Guadeloupe continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 26

Depressed as we were to be back in Pointe-à-Pitre, we were buoyed up at the idea of leaving, almost at
once, for Antigua, in a little steamer called the St. Laurent . We soon learnt, however, that her crew was
on strike. Indefinitely.
The Palais de Justice was as good a place as another to wile away a few of the innumerable hours of
waiting until the strike on the St. Laurent came to an end. Costa had disappeared into the outskirts of la
Pointe with his painting-things under his arm soon after breakfast.
A Negro girl was sitting half a yard in front of me, so I was at last able to inspect at close range a
method of hairdressing that had fascinated me for days. The hair is parted from forehead to nape, and
from this central canal twin contiguous partings radiate at different but always symmetrical angles, which
in their turn multiply into a sub-series of enclosures until the entire scalp is honeycombed and reticu-
lated with lozenges, quadrilaterals and polygons. Then a mother or a sister plaits the segregated hair into
tight clumps—it must be an almost impossible feat—and fastens them down flush with a whole arsenal
of hairpins, so that the owner appears to be wearing a tight and elaborate cap of black wool. It is very
sensible and, above all, very becoming, as it preserves the shape of the head, which is often very fine. Nor
does it interrupt the splendid neckline of the Negro girls—a polished bronze column that melts into firm
shoulders, and ends an uninterrupted line which, in profile, springs from the eyebrows to the shoulder-
blades in a long, question-mark-shaped arabesque.
The girl in front of me wore large gold ear-rings, and a necklace of gold balls the size of chick peas,
which, against the glittering smoothness of her skin, burnt with deep fires. There was scarcely a peasant
woman there who was not weighted down with these gold ornaments. The men were peasants from the
deep savannah, tired-looking elders with grizzled white moustaches, vestigial beards, wrinkled foreheads
and nostrils so splayed that they spread half-way over the cheek. They had come in here to follow some
lawsuit in which they were involved, or just to rest from the glare of the market-place. This was more or
less our object too.
The judges and lawyers were seated beneath the fasces and the Phrygian cap of the Third Republic.
All of them were coloured, some of them that matt obsidian that seems almost darker than black, and in
their silk robes trimmed with fur and their white linen bands, they looked superbly dignified. We saw a
lawyer friend from the hotel, sitting beside a robed and sable Mussolini: Maitre Lara, the best pleader in
the Antilles.
Most of the cases were conducted in Créole (although French was used as much as possible), as they
dealt with questions of land-tenure or infringement of boundaries between peasants. But one of them was
concerned with a razor fight, another with wilful wounding with a cutlass. In the last case, the prosec-
ution made great capital of a raffish-looking old man, half of whose ear had been cut off with a razor
by a young neighbour. The voice of his lawyer shook with forensic indignation as his forefinger traced
the outline of the remaining part of the ear. Thumping damages were demanded. If he had produced the
severed lobe, there are no grounds for thinking that the judges would have proved less easily swayed by
such corroborative detail than the British Parliament in the eighteenth century. But he didn't, and soon, in
a swirling pillar of silk, Me Lara rose to his feet, and in accents that echoed through the tribunal began the
best pleading I have ever heard. (I must excuse myself for the fragments of French that follow; I noted
down some of his discourse, and it would lose a lot in translation.)
He began with a clear exposition of the case, and then warmed gradually into an accusing Buzfuz. He
pointed at the old man—' Sa gorge, monsieur le Juge, est aussi ouverte que sa poche est plate—à cause,
evidemment, de sa fainéantise. Son alcoolisme est redouté par tous ses voisins ….' He proved not only