Luther King is dead
and now
this we cannot avoid
segregation must be destroyed
– The Mighty Sparrow
In April, 1968, I was 10 going on 11, living with my mom and dad in San Fernando, Trindad. My sister was living in the states with my maternal grandmother, finishing out high school. We hadn’t been in Trinidad long, and we were living in the first of 3 houses we’d eventually live in.
I think. I’m talking about a long time ago, and this is how I remember it. There was no sniper fire, I’m sure of that.
My sister and I were expatriate children. My father was the restless sort, as am I, as is my daughter. He took the family overseas when we were little kids. I lived in Venezuela, Trinidad, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.
I loved Trinidad best of all. I also loved Ecuador and Peru very much. Venezuela, too, I suppose, but I was very young. My year in Bogotá was haunted by 3 ruthless bullies, a wounded mother, a dying grandmother, and as best as I can remember, not one day of sunshine.
But that’s another story.
Although I didn’t actually start playing for another 5 years, I believe I became a musician in Trinidad. I became a reader in Trinidad, I discovered women in Trinidad, and I made my childhood’s best friend in Trinidad, an enormous, sloppy German Shepherd named Jefe.
In the extended archipelago of the West Indies, Trinidad is unique in many ways. I should probably run to an encyclopedia, but I want to stay in memory for this, so if I’ve got it wrong in some particulars I apologize.
Of all the islands that stretch from Florida to Venezuela in a long arc, Trindad and Tobago are the last of the chain. From San Fernando, where we lived, you could see the coast of Venezuela most days. Trinidad is below the path of hurricanes, or at least that’s the impression I have.
Certainly there is astonishing beauty in these islands, Tobago especially, but perhaps alone of all the islands Trindad and Tobago is an industrialized nation far more than a tourist stop, with oil reserves and considerable refining capability. A great deal of sugar cane is grown there, as well; the second house we lived in was right next to vast field of the stuff. It’s a miracle I still have teeth.
Steel drums were invented there. Trinidad is home to one of the world’s great Carnivals; situated somehow halfway between Brazil and New Orleans, it seems to reflect (or perhaps influence) both. She is also the mother of Calypso, a musical form that arose, like blues in this country, from the need to communicate under the yoke of brutal slavery. Over the centuries it came to embody a groove, as well, but at its root was a necessary extemporization of vital news into a song form full of humor and double meaning designed to obscure important information from the oppressor.
In the time I lived there, Calypso had become the primary source of political discourse and cultural transmission. The song I quote above is by one of its greatest artists, The Mighty Sparrow. Lord Kitchener was another, but my perhaps faulty memory tells me he was from Jamaica and therefore of not the same stature. This might simply be a reflection of the views of the Trinidadians I hung around with, though.
Whatever was happening, on the island or in the wider world, was immediately communicated via these songs. It was in the air. Revolution — political, sexual, cultural — was being spread right under the noses of the rather dour and prudish leadership of the country (I wonder if this is accurate, or my impression; Trindad was recently independent of Britain, and the Queen’s visage was still everywhere). I was hearing new songs everyday. The radio was playing them fast and hot — I’m sure in bars and on street corners the boil was even higher.
Calypso can be likened to blogging, I suppose, in that it was fast, of the moment, quickly consumed and just as quickly supplanted. It differs in that it’s musical, it’s NOT mostly done by unpleasant white people, and no matter the subject matter, it is always delivered with high humor and appreciation of human foibles:
The lizard run up she foot,
and it disappear –
Ev’rybody still searchin ev’rywhere
Where the lizard?
Teacher Mildred!
She makin jolly and happy
I saw the lizard must be ticklin she
Here’s another thing about Trinidad: her population is basically half African and half Indian in descent. The Africans of course were stolen peoples, slaves, but the Indians, many, many of them at least, arrived in Trinidad as indentured servants. That is, slaves with a theoretical freedom clause. Thralldom for, say, 15 years is in no way similar to a job.
In 1968, television wasn’t THAT evolved in the U.S., and it was in its infancy in a place like Trindad. I’m pretty sure it didn’t even start until 5:00 P.M. In any case, we rarely watched it, and there was only one channel. I remember a news show that was basically a news-less organ of State, called Panorama, anchored by a white guy that (in memory) looked for all the world like Jimmy Durante. The other show I remember was Scouting for Talent, an ongoing talent search that seemed to have no goal beyond allowing each and every citizen the chance to perfom. We loved it. Periodically, the emcee guy would holler, “What’s the name of that rum?” and the audience would shout, “Old Oak!”
So my family talked. and we read, voraciously. We took Time magazine with a 2 week time lag, we devoured the local paper, we cleared out the bookstores, we haunted the libraries.
The United States was mired in Vietnam, reviled by most nations, and daily making things worse for herself. The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, in places like Trinidad, was viewed as a tiny sliver of proof our whole nation wasn’t completely mad. This brilliant, visionary, miraculously eloquent man who was able to articulate the particular plight of African Americans in mid-century America in terms people everywhere could understand, this political genius who had adopted and adapted the pacifist methods of Mahatma Ghandi to turn a nation of racist laws upside down, it’s easy to see his profound appeal to the people of this half African, half Hindu nation, itself founded in colonialism and slavery.
And on that dreadful day in April, 1968, when Dr. King was murdered by ignorant, racist scum in Memphis, Tennessee, the tiny nation of Trinidad was stricken with grief and outrage and shock and anger. What sort of people are these Americans, that extinguish their brightest lights, one after the other?
I remember hearing Dr. King’s speech (see below) over and over. I remember Robert Kennedy’s speech, which I believe calmed not only Indianapolis but Trinidad — and probably many other nations in the West Indies. Our one TV station, our island radio stations, made sure of it.
And the Calypso artists wrote songs of joy and sadness.
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I only ever saw my dad cry twice. Once was when John Kennedy was shot. My father, a Republican, wept for his fallen president, a Democrat he detested in normal circumstances. In his invincible conservative worldview, he thought little of Kennedys, or the SCLC, or for that matter, mass movements in general. A child of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, he believed in the ascendancy of the individual. And like Obama’s grandmother, I heard him sometimes say wincingly awful things. He was, as most all of us are, a product of his times. But he was his own man: he knew history, he sympathized with the poor and downtrodden, and he read, as we all did, voraciously. He was no ideologue, he understood the pain and injustice and suffering that was fueling the flames in America.
And he talked to me about it it. Usually in the form of picking a fight, it was nonetheless my own white, conservative, hard-headed, do-it-yourself dad that made sure I knew who Dr. King was. And Ghandi. And for that matter, Stokely Charmichael. Malcolm X. Che Guevara.
He showed me the world around us. He didn’t hide it from me or try to prettify it — he wanted me to think for myself.
And to understand you can disagree, as he and I almost always did, and still love.
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1968.
It was awful, and it was going to get worse. Cities burned through the summer. Bobby was killed in October. Thousands upon thousands died in Vietnam for reasons no one could articulate at the time, far less now. Blinded by arrogance and a mistaken belief we were powerful enough to do whatever we wanted, we slaughtered countless innocent lives in the name of dubious freedom. Our leaders were willing to tell any lie, but transfixed by their own folly, screwed to a sticking place by illusions of strength and weakness, I don’t think they even felt the depth of their betrayal.
An Evil Foreign Menace, threatening our American Way of Life. Imagine such a notion standing in place of thought.
And those who spoke out against this madness, those who spoke for all beings, those who decried injustice and lawlessness from this nation of great ideals, those who stood up for all of us were shouted down, hated, marginalized, and sometimes murdered.
In 1968.
