CHAPTER III

THE INGREDIENTS OF CHANGE

The ingredients necessary for change were not particularly evident at first sight, but they were present nonetheless: present in the shape of Rude Thompson, who went back to Lago in 1958 to learn that his friend’s struggle in Venezuela had been successful—as successful, too, had been the experiments carried out by the oil company a few months earlier to delegate some of the more basic tasks in the refinery to appropriately conditioned mechanical controllers that would not suffer the effects of boredom, that would perform identically throughout the working day, that would save the company millions over the course of a year and cost it half its workforce.

Elaine Nesbit had passed away and Fidel was already in power, although the place occupied by Cuba in the jigsaw puzzle that was world politics in the Cold War era was yet to be clearly established, when Rude Thompson became the helpless victim of technology as yet another batch of workers was laid off by Lago. When he returned to his island, only for the second time since his initial departure early in 1954, he felt as if he had never left. It had been an intense five and a half years for everyone—he knew—but to him it seemed as if Anguilla was simply immune to whatever happened around it, immune to change.

The ingredients necessary for change might not have been terribly evident, but they included the presence of Alwyn Cooke, whose sudden wealth had left him dumbfounded and confused, and had triggered in him an urge to work harder than ever before, which he did for a while, perhaps as a way to justify his own luck, or perhaps as a gesture toward the dead—as a ritual of mourning that he wore on his sleeve instead of a lugubrious countenance or a black suit—before he let himself go entirely, as if one morning he had woken up to this dream and finally realized that it was true, that it was all his, that he really didn’t need to work another day in his life.

Then came Hurricane Donna, bringing along misery’s cruelest face. For once, however, history was on Anguilla’s side, as the island’s demographic distribution—sparsely populated and lacking any urban center whatsoever—meant that the storm claimed only one human life. But at every other level, the destruction it left behind had never been witnessed by any of the living—some said a similar monster had raced past the island back in the 1880s, others claimed God sent a purge to rid the island of all sins every hundred years, but no one had ever seen anything quite like this: not a single roof remained intact—although the wind had been so violent it had uprooted whole houses and transplanted them to the other side of the island, it had lifted ceilings and wedged them so hard against alien structures that, as you walked around (no cars survived), you could see small concrete houses with roofs that were too large, too wide, sitting firmly above their new base, as if they had always belonged together.

Upon sight of this mayhem, of this indiscriminate slaughter of beasts—all kinds of them: goats and cattle, birds and lizards—of this torrential rain that caused everything to flood, of this ferocious unearthing of trees and plants, of crops and roots, Alwyn Cooke understood that Donna had been sent by God as a sign for him, as a despotic call for him to do something—to do something good—with the golden gift He had bestowed on him. Thus, despite the fact that death and destruction were even more dramatically present in the relatively developed island of St. Martin, Alwyn knew that the governments of France and Holland would be more forthcoming in their contingency plans to rescue their respective portions of the island than the central administration of St. Kitts would be in helping his homeland. So, Alwyn Cooke took it upon himself to do all he could to ease the suffering of his fellow islanders, and he pledged to himself and to God Almighty that with His help and support, he would not reduce his efforts to the management of this crisis, but would persevere until his people were treated as children of God and citizens of the free world, with all the rights such thing entailed.

Nevertheless, among the ingredients necessary for change on those uncertain days prior to the general elections of July 1966, the most determining factor was a widespread discontent among the vast majority of Anguillians. Maybe they weren’t all as vociferous as Rude Thompson, but they knew exactly what he meant when he scorned the candidates and dismissed their attempts to win his vote by making it absolutely clear that I ain’ wastin’ my precious time in no more elections; and when his reticence was met with indignation, he would come back with a violent For wha’? Vote, for wha’? If we be no better dan slaves to Bradshaw, den I go behave jus’ like dat: like a mad slave; and here the argument turned heated, because nobody wanted to be called a slave by anybody else. And, for all the animosity inspired by the Labour Party and its government in Anguilla, there were still a good few hundred—the teachers, the civil servants, those related to somebody who was well-connected in St. Kitts, even the few fools who still believed in the promises made by Bradshaw himself—whose point of view was neither as radical nor as negative as Rude’s and who still saw the possibility of improvement within the present administrative arrangement as the most viable solution to Anguilla’s problems.

