Chapter XIII: In and About Our Virgin Islands (2)

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I took the “King’s Road” through the middle of the island. It runs for fourteen miles, from Christiansted, the capital, to Frederiksted, its rival. These names being too much effort for the negro tongue, the towns are known locally as “Boss End” (either a corruption of the French _Bassin_ or an acknowledgement that the “bosses” of the island always lived in the capital) and “West End.” The northern side is abrupt, with deep water close to the shore, its highest peak, Mount Eagle, rising 1180 feet. South of this range are undulating, fertile valleys and broad, rolling plains not even suggested along the northern coast, and the land slopes away in shoals and coral ledges for several miles from the beach. The highways are maintained by the owners of the estates through which they run; therefore they follow a somewhat roundabout course through the canefields, that the expense of maintenance may be more evenly divided. They are busy roads, dotted with automobiles, of which there are more than one hundred on the island, many donkeys, heavy two-wheeled carts hauled by neck-yoked oxen, a kind of jaunting car of the conservative gentry, and innumerable black pedestrians. The island is everywhere punctuated with picturesque old stone windmill towers that once ground cane, their flailing arms long since departed, and gray old chimneys of abandoned sugar-mills break the sky-line on every hand. Some of these dull-white heaps of buildings on their hilltops look like aged Norman castles; there is something grim and northern about them that does not fit at all with the tropics. They suggest instead the diligence and foresightedness of the temperate zone. Old human tread-mills may still be found among them, and slave-house villages that in some cases are inhabited by the laborers of to-day. Rusted sugar-kettles, such as are strewn through the West Indies from eastern Haiti to southern Trinidad, lie abandoned here and there throughout the island.

Sugar-cane once covered even the tops of the hills, but to-day only the flatter lands are planted, though there are splendid stretches of cane-green valleys. The names of estates are amusing, and range all the way from cynicism to youthful hopefulness,—“Golden Grove,” “Work and Rest,” “Hope and Blessing,” “Whim,” “Slob,” “Judith’s Fancy,” “Barren Spot,” “Adventure.” The ceiba, or “silk-cotton tree,” beautiful specimens of the royal palm, the tibet-tree, full of rustling pods that give it the name of “women’s-tongues” in all the English-speaking West Indies, everywhere beautify the landscape. Ruins of the slave rebellion, of the earthquake of 1848, of the disastrous hurricane of 1916, are still to be found here and there. There is a marvelous view from King’s Hill, with its old Danish gendarmérie, now a police station, from which the central highway, lined by palms and undulating through great valleys of cane, may be seen to where it descends to “West End” and the Caribbean. In the center of the picture sits Bethlehem, the largest sugar-mill on the island, with its cane railway and up-to-date methods. For the modern process of centralization is already spreading in St. Croix; the small independent mills are disappearing, and with them much of the picturesqueness of the island. These big mills, as well as most of the small, are owned by Danes, half the stock of the largest being held by the Danish government. Unfortunately St. Croix has put all its eggs in one basket, or at most, two, sugar and sea-island cotton.

There is not a thatched roof on the island. The people live in moderate comfort, as comfort goes in the West Indies. Toward sunset the roads are lined with women cane-cutters in knee-length skirts, with footless woolen stockings that suggest the tights of ballet-dancers, to protect their legs in the fields, pattering homeward, with their big cane-knives lying flat on the tops of their heads. Bits of colored rags sewed on the hatbands of the men indicate that they are members of the newly organized labor-union. They still bow and raise their hats to passing white men, yet one feels something of that bolshevistic atmosphere which their black leaders are fostering among them. The King’s Road passes a large distillery, which prohibition has closed. Formerly St. Croix made much rum; now it is giving its attention rather to syrup than to sugar, as there is more money in the former; but estate-owners are threatening to give up cane-growing and turn their fields into cattle pastures, so greatly have the wages of field laborers increased in the last two years—from twenty-five cents to a dollar a day. For St. Croix is one of the few islands in the West Indies where “task work” has never taken the place of a fixed daily wage. Cattle are plentiful on the island, from which they are sent to Porto Rico in tug-towed open barges. Some of them are so wild that they are brought down to the coast in cages on wheels, and all of them are roped and swung on board with little regard to their bodily comfort.

