Holiday-Day-Day June 27
Holidays continue to be added to the pile. Sunday was Father’s Day, which managed to close the mall. Wednesday was Labor Day, which closed everything, followed immediately by the Feast of Corpus Christi on Thursday, and yet another national day off from school. Today is First People’s Day, which until last year was officially a thing.
My school routine is to arrive early, on foot, grab the Newsday, Express, and Guardian papers from Miss Hazel’s wide front desk, and share morning coffee with Jodi in the faculty Cave. She has an old-style Irish wit, although she is Trini to the core, a great-granddaughter of big island landowners.
“We’re guilty as sin,“ she confesses with a chuckle, regarding her own colonial pedigree, but, truth be told, she knows more about the lives of the poor than the rich in these parts. She knows how to play J’ouvert. She knows the best way to board and dismount a traveling Carnival toilet on wheels. She knows the best way to vacation in Tobago on a lean budget. She knows the way the oil flows. She knows the secrets of the Chacachacare leper exile, the Canboulay riots, and the Jumbie things that go bump in the night.
Antony, in tropical casual and wallabies, saunters into the Cave for some tea and a wide-angle scan of three different front pages, each of which seems to be using the same sources. Photographs of Doctor Eric Williams are featured today, the radicalized Oxford scholar and TT’s founding father.
“The Simon Bolivar of Trinidad,“ he pronounces crisply. “Just look at him in those dark glasses, even inside. He looks like a stone-cold bloody killer.“ The irreverent Anglo-Trini is quick to qualify that the Doctor had diabetes and was sensitive to bright light. Nevertheless, the many portraits of Trinidad’s George Washington, rendered in Duvalier shades, do make him intense, mysterious, inscrutable. 60’s cool.
Eric Williams grew up as part of a French-creole elite and won a scholarship to Oxford in the 1930’s, where he came under the tutelage of an African History professor, Reginald Coupland, who advised his students, among other things, that Britain freed its Caribbean slaves for purely economic reasons. Oxford, at the heart of the Empire, changed Williams. After he published Capitalism and Slavery in 1944, he became famous, and everyone else changed as well.
In the 50’s, he returned to Trinidad, to “put down meh bucket,“ folksy birth-land words for an academic with a plan for liberation. He held a series of public lectures at Woodford Park, on topics like Democritus, parliamentary procedure, republican ideals, economics, and the history of slavery in the West Indies. In 1956, he formed the People’s National Movement, PNM, which today remains the ruling government of TT.
“The Fidel Castro of Trinidad,“ says Jodi, not even looking up from her paper. This is becoming a quiz show. I would offer Padre Hidalgo of Trinidad, as a salute to my Mexican friends, but Jodi has already turned the page.
“Dis city is hot,“ she says, shaking her head at the expanded crime section, and we are not talking about the sweltering temperatures. Overnight gunfire sprayed through nearby Carenage, Santa Cruz, and Cascade. One woman, allegedly under witness protection, was shot dead near the Green Market, shortly after her son’s graduation ceremony. A slain robbery victim was in his car waiting for the electric driveway gate off the Western Main Road, while another fell just outside of Ferdy’s place, in Cascade—rat-tat-tat—producing a stream of blood in the gutter. Ferdy knows it was a hit job rather than a random act, because there was a pause between fire, and he saw the car speed away from his bedroom window. Ferdy did not sleep. Some blame “the Spanish“ for this latest eruption of violence, but the sources of this craziness are as diverse as the days dedicated to its diversity, or the twisted nature of its crimes.
“De wicked plot against de righteous and gnash dey teet’ at dem, but de Lo’d He laugh,“ says Baba Anil Jaimungal, reciting Psalms 37, shortly before he is shot five times in front of his elderly mother. He is the exorcist who attempted in March to rid the Gasparillo family of its demonic Buck. Now he is fighting for his life at San Fernando General, where it is alleged in Newsday that the gunman—perhaps Baku himself—is trying to shoot the spiritual healer again, a supernatural hit job. It is never a good sign when health professionals are spooked by evil sprits in the ICU.
“Yuh must remember,“ Jodi says hopefully, “we are a young country. We will make mistakes.“ Trinidad and Tobago is only my age, after all, so I like to think she does have a point.