The streets of Belmont are still full of Joe Skerritts. The walls are still scrawled with the easy threats and easy promises of Black Power. The streets are still full of “hustlers” and “scrunters,” words that glamourize and seem to give dispensation to those who beg and steal. Another Malik is possible. At every stage of his career he was supported by some kind of jargon and could refer his actions to some kind of revolutionary ideal.
Malik’s career proves how much of Black Power—away from its United States source—is jargon, how much a sentimental hoax. In a place like Trinidad, racial redemption is as irrelevant for the Negro as for everybody else. It obscures the problems of a small independent country with a lopsided economy, the problems of a fully “consumer” society that is yet technologically untrained and without the intellectual means to comprehend the deficiency. It perpetuates the negative, colonial politics of protest. It is, in the end, a deep corruption: a wish to be granted a dispensation from the pains of development, an almost religious conviction that oppression can be turned into an asset, race into money. While the dream of redemption lasts, Negroes will continue to exist only that someone might be their leader. Redemption requires a redeemer; and a redeemer, in these circumstances, cannot but end like the Emperor Jones: contemptuous of the people he leads, and no less a victim, seeking an illusory personal emancipation. In Trinidad, as in every black West Indian island, the too easily awakened sense of oppression and the theory of the enemy point to the desert of Haiti.
Malik, Jamal, Skerritt, Steve Yeates, Stanley Abbott, Benson: they seem purely contemporary, but they played out an old tragedy. If the tragedy of Joe Skerritt and Steve Yeates and Stanley Abbott is contained in O’Neill’s 1920 drama of the false redeemer, the tragedy of Gale Benson is contained in an African story of 1897 by Conrad, which curiously complements it: “An Outpost of Progress,” a story of the congruent corruptions of colonizer and colonized, which can also be read as a parable about simple people who think they can separate themselves from the crowd. Benson was as shallow and vain and parasitic as many middle-class dropouts of her time; she became as corrupt as her master; she was part of the corruption by which she was destroyed. And Malik’s wife was right. Benson was, more profoundly than Malik or Jamal, a fake. She took, on her journey away from home, the assumptions, however little acknowledged, not only of her class and race and the rich countries to which she belonged, but also of her ultimate security.
Some words from the Conrad story can serve as her epitaph; and as a comment on all those who helped to make Malik, and on those who continue to simplify the world and reduce other men—not only the Negro—to a cause, the people who substitute doctrine for knowledge and irritation for concern, the revolutionaries who visit centres of revolution with return air tickets, the hippies, the people who wish themselves on societies more fragile than their own, all those people who in the end do no more than celebrate their own security.
They were [Conrad wrote] two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion.
One of the last letters Benson received was from her father, Captain Leonard Plugge, who lived in California but continued to use writing paper headed with his Belgravia address. With this letter Captain Plugge sent a translation he had done—typed out on the Belgravia paper and photocopied—of some lines by Lamartine:
On these white pages, where my verses unfold,
May oft a souvenir, perchance your heart recall.
Your life also only pure white pages behold,
With one word, happiness, I would cover them all.
But the book of life is a volume all sublime,
That we cannot open, or close just at our time,
On the page where one loves, one would wish to linger,
Yet the page where one dies, hides beneath the finger.
March–July 1973
4
Postscript
ABBOTT was given twenty years for the murder of Joe Skerritt. Malik was sentenced to death by hanging. Both Malik and Abbott appealed against their sentences. And it was only after their appeals had been dismissed—and after the above account had been written—that the trial for the Gale Benson murder took place.
Five men were accused of the murder. But only two were actually tried: Abbott again, and an Indian motorcar salesman named Chadee, who had been hoping to sell twelve cars to Malik and had then become mixed up with the Malik group. Three of the accused couldn’t be tried. Steve Yeates was dead, drowned at Sans Souci, his body never recovered; Kidogo, Jamal’s American “co-worker,” was in the United States and couldn’t be found; Malik was already under sentence of death. So Malik was never tried for the murder of Benson. It was Abbott who had to go through the calvary of two murder trials.
The murder of Benson was decided on by both Malik and Jamal. It was at the time when the two men were working on one another and exciting one another and producing “reams of literature.” Jamal was writing his exalted, off-the-mark “nigger” nonsense about Malik; and Malik, in his novel, with this Jamal-given idea of his power (and no longer a man on the run, as in his previous fiction), was settling scores with the English middle class, turning the fascination of “Sir Harold” and “Lena Boyd-Richardson” into terror.
This was a literary murder, if ever there was one. Writing led both men there: for both of them, uneducated but clever, hustlers with the black cause always to hand, operating always among the converted or half-converted, writing had for too long been a public relations exercise, a form of applauded lie, fantasy. And in Arima it was a fantasy of power that led both men to contemplate, from their different standpoints, the act of murder. Jamal, when he understood that Trinidad wasn’t the United States, began to feel that in an island where the majority of the population was black he didn’t “look good” with a white woman at his side. And Benson, English and middle class, was just the victim Malik needed: his novel began to come to life.