Fredriksted, the third and last town of our Virgin Islands, is a quaint, “Dutchy” place some five blocks wide and seven long, with wide sanded streets, two-storied for the most part and boasting no real public sidewalks; for though what look like them run beneath the arcades that uphold the upper-story verandas, they are rather family porches, shut off by stairways or barricades, which force the pedestrian to take constantly to the sun-scorched streets. The town has only an open roadstead; indeed, there is not a good harbor in the island. A native band recruited by the American navy breaks the monotony of life by playing here once a week, as it does daily in Christiansted. The cable company is required by law to furnish the world’s news to the press, but as the pathetic little newspapers are so small that they can publish only a few items at a time, the despatches are habitually some two weeks old, each taking its chronological turn irrespective of importance.

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I visited several schools in the Virgin Islands. When an American school director arrived early in 1918 he found no records either of schools, pupils, or parents. By dint of going out and hunting them up, he discovered nineteen educational buildings on the three islands. Ninety per cent. of the population can read and write after a fashion, but the majority usually have their letters written by the public scribe, of whom there is one in each of the three towns, in a set form that gives all epistles a strong family resemblance. The school system was honeycombed with all sorts of petty graft. A man who received three dollars a month for keeping a certain school clean had not seen the building in years. The town clock of Christiansted has not run for five years, yet another favored person received a monthly stipend for keeping it in order. The new director and his two American assistants have still to contend with many difficulties. There are no white teachers; those now employed were trained either in Denmark or in the Moravian schools, and the “English” of most of them almost deserves to be ranked as an independent dialect. The highest teacher’s salary is seventy-five, the average twenty-four dollars a month. Boys of sixteen, drawing the regal income of ten dollars monthly, conduct many of the classes. Those who served a certain number of years under the Danes receive a pension from the famous twenty-five millions. They are small pensions, like those that went to all the small government employees whom the Danes left behind, and those who still hold their places protest against telling their new employer how much they draw from Copenhagen, fancying it may result in a corresponding loss in the increase they fondly hope for under American rule. Lack of funds has forced the director to maintain many of the incompetents in office. One rural school we visited is still taught by the local butcher, whose inefficiency is on a par with his custom of neglecting his educational duties for his more natural calling. But as the island budget does not permit an increase of his monthly thirty-five dollars,—and in every case it is merely Danish, not American, dollars,—no more competent substitute has yet appeared to claim the butcher’s ferule.

The country schools have few desks; the children sit on backless benches, their feet usually high off the floor. The tops of the desks are in many cases painted black and used as blackboards. A rusty tin cup was found doing service for all the thirsty; when the Americans attempted to improve this condition by introducing a long-handled dipper with an edge cut in repeated V shape, the teachers bent the sharp points back and returned to the old dip-your-hand-in method. Lessons are often done on slates or pieces of slate, which the teacher periodically sprinkles with water from a bay-rum bottle, then requires the sums to be erased in rhythmical unison. Formerly the teachers sat in the middle of one large room, surrounded by eight different grades, and the resultant hubbub may be imagined. The Americans put in partitions, and the uproar is now somewhat less incoherent. In some of the larger schools there were half-height partitions, with little sliding-doors, through which the principal could peer without leaving his central “office.” Loud protests have been heard because the Americans nailed these up, forcing upon the sedentary gentlemen in charge the exertion of walking around to the several doors. The teaching methods were, and in many cases still are, of that tropically medieval type in which the instructor asks long questions that require a single-word answer, even that being chiefly suggested by the questioner.

