C. L. R. James (1901–89), a Trinidadian historian, political activist, and prolific writer, was one of the twentieth century's most important intellectuals. He is the author of a renowned study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938), and a play, Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History (1934), which is published by Duke University Press.

BEYOND A BOUNDARY

Duke University Press

Contents

CHAPTER 1

THE WINDOW

TUNAPUNA at the beginning of this century was a smalltown of about 3,000 inhabitants, situated eight miles alongthe road from Port of Spain, the capital city of Trinidad.Like all towns and villages on the island, it possessed a recreationground. Recreation meant cricket, for in those days, except for infrequentathletic sports meetings, cricket was the only game. Our housewas superbly situated, exactly behind the wicket. A huge tree on oneside and another house on the other limited the view of the ground,but an umpire could have stood at the bedroom window. By standingon a chair a small boy of six could watch practice every afternoonand matches on Saturdays—with matting one pitch could and oftendid serve for both practice and matches. From the chair also he couldmount on to the window-sill and so stretch a groping hand for thebooks on the top of the wardrobe. Thus early the pattern of my lifewas set. The traffic on the road was heavy, there was no fence betweenthe front yard and the street. I was an adventurous little boy and so mygrandmother and my two aunts, with whom I lived for half the year,the rainy season, preferred me in the backyard or in the house wherethey could keep an eye on me. When I tired of playing in the yard Iperched myself on the chair by the window. I doubt if for some yearsI knew what I was looking at in detail. But this watching from thewindow shaped one of my strongest early impressions of personalityin society. His name was Matthew Bondman and he lived next doorto us.

He was a young man already when I first remember him, mediumheight and size, and an awful character. He was generally dirty. Hewould not work. His eyes were fierce, his language was violent andhis voice was loud. His lips curled back naturally and he intensified itby an almost perpetual snarl. My grandmother and my aunts detestedhim. He would often without shame walk up the main street barefooted,'with his planks on the ground', as my grandmother wouldreport. He did it often and my grandmother must have seen it hundredsof times, but she never failed to report it, as if she had suddenlyseen the parson walking down the street barefooted. The whole Bondmanfamily, except for the father, was unsatisfactory. It was from hismother that Matthew had inherited or absorbed his flair for languageand invective. His sister Marie was quiet but bad, and despite all thecircumlocutions, or perhaps because of them, which my aunts employed,I knew it had something to do with 'men'. But the two familieswere linked. They rented from us, they had lived there for a long time,and their irregularity of life exercised its fascination for my puritanicalaunts. But that is not why I remember Matthew. For ne'er-do-well,in fact vicious character, as he was, Matthew had one saving grace—Matthewcould bat. More than that, Matthew, so crude and vulgarin every aspect of his life, with a bat in his hand was all grace andstyle. When he practised on an afternoon with the local club peoplestayed to watch and walked away when he was finished. He had oneparticular stroke that he played by going down low on one knee. Itmay have been a slash through the covers or a sweep to leg. But, whateverit was, whenever Matthew sank down and made it, a long, low'Ah!' came from many a spectator, and my own little soul thrilled withrecognition and delight.

Matthew's career did not last long. He would not practise regularly,he would not pay his subscription to the club. They perseveredwith him, helping him out with flannels and white shoes for matches.I remember Razac, the Indian, watching him practise one day andshaking his head with deep regret: how could a man who could batlike that so waste his talent? Matthew dropped out early. But he wasmy first acquaintance with that genus Britannicus, a fine batsman, andthe impact that he makes on all around him, non-cricketers and cricketersalike. The contrast between Matthew's pitiable existence as anindividual and the attitude people had towards him filled my growingmind and has occupied me to this day. I came into personal contactwith Matthew. His brother was my playmate and when we got inMatthew's way he glared and shouted at us in a most terrifying manner.My aunts were uncompromising in their judgments of him andyet my grandmother's oft-repeated verdict: 'Good for nothing exceptto play cricket,' did not seem right to me. How could an ability toplay cricket atone in any sense for Matthew's abominable way of life?Particularly as my grandmother and my aunts were not in any waysupporters or followers of the game.

My second landmark was not a person but a stroke, and the makerof it was Arthur Jones. He was a brownish Negro, a medium-sizedman, who walked with quick steps and active shoulders. He had apair of restless, aggressive eyes, talked quickly and even stammereda little. He wore a white cloth hat when batting, and he used to cut.How he used to cut! I have watched county cricket for weeks on endand seen whole Test matches without seeing one cut such as Jonesused to make, and for years whenever I saw one I murmured to myself,'Arthur Jones!' The crowd was waiting for it, I at my window waswaiting, and as soon as I began to play seriously I learnt that Arthurwas waiting for it too. When the ball hit down outside the off-stump(and now, I think, even when it was straight) Jones lifted himself tohis height, up went his bat and he brought it down across the ball asa woodsman puts his axe to a tree. I don't remember his raising theball, most times it flew past point or between point and third slip, thecrowd burst out in another shout and Jones's white cap sped betweenthe wickets.

