wondered whether she hadn’t thought of going back to Guadeloupe. I asked her one day. She said she hated the island; it was so small; the people were so small-minded, content with so little. The only other place she could think of—and it was the only other thing she had known—was the version of Paris she had lived in. And she didn’t want to go back to Paris. So she stayed where she was, and went out.
I discovered also that there was a certain fluidity to her character. She could adapt her behaviour to the company. She might appear to agree when people complained about African behaviour (accepting invitations to formal dinners and then not turning up, not coming to cultural evenings at the embassies). But then on another day, when we were alone, she might say, “Why should an African want to leave his house and come to a room and sit with all these foreigners and hear someone play the violin? If they would just think about it, they would see it is a foolish thing to ask people to do. The life that Africans have among themselves is so beautiful—they should be trying to find out about that, but they don’t want to know.”
She began to talk one day about Lebrun’s visit to French-speaking West Africa. He was someone we had in common. She thought of him as a fellow antillais. She was critical; she hadn’t committed herself until she felt she knew me. I had heard a lot from various people, but in an imprecise way, about his behaviour. I had heard about his rage.
Phyllis said, “Something happened here, in the capital, when he came. Something happened to him. He wasn’t happy here. He came with his daughter. She was almost white. Did you know that? She wasn’t like him physically. She was very big. She was like a wall, like that door. I think there was some unhappiness there. She lived with her mother. This trip with Lebrun was like a holiday for her.”
“How old was this daughter?”
“Twenty-four, twenty-five.”
Perhaps then her mother had been the calm, attractive woman, Polish or Czech, I had seen with Lebrun in the Maida Vale flat, the woman whose friends I had been sent to in New York later.
I said, “I believe I met her mother.”
“She left him. That’s the story here. She became bored with his communism, and she had the money. The people in the movement begged her to go back for the sake of the movement.”
“Was there somebody else?”
“Obviously there was somebody else. She is a woman. Lebrun went crazy.”
“The other man was black or white?”
“Lebrun didn’t know for a long time.”
“Which would he have minded more?”
“That was the thing. I don’t think Lebrun knew what would have hurt him more. He became very racial-minded when he was here. He insulted quite a few white people for no reason at all. There was something here he didn’t like. What was it? He never absolutely said. It’s a rich city. You see that. It’s not what you think of when you think of an African city. It’s not only rich, but elegant. I don’t think he actually liked that. All the cars, all the shops, all the auto-routes. I suppose it made him feel poor and unwanted. He made his objections political, or tried to. He talked about blacks selling out, about capitalism and imperialism. But do you know what I feel? I feel he expected people to be as excited about his white daughter as he was. He didn’t know Africans. They are strong people. And they are cruel. There was a lampoon in the university paper after he made that famous and shameful scene about French men with their black girl friends. A cartoon. The white daughter saying to the old black man in English, ‘Daddy, why don’t we leave these Negroes and go home?’
It was cruel and unfair. The students of the university here—a new university, with landscaped grounds and paved roads and red-brick halls of residence: most of the students the first in their families to get higher education, and all with government grants—the students here couldn’t possibly imagine the discouragements Lebrun had had to live through in the world outside.
And it was strange that Phyllis, in spite of her own history, her unhappy African marriage, her blank life in Africa, her dependence on expatriates for society, should have taken the African side in this judgement of Lebrun. But that was her way. She didn’t like it when visitors were at all supercilious about Africa; she liked it much less when the visitors were black, from the United States or the West Indies. It was as though she wished to make it clear that she was standing by her decision to come out to Africa.
One day I asked her about her marriage.
She said, “I used to go to this club in Paris. It was for blacks. A cellar, really. And there was this ugly little African fellow. And I mean little. He was small and black and soft, with a lot of gold. Gold watch, gold rings, gold pen. The gold used to reflect on his skin. He courted me hard. He said he loved my name, Phyllis. And my voice. Then he began to ask me to marry him. He said his family was very rich. They were like chiefs, he said. They had lots of land, lots of servants, lots of slaves.”
I said, “He said that about the slaves?”
“I thought he was lying. But I didn’t mind. I liked him for it, in fact. I thought he was just trying very hard to impress me, and I liked him for trying. This went on for some time. And then I agreed to marry him. Do you want to know why? Will you believe me? I agreed because I didn’t like him, because I found him repulsive, in fact. That ugly face and that soft body and that very smooth skin reflecting the gold. I thought it would be good for me, to marry a man I couldn’t possibly love. I felt I was making a deal with God, giving up love and pleasure. I felt I couldn’t go wrong. I used to talk to myself in my room. I used to say, ‘Phyllis, you have to forget about love and beauty. You have to forget your old ways. They haven’t got you anywhere, my girl. They have just got you to this room in Paris. You have to think about your life and future. That is where true happiness lies.’
“So I went to my little chief and said yes, and tried to find happiness in his happiness. The days afterwards in Paris were the best. I felt I had done the right thing, made my deal with God. And I was courted more than ever. After some months, when my little chief had finished his studies, we came out to Africa. And there it all crashed. He hadn’t told his family about his marriage, and they ignored me. Literally. They didn’t talk to me. They even in my presence began to talk to him about the need for him to get married.”
I said to Phyllis, “But how could you go so calmly to that country? Surely you knew it was a tyranny?”
“I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe what I read in the papers. I felt they were lying. I thought there was anot
her truth. You see the way we can tie ourselves up. And I was more concerned with my own adventure. I was nervous, you know. I was more frightened of Africa than any European woman would have been. I have known European women who have married Africans. It’s different for them. There’s the element of pleasure, excitement, even vanity. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and that’s that. For me it was different. I had staked too much on it. I had talked too much to myself.”
“Did you feel protected by your little chief?”
“In the beginning. He took me around everywhere with him. And he didn’t exaggerate. They had a lot of land, and they had a lot of servants and slaves. You didn’t buy the slaves. They were just there in the villages, certain groups, certain families. They were there to look after the other people. Everybody knew about them, so there was no question of them running away.
“Something happened not long after we arrived. We went to my little chief’s village. There was some ceremony of welcome, and at the end the little chief’s feet were washed in blood. Let me tell you about my feelings. I was excited and proud. I loved the ritual. I felt it was very old. I felt it came from the beginning of time. It wasn’t how I had thought of Africa when I was in Guadeloupe. I felt these rituals gave me a place in the world.
“Later I heard that a few days before that ceremony a child had been kidnapped from one of the slave villages. I put two and two together. You normally use animal blood in that foot-washing ritual, but the highest honour, the one that does most good to everybody, is when you do it with human blood. So look at that. Look at how far I had gone, so quickly. I was stunned, of course. But it didn’t do away with my feeling for the beauty of the ritual. My little chief had tried to impress me with his money. But it was the ritual side of his chief’s life that became more and more important to me.
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