“What is the longest river in America? Now, then, Miss-Mis-sissi—”

The answer “pi!” by some unusually bright pupil, is followed by exclamations of praise from the teacher. Like most negroes, the Virgin Islanders have tolerable memories, but little ability to apply what they learn. Not the least of the difficulties confronting the new director was the reform of the Catholic schools, which had long put great emphasis on matters of religion and treated other subjects with scant attention. The attempt to better matters sent shrieks of protest to Washington, whence the director’s hands were more or less tied by misinformed coreligionists. Bit by bit the Virgin Island schools are being improved, however, a decree permitting superintendents to fine the parents of pupils absent without due cause, simply by sending a policeman to collect the sum assessed, without any troublesome process of law, having given a badly needed weapon against the once wide-spread inattendance. Parents who decline, or are unable to pay the fines, are required to work one day on the roads for every dollar unpaid.

There is no agriculture worth mentioning in St. Thomas and no employing class in St. John, hence labor troubles have been chiefly confined to St. Croix. The present leaders of the movement in the larger island are three negroes, all of them agitators of the more or less violent type, differing only in degree, and all more or less consciously doing their best to stir up those of their own color. The one considered the most radical is the least troublesome, as he can readily be bought off. Another, a man of some education, runs a newspaper advocating civil government,—that is, negro government,—preaching that the white man is the enemy of the black, that St. Croix belongs by right to the latter, and openly accusing the white officials of incompetency and dishonesty. In addition to this, he publishes secretly a scurrilous sheet that is doing much to inflame the primitive minds of the masses. The third announced in a public meeting that “if the governor don’t do what we want, we’ll take him out in the bay and send him back where he come from.”

“Since the Americans came, it is all for the niggers,” said an old English estate-owner. “The niggers even steal our fruit and vegetables, carrying them to town a bit at a time in their clothes, for the policemen are all friendly or related to them. Let those black agitators go on a bit longer, and we whites will have to leave the island.”

There are signs that the whites are in peril of losing the upper hand in the island, particularly with the methods of the present governor, who caters to the negroes with un-American eagerness. As an example, though his private yacht may be on the point of steaming from St. Thomas to St. Croix or vice versa, even American white women are left to the mercies of the filthy _Creole_, lest the local merchants complain that trade is being taken away from them. Yet native negro girls are readily carried back and forth, because they happen to be the daughters, relatives, or dependents of members of the colonial council, or of some other local officials of the islands we are paying taxes to support.

The negro newspaper man sees much “social injustice” in St. Croix, of which certainly a customary amount exists; but he seems incapable of noting the great disinclination to work and the fact that the “paltry dollar a day” buys scarcely one tenth the amount of labor which constitutes a day’s work in the white man’s countries with which he strives to compare his own. In 1916 he went to Denmark and raised funds to establish several labor-union estates on the island, where the negroes might raise cattle, cane, and the like, each to get permanent possession of the piece of land on which he was working as soon as he had paid off the mortgage. But the farms are already, after a bare two years in the hands of the union, largely overgrown with weeds, bush, and miserable shacks, and about the only result of the move has been the loss of more land to world production, and the infliction of the sponsor with an exaggerated self-importance that has made him lose the one virtue of the Virgin-Islander—his courtesy.

On the other hand, the employing class is by no means immune to criticism. The larger sugar companies were paying cane-growers from six to seven cents Danish for sugar at the same time that they were selling it for from twelve to fourteen cents in American money. The diligent Yankee who controls the lighterage, wharfage, and many other monopolies at “West End,” as well as sharing with the newspaper man the political control of the island, cannot be acquitted of the native charge of exorbitance. A Danish company whose profits in 1919 were more than a million sent all its gains to Copenhagen, instead of helping to stabilize the exchange by depositing them in New York.

