For A' That
by Alasdair McPherson
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: We're inclined to lose sight of Rabbie amongst the oceans of hate.
Swearwords: None.
Description: We're inclined to lose sight of Rabbie amongst the oceans of hate.
It was the squeal that disturbed my reverie. I felt just a flash of petulance before I smiled and sat upright in my favourite place on the powdery sand amongst the roots. For a start there was no mistaking that squeal: a young woman was mock-scared of the man she was with. Of course, there was the real possibility that Madge is right and the squeal had startled me from sleep.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever heard of that snores when he’s thinking.”
The joy of youth and the warm sun on my face should have roused me to pleasure not petulance.
Glancing up at the sun through the branches I could tell that it was another hour before the kids get home from school, exploding onto the beach and forcing me to continue the hunt for pirate treasure, as like as not.
I’d best stir myself before the young couple get settled. It’s a private beach – my beach – and the folks from the hotel in the main bay too often think that ‘private’ gives a licence to all sorts of behaviour that I’m not yet ready to explain to an eight year old boy far less a six year old girl.
I reached for one of the treasure poles to help me to my feet since there was no one around to witness my infirmity. Once standing I could see that there were two couples; the older pair were walking sedately arm in arm while the youngsters were running in and out of the gentle waves, kicking and splashing in the shallows.
I stepped forward before I called out to them because my black skin can be hard to spot amongst the branches and undergrowth. This is the critical moment and I can feel my heart accelerate as I wait for their reply to my greeting. I don’t want the hassle of dealing with aggressive folks nowadays. Some people see a ‘Keep Out’ notice as a challenge and are ready to assert a right that they don’t possess.
They are on vacation, for goodness sake, so why don’t they just enjoy themselves without doing something illegal? This beach is a perfect spot – if you haven’t been to my island then I’ll bet it’s on the list of places you want to visit before you die. Even the hyperbole of travel brochures doesn’t do justice to the Caribbean paradise where my ancestors arrived more than four hundred years ago. It didn’t look so inviting to them, of course, because they were chained together in a slave market in West Africa and brought across the Atlantic Ocean with inadequate food and so little space that they had to lie down to sleep in relays.
“Hi there! Do you happen to know who owns this beach?” the older man shouted, giving me a friendly wave.
I told him that they were welcome to enjoy the beach providing they left it as they found it. They are a father, mother and daughter from Bangor, Maine; the young lad is the daughter’s boyfriend and mother is clearly a little uneasy about the bold decision to let him come on the family holiday. Father unloaded a backpack onto a rug and I was invited to join them.
Mother offered me a beer, telling me that she had brought it for ‘the boys’ and she was left speechless when daughter grabbed a can of Bud and danced back into the waves pursued by her young man.
They were still telling me about themselves when my great-grandkids arrived an hour later whooping and yelling for Gramps. Charlie slowed when he spotted the visitors and hauled Emma back. He was polite and almost convinced me that he had time to spare to chat to strangers about his age and living in paradise. Emma has the same blunt approach as Madge, her mother.
“C’mon Gramps, you said we’d search where the stream damaged the bank in the last storm.”
I was ready for action; after all there is only so much you can say about life in Bangor. I’m always surprised that people come to our little heaven on earth and can only talk about the prosaic lives they live for the fifty weeks of the year when they are not on vacation. Madge would laugh and tell me that I was piqued because they hadn’t recognised the golden opportunity to talk to an eighty year old whose forefathers had settled the colony.
Thinking of Madge made me smile, as it always does. She’s my grand-daughter in law and she has burst my pompous balloon every day since she breezed into my room in the hospital where I was recovering from a stroke. She had met Ferdinand, my grandson, when they were students and they had lived in New Orleans after they were married. I didn’t go to the wedding because I was in a sulk with Ferdie’s mum, my daughter Ellen, about something or other.
All family feuds were cancelled when I had my life-threatening illness and it was Ellen who organised the visiting rota. I was scared that I was going to die and I was being even more objectionable than usual. She’s Chief of Surgery in the hospital and I was looking for her to assure me that I’d live for ever even after a million brain cells had been wiped out. I was demanding that the whole family should publicly acknowledge what an asset I was not only to them but to the island of my birth, when Madge walked in with Ferdie.
