Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean

ike many writers whose lives are defined by itinerancy, Eric Walrond was concerned with place, or more accurately with the relation between places. “The facts about me are puny enough,” he said self-effacingly, “I was born in British Guiana, December 18, 1898, and at the age of eight, my parents went to live in Barbados.”¹ “I remember boarding a sailing vessel bound for the West Indies. […] We were the only passengers on the vessel, I think, and it was a voyage that was not without its exciting moments. I slept on a bed that was always damp with the water of the sea” (“Godless” 32). In this way, Walrond introduced himself in 1924 to readers of Success magazine, emphasizing passages between places as much as the places themselves. “I remember, five years later, being on another ship—a giant ocean liner. At St. Thomas, the Virgin Islands, we had to transship to another larger steamer going to the Isthmus of Panama. It was the most exciting moment of my life” (“Godless” 32). Finally, on arriving in New York, he could not believe his good fortune: “I go into the most amazing of places. Sometimes, I meet rebuffs; other times, I have had […] to pinch myself and say: ‘I must be dreaming. This surely is not you, Eric.’ Eric, the black boy from a race once in slavery!” (“Godless” 32). He would always think of himself this way: as a black man, and one whose relocations profoundly shaped his views, especially his views on race. Today, such a person might be called cosmopolitan but that suggests a privileged mobility. Walrond’s itinerary was often set by material concerns, and although he was a transnational intellectual, it is not in the same sense as cosmopolitan writers with whom we are familiar today.

The collapse of Barbadian sugar had propelled his parents to the coast of South America, and protracted labor unrest in British Guiana drove them back. Ruth and William Walrond were not poor; William was a tailor and Ruth a devout churchgoer and missionary for the Plymouth Brethren. But they depended on the vitality of the local economy and as a result, Eric, his two brothers, and two sisters were—like many Caribbean families—moved in pursuit of opportunity. Ruth’s desire for middle-class respectability is apparent in Tropic Death’s title story, whose protagonist resembles the author. He stands with his mother at the waterfront in Bridgetown, Barbados, waiting for the boat to Panama.

He was a dainty little boy, about eight years of age. He wore a stiff jumper jacket, the starch on it so hard and shiny it was ready to squeak; shiny blue-velvet pants, very tight and very short—a little above his carefully oiled knees; a brownish green bow tie, bright as a cluster of dewy crotons; an Eton collar, an English sailor hat, with an elastic band so tight it threatened to dig a gutter in the lad’s bright brown cheeks. (161)

It began with his mother’s grandfather. Dodo, as he was called, was the child of Benjamin Joseph Prout, a white planter, and an enslaved woman, a Coromantee from the west coast of Africa. Known as Baba in her youth, she was christened Matilda by her owner, the father of her seven children. A Scotsman born in 1786, Prout came to Barbados as a young man to seek his fortune in sugar and, although he did not grow extravagantly wealthy or ascend to the plantocracy, by the time of Dodo’s birth he managed two modest estates: Arise, a ten-acre estate in the parish of St. Thomas, and Mess House, a twelve-acre estate in the parish of St. George.² It is clear that Matilda, Eric Walrond’s great-great-grandmother, was Joseph Prout’s “lifelong companion and the chief beneficiary of his will.” He not only acknowledged paternity of Dodo, whose given name was Joseph Benjamin Prout, he set him up to run the family business and to enjoy the comforts of planter life, sending him to a school for mulatto children. Dodo grew up at Mess House, in the district of Flat Rock, inheriting Arise upon his mother’s death.³

For Walrond, whose nutmeg complexion and kinky hair marked him unmistakably, it was less his white ancestry than his middle-class respectability that fostered a certain aloofness, a pride accentuated by the stern religiosity of his mother, Ruth Ellen Ambrozine Prout, granddaughter of Dodo. Ruth and her sister Julia were raised in their grandfather’s home, and Julia’s grandson, Brown University professor Charles Nichols, remembered them as “statuesque beauties.”⁴ They converted from Anglicanism to the Plymouth Brethren, a Calvinist sect that required righteous behavior and regular participation in services to affirm their souls’ salvation. It required missionary work, and many evangelicals including Ruth and Julia traveled to “pagan lands,” Julia to Trinidad, where thousands of South Asians worked the sugar estates, and Ruth to British Guiana on the northeast coast of South America. Here she not only found souls to save, she also met William Walrond, a Barbadian tailor who had moved to Georgetown in the mid-1890s. “According to family legend,” notes Robert Bone, “Ruth made several sea voyages back and forth from Barbados in the course of her courtship,” and after marrying William in 1898, she gave birth to Eric, the first of five children, in a house on New Market Street a week before Christmas.⁵

