At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies

To the Anglican clergy, meanwhile, whom I met in the West Indies, I am bound to offer my thanks, not for courtesies shown to me—that is a slight matter—but for the worthy fashion in which they seem to be upholding the honour of the good old Church in the colonies.  In Port of Spain I heard and saw enough of their work to believe that they are in nowise less active—more active they cannot be—than if they were seaport clergymen in England.  The services were performed thoroughly well; with a certain stateliness, which is not only allowable but necessary, in a colony where the majority of the congregation are coloured; but without the least foppery or extravagance.  The very best sermon, perhaps, for matter and manner, which I ever heard preached to unlettered folk, was preached by a young clergyman—a West Indian born—in the Great Church of Port of Spain; and he had no lack of hearers, and those attentive ones.  The Great Church was always a pleasant sight, with its crowded congregation of every hue, all well dressed, and with the universal West Indian look of comfort; and its noble span of roof overhead, all cut from island timber—another proof of what the wood-carver may effect in the island hereafter.  Certainly distractions were frequent and troublesome, at least to a newcomer.  A large centipede would come out and take a hurried turn round the Governor’s seat; or a bat would settle in broad daylight in the curate’s hood; or one had to turn away one’s eyes lest they should behold—not vanity, but—the magnificent head of a Cabbage-palm just outside the opposite window, with the black vultures trying to sit on the footstalks in a high wind, and slipping down, and flopping up again, half the service through.  But one soon got accustomed to the strange sights; though it was, to say the least, somewhat startling to find, on Christmas Day, the altar and pulpit decked with exquisite tropic flowers; and each doorway arched over with a single pair of coconut leaves, fifteen feet high.

The Christmas Day Communion, too, was one not easily to be forgotten.  At least 250 persons, mostly coloured, many as black as jet, attended; and were, I must say for them, most devout in manner.  Pleasant it was to see the large proportion of men among them, many young white men of the middle and upper class; and still more pleasant, too, to see that all hues and ranks knelt side by side without the least distinction.  One trio touched me deeply.  An old lady—I know not who she was—with the unmistakable long, delicate, once beautiful features of a high-bred West Indian of the ‘Ancien Régime,’ came and knelt reverently, feebly, sadly, between two old Negro women.  One of them seemed her maid.  Both of them might have been once her slaves.  Here at least they were equals.  True Equality—the consecration of humility, not the consecration of envy—first appeared on earth in the house of God, and at the altar of Christ: and I question much whether it will linger long in any spot on earth where that house and that altar are despised.  It is easy to propose an equality without Christianity; as easy as to propose to kick down the ladder by which you have climbed, or to saw off the bough on which you sit.  As easy; and as safe.

But I must not forget, while speaking of education in Trinidad, one truly ‘educational’ establishment which I visited at Tacarigua; namely, a Coolie Orphan Home, assisted by the State, but set up and kept up almost entirely by the zeal of one man—the Rev. – Richards, brother of the excellent Rector of Trinity Church, Port of Spain.  This good man, having no children of his own, has taken for his children the little brown immigrants, who, losing father and mother, are but too apt to be neglected by their own folk.  At the foot of the mountains, beside a clear swift stream, amid scenery and vegetation which an European millionaire might envy, he has built a smart little quadrangle, with a long low house, on one side for the girls, on the other for the boys; a schoolroom, which was as well supplied with books, maps, and pictures as any average National School in England; and, adjoining the buildings, a garden where the boys are taught to work.  A matron—who seemed thoroughly worthy of her post—conducts the whole; and comfort, cleanliness, and order were visible everywhere.  A pleasant sight; but the pleasantest sight of all was to see the little bright-eyed brown darlings clustering round him who was indeed their father in God; who had delivered them from misery and loneliness, and—in the case of the girls—too probably vice likewise; and drawn them, by love, to civilisation and Christianity.  The children, as fast as they grow up, are put out to domestic service, and the great majority of the boys at least turn out well.  The girls, I was told, are curiously inferior to the boys in intellect and force of character; an inferiority which is certainly not to be found in Negroes, among whom the two sexes are more on a par, not only intellectually, but physically also, than among any race which I have seen.  One instance, indeed, we saw of the success of the school.  A young creature, brought up there, and well married near by, came in during our visit to show off her first baby to the matron and the children; as pretty a mother and babe as one could well see.  Only we regretted that, in obedience to the supposed demands of civilisation, and of a rise in life, she had discarded the graceful and modest Hindoo dress of her ancestresses, for a French bonnet and all that accompanies it.  The transfiguration added, one must charitably suppose, to her self-respect; if so, it must be condoned on moral grounds: but in an æsthetic view, she had made a great mistake.

