The newspapers of Trinidad announced a “Big Field Day and Race meeting” at Tunapuna, a few miles beyond St. Joseph, on Easter Monday. Having lived through five British holidays in the brief ten days since our landing in Barbados, we ventured to hope that here might be something less deadly dull. Had we paused to reflect, we should have known that white people did not attend these popular festivities. The horror on the face of an English native to whom we mentioned our destination might have given us the same information, had we not taken it to be an expression of pain at being addressed without a formal introduction.
Tunapuna is as Hindu as St. Joseph is Spanish. The domes, or, more exactly, spheres of a white Brahmin temple bulk high above its low houses. These are little mud-plastered houses, for the most part, with dents poked in their walls before they have dried, by way of decoration, which seem to be direct importations from India. The broad asphalt highway bisecting the town was as seething a stream of humanity as the Great Trunk Road. Hindus in their anklets and toe-rings, their clanking bracelets and light-colored flowing garments, made up the bulk of the throng, with here and there a Venezuelan driving a pack-laden donkey to give contrast to the picture. If the place had a European section, it eluded our attention; it looked like a village of India in which a few African settlers had taken up their residence.
The “field day” was held on a broad level space in the center of town. Constant streams of vari-colored Trinidadians, all clad in their most gasp-provoking holiday attire, poured into it from special trains that arrived in close succession. A bandstand covered with palm-leaves had been erected for the higher social orders, but even this was no place for a white spectator who did not care to arouse conspicuous attention. There were perhaps half a dozen white men, all British soldiers, scattered through the hilarious throng, but not a woman of her own race to keep Rachel in countenance. Of near-whites there was no scarcity, all of them affecting the haughty English manner in the vain hope of concealing the African in their family wood-pile. Some of the mixtures of race, language, and custom were incredible. Next to us sat a woman who appeared to be half Hindu and half English, who spoke Spanish, and who carried a quadroon baby with straw-colored hair and almond-shaped blue eyes. We awarded her the palm for human conglomeration, but there were many more who could have run her a close race.
The contests consisted mainly of bicycle races, an uproarious hubbub invariably breaking out among the motley judges and officials after each of them, causing great delay before the shotgun which served as starting pistol set the stage for a new controversy. In view of the fact that the contestants were vari-colored youths who probably lived in unpainted shanties and wore shoes only on Sundays, the tableful of prizes beside us was amusing. Among them we noted a gold-plated jewel-box, a cut-glass fruit-dish, an ice-cream freezer, a gold-scrolled liqueur set, a hatstand of gilt-tipped ox-horns, two manicure sets, a pair of marble horses, and several overdecorated small clocks. One of the many dandies who were continually displaying their graces to the feminine portion of the stand, under the pretense of finding the open space before it more comfortable than the chairs, protested that the prizes “lacked show.” Up to that moment that had seemed to us the one thing they did not lack. This particular individual, a mulatto with a touch of Chinese, wore a tweed coat and white flannel trousers, an artificial daisy in his buttonhole, a brown necktie embroidered at the top with flowers and at the bottom with the word “Peace” in large letters, and carried a riding-crop. Those of his companions who were not armed with this latter sign of field-officer rank all bore canes. One of them flaunted a cravat decorated with the flags of all the Allies. The majority frequently removed their hats, regardless of the blazing sunshine, quite evidently for the purpose of showing that their hair was not curly, an improvement for which several quite evidently had to thank “Mme. Walker’s Peerless Remedies.” An inattentive spectator might have concluded from the wagers shouted back and forth among them at the beginning of each race that they were persons of unlimited wealth, but it was noticeable that very little money actually changed hands. Here, too, the lines of demarkation were social, rather than racial. A Hindu youth dressed in the latest imitation of London fashion might call across the compound to his equally ornate Chinese friend, “Heh, Lee! Come down, mahn!” but he gave no sign of seeing the East Indian in khaki and a battered felt hat who sold peanuts in tiny measures cleverly arranged so that most of the nuts stuck to the bottom when they were upturned in the purchaser’s hand.
