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before (“You always query me. Why you query me so for?”). Or the elderly, sour-faced freelance searcher, waiting every day outside the office door for illiterates to come and give him work, living on the edge when I knew him, occasionally needing the gift of a drink, and now a little more broken down, his services less and less needed. Or the old Barbadian mason who had done work for our family. I used to like to see him at work; I liked his songs; and I liked the way the hairs sprouting out of his nostrils were dusted with cement, like a bee’s legs with pollen. He came to see me now. He stood on the pavement and leaned on the gate. He didn’t want to come into the yard because he had come to ask for money. Times were hard, he said. The lighter colour on his nostril hairs was not cement now, but the grey of grey hair. Even in these people I felt the new sacrament of the square, a little new glory.
    Much of this feeling might have been in me—I was full of nerves on this return, for all kinds of reasons—but I believe I was only amplifying something that was true. The historyof the place was known; its reminders were all around us; scratch us and we all bled. The wonder was that it had taken so long for black people to arrive at this way of feeling. In our colonial set-up the champions of black people had been white men or coloured men like Belbenoit. Black men, with their self-distrust, had looked to such people to be their leaders. Political life had come late to black people; confidence had come late; too many generations had had to bury or mock their emotions in barber-shop gossip. There had been a big strike in the oilfields in 1937, but the leader there, a man from one of the smaller islands, had been more of a country preacher, uneducated and a little mad, quickly going idle after his initial political inspiration, and offering his followers only a kind of religious ecstasy. The new sacrament of the square went far beyond that.
    On this return everything I had known, every street, every building, shrank as soon as I saw it. I liked, as I travelled about, to play with this shift of scale, to compare what existed in my memory, from childhood and adolescence, with what existed now, as if suddenly, before me. In some such way every black or African person from my past altered. And I felt a double distance from what I had known.
    At the meeting I had gone to in the square I had seen a white family walk out in an interval between the speeches. They were an old trading family. I had had some slight dealings with them. For a few weeks, just before I went to work in the Red House, I had been a tutor to one of their children. I felt I had been tricked by them into accepting very low payment for what I did. They had left it to me to fix the fee, and I, not yet seventeen, hadn’t known what to ask. I had given a very low figure, moved by some absurd idea of honour. They hadn’t sought to match that idea of honour; they had paid me the very low fee I had asked, and no more. Old shame and rage (an aspect of the very mood of the meeting in the square) came back to me when I saw them.
    They had been standing at the edge of the square, noticeable,confident, respectful of the occasion. Perhaps they had gone for the show. But then, like me, they might have felt excluded; they might have felt the ground move below them. White people in the colony were very few, though; and they were not really threatened. Much of the hostile feeling released by the sacrament of the square would have focussed on the Indians, who made up the other half of the population.
    The town had been important to me. Its discovery had been one of the pleasures of my childhood: the discovery of fine buildings, squares, fountains, gardens, beautiful things meant only to please people. Yet I had known the colonial town for only ten years. To me it had always been a strange place, a place I had come to from somewhere else, and was still getting to know. Now on