In remembrance of our visit, a little brown child, some three or four years old, who had been christened that day, was named after me; and I was glad to have my name connected, even in so minute an item, with an institution which at all events delivers children from the fancy that they can, without being good or doing good, conciliate the upper powers by hanging garlands on a trident inside a hut, or putting red dust on a stump of wood outside it, while they stare in and mumble prayers to they know not what of gilded wood.

The coolie temples are curious places to those who have never before been face to face with real heathendom.  Their mark is, generally, a long bamboo with a pennon atop, outside a low dark hut, with a broad flat verandah, or rather shed, outside the door.  Under the latter, opposite each door, if I recollect rightly, is a stone or small stump, on which offerings are made of red dust and flowers.  From it the worshippers can see the images within.  The white man, stooping, enters the temple.  The attendant priest, so far from forbidding him, seems highly honoured, especially if the visitor give him a shilling; and points out, in the darkness—for there is no light save through the low doors—three or four squatting abominations, usually gilded.  Sometimes these have been carved in the island.  Sometimes the poor folk have taken the trouble to bring them all the way from India on board ship.  Hung beside them on the walls are little pictures, often very well executed in the miniature-like Hindoo style by native artists in the island.  Large brass pots, which have some sacred meaning, stand about, and with them a curious trident-shaped stand, about four feet high, on the horns of which garlands of flowers are hung as offerings.  The visitor is told that the male figures are Mahadeva, and the female Kali: we could hear of no other deities.  I leave it to those who know Indian mythology better than I do, to interpret the meaning—or rather the past meaning, for I suspect it means very little now—of all this trumpery and nonsense, on which the poor folk seem to spend much money.  It was impossible, of course, even if one had understood their language, to find out what notions they attached to it all; and all I could do, on looking at these heathen idol chapels, in the midst of a Christian and civilised land, was to ponder, in sadness and astonishment, over a puzzle as yet to me inexplicable; namely, how human beings first got into their heads the vagary of worshipping images.  I fully allow the cleverness and apparent reasonableness of M. Comte’s now famous theory of the development of religions.  I blame no one for holding it.  But I cannot agree with it.  The more of a ‘saine appréciation,’ as M. Comte calls it, I bring to bear on the known facts; the more I ‘let my thought play freely around them,’ the more it is inconceivable to me, according to any laws of the human intellect which I have seen at work, that savage or half-savage folk should have invented idolatries.  I do not believe that Fetishism is the parent of idolatry; but rather—as I have said elsewhere—that it is the dregs and remnants of idolatry.  The idolatrous nations now, as always, are not the savage nations; but those who profess a very ancient and decaying civilisation.  The Hebrew Scriptures uniformly represent the non-idolatrous and monotheistic peoples, from Abraham to Cyrus, as lower in what we now call the scale of civilisation, than the idolatrous and polytheistic peoples about them.  May not the contrast between the Patriarchs and the Pharaohs, David and the Philistines, the Persians and the Babylonians, mark a law of history of wider application than we are wont to suspect?  But if so, what was the parent of idolatry?  For a natural genesis it must have had, whether it be a healthy and necessary development of the human mind—as some hold, not without weighty arguments on their side; or whether it be a diseased and merely fungoid growth, as I believe it to be.  I cannot hold that it originated in Nature-worship, simply because I can find no evidence of such an origin.  There is rather evidence, if the statements of the idolaters themselves are to be taken, that it originated in the worship of superior races by inferior races; possibly also in the worship of works of art which those races, dying out, had left behind them, and which the lower race, while unable to copy them, believed to be possessed of magical powers derived from a civilisation which they had lost.  After a while the priesthood, which has usually, in all ages and countries, proclaimed itself the depository of a knowledge and a civilisation lost to the mass of the people, may have gained courage to imitate these old works of art, with proper improvements for the worse, and have persuaded the people that the new idols would do as well as the old ones.  Would that some truly learned man would ‘let his thoughts play freely’ round this view of the mystery, and see what can be made out of it.  But whatever is made out, on either view, it will still remain a mystery—to me at least, as much as to Isaiah of old—how this utterly abnormal and astonishing animal called man first got into his foolish head that he could cut a thing out of wood or stone which would listen to him and answer his prayers.  Yet so it is; so it has been for unnumbered ages.  Man may be defined as a speaking animal, or a cooking animal.  He is best, I fear, defined as an idolatrous animal; and so much the worse for him.  But what if that very fact, diseased as it is, should be a sure proof that he is more than an animal?

