Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric J Robinson

Author:Cedric J Robinson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780807848296
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2000-01-24T05:00:00+00:00

The Black Victorian Becomes a Black Jacobin

Cyril Lionel Robert James was born in Trinidad in 1901, “the son of a Black Trinidadian school teacher, grandson just over half a century after the abolition of slavery of a sugar-estate pan boiler and an engine driver.”59 His earliest years were in Tunapuna, a village of 3,000 by his account, situated half way between the capital at Port of Spain to the west and Arima to the east. It had been along the road between Port of Spain and Arima that the ex-slaves had founded many of their new villages in the 1840s.60 In the valleys around Tunapuna, “liberated” Africans had settled, planting their gardens in the hillsides, and 30 years later, in the 1870s, it was one of the sites where the dancing and fighting bands with their territorial and semisecret codes had proliferated. Tunapuna had “boasted gangs called Sweet Evening Bells, Tiepins, Greyhounds, Island Builders.”61 As a child in a slightly more respectable Tunapuna, James recalls that he had quite early begun to absorb much of the survival ethic that had attached itself to the Black middle class of which he was a part:

I was about six years of age when I got hold of my mother’s copy of Shakespeare. There were 37 plays in it, or 36, and there was an illustration in the front of each play. The illustration had below it the Act and the Scene which it illustrated and I remember the illustration before Julius Caesar saying, “How ill this taper burns.” Now I could not read a play of Shakespeare but I remember perfectly looking up the Act and Scenes stated at the foot of the illustration and reading that particular scene. I am quite sure that before I was seven I had read all those scenes.62

Notwithstanding the availability of adventure stories in his mother’s library, the child’s reading was hardly what Richard Small described as “the normal youth’s interest.” James was being trained in and was exhibiting the lessons of his class. In that prescribed inventory there was contained also the Puritan importance of class propriety:

I was fascinated by the calypso singers and the sometimes ribald ditties they sang in their tents during carnival time. But, like many of the black middle class, to my mother a calypso was a matter for ne’er-do-wells and at best the common people. I was made to understand that the road to the calypso tent was the road to hell, and there were always plenty of examples of hells inhabitants to whom she could point.63

The sexual and moral customs of the Black lower classes, for all their vitality and attractiveness, amounted to a rejection of English bourgeois sensibility, they were an affront to the morality of the colonial model set before the natives. Unquestionably, in a Black family that knew the rules, this implicitly political statement had no place in the future of a properly instructed young Black man. “Good” society, white, Black, and colored, conspired against what it interpreted as Dionysian, Satanic humors.

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