Roaming Through the West Indies

by Harry Alverson Franck

Modern street-cars carry this racial hash, or as much of it as can afford to ride, about the well-paved city and its shady suburbs. Single car-tickets cost six cents, but a strip of six may be had for a shilling. So many citizens are unable to invest this latter sum all at once, however, that numerous shopkeepers add to their profits by selling the strip tickets at five cents each. Port of Spain has perhaps the finest pair of lungs of any city of its size in the world. Beyond the business section is an immense savanna, smooth as a billiard-table—magnificent, indeed, it seems to the traveler who has seen no really level open ground for weeks—called Queen’s Park. Here graze large herds of cattle, half Oriental, too, like the people. There is ample playground left, too, for all the city’s population. In the afternoon, particularly of a Saturday, it presents a vast expanse of pastimes seldom seen in the tropics. The warning cry of “Fore!” frequently startles the mere stroller, only to have his changed course bring him into a cluster of schoolboys shrilly cheering the prowess of their respective teams. The game which outdoes all others in popularity is that to the American incredibly stupid one of cricket, which rages—or should one say languishes?—on every hand, notwithstanding the fact that Trinidad is within ten degrees of the equator. Nor is it monopolized by the better classes, for every group of ragged urchins who can scrape together enough to get balls, wickets, and that canoe-paddle the English call a “bat” takes turns in loping back and forth across the grass, to what end the scorer knows. If there is a color-line on the savanna, it is between the few pure whites, many of them Englishmen who have “come out” within the present century and brought all the unconscious snobbishness of their own island with them, and the olla podrida of all the other races. Among the latter the lines are social, rather than racial, so that Hindu-mulatto-Chinese youths, leaning on their canes, gaze with scornful indifference upon other youths of similar labyrinthian parentage whom chance has not raised to the dignity of annexing collars to their shirts. But there is room enough for all on the immense savanna.

Here and there it is dotted with huge, spreading trees, which grow more thickly in the residential section surrounding it. The original inhabitants called the island “Iëre,” or “Caïri,” meaning the “land of humming-birds.” It is still that, but it is also the land of magnificent trees and the land of asphalt. One may doubt whether any fragment of the globe has so high a percentage of perfect streets and roads—no wonder, surely, when it may have its asphalt in unlimited quantities for the mere digging—and the giants of the forest which everywhere spread their canopies give its rather placid landscape a beauty which makes up for its lack of ruggedness. Behind Queen’s Park is a delightfully informal botanical garden in the middle of which sits the massive stone residence of the governor. Several times a week a band concert is given on his front lawn, a formality bearing slight resemblance to the Sunday-night gathering in a Spanish-American plaza. It takes place in the afternoon and is attended only by the élite, though this does not by any means confine it to Caucasian residents, for there are many others, at least of the island-born Chinese and Hindus and their intermixtures, who count themselves in this category, while negro and East Indian nursemaids are constantly pursuing their overdressed charges across the noiseless greensward. Any evidence of human interest is sternly suppressed in the staid and orderly gathering. They sit like automatons on their scattered chairs and benches, no one ever committing the faux pas of speaking above a whisper. Woe betide the mere American who dares address himself to a stranger, for British snobbery reaches its zenith in Trinidad, and the open-handed hospitality of Barbados is painfully conspicuous by its absence.

Trim lawns bordered with roses, hibiscus, poinsettia, variegated crotons, and a host of other brilliant-foliaged plants surround the homelike, though sometimes overdecorated, residences of the generously shaded suburbs. Over the verandas hang mantles of pink coronella, violet thumbergia, red bougainvillea, often interlacing, always a mass of bloom, at least in this summer month of April. Maidenhair ferns line the steps leading to the portico, rare orchids cling to the mammoth branches of the spreading trees, the air is sweetly fragrant with the odors of cape jasmine and the persistent patchouli. With sunset cigales, tree-toads, and a host of tropical insects begin to chirrup their nightly chorus—an improvement on the flocks of crowing roosters that make the whole night hideous in the town itself, not only in Port of Spain, but throughout the West Indies.

A magistrate’s court is an amusing scene in any of the Antilles; it is doubly so in the racial whirlpool of Trinidad. An English “leftenant,” assigned the task of prosecuting for the crown, but who never once opened his mouth, was the only white man present on the morning I visited this farcical melodrama. A mulatto magistrate whose offensive pride of position stuck out on him like a sore thumb held the center of the spotlight. Never did he let pass an opportunity to inflict the crudest of witticisms, the most stupid of sarcasm on prisoners and witnesses alike. In the language of English courts he was known as “Your Worship,” a title by which even white men are frequently compelled to address those of his class in the British West Indies, where the law knows no color-line. A group of colored reporters sat below him in the customary railed enclosure, jotting down his every burst of alleged wit for the delectation of their next morning’s readers, who would be regaled with such extraordinary moral truths as “His Worship told the defendant that instead of living off his mother and sister he should go and do some honest work to support them and himself,” or “His Worship remarked that the witness seemed to be afflicted with a clogging of his usually no doubt brilliant mental processes.” Beyond the rail was packed the black audience that is never lacking at these popular entertainments in the British West Indies.

