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Overview
A sympathetic and often humorous account of an obscure episode in the history of the remote island of Anguilla, in the northeast Caribbean, The Night of the Rambler revolves around a haphazard attempt by a dozen or so locals to invade neighboring St. Kitts, in an effort to topple the government of the recently established Associated State of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla.
Ostensibly, the action maps the fifteen hours that lapse between the moment when the “rebels” board The Rambler, the thirty-five-foot motorboat that will take them across the strait to St. Kitts, and the break of dawn the following day, when it becomes obvious that the unaccomplished mission will have to be aborted. The novel is at turns highly dramatic and hilarious, all the while bringing deep honesty to the often-unexamined righteousness of revolution.
“Colorful detours into native lore, such as a rich Dutchman’s fabled courtship of a local beauty, strike grace notes that echo Marquez. . . . Readers . . . will be rewarded with the little-known tale of how the underdog country demanded its own place in the 20th century.” —Publishers Weekly
“This is a book about revolution and the underdog, about a small, isolated island fighting for recognition, opportunity and justice; it is a compelling tale about a curious historical episode, but also a vital look at priorities, perspective and the right to live in dignity, issues that, much like Anguilla’s rebellion of 1967, are all too easily forgotten.” —The Island Review
“This is a fine novel, a surprising novel, perhaps the first true novel I have read about the nature of revolutions. The Night of the Rambler is ambitious, smart, and successful. It raises all sorts of questions about what revolutions want, how revolutions fail, and why revolutions are necessary—challenging all the while how history remembers them.” —Percival Everett, author of Erasure
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781617751820 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Akashic Books |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
MAY DE LORD BE WIT' US
When a new pocket of lights flared farther to the east through the deep blackness of the night, Sol Campbell finally vented the rage that had been eating up his insides, and with an intimidating Yo Rude! issued the prelude to his duel. He seemed to stand on higher ground as his voice rose above the rest to ask, Wha' dem lights over dere be? Tell me, nuh — wha' dat light yonder be, if it ain' St. Kitts? Instantly, the roar of the engine receded and the surge behind the boat caught up with its hull, softly thrusting the sixteen passengers forward. Awash at sea, The Rambler drifted helplessly in no particular direction. The calm Caribbean waters rocked the boat melodiously, intensely, in the middle of the night, as its 115-horsepower diesel engine gargled on idle. Every now and then a wayward wave or ripple crashed against the underside of the hull, letting out an empty thump that reverberated inside the men aboard. There was no moon. The night, dark and clear all at once, was made thicker by a sinister haze which veiled the stars and the lights in the distance. Behind the wheel, on the bridge of the thirty-five-foot boat, a bitter argument ensued.
Rude Thompson, captain for a day, had been entrusted to take The Rambler to the northwestern shores of St. Kitts in order to meet local members of the insurrection at the stroke of midnight. But that very stroke had gone at least half an hour earlier, as they'd seemingly found themselves off the coast of, not St. Kitts, but the neighboring St. Eustatius.
The men had gathered at Island Harbour, on the northeastern end of Anguilla, that very day to pack the boat with guns, ammo, and a few provisions for the journey. The mission had been kept secret and the men involved had camped near the training site at Junks Hole Beach for the past three days, away from their families for added security. The Rambler was loaded for the sixty-five-mile journey southward on Friday, June 9, shortly after lunch. Alwyn Cooke, the mastermind behind the plan, showed up uncharacteristically late. He wore his usual gray pressed trousers and white cotton shirt buttoned up to the top. Yet there was something ragged about his looks — something that went beyond the three-day beard and the sunken rings around his eyes. He brought with him the dark green canvas bag in which, ten days earlier, the police task force had intended to take their guns, before they were expelled from the island.
At that time, Inspector Edmonton, head of the police task force, had carried the bag to the Piper Aztec that was supposed to take him and the remaining four members of the force back to St. Kitts. On his way from the small wooden building that was Wallblake Airport to the equally small propeller aircraft sitting on the dust strip, he was met by Rude Thompson, Gaynor Henderson, and the collective indignation against the man whose ill judgment had led to widespread violence months before, during the Statehood Queen Show. Rude's first request for Inspector Edmonton to drop de bag an' go on was more of an order. The inspector's reluctance to obey gave Gaynor the opportunity he craved to restore the pride that had been taken from him three months earlier, on the evening when he was thrown in the dungeon. So, emboldened by the circumstances, Gaynor took a .32 pistol from behind his back and shoved it right inside Inspector Edmonton's mouth, until it polished his uvula. You ever taste de taste of lead in you mout'? Inspector Edmonton had no chance to reply. You better drop de bag unless dis is de last t'ing you ever wan' taste.
