The Boy Between Worlds: A Biography Read online

  Eugenie and her younger sister, Marie, had been raised by their mother, Cornelia, and were fully aware of their special status and the opportunities their light skin afforded them. Their mother’s greatest fear was “blackening” the bloodline; she considered any contact with the black men who had gotten off the plantation a bit later than she did something to be avoided at all costs. Women of color with any ambition would never be caught barefoot—a sure sign of bondage during slavery. They were careful to stay out of the sun so as not to darken their skin and behaved as prudishly as they believed the Dutch women themselves did.

  Eugenie was a quiet, God-fearing girl. She taught Sunday school at the stately Lutheran church on the Waterfront. Since the abolition of slavery, this formerly white conservative bulwark had gradually grown into the lively gathering point of the blaka bakra, the “black whites,” as the Creole elite who rubbed shoulders with the upper layers of white society were called. Like her mother and grandmother, Eugenie seemed predestined to become the concubine of a distinguished white man, although a legal marriage with a successful, light-skinned black person would technically have been possible in those enlightened times as well. Nevertheless, associating with a man of color was still as taboo as in the not-so-distant past, when “amorous congress” between a white woman and a black man was punishable by death.

  It was thus a complete mystery to everyone how the proper Sunday school teacher could have ever gotten involved with a black man, and how Koos Nods ever convinced her to be his wife. Granted, the clock was ticking—Eugenie was over thirty, after all. And as the saying went, “money makes a person’s skin lighter.” If that were true, then Eugenie’s fiancé was one white lily. The fact that Koos had struck gold wasn’t really all that unusual. The Surinamese ground proved generous, and he wasn’t the only hopeful gold miner—gowtuman—to hit the mother lode. But the fact that he had managed to hang on to his fortune and become one of the richest men in the colony was exceptional.

  Most of the porknokkers—as the gold seekers were called because they lived on dried meat in the jungle—enjoyed what chronicler Jacques Samuels called a “short but glorious life.”7 They burned through their profits in no time, diligently helped by family, friends, and anyone who managed to associate with them. Just as in the time of slavery, Surinamese families were expected to share everything with each other. Yet for someone who grew up in such a collective society, Koos was quite noticeably a loner. Maybe it was in his blood. His mother, Mietje, was born on a remote cotton plantation on the Atlantic coast, where Carib tribes still roamed in the surrounding jungle. Mietje’s mother was reportedly the product of an encounter between a field slave and one of those last indigenous inhabitants. Those final remaining tribes were described by a priest as follows:

  Every Indian, albeit the Arawak to a lesser extent than the Caribs, from the time of his youth, is raised to be a completely independent person, recognizing no one as his superior. This makes him self-conceited and egotistical. He must be free—independent from everyone—his own king.8

  This description matched Jacobus Theodorus Gerardus Nods to a T. Not only did he see absolutely no reason to squander his money on his poor family and opportunistic friends, he also wasn’t the least bit troubled by any feelings of inferiority that many black men harbored as a result of slavery. Born in 1872, he was a child of the first truly free generation of Suriname. Growing up, he had profited from the auspicious work of missionaries, who had been scrupulously kept away from the colonies during slavery for fear that they might introduce the slaves to the idea that they, too, were children of God. But now that the so-called Negros had to be cultivated into upstanding citizens, the missionaries were given free rein to carry out their work.

  Koos grew up on a plantation on the Commewijne River, right next to a Catholic mission where a priest had set up a school for plantation children. He was bright and eager to learn, but as a young black man, the only future he had was in the infamous, malaria- and blackwater fever–infested green hell. For as lucrative as gold mining could be, it was extremely laborious and detrimental to one’s health. Between the dreaded jungle diseases, the use of mercury, and the hundreds of yards of haphazardly built mineshafts, hardly any gowtumans lived to see their fiftieth birthday.

