Martinique continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 53

and hat-pins in their bodices; never for use against men, she reassured us; only against rivals. She disap-
proved of it strongly, 'Though, mind you, if another girl stabbed me, I would arm myself when I got out
of hospital, and go round and wound her, at least.'
As we walked down to the capital by starlight after a good but ruinous dinner, Jeannine sang biguines
in a thin, pretty little voice, just a fraction off the note. The only words I could catch among the patois
were the ones with which the refrain ended: joli lavabo . The valley outside the town was illuminated by
brilliant patches of light in half a dozen places, as though by huge colonies of glow-worms. They were
caused by thousands of candles burning on the graves, for it was the vigil of the Jour des Morts . As we
reached the town we could see, over the walls of the Cemetery of the Rich and the Cemetery of the Poor,
families clustered round the tombs for the fateful night that divides All Saints' Day from All Souls' Day.
The great white cubes were laden with flowers and lighted candles. Relations of the deceased knelt on the
grass saying their rosaries, or sat on the edges of the tombs, quietly talking and laughing or dabbing their
eyes with their handkerchiefs, their faces all glowing in the light of the candles. They stay there keeping
the dead company till the dawn.
A short time after our arrival in the island, we met and made friends with Dr. Robert Rose-Rosette. It is
an encounter for which I will be eternally grateful, as not only did this meeting act as an introduction to
intellectual Mulatto circles, and in a sense to much of the non-white world of Martinique, but the doctor
himself is a man of outstanding quality and charm. The more I saw of him and his friends, the more con-
vinced I became that the happy future evolution of the islands, and the slow exorcism of the curses that
still linger from a miserable past, depend on such people as these.
The attitude of Dr. Rose-Rosette and his friends is very different, for instance, from that of the Mulatto
world of Haiti. The latter forms a separate élite who attempt, in exact proportion to the colour of their
complexion, to deny and expunge from their minds all that links them to their African origins and the
dismal centuries of slavery. Their attitude is, if not admirable, at least understandable in a world organ-
ized by whites. But it is a private and anti-social solution. It is no more help to the problems of these
islands than the intransigent conservatism of some of the whites, the violent colour-consciousness of Cé-
saire or the illiterate rancour of the Negro masses; attitudes which can only prolong the deadlock or, in
time, precipitate the islands to disaster. The Rose-Rosette outlook seems to me to be the only dignified
and constructive one. It is the result of much thought and of a conscious choice; a philosophy of tolerance
founded on the mental extirpation of the inherited grief of a past of slavery, and on absolution for the
inherited guilt of slaveowning. This philosophy, if I may call it so, adopts the opposite mental stance to
that of the Haitian Mulatto élite. For, though its adherents have decided to drop their age-old lamentation,
they find a source of pride and inspiration in the African past, and everything that concerns the customs
and traditions that have survived the last centuries. This is accompanied by a corresponding abandon-
ment of the age-old grievance against the whites for the sins of their ancestors; an acknowledgement that
slavery was the accepted custom, and that this being so it would have been a phenomenon if the colonists
had behaved otherwise; an acknowledgement, too, that the slave trade was in many cases merely the ex-
tension of a thriving institution that already existed among the Africans themselves. It is an outlook that
the phrase about letting bygones be bygones adequately captures. Les vieux temps sont les vieux temps .
This may sound an impracticable and over-sanguine hope, and one which overrates the virtue of hu-
manity. But it is the only solution, and one which has indeed good chances of success if its development
is not vitiated at every turn by prejudice and the partisan exploitation of grievances which should now be