Alwyn Cooke had thought the gesture excessively violent, but ten days had shaken Anguilla's world, and he presently approached with the same bag, except that it now looked heavier, bulkier. Come to de back of de truck. Is t'ree more of dem back dere. His shrill voice cut through the air and opened up the silence. By three in the afternoon, The Rambler was loaded with most of the equipment the police force had left behind: six Lee-Enfield Mk III* .303 rifles, such as the ones used during World War I; five Winchester Model 54 .30-06 rifles, the predecessor to the famous Model 70, launched in 1936; four M1 Garand .30-06 semiautomatic rifles; four M1 .30 semiautomatic carbines; eight hundred rounds of ammunition; two boxes of dynamite; four detonators; and four cans of tear gas. In addition to the material confiscated from the task force was a supply of more modern equipment from the USA, including five automatic .25 handguns, three .32-caliber pistols, and, crucially, two M16 automatic rifles and two Browning M1919 .30-caliber machine guns, both of which were popular at the time with the American army, particularly in Vietnam.
However antiquated, The Rambler was equipped with an arsenal big enough to arm a small militia. Which is precisely what Alwyn Cooke, Rude Thompson, and the rest of the organizers of the operation expected to find in St. Kitts that night awaiting their aid. They would be in for a surprise — but not yet. Right now, burdened with the weight of sixteen passengers plus five hundred pounds of guns and ammo, the main concern was how much the boat could carry without sinking. Therefore, provisions for a trip that was to last at least nine hours were kept to a bare minimum: a demijohn of water, some dry crisps, and homemade johnnycakes — a local delicacy made of cornmeal and traditionally baked by women for their men to eat on the journey (later transfigured into johnny) — freshly prepared by some of the more diligent wives.
The Rambler was loaded and ready to go by about three in the afternoon, but the sun wouldn't set until some four hours later. The island, in complete control of the rebel government for the previous ten days, had been inaccessible to foreign traffic for forty-eight hours. Oil drums were carried in pickup trucks and lined up on the dirt strip of the airport to prevent any aircraft from landing, and all beaching points (there were no ports in Anguilla) had been guarded and officially closed to the outside world in an effort to keep any news of a plan which was largely unknown to the population in the first place from leaking to the enemy.
Consequently, at three in the afternoon of Friday, June 9, 1967, The Rambler became the first boat to leave Anguilla's territorial waters in two days. It sailed eastward from Island Harbour, and faced the tough Atlantic tides off the northeastern part of the island, before making the choppy journey past the cliffs of Harbour Ridge. Then it reached the treacherous seas off Captain's Bay, only to drift into the narrow passage between Windward Point, the easternmost part of the island, and Scrub Island, a midsized cay to the east that still housed a dirt strip built as part of that obscure episode of World War II — the Destroyers-for-Bases Agreement.
By four in the afternoon, The Rambler was cutting across the strait between Anguilla and Scrub, steering away from the waves that rolled in all the way from Africa, and heading in the general direction of St. Kitts and the rest of the Caribbean atoll. The first three miles of the passage were expected to be among the roughest of the day, but the sun still burned ferociously in the sky and the men aboard The Rambler still itched with desire to reach St. Kitts and get to the task at hand as the boat left Scrub Island behind on its port side and stopped challenging the high crests of the vigorous sea in order to roll with them toward Tintamarre, a.k.a. Flat Island, about ten nautical miles away.
Like Scrub, Tintamarre is a midsized cay just off the (northwestern) coast of its bigger sister island, St. Martin, which had little of interest for honest citizens outside one or two unspoiled beaches of white sand and turquoise water. Like Scrub, the island is flat enough to home a dirt strip, but with facilities in Dutch Sint Maarten to the south, Scrub Island to the east, and Dog Island to the north, the American army felt adequately prepared to monitor the traffic and disrupt the passage of German U-boats through the Anguilla channel. Perhaps understandably, their plans did not foresee the apparition of Jan van Hoeppel, a mercenary adventurer — half Quixote, half Saint Exupéry — who, in collaboration with the Vichy government across the French Caribbean, would foil the American initiative and develop a sophisticated replenishing station in Tintamarre for the Nazi navy to enjoy fresh fruit and water from Martinique, from Guadeloupe, from Dominica, while their submarines were refueled and replenished.
