Hold Fast to Dreams….

‘Hope’ is an invigorating word that should be high in every writer’s lexicon. Hope that an agent, then a publisher, then the reading public will like their story. ‘Belief’ is another sustaining word. Belief that after countless hours at a desk that same agent, publisher, and public will indeed revel in the story woven from the writer’s research and imagination.

I have been working on a novel which was to be the first of a trilogy – the second and third are written and published – Fireburn and Transfer. Thank you, OC Publishing, and thank you for believing in me enough to agree to publish the next – with a working title of Emancipation. A hopeful title. It was only later, when I envisaged three spines standing side by side that I realised they would read EFT which, depending on how one’s mind works, could be either a juvenile newt or an electronic funds transfer. Neither very catchy for a boxed set, but I hoped readers would get over that.

Emancipation started with the Portuguese royal family’s arrival in Brazil after fleeing Napoleon’s encroaching army. It told how Anna Clausen’s grandfather accompanied the Prince Regent to Rio and how, as a consequence, he came into his fortune which, in turn, lead to Anna’s Fancy, his sugar plantation on St Croix in the Danish West Indies. It was a hopeful book because it revolved around the ‘rightness’ of emancipation. On reflection, I should have called the book Manumission. I don’t think there is an anagram for MFT.

The title is however a moot point.

I knew I could write about freedom. I know I can write about violence. What I hadn’t realised was that I would struggle to write about sustained cruelty. Graham Greene said that in order to write dispassionately, “A writer must be able to retain a splinter of ice in the heart.” Barry Unsworth in Sacred Hunger was able to delve into the tragedy of slavery and write a riveting book. Marlon James did the same in The Book of Night Women. Whilst not putting myself into the same lofty realms of either author, I have found that Apple Gidley cannot retain that splinter on certain subjects. Part of me is pleased. I don’t want to become inured to horror.

My books are character driven. As I research, characters form. Their backstory becomes part of the plot in minute ways. For example, Anna’s favourite colour is yellow because it reminds her of the glow of the Caribbean sun, or the centre of a white frangipani, and it brings her joy. The character’s foibles, their idiosyncrasies, make them real to me and, hopefully, the reader.

Every story needs tension, so not all characters have to be likable but I have to care about the majority of them. The coffee mat on my desk, courtesy of my son, reads, “Please do not annoy the writer, she may put you in a book and kill you.” It’s true. I had great pleasure killing off Anna’s husband, Carl, in Fireburn, but I can’t murder everybody – I’d be writing slasher novels and not historical fiction. 

And that brings me back to hope. Emancipation was truly a time of hope but the more I wrote the less hopeful I felt. That could be a product of what is happening in America today. I’ve been immersed in writing about the issues of racial inequality 200 years ago, and here we are in 2020 seeing how relatively little has changed and it has made me sick to my stomach. I am well aware I’m not alone in that feeling. An email from an African American friend has been churning in my head the last couple of days. After the outrage in Minneapolis he asked, “Where is God when you need him?” He then asked me to excuse his rage. He is indeed a gracious man, always, but particularly in the face of current events when hope seems hard to come by.

That all sounds pretentious. I don’t mean to be. The Swiss-born, British philosopher, Alain de Botton, says “The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.” I was at the despair stage.

So, this morning I wrote to my publisher and said Emancipation is no more. Then I filed all my research notes and put away reference books that have been stacked on my desk, sticky tags in varying colours forming a frill on each book. Usually the process makes me a little sad. A year invested in my characters, my imagination, shelved, but today I felt relief. 

I have failed in a way but hope is once again returning to my lexicon because now, as I think of Langston Hughes’ words, I am smiling at the thought of the next book to be written.

"Hold fast to dreams, 
For if dreams die 
Life is a broken-winged bird, 
That cannot fly.” 

Words we should hold close in these seemingly hopeless and difficult times.

Redemption

I woke up this morning with Bob. Those immortal words written in 1979 by Bob Marley, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery”. The lyrics of Redemption Song danced in my mind as I walked Clyde. Perhaps as counterpoint to the rhetoric I heard yesterday.

