Barbadian writer Timothy Callender (1946-1989) knew something about bad men. Photo from timothycallender.com, Copyright 2014.
Good help is hard to find in Barbados, said the Jamaican service station supervisor. So, too, apparently, is good sense.
A friend and colleague of mine, the late, great animation critic, historian and independent scholar Emru Townsend, once said, “Common sense is usually neither.” He was right, God rest him. He preferred to talk about good sense.
I had filled up the car at the usual station before coming home one evening. When I got home, I went to file my receipt for tax purposes. The name of the gas attendant caught my eye: Hitler.
I showed it to my wife.
“I thought most people with that name had changed it,” I said.
“Must not be Barbadian,” she said, meaning someone from St Lucia, Dominica or St Vincent with an unusual Creole surname.
Still curious, I checked Barbados’ directory. No Hitlers.
Then I noticed the initial before it for the first name: A.
“This can’t be for real,” I said.
When I called and spoke with the supervisor, she was incensed.
“That’s just plain stupid,” she said. “It makes no sense. That’s not his name. Why do it? Sir, let me tell you,” her voice dropped a little, “good help is hard to find here in this place. No matter how much you train.”
Things to do at a service station when you’re bored
The supervisor asked us to return the receipt the next morning, during her shift. When my wife took it in on her way to work, she saw the young man who had signed it.
He was barely 20. Stark yet diffident in the way young men and women in Barbados can be these days, he seemed otherwise efficient. She asked him: “Why did you sign like that?”
He didn’t really look at her. Head down, “I was bored,” he said.
My wife lost it.
“Bored? Bored? Then why not a flower, a smiley face? That’s what you do when you’re bored!”
Or, I said to myself when she told me later, he could have chosen E. Barrow, S. Sobers, even W. Hall—the first initial and surname of Barbados’ first Prime Minister, our greatest cricketer, and the notorious folk hero, respectively.
Breaking bad Bajan style
I’ve been told a story about how during the Second World War in Barbados the name Hitler was used to describe village tough guys or terrors—bad men, as we call them. My mother, six years old when the war started, twelve when it ended, used to talk instead about Russians: “That one, there—he—he is a good Russian!” she would say about someone who was heartless, pitiless; a beater of women and children; wutless or tiefin. She would say the words with a you-go-’long-boy shake of her head that was far from indifference.
To better understand the romance of the Bajan bad man, check out Timothy Callender’s “An Honest Thief.” The best of Callender’s short stories are unique in Barbadian Literature for the way they pelt a reader into the narrative and how the nation-language carries the imagination along from there. He tells a story the way we would, if we could tell stories as clearly and comically. Actually, a true heir of Callender’s among the next generation of Barbadian writers is Shakirah Bourne, whose “innocent and often naïve” characters in her tender, humorous and challenging story collection In Time of Need get caught up in “controversial issues” despite themselves: everyday infidelity, interracial relationships, human trafficking. Every story Callender wrote, too, was an attempt to tell John & Jane Public’s stories, the secret ones and the sordid ones and sometimes the obvious ones.
Whatever happened to Alfred E. Neuman?
This is the opening to Callender’s “An Honest Thief”:
"Every village has a 'bad man' of its own, and St Victoria Village was no exception. It had Mr Spencer. Mr Spencer was a real 'bad man,' and not even Big Joe would venture to cross his path. Besides, everybody knew that Mr Spencer had a gun, and they knew he had used it once or twice too. Mr Spencer didn’t ever go out of his way to interfere with anybody, but everybody knew what happened to anybody who was foolish enough to interfere with Mr Spencer. Mr Spencer had a reputation."
(For a couple other Bajan bad-men antagonists, see William S. Arthur’s story “Sequel to Murder.” Melodramatic and derivative in parts, David and Mannie are nevertheless as familiar and frighteningly common as ever in the Caribbean.)
Is this what the gas attendant was trying to be? To be thought of as tough, not soft because he’s working hard pumping gas?
I saw the young man sign, remembered him pausing with the pen above the paper. He had a choice and he made it. He could have gone for humour. Signing Alfred E. Neuman at school on a hall pass, mad as it may seem today, used to be good for a chuckle when I was a teenager, even from the principal.
But if the gas attendant was going for something darker, and closer to home, the words from Queen Ifrica’s song “Keep It to Yourself” come to mind. Why choose the name of one of the most evil men of the 20th century? Did the boy understand how much he might offend or outrage? Did he even know who Hitler was?
He may as well have signed, I. M. Nobody. Whatever his reason, there was no sense to it: of history, of community, of self.
No good sense at all.