Among the troubles of St. Croix is the problem of what to do with the “immigration fund.” Sugar production requires much labor; ever since slavery was abolished St. Croix has been constantly faced with the difficulty of getting enough of it. A large percentage of the negroes would rather become public charges than work more than a few days a week. In 1854 the planters voluntarily assessed themselves ten cents an acre to establish an immigration fund, the Government making up the deficit. Laborers were brought from the other West Indian islands, particularly from Barbados. Therein lies another grievance of the planters, who assert that though Barbados implored the Government of St. Croix to relieve the former island of some of its over-population, when the request was granted, the Barbadian authorities emptied the jails and sent out all their riffraff. With the establishment of American rule, it became illegal to bring in contract labor, and though the immigration fund now consists of more than seventy thousand dollars, it is impossible to use it as originally intended. Does the money belong to the planters, to the United States, or to the Danish Government? The Croixians are still heatedly debating the question, and at the same time are complaining of the scarcity and high price of willing labor.

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Politically, St. Thomas and St. John, with their numerous neighboring keys and islets, constitute one municipality, and St. Croix another. Under the Danes the executive power was vested in a colonial governor appointed by the crown; the legislative authority being held by a colonial council in each municipality, some of the members likewise crown appointments, some elected. With an American admiral as governor, and naval officers as secretaries and heads of departments, this system has continued, and will continue until our busy Congress finds time to establish another form of government. Though the navy men explain to them that they are virtually under a civil government without the necessity of supporting it themselves, the natives are not satisfied. Among other things the labor leader elected to the colonial council of St. Croix demands the jury trial and “suffrage based on manhood.” The vote is at present extended to males over twenty-five having a personal income of three hundred dollars a year or owning property yielding five dollars a month. Moreover—and this, I believe, is more than we demand even in the United States—the voters must be of “unblemished character.” Thus the Danes sought to insure the ballot only to men of responsibility and there was good reason for the limitation. To the casual observer it seems that the growing tendency to give the natives the universal franchise should be combated, unless the islands are to become Haitian.

Last year one of the agitators went to the United States on the hopeful mission of getting all the offices filled by natives—that is, negroes. Luckily, his demands were not granted. Civil service already applies; there is nothing to prevent a native from holding any but the higher offices if he is fitted for the task; but native ability is not yet high enough, nor insular morals stanch enough, to give any hope that a native government would work efficiently without white supervision.

There is more justice in the plea for a homestead act that will turn the uncultivated land over to the people, though even that should be framed with care. One of the chief troubles with nearly all the West Indies is the ease with which lazy negroes may squat on public land. The islanders have one real kick, however, on the state of their postal service. Under the Danes there were mail-carriers in the towns, there were country post-offices, and a certain amount of rural delivery; all school-teachers sold stamps, and mail was sent by any safe conveyance that appeared. To-day there are only three post-offices and no mail delivery, the country people must carry their own letters to and from one of the three towns, those living on St. John being obliged to bring and fetch theirs from Charlotte Amalie, and though a dozen steamers may make the crossing during the week, the mails must wait for the languid and uncertain _Virginia_ or _Creole_. There are only four postal employees in St. Thomas, in addition to the postmaster, a deserving Democrat from Virginia who, in the local parlance, “does nothing but play tennis and crank a motor-boat.” When one of the mail-schooners comes in, the population crowds into the post-office in quest of its mail, disrupting the service, each hopeful citizen coming back again every half-hour or so until he finds that the expected letter has not come. Yet carriers were paid only thirty-five dollars Danish under the Danes, and three or four of them obviated all this chaotic confusion.

Roughly speaking, the St. Thomas division does not want civil government, feeling it cannot pay for it, and St. Croix does, though her colonial council has asked that no change be made for the present and has implied that it expects the expense of government to be chiefly maintained by congressional appropriation even after the change is made. But this same body demands full jurisdiction over all taxation, the one thing it is least competent to handle properly, for it would result in the powerful and influential and their friends escaping their just share of the burden. There are queer quirks in the taxation system left by the Danes. Buildings, for instance, are taxed by the ell, or two square feet, with the result that old tumble-downs often pay more than smaller modern and useful structures. There is a tax on wheels, so that the largest automobile pays five dollars a year, as does the poor man’s donkey-cart. Moreover, this money does not go to the maintenance of roads, but into the colonial treasury, as does every other cent of revenue. Under the Danes, even with lottery taxes yielding a hundred thousand dollars a year, and a large income from liquor taxes, the islands were never self-supporting. Our income tax in place of these amounts to little, especially as many find ways to get out of paying it. The public revenues of the islands are barely a quarter million a year. We contribute an equal amount directly, and three hundred thousand dollars a year in navy salaries besides, for the governor and his assistants get no other recompense than their regular pay as naval officers. There are a few persons, not Virgin-Islanders of course, who advocate annexing the group to Porto Rico. Theoretically, this plan would greatly simplify matters; in practice there would be certain decided objections to it, though the scheme might be feasible if worked out with care. Two things are indispensable, however, that during the life of the present generation the islands be given no more autonomy than they have at present, and above all that they be taxed by disinterested outsiders.

