By 1942, a traditional sign of revolt had reappeared. The cane fields were being set ablaze at harvest time. This form of primitive rebellion was made a capital offence.51 It was at roughly this time that Fanon saw something so strange that he could scarcely believe his eyes: a crowd of Martinicans refusing to bare their heads as the ‘Marseillaise’ was played, and armed sailors forcing them to stand to attention in silence.52 He concluded that his fellow islanders had ‘assimilated the France of the sailors to the bad France, and the “Marseillaise” those men respected was not their “Marseillaise”’. Scuffles between local youths and Robert’s sailors became increasingly common, and Fanon is reported to have been involved in some of them. Manville has described how, as they were going home after playing football one morning, he, Fanon and Mosole encountered two sailors kicking a youth they had knocked to the ground on the Savanne. Fanon immediately ran to help him. Less impulsive than their friend, Manville and Mosole intervened to ask what was going on. The sailors said that the boy had tried to rob them, and then walked off. The three friends took the boy to the police for first aid, but never got a real explanation for the incident.53 Intervening in a fight like this was obviously dangerous. Had there been more sailors about, the schoolboys might well have taken a bad beating themselves. Fanon and his family also took risks by breaking the law to listen to the BBC in secret. Like many a boy around the world, Frantz plotted the movements of the Allied armies on a map. He almost provoked a quarrel with a friend whose father was Italian by rejoicing at the British victory at Benghazi and making disparaging remarks about Italians, but either he was badly informed at the time or his memory failed him when he wrote Peau noire, masques blancs: it was Wavell and not Montgomery who took Benghazi from the Italians on 7 February 1940.54
On 3 March 1943, Governor Nicol issued a circular to the mayors of Martinique, noting that a number of boats had recently been stolen. It was, he suggested, advisable that all boats should be beached at points where they could be kept under watch at night, and that it was unwise for boat-owners to leave oars, sails or other tackle on the beach after dark.55 It was not only boats that were disappearing. Queries about young men who had not been seen for a while were becoming increasingly common, and the standard answer to them was: ‘Sill pay neyè, i Ouchingtone’ (‘If he hasn’t drowned, he’s in Washington’). A new form of marronage had emerged, and young dissidents were leaving Martinique by clandestine means. Their choice of destination was restricted to St Lucia or Dominica, where they could join the Free French. St Lucia and Dominica are, respectively, only twenty-seven and thirty-five kilometres away from Martinique, but the journey was dangerous. The dissidents (dissidence is the Martinican equivalent to résistance) travelled in open boats propelled by oars or sails. The boats were the locally built craft normally used for in-shore fishing. Brightly painted and with high prows, they still bore a distinct resemblance to the dug-out canoes they had replaced long ago. The seas around Martinique are home to populations of sharks, and both the St Lucia Channel to the south and the Martinique Passage to the north are treacherously dangerous stretches of water where powerful Atlantic currents converge in narrow straits. In purely maritime terms, it would have been safer to leave from Fort-de-France itself, but the strong possibility of detection there meant that most of the clandestine departures were from Sainte-Anne and Le Diamant in the south or Saint-Pierre and Le Prêcheur on the northern Caribbean coast. Some of the passeurs or smugglers who carried the dissidents on their boats were acting out of patriotism, and some were themselves dissidents, but others were less altruistic and charged high prices for their services. There were rumours that some would-be dissidents had been thrown overboard by unscrupulous passeurs and left to drown or to deal with the sharks as best they could. An estimated 4,500 Martinicans made the dangerous voyage and they were joined by some 500 metropolitan Frenchmen, most of whom had deserted from their ships in Fort-de-France.56
Fanon left no written account of his departure from Martinique in early 1943, and seems to have been as reluctant to speak of it as he was to talk of his subsequent wartime experiences in France. After the event, a disillusioned Fanon would tell his parents that he had left Fort-de-France because he still believed in the ‘obsolete ideal’ of French patriotism,57 but in 1943 he clearly still believed that the cause of France was his cause. His place was not, he thought, on the sidelines, but ‘in the heart of the problem’, or in other words, in the war.58 Charles Cézette, who did not go to Dominica but did fight with the Free French, puts it with heartbreaking simplicity: ‘We were twenty, and we believed in France.’59 Fanon ignored the warnings of Joseph Henri, who had taught him at the Lycée Schoelcher and who once studied in Paris with Alain, the anti-militarist who converted so many young men to radical pacifism. He also ignored the warnings of his brother Joby, who can still cite Henri’s words from memory: ‘Fire burns and war kills. The wives of dead heroes marry men who are alive and well. What is happening in Europe is no concern of ours. When white men kill each other, it is a blessing for blacks.’ According to his brother, Fanon was outraged by this and called his teacher a ‘bastard’. At seventeen, he was still convinced that ‘freedom is indivisible’. He would, however, recall a further piece of advice from the same teacher: ‘When you hear people speaking ill of the Jews, keep your ears pricked; they’re talking about you.’60 The decision to leave for Dominica was an early indication of both a character trait and a pattern of behaviour. The decision was taken suddenly, with little consultation and little foreknowledge of its consequences. It was also irrevocable.
Fanon’s convictions may have been sound, but his finances were not. He was still at school and had no source of income, and whilst finding a passeur was not difficult, finding the means to pay him was. The solution was a temporary return to delinquency. Fanon’s father had slowly accumulated sufficient clothing coupons to buy a bolt of cloth and was looking forward to wearing the suit he would have made from it. Fanon appropriated the cloth, and sold it to pay for his clandestine passage to Dominica. For the rest of his life, Casimir Fanon (who died in 1947) would complain to his wife about how ‘her son’ had stolen his suit. To make matters worse, Frantz’s departure was planned for the day of his brother Félix’s wedding in Morne-Rouge. A great deal of money and a great many precious food coupons had been spent to celebrate the occasion. A bullock, two sheep and a pig had been slaughtered, and between 150 and 200 guests were expected. Joby tried to argue with him, but Fanon was adamant and made his way to Le Prêcheur. Bitterly disappointed, his mother mourned the loss of two sons on the same day: one to a wife, and one to de Gaulle’s Free French.61 Precisely how Fanon made his way from Morne-Rouge, a pleasant town on the south-eastern slopes of Montagne Pelée, to the beach where he met his passeur after dark that night is not on record but, although short, it cannot have been an easy journey as he must have had to make his way on foot across the lower slopes of the volcano and through steep ravines choked with dense tropical vegetation.
The absence of any first-hand account makes it difficult to trace Fanon’s movements after his secretive and illegal departure from Martinique. He reached Dominica safely and was, like any other clandestine arrival, interrogated about his reasons for trying to join the Free French. He underwent very basic military training. He did not, however, follow the other dissidents south to St Lucia, on to Trinidad and finally the United States, from whence they shipped out for the battlefields of Europe. At seventeen, he may have been considered too young for active service. More significantly, events had overtaken his plans, and Martinique was no longer an outpost of the Vichy regime. Tan Robè was at last over. Fanon’s adventure ended in bathos. After a few weeks, he was repatriated to Martinique and went back to school.
In the spring of 1943, pro-Gaullist slogans could be seen scrawled on the walls of Fort-de-France and in June leaflets were calling on the population to join in illegal demonstrations to be held in both the capital and St Pierre. A Comité Martiniquais de Libération came into being. The colonial infantry units based at Balata, just outside Fort-de-France,