Ernest Hemingway’s Remarkable and Vivid, Near Literary, Description of the Warm People and Abundant Fishing of the Caribbean

“The people are very pleasant and the most beautiful I’ve seen. They come from Dahomey [in Western Africa, near Nigeria]. They talk a Patois called Creole and Jean [perhaps George’s wife] speaks it perfectly. He knew many people. The girls have beautiful sad faces with wonderful features and great reserve and dignity. Then they light to hear the secret language. There were no beggars. The children all going to school and very cute. The men very respectful and polite without being obsequious. Everyone has some Negro blood and the skin colors are from warm very beautiful ocher to dark mahogany. But honey you never saw so many beautiful people concentrated in one strange beautiful island.”

In 1954 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the crowning moment for his literary exertions over a span of decades. 1957 saw Hemingway’s success move into a different direction from the written word- the movies. Both “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Sun Also Rises’ both came out as major films, and “The Old Man and the Sea” went into production to be released in 1958. These drew major stars like Spencer Tracy, Rock Hudson, and Ava Gardner.

Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary Welsh were living in Cuba, a place that he had first made a home in 1939. In November 1956, while visiting Paris, he was reminded of trunks he had stored in the Ritz Hotel in 1928 and never retrieved. Upon re-claiming and opening the trunks, Hemingway discovered they were filled with notebooks and writing from his Paris years. Excited about the discovery, when he returned to Cuba in early 1957, he began to shape the recovered work into his memoir ‘A Moveable Feast.” The Hemingways left for home in January 1957 aboard the liner the Ile de France. As Mary wrote, “The Ile goes from New York on a Caribbean cruise which touches at Matanzas [Cuba] and Papa has decided to stay aboard her, thus simplifying the transport homewards of our 33 pieces of luggage.”

They remained in Cuba for most of 1957. But Hemingway decided to take a short cruise of the Caribbean in September of 1957, and Mary took that opportunity to go to Minneapolis, her girlhood home. Taking the trip with Hemingway was George Brown, his boxing coach, spearfishing partner, and friend. During the course of the cruise, there would be plenty for time for Hemingway and Brown to go fishing. They would also see the local people, giving Hemingway a chance to reveal his thoughts on blacks, who were the primary residents in the areas being visited. By October both Hemingways were back in Cuba.

Autograph Letter Signed, on French Line stationery, two pages, undated but written in September 1957, to his wife Mary, about the cruise and his rather unimpressed view of his fellow passengers, and his impressions of the black people in the Caribbean. He addresses her as “My dearest blessed.” “Martinique was fine, a very strange island one side the windward and the other the Sea. Clouds over the mountain tops – beautiful country island with high meadows and high straight up and down fields like Kitanga. We had lunch at St. Pierre where the Mt. Pelee volcano blew up in 1902 and killed 40,000 people in five minutes. It’s not a big mountain but the top side of it blew out and the ash fall out, the fumes and the heat killed everybody. It’s rebuilt on the ruins and is a pleasant place. Ate Wahoo, grilled and in court bouillon at a little restaurant on the sea with boys fishing off the dock and a [group] of people working. Saw several [fishermen] but all they got was were beautiful big balaos and a few horned fish.

“The people are very pleasant and the most beautiful I’ve seen. They come from Dahomey [in Western Africa, near Nigeria]. They talk a Patois called Creole and Jean [perhaps George’s wife] speaks it perfectly. He knew many people. The girls have beautiful sad faces with wonderful features and great reserve and dignity. Then they light to hear the secret language. There were no beggars. The children all going to school and very cute. The men very respectful and polite without being obsequious. Everyone has some Negro blood and the skin colors are from warm very beautiful ocher to dark mahogany. But honey you never saw so many beautiful people concentrated in one strange beautiful island. We pulled out last night in the slum atmosphere of the American cruising galoothood [foolishness]. The [men] drunk and their women looking like the cruise passengers at La Floridita [a bar in Havana]. There were many people Kitly Hill could play.

“Here at Grenada in the morning I realized that if I did not stay in and write my kitten this morning you might not ever hear.” He then describes his experiences with the cruise ship passengers. “Have not lost my temper even at the women who greeted me with the news that they’d heard I’d been taken off the ship and put in the hospital under restraint at Martinique (that evidently came from George, Jean and S. leaving in the first boat). Nor at the gentleman who had brought so many things he could not handle them on the tender and I took his sack for him and held it on my lap and he slipped nimbly around and took a photo of me holding it. Then asked me to turn it so it would show his name on it. Nor the lady’s who come up with books to sign in the middle of a meal. Nor those with postal cards to address to their daughters. No. Please just write in the book For Mrs. Hanson and say something interesting about the cruise please. Which I did exactly signing it (very truly yours, while the steak cooled).

“We did have a wonderful time twice on cruises in the Gripsholm but this cruise is just the way it looked when you were at the gangplank. It’s sort of like Willow Run and the less attractive features of up shit creek. They eat around the docks. It was raining a little while ago. But now it is better and we will have lunch aboard and then see the place. It has pretty harbor, nice hills, and a high lake. They say the water is clear and deep and it is very inexpensive; the water and the town too. A truly impossible woman has come in and is talking to me while I write so this is all except I love you my dearest Kitten. Will try to write again this p.m. Some of these places there’s only 1 or 2 planes a week. This would be a nice place for just us kittens. Yr. Big Kitten B.P. [blood pressure] this AM 145/85.”

Hemingway’s views of the cruise and passengers was one of humor mixed with disparagement. Not so with his views of the blacks he came across which was open and generous, and in keeping with his novels. In this letter, he finds them, wonderful, beautiful, dignified, and pleasant. A scholar of the relationship between Hemingway and blacks in his works concludes “that, while he does use stereotypes, he does not do so at the expense of blacks, except perhaps in ‘To Have and Have Not’, where Wesley and the other blacks are treated degradingly. Nevertheless, even here, the prejudiced attitudes expressed are those of Harry Morgan, a bigoted white murderer. On the other hand, depictions of admirable and honorable blacks as we find in the athletes of ‘The Sun Also Rises’ and ‘The Old Man and the Sea’, plus the sympathetic depiction of Louis and other blacks found in ‘Islands in the Stream’, far outweigh the negative treatment of Wesley and the bait-man in ‘To Have and Have Not’. Furthermore, Hemingway’s great admiration of and respect for his black friends in Africa, expressed openly and honestly in ‘Green Hills of Africa’, leaves no question as to his equitable attitude toward blacks.”