Alas, German interest in the Caribbean was short-lived, so when the traffic diminished and, indeed, the bad guys were defeated, van Hoeppel turned to aviation for inspiration: he already owned a four-seat, high-wing, single-engine Stinson Reliant, which he dubbed La Cucaracha, so he flattened the ground in Tintamarre, invested the money he had made collaborating with the Vichy in two ten-seat Stinson Model A trimotors and a six-seat Stinson Detroiter, and, just like that, established the first operational airline in the northeastern Caribbean: Air Atlantique.
Van Hoeppel had long shifted his focus from airplanes to real estate, and the role he plays in this tale hangs in the balance of untyped words, but as sixteen restless men approached the western shores of Tintamarre on the first stage in their voyage, the remnants of a fleet that had been reduced by frequent accidents and decimated by a severe hurricane more than fifteen years back glowed with a rare air of grandeur, of relevance, as if, somehow, one impossible dream could be mirrored in another. Then Alwyn Cooke intervened. Cut de engine. Rude Thompson looked at his comrade with a trace of disbelief, but did not venture as far as to question the order. A few seconds elapsed before Wha' we do now? — a voice so anonymous echoed that it seemed to each of the passengers in the boat as if they had all asked the question at the same time. We wait for night to fall, and the ensuing silence filled the air separating the flat soil of Tintamarre to the starboard and the angled hills of St. Barths in the distance, shadowed in the center by a thick pocket of rain that poured down somewhere at sea, between The Rambler and the island.
It had just gone five when the diesel engine of The Rambler fell silent. The first ten miles of the journey had taken a good two hours, but the sun still hung high in the sky, far above the horizon line. Alwyn Cooke intended to minimize the chances of being caught crossing the St. Barths channel by lingering near Tintamarre until night had fallen. On Friday, June 9, 1967, the sun set at 6:46 p.m. The tropical crepuscule, short-lived and dramatic, shed daylight for another half hour. Hence, The Rambler and its crew had to sit tight and wait out at sea, off the eastern end of Tintamarre, for two full hours. Of which, the first thirty, forty minutes were spent in utter silence, as if Alwyn Cooke's instruction had dropped a tacit curfew on words.
But it had not been Alwyn Cooke, nor anyone else, who had imposed the silence. Instead, it was the simultaneous reaction of sixteen men, all far too absorbed in their own worries to notice the world outside. To the three American mercenaries aboard The Rambler, all scarred from their exploits in Vietnam, this might have seemed like a natural reaction. However, to the average West Indian, a group of sixteen men sitting in silence for this long in a small boat was an aberration. A talkative people steeped in a long tradition of humor and faith, West Indians are not prone to fall silent — to let pass an opportunity to lambaste one another with a copious dose of pique — on any occasion. But this was more than just an adventure, and more was at stake than any of them would have cared to admit: here were joined at once interests that were national and personal, common and individual; here was invested much hope, much time, and much money — money to pay for guns, money to pay for experienced men of war, money that in Anguilla in 1967 simply did not exist. Many of these thoughts never even crossed the minds of any of the sixteen men aboard The Rambler. Nevertheless, the tension, the fear, the uncertainty that reigned was adequately represented in this drawn- out silence that lasted from the moment Alwyn Cooke uttered his order to wait for night, until sometime after six, when the red sun approaching the horizon inexplicably triggered in the young Walter Stewart a need to hum the melody of "The Lord Is My Shepherd."
Walter Stewart sat at the back of The Rambler, where the fumes of the diesel engine had sent him on a dizzying slumber from the start. But the boat had been drifting for a good hour, and, if anything, the pervading smell was of sweat and salt, of men at sea, and Walter had often gone out fishing with his grandfather, Connor, the head of the Stewart family from Island Harbour, and sometimes they had traveled as far north as Sombrero Island, forty miles away from Anguilla and right in the middle of the Anegada Passage, so Walter knew for a fact that what he was feeling was not seasickness, and yet he could not help the vacuum in his stomach, and the spinning inside his head, and the dryness in his mouth, the taste of bitter fullness in his larynx.
