Saga of a Flagwoman
By Dr. Kim Johnson
The death of Yvonne Smith, known far and wide as “Bubulups”, was sadly ignominious, starting with the onset of her illness on January 1, 1993, and ending when her abandoned corpse was finally laid to rest a year later on January 6, 1994 at what used to be the paupers’ cemetery in St James, after 39 days of shuttling between funeral homes.
Bubulups always said that if she took to bed she wouldn't get up again, and it turned out to be true. When her companion of 24 years, Eugene “Tepoo” Bristo, a panman from Tokyo steelband, first took her to the General Hospital, she spilled out of a wheelchair and was unable to rise. Although she’d lost weight she wouldn’t have displaced much less than 250 pounds, and the hospital attendant laughed at this beached whale on the floor.
“In my day he woulda be crying,” she fumed afterwards in impotent rage, for in her day she was the most notorious, most brave danger jamette in Trinidad. But in 1993 it was all she could do was to return her dilapidated two-room shack in Clifton Street, John John, where she remained bleeding from her vagina for several months, emerging from bed mainly to for Tepoo to sponge her down in the front room. In October she spent two weeks in hospital but there was no one to donate blood: Tepoo was too old, and her friends were alcoholics. And on November 29 she died at home of “abdominal malignancy” and “anaemia”, according to the death certificate. She was 69 years of age.
Born on May 2, 1924, Yvonne Smith grew up on Duncan Street. As a child she attended a school on Duke Street. Her father, “Pinhead” Smith wasn't wealthy, but the family was respectable enough. They had a parlour on St Vincent Street by the law courts, and there was a piano at home on which Yvonne played. “She was an ordinary girl but always miserable, always big and she didn't take nothing from nobody,” recalls Wellington “Blues” Bostock, one of the men who went to school with her and later enjoyed the pleasures she sold on the streets.
A wilful and uncompromising child, she probably chafed against the taunts about her size. She had been separated from her mother, Ethel Charles, as a child and must have also resented that. And whereas one half-brother, Selwyn Charles, rose to become a parliamentary representative, Bubulups found herself pushed towards a different eminence.
“Is I break she out in life,” admits George Blackman. He used to ride his bicycle past her house every day and look in the window where she practised piano. “She was about 14 and I was about 16 and we loved one another, so she jumped through the window and we went Carenage to sleep.”
From that first liaison she became pregnant and fled or was chased away from her “respectable” family, just as happened to her younger friend “Jean-in-town” Clarke.
“I met her on Prince Street when I came out as a young girl on the street: I had a child and my father tell me where I catch my cold go and blow my nose; I had nobody to help me out,” recalls Jean-in-town. “I stand up on George Street looking for friends the first night and both of us became friends.”
Similarly, Bubulups had gone years before to live with “friends” in Charlotte Street when she was put out of her home. Blackman, then a stevedore and Admiral for Hill 60 steelband, remained living with his mother, who took her grand-daughter Hermia away from Bubulups the day she was born. Hermia Blackman grew up a stranger to Bubulups, her mother, even after, through coincidence, they lived next door, much as Bubulups had grown up a stranger to her own mother. Hermia would also follow her mother into the demi-monde and is at present facing trial for a murder in a rumshop.
Perhaps Bubulups, barely a teenager, felt she couldn’t afford a child on her own; perhaps she knew a daughter would have no place in the life she was about to enter; but whatever means decent society used to compel Bubulups to surrender her baby must have wounded her to the bone. And she didn't take nothing from nobody.
“She went on the streets for company; she had alot of young girlfriends, and young girls like money,” says Blackman, who remained involved with Bubulups for several years after Hermia was born. He didn't attempt to pull her out of the world she’d entered, though—maybe by then she wouldn’t have accepted his help. Instead she joined the world of steelband badjohns and saga boys. For some time she hung out in the “Big Yard” on George Street where a devil band came out, and by the early Forties she was wining and waving flag for Bar 20 steelband, leading them into battle like an enormous, brown Joan of Arc.
“Bubulups with a flag in she hand,” goes one calypso, possibly by Spoiler, “beggin the police don't stop the band.” Even the most fearless men, such as Carlton “Zigilee” Barrow from Bar 20, found it daunting to keep up with Bubulups when she led them into battle. “When she was in front with the flag your stones was cold but it was a woman in front so you had to go,” he admits.
