A “gran man,” or chieftain of the Bush Negroes, returning from his yearly visit to the Dutch governor of Surinam, with his “commission” from Queen Wilhelmina, and followed by his obsequious and footsore valet
Plainly, too, white men are not accustomed to tramp the roads of British Guiana. There was constant staring, with now and then an impudent remark from some negro, but for the most part there were unfailingly polite greetings. Yet I was handicapped by my color, which, as in all South America—with a few exceptions, such as Buenos Aires—marked me at a glance as of a race apart. Not only was I obliged to pay higher to keep from lodging in negro quarters or among Hindus, but silence fell on almost every group I approached, as if they feared I might hear their real thoughts. If I asked a question, I was instantly looked upon with such suspicion as might meet a detective in a dive of criminals. Not that I would change my color; but it would certainly have been an advantage to be able to disguise myself as a Hindu fakir or an African chief as easily as it is done in popular novels or the legends of famous travelers.
Worst of all, it was Sunday! I was “much humbugged” by the deep-blue tint of that day of the week in the stern Anglo-Saxon civilization I had almost forgotten, for the laws of British Guiana require shops of every description to remain hermetically sealed from eleven o’clock on Saturday evening to Monday morning. They were innumerable, the larger ones kept by Portuguese and Chinamen, as the unfailing name of the proprietor above the doors admitted, the smaller and more slatternly ones by negroes, and a few by Hindus. Plenty of “Licensed Retail Spirit Shops” announced themselves, yet I became ever more cotton-mouthed with thirst, for though the great mud flats on either side of the dike-like road were often lakes, it would probably have meant quick death to drink from them. The natives all drink rain-water, every house or hut of whatever size or material catching it off the roof in barrels or tanks; but these had a scent as of veritable Hindu uncleanliness. Finally I stirred up a negro lolling in a hut to break the Sabbath to the extent of climbing a cocoanut-tree, and drank three of the green nuts dry at a draught. The sun blazed maliciously, but there was a constant breeze from off the sea, which most of the day was so close at hand that I could hear the roar of the breakers and now and then catch a glimpse of it.
Hunger, too, soon discovered that it was Sunday. When I could endure it no longer I attacked the door of a closed shop and aroused the offspring of a Portuguese father and a negro mother, only to get an obdurate, “’Gainst de law, sah, to sell anything on de Sabbath.”
“Not against the law to starve to death though, eh?” I retorted, which extraordinary burst of wit so took his fancy that he exploded into a cackling laugh with, “Ah, no, indeed, sah, dat’s de fac’,” and finally became so mollified as to take me to dinner as an invited guest. It seems it is still permitted to have guests to dinner on Sunday. The meal we sat down to in his stilt-legged house across the way consisted of nothing but a large plate of boiled rice with a bit of fat pork in it, topped by a cup of hot goat’s milk, but King George’s dinner that day did not compare with it. My host would not eat with me, evidently for the same polite reason that had kept Langrey standing, though he asserted he could not eat hot food “because my tooth humbug me too much.” Paucity of vocabulary among not only the negroes but many of the whites born in the colony is astonishing and easily leads to errors. “Jes’ now,” for instance, may mean at once, an hour ago, or a day hence. “Humbug” serves for anything whatever of a detrimental character. “Don’ you let ’nybody make you a fool” is the usual form of that verb as we use it. The first question of a British Guiana negro to any stranger to whom he dares put one is almost certain to be “Your title, please, sah?” meaning, “What is your name?” and closely corresponding to the “Su gracia de usted?” of rural Spanish-America. The negro is the most imitative of human beings. In Brazil he has all the gestures and excitability of the Latin; here he talks with the motionless, solemn demeanor of the Anglo-Saxon. Before I left, my host told me that many detectives were sent out to catch shopkeepers breaking the closing law, and that, never having seen a white man walking the road before, he was still not sure I was not one of them. “An’ de fine ain’t a gill nor a half-bit either,” he added, in the peculiarly squeaky voice of his mongrel race.
The country grew a trifle wilder, with only negroes in the scattered huts, and swamps often stretching away on either side, full of tough sedge-grass whispering hoarsely together in the sea breeze. From mid-afternoon on the land was largely flooded. Rice-fields began on the landward side of the road, with a few grazing cattle on the seaside, and there were long rectangular plots of paddy in all stages from sprouting to nearly ripe. Coolies, who lived by the hundreds in huts bunched together on estates or on their own small farms, were pottering about in them. Some were freemen and others estate workmen who had been given a patch of ground on which to grow their own rice during their spare time. This practice is said to leave many plantations without sufficient laborers on Monday and even Tuesday, for the coolies, feigning sickness, stay home to rest up from their more earnest Sunday labor for themselves. Not being Christians, they are granted a certain immunity in Sabbath-breaking. Coolies, carrying along the road bundles of long, green rice pulled up by the roots for transplanting, greeted me with, “Salaam, sahib!” though “Mahnin’, sah!” was more likely to be that of the Hindu youths born in the colony, their glossy hair and complexions as startlingly out of place in European garb as fluent English of West Indian accent and vocabulary was on their lips. Residents of judgment seem to agree that the imported coolie is inferior to the creole.