  The mix of African and indigenous blood pumping through Koos’s veins had produced a man of extremely tough constitution, and he shared the character of the explorers who had once tamed the Wild Coast. Koos was an energetic go-getter with big dreams. He meticulously invested his earnings in new expeditions and Paramaribo real estate, and at the dawn of the twentieth century, the twenty-eight-year-old “J. Th. G. Nods” prominently appeared on the list of eligible voters published in the annual Gouvernements Advertentieblad, thereby confirming he was among the wealthiest citizens. As is the case with most successful people, wealth alone wasn’t enough for Koos. He wanted prestige. He wanted what was at that time and place the ultimate status symbol for a man of mixed race: a legal marriage with the whitest woman he could find.

  On October 5, 1904, Koos triumphantly walked Eugenie under the king palm trees into the Lutheran church where he had just been accepted as a member that morning. Despite his skin color, he had made the most of the freedom he had been born into and the opportunities his homeland had to offer. He even adapted his occupation to his new life in Paramaribo’s upper class. When they officially married in a civil ceremony at the Gouvernements Logeergebouw on December 14 of that year, he stated his profession as “writer,” in other words, a civil servant—a highly respectable profession in Creole circles.

  In September 1905, barely one year after her sensational wedding, Eugenie gave birth to a daughter, who was named Hilda Esline. The infant had her mother’s relatively light skin, but the Creole features and round build of her African forefathers. Désiré Eugène, born in 1906, was a lighter version of his father: the same chiseled face, the same zest for life. With Waldemar Hugh, who entered the world on September 1, 1908, the Surinamese melting pot produced features that were nearly East Indian in appearance. The quartet was completed in 1910 with the birth of daughter Lily Mathilde, who won the genepool jackpot. The gods must have had a competition to unite the most stunning blend of features from the different races: thick black hair, light-brown skin, a heart-shaped face, and giant light-blue eyes, courtesy of her long-lost Scottish great-grandfather.

  Waldemar and his brother and sisters were not destined to grow up as their father had—scrounging around barefoot on a languishing plantation for whatever he could get his hands on. The four of them had only the best in life. They were baptized in the silver font that a Dutch plantation family had once donated to the Lutheran church and were cared for by a real English nanny imported by their father from British Guiana. They lived on the elegant Heerenstraat in a mansion furnished with expensive carpets, furniture, porcelain, and crystal, and they were dressed in the most beautiful clothes and shoes that money could buy. They spent the hottest months of the year at their holiday house in Barbados, which they sailed to in a slender schooner their father had had custom built.

  Although the Nods children were known to be friendly and well mannered, they had—as the members of the Paramaribo gossip mill would say with a puckered brow—their noses so high in the air they couldn’t see the ground. Apparently, this didn’t have so much to do with the way they talked or behaved, but more with the way they carried themselves and a look in their eyes. Because even though slavery was a thing of the past, the colony still held all things white in high esteem, and it wasn’t so unusual for a lighter-skinned child to simply refuse to be seen on the street with a darker sibling. Everyone knew their place, or rather their color, and acted accordingly. But Waldemar and his brother and sisters held their heads high and looked the world straight in the eye as if they were members of Paramaribo royalty. But, of course—as people muttered under their breath—what else would you expect from such a father, who eschewed the kind of modesty expected from people born w
ith his dark skin tone? Koos Nods was not about to take off his hat and bow his head and mumble “Yes, m’ster” and “No, m’ster” every time he crossed paths with a Dutch person.

  Koos Nods carried himself like a gentleman, and, although entirely unsuitable for the tropical climate, dressed his wife in heavy brocades and velvet gowns. Together, they traveled around the Caribbean like rich European and American couples were in the habit of doing, and he raised his children to be princes and princesses. If he and Eugenie were still to be classified into the categories of the past, then their children were symbols of the country’s entire remarkable history and its people. Their ancestors had come from every corner of the world, and they were just as much the descendants of slaves as they were of masters. The Nodses were children of the world, like everyone from Suriname.