A new code of laws, based on those of Alaska and reputed to contain all the latest improvements in government, has recently been drawn up for the Virgin Islands. Unfortunately, the colonial council can reject that code if they see fit; that is another weakness in the treaty. Already they have marked for the pruning-knife every clause designed to improve the insular morals. The marriage ceremony, for instance, has never been taken very seriously by the natives. Unions by mutual consent are so numerous that our census-takers were forced to include a fifth class in their returns—the “consentually married.” Illegitimacy runs close to eighty per cent., far out-distancing even Porto Rico. In fact, the mass of the islanders have no morality whatever in that particular matter. Girls of fourteen not only have children, but boast of it. The Danes are largely to blame for this state of affairs, for there were few of them who did not leave “gutter children” behind, though it must be admitted that our own marines and sailors are not setting a much better example. The negro, being imitative, is particularly quick to copy any easy-going ways of his superiors; hence there is almost a complete absence of public sentiment against such unions among the blacks. Formerly a special excuse was found in the high cost of legal and church marriages, the fees for which were virtually prohibitive to the poorer classes. To-day they are only nominal, and many an old couple has been married in the presence of their grandchildren. The Danish laws compel the father to contribute two dollars a month to the support of his illegal children, but though the man seldom denies his possible parentage, the woman has frequently no unquestionable proof of it. The new code would force men to marry the mothers of their children.

“But how can we do that?” cried a member of the colonial council, often referred to as “the best native on the island,” yet who makes no secret of having his progeny scattered far and wide. “Most of us are married already; besides, we would have to legalize polygamy to carry out this proposed law. We are quite willing to continue the two dollars a month to our outside children, but how can we marry their mothers? They are not even of our own class!”

Illegitimacy gives rise to another problem. By the Danish laws still in force every minor must have a guardian, and that guardian cannot be a woman, even though she be the mother. Her older brother, her father, or some more distant relative, slightly interested in his task, commonly becomes the legal sponsor for her fatherless offspring. The duties of a guardian are, succinctly, to “take charge of the minor’s property,” with the resultant abuse to be expected. Policemen are now and then appointed the legal guardians of a dozen or more young rascals, and it goes without saying that they do not lie awake nights worrying about the moral and material advancement of their wards.

Another clause that is not likely to escape the blue pencil of the councils is that giving the authorities the right to search the persons and carts of those carrying produce and to demand proof of its legal possession. Yet without some such law there is slight hope of stamping out the wide-spread larceny of growing crops.

One of our most serious problems in the Virgin Islands is to combat disease. The Danes had only three doctors on the islands; now sixteen navy physicians are busy all the time. Their fees are turned into the colonial treasury, an arrangement nowhere else in force in American territory. Half the children die as a natural course, though the islands are really very healthful, and no white child born under proper conditions has died since American occupation. There is no hookworm and little malaria; but much pellagra and “big leg,” or elephantiasis. Tuberculosis is common, and tests indicate that eighty per cent. of the population is infected with a hereditary blood disease. There is a leper colony in St. Croix. The present generation, in the opinion of the navy men, is hopeless. In the improvement of the next they are hampered by the ignorance, indifference, and superstition of the parents. The doctors of “West End” found nothing unusual in the case of a baby that was brought to the hospital already dead because the father had taken it first to a native healer, who put “chibble” (pot herbs) under its nose to cure it of acute indigestion.

