Man smart

Port Antonio, in Jamaica, radiates a torrid, hothouse air. At night the inshore breeze smells faintly of bananas. Port Antonio was once Jamaica’s chief banana port, shipping out an average of three million bunches of ‘green gold’ a year. Harry Belafonte’s greatest hit, ‘The Banana Boat Song’, was sung by Port Antonio dock workers at the break of daylight when their shift was over. You know the song. The workers are tired and they want the day’s banana haul to be tallied and paid for: ‘Come, Mister Tally Man, tally me banana.’

Belafonte, an American of Jamaican heritage, understood the poverty of Caribbean life. Born in Harlem in 1927, he was sent back to rural Jamaica to live with relatives by his mother, a wise, self-contained Jamaican woman of mixed race ancestry. Jamaica was then an outpost of Britain’s sovereignty, and Belafonte’s schooling was accordingly Anglophile in bias.