Although Walter was merely a kid — barely fifteen years old — he had been part of the revolution from the start. He had been there, getting his placard smashed on his head, in January 1967, when Rude Thompson and Alwyn Cooke recruited people to follow Chief Minister Bradshaw during his official visit to the island; he had proved one of the most vociferous hecklers at the speeches the statesman from St. Kitts had tried to deliver in Anguilla to "discuss" the concept of statehood; and he had been there again, watching from a safe distance, as the very same policemen who had so magnanimously shared their tear gas with the crowd left the island in an equally gallant gesture, on the morning of May 30.
Ten days later, the commitment and loyalty of Walter Stewart toward the revolutionary cause was neither challenged nor questioned. What was being put to the test, however, was his stomach — until the sun, hanging low over the horizon, reddened by a thickening mist, put a hymn he loathed in his mind. Then, slowly, he let out a wail, which turned itself into a quiet hum, which led to a whisper. By the time he started whistling the tune, Mario Gómez, one of the American mercenaries onboard, had had enough. What the hell are you singing that for, boy? The only lord who can help you now is this: and he held the long, angular shell of a .30-caliber missile upright in his left hand, between his index finger and thumb. His pale young face squirmed in a failed attempt to look tough. Who the hell would put all that junk in a deserted rock, anyway? asked Gómez, referring to the carcasses of whatever remained of the fleet of Air Atlantique. Corporal Gómez did not think Walter Stewart would be headstrong enough to go on with his gospel, but he did not want to risk it either, nor did he feel in the frame of mind to allow the protracted silence to continue. Meanwhile, Glenallen Rawlingson, a quiet, determined young man with bulging eyes, inward- folded lips, and an anthropoid gait, was also happy to break the silence. He was tall and thin, and darker than the average Anguillian. Unlike most of the men in the expedition, he did not stem from the eastern end of the island, but from the more central South Hill. In a spontaneous burst of energy, he explained, maybe to Corporal Gómez, maybe to everyone else, how once, not too long ago, Flat Island had been an important source of income to Anguillians. My uncle did till de soil of dat land, when it belong to Mr. D.C. Glenallen spoke the truth, but for those who did not know the story it was hard to imagine, adrift, awaiting the end of the day, that anything at all might have ever taken place on that godforsaken rock. Yet Glenallen's voice was less abrasive than the silence it replaced, so Corporal Gómez and the rest of the crew allowed him to continue his tale about an eccentric Dutch heir who had come to this far corner of the earth to dissociate himself from the civilized world and who had decided to set up his kingdom in Tintamarre, where he built a luxurious palace and raised cattle and grew cotton and, implausibly, became a major purchaser of Anguilla's one and only export: labor. Alas, there was to be no happy ending to the fairy tale. D.C.'s death was mysterious, sad, and, as all death must be, lonely, but also categorical, because he failed to plant in Tintamarre or in the womb of his beloved Elaine Nisbet, or anywhere else for that matter, the seed of his spring and consequently brought with the end of his life the end, too, of his lineage and of a Caribbean extravaganza like no other. But this episode is too important to be dispatched as an aside. So let's press the pause button and allow D.C. van Ruijtenbeek to linger in space for the time being, while we call upon the voice of the great Héctor Lavoe to put an end to Glenallen Rawlingson's anecdote with the unmistakable melody of Todo tiene su final / nada dura para siempre ...
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Night of the Rambler"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Montague Kobbé.
Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books.
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
Preface: THE BURNING QUESTION,
PART I,
MAY DE LORD BE WIT' US,
(THE PLAN),
THE BITTER ARGUMENT,
THE RENDEZVOUS,
PART II,
TINTAMARRE AND THE IMPLAUSIBLE TWIST OF ALWYN'S FATE,
RUDE THOMPSON AND THE ARUBAN CONNECTION,
(A FEW WORDS ON THE TIMES AND THEIR GEIST),
THE INGREDIENTS OF CHANGE,
THE SPEECH THAT NEVER CAME TO BE,
THE UNDELIVERED MESSAGE,
THE STATEHOOD QUEEN SHOW,
THE RECONCILIATION,
KICK 'EM OUT!,
PART III,
ATTACK!,
RETREAT!,
Epilogue: THE DENOUEMENT,
Bonus Excerpt: On the Way Back,
A Note from the Author,
About Akashic Books,