CHAPTER XV: THE RACES—A LETTER

Dear –, I have been to the races: not to bet, nor to see the horses run: not even to see the fair ladies on the Grand Stand, in all the newest fashions of Paris viâ New York: but to wander en mufti among the crowd outside, and behold the humours of men.  And I must say that their humours were very good humours; far better, it seemed to me, than those of an English race-ground.  Not that I have set foot on one for thirty years; but at railway stations, and elsewhere, one cannot help seeing what manner of folk, beside mere holiday folk, rich or poor, affect English races; or help pronouncing them, if physiognomy be any test of character, the most degraded beings, even some of those smart-dressed men who carry bags with their names on them, which our pseudo-civilisation has yet done itself the dishonour of producing.  Now, of that class I saw absolutely none.  I do not suppose that the brown fellows who hung about the horses, whether Barbadians or Trinidad men, were of very angelic morals: but they looked like heroes compared with the bloated hangdog roughs and quasi-grooms of English races.  As for the sporting gentlemen, not having the honour to know them, I can only say that they looked like gentlemen, and that I wish, in all courtesy, that they had been more wisely employed.

But the Negro, or the coloured man of the lower class, was in his glory.  He was smart, clean, shiny, happy, according to his light.  He got up into trees, and clustered there, grinning from ear to ear.  He bawled about island horses and Barbadian horses—for the Barbadians mustered strong, and a fight was expected, which, however, never came off; he sang songs, possibly some of them extempore, like that which amused one’s childhood concerning a once notable event in a certain island—

‘I went to da PlaceTo see da horse-race,I see Mr. BartonA-wipin’ ob his face.‘Run Allright,Run for your life;See Mr BartonA comin wid a knife.‘Oh, Mr Barton,I sarry for your loss;If you no believe me,I tie my head across.’

That is—go into mourning.  But no one seemed inclined to tie their heads, across that day.  The Coolies seemed as merry as the Negroes, even about the face of the Chinese there flickered, at times, a feeble ray of interest.

The coloured women wandered about, in showy prints, great crinolines, and gorgeous turbans.  The Coolie women sat in groups on the glass—ah! Isle of the Blest, where people can sit on the grass in January—like live flower beds of the most splendid and yet harmonious hues.  As for jewels, of gold as well as silver, there were many there, on arms, ankles, necks, and noses, which made white ladies fresh from England break the tenth commandment.

I wandered about, looking at the live flower beds, and giving passing glances into booths, which I longed to enter, and hear what sort of human speech might be going on therein but I was deterred, first by the thought that much of the speech might not be over edifying, and next by the smells, especially by that most hideous of all smells—new rum.

At last I came to a crowd, and in the midst of it, one of those great French merry-go-rounds turned by machinery, with pictures of languishing ladies round the central column.  All the way from the Champs Elysées the huge piece of fool’s tackle had lumbered and creaked hither across the sea to Martinique, and was now making the round of the islands, and a very profitable round, to judge from the number of its customers.  The hobby-horses swarmed with Negresses and Hindoos of the lower order.  The Negresses, I am sorry to say, forgot themselves, kicked up their legs, shouted to the bystanders, and were altogether incondite.  The Hindoo women, though showing much more of their limbs than the Negresses, kept them gracefully together, drew their veils round their heads, and sat coyly, half frightened, half amused, to the delight of their papas, or husbands, who had in some cases to urge them to get up and ride, while they stood by, as on guard, with the long hardwood quarter staff in hand.

