A Way in the World Read Free Page B

given it.
    He said, “My father worshipped education. It was his way of giving me ambition. He was not an educated man. But he was born in 1867 or 1870. That’s a long time ago for us. If you look it up, you’ll find the name in Homer. Book four or book five.”
    It was surprising, that this famous man hadn’t gone into his unusual name, didn’t know that the name came from Latin and Virgil, and had simply tried to bluff me. He was a self-made man. He hadn’t had anything like a formal education; all his energies had gone into his profession and making his way. But this flaw in his character, so casually revealed, was worrying. While I was getting used to that new idea of him, he was taking the conversation, by ways I cannot reconstruct, to something else.
    The moment came when he leaned back in his Windsor chair, thrust his big white-sleeved forearm across the table, in a gesture of strength, and said, with a smile, and as a kind of pledge, “The race! The race, man!”
    The black race, the African race, the coloured races: I suppose that was what the lawyer meant, and that was why I had been brought to his chambers.
    I looked at his son. His face registered nothing, as though he hadn’t heard what his father had said and hadn’t noticed the gesture he had made.
    I didn’t believe that, didn’t believe that blank face. At thelower end of St. Vincent Street I had years before smelt paper and ink and warm printing presses, and certain fantasies had come to me. In this back room of the chambers, with the jalousie-strained light, were other fantasies, subterranean emotions that had to be hidden from the light of St. Vincent Street, from the colonial reality of that street.
    This was in the late 1940s. Few black people at that time could see a way ahead. How strange, then, to find an old man, a man born in the last century, to whom the way ahead was clear, something he could even toast, with an instinctive gesture across the desk that twenty years later might have been seen as a black-power salute. What was stranger was that the public idea of Evander, my friend’s father, was not like this at all. In the gossip Evander was the self-made black man who wanted only to be white, wanted to have nothing to do with black people, and in everything he did was fighting only for himself.
    This other dream was like a family secret, which father and son were now admitting me to. I was moved, but at the same time embarrassed. I understood their feelings, shared them to some extent, but I wished, even with that understanding, to belong to myself. I couldn’t support the idea of being part of a group. I would have felt tied down by it, and I thought Evander’s idea of a great racial movement forward too sentimental.
    THE CIVIL service didn’t employ anyone under seventeen, and in the next year, on my seventeenth birthday, I went to work in the Registrar-General’s Department, and got to know St. Vincent Street in quite another way.
    The department was on the ground floor of the Red House. The Red House was the principal building of the administration. It was one of the biggest buildings in the island and we all thought it was beautiful. I am not surewhether its dull red colour came from paint or from something that had been mixed into the plaster. It was one of the buildings that made Port of Spain Port of Spain. You saw it from the harbour, from the hills, and from across the Savannah.
    It was in the Italian style, we were told. It was on two floors, with open galleries on both floors, and with a dome. It was as wide as a block, and there was a walkway, below that red dome, between St. Vincent Street and Woodford Square, on the other side. That walkway gave a special big-town feel. You went up stone steps, and then you walked in an echoing openness past a fountain and then down other steps to the other side. The fountain didn’t work—one of the interruptions we associated with the war—but the marble, though iron-stained and