A Way in the World

5. On the Run

I

AT OUR lunch in his South Kensington club in 1959 Foster Morris had spoken of Lebrun, the Trinidadian-Panamanian communist of the 1930s, as one of the most dangerous men around Butler, the oil strike leader.

That was news to me. Lebrun wasn’t one of the names I had heard about. But then I didn’t know much about the strike. I was five when it happened; it was some years before I could begin to understand about it.

Leb run’s name I got to know only in 1947, when I was in the sixth form at Queen’s Royal College, a full ten years after the strike. And then it was a name connected with a book he had written. A name — like Owen Rutter and Foster Morris — with a local connection, and with the glamour of print.

This book of Lebrun’s was on a bottom shelf of our sixth-form library: two or three rows of glass-cased shelves above a cupboard. The shelves to the left held the school’s small lending stock: popular books (Sabatini, Sapper, John Buchan, the William books) expensively re-bound and gilt-stamped (in England, we were told: that was where the dies were) with the college arms and motto: unyielding, shiny leather spines providing an elegant front for cheap paper furred and worn with handling, with the print itself a quarter rubbed off.

Lebrun’s book was on a shelf next to that, below textbooks and dictionaries. The purple-brown binding had grown so dark that the name on the spine was almost illegible.

The book was about Spanish-American revolutionaries before Bolívar. I never read it, and knew no one who had. Thirty years later people were to write about it in radical journals as one of the first books of the Caribbean revolution; but people doing research in university libraries, where everything is accessible, sometimes see progressions that didn’t exist at the time. There would have been very few copies of Lebrun’s book in Trinidad. There were none in the shops or the Central Library. The only copy I knew about was on the library shelf at school, and it was just there, unread, hardly known, its dark spine illegible.

Still, it was a book, published in London. It gave an aura to the man. It suggested a life of unusual texture. I asked a boy a year ahead of me — he had won a scholarship and was going to Cambridge — about Lebrun.

He said, “Oh, he’s a revolutionary. He’s on the run somewhere in the United States.”

That was dramatic, the exotic black man, Trinidadian-Panamanian, on the run. But I didn’t believe it. I could understand, from the films, how a John Garfield character could be on the run. But I didn’t understand it about Lebrun. I suppose — I was fifteen — I didn’t believe in his character as a revolutionary; didn’t believe such a character was possible for a black man from Trinidad and Panama; and didn’t see how such a man could be thought dangerous enough to be hunted down.

Eight years later I saw him for the first time. He was among the speakers on the bandstand in Woodford Square, outside the Red House, part of the new politics that had come to the island while I had been in England. Almost twenty years had passed since the Butler strike, and Lebrun was now in his fifties, slender, fine-featured. Words poured fluently out of him. He spoke in complete sentences.

The working people of the West Indies, he said, had been engaged for centuries in the mass production of sugar. This meant that they were among the earliest industrial workers in the world: the fact of slavery shouldn’t be allowed to conceal this truth. So the people of the West Indies were readier than most for revolution. He had waited for twenty-five years for this moment. He had never lost hope that the moment would come, that the people could be marshalled for political action.

He talked — I heard him more than once during the few weeks I spent in Trinidad at that time — as though the whole movement was an expression of his will and his ideas, as though he had brought it into being.

Yet he was not one of the people trying to get into the new politics. He had no local base. He was not one of the men to whom power came. After the elections he disappeared, as he had disappeared after the Butler oilfield strike.

That was all that I knew of Lebrun when Foster Morris talked of him three years later. For both of us he was a man from the past. What we didn’t know was that Lebrun — the sexual taunter in the oil-lamp shadows of the little Trinidad country house in 1937, as yet unknown as writer or agitator, the man to whom Foster Morris as a London writer might have shown patronage — was going to be another person to whom Foster Morris was going to say goodbye.

In extreme old age Lebrun fetched up in England, and in a world greatly changed, where black men were an important subject, he was “discovered” as one of the prophets of black revolution, a man whose name didn’t appear in the history books, but who for years had worked patiently, had been behind the liberation movements of Africa and the Caribbean. So a kind of fulfilment came to him. It was very much the idea of himself he had had, and had promoted, for much of his life. It had anchored him, had been a kind of livelihood, that idea. But it had also got him into trouble, with the very people whose cause he thought he served.

ONCE HE was declared to be an undesirable immigrant by the chief minister of one of the smaller West Indian islands. In the long run this didn’t do Lebrun’s reputation any harm, but at the time — this was at the start of decolonization, and this chief minister was one of the lesser men of the region — it was a humiliation: the old black revolutionary barred from the revolution he claimed as his own.

Not long after, I went to this island. I sent in my name to the chief minister’s office — as a courtesy, and an insurance against trouble. To my surprise, the chief minister asked me to have lunch with him at Government House. He wanted to talk about Lebrun.

He said, “Let him come here and try to walk the streets.”

Street-corner talk in Government House. Lebrun wasn’t at all a street-corner man, but as a revolutionary — even in the Butler days — he had always thought that the strength and roughness of the crowd were things he might call on. Now they were being used against him.

The new politics had thrown up people like the chief minister in almost every territory. Most had started as trade-union organizers; and many of them, like Butler in Trinidad, had a religious side.

This man now lived in Government House. It was a modest house, but it was the best in the small island. The uniformed sentry, the local abstract paintings, the heavy locally made furniture — it was all there, the inherited pomp, as in other territories. But the chief minister was already bored. He had already got to the limit of what he could do with power. Power had already begun to press him down into himself, and he now lived very simply, as though it was a needless strain to do otherwise. He didn’t make many speeches now. He seldom went out.

The person closest to him was a middle-aged black woman called Miss Dith, a woman of the people, someone you wouldn’t notice on the street. She was said to be his spiritual adviser, his housekeeper, his cook, his protection against poison.

For the lunch Miss Dith had prepared shredded saltfish in a tomato sauce, sliced fried plantains, rice. You couldn’t get simpler food on the island. She brought out the dishes herself. The food was cold. The tablecloth was stained.

Once the man who was now chief minister would have been flattered by Lebrun’s attentions. He would have loved the big, technical-sounding words Lebrun would have used to describe the simple movement he had got going. He would have loved Lebrun’s introductions to more prominent leaders in other islands. But Lebrun had other ideas about what power might be used for, and the chief minister wanted no part of that. The chief minister didn’t want to undo the world he knew; he didn’t want to lose touch with the power he had risen to.

He said of Lebrun, “The man want to take you over.”

Lebrun was an impresario of revolution. That was the role he had fallen into; it had become his livelihood. He had no base of his own, no popular following. He always had to attach himself to other leaders, simpler people more directly in touch with the simple people who had given them power, and with a simpler idea of that power.

It had always been like that. It had been like that for Lebrun even in the days of Butler. Butler hadn’t achieved power — he had emerged in colonial days, when such power was not to be had. But in his own eyes Butler had achieved something that wasn’t far short of that power: he had achieved the headmanship or chieftaincy of his particular group. And then, after the excitement of the strike and the marches and the Charlie King affair, he had become bored. He was interned during the war. That might have suited him. His political activity afterwards never amounted to much. He became a member of the legislative council, but he preferred to spend his time in England, far away from his followers — doing no one knew what, perhaps doing nothing, perhaps just letting the days pass. Leadership and action no longer had any meaning for him. All that mattered — as it mattered to the chief minister who had roughed up Lebrun — was his chieftaincy, his position; that was what he was keen to protect.

So that contradiction between the complicated ideas of Lebrun and the simple politics he encouraged was always there; and couldn’t but be apparent to him. Foster Morris said he was the most dangerous man around Butler. And I suppose what he meant was that in another situation, at another time, Butler or someone like him might want to do more than win a chieftaincy, might want to turn the world upside down, and Lebrun would have been there to show him how.

In the meantime he was a man still on the run, though often now from old associates; never living with the consequences of what he encouraged as a revolutionary. Others had to endure that: like certain middle-class brown people in that island where Miss Dith read the cards and kept in touch with the spirits and cooked for the chief minister. There were dozens of ways in which these brown people could be tormented. And they were; not as part of any programme of action on the chief minister’s part, but simply because this tormenting of people was an aspect of chieftaincy.

