An amazing subculture emerged in
Port of Spain, in fact east Port of Spain, by the 1870s. It was significant
because it contained the rootstock from which the Afro-Franco cultural matrix
emerged into what we now call ‘born creole’. This heterogeneous assortment of
people more or less covered the intermingling of that flotsam and jetsam of
Trinidad’s Caribbean experience who had endedup here by the time of the British
conquest in 1797. Despite attempts by the authorities, they had continued to
preserve a fluid, free-wheeling lifestyle that contained the extremes of
excessive religious piety and the working of obeah, drunken debauchery and the
brave and ferocious activity of the stickfight.
In terms of syncretic movements,
it was unique. From a social point of view, the people who lived on the eastern
fringes of Port of Spain and across the dry river into the hills of Laventille
and Belmont established a culture from shich calypso, Trinidad’s version of Carnival
and later steelband was born. This culture was known as ‘diametre’ or jamette
society (beyond the diameter of polite society).
Panders, ponces, pimps and
prostitutes, chantwels, stickmen and dandies, kalinda drummers, men who played
beast and devil, bats on roller skates and on bicycles, shago priestesses, seer
men andmoco jumbies, real ligahoos, raconteurs and macos, comperes and
macomers, and the gentlemen who comprised the Long John Cigar Smoking Club of
Almond Wlak - their names were Congo Jack and Petit Belle Lilly, Alice Sugar,
Massy Milly, Ocean Lizzy and Sybil Steel, Cutaway Rimbeau, Gumbo Gleaza, Gumbo
Lili, Darling Dan, Zandolee, Ojuba the Slave, Boboloops Spit In The Sea, and
Mahal Who Drove An Invisible Car. Music was everywhere, violins, guitars,
cuatros, bandols, mandolins, maracas and drums.
African musical forms were
maintained. Remembered from pre-emancipation days, they blossomed in the rich
milieu of ‘behind the bridge’. Congo, sung in Patois, was dance music for
weddings and christenings by people of Congolese descent, played on three drums
and sung with a chorus. There were Rada hymns: chants, drums with sticks, iron,
chac chacs, chatwel and chorus. It was the music for ceremonies of Rada
(Dahomey) cult groups, a vehicle for the invocation of saints and induction of
spirit possession. Shango blossomed, with its items associated with the
imminence of particular dieties. Music for the rites of the cult groups of
Yoruba origin was heard, including hymns, litanies and invocations.
On the other hand, east Port of
Spain at times echoed with French choral singing, with the harmony of French
folk and traditional ‘chansons de Noël’, Christmas cantatas. It was music for
the house, polite music for visiting, not only at Christmas time.
On occasion, fandangoes were
performed in the neighbourhood, rich traditional Spanish music, with its competitive
and repetitive singing, accompanied by triple cuatroes, bandols, guitars and
chac chacs.
Dancing was for pleasure. People
knew how to do reels and jigs, but also bongo, veiquoix, chaties, limbo and the
belé. Music was for festivals or crisis, and sometimes, music was associated
with sacrifice to the ancestral spirits.
The traveller C.W. Day records his
visit to a ‘yard’ where dances were held. He marvelled at the young men who
stood transfixed for hours, torches held high in their hands, as the dancers
reeled and tumbled to the hypnotic rhythm of dozens of drums way into the
night.
The land over the dry river,
known as Piccadilly, was called Grand Jardin. Further north was Mango Rose and
even further north was Belle Eau Road, also known as Shapotie. The central area
from Argyle Street to St. Paul Street was called Sorzanoville and later Gros
Rouge. In those days, there was only one bridge across the dry river at Cadiz
Road.
During the 1850s, many Africans rescued
by British war ships from Portuguese slavers on the high seas (Portugal had not
yet abolished slavery) were ‘freed’ in Port of Spain. Many of these made their
homes in the wooded hillsides of Laventille and Belmont to the extent that this
area was to be known for a time as ‘Free Town’ or ‘Yoruba Town’. Disbanded
veterans from the West India Regiments came to live there, e.g. Sgt. Zampty who
married Black Warner’s daughter and got a lane in Belmont named for him on
Black Warner’s land.
Papa Nanee was a diviner from
Dahomey. He owned land in Belmont Valley Road and maintained a Rada religious
and ceremonial yard for many generations with great purity. It was here where
up to the 1950s water percussion could still be heard - the eerie sound of
calabash halves, floating upside down in a basin of water and hit with sticks.
Lacu Harp and Lacu Pebwa were
famous stickfighting yards (Laku is patois for ‘la court’ - the yard). Arnim
‘Mitto’ Sampson, known as Strongman, recounts in an article by Andrew Pearse
and published in the Caribbean Quarterly, Volume 4, Nos. 3 and 4 of 1958:
“The drums would beat and
canboulay stickmen sing
‘Djab se yo neg,
mé Die se nom-la bla,
Bamboula, Bamboula’
Roucou John fought the invincible
Tiny Satan at Laku Pebwa (Breadfruit Tree Yard) in 1875. Tiny Satan caught him
six consecutive blows and smashed his skull in. Yet, Roucou stood up. When he
finally fell to the ground shortly before he died, he was still mumbling ‘‘Djab
se yo neg, mé Die se nom-la bla..’
The use of this theme was
condemned by the famous mulatto barrister, Mr. Maxwell Phillip. In his opinion
it stigmatised the negro race atrociously, the words meaning:
The devil is a negro,
but God is a white man,
bamboula, bamboula.
The majority of the leading
batonniers of the time refused to cooperate with Phillip, saying that when they
sand ‘Djab se yo neg’ they were possessed by satanic spirits which made them
feel nothing; they could walk into battle and meet sticks, stones, conch shells
and even daggers..”
Behind the bridge in those days
produced, just as it does now, some of this country’s most colourful characters
and bizarre indicents.
When Hannibal the Mulatto died in
jail, his last words were directed at his great rival Zandoli. “Zandoli,” he murmured,
“why you ain’t find your hole?”
His death in 1873 was just as
stormy as his life. Annie Coals and Myrtle the Turtle fought over his grave,
and later his body was dug up and ghouls carried away his head and shroud,
leaving the rotten carcass at the side of the grave. A vast crowd gathered in
Lapeyrouse cemetery, led by Bodicea, the female chantwell and famous jamette,
who had taken of her drew, waved it like a flag and sang:
“Congo Jack vole tet la Hannibal
U vole la mo, gade bakanal”
(Congo Jack steal Hannibal’s head
You steal from the dead, look
bacchanal.)
Cedric le Blanc, the white
calypsonian, later sang of the incident:
“Bodicea first and then Petite
Belle
The Devil waiting for them in
Hell.”
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