Читать книгу Prospero's Daughter - Elizabeth Nunez - Страница 12

FIVE

THEY HAD ALSO seen the sunset. At first Mumsford thought Carlos had not noticed it. He had not moved nor uttered a single word since they had entered the car that was waiting for them at the dock in Trinidad. He sat with his back erect, his arms folded stiffly across his duffel bag and looked straight ahead of him, no expression on his face except a dour rigidity.

Mumsford was certain it was all a pretense; he was convinced the boy was afraid. He had to be. He was in the custody of a police inspector—an Englishman—accused by another Englishman of improper advances to his daughter. The politics were changing in Trinidad, but the island was still a colony of England in spite of the saber rattling. Machete rattling. Mumsford grinned, for that was what he thought of the protest gatherings in the town square, mere machete rattling that England could suppress whenever she wanted to.

It bothered him that England did not seem to want to, that she seemed ready to cave in, that she had lost her will to fight back. But he was not blind to the cost of the war with Germany. Resources, what remained of resources, had to be conserved, used for reconstruction. Still, there were colored people in Trinidad who would fight for England, who would give more credence to what an Englishman said than to anything one of their own would counter. That much Mumsford understood about the workings of colonialism, how a tiny island like his had managed to rule the world.

It was simple actually: a matter of changing the native’s sense of the beautiful, a matter of controlling the mind. Even now the films the people rushed to see in the cinemas popping up all over the island reinforced the message: white skin was beautiful; blue, green, gray eyes were beautiful; blond hair was beautiful; straight black or brown hair was beautiful; curly hair without kinks was beautiful. Even now in the schools it was English history the teachers taught, the English way. Always the heroes were English, always the achievements and accomplishments were theirs.