Kamil Ali

Carrie stepped aside and gestured toward the living room sofa. She closed the door and followed the two officers on wobbly legs to sit on the edge of a single sofa across from them. Her heart thumped and she intertwined her fingers at her knees to steady her trembling hands. The two officers glanced at each other. Delicate delivery of shocking news required a tactful choice of words.
“I’m officer Lynn McDonald and this is officer Pat Nelson.” The policewoman nodded toward her partner who gave Carrie an awkward new-recruit half-smile. “We’re here to let you know that your dad had an accident.” The female officer cleared her throat. “Unfortunately, he did not make it.” Her eyes exuded sympathy.
“Yo mean he dead?” Carrie reverted to her creole dialect which manifests whenever her emotions run high. She and her dad had remained in the house since her mother’s death on Thanksgiving Day the previous year. He had left to get an ice-cream cake for their dinner in memory of her mom. The unspoken gaze from the officers confirmed her worst nightmare. “Oh Gawd…” She sobbed aloud into her hands. “Now ah loss both ah me parents.” Carrie shook her head from side to side. “Gawd, why yo doin dis to me?” Her deflated body slumped in despair.
“I’m sorry, Ma’am.” Officer McDonald stepped behind Carrie and rubbed her shaking shoulders. Officer Nelson grabbed a handful of tissue from the box on the table beside him and handed it to Carrie. He retreated to sit in fidgety discomfort to observe his senior partner’s interaction with the distraught victim of devastating news.
After a few minutes of wailing, Carrie gathered her wits and took deep breaths to suppress her
body’s tremors and absorb the
reality of her loss.
“We believe that he died on
impact.” The female officer
dropped to one knee in front of Carrie and held her hand. “We’re here for you. We’ll stay as long as you wish.”
“Thank you.” Carrie gave the officer’s hand a gentle squeeze of appreciation. “Where is he now?” She cared about her dad’s well-being even in death. “I must go to him.”
“We came over immediately after we found his address from the license plate.” Officer Nelson kneeled beside his partner. “We left the scene after the fire department put out the flames. They’re using tow-trucks to winch the vehicle out of the ravine.”
“What happened?” Carrie tried to push a developing image of her father’s mangled and burnt body out of her head. She searched their eyes for answers.
“Too early to tell.” Officer McDonald responded. “He broke through the metal barrier at Hang Man’s Bend.” The officer referred to a sharp curve of a steep mountainside road. “With no other vehicle involved, it looks like his brakes failed.”
The officer made no mention of the curse that gave the name to the infamous ‘Hang Man’s Bend.’ According to legend, a wealthy eighty-year-old man had cut the brake lines on his twenty-two-year-old ex-wife’s car after a bitter divorce. He sought revenge after she took half of his estate and forced him to pay an exorbitant alimony to keep her in the lifestyle to which he had made her accustomed. She died on Thanksgiving Day. Everyone suspected her get-rich-quick scheme from only six months of marriage but the law had to process the facts.
After she crashed and died on the mountain road, investigators laid murder charges on the octogenarian when evidence pointed to him without a doubt. In a twist of irony, he cheated fate when he hung himself with a rope tied to the barrier at the same spot on Thanksgiving Day one year later. The curse of Hang Man’s Bend took the life of a spurned or victimized lover on Thanksgiving Day at random years ever since that dramatic event.
That night, Carrie sat against her bed’s headboard and used logic to decipher the mystery of why her dad had suffered the curse of Hang Man’s Bend. Had he played the role of victim or perpetrator in a love affair gone wrong? He never mentioned or showed signs of romantic involvement after her mom’s death. Did her mom die on Thanksgiving Day one year before by coincidence or foul play? On the stroke of midnight, Carrie stiffened in fright when the door opened and closed.
“Carrie, we home fuh Tawnksgivin but we kyant stay!” Her dad called out in his native Caribbean accent.
Carrie pulled the bedcover up to her chin. She did not breathe. Only her eyeballs moved in wide-eyed terror while her ears followed the sounds outside her room.
“Happy Tawnksgivin, Lovie.” Her mom addressed her by her pet name. “Yo daddy an me love yo.”
“Carrie, we gawn to we new home.” Her dad’s parting words prompted swift action from Carrie.
“Wait, doan go yet, ah comin!” She hopped off the bed and flung the bedroom door open to the eerie glow of a nightlight in the empty living room. Her heart thumped when she inhaled the mixed aromas of her mom’s perfume and her dad’s aftershave lotion. She stayed awake until dawn.
Internet research stated that the curse of Hang Man’s Bend would be broken by lovers who died one year apart on Thanksgiving Day with no malice or vengeance against each other. One had to die at the curve in the road. Carrie’s heart soared with pride for her parents’ pure love for each other that extended into the afterlife. A tear rolled down her smiling cheek.

