Jamaica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 207

in Central American waters, and now plied between Jamaica and the southern U.S. ports of the Mexican
Gulf. I asked him how Jamaica compared with the States. After a pause he said, 'It's much better in the
States—plenty better. They've got discrimination there, they've got the Jim Crow laws, they call you a
nigger and they call you a jig, but the black folk know where they are, and among black folk life's pretty
good. But here,' he waved his arm round the room, 'they tell you we're all brothers, all the same and
equal. They put their arm round you and call you a brother, and when you're a child it's all fine. But
time goes on, boss, and the buckra, he's way, way ahead, you don't see him no more. But the black man,
he stays right where he is. Right here.' He lit his pipe. 'We're always going somewhere. But we never
get there.' There was a sound of assent from the others at the table.' 'That's right, boss. We're all equal
but we ain't equal .' I was surprised by this general agreement, though it confirmed feelings that had first
occurred to me in Barbados: that our middle course between the French and American extremes—that
is, a colour bar that is non-existent in law but in social practice violently alive—leaves the coloured race
stranded in a limbo of uncertainty whose invisible frontiers materialize when touched, and only then, into
walls of adamant. Being invisible, it is often impossible, without collision, to gauge their distance. The
fingers may feel the cool surface of this mysterious masonry within arm's length; or it may seem to re-
cede step by step until, gaining confidence, the adventurous explorer may quicken his pace through the
psychological Tom Tiddler's ground, only, in the end, to collide with greater force and retreat with more
lasting bruises.
But the fact that, in the West Indies, all the whites live in a 'privileged fashion, that most of them own
motor-cars and pleasant houses, converts the whole white race into an Equestrian Order. Their distinc-
tions and discriminations among themselves are too far from the humbler West Indian to be discernible.
Ignorant of the slums and poverty that exist in Europe, they are prone to think that the Negro race has a
monopoly of the world's social injustice. Black means poor and White, rich. How can they know that a
system operates in Europe which relegates white humanity to the equivalent status of Negro, Mulatto and
buckra, as savagely and inevitably as any colour feeling in the West? Unaware of all this, they conclude
that they are the only victims of a universal conspiracy. Propaganda has taught the poorer classes in the
West Indies to attribute all their disadvantages not to a world-wide evil, from which all races suffer, but
to the specific handicap of their colour. The class war becomes a colour war and the propaganda-line is
painfully easy.
Places of worship abound. The Church of England, the Catholics and the Jews represent the main reli-
gious currents, but a hundred protestant sects flourish in the back streets of the capital, developing, from
orthodox Anglicanism, through the Methodist Connection, the Quakers, the Seventh Day Adventists, the
Good Tidings and the Salvation Army into the odder revivalist cults of the Shakers and the Holy Rollers
and the queer excesses of the Pocomaniacs.
Religious instruction among the slaves of the Church of England planters was, as we have seen, pur-
posely neglected until the beginning of the nineteenth century. When the work of conversion began, some
Christian elements were eagerly grafted, as in Haiti, on to the surviving remnants of the religions of
Africa. But the African survival was less robust than in Haiti, and Pocomania, in spite of its curious prac-
tices, is naively considered by its adepts to be merely another protestant sect. The Trinity, the Angelic
host and the company of Saints have won the contest against any straggling deities from the African pan-
theon. Not one of them remains.