Out of the Depths: In Search for Answers

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Respect the speaker with your silence. But if you are not convinced by his words, let an ounce of doubt in your mind outweigh a ton of blind acceptance.

One

Foam-crested waves dashed against an immense volcanic mass and sent a saline mist into the air that, moments later, rained minute particles of brine. The ocean was angry at the mass for stopping its advance, since only hours before it roared unchecked. Now, finding something in its path, it cursed Nature with its roar as its water ebbed.

That’s the way it might have begun when, millions of years ago, a chain of islands was formed in the South Atlantic, scientists say, by the movement of tectonic plates from a violent eruption deep down in the belly of the earth.

As each link broke off and took on its identity, one remained so entirely different that it took on a character of its own and stood alone. If it had been possible at the time to view the spectacle from above, it might have looked like a rumpled bulge immersed in a sea of blue. Later the rains came and saturated the higher elevations, sending some of that bulge cascading down its slopes until it could travel no more, forming valleys. Then airborne dust watered by rain and dew provided the environment necessary to sustain plant life. Wind-blown seeds and those dropped by birds germinated and developed into forests. About five thousand years ago, the first humans arrived in dugouts and settled in its various links. Those people survived by tilling small plots of land and fishing. But that manner of living would experience a violent change with the arrival of other humans from distant lands more than four thousand years later.

An error in navigation caused Europeans sailing east in search of the spices of India to stumble upon the chain. When they finally arrived on the unusual link, they did not find an easy-to-control people, such as they had met on the others, who had allowed them to establish a base of operation. Instead, the people they now faced were different: obliging but not submissive, forgiving but could not be forced to give. Thus, a fight ensued. But after many years, the earlier inhabitants realized that their arrows were no match against muskets and cannon fire. Those who could not be subdued by gun powder would later yield to trickery by the white conqueror as he plundered with reckless abandon and killed those who looked different.

Those people (named Caribs by the plunderers), almost wiped out as a factor of resistance to the recently arrived Europeans, would become mere footnotes on the pages of history. Not many years passed before slaves, brought in to work the usurped lands for the benefit of the European masters, would replace the first settlers.

The magnitude of the brutal effort of Europeans to wipe out the entire Carib population was made clear in a letter sent by an agent to his government, in which he stated: In spite of the united efforts of the Europeans, the war of extermination declared against the early settlers led only to indefinite conclusions. We need not guess the definite conclusions the Europeans envisioned. But, according to the agent, the mild and timid race of people generally called Arouagues by French historians and Charaibes or Caribs by the British were marked for elimination because they were savages who regarded all Europeans as meat.

Of course, it was a lie of European proportion that the first inhabitants of those islands were cannibals, intent on having them for dinner, but it sent a clear message that European survival depended on the elimination of the human, flesh-eating savages. The new arrivals, however, were so disrespectful of the land and its people that the word savage would have been more appropriately applied to them. But it was convenient to give the insulting marker to those they considered inferior—but whom they were unable to bring under their control.

The Europeans, unable to force the remaining Caribs into service and needing free labor to work the land, began to bring to the island a race of dark-skinned, woolly-haired people who they claimed had been sold to them by African chiefs. (It is said that on Africa’s west coast tribe fought tribe and the vanquished became the property of the victors to dispose of as they chose, including putting them up for sale.) The new breed of people brought to the island in shackles endured a life as brutal as that experienced by the Caribs, if not more so because of the denial of their freedom to resist. However, in spite of the subhuman treatment at the hands of their European owners, which spanned generations, those new islanders survived because their strong desire to eventually live free far exceeded the determination of their owners to keep them shackled.

Much later and facing a threat from treasure-seeking marauders, the cost of keeping humans as chattel exacted a cost far exceeding the benefit. Realizing that, the slave owners, in their effort to lessen any threat from within slave ranks, gave some measure of independence to their property by allowing them to cultivate for their exclusive use and benefit, but on less desirable portions, some of the land they had taken from the Caribs.

During that time, too, and to further lessen resistance to their control, the European masters tacitly devised a method of grouping the black majority by skin tone, classifying the fair-skinned mulatto and designating them a privileged class within their own kind. So the mulatto, allied with his master, set upon his own brother to further weaken black and Carib resistance to white control. And that divide would survive the last vestiges of slavery.