As I looked on, considered what a strange creature man is, and wondered what possible pleasure these women could derive from being whirled round till they were giddy and stupid, I saw an old gentleman seemingly absorbed in the very same reflection.  He was dressed in dark blue, with a straw hat.  He stood with his hands behind his back, his knees a little bent, and a sort of wise, half-sad, half-humorous smile upon his aquiline high-cheek-boned features.  I took him for an old Scot; a canny, austere man—a man, too, who had known sorrow, and profited thereby; and I drew near to him.  But as he turned his head deliberately round to me, I beheld to my astonishment the unmistakable features of a Chinese.  He and I looked each other full in the face, without a word; and I fancied that we understood each other about the merry-go-round, and many things besides.  And then we both walked off different ways, as having seen enough, and more than enough.  Was he, after all, an honest man and true?  Or had he, like Ah Sin, in Mr. Bret Harte’s delectable ballad, with ‘the smile that was child-like and bland’—

‘In his sleeves, which were large,   Twenty-four packs of cards,And—On his nails, which were taper,   What’s common in tapers—that’s wax’?

I know not; for the Chinese visage is unfathomable.  But I incline to this day to the more charitable judgment; for the man’s face haunted me, and haunts me still; and I am weak enough to believe that I should know the man and like him, if I met him in another planet, a thousand years hence.

Then I walked back under the blazing sun across the Savanna, over the sensitive plants and the mole-crickets’ nests, while the great locusts whirred up before me at every step; toward the archway between the bamboo-clumps, and the red sentry shining like a spark of fire beneath its deep shadow; and found on my way a dying racehorse, with a group of coloured men round him, whom I advised in vain to do the one thing needful—put a blanket over him to keep off the sun, for the poor thing had fallen from sunstroke; so I left them to jabber and do nothing: asking myself—Is the human race, in the matter of amusements, as civilised as it was—say three thousand years ago?  People have, certainly—quite of late years—given up going to see cocks fight, or heretics burnt: but that is mainly because the heretics just now make the laws—in favour of themselves and the cocks.  But are our amusements to be compared with those of the old Greeks, with the one exception of liking to hear really good music?  Yet that fruit of civilisation is barely twenty years old; and we owe its introduction, be it always remembered, to the Germans.  French civilisation signifies practically, certainly in the New World, little save ballet-girls, billiard-tables, and thin boots: English civilisation, little save horse-racing and cricket.  The latter sport is certainly blameless; nay, in the West Indies, laudable and even heroic, when played, as on the Savanna here, under a noonday sun which feels hot enough to cook a mutton-chop.  But with all respect for cricket, one cannot help looking back at the old games of Greece, and questioning whether man has advanced much in the art of amusing himself rationally and wholesomely.

I had reason to ask the same question that evening, as we sat in the cool verandah, watching the fireflies flicker about the tree-tops, and listening to the weary din of the tom-toms which came from all sides of the Savanna save our own, drowning the screeching and snoring of the toads, and even, at times, the screams of an European band, which was playing a ‘combination tune,’ near the Grand Stand, half a mile off.

To the music of tom-tom and chac-chac, the coloured folk would dance perpetually till ten o’clock, after which time the rites of Mylitta are silenced by the policeman, for the sake of quiet folk in bed.  They are but too apt, however, to break out again with fresh din about one in the morning, under the excuse—‘Dis am not last night, Policeman.  Dis am ’nother day.’

Well: but is the nightly tom-tom dance so much more absurd than the nightly ball, which is now considered an integral element of white civilisation?  A few centuries hence may not both of them be looked back on as equally sheer barbarisms?