“When the police come, don’t run,” she told the band when they paraded the streets illegally after the funeral of Bar 20 skipper Ancil Boyce, and they went on to beat a handful of policemen and smash their squad car on Quarry Street. The subsequent police retaliation destroyed Bar 20.
At least twice she was sentenced to gaol, apart from the routine police harassment she experienced as a whore sitting by a gateway in George Street. “Police used to give we a hard time on the road,” says her younger friend and colleague Jean-in-town, although eventually they left Bubulups alone. “Once they take all of we to court. The police say she was sitting on a box and Bups tell them they have to be explicit: ‘Am I selling chataigne, peewah or pommecythere?’ The whole court start to laugh and the magistrate dismiss the case.”
On another occasion Jean-in-town told the magistrate, “I did now come out to work and as I pull down my panty to pee the police come with torchlight. I hold the police hand and say let we go drink two Guinness.” Again the court laughed and the case was dismissed.
This harrassment made Jean-in-town move to the clubs along the “Gaza Strip” on Wrightson Road, west of Port of Spain. Perhaps her decision was influenced by her involvement with the Renegades captain, Stephen “Goldteeth” Nicholson, who was the bouncer at a club in the Strip. But Bubulups remained in town.
One term in gaol was for a licking she put on a policeman who had chucked her. After that, when reinforcements were brought to arrest her she had to be carried by several of them, screaming and kicking and naked because she'd ripped off her clothes. That was down Carenage Bay at a St Peter's Day fete, during the war when she was still in Bar 20.
According to Clem Belloram, then a child living in the district, it started when the band went to the festival in honour of St Peter, patron saint of fishermen. As expected, the rum was flowing and Bubulups got into an argument with someone. She began to fight and it spread into an all-out battle between those supporting the whore and those supporting her opponent, until the police arrived and one officer named Alfred Gilkes attempted to tackle Bubulups. “She hit him some coconut and spread him out,” recalls Belloram. “She drop him but you know Alfred Gilkes with he little boxing tactics can’t handle Bubulups to get her in the van cause he had to hit her a punch. I think he hit her a punch in her breast and knock her down. That was the only way you coulda get her to carry. Yeah. She was heavy. All now she would have been still fighting. I’m telling you. You couldn’t carry her nowhere. I could remember that as a little fella. It was during the war, yes, about 1945.”
“Bubulups darling, why you beat the officer?” sang one calypsonian after the incident: “Six months hard labour.”
Some time before she’d befriended a young calypsonian fresh out of the countryside, Aldwyn Roberts, better known as Lord Kitchener, but by the time he sang about Zigilee and Bar 20 in “The beat of the steelband” in 1946, the band was dead and Bubulups had moved on. She was now flying flag for Red Army of Prince Street, a band of pimps if there ever was one. “She was one of the first flagwomen and all of them was jamettes,” says Blues Bostock, a veteran of that band.
The liming spots in the wee hours were Tanti's Tea Shop on George Street and Luther's Tea Shop on Prince Street, where all- night bake and saltfish and coffee would be on sale and Kitchener, Spoiler and other calypsonians would be talking and trying out their latest songs. Bubulups remained friends with Kitchener until her death.
When Red Army, cleaning up its act, metamorphosed into the Merry Makers by shedding its more unsavoury members, and fell under the patronage of a different type of dancer, Beryl McBurnie, the founder of the Little Carib Theatre, Bubulups moved on to Trinidad All Stars where she met Mayfield, a stripper and one of the greatest winers in the country. The two waved flag for All Stars.
Although many of the whores found acceptance in the world of the outcast steelband men, it wasn’t an easy world. Once a panman broke her arm with blows. He got 18 months for that. As for Jean-in-town, she was disfigured for life when a man stabbed her.
“One night I was liming with some Renegades panmen with some of the other girls and we went in this place on Park Street to buy some food,” recalls Jean-in-town. “This little boy who did just like to harass me come pushin money in my face. I spit in he face. Then when I comin out of the place later, somebody bawl ‘Look out!’ and I throw my hand to cover my face.”
Until her death many years after she had left the streets, Bubulups remained close to Mayfield, as to all her friends of “her days”, remarking often that one didn't find friends like them again. The hardship and promiscuous intimacy of their lives must have indeed forged firm bonds of friendship. So although she gave up Hermia as a newborn to George Blackman's mother, she always advised Jean-in-town to save her money for her child, not for any man. But to her friends, Bubulups was generous whenever she had money.