“THE MAN want to take you over,” the chief minister had said over the stained tablecloth in Government House. And I knew what he meant, because Lebrun had tried to do something like that to me. This was at the time of my break with Foster Morris.

He wrote an article about my books in one of the Russian “thick magazines.” He sent me the magazine, together with a translation (or the original) of his article, and a card. He gave a London address; from this I assumed he was still “on the run.”

The article filled many pages of the thick magazine. No one had ever written at such length about my books. To tell the truth, I didn’t think the books I had so far published deserved it. I thought of myself as still a beginner whose big books were to come. I knew that there were people who disapproved of my comedy, some of them because they felt I was letting my side down, and I thought that Lebrun in this Russian magazine would be severe with me.

He wasn’t. His method was original. He ignored the comedy, over which I had taken so much trouble — such care in the mounting of so many scenes, such judgement in the matter of language and tone. He looked through all of that to the material itself — the people, the background — and he considered that with complete seriousness. He said I was writing about people impoverished in every way, people on whom history had played a cruel trick. My characters thought they were free men, in charge of their own destinies; they weren’t; the colonial setting mocked the delusions of the characters, their ambitions, their belief in perfectibility, their jealousies. The books, light as they were, were subversive, the article said, and remarkable for that reason.

It was a version of what Foster Morris had said, in elaborate metaphor, about my first book, as we were leaving his South Kensington club. As with a trout stream, he had said, you had to train yourself to look through the surface reflections to what lay below.

I had said nothing to that, though I had thought the comment misplaced, and of no value to me, because it was denying me — who relished it so much — the gift of comedy (the discovery of which was still linked in my mind with getting started as a writer).

Lebrun’s article, on the other hand, though different only in angle and emphasis from Foster Morris’s comment, was like a revelation to me. I knew immediately what he meant about the helplessness of my characters; I realized I had always known it; I had grown up with that knowledge in my bones.

It was as though, from moving at ground level, where so much was obscured, I had been taken up some way, not only to be shown the petty pattern of fields and roads and small settlements, but also, as an aspect of that high view, had been granted a vision of history speeded up, had seen, as I might have seen the opening and dying of a flower, the destruction and shifting about of peoples, had seen all the strands that had gone into the creation of the agricultural colony, and had understood what simple purposes — after such activity — that colony served.

The article seemed to me a miraculous piece of writing. It stuck closely to what I had actually written, but was about so much more. Reading the article, I thought I understood why as a child I felt that history had been burnt away in the place where I was born. I found myself constantly thinking, “Yes, yes. That’s true. It was like that.”

The revelation of Lebrun’s article became a lasting part of my way of looking. I suppose I was affected as I was, not only because it was the first article about my work, but also because I had never read that kind of political literary criticism before. I was glad that I hadn’t. Because if I had, I mightn’t have been able to write what I had written. Like Foster Morris and others, I would have known too much before I had begun to write, and there would have been less to discover with the actual writing. The problems of voice and tone and naturalness would have been that much harder; it would have been harder for me to get started.

I wrote to Lebrun to acknowledge his marvellous article, and a short time later there came an invitation to dinner, to meet Lebrun, from a common West Indian acquaintance.

The acquaintance worked in a large insurance company. He was in his early thirties, a few years older than me. He did occasional scripts for the magazine programmes of the BBC Caribbean Service; that was how we had met. He came from one of the smaller islands, and I would have said he was a mulatto. He said he was Lebanese. His wife was like him, but with an accent more of the islands.

They lived in a squashed mansion block flat in Maida Vale. It must have been rented furnished. There was a lot of fat upholstered furniture of the 1930s, a feeling of old dirt, of smells and dust ready to rise. The dim ceiling light in the sitting room was made dimmer by a frosted-glass saucer-shaped shade that hung on little chains and was full of dead moths and other insects.

I thought when I arrived that the come-down-in-the-world atmosphere suited the occasion. Lebrun had lost his access to other chief ministers, and was generally out of things in the Caribbean; there were many little towns where he couldn’t walk the streets. And I thought that this was going to be a melancholy little dinner in London for sentimental people who wanted to show solidarity with the old man.

In fact, if I had thought about it, I would have seen that Lebrun, old and displaced as he was, was now at the start of the finest phase of his reputation, the one that would grow and grow until the end. People in most of the territories had lost faith in the first wave of populist politicians. The corruption of these men didn’t matter too much; what power had done was to show up their ignorance and unexpected idleness. Lebrun had been rejected by those men. He remained pure and principled, and educated; he could still speak the language of revolution and liberation. This was what many people — like the people who had come to the Maida Vale flat — still wanted to hear. So it was an air of conspiracy, rather than melancholy, that hung over our dinner.

Black liberation was the principal theme. But we were a mixed group; that was part of the civility of the occasion. And Lebrun, when he came, was with a white American woman, of Czech or Polish origin, a good twenty years younger than he. That reputation, as a womanizer, or as a man successful with women, had always been Lebrun’s.

Lebrun was now past sixty. He was slender and fine-featured; he took care of himself. Close to, he was delicate, smooth-skinned, with a touch of copper in his dark complexion that spoke of some unusual — perhaps Amerindian — ancestry.

It was understood that we had come to hear him talk. And everything that occurred between his arrival and his settling down to talk — the general greetings, the brisk and colloquial exchanges with his Lebanese hosts to establish how well he knew them, his “don’t-mention-it” attitude to my acknowledgement of his article in the Russian magazine — everything was like an orchestra tuning up, to background chatter, for the evening’s big event.

Soon enough — while our hosts went to their little kitchen and cooking smells came out to cling to the old curtains and the fat upholstered furniture — Lebrun was launched.

He was born to talk. It was as though everything he saw and thought and read was automatically processed into talk material. And it was all immensely intelligent and gripping. He talked about music and the influence on composers of the instruments of their time. He talked about military matters.

I had met no one like that from our region, no one who had given so much time to reading and thought, no one who had organized so much information in this appetizing way. I thought his political reputation simplified the man. And his language was extraordinary. What I had noticed in Woodford Square was still there: his spoken sentences, however in volved, were complete: they could have been taken down and sent to the printers. I thought his spoken language was like Ruskin’s on the printed page, in its fluency and elaborateness, the words wonderfully chosen, often unexpected, bubbling up from some ever-running spring of sensibility. The thought-connections — as with Ruskin — were not always clear; but you assumed they were there. As with the poetry of Blake (or, within a smaller compass, Auden), you held on, believing there was a worked-out argument.

It was rhetoric, of course. And, of course, it was loaded in his favour. He couldn’t be interrupted; like royalty, he raised all the topics; and he would have been a master of the topics he raised. But even with that I don’t think that I am pitching the comparisons too high. I thought him a prodigy. I was moved by the fact that such a man came from something like my own background. I began to understand his great reputation among middle-class black people. How, considering when he was born, had he become the man he was? How had he preserved his soul through all the discouragements of the colonial time?

He had a sense of his audience. He appeared to understand the questions in my mind, and no doubt in the minds of others. Late in the evening he began to talk about himself.

He said, “My mother had an uncle who was a coachman for an English family in Barbados. I’m going back a long way now. I’m going back a hundred years. The thing about being a black man in this Caribbean-Central American region is that you have quite an ancestry here, if you want to claim it. At some stage the English family went to London. I don’t know whether they went for good or whether they went for a short time. They took their black coachman with them.

“In London this coachman became friendly with a black man who worked as a servant in the Tichborne house. A famous family, connected with a famous law case. An uneducated Australian appeared one day and said he was the Tich borne heir. Lady Tichborne, for some strange reason of her own, said the man, who could hardly read or write, was her long lost son. A great Victorian scandal. The best account of the affair is by Lord Maugham, who used to be Lord Chancellor, arid on the evidence of this Tichborne book was a much better writer than his novelist brother.

“The black man who worked for the Tichbornes was married to one of the servant women of the house. This had a powerful effect on my mother’s uncle. He used to be in and out of the house. You must imagine him going down the steps to the basement. He said whenever he went the servants gave him tea and cake. The women petted him. He pined for that when he came back to Barbados. When he was very old he was still talking about the black man in the big house in London who had married the white woman and nobody minded, and he was still talking about the white servants who always made him welcome and gave him tea and cake. He would say of the servants, ‘They always much me up.’ Meaning they had made much of him.

