Real unity

The car wash, which is just a high shed with a galvanise roof at the side of the road, has two to three young women washing cars. All are Afro-Trinidadian. One of them has two children — an infant and a boy who is about three years old. So, when she is working, she also has to be looking after the children and, especially, keeping an eye on the three-year-old. He talks continually to the mother, interferes with the infant, and walks around. The mother, who is a leanly built woman in her mid-20s, answers distractedly and, when she loses patience, threatens to beat him with a guava whip if he doesn’t sit down.

One time when I was there, I had to wait while they finished another car — a PAT Bluebird, I think it was.

The owner was a middle-aged Indo-Trinidadian man, medium height, with a moustache and the squinted eyes of a smoker. As he waited, he chatted with the boy, in the usual playful way adults do with small children.

The man asked silly questions, and even got up at one point when the boy ran around to the side of the shed on the side of the road, to make sure he was all right. (That was when the mother brought out the guava whip.)

The last time I was there, there was another woman sitting under the shed, who I hadn’t seen before, along with two others. The woman with the children wasn’t there that day. When I got out of my car, they were all laughing.

“You hear what she say?” the younger one asked me. She was referring to the older woman, who looked about 30, but a hard-lived 30.

“No,” I answered. I looked at the woman. “Why, what you say?” I asked. But she just smiled and shook her head. I grinned back at her and said, “I ent even get out the car good and you badtalking me.”

I sat down in the plastic chair next to her, and she glanced down at the book in my hand. “Palace of the Peacock,” she read. I always pass the time reading when my car is being washed, but in this case I was perusing Wilson Harris’s novel for an essay I was writing to demonstrate why he is a bad writer. But the woman didn’t ask me what the book was about, so I just chatted with her generally. She told me that she managed the car wash place, but also had another job and so she wasn’t always here. Her car, a foreign-used Sunny, was parked next to mine. However, since I am like a dog with a bone about such things, I asked her again what they had been laughing at.

She gave me that grin-blush that Trini women do so well. “I was just telling them that that is a good-looking gentleman,” she said.

I laughed. She had a fine oval-shaped face, but worn with stresses I could only guess about. “So, if had we had made some children, all of them woulda be good-looking then,” I said. (And no, I’m not much of a lyrics man: so I’m lucky that some women find me good-looking.) I was sitting on the outer side of the shed and, when the rain started to fall so that some drizzle was wetting me, she got up and moved a chair to the inside and told me to come and sit there.

I remembered all this last week when I was reading and hearing everyone, from Prime Minister to media commentators, saying that the Soca Warriors had created national unity in a way that had never happened before. I found this absolutely fatuous. My secondary objection to the assertion is that, if the Soca Warriors were the vehicle to national unity, then no credit could be given to the Afro-Trini section of the populace. Since all the Soca Warriors are from that group, then racial unity was really being expressed by those who weren’t Afro: whites, Chinese, Indians.

But the primary objection is this: the unity that these commentators were going on about already exists amongst average Trinidadians. The everyday interactions I have described above are not odd, but common. This does not mean that the same Indo man wouldn’t object to his children marrying Afros; or that the same Afro woman would vote UNC. But neither have the Soca Warriors changed such attitudes where they do exist. Still, racial tolerance is one of the best features of Trini culture: and, in my opinion, making an ideology out of it by feting football only threatens to disrupt our racial relaxedness.

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