I had walked twenty-five miles when I reached the immense sugar estate of “Port Mourant.” Besides its great mill with three stacks, there were the bungalow mansion of the manager, the somewhat less imposing bungalows of the assistant manager and the engineer, a big hospital on legs, the overseers’ barracks, several houses for lesser married employees, and a plethora of offices and smaller buildings scattered away through lawn and trees. Here, I suddenly recalled, I had a letter of introduction to the chief chemist, said to be a fellow-countryman, and I turned into the inclosure. His name was Bird, and he was rightly named. When I had sent the letter up to his residence on stilts and been allowed to stand waiting on the cement floor below stairs about half an hour, like any negro, a cadaverous individual came hobbling down. Handing me back my letter, a look of terror burst forth on his sour face when I hinted a desire to see a bit of the life on a sugar plantation, as if the terrible bourgeois fate of losing his job were already grasping him by the throat.
“I can’t do a thing for you!” he cried hastily, ignoring the fact that I had not asked him to do anything, and he quickly retreated. I was delighted to learn later that he was only a surcharged American after all.
Evidently there was some horrible mystery connected with the sugar plantations of British Guiana; perhaps it was some species of peonage. It was plainly my duty to find the cause of this overwhelming fear of strangers. I stalked across to the big two-story mansion on stilts in which the manager lived. After a second inspection the negro maid actually let me in, permitting me to take the stool nearest the door, and for the next half hour—the manager being in his “bawth”—contriving to pass frequently up or down the stairway at the back of the immense and well-furnished drawing-room to see that I did not get away with the piano or any of the popular novels. Some pretty little tow-headed children passed from the black nurse to the very English governess without being permitted to become acquainted, and at last the manager himself appeared. I had long known that the most painful experience in life is to introduce oneself to an Englishman, but I hold such occasional self-flagellation to be good for the soul. He was typical of the important, “well-bred” Britisher—though evidently Irish—and he descended upon me with the eat-’em-alive air of an attacking bulldog. But as I am least likely to run when most expected to, I sat tight. Unlike many of our own countrymen in positions of importance, or what they and the world consider such, the Britisher never seems to dare to risk loss of authority by even momentarily descending to human ways until he is sure he is not dealing with an “inferior.” The manager was not clear on that point in this case, but gradually it dawned upon him that he could neither shoot me on the spot nor have me dragged out, and once he had recovered from the dreadful feeling of having no precedent to go by, he began to act more like the human being and the tolerably good fellow he undoubtedly was way down underneath his job and his generations of steeping in caste rules. His voice diminished from that of an army officer ordering the immediate execution of a traitor to a tone befitting a drawing-room, and he finally sat down, though explaining that “under no circumstances” could he permit anyone to see the estate without an order from the owners—one of the principal business houses in the colony. Later, when I applied to them in town, they assured me that they never gave such orders, but left the matter entirely to the discretion of the managers on the estates—which was evidently the British form of “passing the buck” and pretending to be cordial while concealing that dreadful secret of Guianese sugar estates.
I rose to say that I would walk on to Berbice—and sleep in a ditch along the way, I might have added, for it was fifteen miles off and the sun was near setting—when a really human idea came to him. Summoning the head overseer, he told him to have the spare bed in the overseers’ barracks arranged for me, adding a more than plain hint that I be allowed to see nothing on the estate and that I be sped on my way as soon as possible in the morning. I was on the point of suggesting that I would not object to being blindfolded, when the manager’s wife appeared in gorgeous costume, followed by the “tea things,” and, there being no way out of it, I was asked to tea. This was a great advance, but I took far higher rank later, reaching almost the heights of a respectable person, when the manager remarked to the head overseer in the voice of a judge asking a lawyer who has specialized in that particular subject, “By Jove, I wonder if it isn’t late enough for the first swizzle?” The head overseer took the weighty question under consideration and at length decided that there was a precedent somewhere in British colonial history for starting the customary evening entertainment at that hour, whereupon a Hindu butler in gleaming white appeared with a yellowish mixture of whiskey base, which he whirled into a foam with a “swizzle-stick” made apparently of the root and stem of a small bush, the latter rolled rapidly between the hands, and served us in order of rank. This universal appetizer and eye-opener of British Guiana being over, the head overseer led the way to a long rambling building on legs, where a score of white Britishers, young or at most in early middle age, were already between merry and maudlin from the same cause.