  In 1914, the Great War broke out in Europe, just as Suriname’s golden economy was starting to lose its sparkle. One year before, with great pomp and circumstance, the final section of the 107-mile-long railroad from the center of Paramaribo to the goldfields in the south of the country was completed. But as fate would have it, the festive opening celebration was not the prelude to prosperity that everyone had expected. On the contrary, gold findings were becoming alarmingly fewer and further between, and in the meantime, the war was proving to be a painful reminder of how dependent Suriname still was on the Netherlands. As fewer European vessels made their way up the Suriname River, the shortage of basic commodities like flour and cloth became more acute. When, on top of that, the farms were hit by a wave of crop diseases, hunger became all too familiar in poor areas of the city.

  Koos tried to turn the tides by investing in balata cultivation. Around the turn of the century, German researchers had discovered a process for extracting this natural rubber from the colony’s wealth of balata trees. Granted, cultivating raw materials for transmission belts and insulation material was hardly as lucrative as striking gold, but it involved significantly less risk, and foreign companies were sending “balata bleeders” into the jungle by the thousands. As one of the few Surinamese among them, Koos Nods had both the money and the guts to outfit the rubber expeditions himself, and after a few successful expeditions to the east of the Suriname River, he organized a large-scale expedition into the Amazon basin in 1914. But this time, the luck that he had grown so used to having on his side failed him miserably. A large portion of his contract workers fell victim to jungle diseases, and the rest, having been left unattended for just a short while, ran off with the profits.

  The adventure cost Koos a large portion of his fortune and forced him to move his family to the Waterfront in the commercial heart of Paramaribo, where they had a wide view over the Suriname River. The new address had perhaps less of the tranquil stateliness of the old one, but it was still quite prestigious. The Waterfront had been the beating heart of the colony since its early days. Every person who had made Suriname what it was had walked down the wooden docks that connected the colony to the rest of the world. Those jetties had borne the loud stomping boots of the European buccaneers who had disputed the territory, the patter of the finely embroidered slippers of the Jewish planters’ wives, the thumping of the tattered soles of immigrants, and of course, the dull shuffle of tens of thousands of barefoot slaves.

  The new Nods family residence was a white two-story wood house at number 76, raised in the middle with lower wings on either side. Located between the weighing house—officially known as De Waag—and the Creole market and directly on the rail line to the south, the house was ideally positioned for the expedition equipment shop that Koos opened on the ground floor. But Waldemar’s father turned out to be far too restless to waste away behind a counter, and it wasn’t long before he headed out again on his schooner, this time to Brazil in search of gold and precious stones. But what the children didn’t know—and it is even unclear whether Eugenie knew—was that on his trip to Rio de Janeiro, he was accompanied by a woman seventeen years younger than he was, whom he had already married back in Paramaribo. However, he never divorced Eugenie. In a world where having multiple concubines was fully acceptable, he evidently assumed that the same norms applied to a legal spouse.

  In the years that followed, Koos remained fully devoted to his first family. Every year he went with Eugenie and the children on holiday to Barbados and regularly sailed with his sons to the British colony of Trinidad to buy horses for their carriage in Paramaribo. But the Great War raged on, and the balata industry withered as a result of falling prices and overexploitation. Suriname’s economic horizon grew dim. And the more he found his footing in rich Brazil, the less time he spent on the Waterfront. Because beneath the shiny exterior of upstanding citizen, Koos Nods was an adventurer at heart, a rolling stone who left behind anything he didn’t need.

  Waldemar, who was six when the family moved to the Waterfront, seemed to hardly notice his father’s more frequent absences. He lived in a world of women: he had his mother; his caring sister, Hilda; his spoiled-rotten little sister, Lily; and their former nanny, May, who now reigned over the preschool he went to in the mornings. The floorboards of his new world on the river were painted red, the red of the brazilwood tree, and he could look out from the front balcony all day long without getting bored for a second. There was always something to see on the street below: carts rattling down the cobblestones, shouting street vendors peddling their wares, colorfully clad tribesmen and people of all races who came to the daily Creole market on the big, canoe-flanked dock known as the agu tobo, or the “pig trough.”