“I heard such a lot about this when I was a child that I developed a fantasy about a big house in England, and white people giving me tea and cake too. The house in my fantasy was like a big estate house. It wasn’t like your big house in Belgravia or South Kensington. And years later that fantasy house came back and got in the way when I began reading the English novelists. It still does, a little bit.

“My mother’s uncle, the old coachman, and a very proud man, used to say, ‘It had no trouble in those days. Black people and white people was one.’ And that was what I grew up believing too, that in the old days things were better. When I was old enough to understand what the old coachman had taught me, I was ashamed. I tried to forget. From various things I deduce that the old man was born in 1840. This was six years after the abolition of slavery. This means that his mother had been a slave, and all the older people around him. It also means something else. The slave trade was abolished in 1807. So when my mother’s uncle was ten or twelve there would have been people of sixty-five or seventy in Barbados who had been brought over from Africa. And still the old man thought that things were better in the old days, and had got me to believe it.

“I was tormented by this memory, until I arrived at my own political resolution, and saw it for what it was.”

“Political resolution”—it was his indirect way of referring to his Marxism; it was as though to speak the word itself would have been too crude.

“But even after I had arrived at my political resolution I couldn’t bring myself to talk of this memory. And then I did so in Trinidad, during the Butler strike. I was at a public meeting, before the big march on Port of Spain that so terrified the colonial government. I was saying something quite simple. Something like: the time had come for black people to take their destiny into their own hands. Just then the memory of the old coachman came to me, and I began to tell the crowd about the white servants and the tea and cake. I could feel them listening in a new way. They had never heard anything like that before from a black man on a public platform. But the biggest effect was on me. As soon as I began to talk about what my mother’s uncle had got me to believe as a child, that in the old days white people and black people were one, as soon as I did that — in five seconds the shame I had carried for twenty years dropped from me.”

He paused. There was a silence. As though everyone was being given time to examine himself.

Then Lebrun said, “And every black man has a memory like that. Every educated black man is eaten away quietly by a memory like that.”

The food was brought out into the dim sitting room. Our hosts were Lebanese, but the food was West Indian, in honour of the occasion. Not the Asian-Mediterranean or French creole style of a cosmopolitan place like Trinidad; but the rough African food of the smaller islands. The central dish was an oily yellowish mound of what looked like boiled and pounded green bananas.

Lebrun made a big show of being excited by this dish.

“Ah,” he said. “Coo-coo. It is the last thing one expected in London. We must give it our full attention.”

Somebody else said, “At home we call it foo-foo.”

Lebrun said, “Coo-coo or foo-foo, it is the serious business of the evening.”

A heavy glistening mound was placed on my own plate. I probed it: boiled yams and green bananas and possibly other tubers mashed together with peppers, the whole mixture slimy from the yams and — the Lebanese touch — olive oil. Below the pepper it had almost no taste, except one of a tart rawness (from the green bananas), and I thought it awful, the texture, the slipperiness. I didn’t think I would be able to keep it down. I let it be on my plate. No one noticed.

While Lebrun ate, and his dutiful woman friend ate, and the smell of meat and oil became high in the squashed sitting room with the old upholstered chairs, and people asked the Lebanese where they had got the yams and green bananas from, I (feeling that I was betraying them all, and separating myself from the good mood of the evening) remembered my aunt twenty years before, fanning her coalpot on the concrete back steps of our house in Port of Spain, and talking about Grenadians boiling their “pitch-oil tin” of ground provisions once a week.

Soon, through his mouthfuls of the coo-coo or the foo-foo, Lebrun began to talk again.

He said, “Perhaps the most extraordinary discussion of the century was the one between Lenin and the Indian delegate, Roy, at the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920.”

I felt that this was an offering to me.

“A re-interpretation of Marx, with special reference to the struggles of non-European peoples in the twentieth century. There is a certain racial view of Marx that we all know about. It was encouraged by the journalism he did about the Indian Mutiny for the American papers. Pieces done to order, unconsidered in parts, clearly not the whole truth. A re-interpretation was necessary, and the work was done all of forty years ago. Some people can forget that. When Gandhi and Nehru and Mountbatten and the others have become footnotes in the history of Asia, people will look back and see that meeting between Lenin and Roy, just three years after the revolution, as one of the crucial events of the century.”

THERE WAS no moment of break with Lebrun, as there had been with Foster Morris. For me the illumination of his article in the Russian magazine remained; but we both soon got to recognize — what I feel sure we always knew — that the relationship between us was forced. We shared a background and in all kinds of unspoken ways we could understand one another; but we were on different tracks.

A great embarrassment occurred just a few weeks after our dinner.

Lebrun’s woman friend — intelligent, easy of manner, accepting, curiously calm — lived in New York. I hardly knew the city and had met very few Americans. I couldn’t set the woman in a background, couldn’t separate what might have been background and background manner from the person. I liked what I saw, though. I liked her especially — she was ten or twelve years older than I — for her calm; that gave her a kind of attractiveness.

It happened that I had to go to New York. I had a commission of sorts: to provide a story idea, for a possible film (really an impossible film): the kind of futility and self-betrayal a young man can be easily lured into. Near the end of the Maida Vale dinner, when things were more informal, I mentioned this trip to Lebrun and his friend. They were interested. They mentioned names to one another. Then Lebrun said he would send me a list of people I should meet in New York.

He did what he said (I always found him punctilious in that way). And so a few weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon, having been let out as on parole from the expensive hotel where my film work was like a torment, I found myself being driven around Manhattan, having the famous sights pointed out to me, by a couple who were overwhelming me with their friendship, and more than friendship: involving me with something like love as Lebrun’s fellow countryman and London friend.

After the sightseeing there was to be a dinner. They had invited some people to meet me; Lebrun, they said, had written to various people about me. The dinner was going to be very nice, the lady said. They had prepared some special dishes; they had prepared gefilte fish.

She asked, turning around to me from the front seat of the car, “Have you had gefilte fish?” (A memory here, connected with this movement, that she was wearing a fur coat.)

She looked happy to hear that I hadn’t.

I knew almost nothing of New York, and couldn’t place these people, couldn’t assess the suburb and the house to which we drove when our sightseeing in Manhattan was over. I couldn’t assess the people who began to arrive, quite early, as I thought, for the dinner and the special dish the lady had gone straight to her kitchen to see about.

They remain vague, but I know they were nice people, intelligent, friendly people. Some were near neighbours. Others had come from some distance for this Sunday dinner. They were all anxious to show friendship to me; but I knew they were showing friendship to Lebrun.

I had accepted Lebrun’s introductions, but I had never really believed in the value of his international contacts. Even with the regard I had grown to have for him, I thought of him as a talker more than anything else. I saw him as a gifted black man compelled by the circumstances of his time, from fairly early on, to live on his wits. His Russian connection, the article in the Russian magazine, his appearance at the Maida Vale dinner with the attractive Polish or Czech woman — all of that, though real enough, I saw as attributes of the now old black man living as by second nature on his wits.

He belonged to the first generation of educated black men in the region. For a number of them — men as old as the century — there was no honourable place at home in their colony or in the big countries. They were in-between people, too early, without status; they tried to make their way. They came and went; they talked big in one place — the United States, England, the West Indies, Panama, Belize — about the things they were doing somewhere else. Some of them became eccentric or unbalanced; some attached themselves to the Back-to-Africa movement (though Africa was itself at that time colonized); some became fraudsters.

When I came to England in 1950 there were still extravagant black figures from that generation about on the streets of London: men in pin-stripe suits and bowlers, with absurd accents. Sometimes they greeted me; they were prompted to do so by solitude, but they also wished to find someone to boast to. One wet winter evening one of these men, met in a Regent Street bus queue, straight away took out his wallet and began to show me photographs of his house and his English wife. They were shipwrecked men. They had lost touch with themselves and now, near the end, were seeing the fantasies they had lived on washed away by the arrival of new immigrants from Jamaica and the other islands, working men in Harlem-style zoot suits and broad-brimmed felt hats.

Lebrun, with all his gifts, I saw as part of that older generation. He too came and went, and was spoken of (like many others) as a man of mystery. But my feeling always was (considering my own arrangements) that the hidden, foreign segments of Lebrun’s life would have been quite tame and full of small financial alarms. In that way I thought he would have been a little like Butler, the 1937 strike leader, who, after the war and internment, went to live, very quietly, in London, cutting himself off from the demands (though not the subsidy) of his followers and his political party, the British Empire Workers and Citizens Home Rule Party. I thought that Lebrun’s time abroad would have had that element of quietness and rest.