Turn-of-the-century Georgetown was extraordinarily diverse yet highly stratified. The novelist Anthony Trollope called British Guiana’s administration “a despotism tempered by sugar,” though as one magistrate said in 1903, “It seemed to me more like a despotism of sugar.”⁶ Unlike Barbados, where a middle class developed after emancipation and people of African descent constituted a majority, Guiana consisted of a small, powerful minority of European officials and planters, large populations of Afro-Caribbeans and South Asians working on the sugar estates, some Portuguese and East Asians, and a native population living principally in inland villages.⁷ The latter represented utter backwardness for Ruth Walrond, a reminder of the civilizing properties of European culture.⁸ The Walrond family lived on stilts. Anyone of means moved into the houses the Dutch had built on tall pilings during colonization. Perched fifteen feet high, the Walronds conducted their domestic lives above the mud, for mud was everywhere in turn-of-the-century Georgetown—along the banks of the many canals, in yards that flooded with alarming regularity, situated just above sea level. Wealth and status were reflected in residential elevation. Derelict tenements housed laborers along the canals, their barefoot children scrambling after paper boats set adrift on the brackish watercourse. Indian “coolies,” indentured workers, gathered manure from the streets to sell or burn. Wooden planks traversed the ubiquitous sewers, precarious passage for respectable West Indian women, dressed primly in taffeta. The year Walrond was born, an English magistrate and sheriff of Demerara wrote of Georgetown’s deplorable conditions: “Let anyone walk through the yards […], and let him ask himself how he could expect respectable, law-abiding citizens to be raised therein.”⁹ Walrond was kept indoors as much as possible, and when his mother was not around, a West Indian maid kept a watchful eye, warning him of duppies, the ghosts beneath the toadstools in the yard, and shielding him from the dangers beyond.

His father’s position as “head cutter” at Hendricks, a tailor on Water Street, allowed them to move into a well-appointed home full of “dark gleams of polished wood and the sparkle of glass.” On pleasant days, the maid brought him to the sea wall, where he delighted in catching “the small iridescent fish that came twinkling over on to the esplanade” (“Servant” 9).¹⁰ He attended Robb Street School in the Sixth Ward, near his father’s shop, and with his mother attended the services of the Plymouth Brethren (“Two Sisters” ii, 25). But he was kept from playing with the neighborhood boys, the rough children from the Ruimveldt estate whose games he observed from the veranda. They teased and tormented each other, splashing mud and catching eels and crayfish. “Ah Chichi lay, Ah Chichi lay,” they sang, “Chichi’s the washer, the July washer.” Walrond “wondered what the song meant. Who was Chichi? And what was a ‘July washer’”? (“Servant” 12). He resolved to ask the maid, who belonged to a lower class, thus beginning a career in idiomatic translation that would come to comprise his life’s work.

His earliest memories of Georgetown were of his eagerness to escape the smothering respectability of home. He was “too small to take more than one step at a time” but “could not get down the stairs fast enough.”

The young boy could not have known it, but the community in which his parents had settled was combustible. At the turn of the century, relations between residents of African and South Asian descent were poisoned by colonial relations of severe domination. Sugar profits had been falling across the Caribbean, and with Europe weaning itself off cane, the renowned Demerara industry suffered. By the turn of the century, the value of British Guiana’s sugar exports to the mother country plummeted to less than one-third of its value in 1884.¹¹ As landowners reeled from the decline and the colonial administration introduced new crops, wages stagnated and living conditions deteriorated. “When the rains fell,” wrote historian Walter Rodney, “Georgetown residents waded among floating feces; when casual laborers obtained two days’ work per week, the entire earnings could barely cover the rent and keep away the bailiff’s cart.”¹² In this context, tensions between “Negroes” and “Hindus” were aggravated by their shared deprivation. The “Hindus” felt the “Negroes” were lazy, while the “Negroes” resented the “Hindus” for driving down wages, as estate owners continued to recruit indentured Indian labor despite rising unemployment. The colonial administration ran Georgetown like a police state, with criminal convictions averaging between ten and thirteen thousand annually in the years leading up to 1905.¹³

This was a fateful year, as labor actions escalated and brutal retaliation ensued in December. The stevedores, truckers, and clerks on the Georgetown docks led a strike that spread quickly to allied industries and to the interior, where miners demanded better wages. One morning, police opened fire on a crowd that refused to disperse, grievously injuring four men; riots erupted. At Ruimveldt, the largest estate near the Walrond’s house, people were assaulted and fired upon as they left to join the strike.¹⁴ Thousands of workers filled the streets, occupying public buildings and chasing the governor into hiding; the local newspaper declared that three-fourths of the population had “gone stark staring mad.”¹⁵ By the day’s end seven were dead and seventeen critically wounded. Because the colonial administration’s authority was virtually unchecked and wedded to the interests of the estate owners, and because laborers could not afford to strike, the uprising was soon suppressed. The arrival in the harbor of two British naval ships fortified the ruling elite. But the conflict alarmed the middle class, which largely sat the matter out, letting the workers—male and female alike—challenge vigilante police patrols and a militia comprised of white men. It is unclear whether William Walrond’s shop was harmed in the conflict, but they were among the middle-class families shaken by what transpired.¹⁶ They now had four children—the eldest of whom, Eric, turned seven soon after these events—and they left the country.