The years passed. I was in my teens at school, playing cricket, readingcricket, idolizing Thackeray, Burke and Shelley, when one day Icame across the following about a great cricketer of the eighteenthcentury:

'It was a study for Phidias to see Beldham rise to strike;the grandeur of the attitude, the settled composure of the look,the piercing lightning of the eye, the rapid glances of the bat,were electrical. Men's hearts throbbed within them, their cheeksturned pale and red. Michael Angelo should have painted him.'

This was thrilling enough. I began to tingle.

'Beldham was great in every hit, but his peculiar glory was thecut. Here he stood, with no man beside him, the laurel was all hisown; it seemed like the cut of a racket. His wrist seemed to turnon springs of the finest steel. He took the ball, as Burke did theHouse of Commons, between wind and water—not a momenttoo soon or late. Beldham still survives....'

By that time I had seen many fine cutters, one of them, W. St. Hill,never to this day surpassed. But the passage brought back Jones andchildhood memories to my mind and anchored him there for good andall. Phidias, Michelangelo, Burke. Greek history had already introducedme to Phidias and the Parthenon; from engravings and reproductionsI had already begun a life-long worship of Michelangelo;and Burke, begun as a school chore, had rapidly become for me themost exciting master of prose in English—I knew already long passagesof him by heart. There in the very centre of all this was WilliamBeldham and his cut. I passed over the fact which I noted instantlythat the phrase, 'He hit the House just between wind and water', hadbeen used by Burke himself, about Charles Townshend in the speechon American taxation.

The matter was far from finished. Some time later I read a complicateddescription of the mechanism and timing of the cut by C. B.Fry, his warning that it was a most difficult stroke to master and thateven in the hands of its greatest exponents there were periods whenit would not work, 'intermittent in its service', as he phrased it. But,he added, with some batsmen it was an absolutely natural stroke, andone saw beautiful cutting by batsmen who otherwise could hardly becalled batsmen at all. When I read this I felt an overwhelming sense ofjustification. Child though I was, I had not been wrong about Jones.Batsman or not, he was one of those beautiful natural cutters. However,I said earlier that the second landmark in my cricketing life wasa stroke—and I meant just that—one single stroke.

On an awful rainy day I was confined to my window, TunapunaC. C. was batting and Jones was in his best form, that is to say, innearly every over he was getting up on his toes and cutting away. Butthe wicket was wet and the visitors were canny. The off-side boundaryat one end was only forty yards away, a barbed-wire fence whichseparated the ground from the police station. Down came a short ball,up went Jones and lashed at it, there was the usual shout, a suddensilence and another shout, not so loud this time. Then from my windowI saw Jones walking out and people began to walk away. He hadbeen caught by point standing with his back to the barbed wire. Icould not see it from my window and I asked and asked until I wastold what had happened. I knew that something out of the ordinaryhad happened to us who were watching. We had been lifted to theheights and cast down into the depths in much less than a fractionof a second. Countless as are the times that this experience has beenrepeated, most often in the company of tens of thousands of people, Ihave never lost the zest of wondering at it and pondering over it.

It is only within very recent years that Matthew Bondman and thecutting of Arthur Jones ceased to be merely isolated memories and fellinto place as starting points of a connected pattern. They only appearas starting points. In reality they were the end, the last stones put intoplace, of a pyramid whose base constantly widened, until it embracedthose aspects of social relations, politics and art laid bare when theveil of the temple has been rent in twain as ours has been. Hegel sayssomewhere that the old man repeats the prayers he repeated as a child,but now with the experience of a lifetime. Here briefly are some ofthe experiences of a lifetime which have placed Matthew Bondmanand Arthur Jones within a frame of reference that stretches east andwest into the receding distance, back into the past and forward intothe future.

My inheritance (you have already seen two, Puritanism and cricket)came from both sides of the family and a good case could be made outfor predestination, including the position of the house in front of therecreation ground and the window exactly behind the wicket.