Mine was a right-side stroke, so my left arm and leg were affected but my speech was just a little slurred because the muscles at the left side of my mouth were weak. Madge is stunning and I decided to use my well-known ability to charm beautiful girls. I invited her to sit on the bed as soon as we were introduced.
“I’ll stand,” she replied, looking me over like an undertaker. “I quite like being chatted up by geriatrics but I insist that they can at least articulate clearly.”
Now, up until that moment everyone had been telling me how wonderfully well I was doing. I had made very little effort to recover the use of my affected limbs and nothing at all to improve my mumbled speech. Family and friends admired my progress towards recovery and my spirit almost as much as I admired myself; Madge was totally without admiration or sympathy.
I felt tears ready to leak from my eyes when she detailed my failings but my self-pity had changed to angry determination before she left after that first visit. It’s not too much to say that she drove me to recovering the use of all the parts damaged by the stroke. Now I was able to get up from the rug where I’d been chatting to the visitors without help, thanks to her.
Charlie had gone up to my den to bring the rods and I followed him while Emma explained that we were making a scientific search for pirate treasure. The folk from Bangor might have little interest in the reminiscences of an octogenarian but they were all agog when my six year old great-grand daughter chatted about where and when doubloons and diamonds as big as gull’s eggs were left on our beach.
“There might be a few skeletons,” she chirped unconcernedly. “After the treasure was buried the captain would have had to kill all the men who knew where it was.” Madge isn’t at all tolerant of baby talk so Emma has adult ideas and a better vocabulary than most grown up people.
I had been just as enthusiastic as Emma when the idea of pirated treasure was put to me seventy-five years ago. I’d been standing more or less where I am now when the two white-skinned people came down the line of the stream. I knew they were on the island, of course, but my Gran had warned me to stay away from the old manor house. The white woman was pretty old to my five year old eyes and she was leading the way followed by a younger man.
There were a few white people in the capital at the other end of the island but it was still a thrill to be so close – especially when they spoke to me. They had come all the way from Norway on the other side of the Ocean to dig out the first house that was built on the island. Gran had studied the early history of the settlement and she was acting as an adviser to the white woman who was the boss of the whole expedition.
The manor house that burned down when Gran was a girl had been built, it was said, on the site of a wood and thatch house that was constructed when our people first arrived. The Norwegians had a theory that it had been built by the Caribs, the original inhabitants who had died out due to diseases brought to the island from Europe. Gran said that was nonsense and I would hear her arguing with the Norwegians when I was in bed too excited to sleep.
They only dug one exploratory trench before Hitler invaded Norway and they hurried back home. I more or less forgot about them until after my stroke when Madge insisted that I find something to occupy my mind. I got Ferdie to fetch Gran’s papers from the loft and discovered just how clever and well-read the old lady had been.
She had corresponded with Helga the Norwegian lady until her death about the history of our island. It was in one of these letters that I learned about Eric, the young man who introduced me to pirate treasure hunting. If I’d been older I would have wondered why a new graduate had been chosen for a prestigious archaeological dig. His dad owned the shipping line that had financed the expedition on condition that his son should be part of the team.
At seventy I could see what was hidden from a five year old: Eric had time to play with me because he was hopeless at the job he was employed to do. According to Helga, he collaborated with the Nazi regime when they got back home and he disappeared mysteriously before the end of the war. Whatever faults he had, Eric knew exactly how to fire children’s imaginations.
Charlie and Emma are proof that the story Eric told me is timeless. Wicked pirates could not put their ill-gotten gains into the local savings bank so they were constantly on the look-out for some quiet spot where they could bury the loot in a hole dug in the sand. Eric was very good on detail; the chosen spot would be close to the trees to be clear of the tide and it would not be more than a few feet below the surface. Pirates are inherently lazy since they steal from people rather than finding steady, honest jobs.
Eric and I used bamboo canes to probe the sand around the tree roots. When I told Charlie and Emma about the search they took the baton and ran with it, leaving me floundering in their wake. My search had been haphazard and I quickly lost interest after Eric departed; the kids sketched a map of the beach and the surrounding sea so they could imagine themselves as pirates choosing a place to hide the spoils. I almost wrecked the game by suggesting that welding rods would be more durable than bamboo; the children were outraged!
