Laventille November 27
‘This time, Sabine, like you really gone!’
I answer the ass, I simply pile in
the back seat and watch the sky burn
above Laventille pink as the gown
in which the woman I left was sleeping,
and I look in the rearview and see a man.
Derek Walcott
In 1876, on the centenary of American independence, the French were feeling especially nostalgic for their revolutionary past, presenting New York with the Statue of Liberty and Port of Spain with Our Lady of Laventille. The white Virgin Mary stands on the hilltop beside a very pregnable Spanish fort, as the British navy demonstrated in 1797. Around Our Lady’s stone feet has since grown a shrine to grace and mercy, which are in short supply on this impoverished hillside. Novelist Earl Lovelace calls it “the eyebrow of the enemy.“
Laventille is one of the oldest and poorest neighborhoods in the city. Set above affluent urban enclaves, the tiny homes here teeter shoulder to shoulder, making for a dense slanted mass of Afro-Caribbean humanity. It is still referred to as “ward of the state,“ having a fierce reputation earned from its history as a refuge for escaped French slaves. The name Laventille is French slang for Vent, for the breeze, but also belying a simmering cauldron. The crime rate is high, the steaming resentments real and raw, yet such observations are scorned for fueling racial stereotypes. This is a forgotten part of the city, so neglected that people are killed collapsing through manhole covers—seriously, do not step on manhole covers here.
Although it is less than a mile from downtown, Laventille is partitioned from the rest of the city by heaps of urban junkyard and a maze of concrete freeway lanes and barbed fencing. Africans started squatting here some 180 years ago, and many of the salvage-board homes look like originals. Plumbing is unreliable, so many get their water from standpipes on the pinched streets, providing a third world form of water-cooler gossip. There is heavy foot traffic during the day, but at night even the cops stay away.
After Spain was ousted, the British military governor, Thomas Picton, built a fort on the hillside of Laventille, which came to be called Picton’s Folly because the ramparts’ gun-holes all faced uselessly away from the sea. The Hill served as a leper colony until Emancipation, and afterward it became the center of Africanism on the big island. Steel pan and calypso were born here. The Old Fashioned Sailors Mas Band of Laventille has been parodying British seamen at Carnival for over a hundred years. Derek Walcott saw “the Window“ as Trinidad’s Harlem. Sir Ralph Woodford, the notorious colonial governor, once considered it his future plantation, but things were not destined to work out:
"No whites can live there; the coloured people suffer much, and Africans and Chinese are the only people who enjoy comparatively good health. It is assumed that a white man who sleeps one night on the Laventille heights must necessarily get fever.“
Some kids are trying to dislodge a mango from a tree with pieces of pitchstone. The mums are chatting up a storm outside a market, twisting with uncontainable laughter, pausing only to reprimand an errant throw—“Watch ‘e stones, buoy!“
“Dey only pelt mango when dee fruit is ripe,“ says the other mum, before she bursts with laughter at receiving the next bit of juice.