Caribbean Beat — 25th Anniversary Edition — March/April 2017 (#144)

with no luck at all, in the newly formed colonies of West Africa.”
The family was thus a microcosm of the Caribbean melting pot
formed by generations of migration and slavery, and the young
Belafonte was brought up aware of all the nuances of colour to
be found in the region.
In her book Becoming Belafonte, Judith E. Smith describes
the daily hardships of poverty and racism confronting young
Harry and his parents, Millie and Harold, Sr, in 1930s New York.
Work was precarious, accommodation often squalid, and after
a younger brother, Dennis, was born, Harry’s father began to
distance himself from the family. As illegal migrants, they lived
in fear of deportation, and the name Bellanfanti was changed
to Belafonte to throw immigration agents off the scent. Fearful
for her older son in a climate of rising racial tension, Millie sent
him to her mother in Jamaica for a year in 1934. Then in 1936,
as the Depression intensified, Millie took her two sons back to
Jamaica again, enrolling them in separate schools, where they
would stay until 1940.
This early experience was to prove life-changing. Far from
the raucous street life of Harlem, Belafonte was subjected
to the stifling conformity of British colonial society and its
anachronistic education system. He was, writes Smith, forced to
eat in the kitchen when guests came to dinner at his aunt’s house,
considered too dark-skinned for polite society. To this ostracism
was added his witnessing of woeful social conditions, the labour
strikes in Kingston in 1938 (“a violent peasant uprising,” he said),
and their inevitable repression.
Even as Harry Belafonte was
introducing an often suspicious
American public to a non-white
world, he was subtly challenging
any misconceptions about the
Caribbean
But if Belafonte’s sense of injustice was fuelled by these years,
so too was his appreciation of the Caribbean’s diverse musical
landscape. Kingston was alive with music, particularly mento,
the gentle acoustic predecessor of ska that was loved by cruise
ship tourists. There was also calypso from Trinidad, enormously
popular in Jamaica, and full of acerbic political commentary.
Belafonte had previously been fascinated by the swing music of
Duke Ellington and New York’s vibrant black culture, and now
he experienced at first hand the sounds of the Caribbean and
South America.
Returning to Harlem aged thirteen, Belafonte again faced
poverty and prejudice. He dropped out of school, did menial
jobs, and eventually enlisted in the navy. A chance encounter
led him to watch a performance by the American Negro Theatre.
Friendly with Bahamian Sidney Poitier, he studied acting at New
York’s prestigious New School (where contemporaries included
Poitier, Walter Matthau, and Marlon Brando). This he paid for by
singing in clubs. His first single, “Matilda”, was a hit calypso of
1953, in which he lamented: “Hey! Ma-til-da; Ma-til-da; Ma-tilda,
she take me money and run a-Venezuela.”
It was the million-selling album of three years later, however,
that earned him the title of “King of Calypso” — a title with
which he admitted he felt uneasy. The songs on the Calypso LP,
he pointed out, “weren’t calypso at all — even though everybody
seems to have hung that tag on them.” And he was an American,
not a Trinidadian — the true prerequisite for calypso royalty.
More particularly, his signature song, “Day-O (The Banana
Boat Song)”, may have been thought of as a calypso, but in reality
its roots lay in mento and, further back, as a traditional call-andresponse
folk song performed by Jamaica’s banana workers as
they loaded the cargo onto United Fruit boats. The song records
the workers’ fatigue after a night’s work, their desire to go home,
and their impatient wait for “Mister tally man” to record their
work rate and pay:
Work all night on a drink of rum
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Stack banana till de mornin’ come
Daylight come and me wan’ go home
Far from repeating the clichés of the Caribbean idyll, the song
evoked a gruelling and thankless job where the “deadly black
tarantula” posed a real threat. In this sense, while spectacularly
successful in commercial terms, it also introduced the listener to
a world in which poverty and hard work coexisted.
Nor did the 1957 film Island in the Sun, in which Belafonte
appeared and sang the title song, present a sugar-coated version
of the Caribbean. The film explores the political and racial
tensions between the old colonial order and a newly powerful
nationalist movement exemplified by Belafonte’s ambitious
character, the politician David Boyeur. Again, the song is less
about “paradise” than tough economic reality:
I see woman on bended knee
Cutting cane for her family
I see man at the waterside
Casting nets at the surging tide
Even as Harry Belafonte was introducing an often suspicious
American public to a non-white world, he was subtly
challenging any misconceptions about the Caribbean. In
a 2006 interview with the BBC, he remarked, “When I did the
‘Banana Boat Song’, for instance, that wasn’t just looking for a
hit. What it did talk about was the working-class struggles of the
people working on the plantations.” “Island in the Sun”, he added,
“had content that talked about struggle.”
As an activist whose anger shows no sign of abating (ask
Donald Trump), Harry Belafonte reminds us that it is possible
to mix politics with entertainment, and that popular culture
can be a powerful ideological force. His extraordinary career,
encompassing a wide spectrum of artistic performance,
provides ample proof of the transformative power of both words
and music. n
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