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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780953222445 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Papillote Press |
| Publication date: | 01/14/2010 |
| Pages: | 268 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.63(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Falling in love
The ship quivered to the wind in the channel. Spray spattered on to the main deck. There was a smell of rubber; a whiff of oil. Far astern the volcano of Martinique hung like a pale triangle between sea and sky. I heard the French consul general say to the lady from South Carolina: "It appears that in Dominica my subordinate is a man of colour. It will not be possible for my wife to go ashore." And the lady, who wore black kid gloves and a lace veil covering an immense hat, sympathetically concurred.
From the north, dark and clouded mountains were already bearing down upon us with a strange effect of haste, of almost sinister import. Surf reared itself against impassive cliffs to fall back defeated. Vegetation clogged the valleys, shrouded the hills. Not until we were close inshore was there sign of human habitation; a tin roof, a spire, brown houses on stony beaches.
The ship cast anchor off the town of Roseau. Men dived from rafts for "black pennies", the pale soles of their feet waving in the water like seaweed. There was a clamour of boat owners. "Take Victoria, Mistress." "Master, White Lily for you." Buildings with shabby faces lined the bay front. Small fish were making seemingly aimless excursions under a jetty of wooden piles encrusted with sea eggs and barnacles. We sought the Botanical Gardens, and were pestered by small-boy beggars and would-be guides who led us through cobbled streets where wooden houses were mounted on massive foundations. Here and there one might glimpse a courtyard where vines were spread on a pergola behind a sagging mansion. A rampart of cliff overhung three cemeteries wherein the dead of three denominations were blanketed in pink coralita and croton bushes.
Under mahogany trees on a velvet lawn the matron of the hospital routed the little boys. "If you follow that path," she directed, "you will come to the Morne barracks." Already, our breath had been taken away by the beauty of the flowering shrubs. "Look at this one," we cried. "What is that?" Climbing the zigzag path, we stopped at corners to look down on to the red-roofed town and the shining sea, and came at last to a shrine under a talipot palm where the image of Christ was nailed among pointed stakes. At the foot of the cross, tight bunches of oleanders had been thrust into jam jars between lighted candles whose flames were quenched by the afternoon sun. A coloured woman, wearing a silk dress and head kerchief, knelt in prayer. Behind her, an ancient cannon, half buried in the grass, lay as though overthrown by the prince of peace.
Beyond a plot of young lime and orange trees, we found the barracks; stone buildings, three of whose roofs were rusted to the colour of mango flowers while the fourth was altogether missing. They were set square about what had once been a parade ground. There was an old man mowing the lawn and the lazy sound of his machine carried all summer in its droning, so that one could almost smell English grass. He said: "Self-help, Sah? Over there." And then, feeling perhaps that he had coped inadequately with the sudden appearance of strangers, he removed a tattered straw hat and, wiping his forehead with his arm, said: "Here walk the headless drummer."
Suspecting that we had strayed into the local loony bin we approached the best repaired building and there discovered a little old white lady who sold us rum punches in a bare room with tables. There were postcards for sale and bead necklaces; gourds made into rattles with painted faces, and coral fans which – when alive and rooted – sway on the surface of the sea like the fins of sharks. "Government allows us to use this room for the ladies self-help association," said the diminutive person. I could not refrain from asking: "Help themselves to what?"
Therefore it had to be explained that ladies who made jam, or bottled cashew nuts, or did embroidery, might here sell their wares to tourists. But neither my husband Lennox nor I were listening any more: far away up the valley, a waterfall poured out of a black-grey mountain whose summit was hidden in cloud. The veranda rail was wreathed in yellow alamanda, and white flowers shaped like trumpets.
"What a wonderful place to live," I muttered.
And the little old lady in the guise of Lucifer whispered: "You might rent the other room to sleep in. It would be very primitive. We don't have many tourists in Dominica."
"What did the old boy mean about the headless drummer?" Lennox asked.
And she said: "Oh, there's an old legend from the French wars," she smiled. "He wouldn't trouble you."
Back on the boat that evening, with the moon rising behind the mountains, dinner was eaten to the sound of waltzes and musical comedy selections in a brightly lit salon where the French consul general was seated with a pale and attractive young man who, in a few weeks would be our solicitor. The lady from South Carolina had made acquaintance with a beautiful blonde whose yellow dress and yellow hair had struck me all of a heap across the crowded room.
"But who is she?" I asked the chief engineer, "Who can she be?"
An American, I was told, resident in the island, living among oranges in the high hills in an estate called Sylvania.
"Tell me," a fellow passenger was saying, "How do you manage here, you a southern girl, meeting coloured people? Do you shake hands?"
And the blonde laughed with a touch of defiance. "Of course," she said, "I've done more than that."
Thus for the second time in one afternoon, although for the first time in our lives, we met this odd differentiation between persons known as the colour bar, against which we immediately flung ourselves to break it down. ("I tell you they are giants," said Don Quixote of the windmills. "And I shall fight against them all.")