Beyond Tunapuna next day other Hindus in the loose garb of their homeland were clawing about the rice blades in their little paddy-fields, cut up into small squares by low dikes. Wattled huts, with East Indians squatted on their heels in the bare, hard-trodden spaces before them, intermingled with wooden shanties, sometimes with lace curtains at the glassless windows, shanties fairly bursting with their swarming negro families. Tall, slender flagpoles from which flew little red flags, some of them already bleached white, showed where goats had been sacrificed in the frequent ceremonies of the Brahmin inhabitants. Little white Hindu temples alternated with small negro churches. Through Tacarigua, with its clusters of buildings flung far up the red-scarred hillsides, Arouca, Dabadie, the procession of huts and cabins continued. Almost without exception they were unpainted and unadorned with anything but the barest necessities, for Trinidad, too, labors under the discouraging “improvement tax.”
Arima, the last settlement of the aborigines before they disappeared from the island as a race, spreads over a slightly elevated plateau, its wide streets and well separated houses giving an impression of unlimited elbow-room, its huge trees and flowery shrubbery making up for its drygoods-box style of architecture. Here is Trinidad’s chief racetrack, enclosing a grassy playground that almost rivals Port of Spain’s savanna, but the incessant staring of the inhabitants suggests that white men are ordinarily rare sights in this important cacao center, as they are in many sections of the island.
Beyond Arima the hills die out and for miles the track is walled by uncultivated brush or virgin forests, with only a rare frontier-like village and a few young cacao plantations sheltered from the sun by the bois immortel, or what Spaniards call madre del cacao. Hindus are more numerous in this region than negroes. The railway ends at the thriving town of Sangre Grande, though it hopes soon to push on to the east coast. Chinese merchants and the resultant half-breeds are unusually numerous; Hindu women in full metallic regalia, sitting in buggies like farmers’ wives in our western prairie towns, some of them smoking little Irish-looking clay pipes, and silversmiths of the same race, naked but for a clout, plying their trade in back alleys, are among the sights of the place.
The Ford mail-and-passenger bus in which I continued my journey was driven by a youth, whose grandparents were respectively Chinese, Hindu, negro, and white. The first had given him an emotionless countenance and a strict attention to business, the second a slender, almost girlish form and a silky complexion, the third wavy hair and an explosive laughter, and the last frequent attacks of that haughty surliness so common to mulattoes or quadroons. Among the passengers was a Hindu girl of striking beauty. She spoke excellent English with a strong West Indian accent, was tastefully and specklessly dressed in a Caucasian waist, black silk skirt, and kid shoes, wore her silky black hair done up in European fashion, and had the manners of an English débutante of the sheltered class. Yet in her nose she wore two gold rings, her arms gleamed with silver bracelets from wrists to elbows, about her neck was a string of heavy gold coins, and a flowered silk wrap was flung about her shoulders and head. Beside her sat a youth of the same race, completely Europeanized in garb and manner. In front, separated from this pair by one of the slow-witted, scornful negroes who filled most of the two seats, was an East Indian in full white Hindu regalia,—a simple, faintly purple turban, white caste marks across his forehead and in front of his ears, and a string of black, seed-like beads about his neck. Not once during the journey did he give a sign of recognition to his Anglicized compatriots.
We snorted away along an asphalt highway bordered by large cacao estates, passing many automobiles, some of them driven by Chinese and Hindus, even through a great forest with many immense trees, their branches laden with orchids and climbing vines. Except for one low ridge the country was flat, with not even a suggestion of the rugged scenery of most West Indian islands. Long hedges of hibiscus in full red bloom lined the way through the considerable town of Matura, where negroes far outranked the Hindus in numbers and Chinamen kept virtually all the shops. Soon the landscape turned to cocoanut plantations, the now narrow road mounted somewhat, and the Atlantic spread out before us. But it was shallow and yellowish, not at all like the sea-lashed east coasts of Barbados or Dominica, the shores of its many bays and indentations low and heavily wooded, a hazy clump of hills stretching far away into the south. Then came a cluster of ridges and mounds of earth covered with primeval forest, only little patches of which had been cleared to give place to the most primitive, weather-beaten thatched huts. These were scattered at long intervals along the way and all inhabited by negroes, the other races evidently finding the region too undeveloped for their more civilized taste. Nineteen miles from Sangre Grande the bus halted at a cluster of hovels on Balandra Bay, the road, which pushes on to the northeast point of the island, being impassable for vehicles.