A tale be told

In the early 1970s I began hiking and camping along our forested North Coast. Our early adventures there were described by author Gerry Besson in his first book Tales of the Paria Main Road, beautifully illustrated by Stuart Hahn, and recently republished as an anniversary token of Paria Publishing Company.

While camping at the mouth of the Madamas River we met a family, just “moved in” from the city. Rupert Cox, a disillusioned activist from the 1970 Black Power, brought his wife Jeannette and their children to live in an abandoned house at Cachipa. Over the next couple of years, I as our camp cook got to know Jeannette well, as my companions went with Rupert to catch fish and collect vegetables.

On one trip, we found Jeannette “heavy with child”, and about three months later met her twin boys, which Rupert delivered there in the wilderness. Some weeks thereafter, at home and just after dark I heard someone calling, “Good night, Good night!” It was Keith, Jeannette’s teenaged son. He had walked for two days and two nights to “find Peter” and deliver a message from his mother.

“Things have changed,” he said, “Ma saw you coming across the sea in a boat, and she needs to talk to you.” After dining, I delivered Keith to his relatives in town, but what he told me did not really resonate – at that time. Not even when we next went camping, and upon reaching Matelot a group of hunters packing two pirogues offered to take us down the coast—in a boat! We landed at Tacarib, and walked the short distance back to Madamas.

Keith and his two younger brothers were there and they were naked. Keith reminded me that Ma needed to see me, alone. “She knows you are here,” he said.

So the following morning I set out alone and walked to the little house in the forest. As I approached, I heard her call to me. I looked up. She was standing on the tiny landing at the top of the wooden stairs, holding one of her twins.

And she was naked. She called me to come up the steps, as she put the child to crawl back into the house.

I walked up and looked into the little house. There was nothing there, just the twins crawling naked on the wood floor. Jeannette crossed her arms over her breasts, began to tremble, her eyes rolled back and she began speaking-- unintelligibly to me-- in tongues. But she ended in English, saying “..... and I am the Alpha and the Omega, and this is the beginning and the end.” Then she “came back”, looked at me quizzically and asked, “You want to know what happened?” We sat inside on the wooden floor, and she described her journey to this place and this state. She was now Mother Earth and Rupert was Good Shepherd. She had received a message to save mankind from the evils of greed and “possessions” and foretold of a great war to come.

“You will know when it is starting,” she instructed, “You will leave where you are and bring your wife and children here to me. Good Shepherd will take you into the wilderness, where you will suffer for 40 days and 40 nights. And when you come back out here, the rest of the world would have been destroyed, and civilization will start anew, in the valley of decision.” We talked a while longer before I returned to the camp on the bay.

A few days later the newspapers carried stories of how the police chased a group of naked people back from Grande Riviere into the forest. But they gathered old crocus bags, covered themselves and walked, via Toco and Arima, into town, where they set up camp in Woodford Square, and she delivered her message daily. When they returned to the forest she had about 70 people with her, the Earth People, living naked in the forest, preparing for Armageddon.

Her story, their story, can be found in the book Pathology & Identity: The Work of Mother Earth in Trinidad, by Roland Littlewood, an English anthropologist who lived with the Earth People for a while.

This was the setting, and the experience, which inspired me to write of the future she had described to me.

But that is for next week.