Malik summoned Abbott from London. He sent a one-word letter: “Come.” And Abbott took the first flight out, travelling first to New York and then down to Trinidad. Malik and Steve Yeates met him at the airport and drove him the few miles to the Malik house in Christina Gardens in Arima. Malik’s wife was there; the Malik children were asleep. And there Abbott met Jamal for the first time. Later Abbott was taken across the road to the other house, the one Jamal and Benson were renting; it was where he was to stay. Abbott didn’t see Benson there; she had gone to Guyana to try to raise money for Jamal, but was going to be back in a few days. (Benson’s movements at this time are not absolutely clear. Her papers were destroyed the day she was killed.)
The four men—Abbott, Malik, Steve Yeates and Jamal—talked through the night. At one stage Abbott asked about The People’s Store. This was Malik’s first Black Power “commune” project in Trinidad; and Abbott had earlier in the year worked on it for a month, helping with the painting and the polishing. Abbott said he wanted to see what the place looked like, and the four men drove the twenty miles or so to Carenage, where the store was.
While they drove—in the Sunday-morning darkness—Malik said they now had the best working group in the universe, that they were going places, and were the chosen ones. Abbott thought that Malik was talking to impress Jamal. “With Jamal,” Abbott said, “he kept on with this mind-destroying talk.” And Abbott was disappointed by what he saw of the Carenage house, on which he and Yeates and others had worked so hard just a few months before. “I saw the house and saw thre
e men—Negroes—living there. I said the house was dirty and it appeared the men were neglected. It looked as though Michael had just placed these men there and neglected them.” They drove back to Arima and Christina Gardens. It was now light; and as though to make up for the Carenage disappointment, Malik showed Abbott the improvements he had made in the Arima house and yard.
The men at Carenage had looked neglected. And that was how Abbott soon began to feel. After the drama of the urgent summons to Trinidad, it seemed that there was nothing important for him to do. He was made to do various yard jobs. He cut bamboo grass for the goats Malik kept and made long journeys to get the hibiscus Malik said the goats needed; he mowed the lawn; he washed the car and the jeep; and he was sent out by Malik to work without payment on the farm that supplied a gallon of milk a day to the Malik family and commune. Abbott said he wanted to be released, to go and live at his mother’s. Malik refused.
It was Malik’s custom to wake Abbott up at seven in the morning. One morning—two days before Christmas, and less than a fortnight after he had arrived—Abbott saw blood on Malik’s mouth and beard. “I told him his mouth was bleeding. What had happened? He said they had killed a calf on the Lourenço farm that morning, and he was drinking blood. I felt scared and sick.” And there was soon another reason for fear. “I heard him speak to Hakim Jamal before the Christmas. He told him to send for somebody in the United States whom he, Jamal, could trust. At that point I walked off, because they were not talking to me. A couple days later this American man, Kidogo, arrived. I again beseeched Michael to allow me to go home, now that he had someone else around to help him. He told me Kidogo was not there for manual work. He told me Kidogo was a hired killer. He elaborated that Kidogo had killed police and all sorts in Boston in the United States, and for me to shut up from now on.”
Kidogo, as an American, didn’t need a visa. And in Christina Gardens he swanned around, a Bostonian among the natives, taking a lot of photographs with an Instamatic camera, helping with none of the household or menial chores, apparently saving himself for his special job. He bought a cutlass and fooled around with it in the yard; in his idleness he carved the letter K on the wooden haft.
If Abbott was afraid of Kidogo because he thought of Kidogo as a professional, there were people in the commune who were just as afraid of Abbott. One day, when Abbott was washing the jeep, Malik said to Chadee, the motorcar salesman, “That man is a psychopath.” Chadee never trusted Abbott after that. This was how, in the commune, Malik orchestrated fear and kept everyone in his retinue up to mark.
Benson returned from Guyana, and it was full house at the commune on Christmas Day. Abbott would have liked to visit his mother that day, but he wasn’t allowed to go. He stayed with the others; and in his statement afterwards he spoke of the Christmas gathering at Christina Gardens with an odd formality, an odd deference to the women of the two houses. “We all spent Christmas together, including Mrs. Michael, her children, and Jamal’s lady, Halé, who was an Englishwoman whom I met at Michael’s house.” There were two other English people: a man called Granger, and the woman called Simmonds, then in “total involvement” with Steve Yeates.
On December 31, Yeates, Simmonds’s “excellent lover,” found time to buy a six-inch file. And it must have been that file Abbott saw Kidogo using—that very day, or the day after—on the cutlass on whose haft he had carved the letter K. Kidogo’s cutlass was a “gilpin.” The blade of the gilpin widens at the end and curves backward to a sharp point, like a scimitar. Abbott saw Kidogo filing off “the gilpin part” of the cutlass and asked him why. Kidogo—a professional, but clearly inexperienced with cutlasses—said it didn’t “balance properly.”
In the evening there was a party: Old Year’s Night, and it was also Simmonds’s thirtieth birthday. They ate the calf that had been killed eight days before; and Simmonds enjoyed the “big feed.”
