Ashore, through a black swarming and a great hum of creole chatter....
Warm yellow narrow streets under a burning blue day;--a confused
impression of long vistas, of low pretty houses and cottages, more or
less quaint, bathed in sun and yellow-wash,---and avenues of
shade-trees,--and low garden-walls overtopped by waving banana leaves
and fronds of palms.... A general sensation of drowsy warmth and vast
light and exotic vegetation,--coupled with some vague disappointment at
the absence of that picturesque humanity that delighted us in the
streets of St. Pierre, Martinique. The bright costumes of the French
colonies are not visible here: there is nothing like them in any of the
English islands. Nevertheless, this wonderful Trinidad is as unique
ethnologically as it is otherwise remarkable among all the other
Antilles. It has three distinct creole populations,--English, Spanish,
and French,--besides its German and Madeiran settlers. There is also a
special black or half-breed element, corresponding to each creole race,
and speaking the language of each: there are fifty thousand Hindoo
coolies, and a numerous body of Chinese. Still, this extraordinary
diversity of race elements does not make itself at once apparent to the
stranger. Your first impression, as you pass through the black crowd
upon the wharf, is that of being among a population as nearly African as
that of Barbadoes; and indeed the black element dominates to such an
extent that upon the streets white faces look strange by contrast. When
a white face does appear, it is usually under the shadow of an Indian
helmet, and heavily bearded, and austere: the physiognomy of one used to
command. Against the fantastic ethnic background of all this colonial
life, this strong, bearded English visage takes something of heroic
relief;--one feels, in a totally novel way, the dignity of a white skin.
... I hire a carriage to take me to the nearest coolie village;--a
delightful drive.... Sometimes the smooth white road curves round the
slope of a forest-covered mountain;--sometimes overlooks a valley
shining with twenty different shades of surface green;--sometimes
traverses marvellous natural arcades formed by the interweaving and
intercrossing of bamboos fifty feet high. Rising in vast clumps, and
spreading out sheaf-wise from the soil towards the sky, the curves of
their beautiful jointed stems meet at such perfect angles above the way,
and on either side of it, as to imitate almost exactly the elaborate
Gothic arch-work of old abbey cloisters. Above the road, shadowing the
slopes of lofty hills, forests beetle in dizzy precipices of verdure.
They are green--burning, flashing green--covered with parasitic green
creepers and vines; they show enormous forms, or rather dreams of form,
fetichistic and startling. Banana leaves flicker and flutter along the
way-side; palms shoot up to vast altitudes, like pillars of white metal;
and there is a perpetual shifting of foliage color, from yellow-green to
orange, from reddish-green to purple, from emerald-green to black-green.
But the background color, the dominant tone, is like the plumage of a
green parrot.
... We drive into the coolie village, along a narrower way, lined with
plantain-trees, bananas, flamboyants, and unfamiliar shrubs with large
broad leaves. Here and there are cocoa-palms. Beyond the little ditches
on either side, occupying openings in the natural hedge, are the
dwellings--wooden cabins, widely separated from each other. The narrow
lanes that enter the road are also lined with habitations, half hidden
by banana-trees. There is a prodigious glare, an intense heat. Around,
above the trees and the roofs, rise the far hill shapes, some brightly
verdant, some cloudy blue, some gray. The road and the lanes are almost
deserted; there is little shade; only at intervals some slender brown
girl or naked baby appears at a door-way. The carriage halts before a
shed built against a wall--a simple roof of palm thatch supported upon
jointed posts of bamboo.
It is a little coolie temple. A few weary Indian laborers slumber in its
shadow; pretty naked children, with silver rings round their ankles, are
playing there with a white dog. Painted over the wall surface, in red,
yellow, brown, blue, and green designs upon a white ground, are
extraordinary figures of gods and goddesses. They have several pairs of
arms, brandishing mysterious things,--they seem to dance, gesticulate,
threaten; but they are all very naif,--remind one of the first efforts
of a child with the first box of paints. While I am looking at these
things, one coolie after another wakes up (these men sleep lightly) and
begins to observe me almost as curiously, and I fear much less kindly,
than I have been observing the gods. "Where is your babagee?" I inquire.