I had forgotten that kids are able to lose themselves in make-believe while still being aware that there is an objective reality. There never were any pirates sneaking ashore to bury treasure in the sand but that fact belongs in the same box as welding rod probes – definitely not relevant to our game. The treasure hunt enables a six year old, an eight year old and an octogenarian to share thoughts and ideas that range far wider than the confines of a childish game. Perhaps when folk talk about ‘second childhood’ they mean this ability of the very old and the very young to suspend reality.
It’s a long way from what Madge intended when she told me to stop complaining about things and find something to exercise my mind. She and Ferdie were both lecturing in New Orleans when he was offered the Chair of Marine Science in the island’s only university. He might have turned it down but Madge sold her first novel and, on the strength of a three-book deal from her publisher, she decided to become a full-time writer. Coming to the island provided the right opportunity for her to write and to start the family they both longed for.
I no longer have the stamina for poking about for hours in the sand so I was especially pleased when Madge came to tell us supper was ready. I handed her my bamboo cane and she poked around with it while the kids and I mocked her ineptitude. It has become an important part of the treasure hunt for the three of us to be disparaging of mum. At those times, I’m just another child.
At other times Madge treats me as an equal. Soon after she came to the island she was commissioned by the Tourist Office to write a history. Her speciality is the slave trade and she knows everything about it from the capture in Africa, through cruel years of exploitation to the eventual freedom. Her history reflected the general situation as it applies to her and her ancestors but the papers that Gran left suggest that things were different on this little island.
The journey began in the same way for my ancestors as for hers; Arab slavers took the able-bodied young people from a village in the interior of West Africa and brought them to the coast in chains. They were sold as a group to a Portuguese captain making his third voyage across the Atlantic to Hispaniola. The ship was caught in the tail-end of a hurricane not far from the island and she was beached when the pumps could no longer prevent water rising in the hold.
The timbers were riddled with worm so it was soon clear that captain, crew and slaves were stranded on a small island some way off the main shipping routes. It was so remote that it hadn’t been claimed by Spain or Portugal, the super-powers in the area at that time. They found out later that there was some trade between what is now the capital and Spanish colonies but when they abandoned hope of sailing away they were convinced that they had only themselves to rely on.
It wasn’t uncommon to throw slaves over the side still in their chains when things went wrong and it must have been tempting for the crew to kill their captives if only to keep the dwindling supplies for themselves. Madge’s research made her think that would have been the usual outcome. What actually happened on the island was that the chains were removed and the slaves joined with the captain and some of the crew in settling the country around the bay. About half the officers and crew opted to leave the island in the ship’s boats to try to reach civilisation.
Unfortunately there is no written record until Gran transcribed the memories of the old folk and the local legends. The captain had continued to keep the ship’s log after they landed but it was lost when the manor house burned down in the 1860’s. Her grandfather had seen the log but his memory was clearly a bit uncertain by the time she questioned him. Madge is sceptical but there must be some truth in the story; when the British annexed the island in the eighteenth century the deeds granting the land in our part of the island to the former slaves were accepted.
She was born and brought up in a poor rural area in Louisiana where the formal freedom of slaves had negligible impact. The land was still owned by the white masters and they controlled the wages on offer to the freed slaves. Of course, black folk could pull up their roots and move to the cities but if you stayed where you were born you accepted economic slavery. I was brought up in an area where the black people owned the land.
“C’mon kids! Dad and I are partying tonight and I need lots of time to get ready.”
She threw the bamboo rod at me, aiming for my left side. When I caught it she gave a little nod and relaxed. We both know that she tests me to see if there is any chance of the stroke coming back. My daughter Ellen puts me through a formal battery of tests when she visits but there is something deeply reassuring about Madge’s spur-of-the-moment tests.
I always eat with the kids unless we are formally entertaining and Madge usually dines with us since Ferdie was made Dean of Engineering. He is following the tradition of service begun by Carlos, the ancestor freed from his chains when they beached half a mile from our home. Until they retired me twenty years ago I was the engineer responsible for supplying drinking water to the whole island. We seem to have inherited a sense of public duty along with our black skins – our good looks come from our menfolk having the good sense to marry beautiful women!