Malik had invited Chadee, the motorcar salesman, to the Old Year’s Night party. Chadee, a man of thirty, of a goodish Indian family but of no great personal attainments (he was also a part-time debt collector), thought that Malik was very rich. At their first meeting, a few months before, Malik had said he wanted to buy twelve new cars, and Chadee was hoping to do big business with Malik. Malik saw Chadee as a man with many interesting contacts, a possible commune recruit, and he had begun to involve Chadee in the commune’s social occasions. Two or three weeks before the calf feast, Chadee had been taken by Malik on a moonlight beach picnic.
And now, just after midday on New Year’s Day, Chadee came again to Christina Gardens. He called first on Jamal and Benson. Chadee had been introduced to them a month or so before by Malik; and Malik had told Chadee at the time that Jamal didn’t really like Benson, that Jamal didn’t think he looked “good” with a white woman in Trinidad. Chadee now wished Benson and Jamal a happy new year; and Benson, who apparently didn’t have too much to say to Chadee, then left the two men together. They sat out in the veranda. Jamal, still besotted by his own writing, read out passages from his autobiography to Chadee, in all the heat of the early tropical afternoon, and spoke of the book he was writing about Malik.
Later Chadee went across the road to Malik’s and wished Malik a happy new year. He saw Abbott. Abbott had been given permission to visit his mother that day, and Abbott asked Chadee to drive him there (Malik never lent his vehicles). Chadee agreed; and he and Abbott decided to take along Parmassar, an Indian boy who was glamoured by Malik and was a member of Malik’s group. They drove to Montrose Village, to Abbott’s mother’s house. Abbott’s mother was a retired schoolteacher, seventy-one years old. Abbott was proud of her and Chadee found her “a pleasant, charming person; she was articulate and expressed herself well.” The three men were given cake and ginger ale. They left at seven, and it was about half-past seven when they got back to Malik’s house in Christina Gardens. Malik asked Chadee to drive his car into the yard. When Chadee did so, the gate was closed. Malik then asked Chadee to hang around with the boys for a while, and Chadee hung around.
At a quarter to nine—and at this stage everything appears to follow a timetable—Malik told the men present that he wanted to talk to them privately in the servants’ quarters at the back of his house. One of Malik’s daughters was there, listening to records with a black girl who did occasional secretarial work for Malik. Malik told the two girls to go elsewhere. There were cushions on the floor; Malik asked the men to sit. Malik himself sat on a chair. Steve Yeates sat on a cushion on Malik’s right, Kidogo on a cushion on Malik’s left. Facing them, and sitting on cushions, were the boy Parmassar, Chadee and Abbott. Jamal was not there.
Malik said that Jamal was suffering from mental strain, that Benson was the cause of the strain, and that she had to be got rid of. Abbott said Malik could give her a plane ticket and let her go back where she came from. At this, Yeates—the man with the wound of England on his back—jumped up and said he wanted “something definite.” “Michael just sat stroking his beard,” Abbott said, “and said he wanted blood.” Blood was the only thing that could keep them together.
Kidogo said nothing. He just looked at Abbott and Abbott saw murder in Kidogo’s eyes, and Yeates’s, and Malik’s. Abbott didn’t look at Parmassar or at Chadee. And Chadee was sick with fear. Malik had told him that Abbott was a psychopath, and Chadee felt now that it was true. He didn’t believe what Abbott had said about giving Benson a plane ticket. He thought it was said to trap him into making a statement that would turn them all against him. So Chadee said nothing, and Malik outlined his plan.
In the morning they would dig a hole for Benson, by the manure heap at the dead end of the road. Steve Yeates would take Benson to the farm to get milk and keep her looking at the cows while the hole was being dug; Malik would take Jamal to some other place, take him out for an early-morning drive. The hole would have to be dug fast, in forty-five minutes. That was all that was said then by Malik: a hole was to be dug in a certain place, within a certain time, for a certain
purpose. Steve Yeates was to bring Benson to the hole; but nothing was said about how Benson was to be killed, or who was to kill her. And nobody asked. As for Chadee, he wasn’t to go home. He and the other Indian, the boy Parmassar, were to sleep in that room, on the cushions. And, Malik said, everybody should go to sleep early and get up before the sun. At ten o’clock the meeting was over.
Abbott left to go across the road to Jamal’s house, where he had his room. Malik reminded Abbott to lock the gate as he left the yard; and Chadee saw in that instruction about the gate a direct threat to himself, a further order to stay where he was. Malik, after this, got up and went to the main house. Chadee didn’t see what he could do. The boy Parmassar was with him; Steve Yeates was in the second bedroom of the servants’ quarters; Kidogo had the back bedroom in the main house, just across the patio from the servants’ quarters. Chadee lay down on the cushions next to Parmassar. His mind was “in a mess”; he had never heard “such a conversation” before. He prayed to God and hoped that in the morning the plan would be forgotten. Then his mind went blank and he fell asleep.
Across the road, in the house with Jamal and Benson, Abbott didn’t sleep. He was lying down in his clothes, thinking. He thought about his mother and what Malik might do to her. He remembered the looks Malik, Kidogo and Steve Yeates had given him earlier in the evening.
The Writer and the World: Essays Page 25