My father's father was an emigrant from one of the smaller islands,and probably landed with nothing. But he made his way, and as amature man worked as a pan-boiler on a sugar estate, a responsible jobinvolving the critical transition of the boiling cane-juice from liquidinto sugar. It was a post in those days usually held by white men.This meant that my grandfather had raised himself above the massof poverty, dirt, ignorance and vice which in those far-off days surroundedthe islands of black lower middle-class respectability like asea ever threatening to engulf them. I believe I understand pretty muchhow the average sixteenth-century Puritan in England felt amidst thedecay which followed the dissolution of the monasteries, particularlyin the small towns. The need for distance which my aunts felt for MatthewBondman and his sister was compounded of self-defence andfear. My grandfather went to church every Sunday morning at eleveno'clock wearing in the broiling sun a frock-coat, striped trousers andtop-hat, with his walking-stick in hand, surrounded by his family, theunderwear of the women crackling with starch. Respectability was notan ideal, it was an armour. He fell grievously ill, the family fortunesdeclined and the children grew up in unending struggle not to sinkbelow the level of the Sunday-morning top-hat and frock-coat.

My father took the obvious way out—teaching. He did well andgained a place as a student in the Government Training College, hiscourse comprising history, literature, geometry, algebra and education.Yet Cousin Nancy, who lived a few yards away, told many storiesof her early days as a house-slave. She must have been in her twentieswhen slavery was abolished in 1834. My father got his diploma, buthe soon married. My two aunts did sewing and needlework, not muchto go by, which made them primmer and sharper than ever, and it waswith them that I spent many years of my childhood and youth.

Two doors down the street was Cousin Cudjoe, and a mighty manwas he. He was a blacksmith, and very early in life I was allowed togo and watch him do his fascinating business, while he regaled mewith stories of his past prowess at cricket and critical observationson Matthew, Jones and the Tunapuna C.C. He was quite black, witha professional chest and shoulders that were usually scantily coveredas he worked his bellows or beat the iron on the forge. Cudjoe toldme of his unusual career as a cricketer. He had been the only blackman in a team of white men. Wherever these white men went to playhe went with them. He was their wicketkeeper and their hitter—aterm he used as one would say a fast bowler or an opening bat. Whenhe was keeping he stood close to the wicket and his side needed nolong-stop for either fast bowling or slow, which must have been quitean achievement in his day and time. But it was as a hitter that hefascinated me. Once Cudjoe played against a team with a famous fastbowler, and it seemed that one centre of interest in the match, if notthe great centre, was what would happen when the great fast bowlermet the great hitter. Before the fast bowler began his run he held theball up and shook it at Cudjoe, and Cudjoe in turn held up his batand shook it at the bowler. The fast bowler ran up and bowled andCudjoe hit his first ball out of the world. It didn't seem to matter howmany he made after that. The challenge and the hit which followedwere enough. It was primitive, but as the battle between Hector andAchilles is primitive, and it should not be forgotten that Americanbaseball is founded on the same principle.

At the time I did not understand the significance of Cudjoe, theblack blacksmith, being the only coloured man in a white team, thatis to say, plantation owners and business or professional men or highgovernment officials. 'They took me everywhere they went—everywhere,'he used to repeat. They probably had to pay for him and alsoto sponsor his presence when they played matches with other whitemen. Later I wondered what skill it was, or charm of manner, or both,which gave him that unique position. He was no sycophant. His eyeslooked straight into yours, and an ironical smile played upon his lipsas he talked, a handsome head on his splendid body. He was a gaylad, Cudjoe, but somehow my aunts did not disapprove of him asthey did of Bondman. He was a blood relation, he smiled at them andmade jokes and they laughed. But my enduring memory of Cudjoe isof an exciting and charming man in whose life cricket had played agreat part.

My father too had been a cricketer in his time, playing on the sameground at which I looked from my window. He gave me a bat andball on my fourth birthday and never afterwards was I without themboth for long. But as I lived a great deal with my aunts away fromhome, and they did not play, it was to Cudjoe I went to bowl to me,or to sit in his blacksmith's shop holding my bat and ball and listeningto his stories. When I did spend time with my parents my fathertold me about cricket and his own prowess. But now I was older andmy interest became tinged with scepticism, chiefly because my motheroften interrupted to say that whenever she went to see him play hewas always caught in the long field for very little. What made mattersworse, one day when I went to see him play he had a great hit andwas caught at long-on for seven. I remembered the stroke and knewafterwards that he had lifted his head. Joe Small, the West Indian Testplayer, was one of the bowlers on the opposite side. However, I was tolearn of my father's good cricket in a curious way. When I was aboutsixteen my school team went to Tunapuna to play a match on thatsame ground against some of the very men I used to watch as a boy,though by this time Arthur Jones had dropped out. I took wickets andplayed a good defensive innings. Mr. Warner, the warden, a brother ofSir Pelham's, sent for me to congratulate me on my bowling, and somespectators made quite a fuss over me for I was one of them and theyhad known me as a child wandering around the ground and askingquestions.
(Continues...)Excerpted from BEYOND A BOUNDARY by C. L. R. JAMES. Copyright © 1963 C. L. R. James. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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