So, just as I had been overwhelmed by Lebrun’s article in the Russian magazine, never expecting such penetration from him, now in this New York suburban house I was thrown into some confusion by this evidence of Lebrun’s international life, which was far more elegant than anything I had expected. It was far more elegant than anything I had known.

They knew a lot about the politics and the personalities of the islands; and they knew about this from Lebrun’s side, as it were. They satirized the local politicians who were Lebrun’s enemies; they described one as a gangster, another as a witchdoctor.

One woman had travelled in the islands, visiting places I didn’t know. It was impossible, she said, to be in those islands without having an idea of their history, and some sense of their future. What had she seen? She couldn’t really tell me. She refused to speak as a tourist; that refusal was like part of her self-esteem. And I felt that, just as (considering the island she had spoken of, the one with the witchdoctor) all the forests that had been there at the discovery had been scraped away for the sugar-cane fields, so she had stripped the people she had seen of all their too easily seen attributes, to get down to some ideal structure that existed in her head.

I remembered the effect on me of Lebrun’s article in the Russian magazine: it had appeared to take me above road-level and show me the pattern of things from above. I felt that Lebrun had done the same for this group, that everything in that woman’s way of looking would have come from her own interpretation of what Lebrun had said.

I remembered how out of tune Lebrun had been in Woodford Square in Port of Spain during the great emotional assemblies of 1956. The meetings were billed as educational; the square was described as a university. People hadn’t of course gone to learn anything; they had gone to take part in a kind of racial sacrament. Lebrun had appeared to be participating in that when he talked about having waited all the years of the century for this great occasion, and never having doubts that the moment would come. But then he had gone off on a track of his own. He had begun to talk about history and the production of sugar.

Windmills and tall factory chimneys were a feature of the landscape of the islands, he had said; they had been for more than two centuries. The large-scale production of sugar had always been an industrial process. Sugar-cane was a perishable crop. It had to be cut at a certain time and it had to be processed within a certain time; in the making of sugar many things could go wrong. This meant that the black people of the islands were among the earliest industrial workers in the world, obeying the discipline of a complex manufacturing process. For this reason they escaped standard racial categorization; they were not like the peasantry of Africa and Asia and large areas of Europe. They were a very old industrial proletariat, and the history of slavery had shown them to be always a revolutionary people. Now they were destined to be in the forefront of the revolution in the New World.

People hadn’t understood what he had said, but he had spoken with passion and fluency, and this had made it appear to be part of the great movement of the square; and he had been applauded. (And the photograph of him on the Victorian bandstand in the square, addressing the crowd below the trees, had been used on the cover of the two or three books of his speeches that had been published in Czechoslovakia or East Berlin.)

This was the view of the region he had offered. This was the currency — this news of the coming revolution, his place within that revolution — with which, as it were, he had paid his way among revolutionaries abroad.

When I had heard him talk in the square in 1956—not absolutely knowing about his Russian sympathies, knowing about him only vaguely as a far-off black revolutionary of the region — I had been as puzzled as anyone by his stress on the industrial nature of slavery in the Caribbean. Later I thought of it as ideology for ideology’s sake, a man on the periphery over-staking his claim.

Now, in the New York house, catching fragments of his views and rhetoric and even his voice in what was being said to me, I saw this stress as part of the “political resolution” he had talked about at the Maida Vale dinner. He had said that that resolution had enabled him to lay aside the shame he had grown to feel because of his mother’s uncle, the old coachman, who looked back to a time nearer slavery as the good time, when white people and black people were one.

The confession had been impressive: every black man, he had said, had some tormenting secret like that. Yet the words, “political resolution,” had appeared to conceal something. And now I felt — with shame, grief, sympathy, admiration, recognizing something of myself in his struggle — that, as much as the uneducated old coachman of ninety years before, and the middle-aged black man in bowler and pin-stripe suit stepping out of the bus queue in Regent Street in 1950 to show me photographs of his house and English wife, Lebrun had always needed to find some way of dealing with the past. With his fine mind, and his love of knowledge, his need might even have been greater.

The ideology he had found (and his interpretation of it) enabled him to do more than most. There was a type of revolutionary (or merely protest) writing which found it easier to move imaginatively in the time of slavery, with its fixed structures, its clear enemy, its clear morality. This kind of writing saw the period of slavery as a time of almost continuous guerrilla war; it relished that drama, but was unable to deal with the period after the abolition of slavery, which by comparison was flat, directionless, without moral issues. Lebrun’s political resolution was very far from this sensationalism. It enabled him, not to embrace the period of slavery, but to acknowledge it without pain, and, presenting it in his own way, to make a claim for its universality, and even its precedence.

“THE MAN want to take you over,” the chief minister had said, over the stained tablecloth in Government House. And I began to feel something of that in the house in New York. I was using Lebrun’s introductions and I suppose it was to be expected that they should think I was a revolutionary too. But after a while I couldn’t help noticing that I was being regarded as part of Lebrun’s revolution. They all knew about the article in the Russian magazine. And somehow my work ceased to be strictly mine; it was as it were contained in Lebrun’s vision of the region. I began to feel that in their vision I was incidental to my own work: I was an expression of Lebrun’s will. I didn’t like the assumption but didn’t know how to speak against it. I had allowed them to talk and never spoken up; I had allowed them to go too far.

I could see that they were willing to make room for me, as once no doubt they had made room for Lebrun. No words about this were spoken, but I could sense that I was being invited to shed my racial or cultural burdens and to be part of their brotherhood. And they were so nice and attractive, and the house was so pleasant, and the thought of the film work in the hotel was so disagreeable, it would have been marvellous, it would have been less trouble, if I could have pretended to be a convert. And I had a sense that years before, in much harder times, Lebrun might have made such a deal, would have shed one smarting skin and felt himself reborn in another.

Few of us are without the feeling that we are incomplete. But my feelings of incompleteness were not like Lebrun’s. In the things I felt myself incomplete Lebrun was — as I thought — abundantly served: physical attractiveness, love, sexual fulfilment. But there were other yearnings that no shedding of skin could have assuaged: my own earned security, a wish for my writing gift to last and grow, a dream of working at yet unknown books, accumulations of fruitful days, achievement. These yearnings could be assuaged only in the self I knew.

No other group would ever again make me an invitation so wholehearted or so seductive. But to yield was to cease to be myself, to trust to the unknown. And like the chief minister, I became very frightened.

We went to a smaller room for the dinner. The walls were of plain brick, rose-coloured, pale, seemingly dusted over, very attractive. Eventually the gefilte fish, which had been promised since the afternoon, came. I didn’t like the way it looked, and have no memory of it. The idea of something pounded to paste, then spiced or oiled, worked on by fingers, brought to mind thoughts of hand lotions and other things. I became fearful of smelling it. I couldn’t eat it. With the coo-coo or the foo-foo in the Maida Vale flat I had been able to hide what I did to the things on my plate. That couldn’t be done here: everyone knew that the gefilte fish had been specially prepared for Lebrun’s friend from London.

Manners never frayed. Conversation revived. But the embarrassment that began in the dining room lasted until I was taken back to the Manhattan hotel.

• • •

THE ART collectors we know about and envy are the successful ones, like those who a hundred years ago bought Van Gogh and early Cézanne for very little. The people we don’t know about from that period are the people who — perhaps with equal passion — collected works by contemporaries who have faded. I once asked a London dealer about such collectors. Did they get to know at a certain moment that they had been wrong? The dealer was unexpectedly vehement. Bad collectors, he said, were a type: they believed in themselves more than in the art they paid for.

I wonder whether that was also true of Lebrun’s New York patrons, or whether they had to find other ways over the next few years of acknowledging that the news he had been giving them was wrong, that the special revolution he had promised in the islands wasn’t going to happen.

The politics of the islands never really changed. The leaders who had come to power at the end of the colonial time — like the chief minister who had ordered Lebrun off his little island — remained in power. It didn’t matter that many of them were bored and didn’t do much. They were all in their different ways racial leaders, and the first successful ones. They were very local, and for that reason special, each man embodying in his territory the idea of black redemption. In the almost mystical relationship between these very local men and their followers there was no room for Lebrun.