Ferdie is working long hours and he often looks exhausted but I’m sure Madge is quietly alert and his mum has her stethoscope at the ready. He will change in his office this evening instead of driving the length of the island to come home only to turn and go back. Madge will drive herself and they’ll sleep in a hotel in the capital tonight.
The kids and I have our own plans for the evening.
I don’t pretend to know what happened after the ship beached all those years ago but I have adapted Gran’s account, adding local oral traditions to make a legend that the kids love to hear. It is a work in progress and this evening will likely follow the usual path of a discussion of some aspect of the tale. We will be in Charlie’s room so Emma can snuggle into one of the bunk beds and I can stretch out on his futon. We will fall asleep arguing and in the morning I will summarise our discussion by re-telling the story with our latest additions.
We have reached an important philosophical point – not that the kids would recognise philosophy if it bit their bums, you understand; I’m giving an adult spin to their observations and comments. On the island there is no disadvantage in having a black skin. We form the majority of the population except amongst the visitors who are mostly white. All levels of service in the hotels and resorts are provided by islanders; this protects our jobs but it results in a situation where black folks are serving white people.
Young as they are, the kids have noticed the patronising way they are treated by visitors. Charlie is top of his class and he came home fuming when a white lady he met outside his school treated him as if he was poor and ignorant.
“I’ll bet her ancestors wouldn’t have survived being slaves and attacked by wild animals. What Carlos went through would’ve killed whities!”
After a lot of discussion he agreed to withdraw the term ‘whities’ as being offensive but he stuck to his guns about black people being superior because of what they had survived in the past. My younger brother threw a light on the same subject from a very different angle.
He devoted his life to making a great deal of money selling real estate and automobiles but at the age of fifty he succumbed to the family urge to perform public service. He chose to research the origins of our forebears in Africa. We didn’t know exactly which port they sailed from although he managed to narrow the choice to three possibilities. He travelled some way inland along the river that flowed through one of these ports and spent some weeks in a town about fifty miles from the coast.
“It can’t have been the right place,” he told me, unable to hide his shock. “These guys have no energy. They’re content to sit around waiting for god knows what. The women do all the work and the men sit around dirty and in rags.”
He had gone off looking for noble savages and it was natural enough for him to exaggerate his disappointment but I think there is an element of truth in his observation. My guess is that the slavers collected a pretty average bunch of natives to take to the coast. It was the process of enslavement and the need to survive appalling treatment that forged the steely resolve of Carlos and the other men and women that landed on our beach. They weren’t born great but had greatness thrust upon them.
My brother didn’t look any further, contenting himself with funding two secondary schools and offering scholarships to three kids from our old homeland to study at the island university: ‘one boy, one girl and one of the new-fangled sexes,’ he explained when I asked why he chose three.
Perhaps we would all laze around picking fruit off the trees if we weren’t forced to work. We often overlook the fact that the fruit Eve offered Adam was from the tree of knowledge; perhaps being expelled from Eden was the best thing that ever happened to humanity – or the worst!
I’m uneasy, I admit, at Charlie’s idea that black people are better than others because we have survived the ordeals of slavery. We’re not the only people to beat the odds – the Jews have certainly shown their worth by overcoming the Holocaust! What worries me is the modern tendency to exclude people different from ourselves. Being black is special but it doesn’t make us superior to people from other races.
Then I stumbled on a book I’d been given when my late wife and I went on a cruise to celebrate my retirement. One of the other passengers was from a Scottish island and he and I hit it off right from the start. It was at the time when Argentina invaded the Malvinas or Falkland Islands and I suggested that the Brits had handled things badly.
“It would certainly have been cheaper to move the islanders to Ardnamurchin,” my Scottish friend replied. “But they wanted to stay and you have to stand behind a man fighting to save his home and his way of life.”
Later he brought me a book of poems by a Scot who had farmed soil so poor that he constantly struggled to survive. Pondering on how to reply to Charlie, I remembered one of the poems by Robert Burns, the Scottish farmer. He must often have seen people better fed and housed than him and his family but instead of the envy which would have been natural he saw through the differences in position and riches – and skin colour – to identify our common humanity.
‘A man’s a man, for a’ that.’
“You’re the only person I’ve ever heard of that snores when he’s thinking.”