The prisoners and the two pedestal-shod black policemen on either side of them, stood stiffly at attention just outside the rail during all the trial. Witnesses assumed a similar posture in a kind of pulpit, took the oath by kissing a dirty dog-eared Bible—even though they were Hindus or Chinese—and submitted themselves to “His Worship’s” caustic sarcasm. The mere fact that the majority of them were patently and clumsily lying from beginning to end of their testimony did not appear to arouse a flicker of surprise in the minds of magistrate, the lawyers of like color, or the open-mouthed audience. The testimony in each case was laboriously written down in longhand by a dashingly attired mulatto clerk, though evidently not word for word, for these fell too fast and furiously to be caught in full. The accused was always given permission to cross-examine the witnesses, with the result that a vociferous quarrel frequently enlivened the proceedings. The majority of cases were petty in the extreme, matters which in most countries would have been settled out of court with a slap or a swift kick. But nothing so pleases the British West Indian, at least of the masses, as a chance to appear in the conspicuous rôle of plaintiff, or even as witness. One black fellow had charged another with calling his wife a “cat.” “His Worship” found the case a source of unlimited platitudes before he dismissed it by adding five shillings to the crown’s resources. A fat negress accused a long and scrawny one of offering to “box me face,” and as British West Indian law takes account of threats, the lanky defendant was separated from her week’s earnings, though she scored high with the audience by proving that the accuser had also used threatening language, thereby subjecting her to a similar financial disaster.

Corporal punishment is still in vogue in the British Antilles. Two negro boys had been playing marbles, when one struck the other with a stick. “His Worship” ordered the defendant to receive ten strokes with a tamarind rod, to be administered by a member of the police force. The order was immediately executed in a back room to which casual spectators were not admitted. To judge from the shrieks that arose from it, the punishment was genuine, but they were probably designed to reach the magistrate’s ear, for when I put an inquiry to the big black chastiser some time later, he replied with a grin, “Oh, not too hard; perhaps a tingle or two at the end jes’ to make him remember.” Even adults are not always spared bodily reminders. A vicious looking negro with a hint of Chinese ancestry who was convicted for the fourth time of thieving was sentenced to one year at hard labor and six lashes with the “cat.” But as this punishment was inflicted at the general prison, there was no means of learning how thoroughly the implement was wielded.

Though a Chinese and a Hindu interpreter were present, all the witnesses, happening to be youthful and evidently born in the colony, spoke perfect English—as it is spoken in Trinidad. It was somehow incongruous to hear a Hindu woman in her silken shroud and a small cartload of jewelry burst forth, as soon as she had kissed the unsavory Bible with apparent fervor, in the negro-British dialect and contradict the assertions of the accused with some such rejoinder as “Whatyer tahlk, mahn, whatcher tahlk?” Those surprises are constantly being sprung on the visitor to Trinidad, however, for notwithstanding the composite of races and the fact that English was not introduced into the island until 1815, it is decidedly the prevailing language. It is a common experience to hear a group that is chattering in Hindustanee suddenly change to British slang, or to turn and find that the discussion of the latest cricket match in the broad-vowelled jargon of the British West Indian negro is between a Chinese and a Hindu youth, both dressed in the latest European fashion. Natives of the islands assert that “the English of a typical Trinidadian is probably as strongly in contrast to that of a typical Barbadian as the language of any two parts of the British Empire.” But to the casual visitor they sound much alike, and far removed from our own tongue. We might readily understand the expression “I well glad de young mahn acquit,” but few of us would recognize that “Don’t let he break me, sir,” means “Do not give him a job after refusing it to me.” An incensed motorman cried out to a Chinese-Hindu negro hackman who was impeding his progress, “Why y’u don’ go home wid dis cyart ef y’u can’ drive et?” to which came the placid reply, “Why you vex, mahn? Every victoria follow he own wheels.” As in the French islands, a banana is called a “fig” in Trinidad, while walls are everywhere decorated with the warning “Stick no Bills.”

Speaking of bills of another sort, those of the smaller denominations are badly needed in the British islands. With the exception of Jamaica, they reckon their money in dollars and cents, but they are West Indian dollars, worth four shillings and two pence each and following the English pound in its rise or fall. Notes of five dollars are issued by the Colonial Bank and the Royal Bank of Canada, but with the exception of Trinidad and its dependency, Tobago, the government of which issues one- and two-dollar bills, there is no local small change, and the already overburdened visitor to these tropical climes must load himself down with a double handful of English silver and mammoth coppers each time he breaks a five-dollar bill. To add to his struggles with the clumsy British monetary system, prices are given in cents, when there are no cents. Small articles in the shops are tagged 24c, 48c, 72c, and so on, never 25c, 50c, or 75c, which is easy enough, for those are the local terms for one, two, or three shillings. But it is not so simple for the heated and hurried stranger to calculate that the euphonism “thirty-nine cents” means a shilling, a sixpence, a penny, and a “ha’penny,” and to find the real significance of a demand for $5.35 requires either a pencil and paper or long practice in mental arithmetic. Perhaps the least fatiguing method is to spread on the counter the whole contents of one bulging pocket and trust to the clerk’s honesty—except that he, too, even if he is trustworthy, is apt to be weak in mental arithmetic. The fall in the value of the pound sterling following the war forced the Trinidad government to enact a new ordinance forbidding “the melting down of silver coins current in the colony, the keeping possession of more silver than is needed for current expenses, or the buying or offering to buy silver coins at more than their face value.” The drop in exchange had given the metal more worth than the coins themselves, and the Hindu custom of turning the family wealth into bracelets and anklets for the women was threatening to make small financial transactions impossible.

Marital felicity is by no means universal in Trinidad, if one may judge from the columns of warnings to the public in its newspapers. In a single issue may be found a score of insertions testifying to this impression and to the mixture of races:

The Public is hereby notified that I will not be responsible for any debt or debts contracted by my wife, Daisy Benjamin, she having left my house and protection.