Within the Caribbean, the economic prospects looked best in Cuba, where sugar and tobacco were thriving, and in Panama, where work had begun on a “trans-isthmian” canal. An experienced tailor might have done well, but both countries were far from British Guiana. More importantly they were Latin American, and the Walronds identified with Great Britain, proud citizens of the oldest Caribbean island in her empire. The prevailing tale of West Indians in Panama at that point was a cautionary one—thousands of Jamaicans had perished in the failed French canal attempt in the 1880s, their deaths the stuff of legend, replete with black vomit and errant dynamite blasts. Ruth’s grandfather, Dodo, now in his mid-seventies, still lived at Mess House in Barbados, where a village bore his name.¹⁷ They decided to return and place themselves in the care of the patriarch. Barbados had a formative influence on Walrond’s life and imagination, furnishing material for nearly half the stories in Tropic Death. It became his muse, color palette, and mental grammar, cultivating an exuberant and promiscuous lexicon, a knowledge of formal and folk speech, and a Victorian sensibility toward public and professional life. David Levering Lewis has described Walrond as “debonair and superior” but he may as well have said “Bajan,” for it was Barbados that taught him to be fiercely independent and to conduct himself as a gentleman.¹⁸

A transplant from “away,” he was teased as a “mud-head,” a derisive term for the Guianese, who lived at sea level on the soggy coast. He felt like an oddity. “At school he was like something cast up from the Sargasso Sea, a newcomer from Demerara,” Walrond wrote in the autobiographical story “Two Sisters,” “and the fact that his classmates drew a line between him and themselves added to his feeling of isolation” (“Two Sisters” iii, 19). He described an incident that mirrored his own experience.

“Hey, hear the ‘Mud-Head’ spouting!”

One boy tugged at the collar of [his] sailor jacket. Another crept up behind him, made a circle of his thumb and forefinger and released it against his ear. A third boy spotted a tiny blue square in [his] white short trousers.

Patch in the crutch

Is nothing much

But patch in the knee

Is poverty.

“What school in Demerara did you go to?” asked one boy, continuing the Inquisition.

“Robb Street School,” [he] answered.

“What they teach you there, bo?”

“Latin and Greek.”

“Oh!”

The bell rang for the end of recess and the boys, full of ugly suspicions, walked with him in silence into the crush of the schoolhouse steps. Running up the steps, [he] stumbled and fell. The boys burst out laughing.

“That ought to knock the Latin and Greek out of your head!” (“Two Sisters” ii, 25)

Compounding his disorientation were unfamiliar surroundings, far more rural than Georgetown. Walrond found himself at age eight amid the vestiges of a bygone era, when sugar was king. Cane fields surrounded Mess House, and the ruins of an old windmill and an abandoned barracks that housed the estate’s laborers lay nearby.¹⁹ When Dodo Prout was Eric Walrond’s age, the sugar industry boomed, producing nearly twenty thousand tons in 1834, the year slavery was abolished and Dodo turned five. This was achieved on the backs of eighty-two thousand slaves who comprised 80 percent of the island’s population. Barbados did not have the largest slave population in the Caribbean, but its place was established early in the triangle trade, the destination of more than sixteen thousand Africans in one decade alone.²⁰ Thus Walrond came “home” to a contradictory yet quintessentially New World inheritance, the descendent of master and slave.

Schooling finessed the contradiction, for everything pointed away from local history toward the seat of the empire in which the island played a privileged part. Barbados was “the oldest and purest of England’s children,” the novelist George Lamming recalls learning, “The other islands had changed hands. Now they were French, now they were Spanish. But Little England remained steadfast and constant to Big England.” Even his elementary school “wore a uniform of flags: doors, windows and partitions on all sides carried the colours of the school’s king. […] In every corner of the school the tricolor Union Jack flew its message.” The total effect, Lamming said, was to render any question of the arrangement unaskable, indeed unthinkable. The notion of slavery was foreign and preposterous.²¹ One wonders what Dodo Prout and his great-grandson discussed as they walked the estate grounds. Whatever it was, whatever St. Stephen’s School instructed about the eternal link between Big and Little England, he would identify himself to New York readers in 1924 as a “black boy from a race once in slavery!”

He had fond memories of his great-grandfather, the gray eminence who was his mother’s “idol in the golden days of her childhood there.” He recalled Dodo in “Two Sisters.”