He was now old and very poor, a revolutionary without a revolution, occasionally flourishing (as his enemies reported) on the bounty of women admirers from the past, but at other times living a hard bohemian life, lodging in other people’s houses or apartments in the Caribbean and Central America, in England and Europe, and always moving on. I grew to feel that at some stage he had given up, lost faith in his cause — though nothing was said, and though, earning his keep, he continued to write communist-slanted articles in small-circulation left-wing magazines.

Lebrun and I never met after that evening in the Maida Vale flat; but I saw him a few times on television when he was very old, and because of that I have the feeling I witnessed his ageing and physical decay. We kept up the courtesies after the New York embarrassment. We exchanged letters; sometimes he sent me magazines containing articles he had written in which he referred to my work. Those references became fewer; finally they stopped.

In 1973 he sent me his last book, The Second Struggle: Speeches and Writings 1962–1972. It was printed in East Germany, and the cover carried the 1956 photograph of him in Woodford Square in Port of Spain, standing at a microphone on the bandstand, before the crowd. He had inscribed the book to me as to “a fellow humanist.” And he had added, “To understand that is at any rate to make a beginning.” A touch of the old charm, the way with words. It didn’t mean anything, but I was moved to see his shaky hand.

It was a dreadful book. It had nothing of the brilliance and the underground emotions of his article in the Russian magazine. In spite of the cover photograph I doubted whether many of the pieces had been speeches. There was an undercurrent of defeat and rancour. There was little subtlety, no sly humour. In certain articles he used stock communist words—“opportunists,” “petit-bourgeois nationalists,” “reformists,” “Blanquists”—almost in a personal way, to denounce his Caribbean enemies, the successful politicians, the men in Government House.

The decline (which might have been partly due to age) was more noticeable in the hack work he had chosen to reprint, the pieces in which, as a colonial, he compared non-European communist countries with imperialist client states — Kazakhstan, for instance, with the Philippines or Pakistan, Cuba with Brazil or Venezuela. Official facts and figures for the communist country, of rising industrial production, of rising numbers at school and universities; and then a simple expository account (like something taken from a simple encyclopaedia) of the backwardness of the Philippines or Brazil or Iran, population figures and areas in square kilometres always given, where feudal landlords owned much of the country and almost no one went to school; the whole essay locked together with a couple of academic-looking tables and a quotation (excessively documented) from an unknown “professor” or “doctor.” Did he believe in those articles? Or were they written by a man who knew that such articles only filled space in official magazines?

Thinking now of his decay, into which he had been led by his cause, the cause that had appeared years before to rescue him from racial nonentity, thinking of that and his poverty, his dependence on others, for lodging and livelihood, I thought how strange it was that he had turned out to be like the people he had written about in his very first book, the one that had lain unread at the bottom shelf of the cupboard in the sixth form at Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain.

HE HAD written in that book about some of the Spanish-American or Venezuelan revolutionaries before Bolívar, and he had concentrated on those with Trinidad connections.

For some years after it had been detached from Venezuela and the Spanish empire and had become a British territory, Trinidad was used as a base by revolutionaries on the mainland, across the Gulf of Paria.

One embittered Spanish official, a refugee in Trinidad, had plotted with an associate on the mainland to start a slave revolt in Venezuela. A hopeless idea: Trinidad was still full of Venezuelans and a number of them were Spanish agents. And then this plot, like so many Caribbean slave plots, was betrayed to the authorities by a slave. The rebels were hanged and quartered, and the quarters of the hanged were displayed on the highway over the mountains between La Guaira on the coast and the inland valley of Caracas. This attempt at revolution never really became famous: everything happened too fast.

Miranda was better known. He had left Venezuela early and had travelled about Europe and the United States. He gave himself the title of Count and got to know important people; in revolutionary France he even became a general. In exile he began to improve on the country he had come from. The blacks and mulattoes of the slave estates receded; the people of Venezuela became Incas, the original rulers of the continent, nature’s gentlemen, as noble as anything the eighteenth-century philosophers dreamed of. These were the people Miranda represented; all they needed was freedom. In middle age, finally, he came to Trinidad, his base, to start his revolution across the Gulf. He had money, a ship, arms, all he had said he needed. He also had the prospectuses of the London merchants who had subsidized him for years; he had promised to scatter these about Venezuela, after he had liberated it. He didn’t liberate Venezuela; he released a kind of anarchy, and was destroyed by the colonial pettiness he had run away from half a lifetime before. It had always been there, waiting for him.

In order to write this book Lebrun had had to do some original work in the Venezuelan archives. His purpose in writing the book in the 1930s had been to prove his old point about the revolutionary nature of the islands; to give himself and his ideas a great past, to link the revolutionary stir of the 1930s to the stir caused in the region by the French Revolution; to lift the islands from the end-of-empire smallness in which they had been becalmed since the abolition of slavery, and to attach them once again to the great historical processes of the continent. He wished, above all, to make the point that revolutions do not simply happen: they have to be prepared for, the people have to be educated, there has to be a revolutionary political party.

All that labour, and I doubt whether a dozen people in Trinidad or Venezuela had read his book. No one at school had read it. I hadn’t read it; I had handled it only as a book, a wonderful object.

I read it one afternoon in the London Library not long after I had looked at The Second Struggle. I would have been the first person for ten years perhaps to take it from its shelf.

What a spirit was locked in its pages! Always there, waiting to speak to me. In Trinidad in 1948 I wonder how much I would have been able to make of it. Not a great deal. I would have been then too much part of that end-of-empire smallness Lebrun had talked about. I would have been as baffled by it as I was when I was told that the writer was a revolutionary and on the run somewhere in the United States. I needed the passage of time, distance, experience, to understand what he had written.

I was aware of the room in which I was reading, in London — how changed from the London in which the book had been published and, as the printed sticker said, presented to the London Library “by the publishers.” It wasn’t only that I had changed since I had seen the book at school. The world had changed; my presence in the London Library was an aspect of that change.

Thinking of the ironies in Lebrun’s life, that at the end he should have been like the people he had written about in his first book, and feeling almost superstitiously that there was a circularity in human lives, I began to wonder where in my own writings I had marked out regions of the spirit to which I was to return. Just as Lebrun, who had sought to submerge his racial feelings in the universality of his political beliefs, had had that dream removed and in old age had been returned unprotected to heaven knows what private alarms.

I thought of his capacity for talk. That gift had opened doors for him all his life. But there was hysteria there, as well, the hysteria of the islands, expressed most usually in self-satire, jokeyness, fantasy, religious excess, sudden spasms of cruelty. I thought of the burning of Charlie King at the time of the strike in Trinidad, and the almost religious, sacrificial regard for the victim ever afterwards. I thought of the taunting of Foster Morris in the old wooden house with the distorted shadows cast by oil lamps. I thought of the black man in the bowler who had stepped out of the bus queue in Regent Street to show me photographs of his wife and house. How could one enter the emotions of a black man as old as the century?

PRIVATE ALARMS, perhaps. But the world had changed. Lebrun wasn’t being returned to his beginnings. The Caribbean was independent. Africa was independent. He had been around for a long time; he was known. And now, near the end, his underground reputation began to alter. At one time he had been the man of principle, the man of the true revolution; the various politicians of the Caribbean had been the men who had sold out. Now, with subtle addition, he became the man of true African or black redemption, the man of principle there, the man who had held out against all kinds of enticements to give up the cause, unlike the false black leaders.

So now he stepped in and out of his two characters, now the man of the revolutionary cause, now the man of racial redemption, the man always of principle. He appeared, in this new personality, to be going against the whole life of revolution he had lived; against the “political resolution” he had come to years before, the universality in which he had shed the burdens of race and shame; against the admiration of his New York supporters; against, even, the inscription to me, as to a fellow humanist, in the copy of The Second Struggle.

His name didn’t appear in books about Africa or the Caribbean; writers and publishers didn’t want to offend the rulers. This added to his prestige; he could be presented on the radio or the television, in the programmes on which he was called to give his opinion about this and that, as the hidden black prophet of the century. He looked the part; he was very old now, almost saintly, the man without possessions.