By Romeo Kaseram

Eric Eustace Williams was born on September 25, 1911, in Port-of-Spain. His father was Thomas Henry Williams, a minor post official, while mother, Eliza Frances Boissière, was a homemaker. According to ARC Magazine, Eliza was a descendant of a mixed French Creole elite family.
Williams’ early education was acquired at the Tranquillity Boys’ Intermediate Government School. Following primary school, he attended Queen's Royal College in Port-of-Spain, where he showed an aptitude for academics. He was also an avid sports player, and according to Caribbean Life, it is believed an injury sustained during a soccer game led to his hearing impairment. Part of Williams’ later iconic stature was his visible hearing aid.
In 1932, Williams won an island scholarship, and this award opened the door for attendance at St Catherine’s Society, Oxford, which later became St Catherine’s College. In 1935 he graduated with first-class honours and a BA in history, and was ranked first among students graduating in history that year. Williams also remained active on the sports field, and represented the university at football games.
In 1938, Williams graduated with a D.Phil., which was acquired under the supervision of Vincent Harlow, a leading historian at the time. William’s doctoral thesis was titled ‘The Economic Aspects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade and West Indian Slavery’. It was published as Capitalism and Slavery (1944), and became a seminal text, which according to Wikipedia, “was both a direct attack on the idea that moral and humanitarian motives were the key facts in the victory of British abolitionism”.
Wikipedia adds the text was also a covert critique of an idea common in the 1930s, emanating in particular from Oxford Professor Reginald Coupland – another prominent historian at the time – that British imperialism was essentially propelled by humanitarian and benevolent impulses. ARC also notes Williams’ doctoral thesis as the basis for Capitalism and Slavery, adding the text was “a controversial and pioneering work establishing the economic contribution of enslavement to Britain’s development, and emphasising the economic rather than humanitarian reasons for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade”.
As Wikipedia points out, Williams’ argument in this thesis, and its preceding textuality in Capitalism and Slavery, owed much to the influence of C.L.R. James. In what is an international, seminal text, James’ famous and respectable The Black Jacobins, which was also completed in 1938, similarly “offered an economic and geostrategic explanation for the rise of British abolitionism”.
Williams later documented much of his educational pursuits at Queen’s Royal College and Oxford University in his book, Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister. In this text, he describes in autobiographical detail experiences of racism endured in Great Britain, and the impact of his travels in Germany following the Nazi seizure of power. According to Williams, life following his BA degree was difficult: “I was severely handicapped in my research by my lack of money... I was turned down everywhere I tried... and could not ignore the racial factor involved.” In 1936, a recommendation from Sir Alfred Claud Hollis, Governor of Trinidad and Tobago, led to a grant of £50 by the Leathersellers’ Company. This substantive grant helped to advance Williams’ doctoral research at Oxford.
In 1939 Williams traveled to the US, where he taught at Howard University as an assistant professor of social and political sciences. During this tenure, he wrote The Negro in the Caribbean (1942), and Education in the British West Indies (1950). While teaching full time at Howard, he also worked as a consultant to the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission, which was an international organisation established after World War II to study the future of the region.
Williams returned to Trinidad and Tobago in 1948 to work as Deputy Chairman of the Commission’s Caribbean Research Council. ARC notes while at the Caribbean Commission, Williams embarked on a public education campaign supported by the Teacher’s Education and Cultural Association and the Political Education Group. These organisations later grew into the Political Education Movement.
As ARC notes, “With the support of PEM, and members of his former study group, the Bachacs, Williams publicly declared his entry into politics in his speech ‘My Relations with the Caribbean Commission’ (1955) in Woodford Square. A year later, he joined members of PEM in forming the People’s National Movement, and was made the Party’s first political leader.”
The PNM won national elections in September 1956, and Williams became Chief Minister from 1956 to 1959. He later became its Premier from 1959 to 1962, and in 1962, following the failure of West Indian Federation, Williams led Trinidad and Tobago to Independence from Britain.
As Wikipedia notes, one of Williams’ specialised areas of study was in slavery, with the impact of his academic work proving to be of lasting significance. In a compilation of essays based on his work, Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman wrote that Williams “defined the study of Caribbean history, and its writing affected the course of Caribbean history... Scholars may disagree on his ideas, but they remain the starting point of discussion... Any conference on British capitalism and Caribbean slavery is a conference on Eric Williams”.
Williams wrote other scholarly works focused on the Caribbean, including British Historians and the West Indies (1964), which was based on research done in the 1940s, and initially presented at a symposium at Atlanta University. As Wikipedia notes, it “sought to debunk British historiography on the region, and to condemn as racist the 19th and early 20th century British perspective on the West Indies”.
Among his other works are Documents of West Indian History: 1492–1655 from the Spanish discovery to the British conquest of Jamaica, Volume 1, (1963); History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago, (1964); From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492–1969 (1971); and, Forged from the Love of Liberty: Selected Speeches of Dr. Eric Williams, (1981).
Williams was Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago until he died in office on March 29, 1981.

Sources for this exploration: Wikipedia, ARC Magazine, and Caribbean Life.

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