Generations later, island blacks became free of the physiological restrictions of slavery but remained burdened by the many years of psychological conditioning that kept siblings divided by the separation put in place by the slave masters, who they called bacras because of the similarity of their complexion to the land crustacean so named. Without the restrictions attendant to being property, the mulattos became landowners.

The Caribs, following in the footsteps of their brothers on the mainland from which they came, never claimed individual ownership of the land they worked. As far as they were concerned, they were mere keepers of Nature’s assets. The land, the water, and the air were to be used cooperatively and with respect. What the Great One had provided was not theirs to claim or give away. In a cooperative way all should have equal, unrestricted access to and enjoyment of it. In recognition of this, they were committed to keeping the air unpolluted and the land and water pure. But the European usurpers changed all that when they claimed exclusive right to the land, even allowing mulatto clans to own portions of it.

Andre Gaston’s ancestors were mulattos, and they owned a piece of land, which Andre and his siblings inherited. On a portion of that land Andre would build a home for himself and Marcel Moulin, his bride-to-be. Both their paternal lines were French. Their maternal ancestors were Kalinago (Indian) and African. This combination was the result of these two different groups’ need for a compact against the common enemy: the white man. But that was before the British began to divide the groups by whatever method that would allow the white man unconditional control over them. However, the enemy also fathered children by both Kalinago and African women, the latter of whom were the master’s property and unable to resist his demands. The masters later claimed that the African women were eager to please them for the measure of importance suggested in the sexual encounter, which, therefore, did not meet the definition of rape.

Because of the interracial mating, although probably nonconsensual in most instances, over time the complexion difference previously seen in the races blended to blur the lines. As a result, many islanders were born light-skinned with straight hair; some dark-skinned with straight hair; and yet others, dark-skinned with kinky hair. Therefore, it was common for members of the same family to show traits of all three subgroups. Andre and Marcel identified with the same subgroup, with fair complexion and straight hair.

The boundaries of Andre’s land were clearly marked by a mountain to the north and streams east and west. To the south were the properties of other clans who owned the land cooperatively. As the families multiplied, the need for more land became greater, which caused them to encroach upon the land of others. To stop anyone from claiming portions of his land, Andre would define his southern boundary, which was covered with vegetation, with his two-room house on the very edge of it. He wanted not to owe anyone when the house was completed. Lacking the means to hire paid help, he resorted to barter, a favor he would have to return at the appropriate time with sweat. Like those on the island unable to buy in bulk, he obtained his building material only as labor became available. He built his home not too far from that of May Batiste (born Gaston), his recently divorced paternal sister. But he did not know this when he selected the spot because the house was owned and occupied by a distant relative.

May had visions of returning to ancestral land, so she did not quibble when her husband, Michel, agreed to purchase the house as part of their divorce settlement, while he maintained sole ownership of the relatively huge, comfortable home. And, as alimony would have suggested an ongoing obligation to his former wife, Michel instead agreed to provide monthly child support for their two girls until the younger reached age twenty-one. For the substantial monthly payments, May was prepared to make drastic adjustments, changes that were unavoidable as she moved from her former large home with three bedrooms, living room, and dinning room (which, by island standards, was a mansion) to her new digs, from a house with all the amenities of wealth to one with just one door, three windows, and no indoor plumbing.

Andre and Marcel were happy that their only neighbor within shouting distance of their home was May. When their house was completed, they furnished it with a sofa and two matching chairs, which Andre built from boards obtained by felling two of the many trees on the property. On the walls of the living room they had not put up any one of the four paintings/portraits that adorned the exposed wall boards of most homes: the Holy family, the Royal family, the pope, and St. Michael the Archangel. Many homes possessed all four, but in this house the walls were bare of them. They could not afford any, and even if they had been given them free, it was doubtful that Andre would have agreed to have any of those faces to look up to, as if in supplication from their vantage point on his walls.

Instead, the owners hung a photograph Andre had neatly torn from a magazine he found in the magistrate’s office, where he had gone to be a character witness for an acquaintance who had been charged in the theft of some mangoes. The photograph was of a beautiful house. In the background were trees of many kinds and sizes, and overhead the sky, clear and blue, cast no shadow on the river basin in which children frolicked. Andre and Marcel had visions of owning a similar house in which to make a home, so they put the picture on the wall to keep their motivation high. However, realizing that they could neither live in it nor own it, they were content to look at it.