These tom-tom dances are not easily seen.  The only glance I ever had of them was from the steep slope of once beautiful Belmont.  ‘Sitting on a hill apart,’ my host and I were discoursing, not ‘of fate, free-will, free-knowledge absolute,’ but of a question almost as mysterious—the doings of the Parasol-ants who marched up and down their trackways past us, and whether these doings were guided by an intellect differing from ours, only in degree, but not in kind.  A hundred yards below we espied a dance in a negro garden; a few couples, mostly of women, pousetting to each other with violent and ungainly stampings, to the music of tom-tom and chac-chac, if music it can be called.  Some power over the emotions it must have; for the Negroes are said to be gradually maddened by it; and white people have told me that its very monotony, if listened to long, is strangely exciting, like the monotony of a bagpipe drone, or of a drum.  What more went on at the dance we could not see; and if we had tried, we should probably not have been allowed to see.  The Negro is chary of admitting white men to his amusements; and no wonder.  If a London ballroom were suddenly invaded by Phœbus, Ares, and Hermes, such as Homer drew them, they would probably be unwelcome guests; at least in the eyes of the gentlemen.  The latter would, I suspect, thoroughly sympathise with the Negro in the old story, intelligible enough to those who know what is the favourite food of a West Indian chicken.

‘Well, John, so they gave a dignity ball on the estate last night?’

‘Yes, massa, very nice ball.  Plenty of pretty ladies, massa.’

‘Why did you not ask me, John?  I like to look at pretty ladies as well as you.’

‘Ah, massa: when cockroach give a ball, him no ask da fowls.’

Great and worthy exertions are made, every London Season, for the conversion of the Negro and the Heathen, and the abolition of their barbarous customs and dances.  It is to be hoped that the Negro and the Heathen will some day show their gratitude to us, by sending missionaries hither to convert the London Season itself, dances and all; and assist it to take the beam out of its own eye, in return for having taken the mote out of theirs.

CHAPTER XVI: A PROVISION GROUND

The ‘provision grounds’ of the Negroes were very interesting.  I had longed to behold, alive and growing, fruits and plants which I had heard so often named, and seen so often figured, that I had expected to recognise many of them at first sight; and found, in nine cases out of ten, that I could not.  Again, I had longed to gather some hints as to the possibility of carrying out in the West Indian islands that system of ‘Petite Culture’—of small spade farming—which I have long regarded, with Mr. John Stuart Mill and others, as not only the ideal form of agriculture, but perhaps the basis of any ideal rustic civilisation.  And what scanty and imperfect facts I could collect I set down here.

It was a pleasant sensation to have, day after day, old names translated for me into new facts.  Pleasant, at least to me: not so pleasant, I fear, to my kind companions, whose courtesy I taxed to the uttermost by stopping to look over every fence, and ask, ‘What is that?  And that?’  Let the reader who has a taste for the beautiful as well as the useful in horticulture, do the same, and look in fancy over the hedge of the nearest provision ground.

There are orange-trees laden with fruit: who knows not them? and that awkward-boughed tree, with huge green fruit, and deeply-cut leaves a foot or more across—leaves so grand that, as one of our party often suggested, their form ought to be introduced into architectural ornamentation, and to take the place of the Greek acanthus, which they surpass in beauty—that is, of course, a Bread-fruit tree.

That round-headed tree, with dark rich Portugal laurel foliage, arranged in stars at the end of each twig, is the Mango, always a beautiful object, whether in orchard or in open park.  In the West Indies, as far as I have seen, the Mango has not yet reached the huge size of its ancestors in Hindostan.  There—to judge, at least, from photographs—the Mango must be indeed the queen of trees; growing to the size of the largest English oak, and keeping always the round oak-like form.  Rich in resplendent foliage, and still more rich in fruit, the tree easily became encircled with an atmosphere of myth in the fancy of the imaginative Hindoo.

That tree with upright branches, and large, dark, glossy leaves tiled upwards along them, is the Mammee Sapota, 227 beautiful likewise.  And what is the next, like an evergreen peach, shedding from the under side of every leaf a golden light—call it not shade?  A Star-apple; 228 and that young thing which you may often see grown into a great timber-tree, with leaves like a Spanish chestnut, is the Avocado, 229 or, as some call it, alligator, pear.  This with the glossy leaves, somewhat like the Mammee Sapota, is a Sapodilla, 230 and that with leaves like a great myrtle, and bright flesh-coloured fruit, a Malacca-apple, or perhaps a Rose-apple. 231  Its neighbour, with large leaves, gray and rough underneath, flowers as big as your two hands, with greenish petals and a purple eye, followed by fat scaly yellow apples, is the Sweet-sop; 232 and that privet-like bush with little flowers and green berries a Guava, 233 of which you may eat if you will, as you may of the rest.