But there is a worse problem than that facing us in the Virgin Islands—the elimination of the habit of trying to live off the exertions of others. Thanks to their race, history, and situation, the islanders are inveterate, almost unconscious, beggars. Young or old, black or white—for environment has given even those of Caucasian ancestry almost the same habits and “ideals” as the negro—they are all gifted with the extended palm. If they do not all beg individually, they do so collectively, in a frank, shameless assertion that they cannot support themselves. The Danes left a “rum fund” that is designed to aid all those who “have seen better days,” and to judge by the applicants the entire population ranks itself in that category. The native woman clerk at the “West End” police station does not hesitate to give any one, even the four-dollars-a-day sugar-porters on the wharves, a certificate that he is unable to pay for medical attention, though the navy doctors’ fees are nominal and, even when they are paid, go into the colonial treasury. The admiral-governor gave a reception to the natives. Food was provided for five hundred—and was carried off by the first hundred street women and urchins who surged through the door. Next day a large crowd came to demand their share, saying they had got nothing the day before. One of the “labor leaders” told the negroes of St. Croix to hide their mahogany bedsteads and phonographs and sleep on drygoods boxes while the congressional committee was scheduled to visit the island. Of the entire crowd appearing before that committee not one had the general good of the islands on his lips, but all came with some petty personal complaint or request.

In short our new wards want all they can get out of us. They want Uncle Sam to provide them with schools, with sanitation, with irrigation, with galvanized hillsides, with roads—even in St. Croix, which has better highways than almost any State in the Union—with public markets, with libraries, with means of public transportation, with anything else which, in his unsophisticated generosity, he chooses to give, so long as he does not require them to contribute their own means and labor to that end. The colonial council of St. Croix “hopes means will be found to get Congress to appropriate a half million a year, a sum far beyond our own means, so that we can live up to the high ideals of our great American nation.” It never seems to occur to them that the schools, libraries, and streets in our cities are paid for by the inhabitants thereof; they have the popular view of Uncle Sam as the world’s Santa Claus. Yet many of the very members of that council have made fortunes in St. Croix and probably could themselves pay a large part of the sum demanded without any more difficulty than the average American finds in paying his taxes. Naïve as they are, the Virgin Islanders can scarcely expect Americans to adopt them and never let them work or want again, yet they talk as if they had some such thought in mind. Or, as a congressman put it during a public hearing, “I doubt whether the farmers of my State of Kansas will be willing to get up at four all summer and pay money into the federal treasury so that you can sleep until nine in the morning and stroll in the park the rest of the day.”

There is no reason why the Virgin-Islanders should not be sufficiently taxed to support their own schools and other requirements. Even if St. Thomas is now largely barren, many of its shopkeepers are steadily growing wealthy. The Danish planters of St. Croix send fortunes home to Denmark every year; at the present price of sugar they alone should be able easily to contribute a sum equal to that they are demanding from Congress. Should not even dollar-a-day negroes pay something in taxes? It might develop their civic spirit. The Virgin-Islanders need many things, it is true; but there are millions living in, and paying taxes to, the United States who have by no means what almost every Virgin-Islander has, or could have for a little exertion. The future of the islands depends largely on whether or not we succumb to our national tendency to make our wards mendicants for life, or give them a start and let them work their own way through the college of civilization.

Whenever I look back upon our new possessions I remember a significant little episode that took place during our first day in St. Thomas. A negro woman was sitting a short way up one of the great street stairways that climb the hills of Charlotte Amalie. A descending friend paused to ask her what was the matter, and she replied in that slow, whining singsong peculiar to the community:

“Me knees jes wilfully refuse to carry me up dem steps.”

That is the trouble with most of the Virgin-Islanders. Their own knees jes wilfully refuse to carry them up the stairway of civilization. They will have to be lifted—or booted.

THE BRITISH WEST INDIES