Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (10 page)

The
next evening, Colonel Bradshaw got on his radio station, ZIZ, and denied
everything. "We sent no one to Anguilla," he said, "and if the
island was in fact raided or invaded it must have been done by Anguillans
living in Anguilla who are fed up with the terrible state to which Adams and
Company have brought their island." He also said that some of the
Anguillan rebels were "known to be Communists," which was pretty well
news to everybody.

Meanwhile,
the Fact Finding Mission, five men of a different ilk, had arrived on St.
Kitts. They talked with Colonel Bradshaw and other officials, and they talked
with the detainees. On the twenty-ninth of June, they went to
Anguilla
to talk to the Peacekeeping Committee. The
other five were still on the island then, occasionally showing up at remote
houses and stealing food at gunpoint, and these two groups of five show the
range of potential solutions being considered for the
Anguilla
problem.

The
Peacekeeping Committee would have liked to talk to the five men in the bush,
but they couldn't find them. However, they were also pleased to talk to the
Fact Finding Mission and agreed to send a delegation to St. Kitts to chat with
the Government there if three conditions were met: first, they required safe-conduct;
second, the British must have somebody present at the meeting; and third, the
Governor, Sir Fred Phillips, should preside at the meeting instead of Colonel
Bradshaw.

Everything
was arranged, and the next day the delegation of five went off to St. Kitts,
led by Peter Adams and including a man named Jeremiah Gumbs, a businessman who
hadn't actually lived on the island for thirty years but who was soon to become
more famous and more important in the ongoing Anguilla crisis than any of his
fellow delegates.

In
the history of
The New York Times
, only two Anguillans have ever made
its "Man in the News" column; the second was Ronald Webster, but the
first was Jerry Gumbs. A big bearish man, with a strainingly sincere expression
of face and a deep, mellow, slow-moving voice, Jerry Gumbs is perhaps the most
middle-class of all the middle-class Anguillans. Born on
February
18,1913
, the son of
a fisherman, he received primary school education on
Anguilla
and in his youth became a lailor.
"Some people are still wearing suits I made for them," he claims,
which says as much for the economy of
Anguilla
as it does for Jerry Gumbs's tailoring.

Two
of Gumbs's sisters had already emigrated to the
United States
. When he was twenty-five he followed them.
This was 1938 and
America
was still in the grip of the Depression,
but it nevertheless offered far more opportunity to an industrious young man
than did
Anguilla
. Jerry Gumbs stayed in
Brooklyn
with one of his sisters and enrolled in the
Metropolitan
Vocational
High School
to get caught up on his education.
Finishing there, he won a scholarship to City College of New York, but
immediately after
Pearl
Harbor
, in 1941,
he quit college and joined the Army. After six months' service he had the right
to become an American citizen, which he did, and after the war he got married
and went to college on the GI Bill to learn furnace installation. He's a hard
worker, and he's smart about money, and it wasn't long before he had his own
fuel-oil delivery business in
Edison
,
New Jersey
. (In January of 1968, the Anguilla
Beacon
ran what it called an "Alphabet of Anguillan
Personalities," and when it got to "J" it went: "J is for
Jerry
, named after the Prophet: If profit's his motive, he gets plenty of
it.")

I
talked with Jerry Gumbs late in 1969, and never have I met a man who so totally
combined the sincere with the humbug. In fact, he's even sincere
about
the humbug. For instance, over the years he has been responsible for much
charitable fund raising for
Anguilla
, and he says, "I gave
Anguilla
secondary education. I gave them a library.
I gave them an operating light. I gave them an X-ray. I gave them encyclopedias
in every school. I gave them a Community Center. I gave them medical supplies
of all lands; in the hospital now there's a frigidaire there; in the health
center there's a freezer. And any man who works with his hands as hard as I've
worked and do this for a people could not be doing it for personal gain."

Well,
yes and no. The truth is slightly more complicated than that. There are now
more than a thousand Anguillans living in the general area of
Edison
and
Perth Amboy
,
New Jersey
, and several years ago Jerry Gumbs founded
an Anguilla Improvement Association to raise money to give things like
libraries and operating lights to the people back home. It is true that Jerry
Gumbs founded the Association, that he has been its leader more years than not,
that he has contributed his own money and a great deal of his own time and
effort, but to say that he alone is responsible for the Association s good
works is not 100 per cent accurate.

Jerry
Gumbs is reminiscent in some ways of a particular kind of forceful movie
director—the sort of man who, if a picture turns out well, begins to believe he
alone made up the story, wrote the dialogue, worked the camera, designed the
sets and composed the music.

A
man like that makes enemies, and Jerry Gumbs has as many detractors as Orson
Welles. He is accused mostly of being money-hungry and a sharp practitioner,
but that's far too simplistic a reading of the man. Listen to him talk about
the house he built in
Edison
: "I built this house with my own
hands. I wasn't taught to be a carpenter, but I had to build a home, and I
lived in a community where our people, black people, were nobody. And I had to
come into a community where there were no black people and do something so
people could see. Not by fighting and clubs and marching, but by definitely
struggling in a society, the way others have struggled whether they're white or
not, to show people that what they're trying to say is not true. I think they
got the message. Because right here in this community this was the only
ranch-style house built here in 1952. And people moved around it, you look
around, you see a piece of land, they built ranch-type homes around it. There
was change in the pattern of thinking."

