Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 by Under An English Heaven (v1.1) Page A

Ronald Webster, but the
first was Jerry Gumbs. A big bearish man, with a strainingly sincere expression
of face and a deep, mellow, slow-moving voice, Jerry Gumbs is perhaps the most
middle-class of all the middle-class Anguillans. Born on February
18,1913 , the son of
a fisherman, he received primary school education on Anguilla and in his youth became a lailor.
"Some people are still wearing suits I made for them," he claims,
which says as much for the economy of Anguilla as it does for Jerry Gumbs's tailoring.
    Two
of Gumbs's sisters had already emigrated to the United States . When he was twenty-five he followed them.
This was 1938 and America was still in the grip of the Depression,
but it nevertheless offered far more opportunity to an industrious young man
than did Anguilla . Jerry Gumbs stayed in Brooklyn with one of his sisters and enrolled in the Metropolitan Vocational High School to get caught up on his education.
Finishing there, he won a scholarship to City College of New York, but
immediately after Pearl
Harbor , in 1941,
he quit college and joined the Army. After six months' service he had the right
to become an American citizen, which he did, and after the war he got married
and went to college on the GI Bill to learn furnace installation. He's a hard
worker, and he's smart about money, and it wasn't long before he had his own
fuel-oil delivery business in Edison , New Jersey . (In January of 1968, the Anguilla Beacon ran what it called an "Alphabet of Anguillan
Personalities," and when it got to "J" it went: "J is for Jerry , named after the Prophet: If profit's his motive, he gets plenty of
it.")
    I
talked with Jerry Gumbs late in 1969, and never have I met a man who so totally
combined the sincere with the humbug. In fact, he's even sincere about the humbug. For instance, over the years he has been responsible for much
charitable fund raising for Anguilla , and he says, "I gave Anguilla secondary education. I gave them a library.
I gave them an operating light. I gave them an X-ray. I gave them encyclopedias
in every school. I gave them a Community Center. I gave them medical supplies
of all lands; in the hospital now there's a frigidaire there; in the health
center there's a freezer. And any man who works with his hands as hard as I've
worked and do this for a people could not be doing it for personal gain."
    Well,
yes and no. The truth is slightly more complicated than that. There are now
more than a thousand Anguillans living in the general area of Edison and Perth Amboy , New Jersey , and several years ago Jerry Gumbs founded
an Anguilla Improvement Association to raise money to give things like
libraries and operating lights to the people back home. It is true that Jerry
Gumbs founded the Association, that he has been its leader more years than not,
that he has contributed his own money and a great deal of his own time and
effort, but to say that he alone is responsible for the Association s good
works is not 100 per cent accurate.
    Jerry
Gumbs is reminiscent in some ways of a particular kind of forceful movie
director—the sort of man who, if a picture turns out well, begins to believe he
alone made up the story, wrote the dialogue, worked the camera, designed the
sets and composed the music.
    A
man like that makes enemies, and Jerry Gumbs has as many detractors as Orson
Welles. He is accused mostly of being money-hungry and a sharp practitioner,
but that's far too simplistic a reading of the man. Listen to him talk about
the house he built in Edison : "I built this house with my own
hands. I wasn't taught to be a carpenter, but I had to build a home, and I
lived in a community where our people, black people, were nobody. And I had to
come into a community where there were no black people and do something so
people could see. Not by fighting and clubs and marching, but by definitely
struggling in a society, the way others have struggled whether they're white or
not, to show people that what they're