The joy of youth and the warm sun on my face should have roused me to pleasure not petulance.
Glancing up at the sun through the branches I could tell that it was another hour before the kids get home from school, exploding onto the beach and forcing me to continue the hunt for pirate treasure, as like as not.
I’d best stir myself before the young couple get settled. It’s a private beach – my beach – and the folks from the hotel in the main bay too often think that ‘private’ gives a licence to all sorts of behaviour that I’m not yet ready to explain to an eight year old boy far less a six year old girl.
I reached for one of the treasure poles to help me to my feet since there was no one around to witness my infirmity. Once standing I could see that there were two couples; the older pair were walking sedately arm in arm while the youngsters were running in and out of the gentle waves, kicking and splashing in the shallows.
I stepped forward before I called out to them because my black skin can be hard to spot amongst the branches and undergrowth. This is the critical moment and I can feel my heart accelerate as I wait for their reply to my greeting. I don’t want the hassle of dealing with aggressive folks nowadays. Some people see a ‘Keep Out’ notice as a challenge and are ready to assert a right that they don’t possess.
They are on vacation, for goodness sake, so why don’t they just enjoy themselves without doing something illegal? This beach is a perfect spot – if you haven’t been to my island then I’ll bet it’s on the list of places you want to visit before you die. Even the hyperbole of travel brochures doesn’t do justice to the Caribbean paradise where my ancestors arrived more than four hundred years ago. It didn’t look so inviting to them, of course, because they were chained together in a slave market in West Africa and brought across the Atlantic Ocean with inadequate food and so little space that they had to lie down to sleep in relays.
“Hi there! Do you happen to know who owns this beach?” the older man shouted, giving me a friendly wave.
I told him that they were welcome to enjoy the beach providing they left it as they found it. They are a father, mother and daughter from Bangor, Maine; the young lad is the daughter’s boyfriend and mother is clearly a little uneasy about the bold decision to let him come on the family holiday. Father unloaded a backpack onto a rug and I was invited to join them.
Mother offered me a beer, telling me that she had brought it for ‘the boys’ and she was left speechless when daughter grabbed a can of Bud and danced back into the waves pursued by her young man.
They were still telling me about themselves when my great-grandkids arrived an hour later whooping and yelling for Gramps. Charlie slowed when he spotted the visitors and hauled Emma back. He was polite and almost convinced me that he had time to spare to chat to strangers about his age and living in paradise. Emma has the same blunt approach as Madge, her mother.
“C’mon Gramps, you said we’d search where the stream damaged the bank in the last storm.”
I was ready for action; after all there is only so much you can say about life in Bangor. I’m always surprised that people come to our little heaven on earth and can only talk about the prosaic lives they live for the fifty weeks of the year when they are not on vacation. Madge would laugh and tell me that I was piqued because they hadn’t recognised the golden opportunity to talk to an eighty year old whose forefathers had settled the colony.
Thinking of Madge made me smile, as it always does. She’s my grand-daughter in law and she has burst my pompous balloon every day since she breezed into my room in the hospital where I was recovering from a stroke. She had met Ferdinand, my grandson, when they were students and they had lived in New Orleans after they were married. I didn’t go to the wedding because I was in a sulk with Ferdie’s mum, my daughter Ellen, about something or other.
All family feuds were cancelled when I had my life-threatening illness and it was Ellen who organised the visiting rota. I was scared that I was going to die and I was being even more objectionable than usual. She’s Chief of Surgery in the hospital and I was looking for her to assure me that I’d live for ever even after a million brain cells had been wiped out. I was demanding that the whole family should publicly acknowledge what an asset I was not only to them but to the island of my birth, when Madge walked in with Ferdie.
Mine was a right-side stroke, so my left arm and leg were affected but my speech was just a little slurred because the muscles at the left side of my mouth were weak. Madge is stunning and I decided to use my well-known ability to charm beautiful girls. I invited her to sit on the bed as soon as we were introduced.
“I’ll stand,” she replied, looking me over like an undertaker. “I quite like being chatted up by geriatrics but I insist that they can at least articulate clearly.”
Now, up until that moment everyone had been telling me how wonderfully well I was doing. I had made very little effort to recover the use of my affected limbs and nothing at all to improve my mumbled speech. Family and friends admired my progress towards recovery and my spirit almost as much as I admired myself; Madge was totally without admiration or sympathy.