He never spoke against a black racial regime. He presented Asian dispossession in Amin’s Uganda and Nyerere’s Tanzania as an aspect of class warfare. Guyana in South America he defended in a curious way: since the days of slavery, he said on one radio programme, the Caribbean could be considered as black people’s territory. He put this racial statement in a vast, categorizing way — very much in the manner of the old Lebrun — on a television programme. He said, “The day the first African slave was landed, the region became black territory. If they had known that was going to happen, they might have thought twice.”

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 reversing 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 another 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.

“It was important to my little chief too. As he fell back into his old ways, he thought less of the beauty of my name, Phyllis, and of the beauty of my Guadeloupe French accent. The time came when he wanted to be rid of me. He wanted to do what his family wanted him to do, to marry a suitable woman of his tribe. He began to be violent, the little chief. He began to beat me, the soft little fellow with the gold. I remembered the foot-washing ceremony. And I didn’t have to be told now that I was in a country without law. The day actually came — it was as though someone were working magic on me — when I felt that if I stayed one more night in the country I would go mad. That was when I went to the airport and took a plane here. And to think that when I went against all my instincts and married him I thought I was making a deal with God.

“He’s very much on my mind now, if you want to know. I’ll tell you about something that happened about a month before you came here. The telephone rang very early one morning. In fact, when I woke up it felt like the middle of the night. It was a man’s voice on the phone, a French voice. The line wasn’t good. I thought it was a nuisance call. It does happen here. The voices are usually French. It makes me feel far from home, and very alone.

“I should have put the phone down right away, but luckily I didn’t. The call was from the police in Santos Dumont, and not from a man giving a bogus name. Santos-Dumont was an early aviator, and the French gave the name to a frontier post they established in the north. There are a certain number of French officers in the police here, and you have seen the French army barracks just outside the town.

“The officer spoke to me as though I was a member of the embassy, rather than a locally employed secretary. I didn’t put him right. He was very polite; I didn’t want to spoil that. He said he had with him in the police station someone from across the frontier. He gave the name of the little chief. He put him on the telephone. It was the little chief all right. His voice was squeaky with terror. He said things had gone very badly on the other side of the frontier. The president there had suddenly turned against him and all the rest of the cheferie. Somebody had told him the day before that he was to be arrested in the morning. He decided to run. He had been driving since the previous afternoon.

“ ‘Thank God for the Mercedes,’ he said, as though we were still together, and I still used the Mercedes. He had driven for hours on bad roads and dusty tracks and the car hadn’t broken down. In the middle of all of his trouble he was still proud of his car.

“He wasn’t absolutely out of danger. He could have been handed back. You know that over the frontier they are very Maoist and anti-French, and they don’t lose a chance of making propaganda in other African countries against the government here. However, I spoke to our ambassador, and he made a few telephone calls. He knew my story. The embassy more or less took the little chief under their protection. I drove up that afternoon to Santos Dumont with someone from the embassy to pick up the little chief.

“He was staying in a police building in a sealed room with an air-conditioning unit. It was very cold in the room. He was in a dirty peasant’s cloth and without his gold. Nothing shining on his skin. It was his idea of a disguise. The terror was still in his eyes.

“ ‘Me, me,’ he kept on saying. ‘A man of the cheferie—they were going to put me on the diète noire.’ You know about that famous black diet, don’t you? They put you in a cell without food or water and leave you to die. It’s what the president does to his enemies. I had heard about it when I was there. But I will tell you that it was another one of the things I heard about and didn’t believe in. I saw now, for the first time, that my little chief had always known about it. And I was shocked by that.

“Through the sealed window you could see the flat, hot countryside. Very strange. The trees, even when they were far away, didn’t bunch together. They were just standing one by one, like poles. The dust was like mist. It was the famous desertification people came to see and write reports about. It was what he had been driving through all night, and the Mercedes hadn’t broken down.

“He never asked me about myself. He never asked me how I had come to the strange country myself, or got my job or how I’d managed all these years. He never thanked me for taking his telephone call or arranging his asylum or driving down to see him. He expected me to treat him well. He was a chief, you see. He was full of his own sufferings and betrayal and his bravery in doing the long night drive. All the way up to the capital he complained like a child. He said his family had always supported the president. They had sent him to school and looked after him and his family. They had stood by him when the president had kicked out the French and there had been all that trouble. And then the president’s mind had been poisoned against the cheferie. Everyone knew who had done that. It was Lebrun, the antillais. Lebrun had bewitched the president. He had flattered him and turned his head. It was Lebrun, Lebrun — the little chief was obsessed with him.”

I had heard many things about Lebrun’s trip to French West Africa. But I hadn’t heard before that he had had any local political influence.

Phyllis said, “It is what people say. He was very angry when he left here, and I suppose when he went across the border they would have received him with open arms. They did a lot of anti-French propaganda with him.”

I said to Phyllis, “You said the little chief was on your mind.”

“With the help of the embassy we’ve been getting some of his money out from the country. We’ve arranged his papers, and he’s getting restless now. He’s forgotten some of his terror. He is talking of going to Paris. He’s got a lot of money there. And these past few days I’ve been thinking, ‘Yes, he’ll go to Paris now, and he’ll pick up some other woman and dazzle her with his chief’s talk and it’ll begin all over again.’ ”

THE TIME came for me to move on. The next stage of my journey was the dictatorship next door. This was the country Phyllis had come out to, the country that had kicked the French out, with all their aid and coopérants, and had, as some people said, gone back to bush.

So, without premeditation, I was following in the footsteps of Lebrun. Phyllis had names for me in the other country. There was someone there she especially wanted me to meet. This person, she said, would give me an idea of the true Africa, the Africa that the newspapers didn’t write about.

The day before I left she came to the hotel to say goodbye. We sat out on the terrace. A tourist feature had been made of the lagoon, which in the old days was famous for its mosquitoes and disease.

She said things she had said often before, about Africa, about the false ideas brought by black people from the West Indies and the United States. She was killing time, I could see. And then, just before she left, she did what she had come to do: she opened her handbag and gave me an envelope with banknotes. The money was for the man she wanted me to see. Life was hard for people over there, she said.

It was a roundabout journey. Political stresses had made a direct flight between the two neighbouring countries impossible. A plane to a neutral country to the north; a breakdown, a long wait at night in an open shed at the edge of an airfield, local police lounging with the passengers; traders in dingy gowns sitting on sacks of cheap rubber shoes and other goods; and then the shaky final trip to the dictatorship.

There were many policemen at the airport. It wasn’t a busy place. The arrival of this small plane was the big event of the morning, and the eyes of the idle officials glittered at the thought of the money to be made from the few people who had come in. It was a shed of an airport hall, with old, blown-up photographs of what must have been local scenes, relic of an earlier time of tourist promotion. I would have had trouble getting Phyllis’s money for her friend through — everything had to be declared, and some people were searched by customs officers trembling with excitement. But the man in front of me was detained so long — he was even taken off at one stage to a cubicle — that I was waved through by a senior officer anxious to close down the desks for the morning and go home.

The climate was similar to the climate of the other place. But, strangely, the light and heat that were part of the life and excitement and crowd of the other place here felt, right away, like tropical or African torpor. The newish airport highway, unmaintained, and cracked in many places, ran through bare red earth. No villages were to be seen, only big boards with sayings of the president’s, and large signs, facing the highway, as though they were meant only for visitors: INCREASE PRODUCTION.

It was strange to think of Lebrun coming here with his daughter; and, in extreme old age, after having gone back on so many of his old views, being received with honour, and finding a kind of revolutionary fulfilment. INCREASE PRODUCTION — it was like coming across a little bit of the raw material, part of the facts and figures and tables, of one of Lebrun’s old communist articles, in which this kind of “production” was better than the other sort of wealth.

The hotel, one of an international chain, was not very full. The air-conditioning was fierce, and the room I had was damp and musty, with a touch of rust on some bits of unprotected metal. I felt it hadn’t been occupied for some time. Everything was very expensive; the exchange rate was absurd. The bar and lounge and other public rooms were full of plain-clothes policemen in dark glasses, as though, in this already desolate place, their principal function was to catch out visitors.

I eventually got Phyllis’s friend on the telephone. He exclaimed when I gave Phyllis’s name. But then he became nervous; he became even more nervous when he heard where I was staying. He said he would telephone me back.