Marcel was pregnant with the couple’s first child, but neither she nor her husband had any idea the baby would see the light of day during its mother’s thirty-first week of pregnancy. When she began to have contractions, Andre positioned a goatskin on the rough flooring in one corner of the only bedroom, with spacing in the flooring made necessary to conserve wood. On the goatskin he placed a mattress made of straw enclosed in burlap. To protect the baby’s skin from the rough burlap, he placed on top of it flour sacks that had been washed and made clean for another purpose.

When Marcel’s frequent contractions began to concern Andre, he ran to May’s house for help. Having given birth to two daughters and taken a two-day course in midwifery, his sister was better prepared to handle the delivery of a woman’s first child. They hurried back to Marcel’s side, both wishing for a routine delivery. A difficult delivery, such as a breach, would have required the presence of a more fully trained person. The only midwife in the parish was miles away and might not have been able to get to the house before disaster struck. May helped Marcel deliver a healthy, normal baby boy while Andre sat outside on the stump near the entrance. Fathers were not allowed to witness the sacred moment of childbirth.

When Andre was allowed to enter the room, immediately after the baby was born, he observed the infant favored the right hand, so he thought him left-handed, and called him Gauche, a name he hoped Marcel would agree to. But May told him that in a right-handed society no one wants to be called Left. The baby’s mother and aunt did not want the child to be named Left or, in later life, Lefty. But Andre insisted on Gauche. However, before the baby was christened, Marcel came up with the name Gosh, which her husband accepted. It allowed him his pronunciation while it saved the child the taunts that were sure to accompany Lefty.

Andre and Marcel cherished their son and wished to share the joy with a sibling for Gosh. They wanted more children, but after much effort none came. Andre opined that his wife’s inability to become pregnant again was a message to hold back on additions to the family until they were able to provide for its basic needs, particularly as they were already having trouble providing for the family of three. But whereas he was willing to heed the message, Marcel wanted to obey the biblical command to be fruitful and multiply, because the poor women at the time saw wealth in their children.

She was hopeful that somehow they would make it, no matter their present circumstance. Enjoying every moment with her little Gosh, who was now two and almost ready to attend junior school (daycare), Marcel wanted more children and prayed that her wish would be granted. The family would make it somehow, although she did not know how—except through prayer. But Andre was a practical man, who believed that prayer at times facilitated the events hoped for, but only with much effort. So, deeply committed to satisfying his wife’s wish for more children, he saw the result they both sought in persistence and determination, not in her petitioning for God’s intervention.

The family had much to live for but little to live on, and from first light to twilight Andre labored on the plot of land near the home to eke out a living. But while the crops grew the family’s needs could not wait. A carpenter by trade, Andre found hourly work husking coconuts on a plantation. Arriving home after dusk each night, he would proudly hand over to his loving wife the few shillings he had earned, precious money he had carefully wrapped in his rag of a handkerchief and placed under his felt hat. If on the way home anyone asked him for a bob (shilling), he would tell the beggar he had no money, quickly turning his pockets inside out to prove it.

When Andre left home in the morning he was not sure if, when he returned in late afternoon, he would have anything to show to justify his long hours from home because work was scarce and unsteady. But he was determined to earn a day’s pay, however small, once he left his home to find work. Some days he found work to spray bananas against leaf spot disease on the lands of the colonials, who claimed the large estates for which they could not produce documents of ownership. That was the way it was on that island, as on many others. What little work one could find was mainly on the plantations of colonials who had claimed the arable lands.

In spite of the hardships, however, Andre and Marcel agreed to have more children, and within the year Little Angel arrived. Marcel had hoped to call her other child Little Angel, irrespective of gender.

They were happy that Gosh would get a baby sibling, but there were complications during the delivery, and it would be Marcel’s last child. When May, the midwife, and her assistant emerged from the room after the delivery, the sadness on their faces spoke volumes of sorrow to Andre. The baby’s mother did not survive; she would never get the chance to hold her Little Angel. A life had ended as another began, and Andre believed that if the midwife had had the requisite skill to handle the difficult delivery, his wife would have lived.

Within weeks of Little Angel’s birth, she was christened Bertha because of her resemblance to the midwife. Marcel had been given a book of Christian names by her church but had not used it in naming Gosh, so the godparents had seen no need to use it as a guide in naming the infant. Without a mother to breastfeed the baby, and Aunt May not able to take on the responsibility, the parish nurse provided a reasonable substitute in powdered milk. May gave infant-appropriate mixtures of barley water and arrowroot until the baby was old enough for the breadfruit and yam mashed almost to a pulp in Andre’s mortar.

