No Win Race. Derek A. Bardowell

But I had little option but to take it. I mean, who could I complain to? And what would they really do about it?

      This had been a weakened West Indian team; no Marshall, Holding or Garner, no Greenidge or Lloyd. But to lose to England, still embarrassing. West Indies’ following match came against Sri Lanka, then still a minor side. But given that the Sri Lankans were playing at home, I feared the worst. Richards once more rose to the occasion. He hit 181 runs off 125 balls, momentarily silencing my teacher.

      Temporary reprieve. The teacher took the captaincy of the school cricket team away from me. No reason. Gave it to a white kid, one of his favourite players from the football team. The only white kid on the team. Under my captaincy, the team had been poor. Under the white kid’s leadership, we were just as bad if not worse. I wanted the captaincy back. I’d been playing well. Felt as if I was still the best player in the team.

      I approached the teacher and told him that I wanted to captain the team again, or to at least co-captain. He said no, insulted that I would ask such a thing. I asked him why. He refused to respond. So, I refused to play. He made me run laps around the sports field in every PE lesson. At the start of every session, he’d growl, ‘Are you going to play?’ I’d say no. And then he would make me do laps while the other kids played football or cricket.

      I didn’t know whether the teacher’s decision to take the captaincy away from me had been racially motivated, even if I suspected it was. Wasn’t the sole point. I didn’t like the way he dismissed me, the way he treated me, the way he bullied me. Without prompting, the rest of the team agreed with my assertion. They didn’t like my treatment either. So, they refused to play too. The cricket team went on strike.

      A black teacher summoned me and the other black and brown players to his classroom to try and end the strike. I sat staring out the window as he tried to reason with us, make us aware that it was our duty to represent the school. The meeting ended in a stalemate.

      The situation had become embarrassing to the school as it could no longer field a cricket team. The PE teacher relented. He made me co-captain. We ended up with three captains: one black, one white and one Indian.

      The PE teacher continued to shout at me. He continued to try to intimidate me. I don’t believe our results were significantly better, but it had been a slight victory. It was probably the first time that I didn’t minimise myself. The first time I had not been hiding.

      Cricket represented the first time that I can remember feeling a true sense of pride in my Caribbean heritage. At home, my cultural reference points were more Jamaican than they were English. Outside of home, black and Caribbean culture and its history had been non-existent. Indeed, the only black person I would learn about through my whole school life would be athlete Jesse Owens, and that had only been in the context of Hitler and World War II. Until I discovered West Indies cricket, there had been a whole side of me that did not exist to my white peers and teachers. When the West Indies forced its way into public consciousness, I didn’t have to minimise as much. Didn’t have to apologise or hide as much. In these cricketers was hope; hope that I wouldn’t always be anxious about being trapped between blackness and Britishness.

      Couldn’t win though. Couldn’t change this narrow perception of blackness. A perception that we were subjects. If we were not subjects then we were somehow extremists, enemies of the state. Couldn’t change the perception that we were all the same. I was no different to my father. No different to a Nigerian. We were possessions. Guests. Barbaric, devilish-looking, ugly. Couldn’t win by rebelling. Couldn’t win by being compliant. Couldn’t win for trying. Blackness had been a white problem, not my problem. I’d started to recognise this through cricket and the establishment’s illogical response to black players. The establishment’s inability to see blacks as equals, its inability to see blacks as truly English, its inability to acknowledge us on our own terms. Blackness could only be seen through their eyes, their history, their struggles. Our version, our history, our lens did not exist. It didn’t seem to exist to my PE coach and it didn’t exist to the establishment.

      ‘It was only long years after,’ said C L R James, ‘that I understood the limitation on spirit, vision and self-respect which were imposed on us by the fact that our masters, our curriculum, our code of morals, everything began from the basis that Britain was the source of all light and leading, and our business was to admire, wonder, imitate, learn; our criterion of success was to have succeeded in approaching that distant ideal –to attain it of course was impossible.’¹⁹

The West Indies cricket team had been the purest sporting experience I had witnessed. It was John Edgar Wideman on ‘race’,^* Serena Williams’ return to Indian Wells after being racially abused by its crowd early in her career, Public Enemy’s ‘Rebel Without a Pause’, the Newham 7. This uprising had been televised. It was legal. Attractive. Brutal. In living black and white. It fractured whiteness (opening the doors for India and Pakistan to follow) and made the rulers the subjects, providing an image of what it would be like if you were us and we were you. England had been colonised. We had been decolonised.

      I’m not sure I could ever support a team as much as that West Indies side. They meant more to me than Ali. They were activism, style, excellence and heritage. They amplified my parents’ childhood stories. They never minimised, despite criticism. They exposed the fragility of the Empire state of mind. They validated me, my past, my present. They represented a part of me, the heart of me, but not all of me. I was stillborn in England. Still more English than Jamaican. I needed to find the English me, the non-white-defined English me, the something that represented a side of me that my father could never be.

^* John Edgar Wideman is an American writer and professor, and the author of ten novels and five non-fiction books. Wideman was the recipient of the Pen/Faulkner Award in 1990 and an American Book Award in 1991.