I felt tears ready to leak from my eyes when she detailed my failings but my self-pity had changed to angry determination before she left after that first visit. It’s not too much to say that she drove me to recovering the use of all the parts damaged by the stroke. Now I was able to get up from the rug where I’d been chatting to the visitors without help, thanks to her.
Charlie had gone up to my den to bring the rods and I followed him while Emma explained that we were making a scientific search for pirate treasure. The folk from Bangor might have little interest in the reminiscences of an octogenarian but they were all agog when my six year old great-grand daughter chatted about where and when doubloons and diamonds as big as gull’s eggs were left on our beach.
“There might be a few skeletons,” she chirped unconcernedly. “After the treasure was buried the captain would have had to kill all the men who knew where it was.” Madge isn’t at all tolerant of baby talk so Emma has adult ideas and a better vocabulary than most grown up people.
I had been just as enthusiastic as Emma when the idea of pirated treasure was put to me seventy-five years ago. I’d been standing more or less where I am now when the two white-skinned people came down the line of the stream. I knew they were on the island, of course, but my Gran had warned me to stay away from the old manor house. The white woman was pretty old to my five year old eyes and she was leading the way followed by a younger man.
There were a few white people in the capital at the other end of the island but it was still a thrill to be so close – especially when they spoke to me. They had come all the way from Norway on the other side of the Ocean to dig out the first house that was built on the island. Gran had studied the early history of the settlement and she was acting as an adviser to the white woman who was the boss of the whole expedition.
The manor house that burned down when Gran was a girl had been built, it was said, on the site of a wood and thatch house that was constructed when our people first arrived. The Norwegians had a theory that it had been built by the Caribs, the original inhabitants who had died out due to diseases brought to the island from Europe. Gran said that was nonsense and I would hear her arguing with the Norwegians when I was in bed too excited to sleep.
They only dug one exploratory trench before Hitler invaded Norway and they hurried back home. I more or less forgot about them until after my stroke when Madge insisted that I find something to occupy my mind. I got Ferdie to fetch Gran’s papers from the loft and discovered just how clever and well-read the old lady had been.
She had corresponded with Helga the Norwegian lady until her death about the history of our island. It was in one of these letters that I learned about Eric, the young man who introduced me to pirate treasure hunting. If I’d been older I would have wondered why a new graduate had been chosen for a prestigious archaeological dig. His dad owned the shipping line that had financed the expedition on condition that his son should be part of the team.
At seventy I could see what was hidden from a five year old: Eric had time to play with me because he was hopeless at the job he was employed to do. According to Helga, he collaborated with the Nazi regime when they got back home and he disappeared mysteriously before the end of the war. Whatever faults he had, Eric knew exactly how to fire children’s imaginations.
Charlie and Emma are proof that the story Eric told me is timeless. Wicked pirates could not put their ill-gotten gains into the local savings bank so they were constantly on the look-out for some quiet spot where they could bury the loot in a hole dug in the sand. Eric was very good on detail; the chosen spot would be close to the trees to be clear of the tide and it would not be more than a few feet below the surface. Pirates are inherently lazy since they steal from people rather than finding steady, honest jobs.
Eric and I used bamboo canes to probe the sand around the tree roots. When I told Charlie and Emma about the search they took the baton and ran with it, leaving me floundering in their wake. My search had been haphazard and I quickly lost interest after Eric departed; the kids sketched a map of the beach and the surrounding sea so they could imagine themselves as pirates choosing a place to hide the spoils. I almost wrecked the game by suggesting that welding rods would be more durable than bamboo; the children were outraged!
I had forgotten that kids are able to lose themselves in make-believe while still being aware that there is an objective reality. There never were any pirates sneaking ashore to bury treasure in the sand but that fact belongs in the same box as welding rod probes – definitely not relevant to our game. The treasure hunt enables a six year old, an eight year old and an octogenarian to share thoughts and ideas that range far wider than the confines of a childish game. Perhaps when folk talk about ‘second childhood’ they mean this ability of the very old and the very young to suspend reality.