[A]n early riser, clad in spotless white drill and so tall that he had to stoop to come through the front door of “Mess House”… with a silvery goatee and a lean, ochre-brown face beneath a cork helmet; his boots caked with mud and shining with dew from the morning’s turn around the estate grounds; his big coat pockets filled with okras plucked from the vegetable patch behind the crumbling walls of the old sugar mill; unloading the okras on the big dining room table and slowly ascending the stairs to occupy himself in the seclusion of the room above with the affairs of the Vestry Board of which he’d been a member for forty years and the Burial Society which he’d founded and the large family of which he was the head. (i, 21)

After a year at Mess House, the Walronds moved to a two-room cottage on a half-acre that Dodo left them in the parish of St. Michael. Called Black Rock, the area was within walking distance of Bridgetown. From their lane, Jackman’s Gap, Ruth brought her children to the Walmer Lodge, where the Plymouth Brethren worshipped, took the produce of her garden to market in Bridgetown, and visited her sister Julia in Eagle Hall Corner (“Two Sisters” iii, 22). The Cave Hill quarry lay nearby, a big operation whose workers lived in the cabins in Jackman’s Gap. A breadfruit tree graced the backyard, beyond which lay a stream that in the dry season became a parched bed of rocks—a playground for lizards, centipedes, and mischievous children (“Two Sisters” ii, 21). The place had long been vacant and was in disrepair, the roof missing shingles, the yard lacking a fence. Walrond spent long hours working outdoors with his family, and when he paused “the silence all around him was broken by the song of a bird overhead (‘Kiss-kiss-ka-dee!’) and the clink of steel on stone from afar: the quarrymen’s drills” (“Two Sisters” ii, 23).²² When the workers returned for lunch, he eavesdropped as they drank at the standpipe, talking volubly, sweat drenching the “stiff tails of their blue denim coats” (TD 21). Some lived well in Black Rock, but mainly they were poor, putting coucou on the table when saltfish was too dear, the bare feet of the children calloused by the marl roads and ravaged by “chiggers,” fleas that burrowed mercilessly into their exposed flesh.

It was not only the Jackman’s Gap residents who were suffering in 1908 but all of Barbados. An infernal drought plagued the island, deepening the troubles that a long depression had induced. Despair and anxiety were common as the land ceased to yield produce, livestock fell ill or perished, and prices climbed. This is the setting of the story that opens Tropic Death, “Drought.” It is also the context in which the young mother of four “squabbling” children in “The Black Pin” feuds with her neighbor, who steals her rack-ribbed goat when the unfortunate creature wanders off. William Walrond had resisted the call to Panama, but he found upon returning to Barbados that unemployment was rampant and men were leaving in droves. Now with the punishing drought, the appeal was stronger still. Testimonials of “Panama men” invariably cite “economic problems in the islands” as their reason for leaving; “the opportunity seemed to be a get-rich-quick proposition, with a daily rate of pay that was much higher than could be had in the islands.”²³ Contrary to the conventional view that the Panama migrants were unskilled laborers and vagabonds, “the offered rate of eighty cents per day’s work brought schoolteachers, barbers, shoemakers, dry goods clerks” and other artisans, including in this case a tailor.²⁴

Nowhere was the Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC) recruitment more vigorous or effective than Barbados. There was a preference for West Indians, who as one canal commissioner wrote were “fairly industrious; not addicted to drink; can speak English, [were] willing to work, and not deficient in intelligence,” while the “native Isthmian will not work,” being “naturally indolent,” and the “Chinese coolie,” whose labor built the U.S. railroads, was “industrious” and “easy to manage” but hopeless with English and invariably desirous of owning “a store as soon as he gets a few dollars.”²⁵ Transportation of European laborers was costly and West Indians came cheap; wages and conditions were so poor that the promise of a paid passage and a salary was almost irresistible. When subsidized housing, meals, and health care were added, it sounded to struggling West Indians something like salvation. The ICC met with resistance in Jamaica, where colonial officials resented the spectacular tragedy of the French effort, which had killed and injured so many. Barbados was more receptive to recruitment, which began in earnest in 1905, and people left by the boatload. Soon everyone in the Caribbean had seen or heard of the “Colón Man,” a legendary figure of folktales and calypsos who made his fortune and returned to the islands, his crisp Panama hat, gold teeth, and watch fob glinting in the sun like a living advertisement. Sometimes these men were actually on the ICC payroll, others just wanted to flaunt their possessions, status symbols that few who stayed home could afford.²⁶ For every worker who signed an ICC contract and shipped off to Colón, another booked passage without a job, just a dream that “money grows on trees in Panama” as a popular song said. In one decade alone, between forty and sixty thousand Barbadians made the trip.²⁷