Later, on deck, the same blonde was heard asking someone from the shore, "Who is staying at the Paz Hotel nowadays?"
"There's an American called Knapp from Fiji, I think," was the answer whereupon my husband broke excitedly into the conversation. "Knapp?" he said, "with a red beard?" Lennox had known John Holly Knapp 13 years previously in Tahiti, which in this place might easily be confused with Fiji. And instinctively he knew that it must be the same man: the Knapp whose house he had helped to build in Taravao; the Knapp who would not write letters and so lost touch with his friends; the Knapp of whom Frederick O'Brien had written in Mystic Isles of the South Seas: "Without doubt as near to a Greek deity in life, a Dionysus, as one could imagine. ... red-gold beard, dark curls over a high forehead, two flaming hibiscus blossoms behind his ears."
As the Lady Drake was about to sail for Montserrat, Lennox sent a card ashore by the agent, writing on one side of it: "You must be my old friend whom I am sorry to have missed seeing," and on the other: "My wife and I plan to come back in three weeks' time." It was typical of Holly that, on receiving the card, he should have looked at one side only, grieving loudly and bitterly at not having seen Lennox, sticking the evidence into his mirror, until days later, his friend Lorna Lindsley idly removed it and, turning it over, exclaimed: "But they're coming back."
* * *
That first visit to Dominica was in the winter of 1931. In the autumn of that year we had been living in London with our two children and the grown-up daughter of my first marriage. It was the depression, and Lennox was overtired, overworked, and constantly rather ill. Both of us on the brink of 40, we seemed to be settled and sunk in domesticity, less well-off than we had been, and seeing little prospect of further adventure. Then a lung specialist, stating positively that Lennox showed no evidence of tuberculosis, nevertheless recommended that we take three months' holiday in search of sunshine, and we chose to go to the West Indies because we knew so little about them.
Between Christmas and New Year we sailed from England for Trinidad in the French ship Colombie, then making her second voyage, and from Port of Spain we took the Canadian national steamship Lady Drake north through the Windward and Leeward islands. Dominica was the only island for which we had no letters of introduction, and with Dominica we fell in love at first sight, an infatuation without tangible rhyme or reason, yet no more irrational than any other falling in love.
When we returned to Dominica – as we had promised ourselves – three weeks later, we climbed into the Paz Hotel by a steep and narrow staircase leading straight off the street into a parlour crowded with basket chairs. Faded and worm-eaten photographs decorated the walls. A tight bunch of croton leaves had been thrust into a brass bowl. Conscious of my hot and crumpled appearance – we had left the pension in Martinique at five that morning and travelled second class in a horrid ship – I went out on to a balcony from which one looked down on to ruined walls. A man and a dog slept side by side on the pavement; a child carried a hand of ripe bananas on her head. Behind the town, mountains were cut into a blue-black frieze against rain clouds.
And there in the Paz was Holly. Attired in a well-fitting white suit with no hibiscus behind the ears, he was not quite my idea of Dionysus. His beard was red indeed but silvered rather than gold. Thus, with mutual pleasure, a friendship made in Tahiti was renewed in the West Indies in 1932.
With Holly that morning in the Paz were Percy Agar, who was to become my son-in-law, and Paul Ninas, an American artist who had lived for three years in the north of Dominica and who, summoned home on account of his father's mortal illness, had lent his house to Holly. It is funny, remembering my shy flight on to the balcony, to realise that Holly and Lorna thought me too "ladylike" to come camping with them in the rough house built by Paul near Calibishie village; and it was not until Lorna had left the island that the invitation was extended which was to change our lives.
Meanwhile the self-help ladies provided beds, knocked a few nails into a wall, and installed us in two rooms in the old barracks. There were no mosquito nets and we slept badly. "They are only bush mosquitoes," the ladies said, "they won't do you any harm." I looked ruefully at my swollen arms and decided harm had been done. From then on we burned coils of incense which looked like cobras ready to strike and made the room smell like a French church.
The ladies also produced Sarah, an ugly woman, a Seventh Day Adventist, and not a very good cook. On the first evening, she had served dishwater soup and a casseroled chicken cunningly designed to be all bone and no flesh. "It's a knack peculiar to 'other races'," Lennox said. "I remember a Chinese cook in Apia ..." And I retaliated with a description of a fowl mangled on a lakeside under Fujiyama. Sarah craved permission to go down the hill to Roseau. "I look for a boy to sleep with me," she said. In view of her unprepossessing appearance I could only wish her luck with a touch of pessimism. Next morning, a spindle-legged child of 10 emerged from the kitchen. "He my son," Sarah announced proudly.