It’s a long way from what Madge intended when she told me to stop complaining about things and find something to exercise my mind. She and Ferdie were both lecturing in New Orleans when he was offered the Chair of Marine Science in the island’s only university. He might have turned it down but Madge sold her first novel and, on the strength of a three-book deal from her publisher, she decided to become a full-time writer. Coming to the island provided the right opportunity for her to write and to start the family they both longed for.
I no longer have the stamina for poking about for hours in the sand so I was especially pleased when Madge came to tell us supper was ready. I handed her my bamboo cane and she poked around with it while the kids and I mocked her ineptitude. It has become an important part of the treasure hunt for the three of us to be disparaging of mum. At those times, I’m just another child.
At other times Madge treats me as an equal. Soon after she came to the island she was commissioned by the Tourist Office to write a history. Her speciality is the slave trade and she knows everything about it from the capture in Africa, through cruel years of exploitation to the eventual freedom. Her history reflected the general situation as it applies to her and her ancestors but the papers that Gran left suggest that things were different on this little island.
The journey began in the same way for my ancestors as for hers; Arab slavers took the able-bodied young people from a village in the interior of West Africa and brought them to the coast in chains. They were sold as a group to a Portuguese captain making his third voyage across the Atlantic to Hispaniola. The ship was caught in the tail-end of a hurricane not far from the island and she was beached when the pumps could no longer prevent water rising in the hold.
The timbers were riddled with worm so it was soon clear that captain, crew and slaves were stranded on a small island some way off the main shipping routes. It was so remote that it hadn’t been claimed by Spain or Portugal, the super-powers in the area at that time. They found out later that there was some trade between what is now the capital and Spanish colonies but when they abandoned hope of sailing away they were convinced that they had only themselves to rely on.
It wasn’t uncommon to throw slaves over the side still in their chains when things went wrong and it must have been tempting for the crew to kill their captives if only to keep the dwindling supplies for themselves. Madge’s research made her think that would have been the usual outcome. What actually happened on the island was that the chains were removed and the slaves joined with the captain and some of the crew in settling the country around the bay. About half the officers and crew opted to leave the island in the ship’s boats to try to reach civilisation.
Unfortunately there is no written record until Gran transcribed the memories of the old folk and the local legends. The captain had continued to keep the ship’s log after they landed but it was lost when the manor house burned down in the 1860’s. Her grandfather had seen the log but his memory was clearly a bit uncertain by the time she questioned him. Madge is sceptical but there must be some truth in the story; when the British annexed the island in the eighteenth century the deeds granting the land in our part of the island to the former slaves were accepted.
She was born and brought up in a poor rural area in Louisiana where the formal freedom of slaves had negligible impact. The land was still owned by the white masters and they controlled the wages on offer to the freed slaves. Of course, black folk could pull up their roots and move to the cities but if you stayed where you were born you accepted economic slavery. I was brought up in an area where the black people owned the land.
“C’mon kids! Dad and I are partying tonight and I need lots of time to get ready.”
She threw the bamboo rod at me, aiming for my left side. When I caught it she gave a little nod and relaxed. We both know that she tests me to see if there is any chance of the stroke coming back. My daughter Ellen puts me through a formal battery of tests when she visits but there is something deeply reassuring about Madge’s spur-of-the-moment tests.
I always eat with the kids unless we are formally entertaining and Madge usually dines with us since Ferdie was made Dean of Engineering. He is following the tradition of service begun by Carlos, the ancestor freed from his chains when they beached half a mile from our home. Until they retired me twenty years ago I was the engineer responsible for supplying drinking water to the whole island. We seem to have inherited a sense of public duty along with our black skins – our good looks come from our menfolk having the good sense to marry beautiful women!
Ferdie is working long hours and he often looks exhausted but I’m sure Madge is quietly alert and his mum has her stethoscope at the ready. He will change in his office this evening instead of driving the length of the island to come home only to turn and go back. Madge will drive herself and they’ll sleep in a hotel in the capital tonight.
The kids and I have our own plans for the evening.
I don’t pretend to know what happened after the ship beached all those years ago but I have adapted Gran’s account, adding local oral traditions to make a legend that the kids love to hear. It is a work in progress and this evening will likely follow the usual path of a discussion of some aspect of the tale. We will be in Charlie’s room so Emma can snuggle into one of the bunk beds and I can stretch out on his futon. We will fall asleep arguing and in the morning I will summarise our discussion by re-telling the story with our latest additions.