But Rude Thompson was not a man of reasonable views or temperate solutions, so when he heard anyone expressing opinions that were less than resolute in their condemnation of the behavior of the Kittitians, or the British, or anybody else even remotely related to the present reality of the Anguillian people, his instant reaction was to make everyone around him understand that You all waste you time talkin’ pointless t’ings. You t’ink we have choice? You t’ink somebody care wha’ we say? We ain’ got no voice, we ain’ got no right to have no opinion, an’ most of all, we ain’ got no vote at all, at all.

Rude Thompson’s thunderous voice broke out like a heavy burden which settled on the air, making everything seem more serious—critical, even—and suffocating the merest intention to try to make a joke out of this. You t’ink you have vote? Tell me—wha’ happen las’ time, when dat fat fool run for Labour an’ got jus’ a few votes? Wha’ happen? I tell you wha’ happen: not’in’ happen, becausin’ our man who beat him sit every day in Baseterre listenin’ to oders take decisions when it no matter if he say yes or no, becausin’ Labour have the majority, anyway, so dem kyan sit all day an’ make faces to our man, an’ if he say yes, no one listen, an’ if he say no, no one listen still. Dat you call a vote? Liberty, you call dat? Slaves, I tell you—not’in’ more dan slaves. And the sound of that word spoken again echoed in the collective memories of the growing crowd, sending insults flying from side to side.

Nothing productive could be derived from this spontaneous meeting-turned-screaming-contest, but Alwyn Cooke had stood by the side of the road long enough to notice the passion, to see the commitment, and to want to hear more of what this fellow had to say, so he went back to his green Ford Anglia, and he pulled up right next to Rude Thompson, and opening the door and ordering him to Get inside an’ shut de door, all was one and the same action, and in the blink of an eye, two of the most important ingredients necessary for change blended into one.

Late into the afternoon Rude and Alwyn sat on the back porch of Alwyn’s house in Island Harbour by the diesel generator, discussing the maladies that had befallen Anguilla just because it had occurred to some ignorant bureaucrat somewhere in the empire that it would be a good idea to consolidate the governments of two distant and fully unrelated islands, when Rude snapped out of the conversation and aggressively asked—So wha’ you say we do ’bout it?

It had not quite crossed Alwyn Cooke’s mind that anything at all could be done, other than negotiate with the British until they agreed to untie the bond that kept Anguilla and St. Kitts joined, but We done dat already—I myself wrote de letter dat two t’ousand people sign in ’57. But so long Bradshaw in power, we ain’ go see no British politician talk to us straight to de eye. Alwyn was reminded of the letter he himself had not signed, not because he was against it, nor because he didn’t care, but simply because that had been in another time—another lifetime—the one he had lived in St. Martin at Lover’s Leap, during the doubly demanding days when D.C. van Ruijtenbeek had already died and Elaine Nesbit struggled to decide whether to continue living his life—his legacy—without him or give up all will to carry on and take a huge gamble in the hope that—somehow, somewhere—she would be reunited with the love of her life.

Alwyn Cooke liked what he saw in Rude Thompson but could not see a way to marry the two arguments his interlocutor put forward. You keep sayin’ we mus’ do somet’in’ but den you say dere ain’ not’in’ we kyan do so long as Bradshaw in power. What kinda foolish talk is dat? Rude Thompson was not the type of guy who would let a question—an affront—like that pass, but neither was he a political or military strategist, so his answer was both fiery and vague, simultaneously infectious and disappointing. Bottom line, Al, bot’ you an’ me know Anguilla need change but no soul ain’ goin’ hear not’in’ we says, only if we go make one big mess dem go hear us, you know.

Rude Thompson might not even have known it himself, but the words he spoke came straight from the mind—from the mouth—of Ignacio Ojeda and those long conversations at the cat cracker almost ten years before, where he had learned everything—the little—he knew about world affairs. And Alwyn Cooke heard the words of one activist filtered through the shape, the tone, the attitude of another, but despite his willingness to understand, despite his eagerness to act, he simply had no idea of how to turn all this talk into practical measures, how to effect the change both he and Rude Thompson knew was critical for the future development, or even the most elementary conditioning, of the island.