Despite Bubulups’s complete immersion in the underworld, she maintained a very clear-cut code of ethics. For one, she abhorred dishonesty, and would never, for instance, pick a client's pocket as whores routinely did to supplement their meagre earnings. Jean-in-town, for instance, admits that, “I never really like sex and thing, you know. I used to more rob man.”
Bubulups was never in that. And despite her battles with the police, she'd not let one be unfairly beaten.
“She saved my life years ago,” recalls former Police Commissioner Randolph Burroughs. That was when he was a constable on the beat. “She used to sit and open she legs under Big Man club on Prince Street. Ruby Rab was there too, and I was pursuing a chap for pickpocketing.”
The rogue darted into the Lucky Jordan club, a hangout for some of the country's worst criminals, and when the young policeman dashed in after him, someone locked the door behind him. “Bubulups knew the danger and she and Ruby Rab began pounding on the door, bawling ‘Murder! They killing the man! Ring the police!’” Burroughs recounts. “Police didn't have revolvers but I put my hand in my pocket and pretend I have a gun until reinforcements from Besson Street arrived.”
Bubulups's formidable wilfulness and, ironically, her self-respect were what got her into the most despised profession, and there in the gutter she defended her dignity with all the belligerence and moral rectitude she could summon. Later, after she’d left the streets for good, she'd exaggerate to her Clifton Street neighbour, Velma Denbow, that she’d always earned a fair amount of money, always had nice clothes—as if to justify the life she’d lived. According to Denbow, Bubulups always recalled to her how good it felt to always have food in her kitchen and new clothes on her back—a rose-tinted memory at best. She also impressed upon Denbow how ladylike she always had been, even when on the streets, which was certainly a lie.
Social commentators could not accommodate the contradiction between her abrasive vulgarity and her strong sense of dignity, and Bubulups was merely considered to be the biggest whore in Trinidad, scorned in calypsoes by Lord Melody, Lord Blakie, Roaring Lion, Kitchener, all the way down to the Mighty Chalkdust’s 1992 “Trinidad ent change” in which he names the prostitutes as the standard of middle class corruption:
Trinidad ent change
Just re-arrange
Prostitutes like Jean and Dinah
Bubullups and Bengal Tiger
They now Mrs Clarke
And Drs Doris Mark
In Federation Park.
Perhaps when Kitchener celebrated flagwomen in his calypso of the same name, this first flagwoman felt a surge of pride, but it’s unlikely. By then she’d already forsaken the streets and Carnival for good. More likely she felt stung on hearing in 1946 Kitch's gloating “Ding Dong Dell” with its unspoken rhyme, “pussy in the well”:
Well the Yankee leave them sad
All them girls in Trinidad
And the course is getting hard
Port of Spain to Fyzabad
Ding Dong Dell
The girls in the town they catching hell
Ding Dong Dell
Starvation in town, they must rebel
Bubulups and Elaine Pow
Every night they making row
Well the thing is not the same
They gone in the poker game
Small and wiry Tipoo Bristo was a butcher who played tenor for Tokyo when he met her one night in 1969 on George Street. “From the first night we liked one another,” he says. “I told her I don't want her to make no fares again, I going to mind her.”
She moved in with him and became progressively reclusive. Once she went to look on at Carnival and tripped somewhere along Prince Street; she never left the neighbourhood again. Eventually she hardly left Tipoo’s shack, not even to go to the nearby standpipe for water.
After she died, squabbling broke out between Tipoo and the estranged Hermia, who lived a few steps away along a rocky dirt path. Hermia, surprisingly, stole the framed photograph Tipoo had of himself and Bubulups. The death certificate also disappeared and the corpse remained in Nella's Funeral Home for 32 days, after which it was returned to Tipoo, who slept with Bubulups for a last night on the same bed. The following day he tried to get the Co-operative Funeral Home to take her corpse but hadn’t the money.
Eventually Yvonne “Bubulups” Smith was laid to rest on January 6, 1994, about two in the afternoon, after a funeral service sponsored by Clark and Battoo’s Funeral Home. Her last rites were attended by a handful of mourners, none of whom included the steelband pioneers such as Blues Bostock working next door to the funeral home in the Pan Trinbago office. Flowers were donated by La Tropicale Flower Shop. At the St James cemetery the coffin was lifted with great difficulty out of the hearse, because she had been a big woman; and George Blackman was the only man there to pay his last respects.
