A Way in the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

his mother, and I imagined him living alone with her in a crowded backyard, in one of those tottering old St. James shacks. The difference between us, though, lay not so much in money as in our prospects. I was a college boy, aiming high; he was an elementary-school boy, accepting his limitations. That was the basis of our street relationship, and I had thought of this boy, tall and thin and seemingly uncoordinated, riding a lady’s bicycle, as a jester, a loud-mouth from the backyards. It was only now, seeing the seriousness with which he drank, and seeing how the rum altered him, seeing how he became red-eyed and unfunny, that I felt that he was serious about himself, about his job, his duties as a clerk, about his own ambitions, in a way I had never supposed. He was not at all content. His jester’s personality, the personality of a man not expecting much, not aiming high, was a cover; he didn’t really mean many of his jokes.
    Belbenoit—one of the senior clerks who sometimes checked my certificates—didn’t have this cover. He was a middle-aged “coloured” man. On both sides he would have been of mixed race for some generations; he was fair-skinned.He had no particular qualifications, but he didn’t think he had done well enough. Though every kind of racial assumption showed in his own querulous face, he felt he had been discouraged for racial reasons from aiming higher: at the time when he had entered the service, the best jobs were reserved for people from England. That was no longer so; but the changes had come too late for Belbenoit. He was famous in the office for being a disappointed man; and people treated his unhappiness like an illness, though it was no secret that Belbenoit (with all his old assumptions) felt he hadn’t had the treatment due to his fair colour, and felt his position in the office was in the nature of a racial disgrace.
    His unlikely ally in the office—in office politics, and in representations of various kinds to the civil servants’ council—was Blair. Blair was a black giant, smooth-skinned, erect, with powerful shoulders. His manners were perfect; he could be very serious; he could also laugh easily, but always with control. He had an immense confidence. He came from a purely black village somewhere in the north-east of the island. This made him unusual: he didn’t have the combativeness and nerves of black people who had grown up in mixed communities. At the same time, because of that isolation, Blair had started school late. But he had made up for that. He was already a senior clerk, and everybody in the office knew he was studying now for an external degree of some sort, looking for the qualifications that Belbenoit never had. Blair sometimes checked my certificates. That very big man had the tiniest and neatest initials: they spoke to me of his ambition and strength.
    Blair was courtesy itself to me; but I felt about him that, though we met with ease in the government office, there was much in his background I could never get to know. That all-African village in the north-east, isolated for some generations, without Indians or white people, would have had its own subterranean emotions, its own faith and fantasies. Blairno doubt felt the same about me; my Indian and orthodox Hindu background might have seemed to him even more closed. But in the neutral ground of the department we didn’t have to worry about these home matters; we got on, as far as we had to get on. In a civil service way Blair was perfection—and not without the disquietingness of such perfection. Just months out of school, and having only that experience to judge outsiders by, I thought of him (in spite of Belbenoit’s apparent alliance with him) as a kind of head boy: someone who could be one of the boys and at the same time represent authority.
    He lived out what I felt about him then. Seven years later he abandoned the civil service, gave up that fine career, abandoned that restrained departmental