The hotel was silent. No one raised his voice. And I felt something of that stillness when some days later I went to an embassy lunch. The embassy building was really a government building of the colonial time; and the lunch to which I had been invited — a last-minute guest — was something of a local occasion.

In colonial days the head of the up-country Christian missions paid an annual official visit to the capital, and was received in some style by the governor. The lunch was an adaptation, or relic, of that colonial ceremony. There wasn’t a governor now: there was the ambassador of the former colonial power. And what had been the governor’s house was now the ambassador’s residence. As for the mission stations — the very words came from the turn of the century — they had gone through many transformations even in colonial times. The main station had become a medical centre, a hospital, a general training centre, a polytechnic. Its missionary associations — which had become more ecumenical — were now underplayed, and the representative who came for the ceremony in the capital was, officially, the principal of the polytechnic. This year, for the first time, the principal was a black man; he was said to be a Baptist. This was the special little drama of the lunch.

We, the early arrivals, sat downstairs, in the loggia, amid the bougainvillaea. Everything had been swept and dusted that morning, but already everything, including the bougainvillaea, was dusty from the desertification. The sand was in the air. It fell fine all the time; it was something you felt below your shoes.

We were waiting for the principal. He was in the building, but he had arrived late, just an hour or so before, and he was upstairs getting ready. There had been some trouble earlier that morning, many kilometres away, with the rope-pulled ferry over some dwindling river. That had delayed him.

When thirty minutes or so later he came down the steps to the patio — from the room he had been given, the room the principal (and, before him, the chief missionary) had always been given — the smell of talcum powder preceded him. He was a big man, brown more than black, with a big, strongly modelled face with great ridges of cheekbones, a big, strong body, and big feet in big shoes. He was in an old and thin dark suit, sepia in patches from sunlight and wear and dry-cleaning fluid. He had been shaving; a dull white bloom — like the desert sand on the bougainvillaea — lay over the chin and cheeks he had been shaving very close.

He talked about the ferry and the bad road and the delay that morning. His words gave me a picture: the flat barge with the old Peugeot car, the shallow river issuing out of swamp, the morning heat-mist, the ferryman pulling on the slack rope or cable looped across the river, the principal standing tall and upright, and then the barge running aground.

The principal said, “Bad roads, primitive ferry. But these are the sacrifices we have to make for the next generation.”

A guest said, not wishing bad things to be said about Africa, “There are wonderful roads over the frontier.”

But that was like bad manners. The principal looked affronted. I thought there was something about his voice and manner and accent.

I said, “Has anyone told you, Principal? You have a West Indian accent.”

He said, with a curious gesture, in which I at once recognized the gestures of many people I knew in my childhood, “I am West Indian.”

His father had studied in London in the 1920s. He had become attracted to the Back-to-Africa views of Marcus Garvey and others; and he had done what many people had talked about but few had actually done. He had come out to West Africa, and had lived there until he died. All these years, this life in Africa!

Our hostess asked, “You would say that’s one reason why the Christian vocation came to you?”

The principal said, “I don’t know. We were Baptists in my family, but the reason why I wanted to go into the church was that when I was at school it seemed the only thing to do. I wanted to be like the men who taught me. The same is true for some black Roman Catholics I know. People of my background. I know an old West Indian man here who became a Roman Catholic priest. I asked him the same question you asked me. Just a few months ago. This old man said to me, ‘What else was there for me? The monastery was the only safe place I could see. And I thought it was nice. I thought they would send me to Ireland.’ That’s true for me too. It may be a vocation. I don’t know. I am a Baptist and a believer. But without colonialism I wouldn’t have had the vocation. I would have been another kind of believer. Let me say that too.”

Somebody said, “You’re talking like your president.”

The principal threw his big shoulders back and made a gesture with his open palms. And it was clear then that he was charged up, that he had come ready to speak for the regime, and ready to take on the criticisms of everyone at the table.

It wasn’t what we were expecting. We were expecting something quieter and more indirect, something that acknowledged the civility of the occasion, not something that imposed the silence of the hotel and the streets on us.

Someone said, “Do they still talk about the chiefs where you are?”

The principal said, “If they do, I haven’t heard it. Lebrun was right. The president was a prisoner of the cheferie. They were getting in the way of all his reforms. But the president didn’t know what would happen if he tried to take them on. Lebrun said very simply, ‘Take an axe to the root.’ Do it decisively, and they’ll all run. No more slavery, no more ritual murders, no more killing of wives and servants when a big chief dies. All the superstitions of feudalism wiped out in one blow. All the things that give Africa a bad name. ‘Take an axe to the root.’ I remember how the women and slaves used to run just before a big chief died. Everybody knew about it, but nobody talked about it. And that was exactly how the chiefs ran when the president brought in the people’s courts.” He made a West Indian gesture, to suggest flight, brushing one open palm glancingly off the other. “You were telling me about the good roads and the Lacoste shops and the lovely houses and the beach restaurants with cabarets and bananes flambés on the other side of the frontier. But the chiefs are still ruling there. The French are doing the job for them, but it is all for the chiefs. When something happens and the French go away, all of that feudal life will still just be there, waiting to terrorize people. Not here. You have the bad ferry, but you don’t have the chiefs now. The chiefs here used to say that they spoke for the people. All right. So let them be tried by the people’s courts. That was the president’s idea.”

I wanted to hear more about the people’s courts.

The principal said, “Highest form of democracy.” And he fitted a West Indian gesture to his words: he raised his open palms just above the edge of the table and threw his shoulders far back — as though to make room for the significance of his words. It was like a choreographed movement: a backward sway suddenly arrested: the most elegant of the movements he had been making at the lunch table.

The gift of speech, the beautiful, timed gestures of hands and upper body, the easy dominance of the lunch table: this took me back. It took me back to Lebrun talking in the cramped Lebanese flat in Maida Vale. And I wondered whether Lebrun’s visit here some months before hadn’t revived certain rhythms of speech in the principal.

But perhaps not. Perhaps this gift of speech and movement went back further, had another parentage, I went back in memory to the solicitors’ clerks in the Red House in Port of Spain, searching for property titles in the big bound books of the Registrar-General’s Department. They sat at the mahogany desks in the high jalousied rooms of the Italianate building and they gossiped and gestured in their conspiratorial fashion, like people with secrets. Make-believe, but just a few years later there were to be the meetings in the Victorian colonial square across the street, where ideas of racial redemption were offered as a kind of sacrament. The passions of that sacrament were proving to be unassuageable, and were now beyond control.

This French West African colonial building where I was now, listening to the principal — long table in the arcaded loggia, tablecloth, glasses, flowers, the fine sand and dust gathering slowly on walls and plants and on the tiled floor — was like the one on the other side of the Atlantic where the clerks had gossiped in their spacious search room: Italianate too, thick walls, with tall jalousied windows hinged at the top, propped open at the bottom just a little way to let in air and light and to give a view of the gardens outside, but to keep out the hot morning sun. Both buildings had been put up at about the same time, just after the turn of the century, at the zenith of empire.

The principal had grown up in Africa. But he had grown up with his father’s story and all the passions, from the other side of the ocean, of the Back-to-Africa movement. In the West Indies his body movements and the rhythms of his speech would have been considered African or black. Here, though, they made him recognizably a man apart.

At the lunch table he continued to talk, holding the attention of all and imposing silence on all: like a theatrical figure with his size and his faded dark suit, the white razor-bloom on his cheeks and chin, and the dusting of talcum powder around his collar: rocking with his big body from the waist up, and making gestures, at times like a dancer’s, with his open palms.

“The president hasn’t put his hand on anybody, whatever the propagandists say from across the frontier. It’s all been done by the people’s courts. They are the guardians of the country. Every street and every city block and every village has its own people’s court. That’s where the chiefs were tried. By their own people, the people who allegedly loved them. You can’t get a higher form of democracy than that.”

And then the principal began to look down at the table, began to go silent, gave up his body dance; and something began to happen to his face. It began to change. Like some actors who, at the end of a performance, continue for some time to have their face set in the role they have just taken, and then, almost visibly, begin to return to themselves, so the principal began to alter. He was like a man beginning to understand the nature of the embassy lunch, beginning to understand the dignity he represented; beginning to under stand how old attitudes of survival had led him away from that dignity.