With a little assistance from May, Andre tried his best to provide a good home for his children. But even with his sister’s help, the few shillings and pence he earned when he found work did not allow him to provide much. When the infant needed clothes, he used a clean flour sack into which he made holes with his hatchet, the large hole at the closed end for the head and two smaller but identical ones on the sides for the arms. While he wept daily for the loss of his wife, he found solace in his children, and never once did he blame God for denying them a mother and him a wife.

To those who define wealth in terms of material abundance, Andre was poor. But he regarded both wealth and poverty as relative conditions and considered himself rich with bountiful blessings: happiness with his children, good health, and a supportive sister, at whose home the children stayed most of the time.

When Gosh was nearly eight years old, Andre wished very much to surprise Bertha on her fifth birthday with her first footwear, thick-soled tennis shoes to protect her feet from the many pebbles around their small homestead and on the road to school. Each morning, except Sunday, he would pass his sister’s house just before sunrise on his way to work or to find work and would not return until nightfall. One morning, however, he was on a different mission and passed May’s house earlier than usual. For reasons she was unable to explain or unwilling to disclose, she was awake and saw her brother pass, his flashlight revealing his position as he approached her house. Sometimes, as the moon played hide-and-seek through the cumulus clouds, he would turn off the light during the seek period to help conceal his movement and extend the life of his batteries.

As he neared May’s home he was careful where he stepped, lest the rustle of leaves awakened those asleep. Today Andre was on a mission—to make his daughter happy—and he hoped that he could pass his sister’s house unnoticed. May once claimed that because of the many dry leaves along the path to her home, no one could walk by even in the dark of night unheard, except when it rained and the leaves were sodden. It had not rained for days, so Andre thought he had met the challenge. However, his sister had followed his every step but was willing to allow him to claim a small victory, telling herself never to let him know she had seen him leave.

May did not think her brother’s early departure unusual because the night before he had told her of a full-time position that was available on one of the plantations for which he was qualified, and she thought he was headed there. But instead of going to the plantation, Andre was going to a nearby island to exchange some of his produce for products, which were unavailable on his island. The night just past was the last time the children would see their father and uncle, and the early morning when she caught sight of her brother would be May’s last.

The voyage to the island was a routine one Andre and the two oarsmen had made many times before in the pirogue owned by a villager, but the return from it would prove deadly. Loaded with a cargo of oil, flour, sugar, rice, cloth, and Bertha’s footwear, the small boat was dangerously close to taking in water over the sides even before it left the calm bay. Out in the open sea, one oarsman lost his oar to the waves whipped up by the increasing wind speed. Grabbing the empty five-gallon paint bucket, which they carried for bailing, Andre began to remove the water that by now had soaked the precious cargo that was not in protective containers. But as the oarsmen maneuvered the small boat through the waves, the water came in faster than Andre could remove it, and slowly the boat went down as much of the cargo floated out of sight. The men’s attempt to stay together was thwarted by high waves, and, lacking any flotation device, they soon disappeared with their cargo.

When the small boat did not return at its scheduled time, the villagers suggested a waiting period of a day before notifying the government because the men, all good swimmers, would make it to shore. In addition, a premature reporting of loss at sea would open them to ridicule. But the next morning, on May’s insistence, they notified the authorities, who simply listed them under the heading Men missing at sea, with an asterisk qualifier, Three country men, meaning men from the country, as if their lives meant less than the lives of Town men.

Two weeks before, Andre had promised Bertha he would get her sneakers and told her to keep the information secret. Seeing that look of expectation in the child’s eyes, he looked at Gosh, whose soles were blistered and heels cracked, and wished that he could also buy his son much-needed shoes. He pained knowing that he could provide little for the people he cherished but was pleased to see that the innocence of a child could allow his daughter to find so much joy in a promise—a promise he meant to keep.

But just as her mother was unable to cradle her, her father would never revel in the joy of seeing her gleefully trying on her first sneakers. It is said that the loss of a mother or father to a newborn is never as devastating as the loss of an infant to its parent(s). Should a mother not survive the moment of her giving birth, the wailing heard from the infant is not to acknowledge a loss of incomprehensible dimensions but to clear its airwaves to accept its entrance into a world it did not yet know. Bertha lost her mom the moment she was born and therefore would never experience the love of a birth mother. Nor could she as an infant understand her loss or remember the one who accepted death to give her life.