V. Naipaul - Miguel Street

He pulled me to his thin chest and said, ‘Do you want me to tell you a funny story?’ and he smiled encouragingly at me.

But I couldn’t reply.

He said, ‘When I have finished this story, I want you to promise that you will go away and never come back to see me. Do you promise?’

I nodded.

He said, ‘Good. Well, listen. That story I told you about the boy poet and the girl poet, do you remember that? That wasn’t true. It was something I just made up. All this talk about poetry and the greatest poem in the world, that wasn’t true, either. Isn’t that the funniest thing you have heard?’

But his voice broke.

I left the house and ran home crying, like a poet, for everything I saw.

I walked along Alberto Street a year later, but I could find no sign of the poet’s house. It hadn’t vanished, just like that. It had been pulled down, and a big, two-storied building had taken its place. The mango tree and the plum tree and the coconut tree had all been cut down, and there was brick and concrete everywhere.

It was just as though B. Wordsworth had never existed.

Big Foot was really big and really black, and everybody in Miguel Street was afraid of him. It wasn’t his bigness or his blackness that people feared, for there were blacker and bigger people about. People were afraid of him because he was so silent and sulky; he looked dangerous, like those terrible dogs that never bark but just look at you from the corner of their eyes.

Hat used to say, ‘Is only a form of showing off, you know, all this quietness he does give us. He quiet just because he ain’t have anything to say, that’s all.’

Yet you could hear Hat telling all sorts of people at the races and cricket, ‘Big Foot and me? We is bosom pals, man. We grow up together.’

And at school I myself used to say, ‘Big Foot does live in my street, you hear. I know him good good, and if any one of all you touch me, I go tell Big Foot.’

At that time I had never spoken a single word to Big Foot.

We in Miguel Street were proud to claim him because he was something of a character in Port of Spain, and had quite a reputation. It was Big Foot who flung the stone at the Radio Trinidad building one day and broke a window. When the magistrate asked why he did it, Big Foot just said, ‘To wake them up.’

A well-wisher paid the fine for him.

Then there was the time he got a job driving one of the diesel-buses. He drove the bus out of the city to Carénage, five miles away, and told the passengers to get out and bathe. He stood by to see that they did.

After that he got a job as a postman, and he had a great time misplacing people’s letters. They found him at Dock-site, with the bag half full of letters, soaking his big feet in the Gulf of Paria.

He said, ‘Is hard work, walking all over the place, delivering people letters. You come like a postage stamp, man.’

All Trinidad thought of him as a comedian, but we who knew him thought otherwise.

It was people like Big Foot who gave the steel-bands a bad name. Big Foot was always ready to start a fight with another band, but he looked so big and dangerous that he himself was never involved in any fight, and he never went to jail for more than three months or so at a time.

Hat, especially, was afraid of Big Foot. Hat often said, ‘I don’t know why they don’t lose Big Foot in jail, you know.’

You would have thought that when he was beating his pans and dancing in the street at Carnival, Big Foot would at least smile and look happy. But no. It was on occasions like this that he prepared his sulkiest and grimmest face; and when you saw him beating a pan, you felt, to judge by his earnestness, that he was doing some sacred act.

One day a big crowd of us — Hat, Edward, Eddoes, Boyee, Errol and myself — went to the cinema. We were sitting in a row, laughing and talking all during the film, having a good time.

A voice from behind said, very quietly, ‘Shut up.’

We turned and saw Big Foot.

He lazily pulled out a knife from his trouser pocket, flicked the blade open, and stuck it in the back of my chair.

He looked up at the screen and said in a frightening friendly way, ‘Talk.’

We didn’t say a word for the rest of the film.

Afterwards Hat said, ‘You does only get policeman son behaving in that way. Policeman son and priest son.’

Boyee said, ‘You mean Big Foot is priest son?’

Hat said, ‘You too stupid. Priests and them does have children?’

We heard a lot about Big Foot’s father from Hat. It seemed he was as much a terror as Big Foot. Sometimes when Boyee and Errol and I were comparing notes about beatings, Boyee said, ‘The blows we get is nothing to what Big Foot uses to get from his father. That is how he get so big, you know. I meet a boy from Belmont the other day in the savannah, and this boy tell me that blows does make you grow.’

Errol said, ‘You is a blasted fool, man. How you does let people give you stupidness like that?’

And once Hat said, ‘Every day Big Foot father, the policeman, giving Big Foot blows. Like medicine. Three times a day after meals. And hear Big Foot talk afterwards. He used to say, “When I get big and have children, I go beat them, beat them.” ’

I didn’t say it then, because I was ashamed; but I had often felt the same way when my mother beat me.

I asked Hat, ‘And Big Foot mother? She used to beat him too?’

Hat, said, ‘Oh, God! That woulda kill him. Big Foot didn’t have any mother. His father didn’t married, thank God.’

The Americans were crawling all over Port of Spain in those days, making the city really hot. Children didn’t take long to find out that they were easy people, always ready to give with both hands. Hat began working a small racket. He had five of us going all over the district begging for chewing gum and chocolate. For every packet of chewing gum we gave him we got a cent. Sometimes I made as much as twelve cents in a day. Some boy told me later that Hat was selling the chewing gum for six cents a packet, but I didn’t believe it.

One afternoon, standing on the pavement outside my house, I saw an American soldier down the street, coming towards me. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon, very hot, and the street was practically empty.

The American behaved in a very surprising way when I sprinted down to ask, ‘Got any gum, Joe?’

He mumbled something about begging kids and I think he was going to slap me or cuff me. He wasn’t very big, but I was afraid. I think he was drunk.

He set his mouth.

A gruff voice said, ‘Look, leave the boy alone, you hear.’

It was Big Foot.

Not another word was said. The American, suddenly humble, walked away, making a great pretence of not being in a hurry.

Big Foot didn’t even look at me.

I never said again, ‘Got any gum, Joe?’

Yet this did not make me like Big Foot. I was, I believe, a little more afraid of him.

I told Hat about the American and Big Foot.

Hat said, ‘All the Americans not like that. You can’t throw away twelve cents a day like that.’

But I refused to beg any more.

I said, ‘If it wasn’t for Big Foot, the man woulda kill me.’

Hat said, ‘You know, is a good thing Big Foot father dead before Big Foot really get big.’

I said, ‘What happen to Big Foot father, then?’

Hat said, ‘You ain’t hear? It was a famous thing. A crowd of black people beat him up and kill him in 1937 when they was having the riots in the oilfields. Big Foot father was playing hero, just like Big Foot playing hero now.’

I said, ‘Hat, why you don’t like Big Foot?’

Hat said, ‘I ain’t have anything against him.’