The 3rd of July is arguably a more relevant day in the former Danish West Indies – now the US Virgin Islands – than the 4th July. Independence Day commemorates the day in 1766 that the thirteen American colonies no longer answered to the British monarchy, and were relieved to no longer have taxation without representation. 

The British as occupiers were long gone from St Croix by then – their first attempt to settle here being in the early 17th century. They did though loiter around the island throughout the occupations / ownerships of both the Dutch and the Danish, mainly as merchants, sailors and privateers. That’s what happens when ‘owned’ by so many countries – St Croix has flown under seven flags – descendants tend to stick around.

“None but ourselves can free our minds”. And yet yesterday afternoon, as words swirled up to our gallery from the Bandstand in Christiansted, one could be forgiven for thinking emancipation had only just occurred, rather than in 1848 – rather than 171 years ago. From one particular group of orators there was no single positive message. There is no denying the atrocious and barbaric Atlantic Slave Trade, or indeed the Domestic Slave Trade that flourished on the US mainland after the abolition of slavery in 1865. But a barrage of condemnation for a country banished from these shores in 1917, when America paid Denmark 25 million dollars for the islands, seemed a rather pointless exercise.  

Rather than harangue the, admittedly, very small audience, perhaps people yesterday should have been encouraged to walk the walk, to honour those men and women who demanded and fought for their freedom by actually taking part in the fort-to-fort trek. 

The drums signalled the march on Frederiksted in 2019 as they did in 1848. At 5am on July 3rd, for the last nineteen years, former Senator Terrence ‘Positive’ Nelson, now Commissioner of Agriculture, has sounded the conch, given an invocation and rattled the chains at Fort Christiansvaern before leading Crucians, and a smattering of imports, on a pilgrimage of remembrance for those enslaved who demanded their freedom. He has lead people, who cared enough to get up early, to trudge those hills and valleys that make up Queen Mary Highway and to rattle the chains at Fort Frederiksted. Paying tribute to the bravery, and rigours, of those men and women who fought for freedom. It is a walk of reflection, and a celebration of what has been achieved, and a walk of hope for the future.

Moses ‘Buddhoe’ Gottlieb, a sugar boiler and a free man, is commemorated as being the leader of the uprising for freedom, yet cautioned restraint to the approximately 8,000 enslaved who converged on Frederiksted on July 2nd, 1848. It was he who gave Governor Peter von Scholten the 4pm deadline to emancipate the enslaved, which lead to the famous proclamation, “All unfree in the Danish West Indies are from today free.”

Surely a more enlightened approach today would be to salute those Virgin Islanders who have succeeded and gone on to achieve so very much, whether here or abroad. People like Hubert Harrison, who became “one of the most brilliant and dynamic Negro intellectuals ever to emerge on the American scene” and touted, if he had not died so young at the age of 44, as being a possible candidate to serve in President Roosevelt’s administration. Or David Hamilton Jackson, the labour leader, legislator and founder of The Herald, the first black newspaper on St Croix. Or Miss Enid Baa, who among many accolades, represented the Virgin Islands in 1960 at the 3rd UNESCO conference in Mexico City on Latin American and Caribbean Bibliography. Or Alton Adams, the first black bandmaster in the US Navy and who wrote the Virgin Islands anthem. Or Ullmont James, not bahn’ here but born of Crucian parents and who was educated in the first graduating class of the Christiansted Senior High School, who went on to be an outstanding administrator and diplomat to various missions in Africa. 

The list is long for the relative size of these three Virgin Islands. Sportsmen like Elrod Hendricks, and that proud son of St Croix, Tim Duncan, who has proved his commitment to his home island by his continual support, particularly after the 2017 Hurricanes of Irma and Maria. Or those who represent the Virgin Islands at the Olympic Games, only once a medallist but always present. Musicians, Jamesie and the All-Stars, or Stanley and Ten Sleepless Knights, who have taken the sounds of the Virgin Islands around the Caribbean and to Europe.