He went silent. He looked down at the tablecloth without seeming to see anything. He made no dancer’s movement, no gesture with his palms.

He was supposed to stay some days at the embassy, as his predecessors had done. But the principal didn’t stay. He left in the Peugeot soon after the lunch, and I heard later from my embassy hosts that he never came back. So with the first black principal a little colonial tradition fell away.

MY MEETING with Phyllis’s friend took place in a café in the main square. It wasn’t easy to arrange. Twice he cried off; and he never wanted to come to the hotel. “Those people there don’t like me,” he said. So when at last we met it was in the old French colonial square. It was run-down, ghostly, with buildings no longer serving the purposes for which they had been built. The café, done in red, with folding red-painted metal chairs at metal tables, was between dingy shops with goods from the communist countries, things like tinned fruit from Vietnam.

In spite of the parked police vans, the area was dangerous with aggressive beggars and cripples and men, still young, who had been deliberately deformed as children. The first time I had gone there I had been mugged, near the newsstand with old newspapers from the communist countries. This had happened in the middle of the morning, coffee time, café-dawdling time. The French colonial square encouraged these ideas, but this was a ghost square: little traffic, no dawdlers. The muggers were a gang of youths and children, apparently beggars, appearing from nowhere, the children suddenly surrounding me and throwing themselves at my feet, turning up to me — as in a famine film clip — pleading, starving, pared-down African faces, plucking at the same time now at my shoe laces, now at my trousers, and appearing to mimic the gestures of hunger and eating, as they had been trained to do by the beggar-master, going through their routine very fast, to confuse the foreign victim and distract his attention from the bigger and more skilled pickpockets.

But these criminals in the square were the only local people I had seen who behaved like free people. They moved about a lot, and they moved fast, whether whole or crippled, the crippled on wheeled boards, like wider skate-boards, or in little box carts, like home-made toys. They shouted and spoke loudly among themselves, as though they didn’t have to be as quiet as everybody else.

Their apparent leader was a young man both of whose legs had been cut off at mid-thigh. Flat round wooden pads two or three inches thick had been strapped on to the base of his stumps; these pads, more or less the diameter of his stumps, were further cushioned or shod with black discs of rubber or leather. When he walked, these thick stumps were all movement; but each step was small, a child’s step, and the torso above the busy stumps moved very slowly. The malevolence in the face of this half-destroyed man, his contempt for the world, was unsettling; and I wondered whether some religious or magical idea, of the dictator’s, about the powers of deformity wasn’t behind this licensed display in the square.

Phyllis’s friend was waiting, as he had promised, in the café with the red-painted metal tables and chairs. He was at a corner table and was reading the local paper. He was a handsome, sinewy man, in his forties, in features and physique and skin-colour more West Indian than African.

I felt, as soon as we began to talk, that there was something Phyllis had left out in her story of her married life here with the little chief. I felt she had liked this man very much and wanted, even at this distance and after all this time, to show him off to me. And there was a touch of vanity in him too, at being recognized as the man Phyllis had liked.

When he heard that Phyllis had given me some money for him he lost control of his smile. It became a grimace; and he made a curious series of dismissing sounds. I felt he had had subsidies like this from women before. I felt it was a way of life he knew. And that expression — tight, unsmiling, unreliable — stayed on his face when I told him that Phyllis had said he would give me an idea of the true Africa.

He spoke of wise men he knew, both in the town and the villages, and the magical tricks they would perform for me, if he asked them. These men would disappear in front of my eyes. They would go through solid walls. They would slash their hands and blood would pour from the wounds; and then they would so heal the wounds that no scar would show. They would perform staggering feats of telepathy, entering houses and minds in many continents.

It wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I had thought, from what she had said, that Phyllis had developed some feeling for the antiquity of tribal ritual; and some idea as a result, stronger than any she had had as an antillaise, of her grip on the world. I might have read too much in what she said. This man was like the con-man of African hotel lounges, offering hippy-style magic to travellers. Perhaps she had known very little of Africa when she had become involved with this man. Perhaps memory had added to him. Perhaps she had become profounder in the other country. Or perhaps this man had answered so many of her needs here — comforter, lover, astrologer, magician — that she had not really been able to judge him.

I wanted to leave the man. But, after this talk of magic, he wanted to stick to me. He came out to the square with me and — strong, elegant, easy in his movements, very attractive — he began to walk back with me to the hotel. The beggars saw us and squawked at us; some of them raced up aggressively in their carts; the man with the padded stumps drove them away.

Phyllis’s friend said as we walked, as though he wanted to live up to what Phyllis had said about him, “You get only the bad news about Africa in the European papers. The wars and the famines. But I will tell you. There are seven sacred spots in Africa. All the forces of the continent are concentrated on those seven spots. There is a holy man in each one of those spots. Every month these holy men meet and arrange the destiny of Africa.”

What was the implication of that? That we were on one of the seven spots, and that he was one of the holy men?

I asked, “How do these seven men meet?”

He made a gesture, making a circular sweep above his head with his index finger. “Telepathically.”

Was this magic African? Or was it part of a fantasy of Africa from across the ocean, a hippy-style fantasy about the powers of old cultures, something that had made its way back here and was now being offered as African to travellers, strangers and solitaries who needed this kind of magic?

Soon, I knew, I would be hearing from this man about the extra-terrestrial beings who had landed on a certain part of West Africa. And, indeed, he was beginning on that when we got to the entry to the hotel. He was frightened of the policemen there. He didn’t follow me in.

WE ALL inhabit “constructs” of a world. Ancient peoples had their own. Our grandparents had their own; we cannot absolutely enter into their constructs. Every culture has its own: men are infinitely malleable. And perhaps Phyllis, with the fluidity of character which her African life had given her, enabling her to be many things to many people (critical of Africans, critical of Europeans, critical of West Indians and black Americans, critical of one group by reference to another), perhaps Phyllis, with her initial French-speaking limitations (Guadeloupe, Paris, West Africa), had established her own further construct of the world. Perhaps in that fluidity, in that shiftingness, she had found freedom. Perhaps, as the years went on, she would recede more and more from her own background; perhaps logic would leave her. As much as the principal’s father’s Back-to-Africa escape (or struggle) had determined the principal’s twin natures, so Phyllis’s construct had been determined by her marriage to her little chief and, before that, by her flight from the French West Indies (so liberating to the black man who was the first to teach me French). She couldn’t go back to what she had left behind; she couldn’t absolutely undo anything she had done; that was part of her woman’s nature.

It was otherwise for Lebrun. He had always been on the run, a revolutionary without a base, always a failure in one way, in another way fortunate, never having to live with the consequences, of his action, always being free to move on.

Perhaps he never knew the consequences of his words in the French West African dictatorship, when for the first time he found a ruler of a state who was ready to be his disciple, because the advice so matched the ruler’s own needs.

When the dictatorship collapsed and the desolate country was opened up, no one thought of calling him to account. He was not associated with desolation. He was, rather, the man who had held fast both to ideas of revolution and African redemption; and had not been rewarded for his pains. In the mess of Africa and the Caribbean he was oddly pure.

He was now very old, and famous among people who were interested in colonial and post-colonial history. But the people who wrote occasional profiles of him couldn’t really understand him. They had grown up in another world, and were simpler than he was. The profile-writers and the television interviewers, who promoted him with self-conscious virtue, were serving a cause that had long ago been won. They risked nothing at all. They had no means of understanding or assessing a man who had been born early in the century into a very hard world, whose intellectual growth had at every stage been accompanied by a growing rawness of sensibility, and whose political resolutions, expressing the wish not to go mad, had been in the nature of spiritual struggles, occurring in the depth of his being.

They came with their interview files, and they asked all the questions that had been asked before. They asked especially about his mother’s uncle, the coachman of the English family who had gone from Barbados to London, and had found friends among the servants of the Tichborne house, who gave him tea and cake. Lebrun told the story again and again. Towards the end of his life, he sometimes forgot the point of the story. He had the old coachman say that in the old days black people and white people were one, and then he, Lebrun, searched for the thing that he knew followed but could no longer find. For the interviewer or the television producer it was enough, a text for today; not understanding that Lebrun’s anguish had begun there, with the old coachman taking him far back, almost to the times of slavery, as to the good times. But perhaps, too, in extreme old age, he had become a child again, looking only for peace.