No one seems to comprehend my question; the gravity of each dark face
remains unrelaxed. Yet I would have liked to make an offering unto Siva.
... Outside the Indian goldsmith's cabin, palm shadows are crawling
slowly to and fro in the white glare, like shapes of tarantulas. Inside,
the heat is augmented by the tiny charcoal furnace which glows beside a
ridiculous little anvil set into a wooden block buried level with the
soil. Through a rear door come odors of unknown flowers and the cool
brilliant green of banana leaves.... A minute of waiting in the hot
silence;--then, noiselessly as a phantom, the nude-limbed smith enters
by a rear door,--squats down, without a word, on his little mat beside
his little anvil,--and turns towards me, inquiringly, a face half veiled
by a black beard,--a turbaned Indian face, sharp, severe, and slightly
unpleasant in expression. "_Vlé béras!_" explains my creole driver,
pointing to his client. The smith opens his lips to utter in the tone of
a call the single syllable "_Ra!_" then folds his arms.
Almost immediately a young Hindoo woman enters, squats down on the
earthen floor at the end of the bench which forms the only furniture of
the shop, and turns upon me a pair of the finest black eyes I have ever
seen,--like the eyes of a fawn. She is very simply clad in a coolie robe
leaving arms and ankles bare, and clinging about the figure in gracious
folds; her color is a clear bright brown--new bronze; her face a fine
oval, and charmingly aquiline. I perceive a little silver ring, in the
form of a twisted snake, upon the slender second toe of each bare foot;
upon each arm she has at least ten heavy silver rings; there are also
large silver rings about her ankles; a gold flower is fixed by a little
hook in one nostril, and two immense silver circles, shaped like new
moons, shimmer in her ears. The smith mutters something to her in his
Indian tongue. She rises, and seating herself on the bench beside me, in
an attitude of perfect grace, holds out one beautiful brown arm to me
that I may choose a ring.
The arm is much more worthy of attention than the rings: it has the
tint, the smoothness, the symmetry, of a fine statuary's work in
metal;--the upper arm, tattooed with a bluish circle of arabesques, is
otherwise unadorned; all the bracelets are on the fore-arm. Very clumsy
and coarse they prove to be on closer examination: it was the fine dark
skin which by color contrast made them look so pretty. I choose the
outer one, a round ring with terminations shaped like viper heads;--the
smith inserts a pair of tongs between these ends, presses outward slowly
and strongly, and the ring is off. It has a faint musky odor, not
unpleasant, the perfume of the tropical flesh it clung to. I would have
taken it thus; but the smith snatches it from me, heats it red in his
little charcoal furnace, hammers it into a nearly perfect circle again,
slakes it, and burnishes it.
Then I ask for children's _béras_, or bracelets; and the young mother
brings in her own baby girl,--a little darling just able to walk. She
has extraordinary eyes;--the mother's eyes magnified (the father's are
small and fierce). I bargain for the single pair of thin rings on her
little wrists;--while the smith is taking them off, the child keeps her
wonderful gaze fixed on my face. Then I observe that the peculiarity of
the eye is the size of the iris rather than the size of the ball. These
eyes are not soft like the mother's, after all; they are ungentle,
beautiful as they are; they have the dark and splendid flame of the eyes
of a great bird--a bird of prey.
... She will grow up, this little maid, into a slender, graceful woman,
very beautiful, no doubt; perhaps a little dangerous. She will marry, of
course: probably she is betrothed even now, according to Indian
custom,--pledged to some brown boy, the son of a friend. It will not be
so many years before the day of their noisy wedding: girls shoot up
under this sun with as swift a growth as those broad-leaved beautiful
shapes which fill the open door-way with quivering emerald. And she will
know the witchcraft of those eyes, will feel the temptation to use
them,--perhaps to smile one of those smiles which have power over life
and death.
And then the old coolie story! One day, in the yellowing cane-fields,
among the swarm of veiled and turbaned workers, a word is overheard, a
side glance intercepted;--there is the swirling flash of a cutlass
blade; a shrieking gathering of women about a headless corpse in the
sun; and passing cityward, between armed and helmeted men, the vision of
an Indian prisoner, blood-crimsoned, walking very steadily, very erect,
with the solemnity of a judge, the dry bright gaze of an idol....