May, the messenger, was plump and strong, smiling, and perhaps 17. Returning from town with a basket of vegetables upon her head crowned by a block of ice wrapped in a sack, she would stand by the veranda rail asserting with proud simplicity, "I back." And indeed it seemed to me that she had reason for pride, for the hill was steep and the load heavy; and I felt slightly ashamed for lying in a deck chair alternately studying Dominican history and throwing bread pellets to lizards. But anyone living so vitally in the present as May would not in the least have cared that battles long ago had been fought in this place, and she would know that lizards – "leezards" – did not require bread.
From one veranda we could see the roadstead streaked with pale currents and dotted with the sails of fishing boats; and from the other the Roseau valley ending in Morne Micotrin whose triangle, at sunrise, would be blackly outlined against a pink sky. At midday, with the peak wreathed in clouds, rainbows would play upon the little village perched on its shoulder. But at sunset, when light filled the dark gullies and the creeper-hung recesses, then the valley would yield its secrets – steam rising from the sulphur springs; patches of the most delicate green sugarcane, lime trees, destined to produce Rose's lime juice cordial, and always the silver ribbon of the waterfall pouring, so it seemed, out of nothing into nowhere.
Beyond the barracks, a path trailed into a scrubby forest where a stream was clouded with a grey stain as though smoke were held under the surface of the water; and, where it dawdled among huge leaves there was an orange scum, sinister and mephitic. A broken-down hut was rotting in that place, under slimy moss; and a tree fern had pushed off the roof which lay dismembered in the undergrowth. Sadness and decay, a flavour of old, unhappy far off things, underlay the island's beauty. It has never been easy to analyse, to define the mysterious charm that has lured some people to stay in Dominica forever, and from which others have fled without even taking time to unpack.
We made excursions on horseback hiring quadrupeds from the barber, crossing the backbone of the island by way of a crater called the Freshwater Lake to distinguish it from the Boiling Lake. For days we climbed precipitous ridges or followed red clay tracks within reach of the Atlantic spray; rode through deep forest, silent save for the call of birds; heard for the first time the unhappy note of the siffleur montagne; and forded again and again swift mountain streams, or broader, smoother ones where every day seemed to be washing day, and garments too torn to be identified, too faded for the original colour to be recognised, were spread on stones too hot for the hand to touch.
Later, we were rediscovered by the American blonde, Patsy Knowlton, whose preoccupation with new people had brought the name of Knapp into the conversation, and one day, we went to see her and her husband John at Sylvania. We drove on a rough metalled track called the Imperial Road because it had been given to the island in celebration of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee. Purple bougainvillea marked the entrance to an old stone house under a saman tree. A broken aqueduct, spotted with ferns and moss, carried water to turn a wooden wheel attached to some invisible machinery. On a narrow col between two watersheds, there was a long low house facing a stupendous panorama of hill and forest which, as clouds passed over, was cut into ever-changing shapes of blue and purple and black.
"Come and look at Morne Diablotin," said John. "You may never have another opportunity." And although I have had countless opportunities, I still remember the mountain as it was that day, blue with a touch of sunset gold on it.
"We've only been here two years," they told us, growing oranges commercially. And the first thing that happened was a hurricane. There were photographs taken before the disaster and after when trees lay on the ground and stripped branches cried for vengeance. We understood then why the people of Dominica were so hurricane conscious. Yet already, where destruction had been, we saw hibiscus hedges, gardenias and a white beaumontia vine writhing among the tree tops.
At Sylvania, where we stayed for a few days, small black finches with red breasts would perch on our beds in the mornings, and at the breakfast table would peck the butter, mangle the toast. Sometimes, towards evening, the mountain called Trois Pitons would flame as though it were on fire, and then bats would fly from under the veranda roof in a great cloud and, dispersing into the twilight, be seen no more.
With Holly and Lorna, we walked from the barracks at Morne Bruce to the village of Giraudel. We sat to eat our lunch under a wayside Calvary, such as one might see in Brittany, the figure of Christ on his cross, with a saint on each side. Children brought us, on plates made of banana leaves, fwaises which are not strawberries nor yet quite raspberries, but which grow wild on that side of the island and, like the edible frog called crapaud or mountain chicken, do not cross the dividing range. This area near Giraudel is a dry part of the country, the steep watercourses standing empty, and we were glad when people brought us drinking water in red clay goblets, not realising then how very far they had had to carry it, bringing it up in buckets or kerosene tins from the valley half an hour's climb away.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Black and White Sands"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Elma Napier.
Excerpted by permission of Papillote Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Before Dominica: a portrait of Elma Napier,
1 Falling in love,
2 Dreaming the dream,
3 Of mud and cockroaches,
4 Building Pointe Baptiste,
5 A new design for living,
6 Forest and river,
7 A taste of colonial politics,
8 War and death,
9 "Must I wear a hat?",
10 Shortages and smugglers,
11 Deck class to Barbados,
12 Manners, migration and bananas,
13 Battle of the transinsular road,
14 The sea for company,