There was pride to be seen yesterday in the quelbe dancing later at the Christiansted Bandstand. Quelbe, recognised as the traditional music of the Virgin Islands and a graceful fusion of bamboula and cariso that tells the story of these islands. That’s keeping history alive in a positive manner.

Never forgetting, and honouring, the trials of our forefathers is important. Knowing our history helps make sense of today and prepares us for tomorrow. But to frame today against a litany of sins from long ago is neither productive nor constructive if, as Bob sang, “We forward in this generation, Triumphantly”!

The Conch Calls

Shadows cavort across the yellow walls of Fort Christiansvaern on St Croix as people mill about waiting for the conch to call them to order. Dawn is a faint glimmer across the hills to the east but all is not quiet. Music, blaring from speakers on a pick-up truck, call for liberation, freedom – Bob Marley is always a popular choice, and blue lights flash like beacons from waiting police vehicles. Then silence. 

Senator Positive Nelson, who has organized this Freedom March for 18 years, is a tall rangy figure in white shorts and a loose African shirt. His dreadlocks swing as his head tips back and he raises the conch to his lips, and blows. The drum beats with a building intensity. It is hard not to be moved.

After a twelve-year gradual freeing of the slaves was announced in 1847, and the order that all babies born from July 28th of that year were to be born free, anger percolated amongst the enslaved. Why not immediate emancipation?

170 years ago on the night of Sunday, July 2nd, in what was then the Danish West Indies and is now the US Virgin Islands, Moses Gottlieb, known to many as General Buddhoe, sounded the conch and led many of those enslaved on a march to Frederiksted demanding their freedom. Gottlieb, a literate and skilled sugar boiler thought possibly to have come to St Croix from Barbados, worked at Estate La Grange but was often borrowed for work on other sugar plantations. It was this freedom of movement, combined with an innate leadership skill, that allowed Gottlieb to secretly organize the march. By morning the crowd had swelled to about 5,000. Later that afternoon, Governor Peter von Scholten, fearing violence and burning, momentously proclaimed, “All unfree in the Danish West Indies are from today Free”. 

Back in the days before cell phones, it took a while for the news of freedom to travel and so an offshoot of the protesters, known as ‘the fleet’ and led by a young man called King, continued to riot, burn and plunder. It was thanks to Gottlieb, who accompanied the Danish fire chief, Major Jacob Gyllich, around the island that the mayhem did not continue and no white lives were lost. 

Order was restored but rumours swirled that the Governor, who had a black mistress, was sympathetic to the cause and knew there was a possibility of an uprising. It was a rumour never confirmed. The sugar plantocracy were enraged with the proclamation, which immediately decimated their workforce, and von Scholten was ordered back to Denmark, where he died a broken man. 

Despite being protected initially from the planter’s wrath by Major Gyllich, Gottlieb was arrested, questioned and shipped off the island aboard the SS Ørnen. He set sail from St Croix as a gentlemen but once out of port was stripped of his clothes and put to work until, in January 1849, he landed on Trinidad. Told he would be executed if he ever returned to the Danish West Indies, Moses Gottlieb aka General Buddhoe is believed to have ended his days in the United States.

Today – July 3rd – is Emancipation Day! 

Celebrated each year with the Freedom March. As I watched the marchers, including my husband, answer the call of the conch, rattle the chains on Fort Christiansvaern and walk along Company Street at the start of their 15 mile march to Frederiksted, dawn trickled over Gallows Bay, pink and orange striations among grey clouds promising much needed rain.

Freedom came to the enslaved of the Danish West Indies 170 years ago and it is easy to think that freedom is global. But it isn’t. Slavery still exists in all its ugly connotations. So whilst we celebrate the bravery of leaders like Gottlieb and the many who marched with him, as well as those who supported their claims for freedom, like von Scholten and Gyllich, and 30 years later the Four Queens who roused the crowd during Fireburn demanding better labour laws, we should remember those still under the mantel of oppression.

Would that the conch call for freedom be heard globally!