  Once a day, the steam train thundered by, sending thick clouds of soot out over the river. For the older boys, like Waldemar’s rascal brother, Decy, jumping on the back of the cars and hanging on until the Waterfront branched off from the river was a favorite pastime. But especially during the dry season, the flying sparks would regularly cause fires—that was how an omi sneisi, a Chinese spice shop, burned to the ground. Waldemar’s mother always had a few buckets of water ready in the front gallery.

  To the left of their house, Waldemar could just make out the contour of Fort Zeelandia and the cannons that had been defending the coastline from invaders for as long as anyone could remember. In front of the fort were the sundial-crested marine stairs, where the governor welcomed the sloops from visiting marine vessels and tent boats carrying distinguished guests from Holland. The largest and most important docks were actually those behind De Waag, kitty-corner to the Nodses’ house, where the river boats moored, and in more prosperous times, passengers from the European steamships disembarked.

  In the evening, when the darkness suddenly set in, Waldemar would watch the lantern lighter use a long pole with a hook on the end to raise the gas mantle up to the street lanterns and set it aflame. In the warm glow, he could see the bats and moths circling around the blooming honeysuckle next to the house. In bed, he could hear bits of jazz carried by the wind from the cafés on the Saramacastraat and Dutch sailors singing their way back to their barracks in Fort Zeelandia. And on Sunday morning, when all the shops were closed, he could watch the entire city parade down the Waterfront. Even the whites, who were usually shut up in their dark houses or at their clubs, wouldn’t miss the opportunity to catch up on the latest news and gossip and to see and be seen. And in the afternoon, everyone would head down to the main square, the Oranjeplein, to enjoy the weekly musical performance in front of the governor’s palace next to the Palmtree Garden.

  But what Waldemar found more beautiful than all of this, even more beautiful than the annual Queen’s Day regatta, was the river itself. He could smell the briny sea, and the sky overhead was constantly changing—sometimes blue, with towering clouds that glided like sailboats over the water below, sometimes nearly white from the blistering heat, and sometimes so dark that suddenly he could no longer see the grayish-green strip of jungle on the other side. He could smell the rain coming before it came pelting down like a curtain—a sibibusi like that would wash the city squeaky clean. And once the st
orm had passed, the world would be bathed in the aroma of the pineapple plants and the lemon and tamarind trees that lined the wide sandy streets; and from the tops of the palm trees in the Palmtree Garden—which had looked so tired and dusty before the rain—fresh green blades would suddenly sprout.

  The sight of Koos Nods’s schooner bobbing in front of the house was becoming increasingly less frequent, but his absence wasn’t so unusual. Fathers were hardly ever home; that’s just the way it was. Most of Waldemar’s black friends were raised exclusively by their mothers, and it was already considered tremendously chic to have someone in your life you could even call father, and even better if he was officially married to your mother. The fact that Waldemar and his siblings had all kinds of older half brothers around the city was never much of a secret. There was even one who had the same last name as they did, but he was a poor fieldworker outside the city, certainly not someone the fashionable children could be associated with.

  In Waldemar’s eyes, his father was an almost mythical character, a person who popped up in his life every now and then and told the most extraordinary tales of Brazil, where he owned a hotel and gemstone quarry, among other things, and lived as a grand seigneur. The only thing that Waldemar did notice about his father’s gradual disappearance from their lives was the change in his mother. Eugenie became even more quiet than she already was, and she devoted more of her attention to him, the most dreamy eyed and affectionate of all her children.

  On December 10, 1918, all of Paramaribo gathered on the Waterfront. The Great War was over, and for the first time in years, a Dutch ship was making its way up the Suriname River. The cannons at Fort Zeelandia welcomed the vessel with a thundering salute, and free loaves of bread were distributed on the Oranjeplein that afternoon to celebrate the return of flour, and with it hope—hope for better times now that the connection with the motherland had been restored.