We have reached an important philosophical point – not that the kids would recognise philosophy if it bit their bums, you understand; I’m giving an adult spin to their observations and comments. On the island there is no disadvantage in having a black skin. We form the majority of the population except amongst the visitors who are mostly white. All levels of service in the hotels and resorts are provided by islanders; this protects our jobs but it results in a situation where black folks are serving white people.
Young as they are, the kids have noticed the patronising way they are treated by visitors. Charlie is top of his class and he came home fuming when a white lady he met outside his school treated him as if he was poor and ignorant.
“I’ll bet her ancestors wouldn’t have survived being slaves and attacked by wild animals. What Carlos went through would’ve killed whities!”
After a lot of discussion he agreed to withdraw the term ‘whities’ as being offensive but he stuck to his guns about black people being superior because of what they had survived in the past. My younger brother threw a light on the same subject from a very different angle.
He devoted his life to making a great deal of money selling real estate and automobiles but at the age of fifty he succumbed to the family urge to perform public service. He chose to research the origins of our forebears in Africa. We didn’t know exactly which port they sailed from although he managed to narrow the choice to three possibilities. He travelled some way inland along the river that flowed through one of these ports and spent some weeks in a town about fifty miles from the coast.
“It can’t have been the right place,” he told me, unable to hide his shock. “These guys have no energy. They’re content to sit around waiting for god knows what. The women do all the work and the men sit around dirty and in rags.”
He had gone off looking for noble savages and it was natural enough for him to exaggerate his disappointment but I think there is an element of truth in his observation. My guess is that the slavers collected a pretty average bunch of natives to take to the coast. It was the process of enslavement and the need to survive appalling treatment that forged the steely resolve of Carlos and the other men and women that landed on our beach. They weren’t born great but had greatness thrust upon them.
My brother didn’t look any further, contenting himself with funding two secondary schools and offering scholarships to three kids from our old homeland to study at the island university: ‘one boy, one girl and one of the new-fangled sexes,’ he explained when I asked why he chose three.
Perhaps we would all laze around picking fruit off the trees if we weren’t forced to work. We often overlook the fact that the fruit Eve offered Adam was from the tree of knowledge; perhaps being expelled from Eden was the best thing that ever happened to humanity – or the worst!
I’m uneasy, I admit, at Charlie’s idea that black people are better than others because we have survived the ordeals of slavery. We’re not the only people to beat the odds – the Jews have certainly shown their worth by overcoming the Holocaust! What worries me is the modern tendency to exclude people different from ourselves. Being black is special but it doesn’t make us superior to people from other races.
Then I stumbled on a book I’d been given when my late wife and I went on a cruise to celebrate my retirement. One of the other passengers was from a Scottish island and he and I hit it off right from the start. It was at the time when Argentina invaded the Malvinas or Falkland Islands and I suggested that the Brits had handled things badly.
“It would certainly have been cheaper to move the islanders to Ardnamurchin,” my Scottish friend replied. “But they wanted to stay and you have to stand behind a man fighting to save his home and his way of life.”
Later he brought me a book of poems by a Scot who had farmed soil so poor that he constantly struggled to survive. Pondering on how to reply to Charlie, I remembered one of the poems by Robert Burns, the Scottish farmer. He must often have seen people better fed and housed than him and his family but instead of the envy which would have been natural he saw through the differences in position and riches – and skin colour – to identify our common humanity.
‘A man’s a man, for a’ that.’
About the Author
Originally from Dalmuir, Alasdair McPherson is now retired and living in exile in Lincolnshire.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned thirteen novels and many short stories. His ten latest novels – The Island, Pilgrimage of Grace, Desert Ark, Swordsmiths, Loyalty, Killing Cousins, Damaged Lives, Patriotism, The Hobos' Union and Getting GOVAN out of the GIRLS – are all McStorytellers publications.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned thirteen novels and many short stories. His ten latest novels – The Island, Pilgrimage of Grace, Desert Ark, Swordsmiths, Loyalty, Killing Cousins, Damaged Lives, Patriotism, The Hobos' Union and Getting GOVAN out of the GIRLS – are all McStorytellers publications.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.