Did
no
other pair of hands do any of the work on the house? If so, their
contributions have been swallowed within Jerry Gumbs's own pride of
accomplishment. "The only reason," he says, "why perhaps I have
accomplished what I have accomplished even in building this house is because I
was blessed with a body with tremendous strength, and maybe a mind to
understand. Two things going together. Now, most people are not that way."

He
gestures across his long, neat living room full of bric-a-brac. "When this
was built, there's a steel beam across it, and that piece of steel, I couldn't
get it here, although I paid for it. The union would not deliver it. And I had
to deliver it, on a little truck that I had, and I did it. And I had to put it
up without a crane, and I put it up with my shoulders." All this trouble
because he was a black man, of course, building in a white neighborhood. He
will
be the strongest man around, and he will never stop finding arenas in which
to test his strength.

"You
build a house, now," he says, "and at night people are gonna gather
and kick it down. They're gonna back up the truck, they're gonna take your
lumber, you gotta bring it back tomorrow. It's not easy. And you don't go and
make a public scene. Inspectors won't give you a license. You run around for
months trying to get somebody to sign a document which is already documented
and signed. You dig open a hole to put a sewer in; they tell you you can't put
that type of pipe in it, you must put a certain type, and that certain type
does not exist in the state." But the house got built.

Other
things got built, too. The fuel-oil business; the Anguilla Improvement
Association; a family with four children, all of them college-bound; and back
on Anguilla two things, a small air ferry service called Anguilla Airways and
the Rendezvous Hotel, a motel-type operation on Rendezvous Bay, where the
French dried their powder in 1796. The most modern hotel on the island, it is
still a bit more primitive than an
Iowa
tourist cabin in the twenties. Still, it
does have electricity—until nine-thirty at night, when the generator is turned
off and the guests convert to kerosene lamps. And it has running water, a
trickle, icy cold, from cisterns that catch the infrequent rain. And it has a
restaurant, half a dozen tables, with meals prepared by
Aunt B, Jerry Gumbs s sister, who runs the
place for him. And it also has a beautiful white-sand beach, and if tourism
ever does become a major industry on
Anguilla
,
Jerry Gumbs has the jump on the trade and can be relied on to drive himself to
stay ahead of the competition. Not entirely for money; to be
first,
and
proud of it.

When
trouble started on
Anguilla
, Jerry Gumbs couldn't possibly stay out of
it. He flew down to the island—the last leg, on his own airplane—joined the
Peacekeeping Committee, and bulled his way into prominence as naturally and
unmaliciously as if he were building his own house.

Jerry
Gumbs and the Anguillan delegation met with the St. Kitts Government on
June
30, 1967
. Whether
pressure had been exerted on Colonel Bradshaw by outside forces it's impossible
to say, but he was more inclined toward compromise than usual. He offered to
appoint a new Warden for
Anguilla
who would not only be Anguillan (Wardens
had almost always been Kittitian before this) but somebody acceptable to the
people of
Anguilla
. He also promised to restore mail
deliveries once the Warden had been appointed and to arrange for the payment of
Government salaries and pensions that had been held up by the rebellion. The
delegation said they'd talk it over with the folks back home and let the St.
Kitts Government know in a few days.

The
only true comparison with the governmental form on
Anguilla
is Athenian democracy. Whenever a problem
comes up, the entire population gathers at Burrowes Park, everybody shouts at
everybody else, a couple of fistfights are dealt with, speeches are made, the
Bible is quoted from, God's assistance is invoked, and gradually everybody
comes around to the same general point of view. The general point of view that
everybody came around to on
the first of July, 1967
, was that Colonel Bradshaw's offer wasn't
good enough. Nothing had been said about an Island Council, nor medical
supplies, nor an amnesty. There was no reason to suppose the Colonel would
remain even this mellow once the spotlight of publicity had been turned off.

And
those five mysterious invaders were still roaming the countryside, stealing
food from poor people at gunpoint. Besides,
Anguilla
had already declared her independence from
St. Kitts, which was what they all wanted; why turn around and go back?

On
Monday, July 3, two cables were sent by the Peacekeeping Committee to St. Kitts
from
Puerto Rico
. One to Sir Fred Phillips, the Governor, said:

governor
may come and bring the mail. can be escorted by mr. wade, chief of police.

The other one was addressed to Mr.
Urban C. Hodge, a retired Anguillan Civil Servant living on St. Kitts, who had
been suggested by Colonel Bradshaw as the new Warden; it said:

happy
to have you in anguilla but not as representative of the central government.

The Fact Finding Mission was
understandably distressed that all its work had come to nothing. They went away
from St. Kitts and wrote a report that criticized the British for playing at
Watchmaker God while turning out lousy watches. They criticized the Government
of St. Kitts for any number of things, including its refusal to offer the
Anguillans an amnesty as a first step in negotiations. Exit the five men of the
Fact Finding Mission.

Exit also the other five. After ten
days of terrorizing old people and children for food, the five mysterious
invaders left
Anguilla
, at night, by rowboat, out to a
ship with a silhouette not unlike that of the St. Kitts Revenue Cutter. They
were seen to leave, but a force large enough to capture them didn't arrive in
time. "The following morning," Colin Rickards writes in
Anguilla:
Island in Revolt,
"my five missing men' were back at their various
jobs in St. Kitts."