From that point onward they sat together frequently on Al’s back porch in Island Harbour or in Rude’s front yard in East End, trying to elucidate a way to catch the attention of some—any—world player, to turn their eyes in the direction of a small, underdeveloped, unproductive, and scarcely populated island in the Caribbean. There they met the news, Al full of expectation, Rude rather cynically, that the opposition candidate, Aaron Lowell, had won the elections in Anguilla by a landslide, while the Labour Party candidate had fared no better than his counterpart five years before. So wha’? Dem guys in St. Kitts go ignore him jus’ so like dey be doin’ for de last ten years. And even though the newly formed opposition party had swept the two seats granted to Nevis, it soon became obvious that Rude Thompson was right, that with a majority of seven seats to three, the Labour Party would pay no more attention to the representatives of Anguilla and Nevis than they had ever done, and that Ain’ not’in’ goin’ change, Al—not’in’ at all: until we go break up good wit’ dem despots in St. Kitts.

There, too, they sat, still looking for the plans they could not find, when an idea found them, traveling sixty-five miles over the Caribbean Sea on middle-frequency waves to smack them right between the eyes, as they heard the news broadcasted by ZIZ Radio St. Kitts that Robert Bradshaw, recently elected chief minister of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, would travel together with his right hand, Fitzroy Bryant, to the island of Anguilla during the New Year on a date soon to be announced, on a trip that was meant to promote the notion of statehood among the local electorate and dispel any doubts or concerns that the people of the island might have harbored over the years about it. To Rude Thompson nothing could have been more obvious: Dis wha’ we be lookin’ for all along, you know. Dis we only chance. It took Alwyn Cooke just a tad longer to understand, but soon enough he, too, was convinced that the first step in their struggle not only to be rid of the unjust and neglectful central administration of St. Kitts, but, first of all, to be heard, to be noticed by the world outside the imaginary entity that was St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, would be to create an alarming situation when Robert Bradshaw visited the island.

And so the brainstorming continued—evolved, really—and moved on from the general question of what to do, to the particulars that entailed creating a situation that was alarming without becoming threatening, because Anguillians were fed up with this artificial association into which they had been born, and Anguillians craved more than anything else in the world a chance to build a future for themselves, and Anguillians were determined to put the time and effort required for change to come about. But the rod would still have to bend a lot further before it snapped, and Anguillians were God-fearing people, principled in their actions and peaceful in their manners, and the mere suggestion of using violence to intimidate Bradshaw—to make him understand the gravity of the matter—would have been enough to split the public opinion in two and give more strength to the pro-government minority. Therefore, as soon as Rude Thompson noted, We bot’ have shotgun in we trucks, Alwyn Cooke looked at him straight in the eye and with a final, curt tone, Don’ even t’ink about it.

So he didn’t. That was that as far as guns and violence were concerned—but more than stones and bullets can be used to turn a crowd hostile. There would be no stone throwing when Bradshaw and Bryant showed up in Anguilla, but Rude Thompson and Alwyn Cooke made certain there would be a suitable reception to make the foreigners realize that they were unpopular and unwanted, and that what had transpired in the recent elections was an accurate representation of the opinion of the vast majority of Anguillians, and that the most the two of them would be able to achieve in their visit would be to get out of the island in one piece.

Rude Thompson and Alwyn Cooke spent days preparing for the occasion—organizing meeting points, coordinating means of transport to mobilize the crowds, devising slogans, producing banners, riling the people, and making completely and definitely sure that the message would be one and the same wherever Bradshaw went, whoever he asked. When the date of the planned trip was announced, Alwyn Cooke went to the small haberdashery by the tamarind tree at the heart of The Valley and bought four brushes and two gallons of black paint. That was the final touch—a touch of spontaneity—missing in the plan. Everything else was set in place and ready for the big day—the day the world would hear, perhaps for the first time, about the hardship, the neglect, that was inflicted upon Anguilla on a daily basis.