Patna the Irish Town December 4
A generation ago, Patna was considered the Irish town. Time and admixture have diluted the Irish DNA strands, and the last of the old ones have passed on, but their descendants are still present. Antony bumped into a bunch of brothers with long straight beards and anemic rasta inclinations, describing them as Trini-hillbillies, with decidedly Irish features starting with the scarcity of melanin. My friend Maeve, from Cork, who certainly knows an Irishman when she sees one, was struck with cognitive dissonance by the piercing green eyes of one very black man in Patna. As for the father, “He looked like he walked straight out of the bog,“ she recalls, which a brogue can conjure to be a bogeyman.
Irish settlers moved to this hillside enclave over a hundred years ago, because it was good for raising livestock and children, growing potato and onion, while providing a paycheck from the city. Many were policemen and teachers at the Catholic colleges. This eerily mirrors my Grampy John’s story of coming to America after the Great War, joining law enforcement thanks to the little nepotism available to the immigrant underclass. Most were not even aware where the exodus ships were precisely heading. Many, like Grampy and Nanna Agnes, ended up in New York, but some ended up in Barbados and Trinidad as well. Patna offered a familiar rural lifestyle in a thoroughly unfamiliar place, which is putting it mildly. I am quite sure my racist grandparents would have been surprised to have a black grandson.
Maeve’s husband Paul tells the story of Patna’s special role during wartime, as it is Port of Spain’s nearest eyes to the north, high above the shore of the Caribbean Sea. Flags were deemed preferable to unreliable electric telegraphs for relaying information regarding ship arrivals. The semaphore signal from the end of the North Post Road was first translated on top of Fort George before retransmission to the city. However, when a “cattle ship“ was once spotted from Patna, “battleship“ was the message received in Port of Spain, which immediately threw everyone into fevered preparation for an imminent invasion—by cows.
Our sedan smells of burned rubber as we scale the final slopes of Patna and nearby Paramin, some two-thousand feet above Turtle Head and the soundless crashing ocean. Chive plants—called Sive, their farmers referred to as Sivers—cling to hillsides cleared of anchoring vegetation by slash-and-burn. When the crop is ready, a fleet of old-savanna Land Cruisers will descend these precarious heights to the central fruit markets of the city; but today is the sabbath, and the Sivers can wait. Some men rest by the narrow roadside, another smoothes a board with some kind of preindustrial plane, while another gives his 14-year-old a truck lesson on an impossible incline from seaside. The kid’s grin is as wide as a reef. I see no sign of fair-complexioned Irishmen, referred to as Red Legs (as opposed to Red Men, which is an acceptable term for mixed-race mulattos), but I feel self-conscious about asking these townspeople where the white folks are. I think they’re looking at them.
At the top of the last hill is Marine Post North Radio Station. Blue smoke from the latest burn pours out the jungle. We park and set the brake firmly. Then Paul and I assemble our proverbial flags and begin the semaphore signal to Fort George, on Cumberland Hill—then on to the oblivious city below: “Only Cows, Boys.“