Travel Reference
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A car drew level with us as we walked back through the town and a head, wreathed with a triumphant
smile, stuck out. It was the taxi-driver. 'I knew you wouldn't like the bar, boss,' he said. 'Now would you
like to go to a club?'
The situation became clearer. All the restaurants or places of amusement we had visited, either with
friends or alone, were officially clubs, of which, thanks to the clarity of our complexions, we were auto-
matically members. We had never been elected and it was impossible to resign, though I have not the
slightest doubt one can be barred. In fact they were not real clubs at all, and could only become so at
the rash approach of a coloured stranger (for no black Barbadian could make such a mistake), when their
dormant legal status as a club would become for a moment real. The mechanism of exclusion would slip
smoothly into gear. ('Let me see. Are you a member? Not? Oh dear!' And then with a rueful smile: 'I'm
afraid only members are admitted….') It has never had a breakdown yet. A Barbadian acquaintance ex-
plained the intricacies of the system with quiet pride, as though he was pointing out one of the natural
beauties of the island. 'It's better that way all round.'
'But what do you do if you want to have dinner with a coloured Barbadian? Where do you meet?'
He looked faintly taken aback.
'But we don't meet—except on official and business occasions. They don't like it either. You say you
didn't feel you were welcome in one of their bars. There you are. We each keep to ourselves. It's much
better that way all round. Some of them are first-class chaps, of course, I'm not saying they aren't….'
Goddard's, he continued, was the only place frequented at a pinch by blacks and whites. It was in the
middle of the business centre and came in very handy. There was nowhere else.
The club system runs all through Barbadian life and the cold shoulder and the open snub are resorted
to only when no legal quibble is available. It segregates the two races of islanders just as effectively as
the most stringent colour discrimination in the United States, and not half so honestly. There, at least,
loathsome as the American colour laws appear to me, Negroes know exactly where they are. There is
none of the mean juggling with the written word that prevails in Barbados, where, on paper, no colour
bar exists. It is a pretty state of society when any white Barbadian or English pup can bounce in virtually
where he chooses, while the elected head of the Government, who is the island's equivalent of the British
Prime Minister, may have to hesitate and draw back. It must be one of the most disgustingly hypocritical
systems in the world.
Except for Canefield and the kindness of our hostess, it was without a pang that we flew away to Trin-
idad. Looking backwards we could almost see, suspended with the most delicate equipoise above the flat
little island, the ghostly shapes of those twin orbs of the Empire, the cricket ball and the blackball.
[1] It is interesting that the nicknames of the Negroes for their white masters usually begin with the letter
B: Bim in Barbados, Béké in the French Antilles, and Buckra in Jamaica.
[2] This family, of which the victor of the battle of Navarino was a member, is one of those which owned
vast estates in the West Indies, and whose name recurs again and again in the history of the Islands.
[3] Ligon.
[4] It is thanks to the generosity and scholarly research of the present Rector of Landulph, the Rev. J.
H. Adams, M.A., that I have been able to learn of the antecedents and descendants of his distinguished
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